For centuries, Oxbridge taught – no, it preached – that ancient Greece and Rome were civilised.  For Shakespeare, that notion was as daft as saying that the Middle Ages gave us chivalry.  His Rome in Titus Andronicus, a violent early tragedy, was ‘a wilderness of tigers’.  Yes, but tigers do not kill cruelly, or for the sake of it.  The Romans do in this play.  They are no better than the barbarian Goths they looked  down on.  Elsewhere, I set out my views on this play, which I admire.  Its tone is set by the opening citation set out below.

At a summer school at Cambridge, my history tutor said he was glad I was taken by Carlisle, The French Revolution.  ‘Treat it just like  an epic poem or opera.’  Spot on.  Last night I watched the Julie Taymor movie again for the first time in many years – after I gave away my book and film libraries. 

I had forgotten just how gutsy this whole project was.  It grabs you by the throat from the very start – and does not let go.  It is like a dream sequence, and the themes crash and swirl like the last movement of Tchaikovsky’s fifth.  Or the finale of Anna Karenina danced by Plisetskaya, or the medieval fantasy of the ballet The Hunchback of Notre Dame.  It is a work of art that defies being boxed in. 

In accordance with procedures laid down, the critics did not understand it, and it bombed at the box office.  We tend to be scared of people of great talent who challenge us.

My views about it are as below.  I had forgotten the intriguing beginning, but not the end.  Nor would most of the crowd who saw it with me at the Longford when it came out.  It is so ‘in your face’ that I kept sensing commedia del’ arte – which is my trigger for high theatre.  I was inclined to the view that Saturninus was overdone, but then I found myself looking at Adolf Hitler in drag.  Some of the latterday Rome sets reminded me of de Chirico, who had such an influence on Jeffrey Smart.  Titus (Hopkins) in the bath was a direct take of Marat, by David, in the French Revolution.  And the following scenes, including my favourite stage direction, certainly held the complete attention of the audience, who were left in quiet wonderment at the end, and gasping for the daylight.

As it happens, I had just been reading up on Jonathan Bate, who now stands as high for me in the pantheon as Tony Tanner.  In Mad About Shakespeare (2022), Bate said he was a ‘huge admirer’ of the play.  ‘For me, Titus was not a self-indulgent spectacle of barbarism, but a profound meditation on how human beings cope, or fail to cope, with extreme suffering.’  God knows we need all of that in October, 2024.  Bate redid the Arden version and said that his edition, and a recent version of the play, and ‘Julie Taymor’s film with Anthony Hopkins in the lead role…helped to rehabilitate it by taking its emotional range, its wit and its stagecraft  seriously.’

This play states my living nightmare – that we are all just like Hottentots treading blindly around the rim of an active volcano, and God knows which of us will fall in.  It teaches us that all of us have a capacity for evil, and that the most dangerous among us are those who have God on their side – not least when they are opposed  by people who have God on their side.

The Taymor film may well be as engaging as any production I have seen of Shakespeare  – with the possible exception of Richard Burton’s Hamlet in New York.  There the audience erupted with relief at the comic parts.  Here the audience is in it up to its neck from the start – especially as we realise that we are in the hands of a consummate director.  And we wind up with a  sense of grotesque annihilation that is different to what we get with King Lear.  The grotesque on stage matches the grotesque in life.

Which is just another reason why it is not a good idea to second guess this playwright.

*

BOOK EXTRACT

TITUS ANDRONICUS A WILDERNESS OF TIGERS

…why should nature build so foul a den

 Unless the gods delight in tragedies?
(Marcus, Brother of Titus Andronicus)

Since in our fonder moments, we believe that our civilisation derives from ancient Athens and ancient Rome, we want to believe and we do believe that they were civilised. Neither was. Each sustained itself on slavery and empire; each practised cruelty and destruction on the subjects of its empire, and on its own citizens as required; each subscribed to a religion of many gods based on sacrifice, ritual and superstition that has no adherents in any place in the world now; neither city, at the time we are talking of, had received the Mosaic Law, much less the Sermon on the Mount.

These facts, which are not in dispute, mean that we cannot begin to refer to ancient Athens or ancient Rome as civilised – no matter what else they may have achieved in letters, the arts, or law. Some very small number of the citizens of either, a privileged elite, may have been able to enjoy the rudiments of what we call a civilised life, but only the more blind of our own privileged elites could say that Athens or Rome was civilised.

Rome had a particular problem. It ruled a mighty empire but was unable to rule itself. It had no constitution that prescribed the appointment or powers of its Emperors. This was a lottery conducted by the army. It was as if the Reich had been sustained, and would probably have produced a Fuehrer as required on appointment by the SS. For a long time in Rome the equivalent of the SS was the Praetorian Guard.

At the start of Titus Andronicus, Titus returns from many years at war with the Goths. There is a bad dispute over who will now be Emperor. First, Titus sacrifices a son of Tamora, the Queen of the Goths, to propitiate the shades of those sons of his and Rome that have died during the wars. She and her sons vow revenge. Then Titus refuses the purple and anoints the evil Saturninus as the new Emperor. Saturninus says he will marry Lavinia, the daughter of Titus. When she says that she is committed, Saturninus marries Tamora instead.

The hard fate of Titus is therefore sealed. Two sons of Tamora rape and mutilate Lavinia and murder a brother of the new Emperor, and get two sons of Titus convicted for that murder. In his extremity of grief Titus appears to go mad, but after Lavinia reveals who mutilated her, Titus is able to be revenged on all of them. He, naturally, dies in the process. The play was advertised as a Roman Tragedy.

This, then, is a very bloody melodrama. But it is not as comically graphic as the gruesome and inane work of Quentin Tarantino, and it was written by a playwright named William Shakespeare. The plot also has Aaron, a black lover of Tamora, an elementally evil man who prefigures Iago (in Othello). Titus himself prefigures King Lear – he is an aging authority given to ungovernable anger and wild folly as he declines in both age and power – and Othello
– he is a soldier much better in battle than in the corridors of power at Rome – and Hamlet – he is a man bent on revenge and takes cover behind madness for that purpose.

In the course of this play, any veneer of civilisation that Rome may have claimed is stripped away. Anyone who has read Suetonius’ The Lives of the Caesars, or The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon, will know that the failure of governance and the appalling crimes referred to in this play, were all quite mainstream. The Romans, like the Greeks, referred to outsiders as ‘barbarians’. Both those ancient powers fell to ‘barbarians’. The Goths were of course ‘barbarians’, but when Titus says that a Goth must be sacrificed for the shades of his sons, a barbarian son of Tamora says, with complete justice:

Was never Scythia half so barbarous. (1.1.131)

When Lucius complains of banishment from Rome, Titus says:
Why, foolish Lucius, dost thou not perceive
That Rome is but a wilderness of tigers?
Tigers must prey, and Rome affords no prey
But mine and mine. How happy art thou then,
From these devourers to be banish’ed! (3.1.53-57)

The forest is twice identified as being a place fit for rape and villainy (2.1.116 and 4.1.58). The brother of Titus is led to say:
O, why should nature build so foul a den,
Unless the gods delight in tragedies? (4.1.59-60)

The evil capacity of the forest stands for the evil capacity of Rome itself. The mutilated form of the innocent Lavinia stands for what Rome can do to the innocent at large.

The action has its dry moments, especially those involving the evil Aaron. When one of Tamora’s sons says ‘Thou hast undone our mother’, Aaron coolly replies, ‘Villain, I have done thy mother’ (4.2.76). But for the most part, the writing is a kind of epic melodrama. Since there is a critical consensus that this play is not all that good, we might set out at length some of the poetry in which Titus reflects on his tragedy.

For now I stand as one upon a rock,
Environ’d with a wilderness of sea
Who marks the waxing tide grow wave by wave,
Expecting ever when some envious surge
Will in its brinish bowels swallow him.
This way to death my wretched sons are gone,
Here stand my other son, a banished man,
And here my brother weeping at my woes:
But that which gives my soul the greatest spurn
Is dear Lavinia, dearer than my soul.
Had I but seen thy picture in this plight,
It would have maddened me: what shall I do
Now I behold thy lively body so?
Thou hast no hands to wipe away thy tears,
Nor tongue to tell me who hath martr’ed thee.
…
Gentle Lavinia, let me kiss thy lips,
Or make some sign how I may do thee ease.
Shall thy good uncle, and thy brother Lucius,
And thou, and I, sit round about some fountain,
Looking all downwards, to behold our cheeks

How they are stained, like meadows yet not dry
With miry slime left on them by a flood?
And in the fountain shall we gaze so long
Till the fresh taste be taken up from that clearness,
And made a brine-pit with our bitter tears?
Or shall we cut away our hands, like thine?
Or shall we bite our tongues, and in dumb shows
Pass the remainder of our hateful days?
What shall we do? Let us, that have our tongues
Plot some device of further misery,
To make us wondered at in time to come. (3.1.93-107 & 120-135)

There are two reasons why I am very fond of this play, which in my view is a great play. The first is that it is a theatrical demolition of the notion that the ancients were civilised, and a reminder of how little there is that separates us from the jungle. We might perhaps add that the historians say that Rome did not practise human sacrifice as such, but the adherents of at least one faith might take the view that such a proposition can only be contained by a very narrow interpretation of the word ‘sacrifice’.

The second reason is that we owe a very great debt to Julie Taymor. Before she directed the film Titus, her only credit was Lion King on Broadway. This is a wonderful film. It is a beautifully executed presentation on the screen of a play that it is very hard properly to put on the stage. Titus Andronicus may be one of those plays which is best seen on the screen above any other form of reproduction.

The film is brilliantly set and choreographed. Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange are the leads. The supreme Geraldine McEwen has a small part that finds the wrong end of a billiard cue. While the sources are Roman, this film comes across as the archetypal Greek tragedy of a cursed house. Hopkins is perfect as the square-jawed servant of public duty. Jessica Lange still conveys that sexy fatality. As the play is developed in the film, it could be at the root of the great Westerns. Most of the show is about how bad the bad guys are, so that when their dispatch comes at the end, the sense of relief is complete. This is the revenge show of all revenge shows.

The play culminates in Act 5, scene 2. This is well done – and brilliantly done in the film. It is very high theatre. It is a kind of noir (or Negri) commedia dell-arte. Titus has been firing arrows with messages tied around them, into the heavens. But so that they land near the emperor. He and Tamora are convinced Titus is mad. Tamora calls on him in that belief to trick him into handing over the son of his who is marching against them. She calls on Titus in the form of the character Revenge. She says her two sons are Rape and Murder. The mad hero comments twice on how much they look like the sons of the Queen of the Goths. He is not duped. The irony is dripping. Tamora is tricked into entrusting her sons to Titus. He tells them that when he has killed them, they will be reduced to the makings of a pie for their mother. If you see this film at a cinema the patrons tend to get audibly squeamish when the next scene opens with Anthony Hopkins with a cheesy grin and a chef’s hat. The stage direction reads Enter Titus like a cook, placing the meat on the table. (In one CD, someone rings a tasteful dinner bell.) Titus wrings the neck of his daughter Lavinia. Why? She has been defiled. By whom? Your sons. Arrest them. They are already here in the pie that you are eating. This is followed by what Manning Clark called uproar (in the play it is a great tumult). People get stabbed all over the place, there is an operatic pile of corpses, then order is restored and there is a new beginning.

We have never been able to joke about rape and the treatment of Lavinia may be much more difficult for directors and audiences now than it was four hundred years ago. But it is very properly done in this production, and just takes its part with the other sad cruelties as part of the strangulated poetry of an ancient barbaric cycle.

Just who is civilised and who is barbaric depends on from which side you are looking. It is much the same with revenge– just who is revenging whom depends on what part of the cycle you come in at. Unless the family of Titus has extinguished the line of Tamora– which we are inclined to call ethnic cleansing now – the cycle of the blood feud will go on. It was the first function of our ancient laws to put an end to the blood feud. It does not look good for the people of Rome at the end of this play. The dead Tamora is to be thrown ‘forth to birds and beasts of prey’ (5.3.198), but the film concludes with the half-caste bastard child being carried into the future, the reverse of the revolting sacrifice of a child on which this awful cycle began. The symmetry is almost fearful.