10. Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare
I cannot believe that this play exists. It is one of the few Shakespeare plays I had not yet read (including Cymbeline and Coriolanus, both of which will be remedied shortly), and although I had some idea of it from The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Abridged), I HAD NO IDEA.
I'm just going to make a list of some wtf moments (I'm paraphrasing):
FIRST SCENE "Let's hew off all his limbs! Yeah, sounds like fun!"
"Here Lavinia, hold my hand in thy mouth"
"Don't kill that fly! Wait, it looks like Aaron the Moor? Die, die already dead fly!"
"I'm going to make a powder out of your bones and then make a paste of it with your blood!"
"Now I'm going to kill my daughter, who already was raped and had her hands cut off and her tongue cut out"
Yeah. It's just Too Much. I was fascinated with Aaron the Moor, the arch-villain(they're all kind of villains except poor Lavinia),the treatment of race in his speech and the dialogue about him is really interesting, especially in comparison with what Shakespeare did later with Othello. I'm not the type of person who reads or watches horror, so this definitely still had the power to shock me, which I guess is kind of cool. Maybe Aaron/Othello will become a paper, we'll see.
To those of you who haven't read this...don't unless you really love gore or would find it interesting from a scholarly perspective on Shakespeare.
I cannot believe that this play exists. It is one of the few Shakespeare plays I had not yet read (including Cymbeline and Coriolanus, both of which will be remedied shortly), and although I had some idea of it from The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Abridged), I HAD NO IDEA.
I'm just going to make a list of some wtf moments (I'm paraphrasing):
FIRST SCENE "Let's hew off all his limbs! Yeah, sounds like fun!"
"Here Lavinia, hold my hand in thy mouth"
"Don't kill that fly! Wait, it looks like Aaron the Moor? Die, die already dead fly!"
"I'm going to make a powder out of your bones and then make a paste of it with your blood!"
"Now I'm going to kill my daughter, who already was raped and had her hands cut off and her tongue cut out"
Yeah. It's just Too Much. I was fascinated with Aaron the Moor, the arch-villain(they're all kind of villains except poor Lavinia),the treatment of race in his speech and the dialogue about him is really interesting, especially in comparison with what Shakespeare did later with Othello. I'm not the type of person who reads or watches horror, so this definitely still had the power to shock me, which I guess is kind of cool. Maybe Aaron/Othello will become a paper, we'll see.
To those of you who haven't read this...don't unless you really love gore or would find it interesting from a scholarly perspective on Shakespeare.
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