I hated this book. It was pompous and wooden and incredibly cruel, so I was bored and disgusted at the same time. I didn't enjoy this experience at all and I don't recommend this play. ( )

3 stars for the play, 4 stars for the edition. Jonathan Bate is a brilliant scholar, however I'd refrain from giving this edition 5 stars - in spite of his fascinating discussions of methods of staging - because I do think that Bate has a bit of a bias here, seeing the play's issues and textual cruces as largely deliberate, and I don't think this finding is born out by modern scholarship. ( )

The Arden Shakespeare collection, in my view the greatest single, most available resource for deep understanding of the text and themes of Shakespeare's plays, here presents one of Shakespeare's most difficult plays, and probably one of his earliest. There is, in fact, considerable debate about how much of the play actually is by Shakespeare's hand, but setting that aside, it's a play rather short on true dramatic action, in the academic sense, though a great deal happens in it. It reads primarily as a simple tale of insult, response, injury, and revenge. What makes it difficult, beyond the fact that it largely just pits one side against another and lets them have at each other without enormous nuance of ideas, is that it is virtually undeniably Shakespeare's most violent work, with hands and arms and tongues lopped off onstage and people baked into pies and eaten. I find Shakespeare's poetry, even his earliest and perhaps weakest, nonetheless enthralling, and Titus Andronicus contains its share. There is a fine and detailed analysis of the play and its place in history, as well as notes on production history and theme. Far from Shakespeare's best, it is still a powerful piece of theatre. ( )

Shakespeare's earliest, starkest, bloodiest tragedy, Titus Andronicus is among a handful of nearly everyone's least favorite Shakespeare plays - mainly for the unmitigated violence, racism, and misogyny that fills it. The body count is staggering - perhaps 14 corpses in all - along with multiple dismemberings, decapitations, and gang rape. The theatrical spectacle is amazing and virtually unmatched in all of the First Folio.

Julie Taymor, noted interpreter of Shakespeare for the stage and screen, says Titus is about what makes great, noble people turn violent. In that respect it has more in common with the most famous classical Greek tragedies than with most of Shakespeare’s plays. It is in the verbal style of Seneca – oratorical declamation – or of Shakespeare’s early contemporaries Kyd and Marlowe, using what Ben Jonson referred to as their “mighty line” – not naturalistic but heightened speech.

The play is set at the time of the late Roman Empire. Unlike in Yeats’ “Second Coming,” in Shakespeare’s play of apocalyptic horrors both the best and “the worst are full of passionate intensity.” At breakneck pace we are subjected to a series of catastrophic errors by the most powerful and respected man in Rome, the conquering general Titus. 1) Ignoring a mother’s pleas for mercy, he has the son of his conquered opponent Tamora killed, dismembered and sacrificed; 2) declining to rule Rome himself, he selects the wrong candidate, Saturninus, to be emperor; 3) disregarding a prior claim by the emperor’s brother Bassianus, he agrees to wed his daughter Lavinia to the emperor; 4) accusing his own son of treason for supporting Lavinia, he kills son Mutius; 5) believing her deceitful peacemaking, he expects friendship and gratitude from Tamora even as she plots the demise of his entire family. And that’s all in the first scene. By the play’s end, only three Andronici (two men and a boy, and virtually no other named characters) are left alive – all the result of unchecked villainy combined with blind adherence to principles of honor.

Early in his career Shakespeare discovered the powerful attraction of articulate, scheming villains. In Tamora and Aaron he created two of the best, and ironically they are also two of the best parents in the play, in their unflagging loyalty to their children. The play’s final irony is that Rome is saved only by an invasion of barbarians. ( )

Not Shakespeare's finest hour, Titus Andronicus is a stodgy and tasteless piece of drama so variable in quality that scholars struggle to place it chronologically in Shakespeare's artistic development, and many come to believe it was a collaborative effort with other playwrights, or perhaps not even written by Shakespeare at all. So over-the-top and ham-fisted is the play that the critic Harold Bloom was able to make a reasonably sound argument that Shakespeare intended it as a Mel Brooks-style spoof.

On the face of it, it's a crowd-pleaser: an orgiastic revenge story with scheming and torture and blood-lusting soliloquies. However, unlike, say, the later Macbeth, there's no real art, finesse or plot to give the violence some structure, and the result is a grimy stew of gore and bile. Its revenge arc is simplistic and unreflective, and yet simultaneously hard to understand. Much of the drama is resolved in abrupt stage actions [x stabs y, y falls] than in the ingenious confluence of plot, theme and lyricism for which the Bard was to win eternal renown. Titus Andronicus is Shakespeare's video nasty; a footnote in the finest career. ( )