Shakespeare's Roman Plays

Paul Innes

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137025906
• eBook ISBN: 9781350316980
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire moderne

Rome was a recurring theme throughout Shakespeare's career, from the celebrated Julius Caesar, to the more obscure Cymbeline. In this book, Paul Innes assesses themes of politics and national identity in these plays through the common theme of Rome. He especially examines Shakespeare's interpretation of Rome and how he presented it to his contemporary audiences. Shakespeare's depiction of Rome changed over his lifetime, and this is discussed in conjunction with the emergence of discourses on the British Empire.
Each chapter focuses on a play, which is thoroughly analysed, with regard to both performance and critical reception. Shakespeare's plays are related to the theatrical culture of their time and are considered in light of how they might have been performed to his contemporaries. Innes engages strongly with both the plays the most current scholarship in the field.

1

Titus Andronicus

Perhaps more than any other Shakespeare play, Titus Andronicus confronts its audiences and readers from the outset with a series of seemingly insuperable problems. Jonathan Bate, editor of the play for the Arden 3 series, begins his extensive Introduction by quoting Peter Brook’s verdict:

When the notices of Titus Andronicus came out, giving us full marks for saving your dreadful play, I could not help feeling a twinge of guilt. For to tell the truth it had not occurred to any of us in rehearsal that the play was so bad.¹

Brook’s seemingly straightforward and innocuous statement needs to be unpicked. First of all, it seems clear that the response to Brook’s modern production is that his company has somehow saved a dreadful play from itself. In this formulation, contemporary performance revives, revises and massively improves a piece of historical stage detritus. Secondly, Brook admits that the process of rehearsal obscured how poor the play really is; the personal experience of the director and the company in the playhouse is radically different from the overall impression normally left by the play. Both audience and players feel that a fundamental difference exists between the play and its performance. Brook’s statement presents in particularly acute form a familiar enough phenomenon: the contradiction between the play as a literary or dramatic artefact on the one hand, and the performance process on the other. His letter to Shakespeare attacks the play head-on: it is quite simply dreadful, albeit redeemable by a good production.

A note of surprise underpins Brook’s awareness here, as though he feels astonished by the pairing of massively incompatible experiences. Performance vitiates the effects of a horrible old play, transforming it into something else, something much more astoundingly positive. In his Introduction, Bate immediately glosses Brook’s reaction with a comment of his own, placing it within an overall context:

Shakespeare’s earliest and bloodiest tragedy has had a curious history. It was hugely successful in its own time – indeed, it perhaps did more than any other play to establish its author’s reputation as a dramatist – but it has been reviled by critics and revived infrequently.²

Bate here sets up a familiar enough opposition between the local if spectacular success of the play on its own stage and its subsequent fall into disrepute, a manoeuvre that echoes the long history of the established gulf between Shakespeare’s own stage and later cultural appropriations of his work. His Introduction continues with its initial juxtaposing of the experience of performance over and against the play’s reputation within this overall context, noting how revivals often do go against the grain of the play’s reputation. He does not characterise this reputation as such, although he has constructed a rhetorical distinction between drama in performance, and the literary experience of simply reading Shakespeare. It is clear which he prefers, at least in the case of Titus Andronicus. However, the point is not trivial: what precisely is it about the literary reputation of this play that has damned it, while at the same time it can come alive again in performance? The issues raised by these responses constitute the main interest of this first chapter.

Titus Andronicus as Performance Piece: Act 1

This chapter started by suggesting that the play immediately confronts readers and audiences with a major set of issues. The source of this is plain to see – the play opens with an extremely long single scene, presenting a reader with very serious matters of comprehension as they struggle with the printed page. It also produces other, perhaps similar, problems of understanding for the bewildered audience member. The challenge for any company is how to negate these concerns, and indeed to take advantage of them, translating them into a form of theatrical practice that will fully and successfully engage the observer.³

The sheer length of this initial scene is not the only problem; its presentation is compounded by its massive complexity. It can be subdivided into thirteen shorter sections, individually delineated by movement onto the stage from the offstage areas. Jonathan Bate quotes an earlier Arden editor, J.C. Maxwell, as writing in his own Introduction that ‘Titus is neither a play with a complicated staging nor one which will ever be widely read.’⁴ Maxwell’s view of the play is obviously different from that of Bate himself, since Maxwell is not even willing to grant the play any affective power in performance, never mind being worth reading. In addition to wondering why he bothered to edit it, one could take issue with his editorial assumption that its staging is not complicated. On the contrary: the first scene demonstrates conclusively that the perceived difficulty is a direct result of extreme complexity.

Maxwell’s bias may well be easily defined as typical of critics of his generation, the very writers that, as Bate notes, revile the play. However, Maxwell remains silent as to why he dismisses the staging as simplistic. One obvious possibility is that he reads the first act as simply a series of disconnected sub-scenes comprising rather basic onstage action, as one tableau succeeds another in quick and rather uninteresting fashion. However, what this fails to realise is that the first act sets up the entire play as defined by a relation between onstage action and offstage movement. Or, to be more precise, the onstage action is bracketed by means of choreography with the offstage regions.

When the play begins, the audience is confronted with a three-way split in the staging. The stage directions in the First Folio are explicit:

Flourish. Enter the Tribunes and Senators aloft. And then
enter Saturninus and his Followers at one doore,
and Bassianus and his Followers at the
other, with Drums & Colours.⁵

The sequence in which these three disparate groups enter is instructive. First, the tribunes, the representatives of the plebs, the common people of Rome, arrive together with the senators. The latter represent the political elite, and traditionally were at loggerheads with the tribunes, an element of Roman political history with which at least some of Shakespeare’s audience would be familiar. This group not only appears together first, it does so at the highest remove from the audience, in the gallery. Then, two armed groups appear simultaneously at opposite ends of the stage itself; associations of civil strife are immediate and obvious.⁶ It is difficult to agree with Maxwell and dismiss this staging as uncomplicated; indeed this is a very sophisticated use of the dimensions available to the Renaissance dramaturge.

The audience is informed by means of set-piece speeches by Saturninus and Bassianus, who head the two factions at the forefront of the stage; they are brothers, sons of the recently deceased emperor. They both lay claim to the throne, and then are (initially) thwarted by Marcus Andronicus announcing that the people of Rome have chosen his brother Titus as the next emperor for his services in war to the state; presumably the senators are in agreement because they stand with him. Both brothers agree to lay aside their arms and accept the people’s choice, and their soldiers are dismissed, leaving the stage. The two brothers then ask to be allowed into the city. In emblematic terms, this is crucial, because it shows familial and dynastic dissension symbolically entering the city, because of course no one in a Renaissance audience is going to be fooled into thinking that brothers who have just fought over a throne are going to be so easily reconciled. The initial impression afforded by the spectacle is too powerful for its memory easily to be effaced.

Their ascension to join the others in the gallery marks the end of the first sub-scene at line 66, and just as this occurs a military captain enters the stage below them. He announces the return of the successful general from the wars, and then Titus enters in force, accompanied by his four surviving sons with the coffin of another, together with his prisoners (Tamora, her three sons, and Aaron her servant). The moment of arrival is carefully choreographed so as to coincide with the movement upwards of Saturninus and Bassianus, effectively allowing the three dimensions to be subdivided once again. The Andronici occupy one side of the stage, with the Goths on the other. This is important in visual terms, because it re-establishes a split stage as the site of contestation.

The action then moves downwards as Titus is about to inter the body of his latest slain son in the tomb of his ancestors, effectively opening up a fourth performance area. This is the trap located in the centre of the public playhouse, which is most often associated with the hellmouth of the old morality plays from which it is descended. Andrew Gurr and Mariko Ichikawa have discussed the use of this theatrical resource in the graveyard scene in Hamlet, drawing out some of its cultural resonances, and the attention they pay to the trap can be usefully extended to Titus Andronicus.⁷ However, it should also be recalled that the trap’s residual associations with hell overdetermine this stage location with some very specific resonances. Again in relation to Hamlet, Margreta de Grazia reminds us that

Weimann’s multiple discussions of Hamlet go far toward establishing Hamlet’s affiliation with the traditional Vice figure. Yet they curiously overlook the trait for which the Vice is named. As the adversary of Virtue in the perennial contest over human souls, the Vice is vicious.⁸

Here she is following and developing the important work of Robert Weimann on stage culture and practices in the Renaissance.⁹ By concentrating on the figure of the Vice, she suggests that Hamlet’s role must be related not to some modern conception of individual personality, but to the exigencies of performance on Shakespeare’s stage, including the vicious elements of the Vice to which she refers. Accordingly, the figure of Hamlet is the result of a combination of effects in characterisation, choreography, language and stage placement in an especially sophisticated form of dramaturgy. De Grazia excavates this performance culture as best she can in the face of a centuries-long tradition that has effaced these vibrant contemporary meanings in the interests of turning Hamlet into a literary artefact.

It should be possible to apply this procedure to Titus Andronicus, and it is absolutely crucial to note that the protagonist (and, indeed his entire family) is associated from the moment of his first appearance on the stage with the trap, the hellmouth and the vicious propensities of the Vice, including his ongoing relationship with revenge. What this play does on its own stage is enact a particularly precise series of symbolic associations that is intimately familiar to its own audiences, steeped as they are in the traditions of popular performance. The figure of Titus reinforces these connotations by following the interment of his son’s body with the order to proceed with the ritual sacrifice of Alarbus, an act of vengeance on the captive Goths that becomes the driver for the developing plot. Tamora and the others plead on their knees for the life of her son in vain, but in accordance with his Vice role Titus rejects their advances. It is not explicitly stated in which direction the sons leave the stage with Alarbus, but it is a reasonable supposition that they take him down into their family mausoleum as wished by their father.¹⁰

This movement towards another offstage (i.e. unseen to the audience) region ends the second sub-section of the act. The initial outburst of violence that seemed to be resolved has now been followed up with a very real ritual execution.¹¹ The combination is extremely effective, layering the stage action with crucial symbolic associations that the play will go on to develop. The location of this first act at the city gates positions the city of Rome very carefully in relation to various worlds. Offstage is associated with the wild wars between Romans and Goths; the gallery stands for the city, or the senate house; the main area of the stage is a liminal site of conflict between wilderness and civilisation;¹² and the trap is an underworld flavoured with the bloody pagan rituals that are shown to underpin Roman society. Each set of meanings is extremely carefully delineated in relation to its appropriate stage or offstage zone. This, ultimately, is the reason behind the play’s insistence on a long first act in what seems to l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the Text
• Introduction
• 1 Titus Andronicus
• 2 Julius Caesar
• 3 Antony and Cleopatra
• 4 Coriolanus
• 5 Cymbeline
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index