Shelter-In-Place Reading Roundup: T.A. and T. of A.

Alan Cumming and Jessica Lange in Julie Taymor’s film Titus, which unfortunately cannot be streamed anywhere for love or money. (Theory: it was originally a Fox Searchlight picture, which means it is now owned by Disney, and this really, really isn’t Disney fare. [Wait, does this mean that Lange’s Tamora is now a Disney princess?])

More thoughts on plays we’ve read in my Shakespeare book club. This time, two of the odder and more obscure tragedies, with titles that are easily mixed up.

Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There are not a lot of similarities between Harold Bloom and my high-school drama teacher (a female Gen-X hipster who loved experimental physical theater), but there’s at least one thing they agreed on: Titus Andronicus can’t be taken seriously. It’s just too baroquely violent, too delighted by its own gruesome bad taste, to be anything other than a parody of the revenge tragedies that were popular in the early 1590s.

I’m not quite sure I buy this. To me, parody seems like a genre that works best in the short form, and would Shakespeare really have hand-written 2550 lines of blank verse just for the sake of an extended joke? Then again, if anyone was going to invent the full-length parody drama in English, it would probably be Shakespeare. And the play does contain several moments that seem more liable to cause shocked giggles than horrified screams.

Still, what if we do take it seriously? What is the point of all the bloodshed? In my Shakespeare reading group, we theorized that it might be intended to show how revenge functions in a godless universe. Greek tragedies, too, feature cycles of revenge, but they also feature dei ex machina who intervene to put an end to the violence whenever it gets too horrible. But there are no gods in Titus – only a mortal woman who dresses up like the goddess Revenge as part of her own revenge plot, and then becomes a victim of her own cleverness. All of the revenge-obsessed characters and a few innocent bystanders die horribly; the only adults who survive (Marcus and Lucius) are also the only adult men in the play who have enough common sense to mostly avoid getting caught up in everyone else's bizarre revenge schemes.

Timon of Athens by William Shakespeare
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Timon of Athens plays better than it reads. If I hadn’t seen an engaging production by San Francisco’s Cutting Ball Theatre in 2018, I might have rated this only two stars. The verse is noticeably unpolished, too many characters are sketched rather than fleshed out, the pace feels slow and uneventful. Alcibiades does not have enough to do in the first half of the play to set up how important a character he becomes in the second half.

But a good production can disguise those flaws (un-metrical verse is less noticeable on the stage than on the page; sketchy characters can come alive when inhabited by an actor who makes interesting choices) and reveal the play’s virtues. Which, for me, come down to this: many Shakespeare plays feel timeless, but this one feels actively modern. It’s one of his few plays that doesn’t center on familial or romantic relationships, but on money and society. (This also means that pretty much all the characters could easily be played by anyone of any age, race, or gender.) It is not a deep work of psychological realism, but a moral fable with a cynical sting. It makes perfect sense to me that this was a favorite play of Karl Marx and of the Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht. (After learning this, I couldn’t help thinking of Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan , another play about the difficulty of being a good-hearted, generous person in an amoral society.) Timon’s extremism—going from the most generous man in Athens to the most embittered—feels appropriate for a polarized time like the 21st century.

So then I guess it’s no surprise that Timon plays better than it reads. I often feel that way about Brecht and a lot of other modern playwrights.