Can we still be friends if I tell you that I refuse to see another Coen Brothers movie? I know that all the cool people love the Coen Brothers, but I don't care: not gonna do it. Their images get under my skin and stay there, and really I like the underside of my skin just fine without any mangled dead bodies lurking there. I don't mind the quirky (I'd be in a world of trouble if I hated quirky, since quirky is practically my middle name). I mind the blood, I mind the improbably motivated killings, I mind the characters whose inner workings I just cannot fathom -- all of which brings me to Titus Andronicus.
Titus Andronicus is awash in blood. It reminds me of a New Yorker cartoon that came out when The Passion of Christ was in theaters, with Mel Gibson shouting into a director's megaphone "More blood!" Titus Andronicus is widely held to be Shakespeare's worst play, and I am here to tell you the reputation is not undeserved.
It is so alarming that it kept me pretty much rapt, waiting to see what awful thing would happen next. In the final act Titus kills his daughter, his beloved broken daughter, a deed that made me say out loud, "Oh, no, you didn't!" That's the moment I keep puzzling over in my head, telling myself things like "paterfamilias" and "death before dishonor." But mostly I just keep telling myself, "That is deeply wrong."
It's not just that it's excessively bloody and set in a time when fathers ruled absolutely over their families. The characters don't even make sense. Tamora, the captured queen of the Goths, appears first in Act I pleading for the life of her son. "And if thy sons were ever dear to me, / O think my son to be as dear to me," she implores. "Wilt thou draw near the nature of the gods?" she asks. "Draw near them then in being merciful. / Sweet mercy is nobility's true badge." And yet when she gives birth to her lover's child she sends the baby to him with instructions to kill it, to "christen it with thy dagger's point." Really, Tamora? Really? And oh, her lover Aaron is a piece of work -- a Moor (cue the blackness cliches) with not an iota of goodness in him. In his last appearance on stage he asserts: "Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things / As willingly as one would kill a fly, / And nothing grieves me heartily indeed, / But that I cannot do ten thousand more."
I don't buy it. Shakespeare's later villains are much more persuasive.
Still, in the years I have spent reading Shakespeare, the moments I have disliked most are the sloggy moments, spent counting down the lines until an act is over. Titus Andronicus has many flaws, but it is certainly not boring. And it also means that this year of Shakespeare can only get better.
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