Titus Andronicus & Timon of Athens Read online

  The RSC Shakespeare

  Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen

  Chief Associate Editors: Jan Sewell and Will Sharpe

  Associate Editors: Trey Jansen, Eleanor Lowe, Lucy Munro,

  Dee Anna Phares, Heloise Senechal

  Titus Andronicus and Timon of Athens

  Textual editing: Eric Rasmussen and Sophie Holroyd

  Introduction and Shakespeare's Career in the Theater: Jonathan Bate

  Commentary: Heloise Senechal and Esme Miskimmin

  Scene-by-Scene Analysis: Will Sharpe (Titus) and Jan Sewell (Timon)

  In Performance: Karin Brown (Titus) and Clare Smout

  (Timon, RSC stagings) and Jan Sewell (overviews)

  The Director's Cut (interviews by Will Sharpe, Jan Sewell, and Kevin Wright): Gregory Doran and Yukio Ninagawa on Titus Andronicus;

  Gregory Doran on directing Timon of Athens and Michael Pennington

  on playing Timon

  Editorial Advisory Board

  Gregory Doran, Chief Associate Director, Royal Shakespeare Company

  Jim Davis, Professor of Theatre Studies, University of Warwick, UK

  Charles Edelman, Senior Lecturer, Edith Cowan University,

  Western Australia

  Lukas Erne, Professor of Modern English Literature,

  Universite de Geneve, Switzerland

  Jacqui O'Hanlon, Director of Education, Royal Shakespeare Company

  Akiko Kusunoki, Tokyo Woman's Christian University, Japan

  Ron Rosenbaum, author and journalist, New York, USA

  James Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature,

  Columbia University, USA

  Tiffany Stern, Professor and Tutor in English, University of Oxford, UK

  2011 Modern Library Paperback Edition Copyright (c) 2007, 2011 by The Royal Shakespeare Company All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of

  The Random House Publishing Group, a division of

  Random House, Inc., New York.

  MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks

  of Random House, Inc.

  "Royal Shakespeare Company," "RSC," and the RSC logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of The Royal Shakespeare Company.

  The version of Titus Andronicus and Timon of Athens and the corresponding footnotes that appear in this volume were originally published in William Shakespeare: Complete Works, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, published in 2007 by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-1-58836882-9

  www.modernlibrary.com

  Cover design: Gabrielle Bordwin

  Cover photograph: (c) David Buffington/Getty Images

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Titus Andronicus

  Timon of Athens

  About the Text

  Key Facts: Titus Andronicus

  Titus Andronicus

  Act 1

  Scene 1

  Act 2

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Scene 3

  Scene 4

  Act 3

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Act 4

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Scene 3

  Scene 4

  Act 5

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Scene 3

  Textual Notes

  Scene-by-Scene Analysis

  Titus Andronicus in Performance: The RSC and Beyond

  Four Centuries of Titus Andronicus: An Overview

  At the RSC

  The Director's Cut: Interviews with Gregory Doran and Yukio Ninagawa

  Key Facts: Timon of Athens

  Timon of Athens

  Act 1

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Act 2

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Act 3

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Scene 3

  Scene 4

  Scene 5

  Scene 6

  Scene 7

  Act 4

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Scene 3

  Act 5

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Scene 3

  Scene 4

  Textual Notes

  Scene-by-Scene Analysis

  Timon of Athens in Performance: The RSC and Beyond

  Four Centuries of Timon: An Overview

  At the RSC

  The Director's Cut: An Interview with Gregory Doran

  Playing Timon: Michael Pennington

  Shakespeare's Career in the Theater

  Beginnings

  Playhouses

  The Ensemble at Work

  The King's Man

  Shakespeare's Works: A Chronology

  The History Behind the Tragedies: A Chronology

  Further Reading and Viewing: Titus Andronicus and Timon of Athens

  References: Titus Andronicus and Timon of Athens

  Acknowledgments and Picture Credits

  INTRODUCTION

  Shakespeare's most sustained and enduringly influential encounter with the culture of antiquity, which was itself such a formative influence on his own culture, came in the three plays that he based on Sir Thomas North's English translation of Plutarch's Lives of the Most Noble Grecians and Romans: Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. But these great tragedies were not his only forays into the classical world. He also wrote a long poem about early Rome's transition from monarchy to republic (The Rape of Lucrece), a dramatization of part of the Trojan war (Troilus and Cressida), a strange, generically hybrid play about the Romans in Britain (Cymbeline), and a romance of the ancient world based ultimately on sources from the Hellenistic period (Pericles). And there are two further "classical" plays, which, though one belongs to the early Elizabethan phase of Shakespeare's career and the other to his mature Jacobean years, have fascinating similarities that make them into a most intriguing pair: Titus Andronicus and Timon of Athens.

  The full extent of their Shakespeareanness has always been doubted: scholars are now all agreed that Timon was a collaboration with Thomas Middleton, and most agree that Titus is marked with the hand of George Peele--though there is still a debate as to whether the play was an active collaboration or a Shakespearean reworking and development of an earlier effort by Peele. Both plays include a high proportion of original plotting, as opposed to the Plutarch-based Roman tragedies, which follow their historical sources with a degree of rigor. Both plays have a hero who becomes increasingly isolated and verges toward madness. Both make much of the contrast between the supposedly civilized but actually corrupt city (Rome, Athens) and a wood or wilderness beyond. Both include soliloquies of great denunciatory force. Yet for three centuries, neither was staged with any regularity.

  In the late twentieth century, however, Titus came into its own: in an age of genocides in real life and extreme, often playful violence within cinematic art, it seemed a very modern work. Indeed, in 1999 the immensely imaginative director Julie Taymor turned it into one of the finest of all Shakespearean movies, starring Anthony Hopkins. Timon, on the other hand, still awaits its modern rediscovery. But in an age dominated by financial anxiety, it may well be about to come into its own, perhaps justifying the sense of its importance that we find in the economic writings of its most famous nineteenth-century advocate, Karl Marx.

  TITUS ANDRONICUS

  From the
1700s to the Second World War Titus Andronicus was considered so shocking and so subversive of the noble Roman ideal of decorum that it was hardly ever staged and was frequently said to be by someone other than Shakespeare. High-minded critics and scholars could not imagine the National Poet soiling himself with a barbaric feast of rape, dismemberment, and cannibalism. Yet Titus was one of the most popular plays of the Elizabethan age.

  A glorious mishmash of history and invention, it creates an imaginary Rome that is simultaneously democratic and imperial. The play is not so much a historical work as a meditation on history. We might call it a "meta-history." The political structures of the early Roman republic and the decadence of the late Roman Empire are deliberately overlaid upon each other. They are also mingled with the preoccupations of late Elizabethan England: the opening political dispute between Saturninus and Bassianus is over the question of the succession to the recently deceased emperor, a matter of considerable concern at the time Shakespeare was writing, when the old Virgin Queen was nearing the end of her life and there were several rival candidates to succeed her.

  We are asked to imagine that this could be any time in the Roman era and no time. The spiral of revenge begins with an act of human sacrifice, the slaying of Tamora's son Alarbus to appease the shades of those of Titus' sons who have been killed in the wars against the Goths. Historically, human sacrifice was never practiced in ancient Rome, but mythically all cultures have their foundational myths of such offerings. For Shakespeare and his audience, Rome was evocative of the Roman Catholic Church as well as the pagan empire of the past. So it is that the action is peppered with allusions to the ultimate sacrifice, the crucifixion of God's own son, and to the doctrinal differences consequent upon it. The word "martyred," which was deeply significant to both Catholics and Protestants, is applied to Lavinia, and when she assists her father in the butchery of Chiron and Demetrius, she is asked to "receive the blood," a phrase that darkly parodies the language of the Eucharist, in which we are redeemed by the blood of Christ--though whether the wine of the feast was real or symbolic blood was a matter of fierce debate.

  The play sealed Shakespeare's reputation as the authentic successor to the original angry young man of English drama, Christopher Marlowe. Aaron's delight in his own villainy is shamelessly pillaged from Barabas' and Ithamore's boasting in the same vein in Marlowe's Jew of Malta. Shakespeare was a contrarian. He took the commonplaces of his age and stood them on their heads--or perhaps sliced off their heads and baked them in a pasty. Rome was synonymous with civilization and the Goths with barbarism: so Shakespeare considers the possibility that Rome was just as barbarous as the Gothic forest. Roman Stoicism proposed that it was healthy to keep your emotions under tight restraint: so Shakespeare voices the need to give your feelings vent ("Sorrow concealed, like an oven stopped, / Doth burn the heart to cinders where it is"). The law prescribed that punishment should be left to the justice system: so Shakespeare dramatized the primal--though ultimately self-destructive--attraction of acting out revenge for oneself. A daughter has been raped and mutilated. The law is not there to help; even the poor Clown goes from quest for imperial justice to arbitrary execution. Titus accordingly raises the stakes and thinks of a revenge so hideous that it outdoes the original crime. This is but an extreme version of an instinct that is still with us: the police do nothing about burglaries, so out comes the homeowner's shotgun.

  Structurally, the violence in Titus is always artistically purposeful, never showily gratuitous. There is a harsh but elegant symmetry to the action. Alarbus' limbs are lopped, and so then are Lavinia's: since Tamora Queen of the Goths loses her son, Titus General of the Romans must lose his daughter. Ever since the time of ancient Greek tragedy, Western culture has been haunted by the figure of the revenger. He or she stands on a whole series of borderlines: between civilization and barbarity, between an individual's accountability to their own conscience and the community's need for the rule of law, between the conflicting demands of justice and mercy. Do we have a right--a duty even--to exact revenge against those who have destroyed our loved ones? Or should we leave vengeance to the law or the gods? And if we do take action into our own hands, are we not reducing ourselves to the same moral level as the original perpetrator of murderous deeds? In the Elizabethan public theater, Thomas Kyd began to explore these questions in The Spanish Tragedy; Shakespeare developed them further in Titus Andronicus and then refined them to their highest level in Hamlet.

  Revenge drama can deal as powerfully with emotional trauma as with ethical dilemma. Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy is driven mad by the death of his son. In the end his grief becomes so intense that it is literally inexpressible, causing him to bite out his own tongue. Shakespeare nods toward Hieronimo when Titus says "Or shall we bite our tongues, and in dumb shows / Pass the remainder of our hateful days?"

  Is it possible to relieve emotional anguish through language? The attempt to do so is the traditional cathartic function of poetic tragedy. In Titus, Marcus--the play's chief "spectator" figure--confronts the appalling mutilation of his niece, Lavinia, and finds himself searching for a language of mourning that will "ease [her] misery." Her father, Titus, later tries to share her pain by holding her closely to him and comparing her to the weeping wind; himself to first the sea and then the earth. But even this elemental language is insufficient. Lavinia's woes are literally unspeakable. Throughout Titus, Shakespeare pushes at the boundaries between true expression and false, sanity and madness, speech and silence.

  In particular, he is fascinated by the ways in which the human body itself can be made to speak. The actor on the Elizabethan stage communicated with his audience in two ways: through words and gestures. Shakespeare began his career as an actor, learning the elaborate rhetorical speeches and highly formalized physical gestures that characterized the relatively crude dramatic repertory of the time. The top box-office star of this period, the early 1590s, was Edward Alleyn. The first Hieronimo, Alleyn was renowned for his grand style. Shakespeare, though, quickly saw the dangers of going "over the top" onstage. Working closely with his leading actor, Richard Burbage, he sought to develop a much subtler style, in which poetic language became a medium less for showy display and more for a flexible, inquiring exploration of the inner life. Titus has its share of windy rhetorical grandiloquence--that was necessary in order to bring in the crowds. But its unique brilliance occurs in those passages where Shakespeare deliberately deprives himself of the dramatist's usual resources of word and gesture. Kyd's Hieronimo only bites himself into silence in the final scene before his death, whereas Shakespeare's Lavinia has her tongue cut out before the halfway mark in the action. For the remainder of the time, she can speak only in dumb show. Nor can she express herself with gestures, for her hands have been cut off. She has become a visual icon of man's inhumanity to woman. So it is that her father, Titus, has to "wrest an alphabet" from the "martyred signs" of her mutilated body.

  Titus' own body has been battered by years of war, and yet he survives. Shakespeare reminds us that real human beings are not supermen or last action heroes, but vulnerable creatures. Titus is scarred, muddy, physically made to stoop low, yet he remains high and indomitable in spirit, despite all the wrongs he has to endure in a cruel world devoid of divine justice:

  Marcus, we are but shrubs, no cedars we,

  No big-boned men framed of the Cyclops' size,

  But metal, Marcus, steel to the very back,

  Yet wrung with wrongs more than our backs can bear.

  Aaron, meanwhile, is the first great Shakespearean villain, the forerunner of Richard the Third, Iago in Othello, and Edmund in King Lear. But he is also the first great black role in English drama. Motivated throughout by his status as an outsider, at first he seems to be the devil incarnate. But toward the end, there is an astonishing turn-around. "Is black so base a hue?" he asks the Nurse who has handed him his first-born son with an insult. Black pride and paternal affection undo the ancient racist equation o
f darkness with evil.

  Titus Andronicus plays like the work of a very clever, very naughty schoolboy. In the classroom of the Stratford-upon-Avon grammar school, young Will would have learned that the purpose of studying the classics was to be inspired by their heroic actions and moral virtues. This was the message of books such as Plutarch's Lives of the Most Noble Grecians and Romans, out of which he would later create his Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. But what he also found in classical literature were glorious tales of blood and gore, not to mention every sex crime imaginable. The brilliance of Titus is that it is suffused with the language of the Elizabethan classroom--words like "tutor," "instruct," "lesson"--yet uses classical literature as "pattern and precedent" not for virtue but for high crime and misdemeanor. The story of the rape of Philomel by Tereus and her sister Progne's juicy act of revenge, as told in Ovid's Metamorphoses, is explicitly invoked first by Demetrius and Chiron as the pattern for what they do to Lavinia and then by Titus as the precedent for what he will do to them. And it is by way of reference to the actual book of Ovid that the silenced Lavinia contrives to reveal what has happened.

  Again, the lesson of classical literature was that tragedy should be kept apart from comedy, high art from low. Shakespeare was perfectly capable of following this precept when he wanted: Julius Caesar probably has fewer laughs than any other play in the canon. But in Titus, he wantonly flouts the classical rules. He recognizes that there is actually a very narrow borderline between tragedy and farce. Four hundred years before the enfants terribles of modern Hollywood, he saw that audiences love the shock of the roller-coaster ride from violence to humor. Jokes are always at someone's expense and it is one of the obligations of the serious artist to push at the barrier of good taste so that we can discover when the expense is so great that we feel sick.

  If the play has a fault, it is that the formality of both language and action in the opening scenes creates a sense of stiffness that suggests classicism at its most tedious. This is probably not Shakespeare's fault: modern scholarship has persuasively demonstrated by means of close stylistic analysis that Titus Andronicus was begun by another dramatist, George Peele, who had a high-level classical education and a taste for large-scale symmetrical stage encounters spoken in high-flown rhetoric. It is almost certainly Peele who deserves credit for the play's ingenious syncretism, its sweep across the diversity of Roman history. We do not know whether the play was written as a purposeful collaboration or whether Shakespeare came in to do a rewrite or to complete an unfinished work. Nor do we know at precisely what point the writing became his alone--though there is no doubt that he is the author of all the most dramatic scenes, from the rape through the hand-chopping to the fly-killing banquet (which was his later addition, not included in the earliest printed text) to the feast at the climax.