Titus Andronicus (The Arden Shakespeare) [Hardcover]

William Shakespeare (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1961 | Series: The Arden Shakespeare

The author described by "The Guardian" as "one of Shakespeare's best contemporary critics", offers a reappraisal of Shakespeare's bloodiest tragedy. "Titus Andronicus" resonates in an age in which the dramatic representation of violence has become an issue of enormous controversy. The text puts forward arguments regarding the date of the play, its sources and its early stage history, recognizing "Titus" as one of Shakespeare's early masterpieces.

--This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'...impressive and exciting...' -- Shakespeare Quarterly

'Bate achieves a remarkable fusion between performance history and criticism.' -- John Jowett, Shakespeare Survey

'a great edition of a great play' -- Julie Taymor, Director TITUS, 20th Century Fox, 1999 --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

About the Author

Jonathan Bate is Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at the University of Warwick, an honorary Fellow of St. Catharine's College Cambridge, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He has written several books on Shakespeare, including Shakespeare and Ovid and The Genius of Shakespeare. Well known as a reviewer and broadcaster, he is also the author of Romantic Ecology and a novel, The Cure for Love.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 392 pages
• Publisher: Routledge Kegan & Paul (June 1961)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 041647280X
• ISBN-13: 978-0416472806
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Manly tears and excessive violence: the first John Woo film?, December 18, 2000

By 

darragh o'donoghue - See all my reviews

This review is from: Titus Andronicus (3rd Series) (Hardcover)

On a superficial first reading, 'Titus Andronicus' is lesser Shakespeare - the language is generally simple and direct, with few convoluted similes and a lot of cliches. The plot, as with many contemporary plays, is so gruesome and bloody as to be comic - the hero, a Roman general, before the play has started has lost a wife and 21 sons; he kills another at their funeral, having dismembered and burnt the heroine's son as a 'sacrifice'; after her husband is murdered, his daughter is doubly raped and has her tongue and hands lopped off; Titus sacrifices his own hand to bail out two wrongfully accused sons - it is returned along with their heads. Et cetera. The play concludes with a grisly finale Peter Greenaway might have been proud of. The plot is basically a rehash of Kyd, Marlowe, Seneca and Ovid, although there are some striking stage effects.

Jonathan Bate in his exhaustive introduction almost convinces you of the play's greatness, as he discusses it theoretically, its sexual metaphors, obsessive misogyny, analysis of signs and reading etc. His introduction is exemplary and systematic - interpretation of content and staging; history of performance; origin and soures; textual history. Sometimes, as is often the case with Arden, the annotation is frustratingly pedantic, as you get caught in a web of previous editors' fetishistic analysing of punctuation and grammar. Mostly, though, it facilitates a smooth, enjoyable read.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An underrated play, October 4, 2010

By 

Kavita Mudan (Columbus, OH United States) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Titus Andronicus (Arden Shakespeare: Third Series) (Paperback)

I purchased this particular edition of Titus Andronicus because I was teaching it (undergraduate-level Shakespeare elective), and as I reread it, I was struck by how entertaining it was. This is a fantastic text for the beginning of a Shakespeare class -- it's short, it's outrageous, it's shocking, and, above all else, it's GREAT writing. This is classic revenge tragedy, full of awfulness and bleak realizations about humanity (or the lack thereof in many cases), but also with some incredibly effective black comedy that doesn't get nearly as much attention as it deserves. My students LOVED it.

This particular edition has very good notes on textual issues as well as some early performance history (even if it was published too early to include Julie Taymor's wonderful 1999 film). The excerpts at the end from The Spanish Tragedy, The Jew of Malta, and Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses were also extremely handy for contextual questions.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars ARDEN NEARLY IMPECCABLE IN ITS DEFENSIBLE EDITION; YET HALF OF COMMENTS DISPOSABLE, September 19, 2008

By 

C. Scanlon "least helpful reviewer" (among us humans) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Titus Andronicus (Arden Shakespeare: Third Series) (Paperback)

Titus is the play for our day of crumbling and self-destructing empire; this fable has much to teach us now. As the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. warned us: Either we learn to live together as brothers or we die apart as fools.

Here we find fool brother killing brother, citizen killing citizen, the extreme abuse of the most vulnerable and pure, the excessive cruelty of wealth and power, a fable for our age.

Here in the Third revision series from Arden (the first presentation nearly one hundred years old and thus this represents one of the most ancient, traditional and continual series of Shakespearean texts, unlike certain far more recent and much less reliable usurpers of the "traditional" crown) we may discover a nearly impeccable edition of this four hundred year old much maligned and frequently orphaned text, a fable for our present times.

The editor Jonathan Bate presents strong and nearly undeniable reasons for his selection of readings from Quarto, Folio and emended editions, including of course Theobald and Capell but also the most recent scholarship and productions. His use, for example of "Muly lives" rather than "Mulietus" is admirable, as is his conflation of false starts, later additions, and other lines always clearly indicated in other typeface and explained fully in the footnotes and introduction.

Nevertheless, I found some of his interpretation unfortunate. I believe this play not a comedy but an exposure of the absolute corruption to which power and wealth lead us. It is not comedy but an exposure of our depravity. It is not to laugh but to weep, and to repent, and to resolve to live in peace and communal cooperation and compassionate concern, to learn to live together as brothers, although not as these. It is thus a morality play, not a comedy; yet we now have no concept of such a thing, and thus laugh where we must repent, and revolt.

His continual praising and uncritical reference in the footnotes to the televised BBC and to the Warner productions also calls into question his judgment. I cannot imagine, for example, admiring bringing in the cannibal banquet table singing as did the Warner = "Heigh ho it's off to work we go!" as anything other than an inappropriate, anachronistic indulgence.

In short about half of the footnotes might easily and gratefully find blue pencil from a compassionate and wise editor of this edition who can distinguish personal interpretation and opinion from scholarly fact. As well, a basic rule for those who wish to define or explain words is never to make the definition more complex nor obscure than the word being defined, nor make the definition so general as to be useless. Thus we find the terms suffrages and tyrannies in Act Four defined completely as "key terms in the political lexicon" rather than explaining their significance in terms of Act One. This is neither helpful nor necessary.

In short, about half of the footnotes may be eliminated to the benefit of this great book, as they cast doubt upon the reliability of the edition itself, and this edition seems nearly impeccable.