Alrightyroo. Another chapter of the life of William Shakespeare. I wish I could be more creative with these openings. These openings really do suck don't they? Eh...anyway, on to the show.
Cheers
Shakespeare: A Biography
by
Peter Ackroyd
Part Three
Chapter 30: O Barbarous and Bloody Spectacle
There is not much argument that the young Shakespeare did write most of Titus Andronicus, a blood and thunder piece designed for the popular market of the public playhouse. The first act was almost certainly composed by George Peele and Shakespeare was brought in to finish the work. It is possible that Shakespeare wrote the entire play although the motive for imitating Peele's ceremonial style is unclear.
Titus Andronicus is a play that attempted to beat Kyd and Marlowe at their own game, a revenge tragedy on a large and bloody scale. He borrowed structure and details from Kyd's tragedy The Spanish Tragedy and makes it it more colourful and theatrical. He took his stage villain, Aaron and modeled it after Barabas in Marlowe's The Jew of Malta but made him way more wicked. The drama has lashings of Ovid and Virgil, as if to prove the point that Shakespeare had also been given a classical education too.
Titus Andronicus is fairly violent. The heroine, Lavinia, has her tongue cut out and her hands are lopped off. She is then obliged to write down the name of her murderer with her remaining stumps. The horror reaches a climax in the last scene when the evil queen eats the flesh of her two sons, backed in a pie before being stabbed to death by Titus. It has suggested that Shakespeare was parodying the worst excesses of the genre. However, there is no evidence at all for that assumption. It would also go against the practice of the sixteenth century stage, where revenge drama was too new to be satirized. It is unlikely, for example, that an Elizabethan audience would have laughed at the sight of Lavinia with her hands chopped off. It was still a punishment deployed in public places.
Titus Andronicus was not seen a failure at the time. It is a curious fact that the earliest productions of writers and dramatists contain the seeds of their future works. In Titus Andronicus we can see the first stirrings of Caliban, Macbeth and Lear, all as it were vying for attention. Great
Titus Andronicus is fairly violent. The heroine, Lavinia, has her tongue cut out and her hands are lopped off. She is then obliged to write down the name of her murderer with her remaining stumps. The horror reaches a climax in the last scene when the evil queen eats the flesh of her two sons, backed in a pie before being stabbed to death by Titus. It has suggested that Shakespeare was parodying the worst excesses of the genre. However, there is no evidence at all for that assumption. It would also go against the practice of the sixteenth century stage, where revenge drama was too new to be satirized. It is unlikely, for example, that an Elizabethan audience would have laughed at the sight of Lavinia with her hands chopped off. It was still a punishment deployed in public places.
Titus Andronicus was not seen a failure at the time. It is a curious fact that the earliest productions of writers and dramatists contain the seeds of their future works. In Titus Andronicus we can see the first stirrings of Caliban, Macbeth and Lear, all as it were vying for attention. Great
writers are much more likely to be inspired by their unknown future than by their known and constricted past.
Then, as seem to have been his custom, he revised the play in later years for different actors or for different production. It seems likely that he had a ready hand instinctive grasp of stagecraft before he turned his attention to expression. Unlike his contemporaries he already possessed by a firm idea of characters in actions and of characters in response to action. When they emerged from his pen were already engaged in the game.
So from a possible early version of Hamlet we have six or seven plays which might have been composed by the young Shakespeare in the first two years after his arrival in London. It has been objected in the past that he could not have written so many plays in such a short space of time, some three or a four year. He was not a modern dramatist. The wonder is that he did not write more. Contemporaries like Robert Greene produced them on demand, and were lucky if their work had a life of a month or even a week.
Then, as seem to have been his custom, he revised the play in later years for different actors or for different production. It seems likely that he had a ready hand instinctive grasp of stagecraft before he turned his attention to expression. Unlike his contemporaries he already possessed by a firm idea of characters in actions and of characters in response to action. When they emerged from his pen were already engaged in the game.
So from a possible early version of Hamlet we have six or seven plays which might have been composed by the young Shakespeare in the first two years after his arrival in London. It has been objected in the past that he could not have written so many plays in such a short space of time, some three or a four year. He was not a modern dramatist. The wonder is that he did not write more. Contemporaries like Robert Greene produced them on demand, and were lucky if their work had a life of a month or even a week.
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