Violence In Julie Taymor's Titus Andronicus

William Shakespeare's play, Titus Andronicus, is a very convoluted play that could have easily failed to connect with its audience when first performed on stage. With poor props, setting and theatrical effects, Shakespeare’s major themes in the play could easily have been lost on the audience. Over four hundred years after it opened at The Globe Theatre, film director, Julie Taymor used techniques including time travel, costume choice and a mixture of ancient Roman and contemporary artifacts to emphasize and revamp the major ideas of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. To focus on violence, one of Shakespeare's major themes, Julie Taymor set her film in many different eras. In the opening of the film, Taymor places us in a little boy’s kitchen. He is yelling and violently playing on the kitchen table with his Roman army action figures

We know, in Titus Andronicus the tiger was used to symbolize predatory violence and revenge. Earlier in the play, Titus states: “That Rome is but a wilderness of tigers. Tigers must prey, and Rome affords no prey.” The use of this pattern in this scene was very clever as it had complimented Shakespeare’s idea of tigers. When discussing Lavinia’s multination and rape, we notice her appearance changes in both the play and the film. In the film, Taymor decides to dress Lavinia in a white, delicate undergarment that is now dirty, ripped and stained with blood. Perhaps this item of clothing was chosen to portray Lavinia’s vulnerability. White is a very clean and pure colour easily stained by any other colour. In this scene, her hair is down, something we have not seen before. In contrast, in the play’s text during Marcus’s soliloquy he says, “Alas, a crimson river of warm blood, Like to a bubbling fountain stirr’d with wind, Doth rise and fall between thy rose lips,…But, sure, some Tereus hath deflowered