Re-watched Julie Taymor’s “Titus” last night. I have a great many theories on the play, but a new one came to light last night. Harold Bloom, in Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human is indeed absolutely correct in approaching Shakespeare from a character-based perspective instead of grouping and studying the plays by similar themes or genres. Bloom, of course, has a blind spot when he wishes “Titus Andronicus” had never been written, but his blinder spot is in ignoring the ways in which “Titus” literally gives birth to some of the greatest plays in the canon. Shakespeare throws just about every assortment of character type he could into the script, literally giving them free play of each of their wills in extremity. Of course there’s the sloughing off of Marlovian influence, but it was interesting to peer further into that critical mantra and understand the ways in which he was fucking with Marlovian impulses, experimenting with the amount of pitch and yaw he could muster between genuine tragic feeling and farce, without bringing down the Leonardo flying machine. But this is all so many digits off a general’s hand. What I meant to say is that the the child of Tamora the Goth and Aaron the Moor is Othello. Not in any chronomimetic way, but as a character and as a drama, Othello is the bold military hero envisioned as Aaron’s own desire for his son’s future. Race and status and gender are reversed in the protagonist, lover and “incarnate devil” between the two plays, and Othello is undone by Iago in almost an Oedipal way — Oedipal in the sense of the inexorable descent of Fate, conferred via birthright. It is only natural that Othello should be manipulated in the same way that his parents manipulated the fates of “Titus”’s characters. And I’ve gained a greater appreciation for the way at which Shakespeare’s laughing at his own plot — the wonderful double-manipulation of pageant theatricality, and the exposure of the mechanics of allegory, in the Rapine-Revenge-Murder scene. I want to fight even more for this play: it’s as if you can feel the contours of Shakespeare’s brain as you’re watching it.
No Comments Yet
No comments yet.
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
Leave a comment
