1985 BBC Production

This adaptation, the last broadcast in the BBC series, was directed by Jane Howell and featured Hugh Quarshie as Aaron the Moor; Anna Calder-Marshall as Lavinia; Eileen Atkins as Tamora; Trevor Peacock as Titus; and Paul Davies Prowles as Young Lucius.

Henry Fenwick, in his essay on “The Production” (17–27) for the booklet the BBC published to coincide with the broadcast, opened by emphasizing the play’s reputation for being gruesome and grotesque and its tendency to be dismissed, but he quoted director Jane Howell’s interest in such matters as Titus’s grandson, the reference to harming a fly, and the possibility that the play might be a kind of (bad) dream (17–18). Howell and set designer Tony Burrough decided not to treat the ancient Roman setting too literally, and the same was true of costume designer Colin Lavers, who drew on recent 1980s inspirations for some of the clothing and who had to disguise supposedly lost appendages by using long sleeves (18–19). Howell explained why she made many lesser characters wear masks (to make them seem uninvolved spectators [19]). Producer Shaun Sutton stressed the blood-revenge aspects of the play, but he also saw it as more and better than a mere grotesque spectacle, especially in the ways it presents Titus’s development and his possible awareness that he is play-acting (20). The production was well-rehearsed, which helped some actors, such as Eileen Atkins playing Tamora, to appreciate it more than she had at first (20). Atkins wanted to appear and act as a foreigner contemptuous of Rome and was confident the play could be done well on television because it could seem more realistic than on stage (21–22). Anna Calder-Marshall, as Lavinia, thought the characters developed because of the violence they suffered and committed, and of course her role was especially horrible to see performed and brought her pain even to describe it (22–23). Fenwick said that Hugh Quarshie, as Aaron, made the character “a charismatic, almost sympathetic figure”—“a figure of spontaneity and natural impulse,” unlike the Romans. Quarshie saw Aaron as a relativist free from Roman absolutism (24). Trevor Peacock, as Titus, found the play’s violence and cruelty relevant to the 1980s. Peacock was intrigued by the degree—or even the existence—of Titus’s insanity (25–26). The theme of madness was emphasized as the production developed, so that Titus was played as an inflexible military leader in a play Howell came to consider completely Shakespeare’s and extremely subtle (26–27).

J. C. Bulman and H. R. Coursen, in their comprehensive 1988 critical anthology Shakespeare on Television, reported some reviews from 1985. A reviewer for the London Times called the production dull; disliked the “blankly-lit studio set”; and faulted “some over-theatrical performances.” A writer for the New York Times thought the opening and continuing focus on Young Lucius permitted “violence while openly questioning it, too,” adding that the “production approaches the solemnity of a black mass” and admiring the “complex” performance of Hugh Quarshie as Aaron. The Washington Post’s reviewer found the horror “inadvertently entertaining” and thought that the director’s methods “fail to ennoble the material,” instead creating an “unfortunate pretentiousness.” In Britian’s Times Literary Supplement, Stanley Wells, a major scholar, thought this production’s emphasis on the grandson worked well; explained how the play was altered to emphasize his presence; saw him in his “grave compassion,” as a representative of the audience; and noted various other alterations in the play script (313). Wells thought that although the production avoided unintended comedy, “the play’s emotional impact is not fully realized”; “its tableaux of grief are comparatively unaffecting”; and often “the performers do too little to move us.” Ultimately he found the “mixed merits and weaknesses of this production … characteristic of the ambitious series that it brings to an end” (314).

Susan Willis, in her 1991 book on the BBC series (172–76), reported that director Jane Howell found dealing with the play’s violence a stimulating challenge (172). She rearranged the action to emphasize Titus; used “the visual element to show the political crisis wordlessly” (173); employed hanging meat as a pattern of imagery; and emphasized “bodies, hanging, slaughter, [and] devouring” to accentuate important themes (174).

Peter Cochran, in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (71–72), wrote that the effective lighting helps make this production one of the best in the BBC series (71–72) and considered Trevor Peacock, as Titus, ideally suited for the role. He particularly admired Hugh Quarshie as Aaron and also praised the actors playing Lavinia and Marcus Andronicus. According to Cochran, this production succeeds because the actors play it straight (72).

In the 2013 second edition of a survey dealing with Titus in performance, Michael D. Friedman and Alan Dessen (49–53) called this production fairly “realistic” (49); quoted at length from Stanley Wells’s assessment (mentioned above); and commented that “[o]ne danger of too much ‘realism’ and too many close ups is an overdose of horrors that can turn Titus into an equivalent to a slasher movie or lead to a comic-book flattening of the figures,” as sometimes happened with “this version’s Saturninus.” But Friedman and Dessen wrote that “[s]trong acting from Peacock, Quarshie, Hardwicke, Calder-Marshall, and Atkins overcame most of these dangers. Moreover, Howells’ adept use of young Lucius as a framing device or barometer often screened what was happening through an on-camera consciousness so as to channel the horrors and convey vividly the logic (and the taint) of violence and revenge.” They concluded that “[g]iven the many problems in adapting any Shakespeare script, much less this daunting one, fur television, Howell’s production represents a significant achievement and provides the most ‘realistic’ Titus one is likely to see” (53).

In her book from 2021 titled Shakespearean Drama, Disability, and the Filmic Stare (57–64), Grace McCarthy suggested that Howell tended to depict “disability as disability regardless of gender” and generally uses composition “and wide shots of Titus after he loses his hand in such a way that in the medium shots the stump is not in frame. In wider shots, that arm is frequently behind a prop or another actor. Additionally,” she noted, “Howell’s design avoids prostheses” and she “subtly suppresses the visibility of Titus’s impairment throughout the latter half of the film. Audiences cannot stare at an impairment that is invisible either by not being in frame or as a function of the design of the film.”

1999 Julie Taymor Production

This film, directed by Julie Taymor and titled simply Titus, starred Osheen Jones as Young Lucius; Anthony Hopkins as Titus; Jessica Lange as Tamora; Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Chiron; Matthew Rhys as Demetrius; Harry Lennix as Aaron; Angus Macfadyen as Lucius; Alan Cumming as Saturninus; and Laura Fraser as Lavinia.

Daniel Rosenthal, in his book from 2000 titled Shakespeare on Screen (164–65), writing that “Julie Taymor’s devastating Titus shows that there’s much more to the play than mere violence,” mentioned its “dazzling invention” and “time-bending” chronology (164) while also commenting on “several jarring special-effects sequences,” saying that Aaron is effectively played, and observing that “Taymor deftly fuses horror with hilarity.” He called Hopkins “almost unwatchably moving” and was intrigued by the film’s “daring fusion of periods, fantasy and graphic reality, not to mention accents (American, Scots, Irish and Welsh), [which] might have been an incoherent mess. Yet Taymor,” he thought, “gives it absolute clarity by decisively separating the opposing sides,” allowing her “to make a powerful case for Titus Andronicus to be treated with respect and [ensure] that the relentless brutality of Titus is moving and thought-provoking, rather than numbingly empty” (165).

Commenting on the film in 2000 in an article titled “‘To Sup with Horrors’: Julie Taymor’s Senecan Feast,” Jim Welsh and John C. Tibbetts considered it “splendidly cast,” writing that “Anthony Hopkins plays Titus, proud, dutiful, soon transformed through grief and madness into a fearsome avenger. Jessica Lange is an overly made-up, stone-hearted Tamora. But the stand-out performances,” they thought, “belong to Alan Cumming, looking as though he had stepped out of Cabaret and into Fellini Satyricon, utterly decadent, self-absorbed, and evil, and, especially, to Harry Lennix as Aaron the Moor, the ultimate emblem of subconscious evil and one of Shakespeare’s most powerful creations.” They saw the film as “marked by gross indulgence and hideous excesses” but said “it is sometimes shockingly effective and even darkly humorous, as when Titus scampers around dressed in a chef’s uniform and hat at the Thyestian feast at the play’s awful climax, served to Saturninus, who finds it tasty, and Tamora, who clearly doesn’t know what’s cooking” (156).

Mary Lindroth, discussing the film in an essay from 2001 titled “‘Some Device of Further Misery’: Taymor’s Titus Brings Shakespeare to Film Audiences with a Twist,” wrote that “[o]nce audiences are free to see Titus with their own eyes, unencumbered by its reputation, then they are ready for an experience that teaches them that what should be frightening is not the play’s reputation for violence, and not even what appears before their eyes on the screen, but rather the ways in which the illusory world that appears on screen resonates with their real life.” She said that “[i]t is clear while watching the film that it is about Titus, the Romans, and the Goths. But upon leaving the film, as critic after critic cannot help but note, one finds oneself thinking about Bosnia, East Timor, Rwanda, Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, Fascist Italy, and Fascist Germany” (110).

In his 2002 book titled Shakespeare in the Cinema (187–92), Stephen Buhler said that Taymor’s film “connects the violence of the play with our own age’s problematic relationship with violence and its representations”; called attention to its resemblances “to the work of Quentin Tarantino and Oliver Stone” (188); and suggested that in “part because of the play’s status as ‘unworthy’ of Shakespeare, Taymor has been able to bypass the sometimes deadening authority established around the playwright and thereby to unleash more of the critical and emotional energies that truly animate the text” (192).

Also publishing in 2002, in his book Shakespeare in Space (133–41), Herbert R. Coursen called the Taymor Titus “brilliant filmmaking” (134) despite finding problems with the opening sequence (135). Saying that the film “really begins when Titus inspects the ranks” (136), he termed the acting “superb”; praised the whole film as “visually stunning” (138); and quoted Taymor’s own assessment of it as “shockingly beautiful” (140). He concluded that the “power of Taymor’s film results partly from the pervasiveness in our culture of the motivation of each of the major characters in the script—the desire to hurt those who have hurt them” (141).

In another assessment from 2002, Lisa S. Starks, in “Cinema of Cruelty: Powers of Horror in Julie Taymor’s Titus,” contended that “Taymor’s Titus revises both the genre of horror and the revenge play of Shakespeare.” She suggested that by “re-visioning elements of the slasher and the classic horror film through Shakespeare, Titus displaces the binary of ‘high/low’ of the horror film genre, while it calls into question its gendered representations; simultaneously, it reinvents Shakespeare’s ‘low’ revenge play through its investigation of the representational and psychological dynamics of horror” (137).

In one more essay from 2002, Elsie Walker, in “‘Now is a Time to Storm’: Julie Taymor’s Titus (2000),” asserted that “Titus is a quintessentially postmodern adaptation: playful, self-conscious, heterogeneous. Like other postmodern directors, Taymor plays with the make-believe or Illusionist conventions of cinema, featuring ‘stagy’ scenes, editing discontinuity, and subjective camera work rather than filming straight, ‘objective’ reality.” Walker noted that nonetheless “Taymor describes Titus in anti-postmodern, perhaps mystificatory [sic] terms, as a total, cross-cultural narrative encapsulating the violence of the last two centuries” (194). Generally discussing the combination of artifice and realism in the film, Walker added that “Taymor plays up elements of Titus that have long alienated critics—the playful theatricality in which the most gruesome events are presented and the seeming inadequacy of the verse to contain the horrors we see” (197).

Discussing this adaptation in his 2003 book Shakespeare’s Violated Bodies (46–49, 120–23), Pascale Aebischer wrote that the “exploration of beauty and horror and the attempt to strike a balance between the focus on Lavinia’s individual, gendered suffering and the overall plot is typical of Taymor’s approach to the character.” He noted Taymor’s “decision to metaphorically represent the rape elided in the playtext” (48); said this production’s “Aaron offers a mesmerising performance of evil” (120); and asserted that the ultimate “iconic image of crucifixion portrays Aaron, and not Lavinia or any of the Andronici, as the sacrificial victim over whose dead body the commonweal can be restored,” so that the “audience’s silent endorsement of Lavinia’s and Titus revenges on the Goths is, at the very end of Taymor’s film, exposed as excessive” (122).

In his book from 2003 titled Shakespeare at the Cineplex (203–17), Samuel Crowl wrote that Taymor “mixes the lyric (Tamora’s pastoral seduction of Aaron) with the absurd (the fly-killing scene)” and “mixes the symbolic (Titus shooting his message-laden arrows up at the gods) with the cruel and tender (Marcus’s evocation of the ravished Lavinia)” and “restlessly tries to find visual equivalents for Shakespeare’s shifts of tone and atmosphere.” He argued that her “abrupt visual and musical shifts are Taymor’s way of not just mingling past and present but of finding filmic equivalents for similar startling transpositions in Shakespeare’s textual atmospherics” (207). Asserting that “Taymor does not do orgies well” and calling her “orgy images … stale and flat,” he also regretted “her decision to cast Alan Cumming as Saturninus,” saying he had recently starred on stage in Cabaret, the famous play about the rise of Hitler. Crowl suggested that “trying to link Saturninus with the Nazis and Fascists remains an idea poorly realized. The Nazis were cold, efficient killers; Cumming’s Saturninus is an insipid brat who strikes poses” (208). But Crowl felt that the “film regains its energy when it turns to focus on Titus and Aaron” and noted that “Taymor repeatedly shoots Hopkins’s Titus against the background of the ruinsand remnants of the Roman civilization he honors” (209). He thought, however, that she had difficulties depicting Tamora and her sons (“two hyper-charged brats”), saying their “evil is banal, not rapacious.” According to Crowl, Taymor’s “imaginative powers are more alive when concentrating on the play’s second odd couple, Titus and Aaron. The film makes us care about the fates of these two fathers, but fails to find a spark of sympathy (or interest) in what motivates Tamora’s revenge” (213). He observed that the “film cross-cuts between the two fathers to deepen the parallel [between them] Titus usurps Aaron’s role as the revenger as Aaron usurps Titus’s role as the patriarch” (215).

Michael Anderegg, in his 2004 book Cinematic Shakespeare (183–90), offered especially interesting remarks about the film. He stated that “Taymor’s stylized mise-en-scene, her mixture of incompatible periods and wildly inconsistent settings, costumes, and properties, echoes the inconsistencies of Shakespeare’s play, which, with little regard for Roman history and customs, mixes together ancient and imperial, republic and dictatorship, the rise and the decline of empire.” Anderegg thought that “Taymor’s film does not, any more than does Shakespeare’s play, provide a coherent context in which the seemingly arbitrary turnarounds of the first act unfold. Taymor makes no attempt to mitigate the sense of pell-mell arbitrariness” (183). Suggesting that her “eclectic,” “postmodern” style made political interpretations “problematic” (185), Anderegg also noted that too much “postmodern allusiveness” can prevent even a director from imposing any obvious meaning on a film, although he thought that “Taymor avoids some of these difficulties by firmly anchoring her film to Shakespeare’s text, a text she presents with the utmost clarity and comprehension.” In fact, he wrote that “Titus must be one of the clearest Shakespeare films ever made. Previous knowledge of the play is unnecessary: virtually every line spoken by every actor is delivered as action as much as speech” (186). He mentioned other means of directorial control, such as “[s]elf-conscious blocking and framing, deliberate camera placement” as well as “rapid camera movement, speech and action combined,” and the use of a “handheld camera” (188).

Writing about the film in a 2004 essay titled “Julie Taymor’s Titus: Deciding Not to Cut,” Cecile Marti thought that the “loss of bodily coherence fell by Titus is but the consequence and physical expression of the disruption of gender roles. Titus, as the chief representative of Roman values, is therefore the one who is assaulted from all parts, his masculine being on the front line of the gender conflict opposing Goths and Romans, and his own body … the locus where this conflict takes place.” She thought that “[i] is not only the editing that actively contributes to the creation of meaning through his body,” because “the costumes also play a function in modeling his shifting identity. The muddy, bronze armor and helmet protecting his body and displaying the marks of his masculinity gave way, little by little, to grotesque, soft wooly coats depriving him of his proud virtus” (125).

In their 2007 book New Wave Shakespeare on Screen (69–96), Thomas Cartelli and Katherine Rowe suggested that Taymor “risks reducing the film to an array of too prominent signs and markers” and wondered whether the film, “[o]utside of the concept-addled New York art and theater scene where this convention is rooted, … may all seem too calculated and self-reflexive,” noting that some commentators had seen as it as “an extraordinarily beautiful but hollow cinematic shell, or worse” (71). But they considered such responses “important but partial observations that obscure the full range of uses to which Taymor puts Titus Andronicus,” arguing that “Taymor’s dramatically sustained interpolations—both her explicit scenic additions to the play-text and her interventions in how that text gets cinematically expressed—do more than exploit blank spaces in the Shakespearean play-text to dramatic effect. They adapt Shakespearean stage-practice to the multi-mediated language of postmodern film-art and technology” in intriguing ways. They therefore approached the film “as an opportunity for exploring the kinds of viewing and interpretative strategies called for by what gets ‘added to’ a Shakespeare play in screen adaptations, concentrating on several strands of Taymor’s allusions and interpolations” (71). They offered a generally appreciative assessment of the film in sections (listed in the table of contents) titled “Recycling Rome,” “Interpolation as Balancing Act,” “Heads and Hands,” and “The Door in the Sky.” Other topics they discussed include “conceptual art, ghosting, surrogation, new media, [and] expressionist film.”

Maurice Hindle, also discussing Taymor’s Titus in his 2007 book Studying Shakespeare on Film, noted that the film had to compete with Ridley Scott’s recent Hollywood blockbuster titled Gladiator (also set in ancient Rome) but also remarked that although “it has horrors aplenty in it, Titus is no horror movie. Rather, by creating her own sophisticated visualisation of this early revenge tragedy. Taymor’s most vital achievement has not been to connect with a mass culture audience, but with the ‘arthouse’ viewer” (59). Meanwhile, Carol Chillington Rutter, in her 2007 book Shakespeare and Child’s Play (72–95), discussed, in great detail, the events of the film as seen from a child’s perspective and involving children.

Samuel Crowl, in his 2008 students’ guide Shakespeare on Film (94–96, 174–76), wrote that Taymor sees the play as “a parable about family, state, and power” as well as about “empire and violence” both in Rome and the United States (94–96; see also 175). He noted that the film combines places and times and emphasizes the importance of Titus and Aaron (95).

In an essay from 2008 titled “Titus Androgynous: Foul Mouths and Troubled Masculinity,” David Fredrick wrote that “the rescuing of Rome in Titus is not as easy as in most earlier Roman films because its ending, so similar visually to that of The Robe and The Sign of the Cross, in fact rejects the exclusionary logic that upholds the restoration of empire in both Shakespeare’s text and the Roman movie tradition. Lucius,” Fredrick continued, “carries off into the sunrise the [biracial] child of a union that Ben-Hur’s America could not have accepted. More importantly, the genre of the Roman movie had always been about staging spectacular and ‘perverse’ forms of pleasure that cast the male body in traditionally female terms as fetish, consumable, woundable, and penetrable sexually.” According to Fredrick, “Ultimately, the genre would then, through its rescue of Rome in Christian salvation, seal the male body back up, resituate the female body as the sole legitimate object of the gaze, and deny that those pleasures had ever really been of interest to us as spectators: that’s what the Romans liked, not us.” He thought that “Titus is, in visual terms, a long, partly parodic, invocation of this tradition. However, its ending does not reproduce the escape from perverse Rome into a better kingdom. Rather, while seeming to reproduce the conclusion of these movies, it measures its distance from their comfortable endings, intimating that the better kingdom of ‘legitimate’ visual pleasures no longer exists” (230–31).

Discussing the film in her 2008 book Filming Shakespeare, from Metatheatre to Metacinema (77–79, 89–90, 95, 130–32), Agnieszka Rasmus wrote that Titus has multiple characters who use direct address to the camera to make their thinking as clear as possible (77). These include Tamora and Aaron, the latter of whom sometimes seems completely evil but whose last speech seems almost poignant (79). Rasmus saw Aaron as a kind of director in this film, with greater independent initiative than he has in the play (89), saying he “transforms [the] theatre of cruelty and spectacle of death into the realm of parody and pastiche” (89). Commenting that although Titus does sometimes look at the camera he does so in ways implying that he remains trapped in the film (95), Rasmus also described the opening (130) and noted that the boy who appears there reappears at various later points (131). She noted the film’s emphasis on “the role of media, especially television, in propagating violence” (131); said the film depicts three different realities (131); and suggested that its ending is positive (132).

Lucian Ghita, in a 2009 essay titled “Aesthetics of Fragmentation in Taymor’s Titus,” focused on such matters as the banquet sequence (211), the Roman baths (211–12), and the important perspective of young Lucius (212). He concluded by arguing that “the audience is interested not so much in the object of the story itself, but, rather, in its telling, its representational modes, its nuances” (213).

Thomas P. Anderson, discussing the film in a 2013 essay titled “Titus, Broadway, and Disney’s Magic Capitalism; or, The Wonderful World of Julie Taymor,” sought to show “that by drawing her viewers’ attention to children who are simultaneously nurtured by and victims of Roman violence, Taymor’s film version of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus allegorizes the director’s desire to walk away from her Disney legacy.” He wrote that “[i]n exploring how both Shakespeare and Taymor make the status of children central to both the play and film, I link representations of Aaron and Tamora’s [illegitimate] child in the play and the film to issues of cultural inheritance from classical Rome, the English Reformation, and twentieth-century Disney.” He continued: “By connecting the way these artists understand how history is embedded in their work, I suggest that both Shakespeare and Taymor are able to allegorize their resistance to the very cultural conditions that give rise to their creative enterprises. More specifically, the film Titus is a powerful expression of the anxiety produced by what had increasingly become an uncomfortable position for Taymor as an inheritor of two legacies—one, the historical avant-garde, and two, the wonderful world of Disney” (68).

Also in 2013, Peter Cochran, in his book Small-Screen Shakespeare, called this film “striking” (72), noted its ambiguous use of time schemes, thought it “all looks spectacularly weird” (73), and observed that it borrows repeatedly from the BBC version (73–74). He also praised Anthony Hopkins as Titus and the rest of the (mostly non-English) cast (74).

Assessing the film at length in their 2013 book on performances of the play (197–229, 251–63), Michael D. Friedman and Alan Dessen compared and contrasted Taymor’s stage and film versions, commenting that “[a]s Taymor moved from stage to screen, she also modified many of the elements she borrowed from [Jane] Howell’s realistic BBC-TV rendition.” Although Taymor said she had not been influenced by seeing that adaptation, Friedman and Dessen wrote that “Howell’s fingerprints were all over both of Taymor’s Titus productions, especially in their depictions of the killing of Chiron and Demetrius” (208), observing that although she generally “refrained from vivid depictions of bloodshed, … she filmed the murder of Chiron and Demetrius in a graphic and lifelike manner” (209). Friedman and Dessen also noted that “Taymor employed Young Lucius, as Howell did, to channel viewers’ responses to the play’s events. Both directors featured Titus’s grandson as an observer in many scenes in which he does not appear in Shakespeare’s play, and both expanded his role to include actions that directly affected the meaning of their productions” (209). They commented that in Taymor’s Titus, “Young Lucius did not fully reject violent revenge until he witnessed the carnage that followed Titus’s revelation of the pie’s filling,” with the final impact of the boy’s presence in the film differing significantly from the darker implications of his presence in the stage and television productions (212). According to Friedman and Dessen the more “hopeful conclusion” of the film “prompted more negative commentary from critics and reviewers than any other aspect” of the movie, with various reviewers condemning it as sentimental and improbable (214).

Peter E. S. Babiak, in his 2016 survey of a hundred years of Shakespeare films (159–62) commented that in spite of its pervasive nihilism, Taymor’s Titus did “end on a note of optimism” (159). He discussed its emphasis on children; described its opening scene (159); noted that the first and final scenes of the film are not found in Shakespeare’s play (160–61); and observed its stress on “children imitating adult behavior.” Remarking that the film’s Rome “is populated by people who have not developed from innocence through knowledge to compassion; rather, they have developed from innocence through ignorance to cruelty,” he said that Saturninus is presented as such a child (161) and that the rapists’ “infantile response to their ravishing of Lavinia is entirely consistent with a lack of understanding of the enormity of their acts” (162). Even Titus, according to Babiak, sometimes seems immature, and “the violence of Titus,” he thought, “is directly linked to a larger contemporary celebration of violence”—in this case, violence that proves self-destructive (162).

Discussing the film in her 2017 book Devouring Time (198–222), Philippa Shepherd emphasized the “grotesque” aspects of the film; connected them to “our own [postmodern] society’s uncomfortable sense that violence and entertainment are inextricably linked” (198); and commented that “hybridity, central to grotesque, is prominent right from the start of Titus” (202–4). According to Sheppard, “The most obvious instance of hybridity is when Tamora and her two sons appear as Revenge, Rape, and Murder. Taymor calls this scene her Penny Arcade Nightmare #4. Even its title suggests the presence of the grotesque—both fun and funny, like a penny arcade, and terrifying, like a nightmare” (207). Suggesting the presence of nostalgia in some of the movie’s most memorable scenes and the presence of infantilism in way Saturninus is depicted (212), Sheppard also stressed the film’s interest in grotesque humor and repulsive violence (214) as well as its frequent focus on such matters as “food, horror, murders, and perverse games” (216).

Grace McCarthy, in her 2021 book on Shakespearean drama and disability (57–64), wrote that “Taymor introduces the use of prostheses” in her film “to play more deeply with the representations of physical disability and gender” (57) and sometimes employs them in a way that “genders the representation of the impairment on screen.” Commenting on Taymor’s depiction of the wounds Titus suffers, McCarthy noted that at one point a “bloody bandage is the brightest thing in the frame, subtly drawing attention to itself” and that “Taymor also keeps Titus’ arm and bandaged/capped stump in frame and unobstructed by props or people” (58). She thought, concerning another character’s wounds, that the “shots of prostheses function like close-ups in that they highlight Lavinia’s impairment and the need of Titus and the able-bodied men in her life to undo Lavinia’s disability. Prosthetics [thus] become a motif for Taymor, and a visual synecdoche for Lavinia, which also strengthens the stare”—i.e., our common tendency to stare at others’ disabilities, so that from “the first time we see Taymor’s Lavinia on screen after she acquires her impairments, characters try to replace Lavinia’s hands” (59). This is just one of various ways in which McCarthy analyzes the film in terms of disability studies.

In an essay from 2022 titled “Tracing Julie Taymor’s ‘Rough Magic’ in Her Three Screen Shakespeares,” Kade Ivy asserted that “the very fact that Taymor stylizes the PANs [Penny Arcade Nightmares, ‘inserts’ in the movie] in traceable performance traditions evinces the theatrical sensibilities of her film. As the PANs double down on stylized theatricality, they fracture the artifice of film’s literalness to remind us of our spectatorship and, perhaps, when it comes to the violence of Titus, our culpability” (122).

Bibliography