Having first reared its bloody head somewhere between 1590 and 1594, Titus Andronicus is belived to be one of Shakespeare's earliest plays. It is also the first play to have appeared in print (McDonald, Russ. "Introduction to Shakespehere's Titus Andronicus." The Pelican Shakesphere. Ed. Russ McDonald. New York: Penguin, 2000. xxvix-xlix.) Shakespeare seems to have been vying for the attention of his Elizabethan audience by participating in the revenge play trend popularzed at this time by Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and Christopher Marlow's The Jew of Malta. Over the years, Titus has suffered some terribly harsh critisim from people like Ben Jonson who references the work in his introduction to Bartholomew Fair (1614) as a play applauded by unapprised audiences and T.S. Eliot who said it is "one of the stupidist and most uninspired plays ever written" (Bevington, David. "Introduction to Shakespehere's Titus Andronicus." The Complete Works of Shakespeare. Ed. David Bevington. United States; Addison-Wesley, 1997. 938-41.) A fairer assemessment of this early work is that the play seems to bare the mark of a young, ambitious, and still developing playwright. While it may not offer the same complexity characateristic of Shakespeare's later, more polished works, it is certainly a harbinger of the great tragedies yet to come such as Hamlet, King Lear and Othello.
Animal Imagery
Further Reading:
Bott, Robin. "'O, Keep Me From Worse Than Killing Lust' : Ideologies of Rape and Mutilation in Chaucer's Physicians's Tale and Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus." Representing Rape in Medevil and Early Modern Literarture. Ed. Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose. New York: Palgrave, 2001, 189-211.
Jones, Nancy. "The Daughter's Text and the Thread of Lineage in the Old French Philomena." Representing Rape in Medevil and Early Modern Literarture. Ed. Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose. New York: Palgrave, 2001, 161-87.
Robertson, Karen. "Rape and the Appropriation of Progne's Revenge in Shakespeare's Titus Andronocus, or 'Who Cooks the Thystean Banquet?'" Representing Rape in Medevil and Early Modern Literarture. Ed. Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose. New York: Palgrave, 2001, 213-37.
Taylor, A.B. "Animals in 'Manly Shape as too the Outward Showe': Moralizing and Metamorphosis in Titus Andronicus." Shakespeare's Ovid: the Metamorphosis in the Plays and Poems. Ed. A.B. Taylor. Cambridge: U of Cambridge P, 2000. 66-80
Jstore Articles.
Belsey, Catherine. "Tarquin Dispossessed: Expropriation and Consent in The Rape of Lucrece"
Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 52, No. 3. (Autumn, 2001), pp. 315-335
Newman, Jane O. "'And Let Mild Women to Him Lose Their Mildness"': Philomela, Female Violence, and Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece." Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 45, No. 3. (Autumn, 1994), pp. 304-326.
Rowe, Katherine A. "Dismembering and Forgetting in Titus Andronicus" Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 45, No. 3. (Autumn, 1994), pp. 279-303.
