12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A useful and handsome edition of an under-rated classic., June 11, 2001
TITUS ANDRONICUS. Edited by Eugene M. Waith. 226 pp. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1984 and Reprinted.
Hearsay wreaks an incalculable amount of harm in the world, and all of us are, to a greater or lesser extent, its victims. We entertain the most inaccurate opinions about many things of which we have no real knowledge or experience - entire races and nations, individuals, happenings, places, books, etc., - often without either knowing or caring where these opinions came from. And it can be a shock to discover just how wrong we are.
Like almost everyone else, somewhere along the line I picked up the notion that Shakespeare's early tragedy, 'Titus Andronicus,' was a very inferior work and was hardly worth reading. What a jolt I got when, quite by accident, I had a chance to watch the video of TITUS, the recent brilliant adaptation of 'Titus Andronicus' by Julie Taymor in which an even more brilliant Anthony Hopkins plays the leading role.
I don't know how many minutes of viewing it took to reduce my previous 'opinion' to tatters, and it certainly had something to do with the superb acting, the original costumes, the well-designed settings, and Elliot Goldenthal's impressive musical score. And Eugene Waith, in his interesting Introduction to the present edition, does make the point that this is a play which really has to be seen to be fully appreciated.
But apart from enjoying the play as dramatic spectacle, I also found myself greatly enjoying the poetry. No-one would pretend that it reaches the heights of 'Hamlet' or 'King Lear,' but it's very far from the contemptible stuff it's generally reckoned to be.
Who, for example, could forget Hopkins' pacing and shading of Shakespeare's marvelous lines - those, for example, in the kitchen scene - his finding of precisely the right rhythms and emphases and intonations preparatory to his calm gutting of the degenerate and worthless offspring of Tamura : "Come, come, Lavinia ; look, thy foes are bound. . . . O villains, Chiron and Demetrius, / Here stands the spring whom you have stained with mud, / This goodly summer with your winter mixed. . . " (5.2.166-71). After this, I just had to read the play, and was lucky to find a bargain copy of the Waith.
The series in which Waith's edition appears, 'The Oxford Shakespeare,' seems to have been designed as a rival or competitor to the well-known Arden series. Both are scholarly editions, although the Oxford seems lighter in its demands on the reader, its spelling has been modernized, and its footnotes are far more concise and much easier to take in. With regard to the latter, The 'Times Literary Supplement' remarked of the Oxford series : "... an unacknowledged genius has solved the problem of printing footnotes so that they can be understood and read with pleasure."
Waith's 69-page Introduction is quite full, and I found his discussions of 'The Play in Performance' and its 'Reception and Interpretation' especially interesting. Personally I think he makes a very good case for considering 'Titus Andronicus' a far more significant work of art than received opinion would have it.
The book is rounded out with five Appendices and an Index, enriched with ten interesting Illustrations including the famous 'Peacham Drawing,' which is given its own 7-page discussion in the Introduction, is beautifully printed on excellent paper, and is also stitched.
As editions of Shakespeare go, the Waith seems to me to strike a nice balance between the needs of the scholar and those of the general reader, and it would make a handsome addition to the bookshelves of either. But whether you get Waith's 'Titus Andronicus' or some other, you ought certainly to read this play, though not perhaps until after having listened to a recording of a good production or seen Anthony Hopkin's marvelous TITUS. I think if you do you may find yourself changing your opinion of 'Titus Andronicus' too.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
Shakespeare's only so so play, January 27, 2009
This review is from: Titus Andronicus: The Oxford Shakespeare Titus Andronicus (Oxford World's Classics) (Paperback)
Shakespeare, in his extreme youth, worked in a theater system that could well be compared to the "studio system" of Hollywood film in the Thirties. He made a whole tour of the popular genres when he started out. There was a fad for gore, and Shakespeare seems to have been assigned to do the Elizabethan version of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. If Tom Stoppard were assigned to write Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3, it would probably turn out this badly. Shakespeare's too smart, too talented and he keeps trying to find Meaning or at least Poetry in this shlock. Sometimes he seems to get bored and make fun of the whole genre, overdoing it on purpose. It says a lot that once he was his own man he never wrote another one of these again.
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