Titus Andronicus & Timon of Athens
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As the costumes appealed to the eyes, so there was music for the ears. Comedies included many songs. Desdemona's willow song, perhaps a late addition to the text, is a rare and thus exceptionally poignant example from tragedy. Trumpets and tuckets sounded for ceremonial entrances, drums denoted an army on the march. Background music could create atmosphere, as at the beginning of Twelfth Night, during the lovers' dialogue near the end of The Merchant of Venice, when the statue seemingly comes to life in The Winter's Tale, and for the revival of Pericles and of Lear (in the Quarto text, but not the Folio). The haunting sound of the hautboy suggested a realm beyond the human, as when the god Hercules is imagined deserting Mark Antony. Dances symbolized the harmony of the end of a comedy--though in Shakespeare's world of mingled joy and sorrow, someone is usually left out of the circle.
The most important resource was, of course, the actors themselves. They needed many skills: in the words of one contemporary commentator, "dancing, activity, music, song, elocution, ability of body, memory, skill of weapon, pregnancy of wit." Their bodies were as significant as their voices. Hamlet tells the player to "suit the action to the word, the word to the action": moments of strong emotion, known as "passions," relied on a repertoire of dramatic gestures as well as a modulation of the voice. When Titus Andronicus has had his hand chopped off, he asks "How can I grace my talk, / Wanting a hand to give it action?" A pen portrait of "The Character of an Excellent Actor" by the dramatist John Webster is almost certainly based on his impression of Shakespeare's leading man, Richard Burbage: "By a full and significant action of body, he charms our attention: sit in a full theatre, and you will think you see so many lines drawn from the circumference of so many ears, whiles the actor is the centre.... "
Though Burbage was admired above all others, praise was also heaped upon the apprentice players whose alto voices fitted them for the parts of women. A spectator at Oxford in 1610 records how the audience were reduced to tears by the pathos of Desdemona's death. The puritans who fumed about the biblical prohibition upon cross-dressing and the encouragement to sodomy constituted by the sight of an adult male kissing a teenage boy onstage were a small minority. Little is known, however, about the characteristics of the leading apprentices in Shakespeare's company. It may perhaps be inferred that one was a lot taller than the other, since Shakespeare often wrote for a pair of female friends, one tall and fair, the other short and dark (Helena and Hermia, Rosalind and Celia, Beatrice and Hero).
We know little about Shakespeare's own acting roles--an early allusion indicates that he often took royal parts, and a venerable tradition gives him old Adam in As You Like It and the ghost of old King Hamlet. Save for Burbage's lead roles and the generic part of the clown, all such castings are mere speculation. We do not even know for sure whether the original Falstaff was Will Kempe or another actor who specialized in comic roles, Thomas Pope.
Kempe left the company in early 1599. Tradition has it that he fell out with Shakespeare over the matter of excessive improvisation. He was replaced by Robert Armin, who was less of a clown and more of a cerebral wit: this explains the difference between such parts as Lancelet Gobbo and Dogberry, which were written for Kempe, and the more verbally sophisticated Feste and Lear's Fool, which were written for Armin.
One thing that is clear from surviving "plots" or storyboards of plays from the period is that a degree of doubling was necessary. 2 Henry VI has over sixty speaking parts, but more than half of the characters appear only in a single scene and most scenes have only six to eight speakers. At a stretch, the play could be performed by thirteen actors. When Thomas Platter saw Julius Caesar at the Globe in 1599, he noted that there were about fifteen. Why doesn't Paris go to the Capulet ball in Romeo and Juliet? Perhaps because he was doubled with Mercutio, who does. In The Winter's Tale, Mamillius might have come back as Perdita and Antigonus been doubled by Camillo, making the partnership with Paulina at the end a very neat touch. Titania and Oberon are often played by the same pair as Hippolyta and Theseus, suggesting a symbolic matching of the rulers of the worlds of night and day, but it is questionable whether there would have been time for the necessary costume changes. As so often, one is left in a realm of tantalizing speculation.
THE KING'S MAN
On Queen Elizabeth's death in 1603, the new king, James I, who had held the Scottish throne as James VI since he had been an infant, immediately took the Lord Chamberlain's Men under his direct patronage. Henceforth they would be the King's Men, and for the rest of Shakespeare's career they were favored with far more court performances than any of their rivals. There even seem to have been rumors early in the reign that Shakespeare and Burbage were being considered for knighthoods, an unprecedented honor for mere actors--and one that in the event was not accorded to a member of the profession for nearly three hundred years, when the title was bestowed upon Henry Irving, the leading Shakespearean actor of Queen Victoria's reign.
Shakespeare's productivity rate slowed in the Jacobean years, not because of age or some personal trauma, but because there were frequent outbreaks of plague, causing the theaters to be closed for long periods. The King's Men were forced to spend many months on the road. Between November 1603 and 1608, they were to be found at various towns in the south and Midlands, though Shakespeare probably did not tour with them by this time. He had bought a large house back home in Stratford and was accumulating other property. He may indeed have stopped acting soon after the new king took the throne. With the London theaters closed so much of the time and a large repertoire on the stocks, Shakespeare seems to have focused his energies on writing a few long and complex tragedies that could have been played on demand at court: Othello, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Cymbeline are among his longest and poetically grandest plays. Macbeth survives only in a shorter text, which shows signs of adaptation after Shakespeare's death. The bitterly satirical Timon of Athens, apparently a collaboration with Thomas Middleton that may have failed on the stage, also belongs to this period. In comedy, too, he wrote longer and morally darker works than in the Elizabethan period, pushing at the very bounds of the form in Measure for Measure and All's Well That Ends Well.
From 1608 onward, when the King's Men began occupying the indoor Blackfriars playhouse (as a winter house, meaning that they only used the outdoor Globe in summer?), Shakespeare turned to a more romantic style. His company had a great success with a revived and altered version of an old pastoral play called Mucedorus. It even featured a bear. The younger dramatist John Fletcher, meanwhile, sometimes working in collaboration with Francis Beaumont, was pioneering a new style of tragicomedy, a mix of romance and royalism laced with intrigue and pastoral excursions. Shakespeare experimented with this idiom in Cymbeline, and it was presumably with his blessing that Fletcher eventually took over as the King's Men's company dramatist. The two writers apparently collaborated on three plays in the years 1612-14: a lost romance called Cardenio (based on the love-madness of a character in Cervantes' Don Quixote), Henry VIII (originally staged with the title "All Is True"), and The Two Noble Kinsmen, a dramatization of Chaucer's "Knight's Tale." These were written after Shakespeare's two final solo-authored plays, The Winter's Tale, a self-consciously old-fashioned work dramatizing the pastoral romance of his old enemy Robert Greene, and The Tempest, which at one and the same time drew together multiple theatrical traditions, diverse reading, and contemporary interest in the fate of a ship that had been wrecked on the way to the New World.
The collaborations with Fletcher suggest that Shakespeare's career ended with a slow fade rather than the sudden retirement supposed by the nineteenth-century Romantic critics who read Prospero's epilogue to The Tempest as Shakespeare's personal farewell to his art. In the last few years of his life Shakespeare certainly spent more of his time in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he became further involved in property dealing and litigation. But his London life also continued. In 1613 he made his first major London property purchase: a freehold house in the Blackfr
iars district, close to his company's indoor theater. The Two Noble Kinsmen may have been written as late as 1614, and Shakespeare was in London on business a little over a year before he died of an unknown cause at home in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1616, probably on his fifty-second birthday.
About half the sum of his works were published in his lifetime, in texts of variable quality. A few years after his death, his fellow actors began putting together an authorized edition of his complete Comedies, Histories and Tragedies. It appeared in 1623, in large "Folio" format. This collection of thirty-six plays gave Shakespeare his immortality. In the words of his fellow dramatist Ben Jonson, who contributed two poems of praise at the start of the Folio, the body of his work made him "a monument without a tomb":
And art alive still while thy book doth live
And we have wits to read and praise to give ...
He was not of an age, but for all time!
SHAKESPEARE'S WORKS:
A CHRONOLOGY
1589-91
? Arden of Faversham (possible part authorship) 1589-92
The Taming of the Shrew
1589-92
? Edward the Third (possible part authorship) 1591
The Second Part of Henry the Sixth, originally called The First Part of the Contention betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster (element of coauthorship possible) 1591
The Third Part of Henry the Sixth, originally called The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York (element of coauthorship probable) 1591-92
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
1591-92; perhaps revised 1594
The Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus (probably cowritten with, or revising an earlier version by, George Peele) 1592
The First Part of Henry the Sixth, probably with Thomas Nashe and others 1592/94
King Richard the Third
1593
Venus and Adonis (poem)
1593-94
The Rape of Lucrece (poem) 1593-1608
Sonnets (154 poems, published 1609 with A Lover's Complaint, a poem of disputed authorship) 1592-94/1600-03
Sir Thomas More (a single scene for a play originally by Anthony Munday, with other revisions by Henry Chettle, Thomas Dekker, and Thomas Heywood) 1594
The Comedy of Errors
1595
Love's Labour's Lost
1595-97
Love's Labour's Won (a lost play, unless the original title for another comedy) 1595-96
A Midsummer Night's Dream
1595-96
The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet
1595-96
King Richard the Second
1595-97
The Life and Death of King John (possibly earlier) 1596-97
The Merchant of Venice
1596-97
The First Part of Henry the Fourth
1597-98
The Second Part of Henry the Fourth
1598
Much Ado About Nothing
1598-99
The Passionate Pilgrim (20 poems, some not by Shakespeare) 1599
The Life of Henry the Fifth
1599
"To the Queen" (epilogue for a court performance) 1599
As You Like It
1599
The Tragedy of Julius Caesar
1600-01
The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (perhaps revising an earlier version) 1600-01
The Merry Wives of Windsor (perhaps revising version of 1597-99) 1601
"Let the Bird of Loudest Lay" (poem, known since 1807 as "The Phoenix and Turtle" [turtledove]) 1601
Twelfth Night, or What You Will
1601-02
The Tragedy of Troilus and Cressida
1604
The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice
1604
Measure for Measure
1605
All's Well That Ends Well
1605
The Life of Timon of Athens, with Thomas Middleton 1605-06
The Tragedy of King Lear
1605-08
? contribution to The Four Plays in One (lost, except for A Yorkshire Tragedy, mostly by Thomas Middleton) 1606
The Tragedy of Macbeth (surviving text has additional scenes by Thomas Middleton) 1606-07
The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra
1608
The Tragedy of Coriolanus
1608
Pericles, Prince of Tyre, with George Wilkins 1610
The Tragedy of Cymbeline
1611
The Winter's Tale
1611
The Tempest
1612-13
Cardenio, with John Fletcher (survives only in later adaptation called Double Falsehood by Lewis Theobald) 1613
Henry VIII (All Is True), with John Fletcher 1613-14
The Two Noble Kinsmen, with John Fletcher
THE HISTORY BEHIND THE
TRAGEDIES: A CHRONOLOGY
FURTHER READING
AND VIEWING:
TITUS ANDRONICUS AND
TIMON OF ATHENS
TITUS ANDRONICUS
Critical Approaches
Braden, Gordon, "Shakespeare's Roman Tragedies," in A Companion to Shakespeare's Works Volume 1: The Tragedies (2003). Analysis of the play within a wider examination of Shakespeare's changing depictions of Rome.
Kolin, Philip C., ed., Titus Andronicus: Critical Essays (1995). Compendious and indispensable collection that covers a huge range of critical ground relating to the play.
Metz, G. Harold, Shakespeare's Earliest Tragedy: Studies in Titus Andronicus (1996). Lively study containing essays on the play's critical heritage, its text, its authorship, and its life onstage in recent decades.
Miola, Robert, Shakespeare's Rome (1983). Influential study focusing on Shakespeare's changing conception of Rome and code of military honor; chapter 3 is on Titus Andronicus, pp. 42-75.
Smith, Ian, "Titus Andronicus: A Time for Race and Revenge," in A Companion to Shakespeare's Works Volume 1: The Tragedies (2003). Analysis of the play in its Renaissance contexts.
Taylor, Neil, and Brian Loughrey, eds., Shakespeare's Early Tragedies: Richard III, Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet (1990). Anthologizes both early (pp. 31-33) and recent (pp. 99-151) criticism on the play.
Tempera, Mariangela, Feasting with Centaurs: Titus Andronicus from Stage to Text (1999). Book-length study that uses performance analysis as a springboard for examining the play critically and thematically.
Vickers, Brian, Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (2002). Full account of the collaboration between Shakespeare and Peele on the play.
The Play in Performance
Sher, Antony, and Gregory Doran, Woza Shakespeare! Excellent diary-like account of the production mounted at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg, in 1995 which Doran directed, and in which Sher played the title role.
Jackson, Russell, and Robert Smallwood, eds., Players of Shakespeare 3 (1993). Includes an interview with Brian Cox on playing Titus.
Available on DVD
Titus Andronicus, directed by Jane Howell for the BBC Shakespeare series (1985, DVD 2005). Stripped-down production that focuses acutely on the ritualized aspects of violence, starring Trevor Peacock as Titus, Hugh Quarshie as Aaron, Eileen Atkins as Tamora, and Brian Protheroe as Saturninus.
Titus, directed by Julie Taymor (1999). Lavish, beautiful, gruesome, and slightly surreal rendering, with Anthony Hopkins superb as a Hannibal Lecter-ish Titus, Harry Lennix as Aaron, Jessica Lange as Tamora, Alan Cumming as Saturninus, and Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Matthew Rhys as Chiron and Demetrius.
TIMON OF ATHENS
Critical Approaches
Butler, Francelia, The Strange Critical Fortunes of Shakespeare's Timon of Athens (1966). Book-length study which explores the play's mixed critical history and also examines its worthiness as a stage vehicle.
Fischer, Sandra K., " 'Cut My Heart in Sums': Shakespeare's Economics and Timon of Athens," in Money:
Lure, Lore, and Literature, ed. by John Louis DeGaetani (1994). Examination of Timon's character through his fiscal failures.
Knight, George Wilson, "The Pilgrimage of Hate: An Essay on Timon of Athens," in The Wheel of Fire (1930). Classic essay from a classic collection still reprinted.
Nuttall, A. D., Timon of Athens, Harvester New Critical Introductions to Shakespeare (1989). Excellent study which functions as a sort of collection of essays (all by Nuttall) elucidating the most difficult aspects of the play.
Reid, Stephen. " 'I am Misanthropos'--A Psychoanalytic Reading of Shakespeare's Timon of Athens." Originally published in the Psychoanalytic Review 56, no. 3 (1969), pp. 442-52. Available in Shakespearean Criticism 52, pp. 296-300. An examination of Timon's misanthropy based on modern psychoanalytical categories.
Soellner, Rolf, Timon of Athens: Shakespeare's Pessimistic Tragedy (1979). Book-length study of the play which includes a stage history by Gary Jay Williams.