What Shakespeare Teaches Us about Psychoanalysis by T. Grunes Dorothy;M Grunes Jerome;

Author:T. Grunes, Dorothy;M Grunes, Jerome;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

CHAPTER FIVE

Madness and the death of self in Titus Andronicus

Titus Andronicus is a difficult play. Read, it feels disorderly and disorganising. Staged, it proves complicated, and with its grotesque imagery it is difficult to make palatable to contemporary audiences. While it was popular and a financial success during William Shakespeare’s lifetime, it was abandoned and left virtually unperformed for three centuries. It continues to be one of the least popular of Shakespeare’s works. Comments by some of the best readers of Shakespeare attest to this. Samuel Johnson described it as a work that “… can scarcely be conceived tolerable to any audience” (Johnson, 1864, p. 364). T. S. Eliot characterised it as “one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written” (Eliot, 1950, p. 67). Harold Bloom states “I am rendered incredulous, and still wish that Shakespeare had not perpetuated this poetic atrocity” (Bloom, 1998, p. 79).

There have been many performances of Shakespeare using inventive staging and direction, which work hard to undo the difficulties of the content. Following Puck’s example in his apology of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “… you have but slumber’d here/While these visions did appear” (V.i.411–412), The American Players Theater, for instance, to make palatable the misogynist sentiments in The Taming of the Shrew produced the play as if it were all a drunken dream of Kate’s henpecked husband Petruchio. In 1996, the slightly abridged film Titus framed the story in a manner that also protects the audience from its alarming content. It begins with a boy playing with toy soldiers, set up as marching men, which are sent flying by the child’s destructiveness. The marching men become Titus’ army, but since it is introduced in the context of kinderspiel the events that follow need not be taken seriously, or perhaps the viewer may revert to viewing this as imaginative play when the drama becomes too painful.

Unlike many of Shakespeare’s plays, there is no source for Titus Andronicus. The play opens with dissension in the Roman court. The sons of the late emperor struggle for power. We are introduced to Saturninus, the eldest brother. Saturninus for Saturn is from the Greek god Kronos. Kronos, usually depicted with the scythe he had used to castrate his father, Uranus, was Gaia’s youngest son, and he represented the first generations of the Titans. Known as the Roman god Saturn, he himself was overthrown by his own son Zeus. Irwin Rosen summarises the creation myth, writing that the children of Uranus and Gaia “… all (probably projectively) feared and hated by their father (Uranus), who kept them buried alive in the earth, or … inside the body of their mother … (Saturn) Kronos (the son) … castrate[d] Uranus and … seize[d] power; projectively fearing a subsequent revenge from his own offspring, he ate them at birth” (Rosen, 2007, pp. 595–620). This early primitive myth lends the name to Shakespeare’s childless Saturninus, yet may prove to better identify the character of Titus in all his aspects and acts as a leitmotif of the father–son relationships throughout the play.

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