Opus 7: Titus Andronicus

If your name is William Shakespeare and you’ve lost the editors of my Pelican Shakespeare omnibus, you know that you’ve really gone badly astray. But Titus Andronicus is such a schlocky train wreck that even these folks, who are prepared to read Deep Meaning into The Comedy of Errors and make all manner of excuses for the blatant misogyny of The Taming of the Shrew, can’t quite get behind it. “Titus Andronicus is a ridiculous play,” opines Gustav Cross of the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, by way of opening his essay on the subject. “This gallimaufry of murders, rape, lopped limbs, and heads baked in a pie, lavishly served with the rich purple sauce of rhetoric, may have been to the taste of the Elizabethans, but what is one to make of it today?” What indeed? Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s first attempt at a pure tragedy, has long been regarded as the worst thing that he ever wrote — in fact, in the opinion of no less a literary luminary than T.S. Eliot, “one of the most…

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