Titus and Dronicus

or

Tamora and Tamora and Tamora

For purposes of this review some assumptions: first that the reader has a pretty good idea of who wrote the underlying play (herein called Andronicus) for the film (Titus). Second, that since the play has been around, perhaps since 1576, it is fair game to reveal the plot.  

Unlike Shakespeare in Love, Titus does not play footy-footy with the authorship issue. While Titus' makers may well know that Andronicus is an early play written by Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, it is evident only in the skill with which they have treated his work. The producers of Love wallowed in a rather banal (although often very funny) banter, revealing that they really do know Romeo was not written by an illiterate android from Stratford on Avon; and that at least some of their advisors had been hitting on them to be brave enough to admit it. In the case of Tom Stoppard, who confessed to Charlie Rose that he did not take much stock in current scholarship, he is either as stupid as he is talented; or is a closet Oxfordian planning to write a block-buster expose.  

Andronicus has split the scholars over the ages: those who believe it was written by Shakespeare; and those who do not. In many cases Marlowe (misplaced in Stratfordian timing) erroneously gets the credit or blame. The play's classical origins have been sifted with archaeological skill. Its direct references to Terence and Ovid (Philomel's sad scam of hands and tongues) are self-explanatory. Often corrupted by Stratfordian bias, scholars have still found Seneca as the primary source for this brand of tragedy. We are saved here from a lengthy trip through esoteric references by T. S. Eliot. He held that Seneca would have chosen Shakespeare over other Elizabethan authors for his understanding of ancient works wired with exquisitely non-gratuitous cruelty.  

There is no shortage of other references. Nina Green reminds us that Eva Turner Clark tried to connect the play to a performance of Titus and Gisippus noted in Revels accounts of 1576-7. For Hank Whittemore "the 'Spanish Fury', a terrible massacre by Catholic fanatics, in Antwerp on Nov. 4, 1576" is a more immediate source for so violent a play. But Nina, noting that Oxford had just returned from the Continent, sees the possibility of "a real political cover story for the horrors of a real rape of a real woman (Anne Cecil). She adds other fuel in favor of a later date with the punishment awarded John Stubbs in 1579 for his tract against the French marriage. She feels that Oxford would have reacted strongly to the removal of Stubbs hand both in principal, and because he "was the husband of Oxford's first cousin, Anne Vere." In Shakespeare A-Z Boyce "allows" that his version of the Bard might have known that the 12th-century Byzantine Emperor Andronicus Comnenus, famous for his cruelty, was killed by a mob after having his hand cut off.

This plot must have been a ball for a young noble playwright steeped in Greek and Roman classics that he had read in the original. A conquering general returns to Rome to bury his sons, sacrifice one prisoner in the funeral rites, deliver his other prisoners, and retire. He refuses the offer of the job of Emperor, fobbing it off on the eldest son of the former ruler.  A bad guy, the new emperor demands Titus' lovely daughter as his queen. His younger brother, a good guy to whom she is betrothed, promptly absconds with her. The new emperor takes the sexy (and now liberated) Queen of the Goths instead, installing her troupe of two remaining sons and an interesting Moor in his court. It doesn't take long for the Queen and her sons to avenge their son/brother's death by murdering the emperor's younger brother and ravishing his new bride. They silence her by chopping off her hands and cutting out her tongue. Guided by the Moor in all this, they contrive to blame it all on Titus' sons who lose their heads. Their father also loses a hand, offered as security for their fair trial. Lavinia, the daughter uses a copy of Ovid to compare her plight with that of Ovid's Philomel and manages to write her assailants' names in the sand. Titus' remaining son, banished, runs to get help from their former enemies, the Goths.  

A telling sub-plot has the Moor, who has been the Queen's lover all along, receive his/her newborn son (sufficiently pigmented to require a deft substitution) and to bargain for its life by agreeing to reveal the details of the above shenanigans. He will then spend the rest of his time on earth buried in it up to his neck.  

Titus, not unaffected by all of this, feigns madness to position himself for appropriate revenge. The Queen's sons are dispatched into a meat pie served to their mother and the emperor at a parley with son Lucius and the Goths.  There nearly everyone is killed off except this last son, who gets to be emperor.

The present task of saying something useful about Titus has been lightened by the film itself. For me it has opened up a difficult play for the first time.  It does this in two ways: "infrastructure" and language. This brand new cinematic term, coined here by necessity, can be defined by some examples. Titus opens on a child at dinner, presumably in his nursery, playing with his toy soldiers. A mix of sturdy Roman figures with modern engines of war are anointed with catsup and tossed about in frantic battle until the scene is enveloped in a windy blast. The child is rescued from this explosion and carried triumphantly into a great square, to the cheering of an unseen crowd.

Still unsure of what Julie Taymor has in store for us we watch the square fill up with orchestrated military might: tramping warriors, chariots, and (oops!) motorcycles and tanks. From this seething panoply Titus and his sons emerge, helmeted and covered with dust. Ok, we get it, the film wants us to recognize that war has no special place in time: the link between the "modern" kid and his imagination. We are to see things through his eyes from now on. But who is he? It turns out that he is Titus' grandson, and may well some day follow his father as emperor. But I suspect that the film wants us to know something more important about the play.

While Andronicus' script does not verbally establish the abstract concept of military might, some appropriate stomping and clanking about the Elizabethan stage would have stirred an audience closer in time to this ancient technology. Spoiled by Hiroshima and Star Wars, today's audience can appreciate Taymor's understanding that for its author this film's setting would have been absolutely necessary. Our equivalent might have been Great Eisenhower, atop a tank returning up Broadway as Liberator to become President. Try to imagine Andronicus having been written (in 1585) by a young country bumpkin for whom there is no record of his ever having been subjected to unnecessary schooling, owned a book, gone to war, or learned a classic language.

But would the good Earl have seen himself as that impressionable boy dreaming through his own translations of ancient heroes and battles, or as the tournament champion on tour, immersing himself in the entrails of Rome?  You bet! This, then is both the physical and psychological infrastructure of the film. The chaotic political parade that follows is done in modern limousines with loudspeakers spewing the rivalry between royal sons Saturnius and Bassianus. We are asked (this time by Julie Taymor, not Shakespeare) to enjoy a special historic sandwich. Andronicus, written under a painfully absolute hereditary monarchy, is suspended between the electoral promise of late Rome and that of our own time. In 1585 that was heady stuff more suitable for the block. Our founding parents may have modeled their new democracy on what they had learned from Shakespeare, among others.

The Canon's special brand of behaviorism was not lost on common men faced with the task of governing themselves. Our constitution and laws are laced with its wisdom. Ask your favorite Stratfordian (who wants Shakespeare to have been anything but noble) if this splendid explication is not more satisfying.

All along we have been waiting to see what brilliance is in store from the genius behind the stage version of The Lion King. Our reward is powerful restraint. Granted that Rome's setting is larger than life, that the jungle in which the bloody hunt wallows is equipped with a real tiger, and that the more clinical special effects are suitably uncomfortable, we are not asked to abide with clever puppets. Instead, the amputations, penetrations, and throat slittings are so real that they become abstract and almost subsidiary to the intensity of the un-retouched lines that accompany them.

The film's most welcome feature is the deft preservation of the play's language. In all but one or two instances key speeches are framed in close-ups supported by the facial energies of a well-chosen cast. After seeing Titus it is difficult to imagine an equal impact from these same words cast adrift on any staging of Andronicus. We would expect Anthony Hopkins to be able to get his lines across in a hurricane, but the film's "talking-head" format allows us to share in the more intimate feelings of a complicated man. Likewise the electric energies of Jessica Lang (Tamora), propped up by a costume that would make Madonna jealous, do justice to her less than charitable nature.  

But the soliloquies fall to Aaron, the Moor, whose ritually scarred face and fine-tuned acting skill keep us in touch with the play's original author.  Elizabethan scholarship seems to spread the provenance of stage Moors rather thinly, from light-skinned North Africans to Spaniards; and for those who have come to hate him, even to the Earl of Leicester, Elizabeth's Number One Guy. But Ms Taymor, an acknowledged champion of African culture, pulls no punches. Andronicus' script says "black", and Aaron's best lines are those that do not question his, and his tiny son's natural (racial) superiority.  

At least seventy percent of the Canon is about cause-and-effect and responsibility. Here, in an ancient behavioral sink, Shakespeare has chosen to compare levels of integrity. We have Titus, whose principles extend to adherence to routine (for us brutal) sacrificial rites, a sense of duty that requires him to kill one of his few remaining sons, and unquestioning love for his mutilated daughter. His brother, Marcus the Tribune, maintains a principled and even keel throughout. Tamora, whose only identification with ethical procedure is to term the ritual sacrifice of her oldest son as "irreligious", otherwise makes the bloody wars of the Romans pale before her private peace. Saturnius, played here as a caricature of the standard neurotic Roman emperor (with a touch of 16th century monarchical physchosis), is Evil incarnate. Minor characters such as Titus' and Tamora's sons act in resonance with the morals of their parents, laced with appropriate heroics or cowardice.  

But in Aaron, the film has preserved a four hundred year old hologram of integrity. The Moor, admittedly more intelligent than the rest of the cast, understands his own creative iniquity. In contrast to the un-structured behavior of other cast principals, he alone is true to both sides of his nature. His defense of his helpless son raises haunting questions about the play's author. We know that Oxford lost one son in childbirth (1583), had another out of wedlock, and a third by his last marriage. Then there is the question of his own birth. Was he really the son of a Queen? Who was his real father? He certainly knew the rumors of a royal son (by Leicester) living safely in Spain. Oxfordian scholars are deeply split on this and other possibilities, but Andronicus was not written in a social vacuum.  

It would have been easy for Shakespeare to make Aaron a total scoundrel; certainly easier than it would have been for a modern film maker. What I wouldn't give to share a cup of coffee with Julie Taymor to find out what attracted her to this play, and to see in it this potential. Hollywood has its precedents for the noble savage from nearly every culture. But this crisp presentation of a man whose last "confession" was limited to remorse for any kind deed he may have done, was done as much in honor of the Bard as it was for any political correctness. Titus ends with someone, possibly the new emperor Lucius or his son (the little boy), carrying the Moor's cuddly infant off into the sunrise. This is not in the original play. Was this the infant Oxford being brought forth from Roman time to the sixteenth century to put things to right; or was Oxford's brainchild being passed on to us?  

By the way, Boyce offers up a Moor from a story by the 16th century Italian author Matteo Bandello "whose crimes are similar and whose delight in his own evil is much more like the Shakespearian character." But his other dates, leaning on Marlowe and Kyd, delay the play for ten years beyond the time when the above source events took place.  

With her perceptive treatment of one of the Canon's more troublesome plays Julie Taymor has won the right to bring her own loving agenda to bear. The film opened to some acclaim, but then faded from sight. My prediction is that, aided by the inevitable capitulation of the Stratfordian Heresy, we have a cult film on our hands. In its respect for ideas and purposes of the original play, Titus is, in my opinion, the best Shakespeare film to date.  It certainly belongs in every college film archive for direct use in course work.

Joseph L Eldredge

West Tisbury