I’m not sure, at all, what to make of this play.

The movie has spectacle down pat, in scenes and costuming to match the gory spectacle of its events. There are a few scenes thrown in purely for art value: for example when Titus begs the passing Tribunes to be pitiful to his two sons, there’s a two-minute … thing, with some kind of angel(s) blowing trumpets and a son’s face superimposed on a sheep lying on a stone altar, with flame effects as a backdrop. I really don’t know what it’s supposed to mean. Sacrifice? Vulnerability? And the introduction is very weird. Young Lucius is playing war with toy soldiers in a modern-looking kitchen, spraying ketchup everywhere for blood. Then there’s an explosion outside the kitchen window, a man (perhaps the Clown) picks him up and carries him downstairs, to … Rome. I guess. The Coliseum. And the soldiers walk like robots, and they’re all encrusted with mud. And some of them are riding motorcycles. I don’t know. It’s all very weird.

Though the movie has very little gore on the horror-movie scale, it ranks with modern plots in random violence, so I can only imagine the reception of its performance in Shakespeare’s day — or is it a modern fallacy to think Shakespeare’s audience was less inured to violence than we are? I’ll check and see if I can find some accounts of the reaction. The SparkNotes summary says the killing and maiming is “the essence of the play. Titus Andronicus is a non-stop potboiler catalog of abominations.” So I’m not far off in thinking that plot is not the play’s selling point.

Anthony Hopkins as Titus is disturbing. I was trying to separate this character from Hannibal Lecter and especially in the last act, that’s almost impossible. I can’t decide if it’s good casting or playing to type, but it definitely draws some comparisons to Silence of the Lambs.

The pacing in this production, however, is dragging. I don’t know if any lines were cut, but I doubt it. I kept thinking it was almost over, only to see I was less than an hour in, then when I checked again, only halfway through. I’m staying up late to get this post done because I could no longer stand the guilt of a long-promised undone task (of which I have more than one), so perhaps I’m watching the time a little closely. But really, at 162 minutes it could stand to be sped up. Young Lucius is just walking, memorably, symbolically, endingly, whatever, for a full three minutes after the last line and before the end credits started.

I’m sure it would all have made better sense if I’d read the play first, but like I said, I had had it and I wanted to get this done and posted, so it was movie first. I’ll still read the play (and look ahead to see what Bloom has to say about it), and as always I’m grateful to have a visual sense of the action, but Titus Andronicus is not quite up there with my favorites.

A question came up elsewhere online: what sort of play is Titus Andronicus? With all the blood-spurting and the murder and the rape and Lavinia turning pages with the bloody stumps at the ends of her arms?

Several posters suggested parody. Harold Bloom, in Shakespeare: Invention of the Human, suggests that Titus Andronicus in unplayable any other way. That Shakespeare is not only parodying Marlowe, he is exorcising Marlowe. That audiences wanted and still want blood and gore, so by all means, give it to them. That he would only see it acted again if Mel Brooks directed.

Bloom also places the play in the same vein as Stephen King in the modern canon. I haven’t read the play, but I wonder if there isn’t a fine line between horror and parody of horror, or that Titus Andronicus is really a horror play. I’d say that Shakespeare creates the genre, but according to Bloom, Shakespeare pulls from Seneca. (Damn Romans created everything the Greeks didn’t.)

I suppose the only way to answer this question for myself is to read the play. But given some of Bloom’s summaries, I … really don’t want to.