The Globe’s recent production of Titus Andronicus, a story already full of betrayal, murder, and cannibalism, presents a particularly bloody version of the play, but it was one small moment in the (relatively) quiet first scene that has stuck with me since the curtains fell. After Titus has made his dramatic entrance and presented his captives, he makes an impassioned speech about his experiences in the war and his many losses. Suddenly, in the middle of his speech, as he berates himself, “Titus, unkind and carless of thine own,/ Why suffer’st thou thy sons, unburied yet,/ To hover on the dreadful shores of Styx?” William Houston (Titus) grabs his head, and his words become slurred. The music ramps up to a high-pitched tone, and Titus almost swoons. Suddenly, the music returns to normal, and Titus straightens back up and resumes his speech. No one comments on the sudden aberration, and Titus doesn’t try to explain it.
It is an odd moment, and as far as I can tell, there is nothing in Shakespeare’s script to suggest it. Obviously, the subject matter is grim—a father declaring that he must now bury his slain son—but, if I were a director, I wouldn’t look at those lines and immediately see an opportunity to hint that Titus is already insane. Nonetheless, that is certainly the impression I got from this moment—the high-pitched noise and Houston’s body language strongly hint to the audience that this a man who is already insane, long before Tamora and Aaron begin to plot their revenge. In the Q&A with the actors after the performance, Indira Varma (Tamora) revealed that Houston looked into the psychology of post-traumatic stress disorder to inform his performance as Titus. Knowing this, this seemingly odd scene makes much more sense, and I realized that Houston is using these lines as an opportunity to convey his interpretation of Titus’s psychology.
Of course, during the later acts of the play, Titus’s insanity becomes even more overt, but upon reflection, I realized that many of the techniques that Houston uses to illustrate Titus’s abnormal mental state are present in that first scene as well. For example, one easy way to convey that a character has gone insane is to have the pitch of their voice fluctuate wildly. Houston certainly relies on this technique: during his various speeches, Titus’s voice rises and falls noticeably without any discernable pattern. One would expect him to do this only in the later scenes of the story, but Houston’s Titus displays this irregularity of voice even in the first scene. Again, it’s a small detail, but the audible strain in Houston’s voice even in his first moments on stage paints this Titus as coming into the play with his sanity damaged beyond repair.
These may seem like insignificant details, but the decision to play Titus as being mentally ill at the start of the play fascinates me, as it radically alters the character arc that forms the core of the narrative. I always understood this play as depicting the downfall of a proud general into a bloodthirsty killer. By portraying him as insane from the start, the Globe’s production abandons that emotional arc and replaces it with the story of a man turning his bloodlust from foreign enemies to his former masters. This in turn significantly changes the moral timbre of the play. The original script seems to direct its anger at Rome’s squabbling leadership. In contrast, by portraying the basic root of Titus’s insanity as stemming from his war experiences rather than the machinations of the Roman rulers, the recent Globe production imparts a broader but perhaps more timeless condemnation of the brutality of war rather than a specific dig at a particular corrupt government.
Does this revision on the part of director Lucy Bailey represent some kind of heretical revision to Shakespeare’s story? Perhaps. But I actually think this change adds a great deal of emotional depth to a story that otherwise relies too heavily on shock value and gore. In the actors’ Q&A, Indira Varma called the play an anti-war parable. Portraying Titus as a shell-shocked veteran suffering from the psychological after-shocks of his years of battle adds another layer of tragedy and poignancy to the narrative. Many of Shakespeare’s protagonists are former soldiers trying and failing to adjust to civilian life—see Macbeth, Henry IV, and (in some interpretations) King Lear. This was clear a theme dear to the Bard’s heart, yet in the text of Titus Andronicus, any deep statements on the long-lasting effects of war on men’s minds are subsumed by cheap violent thrills and shock scenes. In depicting Titus as having been driven insane not by Tamora’s machinations but by his previous tours of duty, Bailey’s production taps into that Shakespearean tradition and gains far more than it loses.