Titus Andronicus: the State of Play ed. by Farah Karim-Cooper (review)

For over three centuries, Titus Andronicus was Shakespeare's least popular play. It was performed only in adapted versions by Edward Ravenscroft (1686) and Ira Aldridge (1850), it was excluded from print editions aimed at children or families, and successive commentators argued that the play is too vulgar to be Shakespeare's work at all. Today, productions of Titus Andronicus still occasionally advertise it as a "rarely performed" work. But in fact the play's fortunes reversed dramatically in the late twentieth century, and today it receives considerable attention from both scholars and practitioners. That it is only the third of Shakespeare's plays to inspire a "State of Play" volume of essays from the Arden Shakespeare (after Macbeth and Othello) is a testament to this surge of critical and theatrical interest in Titus.

The volume, edited by Farah Karim-Cooper, offers several possible causes for the play's increased popularity. The introduction argues that the publication of Jonathan Bate's Arden edition in 1995 was a watershed, while Emma Whipday's essay on sexual violence in key productions of the play maps a performance tradition from Peter Brook's 1955 RSC production starring Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier, to Deborah Warner's 1987 staging and Julie Taymor's starry 1999 film. Other contributors suggest that the play's black humor, self-conscious literary references, and "decidedly postmodern quality" are particularly attractive to contemporary readers and audiences (225).

Karim-Cooper's efficient introduction outlines the shape of the collection and addresses some of the challenges of gathering essays on a play like Titus Andronicus. For instance, she notes that contributors do not have a uniform view on its authorship—some refer to it as a collaborative work, while others argue that it is adapted from a lost earlier play by George Wilkins. The essays are organized thematically in four parts: "Genre, style and sources"; "Race, culture and politics"; "Bodies, emotions and metaphor"; and "Performance and adaptation." These categories draw out productive connections among chapters, particularly in the "Race, culture and politics" section, where essays by John Kunat, David Sterling Brown, and Carol Mejia LaPerle complement one another by approaching the play's depiction of blackness, whiteness, and biracial families from three distinct angles: a contextual study of the experiences of Elizabethan people of color, an in-depth analysis of Aaron's character, and an assessment of the play's cultivation of affect, respectively. There are also threads to trace across the length of the collection: Lizz Angello's essay on adaptation picks up on ideas of literary ingestion, digestion, and indigestion first introduced in Curtis Perry's opening essay on Shakespeare's debts to Seneca.

Increased scholarly attention to race in Shakespeare's plays has also contributed to the resurgence of interest in Titus Andronicus, since Aaron is Shakespeare's only major character of African descent besides Othello. This was the reason that the nineteenth-century African American actor Aldridge wanted to revive the play despite the heavy edits required to make it palatable to a Victorian audience. Kunat's reading draws on the history of Elizabethan efforts to deport black residents and sell them into slavery, as well as on Aaron's connections to the stock figure of the servus callidus or "clever slave" in Roman comedy, to argue for the disruptive potential of the two mixed-race children mentioned in the play. Sterling Brown's chapter on "blackness and domesticity" emphasizes the parental role Aaron adopts toward his lover's feral sons, Chiron and Demetrius, to argue persuasively that Shakespeare uses Aaron "to critique … the dominant culture's domestic behaviour," calling for readers to remember the early modern black lives whose "shadows" appear in the form of Aaron and his son (113–14). Mejia LaPerle's reading is less convinced of the play's potential to be progressive, suggesting rather that it is a "primal pedagogical performance" of the punishment of a black body that...