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Abstract
Titus Andronicus is in all agreement of the most of Shakespearean tragedies, and by far, the most prominent example of the playwright’s early interest in Senecan revenge drama which dominated sixteenth-century theatre in England. Although the play has an interesting textual history, it has not received critical acclaim when it comes to performance and reception. Almost all discussions of the play open with a statutory apology for its content and its irreverent presence within Shakespeare’s literary legacy. This follows from Thomas Ravencroft1 who referred to the play in his edition as “the most incorrect and indigested piece in all his [Shakespeare’s] works”2, and further “a heap of rubbish than a structure”3. Ravencroft’s ruthless attack went so far as to question the play’s authorship – “ I have been told by some anciently conversant with the stage that it was not originally his but brought by a private author to be acted, and he only gave some master-touches to one or two of the principal parts and characters"4. This devastating judgement led to a literary scramble, on the one hand, to locate the ‘private author' Ravenscroft spoke of, and on the, to justify plainly that the play is indeed in its entirety, the ‘master’s work, something which today has received overwhelming opinion. While the play received more than a favourable response in the period of its inception, as noted by Manfred Draudt5 – being conceivably a significant influence on Jacobean revenge tragedies ranging from John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge to Cyril Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, it fell out of favour completely during the late Romantic period, following attacks by Dr. Samuel Johnson and August Wilhelm Schlegel6 among others. Since then, the play entered a period of ‘dark ages’ in its literary history in terms of transmission, and has only recently in the middle of the twentieth century been revived by Peter brook in a landmark 1955 Royal Shakespeare production (with Laurence Olivier in the title role and Vivian Leigh as his daughter, Lavinia) and received with favour. The reason for this twentieth-century revival is perhaps not unnatural. The themes of dissembling, blood feuds, torture (both physical and mental), incessant brutality, murder, dismemberment, mutilation and perhaps most poignantly, rape, are not new in the world we inhabit today. Considering the presence of these horrific, brutal and barbaric acts of vengeance in our daily lives, the play is being looked into more as a relevant expression of modern culture as compared to that of a heinous and mercenary past.