Was something lost in the translation?

Film review: Shakespeare’s Titus

Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy Titus Andronicus (circa 1592-5), although apparently very popular in its day, has a number of problems, both textual and aesthetic. Scholars have raised doubts about its authorship, and critics from the 18th century onwards have recoiled from its alleged violations of literary decorum, viz., its violence and its ambivalence of tone. Productions in the 19th century drastically "corrected" such indiscretions, and the play has not been given much stage time in the 20th. Only an audacious director, it seemed, would dare take it up and a visionary to make it work.

That is what Julie Taymor is in choosing to adapt Shakespeare’s play into film as Titus, starring Anthony Hopkins as the eponymous hero. The screen adaptation, currently playing at the Greenbelt cinema, may loosely be called revisionist. The plot remains generally the same as in Shakespeare: Titus Andronicus, a Roman general, returns victorious from a war and brings Tamora, the Queen of the Goths, her lover Aaron, and her sons as prisoners. He orders the sacrifice of the eldest of her sons and so begins a personal feud with Tamora, a conflict resulting in a chain of murders, rape, mutilation, and cannibalism. The film, however, shuttles back and forth in time, from the Roman Empire to the Mussolini era to the present. We are also made aware of the play as play at certain points. The role of young Lucius, Titus’ grandson is expanded, and he easily becomes, as the character dressed conspicuously in contemporary fashion, our focalizer. Scenes are omitted, re-arranged, and broken into shorter scenes.

Such liberties as those that Taymor takes, however, may actually bring the audience closer to Shakespeare’s stage. The Elizabethan stage was not realistic and required of its audiences more than a modicum of suspension of disbelief. A sixteenth-century illustration (haply of a performance of the Titus) shows actors wearing costumes from different periods–Elizabethan, Roman, and medieval–all in the same scene. Even a cursory reading of any Shakespearean play would reveal its many anachronisms: references to Christianity in a pre-Christian setting, for instance. Anachronisms, it seems, were taken by Shakespeare’s audience as a matter of convention, just as they are a source of amusement to today’s "postmodern" generation (as seen, for example, in many a Disney cartoon), who sees them as acts of play. By pointing out these anachronisms, indeed, by creating a number of them herself, Taymor foregrounds the affinities, rather than the difference, between our time and Shakespeare’s.

More important is the question of tone. Critics have been unsure as to how to take Titus Andronicus. A number have argued that Shakespeare was writing a burlesque of the "revenge tragedy," which was very popular among the Elizabethans and which Shakespeare would later raise to philosophic heights (in Hamlet). Indeed, there are playful references to such plays in Titus Andronicus. For example, where Thomas Kyd begins his Spanish Tragedy (circa 1587) with the allegorical figure of Revenge standing on the upper stage, as author of the events we witness center stage, Shakespeare ends Titus Andronicus with Tamora (Jessica Lange) disguised as Revenge. However, instead of authoring a plot, she becomes the victim of the very plot she initiates. Titus, who significantly enters upstage, steals the pen, as it were, adds characters (Murder and Rape), and rewrites such an outcome for the play as to out-revenge Revenge herself in its stark cruelty.

Taymore’s challenge is to find the equivalent of such intertextual legerdemain. Classic theater as a source of shared meanings and references has been replaced by movies and other media, so Shakespeare’s jab at Kyd is probably significant only to the English major. It is here that the ingenuity of the movie’s casting comes to the fore, for Anthony Hopkins exists in the popular imagination as Hannibal Lecter. Taymore’s reference is obviously to the Silence of the Lambs, the Spanish Tragedy of the late 20th century. Indeed, as if to make sure we catch the allusion, in one scene (not in Shakespeare) Titus receives a vision of a lamb about to be sacrificed (the Abraham and Isaac story), the head of which becomes that of his own son Mutius, whom he has killed in a fit of rage. When, in the final scene, Titus, dressed as a chef, serves Tamora the flesh of her own sons, we are at once giggling and cringing in our seats–the same effect, if the conjecture of scholars is correct, that the play had on its original audience.

The humor of Shakespeare’s play is, indeed, grim, and its numerous puns on gaping holes and hands being lopped off have been considered bad form (e.g., O handle not the theme, to talk of hands, / Lest we remember still that we have none). Earlier productions have taken out some scenes that might induce "intrusive laughter." Taymore puts them all in, including the scene where Lavinia scrawls the names of her rapists on the sand with a "staff in her mouth, guiding it with her stumps," because humor (bitter, dark, and absurd) is part of Shakespeare’s vision–a vision summed up in Titus’ laugh when he sees his sons’ severed heads. "Why dost thou laugh? it fits not with this hour," asks his brother Marcus. Titus replies: Why, I have not another tear to shed: / Besides, this sorrow is an enemy, / And would usurp upon my wat’ry eyes, / And make them blind with tributary tears: / Then which way shall I find Revenge’s cave? Perhaps, Taymore senses that we are closer to the Elizabethans in their blurring of dichotomies (horror and/or humor) than the 19th-century critics were to appreciate the macabre elements in Titus. "If you think revenge is sweet," proclaims the movie poster, "taste this" – there is the 20th-century equivalent of Shakespeare’s grim puns.

The serious questions that the play raises, however, shouldn’t be forgotten. To mention just one: Shakespeare, it is said, was concerned about the problems of governance and monarchal succession. By showing the excesses of Roman society, including its moral decadence, he was issuing a warning to the Elizabethans, whose society was then at its height and, in a sense, was the empire of its age. Taymor effects a similar questioning by alluding to the Fascism of our recent past, showing the Romans in orgiastic transports where Shakespeare only suggests, and quite literally staging the last scene in an amphitheater where the Romans used to have their bloodbaths and "entertainments."

It seems, then, that Taymore succeeds in being faithful to Shakespeare’s matter because of her apparent revisionism. Her fidelity, however, is also to her medium. To cite an instance, part of the function of speeches in Shakespeare was to indicate settings, as the stage was bare and property was minimal. Taymore has Aaron recite his first soliloquy (Now climbeth Tamora Olympus’ top . . .) over close-ups of Tamora walking up the palace steps–she has just set her revenge in motion–followed by shots of a sunrise. Taymore also uses a number of montages, one of which, containing references to Marilyn Monroe, conflates the imagery of hunting and the rape and mutilation of Lavinia.

Of course, Taymore’s adaptation is not without its weaknesses–weaknesses conditioned by her very medium. Viewers, even postmodern ones, tend to demand more internal consistency from a film than from a play, and the loopholes in Shakespeare, invisible to a theater audience, surface when transferred to show-all big screen. Still, Titus is an accomplishment that one shouldn’t overlook. Shakespeare’s themes of personal justice versus impersonal law, the persistence of savagery beneath the veneer of civilization, the conflict between illusion and reality, the mystery of the evil will–all brilliantly captured in Taymore’s adaptation–resonate in our time of political uncertainties and show that Shakespeare is indeed our contemporary.