WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE William Shakespeare Lived for Fifty-Two Years
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WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE William Shakespeare lived for fifty-two years. In that time he produced approximately forty plays that we know of, as well as sonnets and poems, which together form the greatest, most compelling body of work in the English language. ELCOME to the RSC and the Swan Theatre. I hope you enjoy today’s performance of Titus Andronicus, directed by Michael Fentiman. 1580-1590 If it’s the first time you’ve visited us please explore the rest of our building, and if you’ve been many times I hope you’ll still be able to The Taming of the Shrew find something new in our exhibition spaces, bars, cafe and 1590-1600 restaurant. I’m honoured to have taken over from Michael Boyd as the Artistic Henry VI Part 2 Director of this great Company and look forward to sharing our work with you Henry VI Part 3 The Two Gentlemen of Verona PLAYING over the coming years. I joined the RSC over 25 years ago, first as an actor, UNTIL W Titus Andronicus 26 OCTOBER then as Assistant Director and then Chief Associate, and if my appointment Henry VI Part 1 means anything, it represents a long term commitment to the disciplines and WILLIAM Richard III craftsmanship required to do the astonishing plays of William Shakespeare. SHAKESPEARE The Comedy of Errors But I also want to see Shakespeare in context – I want to celebrate not only Love’s Labour’s Lost his work, but the work of his contemporaries, and to invite some of the most A Midsummer Night’s Dream PLAYING exciting theatre-makers of our own day to work with us on new plays. I am Romeo and Juliet 10 OCTOBER – Richard II 16 NOVEMBER confident that my first season as Artistic Director marks the first steps King John towards realising those ambitions. From autumn 2013 through to early 2014 The Merchant of Venice you will be able to enjoy Shakespeare, with my production of Richard II with Henry IV Part 1 David Tennant in the title role, alongside Ella Hickson‘s new play Henry IV Part 2 Wendy & Peter Pan, with its unique spin on JM Barrie’s Peter Pan, and the stage Much Ado about Nothing PLAYING adaptations of Hilary Mantel’s critically-acclaimed novels, Wolf Hall and Henry V UNTIL As You Like It 28 SEPTEMBER Bring Up the Bodies, by Mike Poulton. Julius Caesar Please come back and join us this summer in the Royal Shakespeare and - Swan Theatres, where we have some of the UK’s most talented directors, 1600 1610 PLAYING designers, writers and artists bringing you Shakespeare, a Jacobean classic UNTIL Hamlet 28 SEPTEMBER never before performed at the RSC, and a world premiere by our Writer in The Merry Wives of Windsor Residence, Mark Ravenhill. Twelfth Night Troilus and Cressida Othello GREGORY DORAN Measure for Measure PLAYING ARTISTIC DIRECTOR 19 JULY – All’s Well that Ends Well 26 SEPTEMBER Timon of Athens King Lear Macbeth Antony and Cleopatra Coriolanus THE RSC IS GRATEFUL FOR THE SIGNIFICANT SUPPORT OF ITS PRINCIPAL FUNDER, ARTS COUNCIL ENGLAND, WITHOUT WHICH OUR WORK WOULD NOT BE Pericles POSSIBLE. AROUND 50 PER CENT OF THE RSC’S INCOME IS SELF-GENERATED FROM BOX OFFICE SALES, SPONSORSHIP, DONATIONS, ENTERPRISE AND PARTNERSHIPS WITH OTHER ORGANISATIONS. WILLIAM Cymbeline SHAKESPEARE THE RSC WAS ESTABLISHED IN 1961, BUT ITS HISTORY STRETCHES BACK TO 1879 WHEN THE FIRST PERMANENT THEATRE WAS BUILT IN STRATFORD ON THE AFTER 1610 SITE OF THE CURRENT ROYAL SHAKESPEARE AND SWAN THEATRES. The Winter’s Tale THE ROYAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY IS INCORPORATED UNDER ROYAL CHARTER AND IS A REGISTERED CHARITY, NUMBER 212481. The Tempest The RSC Ensemble is generously supported by The RSC Literary Department Henry VIII THE GATSBY CHARITABLE FOUNDATION and is generously supported by The Two Noble Kinsmen THE KOVNER FOUNDATION THE DRUE HEINZ TRUST Inset: Henry Peacham’s period illustration of AncienT a performance of Titus (c.1595) depicts actors in a mixture of contemporary Elizabethan costume and MYThs, Roman togas. modern Times Titus Andronicus: a mash-up of two thousand years of history? Jonathan Bate discusses the play’s historical timelessness and the relevance of its themes today VER SINCE THE TIME OF ANCIENT GREEK tragedY, western culture has been haunted by the figure of the revenger. HeE or she stands on a whole series of borderlines: between civilisation and barbarity, between an individual’s accountability to their own conscience and the community’s need for the rule of law, between the conflicting demands of justice and mercy. Do we have a right – a duty even – to exact revenge against those who have destroyed our loved ones? Or should we leave vengeance to the law or the gods? And if we do take action into our own hands, are we not reducing ourselves to the same moral level as the original perpetrator of murderous deeds? Bloody revenge, dismemberment, rape, feigned madness, cannibalism: this sounds like the sort of thing that can give theatre a bad name. But the violence in Titus is artistically purposeful - there is a harsh but elegant symmetry to the action. Alarbus’ limbs are lopped, and so then are Lavinia’s: since Tamora Queen of the Goths loses her son, Titus General of the Romans must lose his daughter. Shakespeare believed that ancient myths may speak to modern times. Titus Andronicus mingles mythology, history and invention. The story is patterned on the tale in Ovid’s Metamorphoses of Philomel, who is raped by her brother-in-law. He cuts out her tongue so that she cannot reveal his identity, but she finds another way of communicating, so enabling her sister to serve up a horrible revenge for dinner. Shakespeare took this mythic prototype and retold it through an invented narrative about a fictional Roman general, Titus Andronicus, who returns from successful wars against the Goths only to find himself at odds with the new emperor. Rome collapses into chaos from within. The play is set simultaneously in timeless myth, imperial Rome and Shakespeare’s own Europe. It should be read as a compendium of two thousand years of warfare and violence. A glorious mishmash of history and invention, Titus is not so much an historical work as a meditation on history. The political structures of the early Roman republic and the decadence of the late Roman empire are deliberately overlaid upon each other. They are also mingled with the preoccupations of late-Elizabethan England: the opening political dispute between Saturninus and Bassianus is over the question of the succession to the recently- deceased Emperor, a matter of considerable concern at the time Shakespeare was writing, when the old Virgin Queen was nearing the end of her life and there were several rival candidates to succeed her. We are asked to imagine that this could be any time in the Roman era and no time. The spiral of revenge begins with an act of human sacrifice, something that was never practiced in ancient Rome. But in their myths all cultures have foundational stories of sacrifice. For Shakespeare and his audience, Rome was evocative of the Roman Catholic church as well as the pagan empire of the past. So it is that the action is suffused with hints of that ultimate sacrifice, the crucifixion of God’s own Son – the word martyred is applied to Lavinia, and when she assists her father in the butchery of Chiron and Demetrius, she is asked to ‘receive the blood’, a phrase that darkly parodies the language of the Eucharist, in which we are redeemed by the symbolic blood of Christ. The play was enormously successful in its own time. It was the first of Shakespeare’s tragedies to be published, one of the works that made his name. But it became an embarrassment to later generations. When Titus Andronicus confronts the horrific fate of his children, his brother Marcus expects him to rant like an over-the-top actor. But Titus does not cry or curse. He laughs. Critics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries could not cope with such incongruity. Its affront to stylistic decorum was thought to be on a par with the play’s shocking lack of respect for the principle of poetic justice, in which the evil are punished and the good are duly rewarded. In our time, though, we have become sceptical about easy divisions between good and evil, black and white. We understand the play’s rapid dissolution of the opposition between insiders and outsiders, ‘civilised’ Romans and ‘barbaric’ Goths. And we also understand the juxtaposition of radically differing styles. Modern movies have made us familiar with characters like Aaron the Moor, who delivers a verbal pun one moment and a stab in the guts the next. Titus’ unexpected laugh helps us to comprehend the way in which human beings deal with inexpressible anguish, rather as Brian Keenan, one of the western hostages in the Lebanon, describes his discovery of the saving grace of humour: ‘in the most inhuman of circumstances men grow and deepen in humanity. In the face of death but not because of it, they explode with passionate life, conquering despair with insane humour.’ Whilst making us face the worst that we humans can do to each other and ourselves, Titus also offers us glimpses of the best. Like King Lear, Titus Andronicus journeys from authority to isolation; his wits begin to turn, but through humility he learns to love. There is even a strange tenderness to the way in which he finally puts his daughter out of her misery. Precisely because of all its extremities, Titus is the Shakespeare play for our extreme time, our post-millennial moment of dark memory and fresh hope.