Saturday, December 6, 2014

Titus Andronicus

"I tell my sorrows to the stones..."

"I tell my sorrows to the stones..." These chilling words from Shakespeare's tale of loyalty betrayed by power reverberate profoundly in our world today, and in my mind this play's subject matter takes it off the shelf and puts it into the forefront of the current Shakespeare canon. I say this despite readily admitting that the language of Titus Andronicus does not equal that of Shakespeare's later plays - that it is the most crudely wrought of all his works - but even this fact does not devalue such a powerful, passionate, and indignant vision of a world utterly deprived of justice.

The only word for this vision would be apocalyptic, and it is interesting to me that Shakespeare initiated his career as a tragedian with such a work, and ended it many years later with an equally apocalyptic work in King Lear, and that in both of these plays the fatal element is human nature. That, it seems to me, is what Shakespeare most wanted to leave us with as a writer, an impression that human nature itself is the critical element in human tragedy - that we essentially create tragedy with our own hands, and without a widely shared vision underpinning a moral order there is no way to construct a reality devoid of horror. So for readers who have the strength to endure its terrible violence and unrelenting pathos there is a message to be taken from this play that is crucial, and that is that there is simply no limit to human cruelty once a shared spiritual and intellectual vision is lost.

That appears to have been Shakespeare's first and last word to posterity, this unflinching look at the horror of life in a world predicated on nothing but the struggle for survival. For this reason alone Titus Andronicus is a great play and should be among the must-read works for anyone seeking to understand the broader meaning of Shakespeare's contribution. It is a recurring question in human existence, one that must be faced again and again by each successive generation, and in Titus Andronicus Shakespeare clearly wanted to convey the devastating result of the failure to reach for a higher spiritual plane.

Brent Hightower
Copyright 2014 Brent Hightower
21stcenturyperceptions.blogspot.com