Shakespeare 3, Titus Andronicus
Skipping the Henry VI's for now, it's on to "Titus Andronicus", Shakespeare's earliest tragedy and somewhat notorious for being his least liked play. People familiar with the comedic "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)" will remember it as the play where someone's head gets baked into a pie.
It was popular in Shakespeare's own time, but disrespected and seldom staged from about 1650 to 1950. The main reason cited is the violence in the play, and while supposedly Richard III has more deaths, this play does serve up a lot of violence. It includes:
As for my reading experience of this play, I didn't enjoy it as much as the two comedies I'd read so far, but it was still pretty riveting. I could feel quite strongly Titus' regret, a desperate longing to turn back the clock after each senseless death or act of violence. This is, after all, the story of a man who had 25 sons and 1 daughter, and winds up with only 1 son left alive.
For me the highlight of the play was Aaron the moor. I was, of course, initially drawn to him because he's the Shakespeare character with the same name as me, but beyond that, it's just fun how much he loves his evil. While the violence that is done to the Andronici by the goth queen Tamora and her sons is in revenge for Titus' sacrificial killing of Tamora's eldest son, the revenge is in fact engineered by Aaron. When he is finally captured by Titus' last remaining son, Aaron gives a great monologue about how much he loves hurting people.
LUCIUS: Art thou not sorry for these heinous deeds?
AARON: Ay, that I had not done a thousand more.
Even now I curse the day-and yet, I think,
Few come within the compass of my curse,-
Wherein I did not some notorious ill,
As kill a man, or else devise his death,
Ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it,
Accuse some innocent and forswear myself,
Set deadly enmity between two friends,
Make poor men's cattle break their necks;
Set fire on barns and hay-stacks in the night,
And bid the owners quench them with their tears.
Oft have I digg'd up dead men from their graves,
And set them upright at their dear friends' doors,
Even when their sorrows almost were forgot;
And on their skins, as on the bark of trees,
Have with my knife carved in Roman letters,
'Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead.'
Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things
As willingly as one would kill a fly,
And nothing grieves me heartily indeed
But that I cannot do ten thousand more.
Later, when he's about to be executed by being buried to the shoulders and left to die, he reiterates this:
I am no baby, I, that with base prayers
I should repent the evils I have done:
Ten thousand worse than ever yet I did
Would I perform, if I might have my will;
If one good deed in all my life I did,
I do repent it from my very soul.
In addition to this gleeful wrongdoing, he has some great barbs, including a Shakespearean "your mom!" joke, when the nurse brings out Tamora's newborn baby and the child's dark skin shows that it is the child of her lover Aaron rather than her husband the Roman emperor:
DEMETRIUS: Villain, what hast thou done?
AARON: That which thou canst not undo.
CHIRON: Thou hast undone our mother.
AARON: Villain, I have done thy mother.
Of course, the problematic thing about Aaron for us modern readers is that he's a moor and the play is full of constant references to how hideous and strange his black skin is. (GOTH: What, canst thou say all this and never blush? AARON: Yes, like a black dog, as the saying is.)
I find I can intepret Aaron's character in one of two ways. The first, is simply that he's a psychopath, who loves to kill people for pleasure as he says, and cares about no one but himself and his heir (since he viciously defends his child, who Tamora and her other sons want to make an infanticide of). The second, is that, while he is still an evil guy, all his talk about doing evil for its own sake is just bravado, a facade he takes up because everyone thinks he's so evil due to his race anyway.
Now that I think of it, the other recurring theme in Titus Andronicus is that even those we see as evil can feel genuine love for one another, such as the love of a parent for their child or a man for his country. Even the evil-to-the-core Aaron is willing to act nobly in the defense of his own bastard newborn. Tamora sums up this idea in Act 1 when she is begging Titus not to kill her son.
Stay, Roman brethren! Gracious conqueror,
Victorious Titus, rue the tears I shed,
A mother's tears in passion for her son:
And if thy sons were ever dear to thee,
O, think my son to be as dear to me!
Sufficeth not that we are brought to Rome,
To beautify thy triumphs and return,
Captive to thee and to thy Roman yoke,
But must my sons be slaughter'd in the streets,
For valiant doings in their country's cause?
O, if to fight for king and commonweal
Were piety in thine, it is in these.
On a textual note, I found only two professional annotated versions of Titus Andronicus in the Kindle store. One was the Penguin edition (the same series from which I read "Two Gentlemen of Verona"), and the other was the "Pelican Shakespeare" edition. Since it was such a pain reading the footnotes of the Penguin version of "Verona", I tried out the Pelican version of Kindle. It turned out to be even worse, with the footnotes interspersed within the dialogue, presumably at the bottom of where each "page" would be in the print edition. So, I sent it back for a refund. So far it has seemed like no publisher has tried to actually read their Kindle edition of Shakespeare; rather they all seem like they've just taken a PDF and run it through a conversion program with no inspection by human eyes. The only version of Shakespeare I've seen which is decently formatted for Kindle is the free Moby Books version, which sadly is not annotated.
I was going to buy the Penguin Kindle edition again, but then I did some math and realized that if I buy the Kindle edition of all of Shakespeare's plays, at about $6 apiece and around $40 plays, I'm looking at about $240. So I hit the library instead. It turned out they had the print version of the Pelican Titus Andronicus, which unlike the Kindle version, was extremely readable. It didn't have superscripts to mark the footnotes, but it did use a numbering system off to the side of the dialogue, which was almost as good.
On a closing note, one thing I've discovered from reading all these scholarly annotated versions of Shakespeare, is that even the Shakespearean scholars aren't sure what he means all the time. In every play so far, there have been several points where the footnotes indicate that scholars disagree on the meaning of a particular line. In some cases this is credited to possible mistakes in the early printed versions of Shakespeare making a line nonsensical, but in other cases it's simply due to the obscurity of his poetic Elizabethan writing.
So, whenever I'm reading Shakespeare and I can't figure out what one part means, it makes me feel better to remember that even the people who edit annotated versions of Shakespeare don't always know what he means.
Next up, "The Comedy of Errors"!
It was popular in Shakespeare's own time, but disrespected and seldom staged from about 1650 to 1950. The main reason cited is the violence in the play, and while supposedly Richard III has more deaths, this play does serve up a lot of violence. It includes:
- A man dragged away from his screaming mother and sacrificed (offstage) by having his limbs chopped off and his entrails cut open
- A young bride whose husband is stabbed to death in front of her (onstage), and then she is raped and has her tongue and hands cut off (offstage)
- Her two brothers are then framed for her husband's murder and sentenced to be tortured to death (offstage)
- Her father cuts off his hand (onstage) thinking that the emperor will spare his sons if he does so
- This turns out to be a cruel hoax, and his sons' two heads and his own severed hand are returned to him by a messenger (onstage)
- The two rapists have their throats cut and bleed out (onstage)
- They are then baked (offstage) into meat pies which are served (onstage) to their mother
- The father does an honor-killing of his mutilated daughter
- And of course it ends in classic Shakespearean tragedy style with nearly everyone in the final scene dying (though at least that's by good old fashioned stabbing with swords)
As for my reading experience of this play, I didn't enjoy it as much as the two comedies I'd read so far, but it was still pretty riveting. I could feel quite strongly Titus' regret, a desperate longing to turn back the clock after each senseless death or act of violence. This is, after all, the story of a man who had 25 sons and 1 daughter, and winds up with only 1 son left alive.
For me the highlight of the play was Aaron the moor. I was, of course, initially drawn to him because he's the Shakespeare character with the same name as me, but beyond that, it's just fun how much he loves his evil. While the violence that is done to the Andronici by the goth queen Tamora and her sons is in revenge for Titus' sacrificial killing of Tamora's eldest son, the revenge is in fact engineered by Aaron. When he is finally captured by Titus' last remaining son, Aaron gives a great monologue about how much he loves hurting people.
LUCIUS: Art thou not sorry for these heinous deeds?
AARON: Ay, that I had not done a thousand more.
Even now I curse the day-and yet, I think,
Few come within the compass of my curse,-
Wherein I did not some notorious ill,
As kill a man, or else devise his death,
Ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it,
Accuse some innocent and forswear myself,
Set deadly enmity between two friends,
Make poor men's cattle break their necks;
Set fire on barns and hay-stacks in the night,
And bid the owners quench them with their tears.
Oft have I digg'd up dead men from their graves,
And set them upright at their dear friends' doors,
Even when their sorrows almost were forgot;
And on their skins, as on the bark of trees,
Have with my knife carved in Roman letters,
'Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead.'
Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things
As willingly as one would kill a fly,
And nothing grieves me heartily indeed
But that I cannot do ten thousand more.
Later, when he's about to be executed by being buried to the shoulders and left to die, he reiterates this:
I am no baby, I, that with base prayers
I should repent the evils I have done:
Ten thousand worse than ever yet I did
Would I perform, if I might have my will;
If one good deed in all my life I did,
I do repent it from my very soul.
In addition to this gleeful wrongdoing, he has some great barbs, including a Shakespearean "your mom!" joke, when the nurse brings out Tamora's newborn baby and the child's dark skin shows that it is the child of her lover Aaron rather than her husband the Roman emperor:
DEMETRIUS: Villain, what hast thou done?
AARON: That which thou canst not undo.
CHIRON: Thou hast undone our mother.
AARON: Villain, I have done thy mother.
Of course, the problematic thing about Aaron for us modern readers is that he's a moor and the play is full of constant references to how hideous and strange his black skin is. (GOTH: What, canst thou say all this and never blush? AARON: Yes, like a black dog, as the saying is.)
I find I can intepret Aaron's character in one of two ways. The first, is simply that he's a psychopath, who loves to kill people for pleasure as he says, and cares about no one but himself and his heir (since he viciously defends his child, who Tamora and her other sons want to make an infanticide of). The second, is that, while he is still an evil guy, all his talk about doing evil for its own sake is just bravado, a facade he takes up because everyone thinks he's so evil due to his race anyway.
Now that I think of it, the other recurring theme in Titus Andronicus is that even those we see as evil can feel genuine love for one another, such as the love of a parent for their child or a man for his country. Even the evil-to-the-core Aaron is willing to act nobly in the defense of his own bastard newborn. Tamora sums up this idea in Act 1 when she is begging Titus not to kill her son.
Stay, Roman brethren! Gracious conqueror,
Victorious Titus, rue the tears I shed,
A mother's tears in passion for her son:
And if thy sons were ever dear to thee,
O, think my son to be as dear to me!
Sufficeth not that we are brought to Rome,
To beautify thy triumphs and return,
Captive to thee and to thy Roman yoke,
But must my sons be slaughter'd in the streets,
For valiant doings in their country's cause?
O, if to fight for king and commonweal
Were piety in thine, it is in these.
On a textual note, I found only two professional annotated versions of Titus Andronicus in the Kindle store. One was the Penguin edition (the same series from which I read "Two Gentlemen of Verona"), and the other was the "Pelican Shakespeare" edition. Since it was such a pain reading the footnotes of the Penguin version of "Verona", I tried out the Pelican version of Kindle. It turned out to be even worse, with the footnotes interspersed within the dialogue, presumably at the bottom of where each "page" would be in the print edition. So, I sent it back for a refund. So far it has seemed like no publisher has tried to actually read their Kindle edition of Shakespeare; rather they all seem like they've just taken a PDF and run it through a conversion program with no inspection by human eyes. The only version of Shakespeare I've seen which is decently formatted for Kindle is the free Moby Books version, which sadly is not annotated.
I was going to buy the Penguin Kindle edition again, but then I did some math and realized that if I buy the Kindle edition of all of Shakespeare's plays, at about $6 apiece and around $40 plays, I'm looking at about $240. So I hit the library instead. It turned out they had the print version of the Pelican Titus Andronicus, which unlike the Kindle version, was extremely readable. It didn't have superscripts to mark the footnotes, but it did use a numbering system off to the side of the dialogue, which was almost as good.
On a closing note, one thing I've discovered from reading all these scholarly annotated versions of Shakespeare, is that even the Shakespearean scholars aren't sure what he means all the time. In every play so far, there have been several points where the footnotes indicate that scholars disagree on the meaning of a particular line. In some cases this is credited to possible mistakes in the early printed versions of Shakespeare making a line nonsensical, but in other cases it's simply due to the obscurity of his poetic Elizabethan writing.
So, whenever I'm reading Shakespeare and I can't figure out what one part means, it makes me feel better to remember that even the people who edit annotated versions of Shakespeare don't always know what he means.
Next up, "The Comedy of Errors"!