Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Ralph Berry

Critical Essay by Ralph Berry

SOURCE: "The Roman Plays and Timon of Athens" in Shakespeare and Social Class, Humanities Press International, Inc., 1988, pp. 143-64.

In the following essay, Berry surveys class issues raised in Shakespeare's Roman plays and Timon of Athens.

Titus Andronicus

Peter Brook, who in 1955 directed the play's most celebrated revival, described Titus Andronicus thus: "Everything in Titus is linked to a dark flowing current out of which surge the horrors, rhythmically and logically related—if one searches in this way one can find the expression of a powerful and eventually beautiful barbaric ritual."¹

His judgment makes Titus Andronicus a ritual drama, which later practice has largely confirmed as the best way of staging the play. The horrors are central, and the director's first duty is to determine the mode of presenting them. Little seems to propose a social context for the horrors, or suggests other than a remote and barbarous past. And yet...
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