Titus Andronicus Research Articles

Shakespeare and the Folktale: An Anthology of Stories ed. by Charlotte Artese

Reviewed by: Shakespeare and the Folktale: An Anthology of Stories ed. by Charlotte Artese Sara Cleto (bio) Shakespeare and the Folktale: An Anthology of Stories. Edited by Charlotte Artese, Princeton University Press, 2019, 373 pp. In 2015, Charlotte Artese published her groundbreaking text Shakespeare’s Folktale Sources, in which she demonstrated how folktales profoundly shaped and influenced Shakespeare’s plays. While scholars had previously noted connections between folktales and Shakespeare’s plots and characters, these observations were largely restricted to motif spotting. In Shakespeare’s Folktale Sources, Artese argued that the majority of Shakespeare’s plays are deeply entwined with folklore and, more specifically, that seven of the plays have plots that are derived directly from folktales. Furthermore, she illuminated the ways in which the network of Shakespeare’s plays and their narrative elements function much like folktales themselves. Artese’s new book, Shakespeare and the Folktale, is the logical and welcome extension of her previous project. In this anthology, she has collected [End Page 383] and edited the folktales that are the backbone of her argument: the folktales that animate Shakespeare’s plays. As she explains in her introduction, “[T]his anthology aims to augment our knowledge of Shakespeare’s sources and influences by supplying examples of his folktales’ sources rather than revisiting his acknowledged literary ones,” which are already generally recognized and are readily available in other texts (3). The book consists of an introduction, eight chapters, a bibliography, and an extensive index. Each chapter addresses one Shakespeare play, including a brief discussion of that play’s sources followed by the full text of five to eight related folktales. In Shakespeare’s Folktale Sources, Artese considered seven plays: The Taming of the Shrew (1592), Titus Andronicus (1592–93), The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597/1602), The Merchant of Venice (1596–99), All’s Well That Ends Well (1598–1608), Measure for Measure (1603–04), and Cymbeline (1611), each of which features one or more plots drawn directly from a folk-tale. The contents of Shakespeare and the Folktale: An Anthology overlap with but do not replicate those found in the earlier book. The new anthology includes a chapter on King Lear (1606), which “adapts a legendary history that includes folktales and folk narrative motifs,” a chapter on The Comedy of Errors (1594), which has a classical Roman source as well as a folktale source, and a chapter on The Tempest (1610–11), “whose dependence on the ‘Magic Flight’ folktale is partial and incomplete but fascinating nonetheless” (7). Artese does not include chapters on The Merry Wives of Windsor or Measure for Measure because of the lack of relevant folktale versions available to print in English. There is a significant methodological challenge to Artese’s project, which is, simply put, that we do not know exactly which versions of each folktale circulated in Shakespeare’s day, let alone which ones he personally encountered. The very nature of oral tradition makes a perfect reconstruction of Shakespeare’s folktale sources impossible. However, this does not make Artese’s project any less worthwhile. We know that the folktale plots that underpin Shakespeare’s plays existed before he ever set pen to paper because medieval versions survived (2). Though we will never know exactly which versions Shakespeare encountered orally, “folktales collected in the modern world (the nineteenth century and after) can give us insight into the stories Shakespeare and his audience might have known” (2). The folktales that Artese has assembled are, therefore, not Shakespeare’s exact sources but instead “later members of the genus of his sources” (2). Because we cannot know the exact sources—and because Shakespeare himself may likely have been working from several different oral versions—Artese has included several examples of each folktale type in the collection to provide a sense of possible variations. “Attending to the folktale in its many guises can [End Page 384] give us a clearer sense of the story tradition available to Shakespeare, although we cannot reconstruct it exactly” (3). Because the anthology represents an educated and creative reconstruction rather than a precise replica of Shakespeare’s sources, Artese’s primary criteria for selection was how closely a folktale resembled the Shakespeare play...

Reading at the Seams in Titus Andronicus: Shakespeare’s “House of Fame” and its Virgilian-Ovidian-Chaucerian Resonances

Reading at the Seams in Titus Andronicus: Shakespeare’s “House of Fame” and its Virgilian-Ovidian-Chaucerian Resonances

Stealing Shives: Titus Andronicus as Chaucerian Anti-Romance

Stealing Shives: Titus Andronicus as Chaucerian Anti-Romance

РЕЦЕНЗИЯ НА КН.: SACHON S. SHAKESPEARE, OBJECTS AND PHENOMENOLOGY : DAGGERS OF THE MIND. - NEW YORK : PALGRAVE MACMILLAN, 2020. - 243 P. [СЭКОН С. У. ШЕКСПИР, ОБЪЕКТЫ И ФЕНОМЕНОЛОГИЯ: КИНЖАЛЫ РАЗУМА

The main subject of the book written by S. Sachon is the perception of objects both visible to the audience and imaginative in five Shakespearian plays: Titus Andronicus, Henry V, Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear. Her approach is a synthesis of phenomenology, historicism, close reading, theatrical studies and modern cognitive studies. Her aim is to analyze both audience's conscious and subconscious response to the language and images of Shakespearian plays.

Hamlet’s Choice: Religion and Resistance in Shakespeare’s Revenge Tragedies. Peter Lake. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020. Pp. ix+215.

<i>Hamlet’s Choice: Religion and Resistance in Shakespeare’s Revenge Tragedies</i>. Peter Lake. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020. Pp. ix+215.

Titus und kein Ende

Abstract As part of the discussion on the poetics of endings, this paper looks at Shakespeare’s early Roman revenge tragedy as a particularly rich case study. Readers, spectators, and critics of Titus Andronicus have long been puzzled and sometimes annoyed by the sense of uncertainty and irresolution which this play seems to leave us with, even though its final speeches take us through the motions of a strong conclusion. Recent criticism has especially focussed on the figure of the new emperor, whose words close the tragedy with traditional burial orders but whose authority remains in doubt. My paper reopens the case by drawing also on two German adaptations, Heiner Müller’s Anatomie Titus Fall of Rome (1984) and Botho Strauß’s Schändung (2005), as heuristic texts to highlight fundamental ruptures that are at stake here. Trying to put the question of endings also into the religious context of the English Reformation and into the culture of the playhouse, the paper argues that Shakespeare’s dramatic non-ending in Titus may indeed be quite productive.

Of an Age, Not Just for All Time: Shakespeare’s Screen Traffic in a City and Time “Out of Joint”

ABSTRACT This essay will assess the extent to which screened broadcasts of Shakespeare plays in Hong Kong contribute to a sense of cosmopolitan cultural identity in the city, and engage with current issues and events, as Shakespearean presentist theory argues. I will discuss how this relatively recent digitally mediated traffic in transnational Shakespeare, functioning as it does as a simulacrum of the physical theatre-going experience, resonates with the sociocultural ethos of Hong Kong. Like the asynchronous – as opposed to simulcast – theatre broadcast of Western Shakespeare, the time seems palpably “out of joint” to many residents of the city. A major factor affecting the continuation of Hong Kong's hitherto rich cultural life is the rapidly accelerating erosion of its autonomy and supposedly guaranteed civic freedoms, following Beijing's imposition of sweeping national security legislation. The essay discusses the significance of Shakespeare theatre broadcast in this highly charged political atmosphere in Hong Kong, with its dwindling, but stubbornly residual, cultural links to the country of the dramatist's birth. The second part will explore the local resonances of four broadcast theatre productions of Shakespeare plays in Hong Kong, Coriolanus and Hamlet (both NT Live) and The Tempest and Titus Andronicus (both RSC Live).

Myth, Historical Metaphor, and Figuration: Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus

Metaphor is crucial in Titus Andronicus and in the historical interpretation of it. Aaron, its villain, thinks mythically, reducing metaphors, myths, and their aestheticizing of violence to physical actuality, with Lavinia as the prime exhibit of both physical brutality and the myth of Philomela. Aaron is revealed progressively, as if layers were being peeled off to find his malignant core.

The Impossibility of Turning Rancour to Love: The Post-war Controversy over the Pacifist Constitution and Yukio Ninagawa’s Construing of Romeo and Juliet

ABSTRACT This essay is an attempt to shed light on the late Yukio Ninagawa’s (1935–2016) unique perspective of construing Romeo and Juliet, which crystallized in the moment of his little-known production of the play performed at Sainokuni Saitama Arts Theater in August 2014. In his attempt to localize the play and make it “agitate” actors and audiences in Japan, Ninagawa transformed the play into a platform for the nation’s ongoing controversy over the Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) under the pacifist Constitution. The religious and legal (and secular) ideologies of peacekeeping in Verona of Romeo and Juliet are translated into the constitutional ideal and political rationality regarding the JSDF under the war-renouncing Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution. Unlike the eleven plays including Ninagawa Macbeth (1980-), Titus Andronicus (2004-), and, more recently, Richard II (2015-) which made him a globally recognized Shakespeare director, 1 Ninagawa directed Romeo and Juliet in ways “to appeal to the ordinary people in Japan” (Power 164) 2 perhaps giving a hint to construe his dramaturgy of the twenty-one other Shakespearean plays performed domestically.

Early Shakespeare, 1588–1594. Edited by Rory Loughnane and Andrew J. Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. v+324.

<i>Early Shakespeare, 1588–1594</i>. Edited by Rory Loughnane and Andrew J. Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. v+324.

Hewers of Wood, Drawers of Gall: The Wooden Economies of Race in Titus Andronicus and Lust’s Dominion

Hewers of Wood, Drawers of Gall: The Wooden Economies of Race in <i>Titus Andronicus</i> and <i>Lust’s Dominion</i>

‘The Hunt is Up’: Death, Dismemberment, and Feasting in Shakespeare’s Roman Tragedies

Critics have noted the prominence in Shakespeare’s Roman tragedies of the related discourses of hunting, sacrifice, and ceremonialism. The emphasis on ritualism and aberrant feasting in these plays finds its echo in the par force hunting, which evokes in order to deny the subjectivity of the noble quarry, casting the deer as both worthy adversary and aestheticized corpse. Early modern hunting manuals describe the ritualism at the conclusion of the aristocratic hunt, formalised ceremonies which enacted an elaborately ceremonial dissection and distribution of the body of the slain quarry, drawing their symbolic charge from the inherent violence of the hunt and its sacrificial emphasis on the dead animal’s physical dismemberment. Exploring the interactions between hunting, ritualism, and sacrifice in Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, and Coriolanus, this article excavates the contemporary significance of the deer as animal, as lordly game, and as symbol. This article suggests that in these plays, the animal corpse becomes a useful metaphor for communal conflict and division, resonances which the aristocratic sport easily evoked given the discourses of exclusion and elitism which surrounded it and its importance in the construction of noble male identity.

Violence and violation: A Palestinian reading of rape and revenge in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus

ABSTRACT This paper employs the methodologies of feminism, new historicism and presentism to argue that Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus is a conflict between patriarchal and matriarchal voices. From a feminist standpoint, the verbal and physical violence the play enacts emanates from male figures’ deafness to the female voice. Shakespeare dismantles the virgin-whore dichotomy in the figures of Lavinia and Tamora, who mimic patriarchal prescriptions on female speech and silence and, in the latter case, the patriarchal speech of authority. Reading Titus alongside its historical context, I argue that this tragedy endorses the conventional association of woman’s speech with wantonness possibly in connection with cultural anxieties about Elizabeth’s public, often spectacular role. Titus Andronicus prefigures the new historicist ideology of containing opposing voices. The dominant male powers deliberately foster the subversive behaviour of others (Tamora, Lavinia, and Aaron) in order to crush them publicly and so assert their dominance. In addition to these methodologies, I deploy the critical thread of presentism to reveal trans-cultural and trans-historical continuities between the fictional world of Titus Andronicus and contemporary Palestine. For Palestinian scholars of English, this tragedy speaks of the gendering of nationalism as female in Palestinian national narratives, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, honour killing, and the construction of nation as narration.

Two New Sources for Titus Andronicus

Two New Sources for Titus Andronicus

The Orient: Villains in the plays of Marlow and Shakespeare

The paper attempts to underline how, in view of the 16th century British socio-cultural and economic scenario, that held a remarkable efficacy in shaping the characters in literature, the Oriental Muslim characters were portrayed, particularly, penned by the two prominent playwrights of the time- Shakespeare in Titus Andronicus and Othello, and Marlowe in Tamburlaine the Great I and II. As the plays are taught in almost all the universities at the higher levels, the paper is particularly relevant to underline how it does predispose students through the misrepresentation of the Orient. At the same breadth, it also aims to analyse how at certain instances in their works, the two playwrights explore the ambiguities and conflicting notions that the Elizabethan England harboured about the Islamic world of the East. The paper, particularly, focusses on the idea of justifying violence through polemical stereotyping and negative image which culminates with the ending of Tamburlaine the Great.

The Representation of Gender and Discourses of Gender Discrimination in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus

This paper discusses the problems involved in the representation of women and the negative aspects of the patriarchal system and its failure represented in Titus Andronicus. Shakespeare reveals the negative aspects of the patriarchy through bizarre actions of revenge practiced by the oldest male in the family. The play represents male violence on women through the rape of Lavinia and the extreme view of patriarchy as obsessed with women’s modesty. Moreover, it dramatizes distorted patriarchal perception viewing women in the virgin/whore dichotomy. Tamora is portrayed as an adulterate whore, while Lavinia is represented as a sacred virgin. The patriarchal pressure given to raped Lavinia is a problem. It was not conceived as legitimate for Shakespeare to represent women on the patriarchal premises that discriminate against women and deny their autonomy. His criticism of the patriarchy is revealed in his representation of Titus Andronicus. He is the paterfamilias who embodies Roman ideals. The failure of Titus represents the failure of patriarchy. He commits significant errors and mistakes. He kills his youngest son Mutius, Tamora’s sons, Lavinia as a way of getting rid of ‘shame.’ These processes reveal the abused use of the paterfamilias’ power. Titus Andronicus gives the negative aspects of the patriarchy and gender discrimination against women in the form of revenge tragedy.

Use of Folktales in the plays of Shakespeare

The present paper aims at to discuss the use of folktales in some notable plays of William Shakespeare. World widely he is well accepted and acknowledge a great dramatist, but this fame of Shakespeare is relied on his use of folklores of various languages and cultures. He became master in using folklores in his plays with new flavour and glamour. As we know that folklores are the foundation of modern literary forms. They are deep rooted in cultures and languages. Folklores have a tradition that they are not available in any written form but they are moulded in order to suit best in new modern literary forms. Shakespeare was the master in doing so. Folklore is a very broader term includes everything about humans and their cultures. For most of his plays, Shakespeare borrowed the material from folklores. But it’s very unfortunate that many scholars of Shakespeare concentrated themselves only on literary forms instead foundation of his plays ignored or paid no attention. So here I am making a small effort to talk about those folklores that supplied rich materials for his plays The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, The Taming of The Shrew, The Comedy of Errors, Titus Andronicus, All’s Well That Ends Well, Cymbeline and The Tempest. Apart from this there are some well-known literary sources as Holinshed’s chronicles, Plutarch’s The Lives of Noble Greeks and Romans and Ovid’s Metamorphosis.

Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages. Tanya Pollard. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. vii+331.

<i>Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages</i>. Tanya Pollard. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. vii+331.

'Such Violent Hands'

For many, ‘Titus Andronicus’ exemplifies the extreme visual horror which characterises the subgenre of Elizabethan revenge tragedy. Long recognised as a collaboration between William Shakespeare and George Peele, the play’s notorious denouement – in which a Gothic queen is tricked into eating her slaughtered sons – has often been interpreted as a satire upon the revenge genre itself. Yet the nature of the play has recently been complicated by the claim that an additional banquet scene, only present in the 1623 Folio, may be a later addition written by a third dramatist, probably Thomas Middleton, and incorporated into the play sometime after 1616. This article will consider the implications of this probability further. It will explore how the author was not simply adding new material to ‘Titus Andronicus’ in order to provide a new selling point for a later revival of the work, but was constructing a new sequence designed to mirror and complement the already infamous cannibalistic conclusion of the original text. Understanding this scene as a later addition, we can now better understand how this additional scene serves as an integral turning point in the drama’s narrative, and is far less ‘disposable’ than previous critics have been equipped to realise.

Consuming and Being Consumed

The article explores how Margaret Atwood demystifies the romance plot in her first novel The Edible Woman by exposing the world of consumerism as artificial and threatening to the point of cannibalism. This is revealed through references to fairy tales and myths with cannibalistic undertones such as ‘Snow White’, ‘The Robber Bridegroom’ and ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’. It is also highlighted in the reference to the theme of the eaten heart in Boccaccio’s Decameron and to Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. In the tempting world of advertisements and commercials, women are objectified and traded and their roles are diminished. In this realm, Marian, the protagonist, is in search of her identity but first tries to ‘adjust’ to society’s artificial and delusional narrative. The advertisements dictate a behaviour, objectify her body and force her to comply with preformed roles. She consciously tries to defend herself from this consumerist mentality by allowing her body to ‘speak’ for her. Her body starts to refuse food and she feels it is alive, until it cuts itself off. Therefore, showing how she refuses to ‘adjust’ to the consumerist society. The narrative points out the inherent cannibalistic quality of the consumerist society in which human beings are commodities and their roles are dictated by commercials and the ferocious rules of profit.