SOURCE: "Introduction: Titus Andronicus," in Tragic Alphabet: Shakespeare's Drama of Language, Yale University Press, 1974, pp. 1-21.

In the following excerpt, Danson explores Shakespeare's concern in Titus Andronicus with the possibilities and limitations of language as a means of expressing identity and experience.

Ben Johnson, with his career to protect in 1614, had reason to be contemptuous of a curde old play like Titus Andronicus. There were playgoers who could swear that Shakespeare's Titus or Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy "are the best playes, yet"; such a one "shall passe unexpected at, heere, as a man whose Iudgement shewes it is constant, and hath stood still, these five and twentie, or thirtie, yeeres." But if we today share a smile at Jonson's backhanded compliment [in Bastholomew Fair], we should do so uneasily, for we have learned not to be complacent about that audience whose taste for blood and bombast made possible...