I feel rather guilty about liking this play, as if it makes me a Bad Feminist. (I’m also unreasonably fond of the Stones’ “Under My Thumb,” as long as we’re getting Bad Feminist Confessions out of the way, and had fantasies of doing an ironic, gender-switched cover version back when I was fourteen and wanted to be a rock star.) Nevertheless, I think there are a lot of elements that redeem the gender politics, or at least complicate them. (I have a hard time taking Petruchio seriously as a domestic abuser when his Grand Plan to tame Katharina by depriving her of food and sleep involves doing exactly the same thing to himself.) And hell, it’s just too much of a romp not to enjoy, what with all of those fake schoolmasters, and that completely daft wedding, and Lucentio’s two fathers.
What I love about this play: The Christopher Sly framework, for a start. (I have yet to see a stage or film version with the full Induction, which saddens me because I have a soft spot for metatheater. I do own a DVD of a Stratford Festival production from the 1980s that includes a bit of it, but the main action is framed as Sly’s drunken dream rather than an actual play.) I imagine it becomes quite a different play when the entire plot is presented as a purposefully constructed fiction – and there are so many other characters engaging in various sorts of role-playing and fiction-crafting that it must work like a set of nesting dolls.
The other bit that I really like – and which redeems a LOT of the potentially uncomfortable moments for me – that scene on the road to Padua when Katharina and Petruchio stop being adversaries and become co-conspirators. (And yes, I think she is a free and voluntary participant in the game – she’s clearly having far too much fun hailing the old man as “young budding virgin, fair and fresh and sweet,” and “Happy the man, whom favorable stars / Allot thee for his lovely bed-fellow!” is her own elaboration – Petruchio doesn’t tell her to go that far!) In Petruchio-land, words don’t have to correspond to anything real, and Katharina is finally getting this and starting to grasp the possibilities. Since both of these characters have shown so much delight in speaking absurdities with a straight face, I feel perfectly free to read the “Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper” speech as one of those absurdities rather than a serious homily.
Favorite memory: I was going to say that I didn’t have one, but then I remembered that Shrew plays a big part in the abortive novel I wrote when I was nineteen, the one that was going to be a lesbian Catcher in the Rye. (Why I decided to pursue such a project when I wasn’t actually a lesbian is something of a mystery, as is the fact that I decided to set it at a snooty girl’s boarding school, a world that I knew nothing about.) My protagonist, a rebellious teenager obsessed with Shakespeare and secretly in love with her roommate, has an evil stepfather who tries to molest her, stroking her hair. In a fit of revulsion, she runs off to the nearest hairdresser and gets it all shaved off, and then pretends – for some reason – to have cancer. This garners her a lot of sympathy from her schoolmates, but when they discover she’s faking it, they all turn against her. She runs away to the nearest large city and hides in a theater, where she watches a performance of The Taming of the Shrew. The actor playing Petruchio eventually discovers her, realizes she’s in trouble, and brings her back to his apartment. Petruchio’s boyfriend arrives, who happens, by an extraordinary coincidence, to be the protagonist’s favorite teacher from prep school. He briefly freaks out, because he doesn’t want anyone at the school to know he’s gay; Petruchio calms him down, and then – for no apparent reason whatsoever – launches into a two-page monologue about the gender politics in the play. Then the protagonist’s mother arrives, and announces that a) she’s pregnant; and b) the evil stepfather has been arrested for having sex with a thirteen-year-old prostitute in Vietnam. (What the heck was he doing in Vietnam? I haven’t the foggiest.)
At this point, wisely, I realized I wasn’t cut out for novel-writing, abandoned the project, and decided to pursue a career in which it actually makes sense to pontificate about Shakespeare at random moments.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Shakesblogging: Love's Labour's Lost
What I love about this play: I adore the way it springs to life in performance. It feels rather dead on the page – all those 400-year-old literary in-jokes are tedious when we no longer recognize their thrust – but on the stage it’s absolutely charming. I’ve loved all three of the live performances I’ve seen.
And it has Berowne, the first of a series of witty rebels. (As much as I love Shakespearean comedy, so many of the young men lack character. The women don’t; Lysander and Demetrius, for example, are more or less interchangeable, while Hermia and Helena are not. But a handful of them have real personality and force – and it’s with Berowne’s skeptical question, “What is the end of study? let me know” that this character type is born.)
As with so many of the comedies, the tonal play gets me every time. We start with four young men trying to become SERIOUS SCHOLARS, YO (and swearing impossible oaths just to prove how very very Serious then are), but almost immediately they get drawn back into a courtly culture that seems entirely frivolous – a world of wordplay and wit, masks and love-tokens and entertainments. And then, suddenly, real grief intrudes; the world takes on weight and substance, and they recognize that maybe, cherishing those moments of youth and love and frivolity while you can is the wiser choice after all – for winter, as it does in the songs at the end of the play, will get the last word.
Favorite memory: Finding myself in Exeter last summer on just the right weekend to catch a free student performance, staged at different locations in a public park. For some reason, both of the undergraduate productions I’ve seen were really good – I guess because the play is not so well-known as to be intimidating, and because the young protagonists are so much like bright students at every college in the world, with their exuberance and wit and their silly but heartfealt earnestness. And it is a play that’s meant for outdoor staging; the scene where all the guys are eavesdropping on each other works so much better when they have actual trees to hide in.
And it has Berowne, the first of a series of witty rebels. (As much as I love Shakespearean comedy, so many of the young men lack character. The women don’t; Lysander and Demetrius, for example, are more or less interchangeable, while Hermia and Helena are not. But a handful of them have real personality and force – and it’s with Berowne’s skeptical question, “What is the end of study? let me know” that this character type is born.)
As with so many of the comedies, the tonal play gets me every time. We start with four young men trying to become SERIOUS SCHOLARS, YO (and swearing impossible oaths just to prove how very very Serious then are), but almost immediately they get drawn back into a courtly culture that seems entirely frivolous – a world of wordplay and wit, masks and love-tokens and entertainments. And then, suddenly, real grief intrudes; the world takes on weight and substance, and they recognize that maybe, cherishing those moments of youth and love and frivolity while you can is the wiser choice after all – for winter, as it does in the songs at the end of the play, will get the last word.
Favorite memory: Finding myself in Exeter last summer on just the right weekend to catch a free student performance, staged at different locations in a public park. For some reason, both of the undergraduate productions I’ve seen were really good – I guess because the play is not so well-known as to be intimidating, and because the young protagonists are so much like bright students at every college in the world, with their exuberance and wit and their silly but heartfealt earnestness. And it is a play that’s meant for outdoor staging; the scene where all the guys are eavesdropping on each other works so much better when they have actual trees to hide in.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Shakesblogging: Richard III
What I love about this play: First off, that verbal fencing scene with Lady Anne? Hothothot, if it’s done right. Oh yes, she should know better, but I can’t blame her for yielding in the slightest, because the Richard of Act I is almost impossible to resist. He’s not, as yet, noticeably worse than the rest of the nobles; indeed, he’s got his finger on the pulse of all of their vices, and makes them fodder for his abundant wit. (“Naught to do with Mistress Shore! ... / He that doth naught with her, excepting one / Were best he do it secretly, alone.” “Simple, plain Clarence! I do love thee so, / That I will shortly send thy soul to heaven, / If heaven will take the present at our hands.”)
And there’s that barbed edge of self-pity that makes me want to make excuses for him, even though I know better: “Upon my life, she finds, though I cannot, / Myself to be a marvelous proper man.”
All in all, it’s a hell of a sexy combination:
Anne: He is in heaven, where thou shalt never come.
Richard: Let him thank me, that holp to send him thither;
For he was fitter for that place than earth.
Anne: And thou unfit for any place but hell.
Richard: Yes, one place else, if you will hear me name it.
Anne: Some dungeon.
Richard: Your bedchamber.
Much later in the play, Richard matches wits with another woman, in a scene that closely balances this one. By then, of course, most of the audience is no longer rooting for him (and I think that Queen Elizabeth does come off the victor in this exchange; he’s pretty clearly on the verbal defensive as she twists his words and uses them against him, whereas he’s on the offensive with Lady Anne).
And, finally, there’s the wonderful “The lights burn blue. It is now dead midnight” speech, in which four plays’ worth of civil wars culminate in Richard’s internal monologue, as all that violence turns inward:
What do I fear? myself? there’s none else by.
Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I.
Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am:
Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason why:
Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?
Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? for any good
That I myself have done unto myself?
O no! alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself.
I am a villain: yet I lie, I am not.
Fool, of thyself speak well: fool, do not flatter...
Favorite memory: Falling in love with Richard – dizzyingly, violently, against my better judgment, and in precisely the way Richard wants you to fall in love with him – when I first read the play as a freshman in college. As an older, more dispassionate reader, I can see all the ways he’s playing the audience. He induces us to fall into the same trap as Lady Anne, dazzling us with his wit and apparent candor, playing up his disability and self-loathing when it suits him to make us pity him, making us feel that we understand him when the rest of his world does not. But I kind of miss coming to this play as a naive reader, unable to see him pulling the strings.
And there’s that barbed edge of self-pity that makes me want to make excuses for him, even though I know better: “Upon my life, she finds, though I cannot, / Myself to be a marvelous proper man.”
All in all, it’s a hell of a sexy combination:
Anne: He is in heaven, where thou shalt never come.
Richard: Let him thank me, that holp to send him thither;
For he was fitter for that place than earth.
Anne: And thou unfit for any place but hell.
Richard: Yes, one place else, if you will hear me name it.
Anne: Some dungeon.
Richard: Your bedchamber.
Much later in the play, Richard matches wits with another woman, in a scene that closely balances this one. By then, of course, most of the audience is no longer rooting for him (and I think that Queen Elizabeth does come off the victor in this exchange; he’s pretty clearly on the verbal defensive as she twists his words and uses them against him, whereas he’s on the offensive with Lady Anne).
And, finally, there’s the wonderful “The lights burn blue. It is now dead midnight” speech, in which four plays’ worth of civil wars culminate in Richard’s internal monologue, as all that violence turns inward:
What do I fear? myself? there’s none else by.
Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I.
Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am:
Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason why:
Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?
Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? for any good
That I myself have done unto myself?
O no! alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself.
I am a villain: yet I lie, I am not.
Fool, of thyself speak well: fool, do not flatter...
Favorite memory: Falling in love with Richard – dizzyingly, violently, against my better judgment, and in precisely the way Richard wants you to fall in love with him – when I first read the play as a freshman in college. As an older, more dispassionate reader, I can see all the ways he’s playing the audience. He induces us to fall into the same trap as Lady Anne, dazzling us with his wit and apparent candor, playing up his disability and self-loathing when it suits him to make us pity him, making us feel that we understand him when the rest of his world does not. But I kind of miss coming to this play as a naive reader, unable to see him pulling the strings.
Monday, April 5, 2010
Shakesblogging: Henry VI, Part 3
What I love about this play: Part 3 is dark, violent, and chilling; first the Lancastrians, then the Yorkists, kill the head of the opposing family and one of its children. Revenge piles upon revenge; both sides make claims on the audience’s sympathies and then lose them; in a lot of ways, it’s a more morally complex world than the sequel, Richard III, although the two plays are clearly of one piece, and there are lots of touches of foreshadowing. (Particularly of note is Richard of Gloucester’s verdict on Margaret: “Why should she live, to fill the world with words?”) It’s also an increasingly claustrophobic world, as the focus grows narrower and narrower. We don’t see much of the commons in this one, apart from the scene where poor King Henry encounters two of his subjects who emblematize the kingdom as a whole: a father who has unwittingly killed his son, and a son who has killed his father.
This is very much Queen Margaret’s play. I’m not sure she really coheres as a character across all four parts of the tetralogy – she seems more like a collection of feminine archetypes: ingenue, dangerous French adulteress, queen, mother tiger, witch. But she’s a great, tragic character in this installment. She leads armies. She fights for the kingdom her husband has abandoned. She takes bitter, cruel revenge on her enemies, and they butcher her son in front of her in return. She pleads for death, and those pleas are denied, so she curses, and those curses take root.
I also like the fact that the hapless Henry VI – alone of all the characters who surround Richard – calls him on his essential falseness: “What scene of death hath Roscius now to act?” (Pretty nearly everyone will accuse Richard of being a monster by the end of R3; but it is only Henry, in that sharp moment of clarity before his death, who accuses him of being an actor.)
Favorite moment: I’m running out of Henry VI-associated memories, so it’ll have to be a favorite moment: the end of 3.2., when Richard of Gloucester comes into his own. There have been little character touches, lines that are clearly intended to play up the contrast between Richard and his brothers, from the middle of Part 2 onward, but in this 70-line soliloquy he bursts into life – confessing his ambitions, taking the audience into his confidence, promising to put on the performance of a lifetime: “I’ll play the orator as well as Nestor / Deceive more slyly than Ulysses could ... I can add colours to the chameleon, / Change shapes with Proteus for advantages, / And set the murderous Machiavel to school. Can I do this, and cannot get a crown?” This is the speech where Richard becomes Richard, and it’s awesome.
This is very much Queen Margaret’s play. I’m not sure she really coheres as a character across all four parts of the tetralogy – she seems more like a collection of feminine archetypes: ingenue, dangerous French adulteress, queen, mother tiger, witch. But she’s a great, tragic character in this installment. She leads armies. She fights for the kingdom her husband has abandoned. She takes bitter, cruel revenge on her enemies, and they butcher her son in front of her in return. She pleads for death, and those pleas are denied, so she curses, and those curses take root.
I also like the fact that the hapless Henry VI – alone of all the characters who surround Richard – calls him on his essential falseness: “What scene of death hath Roscius now to act?” (Pretty nearly everyone will accuse Richard of being a monster by the end of R3; but it is only Henry, in that sharp moment of clarity before his death, who accuses him of being an actor.)
Favorite moment: I’m running out of Henry VI-associated memories, so it’ll have to be a favorite moment: the end of 3.2., when Richard of Gloucester comes into his own. There have been little character touches, lines that are clearly intended to play up the contrast between Richard and his brothers, from the middle of Part 2 onward, but in this 70-line soliloquy he bursts into life – confessing his ambitions, taking the audience into his confidence, promising to put on the performance of a lifetime: “I’ll play the orator as well as Nestor / Deceive more slyly than Ulysses could ... I can add colours to the chameleon, / Change shapes with Proteus for advantages, / And set the murderous Machiavel to school. Can I do this, and cannot get a crown?” This is the speech where Richard becomes Richard, and it’s awesome.
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Shakesblogging: Henry VI, Part 2
What I love about this play: Pirates! Witches! Popular rebellion! More severed heads than any other play in Shakespeare, including Titus! What’s not to love?
This is probably the cheeriest installment of the first tetralogy, although that isn’t necessarily saying much; Shakespeare’s first cycle of history plays is a story about a world spiraling farther and farther into chaos, and conflicts that are growing more and more insular. The international war of Part 1 has been replaced by feuding factions of English nobles; later, the focus will narrow to a single family torn apart by treason and violence; and finally, at the very end of Richard III, to Richard’s inward war with himself. The bitterest moments are in the future, though; there’s trouble enough in Part 2, but there’s also time, as yet, for the carnival mood of the Jack Cade scenes, and a few moments of slapstick as Gloucester exposes the con man Simpcox, and the combat between Peter and Horner, in which there is lots of drinking and a victorious underdog. (This is also the one installment of the first tetralogy in which the commoners play a major role; like Shakespeare’s later histories, it feels like it’s about England instead of about the nobility.)
And then there’s Suffolk and the pirates! This is the first appearance in Shakespeare of the Plot Device Pirates – that convenient band of buccaneers that shows up whenever the playwright has written himself into a corner. (See also Hamlet and Pericles.) Poor Suffolk just can’t get over the fact that he’s about to “die by vile bezonians,” although in fact the pirates are surprisingly erudite, and socially conscious enough to blame the ambitious nobleman for most of the kingdom’s ills.
Favorite memory: Seeing this live in Stratford, Ontario. They did all three parts (condensed into two plays, but I’m counting it as three on my life list). What I remember most about that production are the Cade scenes – all that riot and energy, and rebels tossing loaves of bread at each other, and you get that the rebellion is a holiday for people who haven’t had many chances at liberty in their lives.
This is probably the cheeriest installment of the first tetralogy, although that isn’t necessarily saying much; Shakespeare’s first cycle of history plays is a story about a world spiraling farther and farther into chaos, and conflicts that are growing more and more insular. The international war of Part 1 has been replaced by feuding factions of English nobles; later, the focus will narrow to a single family torn apart by treason and violence; and finally, at the very end of Richard III, to Richard’s inward war with himself. The bitterest moments are in the future, though; there’s trouble enough in Part 2, but there’s also time, as yet, for the carnival mood of the Jack Cade scenes, and a few moments of slapstick as Gloucester exposes the con man Simpcox, and the combat between Peter and Horner, in which there is lots of drinking and a victorious underdog. (This is also the one installment of the first tetralogy in which the commoners play a major role; like Shakespeare’s later histories, it feels like it’s about England instead of about the nobility.)
And then there’s Suffolk and the pirates! This is the first appearance in Shakespeare of the Plot Device Pirates – that convenient band of buccaneers that shows up whenever the playwright has written himself into a corner. (See also Hamlet and Pericles.) Poor Suffolk just can’t get over the fact that he’s about to “die by vile bezonians,” although in fact the pirates are surprisingly erudite, and socially conscious enough to blame the ambitious nobleman for most of the kingdom’s ills.
Favorite memory: Seeing this live in Stratford, Ontario. They did all three parts (condensed into two plays, but I’m counting it as three on my life list). What I remember most about that production are the Cade scenes – all that riot and energy, and rebels tossing loaves of bread at each other, and you get that the rebellion is a holiday for people who haven’t had many chances at liberty in their lives.
Friday, April 2, 2010
Shakesblogging: Henry VI, Part 1
I must admit that I found it hard to come up with stuff to say about this play, even though I wrote large chunks of my master’s thesis about it. I think it’s essential for setting up the rest of the tetralogy, so I didn’t want to skip it, but it doesn’t grab me as much as the three sequels, in large part because Talbot just doesn’t interest me all that much. That said:
What I love about this play Evil Joan of Arc! Kicking ass and taking names! Yes, she is the villian – and either a cynical manipulator or totally deluded, or possibly both – but she’s strangely compelling. Also, she feeds fiends with her own blood (for this version of Joan is basically a witch), and there’s this gloriously creepy scene when they abandon her and refuse to do her bidding. In desperation, she offers one of her limbs, her body, and finally her soul in exchange for one last French victory. The stage directions tell a grim story in a few words: They walk and speak not ... They hang their heads ... They shake their heads ... They depart.
Immediately after this moment, we also meet Margaret of Anjou, Joan’s spiritual successor. As yet, she’s a minor character and a wide-eyed young pawn in the men’s political games, but there are a few hints of the formidable figure she will become: “To be a queen in bondage is more vile / Than is a slave in base servility.” The ambitious Suffolk falls in love with Margaret and, weirdly, determines to marry her off to the king and seduce the king through her: “Solicit Henry with her wondrous praise ... That when thou comest to kneel at Henry’s feet / Thou mayst bereave him of his wits with wonder.” The play closes with Suffolk’s final, ominous lines: “Margaret shall now be queen and rule the king; / But I will rule both her, the king, and realm.”
On a somewhat random note, I also like the awesomely assonant line: “Why ring not out the bells aloud throughout the town?”
Favorite memory: Um. Finally getting done with my MA thesis?
What I love about this play Evil Joan of Arc! Kicking ass and taking names! Yes, she is the villian – and either a cynical manipulator or totally deluded, or possibly both – but she’s strangely compelling. Also, she feeds fiends with her own blood (for this version of Joan is basically a witch), and there’s this gloriously creepy scene when they abandon her and refuse to do her bidding. In desperation, she offers one of her limbs, her body, and finally her soul in exchange for one last French victory. The stage directions tell a grim story in a few words: They walk and speak not ... They hang their heads ... They shake their heads ... They depart.
Immediately after this moment, we also meet Margaret of Anjou, Joan’s spiritual successor. As yet, she’s a minor character and a wide-eyed young pawn in the men’s political games, but there are a few hints of the formidable figure she will become: “To be a queen in bondage is more vile / Than is a slave in base servility.” The ambitious Suffolk falls in love with Margaret and, weirdly, determines to marry her off to the king and seduce the king through her: “Solicit Henry with her wondrous praise ... That when thou comest to kneel at Henry’s feet / Thou mayst bereave him of his wits with wonder.” The play closes with Suffolk’s final, ominous lines: “Margaret shall now be queen and rule the king; / But I will rule both her, the king, and realm.”
On a somewhat random note, I also like the awesomely assonant line: “Why ring not out the bells aloud throughout the town?”
Favorite memory: Um. Finally getting done with my MA thesis?
Shakesblogging: Titus Andronicus
... known to generations of critics as “Shakespeare’s worst play,” although this is unfair. It’s a pretty bad play if you compare it to Hamlet or The Duchess of Malfi, but it starts to look like a very good one if your touchstone is The Spanish Tragedy or The Jew of Malta – in other words, stuff people were actually writing in the early 1590s, and not a gold standard that wouldn’t exist for another ten years. It’s good theater: brutally funny, energetic, mesmerizing.
It is also a play that acknowledges that people get a charge out of watching violence and mutilation and broken social taboos, as long as it happens in the safe space of the theater. (I read it for the first time as a college freshman, in the fall of ‘94 when everyone was watching bootleg copies of Pulp Fiction in the dorms at night, and I think it probably resonated more then than it did for two centuries previously: instinctively, we got the concept of violence as spectacle, revenge as art.)
What I love about this play: First off, it’s got the single best stage direction in Shakespeare: Enter a Messenger with two heads and a hand. Eat your heart out, bear.
You can see Shakespeare learning the art of the Big Marlovian Line and making it his own: “The woods are ruthless, dreadful, deaf, and dull.” “Rome is but a wilderness of tigers / Tigers must prey, and Rome affords no prey / But me and mine.” “When will this fearful slumber have an end?”
It also has Aaron, one of the most badass villains ever. (I think I have mentioned before that I would LOVE to see him played by Samuel L. Jackson.) He’s got some great zingers: “Thou hast undone our mother.” “Villain, I have done thy mother.” “Art thou not sorry for these heinous deeds?” “Ay, that I had not done a thousand more.” This much is also reminiscent of Marlowe, but once Aaron’s baby son enters the picture, Shakespeare tries out something more complicated and distinctly Shakespearean. Rome eats its young; we’ve already seen Titus kill not only Tamora’s son, but also his own, all in the name of Roman virtue. It’s Aaron, the barbarian, who has real human affection for his child and does everything he can to ensure the baby’s survival: “This before all the world do I prefer ... I’ll make you feed on berries and on roots, / And feed on curds and whey, and suck the goat, / And cabin in a cave, and bring you up / To be a warrior and command a camp.” There aren’t really any good guys in this play; Romans and Goths and Moors all do unspeakable things to each other, and sometimes to their own families; but to the extent that anyone has any moral claims at all, they’re evenly balanced.
Favorite memory: Freshman Intro to Shakespeare. Classroom performance. Chewable blood pills. Need I say more?
It is also a play that acknowledges that people get a charge out of watching violence and mutilation and broken social taboos, as long as it happens in the safe space of the theater. (I read it for the first time as a college freshman, in the fall of ‘94 when everyone was watching bootleg copies of Pulp Fiction in the dorms at night, and I think it probably resonated more then than it did for two centuries previously: instinctively, we got the concept of violence as spectacle, revenge as art.)
What I love about this play: First off, it’s got the single best stage direction in Shakespeare: Enter a Messenger with two heads and a hand. Eat your heart out, bear.
You can see Shakespeare learning the art of the Big Marlovian Line and making it his own: “The woods are ruthless, dreadful, deaf, and dull.” “Rome is but a wilderness of tigers / Tigers must prey, and Rome affords no prey / But me and mine.” “When will this fearful slumber have an end?”
It also has Aaron, one of the most badass villains ever. (I think I have mentioned before that I would LOVE to see him played by Samuel L. Jackson.) He’s got some great zingers: “Thou hast undone our mother.” “Villain, I have done thy mother.” “Art thou not sorry for these heinous deeds?” “Ay, that I had not done a thousand more.” This much is also reminiscent of Marlowe, but once Aaron’s baby son enters the picture, Shakespeare tries out something more complicated and distinctly Shakespearean. Rome eats its young; we’ve already seen Titus kill not only Tamora’s son, but also his own, all in the name of Roman virtue. It’s Aaron, the barbarian, who has real human affection for his child and does everything he can to ensure the baby’s survival: “This before all the world do I prefer ... I’ll make you feed on berries and on roots, / And feed on curds and whey, and suck the goat, / And cabin in a cave, and bring you up / To be a warrior and command a camp.” There aren’t really any good guys in this play; Romans and Goths and Moors all do unspeakable things to each other, and sometimes to their own families; but to the extent that anyone has any moral claims at all, they’re evenly balanced.
Favorite memory: Freshman Intro to Shakespeare. Classroom performance. Chewable blood pills. Need I say more?
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