In my graduate school, where I once taught introductory college English to first- and second-year students, incorporating Shakespeare’s works has become commonplace. Titus Andronicus In addition to much of the Lit Overview syllabus; Julie Taymor’s gorgeous film adaptation. The early work is thought to be Shakespeare’s first tragedy, combining popular Roman history with Elizabethan revenge drama. And it’s a truly strange play, swinging wildly in tone from classical tragedy to satirical black humor to comic farce and back to tragedy. critic Harold Bloom called Titus It is an “exploitative parody” of the revenge dramas that were very popular at the time. Murder, serious injuries, rape, and dismemberment overlap in each scene, and the shocking body count shakes the characters and the reader/audience into a state of sadness and disbelief.
part of the fun of teaching Titus I watch my students’ jaws drop as they realize how much of a blue-blooded heart Bard has. Although Taymor’s film adaptation takes many modern liberties with costumes, music, and set design, its depiction of a horror show is TitusRelentless mayhem is true to the text. Later, a more mature play tones down the excesses of black comedy and shock elements, but the bodies still pile up. Although we are accustomed to thinking about modern entertainment, game of thrones Particularly free of charge, the entire Shakespeare corpus, Alice Vincent writes: telegraph paper“more gory” than HBO’s cringe-worthy fantasy epic, with a total of 74 deaths across 37 plays. game of thronesEpisode 61 out of 50.
All of these various deaths were brought to light in the 2016 production of the film at the Globe Theater in London. complete death. It included everything from “early rapier thrusts to the more elaborate viper-breast application adopted by Cleopatra.” The only death that director Tim Crouch has left out is “the death of a fly with a tragic ending.” Titus Andronicus” You can see all of these causes of death in the infographic above. antony and cleopatrasnakebite and Titus Andronicus“Piece de résistance”, “Baked in a pie”.
Part of the reason that many of my former undergraduates found Shakespeare’s brutality shocking and unexpected had to do with the way his work had been domesticated by late 17th- and late 18th-century critics, who “didn’t approve of bloodshed on stage.” telegraph paper Quoting Michael Dobson, director of the Shakespeare Institute, he points out that Elizabethan plays were particularly gruesome. “English theater is notorious for on-stage deaths,” and all of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, including Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, wrote violent scenes that still shock us today.
In recent works, there is a kind of bloody production. Titus The Globe Theater restores the bloody expressions of Shakespeare’s works, complete death Audiences had little doubt that Shakespeare’s culture was as permeated by violence as ours, and that it was plagued by, if not more than, the real thing.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.
Related content:
Take a virtual tour of Shakespeare’s Globe Theater in London
Listen to Shakespeare’s original pronunciation
3,000 illustrations from the complete works of Shakespeare in Victorian England released in digital archive
See the first film adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays: King John, The Tempest, Richard III and more (1899-1936)
josh jones I’m a writer and musician based in Durham, North Carolina.
Source: Open Culture – www.openculture.com
