The Plays of Shakespeare

If your name is William Shakespeare and you’ve lost the editors of my Pelican Shakespeare omnibus, you know that you’ve really gone badly astray. But Titus Andronicus is such a schlocky train wreck that even these folks, who are prepared to read Deep Meaning into The Comedy of Errors and make all manner of excuses for the blatant misogyny of The Taming of the Shrew, can’t quite get behind it. “Titus Andronicus is a ridiculous play,” opines Gustav Cross of the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, by way of opening his essay on the subject. “This gallimaufry of murders, rape, lopped limbs, and heads baked in a pie, lavishly served with the rich purple sauce of rhetoric, may have been to the taste of the Elizabethans, but what is one to make of it today?”

What indeed? Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s first attempt at a pure tragedy, has long been regarded as the worst thing that he ever wrote — in fact, in the opinion of no less a literary luminary than T.S. Eliot, “one of the most stupid and uninspired plays” that anybody has ever written. Many find it hard to believe that it was Shakespeare’s seventh play, coming after much better works, even if before most of his truly great ones. Desperately looking for an explanation, Gustav Cross speculates that maybe the chronologies that scholars have assembled out of the scant surviving documents from the period have this one wrong. Maybe this was really the Bard’s very first play; maybe it is a revival of Titus Andronicus that is listed in the diary of the theatrical entrepreneur Philip Henslowe on the day marked January 24, 1594.  Although it’s impossible to rule that possibility out entirely, in the absence of any affirmative evidence to that effect most scholars continue reluctantly to slot the black sheep of the Shakespeare clan into the chronology at or around the seventh spot.

Titus Andronicus takes place in a kind of lazy ancient Roman setting, one that can’t be pinned down to any specific century, much less to any specific historical event; this Rome sometimes seems to be the Republic that preceded Julius Caesar, sometimes the Empire that came after him, depending on how the mood strikes Shakespeare in any given scene. The story is partially based on an episode from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but with a lot of emendations and modifications, some from other, more contemporary books and plays that were floating around London at the time it was written. The final concoction more than justifies T.S. Eliot’s description of it as simply “stupid.” My lord, is it stupid, in addition to being more bloody-minded than most slasher movies and more racist than the worst of all your uncles at the Thanksgiving dinner table. The only reason I don’t dislike Titus Andronicus even more than The Taming of the Shrew is because it’s so bad that it’s almost — almost — good at times.

The play opens as General Titus Andronicus, the world’s worst excuse for a tragic hero, makes his triumphant return to Rome after a long campaign against the Goths. (Here we have the first unresolvable historical contradiction. The wars with the Goths took place in the latter days of the Roman Empire; a subgroup known as the Visigoths famously sacked Rome itself in AD 410. Rome had long since gone Christian by then, but the Rome of this play is clearly still a pagan culture. Go figure. But it would get tedious in the extreme if I kept pointing out such irregularities, so I’ll just stop now. Suffice to say that they’re among the least of this play’s issues.) Titus has, we are informed, sired no fewer than 25 sons — it isn’t clear with what woman or women — in between fighting Rome’s enemies, and has seen all but four of them die violently in war, a fact of which he is inordinately proud.

The old battleaxe has brought with him in his train Tamora, the captured queen of the Goths, along with three of her sons and Aaron, her part-time lover , a “Moor” — in other words, a black man.  (Basically everyone who was dark-skinned was a Moor in the eyes of Elizabethan playwrights.) As the play proceeds, Shakespeare will make it his mission not to let us forget the color of this fellow’s skin, by mentioning it roughly every two minutes.

Being a man of principle, Titus informs Tamora that one of her sons will have to be sacrificed to the gods to commemorate his victory; hey, he didn’t write the rules, he just abides by them. He is nonplussed when Tamora reacts unfavorably to this plan, but is well enough pleased a little later when he is told by his own son Lucius that the young Goth’s limbs have been duly “lopped off and [his] entrails feed the sacrificing fire, whose smoke like incense doth perfume the sky.”

While these pleasantries have been taking place, there has been a raging debate in Rome about who should become the next emperor, the old one having just died. Titus first refuses the title for himself, and then points his finger at the old emperor’s first-born son Saturninus (don’t look for this name in the history books), who has been feuding over the throne with his younger brother Bassianus. Everyone immediately bows to Titus’s judgment because he’s a bad-ass general and all — or maybe they just bow to the reality that it’s pretty much always the first-born son who gets to climb up to the cat-bird seat in these situations.

There arises now a spot of controversy about the disposition of Titus’s only daughter — that we know of, anyway — a fetching lass named Lavinia. She is betrothed to and deeply in love with Bassianus, but Saturninus has suddenly decided he would like to have her for himself. Such is the prerogative of monarchs, acknowledges our man Titus, and promptly kills another of his own sons in cold blood when said son questions this point of view; Titus is apparently not overly concerned at this point that his offspring have become such a dwindling resource. As for us in the audience: already we are learning to heartily wish that someone would just drop a big bomb on the stage to take out every one of the miserable squabbling mental midgets who inhabit this play.

Now  Saturninus, who has quite the roving eye for the ladies, decides he likes the looks of Tamora even better than Lavinia. He tells his little brother that he can have Lavinia after all — thereby rendering the death of Titus’s son moot as well as brutal — and points his imperial finger at the former queen of the Goths, who agrees to become his empress. Little does anyone dream that she’s still holding onto that pesky grievance of having watched her son have his limbs lopped off and his entrails cut out and fed to the fire.

Tamora
I’ll find a day to massacre them all
And race their faction and their family,
The cruel father, and his traitorous sons,
To whom I sued for my dear son’s life;
And make them know what ’tis to let a queen
Kneel in the streets and beg for grace in vain.

Tamora turns to her lover and general right-hand man Aaron to devise a plan for realizing this modest set of goals. We know that he is irredeemably evil, of course, from the color of his skin, a fact of which Shakespeare is still regularly reminding us by reiterating how he is “raven-colored,” with “a soul black like his face,” and much other commentary in the same vein. When he’s allowed to speak for himself, he comes across like a second-rate imitation of Richard III, minus the pathos and the sly charm.

Aaron
Even now I curse the day…
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 stalks in the night
And bid the owners quench them with their tears…
But 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.

Aaron ropes in Tamora’s two surviving sons, who are best understood as Beavis and Butthead in togas. The most sensible way to embark on the family project of revenge, Aaron tells them, is to waylay Bassianus and Lavinia in a proverbial dark wood somewhere, then kill the former and gang-rape the latter real, real good. You know, tag-team style: “There speak and strike, brave boys, and take your turns.”

Once Beavis and Butthead… er, Demetrius and Chiron, as they’re known here, have stopped giggling over this prospect, one concern penetrates the dim recesses of their minds: won’t Lavinia, like, you know, tell everyone who it was that killed her beau and raped her? Never fear, brave lads: Aaron has a plan for that. After they’ve had their fun, they’re to cut out her tongue and cut off her hands. That way, she won’t be able to tell anyone who raped her; she won’t even be able to point to them. Genius, right?

All goes according to plan. Demetrius and Chiron meet Bassianus and Lavinia in the aforementioned dark wood and carry out their assignments with enthusiasm; they make the body of Lavinia’s boyfriend “pillow to our lust” for her. (Eww!) When the boys have no more seed to expend on the poor girl, it’s time to engage in some clever banter.

Demetrius
So, now go tell, an if thy tongue can speak,
Who ’twas that cut thy tongue and ravished thee.
Chiron
Write down thy mind, bewray thy meaning so,
An if thy stumps will let thee play the scribe.
Demetrius
See how with signs and tokens she can scrowl.
Chiron
Go home, call for sweet water, wash thy hands.
Demetrius
She hath no tongue to call, nor hands to wash;
And so let’s leave her to her silent walks.
Chiron
An ’twere my cause, I should go hang myself.
Demetrius
If thou hadst hands to help thee knit the cord.

Aren’t they adorable little scamps? She can’t call for water or wash her hands or even hang herself because she doesn’t have a tongue or hands anymore! Get it?

Lavinia will now proceed to pop up at the margins of scene after scene for the balance of the play, waving her stumps around ineffectually, while the collection of MENSA candidates who are her family try to figure out why she won’t just, you know, tell them what the hell she’s so worked up about.

While Lavinia is thus at a loss for words, Aaron is moving on to the next stage of his diabolical plan. He manages to frame two of Titus’s three remaining sons for the murder of Bassianus and quite possibly the rape of their sister. (Eww!) But never fear, he tells their concerned family: if Titus will only agree to chop off one of his hands and give it to him to deliver back to the emperor — this dude really has a thing for severed hands — then he will free the two boys and send them back to their father, because… something, something, Ancient Justice. Titus, who recently killed another son about as casually as I trap moles in my backyard, inexplicably gets all sentimental over these two. He takes Aaron at his word, thereby throwing his MENSA candidacy into serious question, and offers up a chip off the old block, as it were. The ever helpful Aaron wields the axe himself, and then skedaddles off with his handsome prize.

But lo and behold! Aaron betrays Titus. (Who could have seen that coming?) A messenger arrives with the heads of Titus’s two sons, because Aaron never said he would send them back alive. Get it?

Just when you think things can’t possibly get any dumber, Titus the one-handed wonder freaks out on his brother, whose name is Marcus, for killing a fly. Note that he expresses far more grief for this fly than he ever did for the son he killed.

Marcus
Alas, my lord, I have but killed a fly.
Titus
But? How if that fly had a father and mother?
How would he hang his slender gilded wings
And buzz lamenting doings in the air!
Poor harmless fly,
That, with his pretty buzzing melody,
Came here to make us merry, and thou hast killed him.
Marcus
Pardon me, sir; it was a black ill-favored fly,
Like to the empress’ Moor; therefore I killed him.
Titus
O,O, O!
Then pardon me for reprehending thee,
For thou hast done a charitable deed.
Give me thy knife, I will insult on him,
Flattering myself as if it were the Moor
Come hither purposely to poison me.
There’s for thyself, and that’s for Tamora.
Ah, sirrah!
Yet, I think, we are not brought so low
But that between us we can kill a fly
That comes in likeness of a coal-black Moor.

While Titus is thus beating his chest over having killed a fly, Lavinia is still running around in the background doing her pantomimes. Marcus — who, it’s slowly becoming clear, is the true bright spark of the Andronicus family — now has a brilliant idea. What if they give Lavinia a stick that she can just about grasp between her stumps and let her scratch whatever it is she’s trying to tell them into the dirt? They do so, whereupon she scratches out the names of Beavis and Butthead… er, Demetrius and Chiron. “What, what!” exclaims Marcus in a state of complete shock that makes you start to wonder he’s really as clever as you thought he was. “The lustful sons of Tamora, performers of this heinous bloody deed?” To which the reader/viewer can only reply, “No shit, Sherlock. You’ve cracked the case.”

Said performers of the heinous bloody deed are still chortling over it at that very moment with Aaron: “I wish we had a thousand Roman dames by turn to serve our lust!” But their witticisms are interrupted by a nursemaid who arrives bearing a baby. It seems that Tamora has just casually popped him out from her loins between breakfast and lunch, nobody having noticed prior to this point in the play that she was even pregnant. But there’s something rather awkward about the baby, as the nursemaid observes: “A joyless, dismal, black, and sorrowful issue! Here is the babe, as loathsome as a toad amongst the fair-faced breeders of our clime.” Oh, my. That is a problem (and I’m not just talking about the racism). Tamora wants Aaron to kill the baby and bury the evidence, but instead he goes into raptures of parental love for the squealing little bundle. He kills the nursemaid instead to keep her quiet; a Moor’s gotta do what a Moor’s gotta do. Then he hightails it out of Rome with the baby in his arms.

In the meantime, Titus has sent his son Lucius back to the land of the Goths to raise an army there and lead it to Rome to depose Saturninus and Tamora. It isn’t explained why the Goths should be willing to do this, nor why the Roman legions who so recently defeated them should be unable to do so once again.

Having accomplished his assignment in record time, Lucius is returning to Rome with his army of enemies-turned-besties when he runs smack dab into Aaron, who is trying to ferry his baby to safekeeping somewhere well away from the seat of empire. “Where the bull and cow are both milk white, they never do beget a coal-black calf,” observes one of the Goths, demonstrating yet more of the keen deductive skills that mark so many of the characters in this play. Displaying his standard level of compassion, Lucius gives the order to “hang the child, that he [Aaron] may see it sprawl — a sight to vex the father’s soul withal.” But Aaron saves himself and his baby, at least for the nonce, by promising to spill all of his and his fellow conspirators’ nasty little secrets to Lucius. Truly does he know the way to an Andronicus’s heart — which is not to say that he can tell Lucius anything he shouldn’t have already figured out for himself.

Back at the Roman ranch, Tamora, rather than pausing to wonder what has become of her lover and their mutual child, has busied herself devising another scheme to psychologically torture Titus. She and her two reprobate sons dress up as Furies, the personifications of Revenge, Murder, and Rape, just to mess with the funny old guy some more. When they first show up knocking at his door, Titus seems to be led down the garden path as easily as ever. But after Tamora, who is playing the role of Revenge, leaves the sport for a while to go pull the tails off some cats or something elsewhere, Titus suddenly reveals that the deception was no match for his keen insight: he knew all along that these three costumed figures who sounded and looked just like Tamora, Beavis, and Butthead… er, Demetrius and Chiron were in fact those people. He and his household servants spring upon the boys and tie them up.

“Enter Titus Andronicus with a knife, and Lavinia with a basin,” read the stage instructions to the next scene; these words ought to make Demetrius and Chiron very, very nervous. And sure enough, the tidings are not good.

Titus
Your know your mother means to feast with me,
And calls herself Revenge, and thinks me mad.
Hark, villains, I will grind your bones to dust,
And with your blood and it I’ll make a paste,
And of the paste a coffin [pie crust] I will rear,
And make two pasties of your shameful heads,
And bid that strumpet, your unhallowed dam,
Like to the earth, swallow her own increase.
This is the feast that I have bid her to,
And this is the banquet she shall surfeit on…
And now prepare your throats. Lavinia, come,
Receive the blood; and when that they are dead,
Let me go grind their bones to powder small
And with this hateful liquor temper it;
And in that paste let their vile heads be baked.

All of which leaves me with two questions. How exactly does one “prepare” one’s throat to be cut, and how does Titus plan to grind the dynamic duo’s bones to dust with only one hand?

But never mind — it’s time for the final banquet scene, the most heartwarming of them all. The gang’s all here, including Lucius with his prisoners and his army. They dig into the feast before them, while Titus, dressed in a chef’s frock just in case any of us in the audience have failed to get the joke, snickers behind his one remaining hand.

Then it’s time to get his violence on. He kicks off the proceedings by stabbing Lavinia out of the blue for no apparent reason. (To be fair, she had become really annoying, forever waving her stumps about like the world’s most ineffectual poltergeist.) Then he relishes telling Tamora that her sons have also come to dinner, just before he takes her out as well.

Titus
Why, there they are, both baked in this pie,
Whereof their mother daintily hath fed,
Eating the flesh that she herself hath bred.
‘Tis true, ’tis true; witness my knife’s sharp point!

And so she does bear witness to the business end of his weapon: scratch one empress. Whereupon Saturninus stabs Titus to get back at him for stabbing his wife, and Lucius stabs Saturninus to get back at him for stabbing his father. Then Lucius promises Aaron that he is going to get something even worse than a stabbing, just as soon as his judge, jury, and executioner is finished accepting the crown as the next emperor of Rome.

Lucius
Set him breast-deep in earth, and famish him.
There let him stand and rave and cry for food.
If anyone relieves him or pities him,
For the offense he dies. This is our doom.

Thus begins the reign of another wise and benevolent emperor of Rome.

And what of the baby, you may be wondering? It beats the hell out of me. Everybody seems to have forgotten about him. Still, I would have to give him long odds for survival in the vicinity of this lot.

In addition to being bad in all of the practical ways that a work of fiction can be bad — being contrived, inconsistent in regard to its characters’ personalities, poorly plotted with regard to its own internal chronology, and full of more loose threads than a rag doll — Titus Andronicus is an abject failure as a tragedy. I’m going to table a longer discussion about what tragedy is or should be as a literary genre until we have some more promising examples from Shakespeare’s oeuvre to which to apply it. For now, though, suffice to say that this here play ain’t what Aristotle and Nietzsche were always going on about. Whatever else it is or does, a tragedy ought to make you feel something for the tragic hero, even if he has done terrible things. We ought to be able to see ourselves in him, ought to be able to see how circumstances or character flaws or insecurities or simply bad advice can lead us all astray in a world where the right thing to do is all too often also the hardest thing to do. The key to tragic catharsis is empathy, and its handmaiden of sympathy for the all too human weaknesses that lurk inside all of us.

But it’s impossible to work up any empathy or sympathy whatsoever for Titus, much less any of the rest of this motley collection of psychopaths. When the killing is finally over, Shakespeare tries to nod toward the traditional tragic resolution, with a new generation taking over from the one whose bodies lie strewn about the stage, promising a restoration of the natural order of things and a brighter future. But it’s as fake and hollow as the rest of the play. For the fact is that everyone on that stage is still a petty, vindictive asshole, as Lucius demonstrates with his first order as Rome’s new emperor. And unmitigated assholes just aren’t very interesting, whether in real life or in fiction. The play falls victim to the eight-word judgment that is the death knell for any story: “I don’t care what happens to these people.”

How strange to think that this amateurish misfire of a play was written by the man who would go on to become the greatest tragedian in the history of English literature. Naturally, Shakespeare scholars have been wondering and debating with one another for a long, long time about just what he was trying to do here. The most plausible theory is that Shakespeare, operating very much in Commercial Playwright mode, was trying to ape the freshly deceased wunderkind Christopher Marlowe, perhaps in the hope of cementing his position as the latter’s popular successor. By all indications, Marlow’s most successful plays had been a duology known as Tamburlaine the Great, based on the life of the fourteenth-century Muslin conqueror Timur. Those plays too are packed with flagrant, often grisly violence at every turn, but there is an oddly dignified, almost operatic quality to the bloodletting that seems to be one of the few things that Shakespeare, that most humanistic of writers, can’t quite pull off. Titus Andronicus falls as flat as did most attempts to imitate Marlowe on the Elizabethan stage — and believe you me, there were many of them.

Or such is our modern perspective. All signs are that Titus Andronicus was actually very popular — possibly as or more popular than Shakespeare’s Wars of the Roses tetralogy — during its first run in London, thus proving two assertions: that audiences have always loved to see blood spilled in their entertainments, and that bad taste is universal.

Already by the dawn of the eighteenth century, however, Titus Andronicus had fallen out of favor, being well on its way to the modern critical consensus that holds it to be Shakespeare’s worst play ever. The prim and proper Victorians had a particular loathing for it; it was virtually never performed during the nineteenth century, being treated as the embarrassing skeleton in Shakespeare’s closet.

It’s enjoyed a modest onstage revival since, but only a modest one, and often as high camp. (Some have gone so far as to claim that camp was Shakespeare’s intent all along, but that’s as unsustainable an argument as the one that says that The Taming of the Shrew was all along a sly argument for the rights of women.) The most widely discussed stage production of Titus Andronicus since it was a new play in London took place in 1955 at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford–upon-Avon. Laurence Olivier starred in that version of the play, fresh off his movie of Richard III, and was directed by Peter Brook, by many reckonings the most celebrated Shakespearean director of the entire twentieth century. The reviews were surprisingly effusive, claiming that Olivier and Brook had discovered some hidden vein of pathos in the script that had somehow eluded everyone else. It would be fascinating to see what those critics saw, but no film from any of the Stratford-upon-Avon performances, nor from a traveling version of the production which Oliver and Brook mounted in 1957, still exists today. I can’t help but think that I wouldn’t be all that impressed anyway, given what I thought of Olivier as Richard III.

So, absent any more compelling redemption arc for this play, all I can tell you is to stick with me a little longer, dear readers. Shakespeare may have given us two remarkably unpleasant plays in a row with The Taming of the Shrew and Titus Andronicus, but please trust me when I say that it starts to get better from here.

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Straight adaptations of Titus Andronicus for the screen have been even rarer during the mass-media age than have been ones for the stage. When the proud old warrior with the dodgy recipe book has made an appearance in electronic media, the productions have generally skewed even more markedly toward horror or camp, or more often both.

To wit: the 1973 cult classic Theatre of Blood, starring Vincent Price, who made an iconic career for himself out of blending horror with camp in films that straddled the line between “legitimate” cinema and unabashed B-grade fare. To be clear, this movie is not actually an adaptation of Titus Andronicus at all, not even in the loosest sense; the one scene that is a direct lift from the play fills only about ten minutes. Despite this, it’s long been closely identified with the play, for reasons I can certainly understand. For what it lacks in faithfulness, it makes up for in its macabre spirit. No movie has ever felt so in tune with Shakespeare’s vision of bloody mayhem for the pettiest of reasons. Except here, the filmmakers, screenwriters, and actors are all in on the joke. Theatre of Blood is one of those bad movies that know they’re bad, and so can wind up being pretty good. It’s the sort of fare for which the term “guilty pleasure” was invented.

Directed by the British journeyman Douglas Hickox, just a couple of years before he would try to turn a lumbering, sickly John Wayne into Clint Eastwood in Brannigan, Theatre of Blood is the tale of another aging actor who is in danger of being left behind by the zeitgeist. Vincent Price, in the role of a past-his-prime Shakespearean thespian, one who was apparently never all that talented in the first place, fakes his own death and then starts taking out all of the critics who have dissed him over the years, one by one. Each murder is an ingenious re-creation of one of Shakespeare’s grislier death scenes. He’s prepared to dig deep into the canon in search of inspiration: for example, in addition to an homage to Richard III’s murder of his brother George, Duke of Clarence (accomplished by drowning the victim in a barrel of wine and sealing him up inside), the burning at the stake of Joan of Arc in Henry VI, Part 1 makes an appearance. But the highlight — or lowlight, depending on how you feel about it — is surely the fate that awaits one metrosexual critic who is seldom seen without his two beloved poodles in his arms. Price’s murderous mastermind grinds the dogs up, bakes them into a pie, and feeds them to their proud papa — in fact, he does Shakespeare one better in the bloody-mindedness sweepstakes by sticking a funnel down his victim’s throat and force-feeding him his little darlings until he chokes and dies. This is not a film for the squeamish.

But nor is it a stupid movie; in the ways that count, it’s much smarter than Titus Andronicus itself. There’s a lot of telling subtext here: it puts its finger on the raw nerve that always runs between creators and their critics, who especially back in the days when print was still king had the power to make or break productions and careers with a single review. (That’s a responsibility that this critic would prefer not to carry, even absent the threat of a psychopathic creator bent on violent revenge; I’m therefore thankful that almost all of my voluminous body of criticism is of works from years, decades, or in some cases centuries in the past.) Of course, Vincent Price himself wasn’t exactly considered Best Actor material by the critical establishment. Thus one can all too easily imagine that it’s Price himself doing these murders, as he gazes balefully out at us from behind the remnants of the fourth wall.

For all that he wasn’t an overly subtle actor, Price clearly knew his Shakespeare. As he capers through his savage rampages, he’s constantly soliquizing passages from the plays. There’s an uncanny amount of love for the Bard and for the actor’s art to be discerned in this messy pastiche. If you can stomach it, that is.

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For those who insist on something more than a Titus Andronicus-flavored pastiche, the 1999 movie Titus is easily the most faithful and expensive version of the play ever filmed. It placed a horror icon of a rather different stripe from Vincent Price in the title role: Anthony Hopkins, who had already displayed a fondness for gourmet cooking with human flesh as Hannibal Lector in The Silence of the Lambs. Jessica Lange co-stars as Tamora, but it is Alan Cumming who darn near steals the show with his delightfully louche, thoroughly dissipated take on Emperor Saturninus.

The film drags the play kicking and screaming into a pseudo-modern setting, a move that was much in vogue in Shakespearean circles during the 1990s. We’re still told that we’re in Rome, but this is a fascist Rome, complete with Nazi salutes, slick black uniforms, big mid-century-vintage cars and motorcycles, and swing jazz on the radio; much of the footage was shot amidst the monumental leavings of Benito Mussolini in and around the real Rome. This big, lavish, stylish, and unashamedly surreal production was the very first feature film from Julie Taymor, a veteran theatrical director who had previously put on Titus Andronicus for New York City’s Theatre for a New Audience. At the time she made this movie, she was riding high off her smashingly successful theatrical version of The Lion King. The very fact that she shoveled all of that commercial capital into such an oddball project as this one tells us that it must have been a labor of love. And sure enough, the film earned back about one-sixth of its $18 million production budget.

Sadly, it functions only marginally better as an artistic statement than it did as a box-office proposition. Part of the problem is that it’s just too drawn-out, stretching one of Shakespeare’s thinnest gruels way too far: the movie fills close to three well-nigh interminable hours. Another part of the problem is that the whole fascist Shakespeare thing had been done enough on stage and screen by 1999 that it was starting to feel rote and tired; the look and feel of Titus, if unfortunately not the pacing, are strikingly similar to Richard Loncraine’s 1995 film of Richard III. But the biggest reason this movie feels so hollow, despite the talented cast, director, and production team, is that the source material is itself so empty. There are always hidden nuances waiting to be teased out of Shakespeare’s great and even merely good works, but with Titus Andronicus, what you see on the surface is all there is; there are no depths waiting to be plumbed in this banal revenge fantasy. All the high production values and creative set designs in the world can’t keep the movie from tipping over into camp from time to time. At least Theatre of Blood was in on the joke.

Julie Taymor does try here and there to squeeze a little more humanity out of the script. Most notably, she inserts an ending in which Titus’s grandson, a bit part in the original play, picks up the forgotten child of Tamora and Aaron and walks away with him into the setting sun, as if deliberately turning his back on the spiraling cycles of violence that we’ve been watching for more than two and a half hours by that point. It’s a lovely image with which to close, but it has little to do with Shakespeare’s play, coming across more like a non sequitur than the catharsis that the Bard’s first and weakest tragedy is so sorely lacking. To paraphrase the playwright himself: Titus Andronicus is a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing. And did I mention that it’s populated exclusively by assholes?

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