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Freshman Foundations 100
A Head for Headless Rome; Al Drake. Office: 231 Wilkinson, MW 2:15-3:15 | 714-434-1612 ©2002 by DrakeNotes.com. No part of this handout may be reproduced, handled, read, skimmed, mentioned, or even imagined without obsequious homage to its author and payment of extortionate royalties. General Suggestions: A) Note the play's frequent references to various body parts - most particularly heads, hands, and tongues. If you can keep a straight face while eyeing the play with this feature in your head, I'll give you a hand and will be all ears for any comments that pass your lips. B) Consider, with regard to our honorable Roman Titus, Machiavelli's statement in The Prince that "Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good. Hence a prince who wants to keep his authority must learn how not to be good" (Chapter XV, pg. 42). To the authors of Chicken Soup for the Soul and its dizzying number of feel-good offspring, I say, "Take that!" C) Notice the studied lack of realism in the way characters deal with grief. A character sees something horrible, and responds with floods of Classical similes and atrocious puns. That's not unusual in Shakespeare. C18 critic Samuel Johnson said that Shakespeare "tried every style except simplicity." Of course, Shakespeare is quite capable of making fun of excessive rhetoric even as he employs it. The sun doesn't simply rise on England; as in Romeo and Juliet, it "peer[s] forth the golden window of the East." Observations about the 2000 Film Version: a) Mark you well the film's "Y2K-retro-1930's" atmosphere: Saturninus is a decadent playboy, and the film is studded with posters of a departed Caesar reminiscent of Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist dictator and ally of Hitler and Hirohito against the Allies during World War II. The film moves back and forth between ancient costume/settings and modern ones, so that the symbols and places associated with the Roman Empire come to look like neo-Imperial fashion statements. Notice that at the film's opening, the Roman centurions look like expensive toy soldiers, perhaps to remind us that "Rome" was a construction or work of art, a necessary ideal fiction, even for the Romans themselves. Mussolini, and indeed Hitler, appropriated Classical symbols and customs in a similar manner -- see Leni Riefenstahl's propaganda 1930's films Triumph of the Will and Olympiade -- because they saw themselves as the world's new emperors, masters of a "Thousand-Year Reich," and wanted to overwhelm with sheer aesthetic brilliance people's consciousness of the violent acts they committed in their quest for power. Sometimes, "art" and politics go hand in hand -- excuse the pun. b) The acting is superb: Anthony Hopkins is a remarkable Shakespearean actor, and Jessica Lange's Tamora, Queen of Goths, is magnificently, incomparably Machiavellian and wicked. Her only rival may be the poisonous Livia, Augustus Caesar's Empress in Robert Graves' novel I, Claudius. As an added bonus, Hopkins is the actor who played "Hannibal the Cannibal" Lecter in Silence of the Lambs -- what an appropriate choice, then, for Titus! So what kind of wine would Titus serve with the census-taker's liver? c) Because of the affective power of cinema -- its ability to grab our emotions and not let go, the film version may in places seem "heavier" than the play would be if staged live. The special-effects-quality violence also makes the film seem more serious than it would be on stage. To compensate for that difference between stage and cinema, the director ingeniously threads in a sense of humor: the mixed Roman setting, the garish backdrops and goings-on associated with Saturninus' palace, the neo-Gothic punk-rock look of Tamora's sons Chiron and Demetrius, Tamora's fetish costumes, and so forth. In this way the film's lavish outrageousness helps prevent us from taking Titus Andronicus as a standard tragedy. It's important that we remain aloof from the sheer violence of the play because even though it is Shakespeare's earliest tragedy (1594), it amounts in part to a spoof of the revenge genre. Further, not taking the action too seriously allows us to see the perfectly serious exploration made in the play concerning the uneasy, yet unavoidable, mingling of family and state interests in monarchist tradition. d) On the tendency of directors to modernize Shakespeare's historical settings while retaining the Elizabethan language and some of the costumery, consider the following statement in satirist Thomas Love Peacock's essay "The Four Ages of Poetry" (1820): Greek and Roman literature pervaded all the poetry of the golden age of modern poetry, and hence resulted a heterogeneous compound of all ages and nations in one picture; an infinite license, which gave to the poet the free range of the whole field of imagination and memory. This was carried . . . farthest of all by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, who used time and locality merely because they could not do without them, because every action must have its when and where: but they made no scruple of deposing a Roman emperor by an Italian count, and sending him off in the disguise of a French pilgrim to be shot with a blunderbuss by an English archer. This makes the old English drama very picturesque . . . though it is a picture of nothing that ever was seen on earth except a Venetian carnival. (Adams, Hazard, ed. Critical Theory since Plato, rev. ed., NY: Harcourt, 1992. 512.)
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