In the grad­u­ate depart­ment where I once taught fresh­men and sopho­mores the rudi­ments of col­lege Eng­lish, it became com­mon prac­tice to include Shakespeare’s Titus Andron­i­cus on many an Intro to Lit syl­labus, along with a view­ing of Julie Taymor’s flam­boy­ant film adap­ta­tion. The ear­ly work is thought to be Shakespeare’s first tragedy, cob­bled togeth­er from pop­u­lar Roman his­to­ries and Eliz­a­bethan revenge plays. And it is a tru­ly bizarre play, swing­ing wild­ly in tone from clas­si­cal tragedy, to satir­i­cal dark humor, to com­ic farce, and back to tragedy again. Crit­ic Harold Bloom called Titus “an exploita­tive par­o­dy” of the very pop­u­lar revenge tragedies of the time—its mur­ders, maim­ings, rapes, and muti­la­tions pile up, scene upon scene, and leave char­ac­ters and readers/audiences reel­ing in grief and dis­be­lief from the shock­ing body count.

Part of the fun of teach­ing Titus is in watch­ing stu­dents’ jaws drop as they real­ize just how bloody-mind­ed the Bard is. While Taymor’s adap­ta­tion takes many mod­ern lib­er­ties in cos­tum­ing, music, and set design, its hor­ror-show depic­tion of Titus’ unre­lent­ing may­hem is faith­ful to the text. Lat­er, more mature plays rein in the exces­sive black com­e­dy and shock fac­tor, but the bod­ies still stack up. As accus­tomed as we are to think­ing of con­tem­po­rary enter­tain­ments like Game of Thrones as espe­cial­ly gra­tu­itous, the whole of Shakespeare’s cor­pus, writes Alice Vin­cent at The Tele­graph, is “more gory” than even HBO’s squirm-wor­thy fan­ta­sy epic, fea­tur­ing a total of 74 deaths in 37 plays to Game of Thrones’ 61 in 50 episodes.

All of those var­i­ous demis­es came togeth­er in a 2016 com­pendi­um staged at The Globe (in Lon­don) called The Com­plete Deaths. It includ­ed every­thing “from ear­ly rapi­er thrusts to the more elab­o­rate viper-breast appli­ca­tion adopt­ed by Cleopa­tra.” The only death direc­tor Tim Crouch exclud­ed is “that of a fly that meets a sticky end in Titus Andron­i­cus.” In the info­graph­ic above, see all of the caus­es of those deaths, includ­ing Antony and Cleopa­tra’s snakebite and Titus Andron­i­cus’ piece-de-resis­tance, “baked in a pie.”

Part of the rea­son so many of my for­mer under­grad­u­ate stu­dents found Shakespeare’s bru­tal­i­ty shock­ing and unex­pect­ed has to do with the way his work was tamed by lat­er 17th and 18th cen­tu­ry crit­ics, who “didn’t approve of the on-stage gore.” The Tele­graph quotes direc­tor of the Shake­speare Insti­tute Michael Dob­son, who points out that Eliz­a­bethan dra­ma was espe­cial­ly grue­some; “the Eng­lish dra­ma was noto­ri­ous for on-stage deaths,” and all of Shakespeare’s con­tem­po­raries, includ­ing Christo­pher Mar­lowe and Ben Jon­son, wrote vio­lent scenes that can still turn our stom­achs.

More recent pro­duc­tions like a bloody stag­ing of Titus at The Globe have restored the gore in Shakespeare’s work, and The Com­plete Deaths left audi­ences with lit­tle doubt that Shakespeare’s cul­ture was as per­me­at­ed with rep­re­sen­ta­tions of vio­lence as our own—and it was as much, if not more so, plagued by the real thing.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Shakespeare’s Globe The­atre in Lon­don

Hear What Shake­speare Sound­ed Like in the Orig­i­nal Pro­nun­ci­a­tion

3,000 Illus­tra­tions of Shakespeare’s Com­plete Works from Vic­to­ri­an Eng­land, Pre­sent­ed in a Dig­i­tal Archive

Watch Very First Film Adap­ta­tions of Shakespeare’s Plays: King John, The Tem­pest, Richard III & More (1899–1936)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

The sto­ry of the Globe The­atre, the ances­tral home of Shakespeare’s plays, is itself very Shake­speare­an, in all of the ways we use that adjec­tive: it has deep roots in Eng­lish his­to­ry, a trag­ic back­sto­ry, and rep­re­sents all of the hodge­podge of Lon­don, in the ear­ly 17th cen­tu­ry and today, with the city’s col­or­ful street life, min­gling of inter­na­tion­al cul­tures, high and low, and its delight in the play and inter­play of lan­guages.

“The first pub­lic play­hous­es,” notes the British Library, “were built in Lon­don in the late 1500s. The­atres were not per­mit­ted with­in the bound­aries of the City itself”—theater not being con­sid­ered a respectable art—”but were tol­er­at­ed in the out­er dis­tricts of Lon­don, such as South­wark, where the Globe was locat­ed. South­wark was noto­ri­ous for its noisy, chaot­ic enter­tain­ments and for its sleazy low-life: its the­atres, broth­els, bear bait­ing pits, pick­pock­ets and the like.”

The Globe began its life in 1599, in a sto­ry that “might be wor­thy,” writes the Shake­speare Resource Cen­ter, “of a Shake­speare­an play of its own.” Built from the tim­bers of the city’s first per­ma­nent the­ater, the Burbage, which opened in 1576, the Globe burned down in 1613 “when a can­non shot dur­ing a per­for­mance of Hen­ry VIII ignit­ed the thatched roof in the gallery.” With­in the year, it was rebuilt on the same foun­da­tions (with a tiled roof) and oper­at­ed until the Puri­tans shut it down in 1642, demol­ish­ing the famed open-air the­ater two years lat­er.

In a twist to this so far very Eng­lish tale, it took the tire­less efforts of an expa­tri­ate Amer­i­can, actor-direc­tor Sam Wana­mak­er, to bring the Globe back to Lon­don. After more than two decades of advo­ca­cy, Wanamaker’s Globe Play­house Trust suc­ceed­ed in recre­at­ing the Globe, just a short dis­tance from the orig­i­nal loca­tion. Open­ing in 1997, three-hun­dred and fifty-five years after the first Globe closed, the new Globe The­atre recre­at­ed all of the orig­i­nal’s archi­tec­tur­al ele­ments.

The stage projects into the cir­cu­lar court­yard, designed for stand­ing spec­ta­tors and sur­round­ed by three tiers of seats. While the stage itself has an elab­o­rate paint­ed roof, and the seat­ing is pro­tect­ed from the weath­er by the only thatched roof in Lon­don since the 1666 Great Fire, the theater’s court­yard is open to the sky. How­ev­er, where the orig­i­nal Globe held about 2,000 stand­ing and 1,000 seat­ed play­go­ers, the recre­ation, notes Time Out Lon­don, holds only about half that num­ber.

Still, the­ater-goers can “get a rich feel for what it was like to be a ‘groundling’ (the stand­ing rab­ble at the front of the stage) in the cir­cu­lar, open-air the­atre.” Short of that, we can tour the Globe in the vir­tu­al recre­ation at the top of the post. Move around in any direc­tion and look up at the sky. As you do, click on the tiny cir­cles to reveal facts such as “Prob­a­bly the first Shake­speare play to be per­formed at the Globe was Julius Cae­sar, in 1599.”

If you don’t have the lux­u­ry of vis­it­ing the new Globe, tak­ing a tour, or see­ing a per­for­mance lov­ing­ly-recre­at­ed with all of the cos­tum­ing (and even pro­nun­ci­a­tion) from Jacobean Eng­land, you can get the fla­vor of this won­drous achieve­ment in bring­ing cul­tur­al his­to­ry into the present with the vir­tu­al tour, also avail­able as an app for iPhone and iPad users. This inter­ac­tive tour super­sedes a pre­vi­ous ver­sion we fea­tured a few years back.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2018.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold Shakespeare’s First Folio, the First Pub­lished Col­lec­tion of Shakespeare’s Plays, Pub­lished 400 Year Ago (1623)

Hear What Shake­speare Sound­ed Like in the Orig­i­nal Pro­nun­ci­a­tion

3,000 Illus­tra­tions of Shakespeare’s Com­plete Works from Vic­to­ri­an Eng­land, Pre­sent­ed in a Dig­i­tal Archive

Read All of Shakespeare’s Plays Free Online, Cour­tesy of the Fol­ger Shake­speare Library

A Playlist of 45 Shake­speare Film Trail­ers, from 1935 — 2021

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

Since George Orwell pub­lished his land­mark polit­i­cal fable 1984, each gen­er­a­tion has found ample rea­son to make ref­er­ence to the grim near-future envi­sioned by the nov­el. Whether Orwell had some prophet­ic vision or was sim­ply a very astute read­er of the insti­tu­tions of his day—all still with us in mutat­ed form—hardly mat­ters. His book set the tone for the next 70-plus years of dystopi­an fic­tion and film.

Orwell’s own polit­i­cal activities—his stint as a colo­nial police­man or his denun­ci­a­tion of sev­er­al col­leagues and friends to British intel­li­gence—may ren­der him sus­pect in some quar­ters. But his night­mar­ish fic­tion­al pro­jec­tions of total­i­tar­i­an rule strike a nerve with near­ly every­one on the polit­i­cal spec­trum because, like the spec­u­la­tive future Aldous Hux­ley cre­at­ed, no one wants to live in such a world. Or at least no one will admit it if they do.

Even the insti­tu­tions most like­ly to thrive in Orwell’s vision have co-opt­ed his work for their own pur­pos­es. The C.I.A. rewrote the ani­mat­ed film ver­sion of Ani­mal Farm. And if you’re of a cer­tain vin­tage, you’ll recall Apple’s appro­pri­a­tion of 1984 in Rid­ley Scott’s Super Bowl ad that very year for the Mac­in­tosh com­put­er. But of course not every Orwell adap­ta­tion has been made in the ser­vice of polit­i­cal or com­mer­cial oppor­tunism. Long before the Apple ad, and Michael Radford’s 1984 film ver­sion of Nine­teen Eighty-Four, there was the 1949 radio dra­ma above. Star­ring British great David Niv­en, with inter­mis­sion com­men­tary by author James Hilton, the show aired on the edu­ca­tion­al radio series NBC Uni­ver­si­ty The­ater.

This radio dra­ma, the “first audio pro­duc­tion of the most chal­leng­ing nov­el of 1949,” opens with a trig­ger warn­ing, of sorts, that pre­pares us for a “dis­turb­ing broad­cast.” To audi­ences just on the oth­er side of the Nazi atroc­i­ties and the nuclear bomb­ings of Japan, then deal­ing with the threat of Sovi­et Com­mu­nism, Orwell’s dystopi­an fic­tion must have seemed dire and dis­turb­ing indeed.

Every adap­ta­tion of a lit­er­ary work is unavoid­ably also an inter­pre­ta­tion, bound by the ideas and ide­olo­gies of its time. The Niv­en broad­cast shares the same his­tor­i­cal con­cerns as Orwell’s nov­el. More recent­ly, this 70-year-old audio has itself been co-opt­ed by a pod­cast called “Great Speech­es and Inter­views,” which edit­ed the broad­cast togeth­er with a per­plex­ing selec­tion of pop­u­lar songs and an inter­view between jour­nal­ists Glenn Green­wald and Dylan Rati­gan. What­ev­er we make of these devel­op­ments, one thing seems cer­tain. We won’t be done with Orwell’s 1984 for some time, and it won’t be done with us.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

George Orwell Explains in a Reveal­ing 1944 Let­ter Why He’d Write 1984

The Cov­er of George Orwell’s 1984 Becomes Less Cen­sored with Wear & Tear

Hear George Orwell’s 1984 Adapt­ed as a Radio Play at the Height of McCarthy­ism & The Red Scare (1953)

Free Down­load: A Knit­ting Pat­tern for a Sweater Depict­ing an Icon­ic Cov­er of George Orwell’s 1984

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness