"Titus Andronicus" by William Shakespeare

This review is part of my new ongoing quest. I picked the book up from the library because the quest required me to read something by Shakespeare, and one does not simply review something like Hamlet. You write a book about that, not a book review.

But Titus Andronicus is one of the lesser-known plays, and I had no preconceived ideas of what it was about. I didn't even know it was a tragedy. So I picked it to review for the quest, because it was the sort of thing I felt comfortable doing a book review on. (I have trouble doing literary analysis essays on less "serious" books, and I have trouble doing book reviews of famous things.)

I didn't initially know it was a tragedy (I actually thought it was a history), but the impending trainwreck quickly became apparent. I think I first saw it coming when Tamora, Queen of the Goths (I will neither confirm nor deny that I imagined her wearing black clothes and eye makeup) declared her intention to ruin the lives of Titus Andronicus and his entire family.

Brief side note: Pretty much everyone in this play has Ancient Roman names -- Titus, Lucius, Saturnius, Bassianus, et cetera. And then there's this evil barbarian schemer guy, clearly intended to have a foreign-sounding name... and his name is Aaron. I had a bit of a hard time taking him seriously.

All right, before we go any further, I'm going to do a format break and give you the videogame rating now. Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: M for graphic violence, rape (offscreen), mutilation, adultery, vast amounts of innuendo (mostly by Aaron's), and cannibalism. This is not a pleasant play.

I honestly wonder how they originally did some of this. I mean, people's hands get cut off, and they do it onscreen -- how the nouns did they manage that with 17th-century special effects? For that matter, how did they do the severed heads? (The decapitations are offscreen, but the severed heads show up and get carried around for a while.)

Shakespeare does prove his writing prowess in this play, though. There's one scene where a character is essentially begging for her life that was legitimately hard for me to read, and I don't mean in an archaic-language way, either.

One consequence of being written four hundred years ago is that most of Aaron's sexual innuendo no longer registers with modern audiences. Fortunately (not really fortunately), the footnotes explain it all.

This is a revenge tragedy, apparently (according to the internet) written in the style of Shakespeare's contemporaries, who liked writing... uh... this sort of thing. So the play consists, in the first part, mostly of everyone else ruining Titus Andronicus's life, and then in the second part, Titus Andronicus ruining their lives.

There are like a grand total of four nice characters in this entire play. Two of them (Titus's sons Quintus and Martius) get framed for murdering a guy* and then executed, one (Titus's daughter Lavinia) gets {T15+ at least raped, then mutilated so she can't reveal who did it,} and eventually stabbed to death, and only one (Titus' son Lucius) manages to survive the play. And he does so by getting exiled to the frontier, gathering an army of Goths, and invading Rome, only to find that while he was gone, the impending trainwreck finally happened and everyone important is dead.

I find it mildly funny that when Aaron is about to be executed, they ask him if he has any last words, and he's basically like "Y'know what? I wish I had been MORE evil. I think I may have done a few good deeds in my life, and I wholeheartedly repent of those."

2 stars. This... this was not pleasant to read.

(*Endnote: Saturnius seriously needs to learn that just because you're in proximity to a dead body does not mean you caused that dead body.)