Read the following extract from the review of the film ‘Titus’ from the Independent newspaper (http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/dont-put-your-slaughter-on-the-stage-697339.html).
Consider the views expressed here and makes notes on the critical opinions explored, in preparation for a class discussion on whether the aspects mentioned make Titus Andronicus worthy of academic study. In addition, having read this review, try to develop your own viewpoint on the play and be prepared to defend it.
In 1995, Antony Sher led a group of actors from the National Theatre to newly-democratic South Africa. To widespread dismay, they chose to stage Titus Andronicus at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg. Among the audience for Shakespeare’s early tragedy of grotesquerie and Grand Guignol was Albie Sachs, the human-rights lawyer horrifically injured in a car-bomb attack by agents of the apartheid regime. ‘It’s not,’ he reflected after the show (which begins with the ritual murder of an enemy child and climaxes in a cannibal banquet), ‘a play for amputees.’
Or for anybody else much, if a 400-year tradition of vilification and nervous giggling is any guide. Fervent efforts by genteel critics and editors to detach Titus from the Shakespeare canon began in the Restoration era and have never really ceased. Either the...
