That you create your emperor’s eldest son Lord Saturnine,Ĭrown him and say, Long live our emperor! Tribunes, I thank you and this suit I make,
Rome, I have been thy soldier forty years Gracious Lavinia…that I will here dismiss my loving friends. In election for the Roman Empery chosen Andronicus.Īnd so I love and honor…thy noble brother Titus and his sons,Īnd her to whom my thoughts are humbled all, Know that the people of Rome…have by common voice Romans, fight for freedom in your choice! Suffer not dishonor to approach the imperial seat Romans, friends, followers, favorers of my right I am his first-born son, that was the last Plead my successive title with your swords: Saturninus, eldest son of the late emperor: Thrice-noble Titus, spare my firstborn son! I give him you, the noblest that survives, That we may hew his limbs, and … sacrifice his flesh. Give us the proudest prisoner of the Goths, Sleep in peace, slain in your country’s wars! These that I bring unto their latest home, These that survive, let Rome reward with love, And now without further ado: The Fifteen-Minute Titus I’d say that Titus ranks very high – with The Fall and The Tree Of Life – among my favorite visual treats in cinema. It’s a beautiful film, and I couldn’t include half of the scenes I’d have liked to. Lastly, please excuse not only the length, but the (must be a record) 20 images. All the text is straight from the play, though obviously lines are cut willy-nilly to fit my purposes. There are only one or two scenes (not terribly critical) skipped entirely, and there’s been a tiny bit of rearrangement in Act I to correspond to a similar shift in the film. I didn’t actually time it out, but I suppose this can probably be read through in fifteen minutes, and it gets you pretty much the entire plot of Titus Andronicus (and many, though certainly not all of the best lines) in a more-or-less coherent fashion. What I’m going to do here, instead of a traditional write-up (and how boring are those, anyway?), is a sort of Fifteen-Minute Titus. Though, I will admit that for the write-up I took a bit of a cue from the short for that film – The Fifteen-Minute Hamlet – which excerpted just the best bits of Shakespeare’s masterpiece into a 15-minute short film (though it was a bit incoherent). This week’s film (1999’s Titus by Julie Taymor) was the very first actual Shakespearean adaptation shown at Cinema 1544 (because Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead doesn’t count).
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