FAQ

Partly. Although the play was one of Shakespeare's most successful productions during his own lifetime (for example, it was the first of his plays to be printed), it fell out of favour after his death, and remained so for several hundred years. The degree to which the reputation of the play suffered is indicated by the fact that when it was directed by Robert Atkins at the Old Vic in 1923, it was the first performance in England of Shakespeare's text since 1596, although there may have been a performance in 1667. Either way, the play was absent from the stage for some 256 to 327 years. No other play in Shakespeare's canon has such a long performance gap.

As these dates indicate, the main criticisms of the play came in the Victorian era, when scholars came to abhor it so much that debates arose as to whether or not Shakespeare could have written it; the argument being that it was so bad, there was no way he could possibly have created it. Perhaps the most famous attack on the play is also the one which initiated the debates about authorship; in the introduction to his 1678 adaptation, Titus Andronicus, or the Rape of Lavinia, Edward Ravenscroft wrote,

I have been told by some anciently conversant with the Stage, that it was not Originally his, but brought by a private Author to be Acted, and he only gave some Master-touches to one or two Principal Parts or Characters. This I am apt to believe, because 'tis the most incorrect and indigested piece in all his works. It seems rather a heap of rubbish than a structure.

Titus Andronicus; London: Arden, 1995, 79] The process of denigration begun by Ravenscroft continued throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with many well-known and well-respected scholars voicing their opinion. For example, in 1795, Samuel Johnson questioned the possibility of staging the play at all;

the barbarity of the spectacles, and the general massacre which are here exhibited, can scarcely be conceived tolerable to any audience.

Titus Andronicus; London: Arden, 1995, 33]

A nineteenth century example is August Wilhelm Schlegel, who in 1879 claimed that the play was...

framed according to a false idea of the tragic, which by an accumulation of cruelties and enormities, degenerated into the horrible and yet leaves no deep impression behind

[Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature; London: George Bell & Sons, 1879, 442]

This process continued into the modernist period where a well-known critic was T.S. Eliot, who, in 1927, famously called it...

one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written, a play in which it is incredible that Shakespeare had any hand at all, a play in which the best passages would be too highly honoured by the signature of Peele.

["Seneca in Elizabethan Translation", in Selected Essays 1917-1932; New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1950, 67]

Similarly, in 1948, renowned Shakespeare scholar John Dover Wilson wrote that it...

seems to jolt and bump along like some broken-down cart, laden with bleeding corpses from an Elizabethan scaffold, and driven by an executioner from Bedlam dressed in cap and bells.

[Introduction to Titus Andronicus; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948, xii]

However, from the mid-twentieth century, roughly analogous with the advent of postmodernism, the play has been undergoing something of a reassessment. A good example of a later twentieth century defender of the play would be Jan Kott. In his 1964 book, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (one of the most widely read and oft cited books ever written on Shakespeare), Kott argued that

Titus Andronicus is by no means the most brutal of Shakespeare's plays. More people die in Richard III. King Lear is a much more cruel play. In the whole Shakespearean repertory I can find no scene so revolting as Cordelia's death. In reading, the cruelties of Titus can seem ridiculous. But I have seen it on the stage and found it a moving experience. Why? In watching Titus Andronicus we come to understand perhaps more than by looking at any other Shakespeare play the nature of his genius: he gave an inner awareness to passions; cruelty ceased to be merely physical. Shakespeare discovered the moral hell. He discovered heaven as well. But he remained on earth.

[New York: Doubleday Publishing, 1964, 27]

In his 1987 edition of the play for the Contemporary Shakespeare series, A.L. Rowse speculates as to why this reassessment of the play may have come about;

in the civilised Victorian age the play could not be performed because it could not be believed. Such is the horror of our own age, with the appalling barbarities of prison camps and resistance movements paralleling the torture and mutilation and feeding on human flesh of the play, that it has ceased to be improbable.

[Maryland: University of America Press, 1987, 15] Titus director Julie Taymor has similarly noted that "it seems like a play written for today, it reeks of now" (from Charlie Rose interview).

In an essay on Titus itself, scholar Lisa S. Starks argues that Taymor is herself part of the process of re-evaluation;

in adapting a play that has traditionally evoked critical condemnation, Taymor calls into question that judgment, thereby opening up the possibility for new readings and considerations of the play within the Shakespeare canon.

["Cinema of Cruelty: Powers of Horror in Julie Taymor's Titus", in Lisa S. Starks and Courtney Lehmann (editors), The Reel Shakespeare: Alternative Cinema and Theory; London: Associated University Press, 2002, 122]

Nevertheless, some scholars continue to denigrate the play, insisting it has no intrinsic qualities whatsoever. An especially well-known criticism of the play is that of Harold Bloom in his 1998 book, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. In a sustained assault on the play, Bloom argues that it is a parody of Christopher Marlowe and the type of violent theatre in which Marlow excelled. As such, Bloom refers to it as "a howler", "a poetic atrocity", "an exploitative parody" and "a blowup, an explosion of rancid irony." He summates his views by declaring "I can concede no intrinsic value to Titus Andronicus", and he concludes that the best director to tackle a stage production would be Mel Brooks (New York: New York Publishing Company, 1998, 77-86).

The debate as to the play's qualities, or lack thereof, rages on, as does the question of authorship. Until 2002, it was thought by most scholars that Shakespeare was the sole author, but upon publication of Brian Vickers' book Shakespeare, Co-Author, the weight of critical opinion has now shifted to the play being a collaboration between Shakespeare and George Peele (specifically, Peele is thought to have written Act I, Act II Scene I and Act IV Scene I). Either way, it remains one of the most divisive plays in the canon, with many critics regarding it as, quite literally, Shakespeare's worst play, whilst others continue to defend it and point out merits which, they argue, are only becoming apparent in the ultra violent epoch of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

For the most part, it is very close. Every line of dialogue is taken from the play, all of the characters are from the play, most of the scenes come from the play, and the plot is identical to the play. Within that however, there are also many differences. For example, many lines from the play have been cut; roughly one hour of dialogue, spread over the entire play, has been removed for the film. Additionally, although all of the characters and most of the scenes are from the play, there are many interpolations throughout the film, which some would say are perhaps divergent from the original text (the use of motor cars for example, which obviously aren't included in the play). Such interpolations however don't alter anything from the original, they are simply additions to what is already there (Shakespeare's plays feature hardly any scenic descriptions and virtually no prop descriptions; as such, the use of, for example, motor cars doesn't necessarily constitute an active alteration of what is indicated in the text).

The single biggest difference is the character of the boy—young Lucius (Osheen Jones). This character has a much smaller role in the play where he plays a minor role in several scenes. Obviously, the opening scene is not from the play, and the character is present throughout from that point, albeit without any "new" dialogue. The only time the text is altered regarding the character is in the fly killing scene (Act III Scene II). In the original, it is Marcus (Colm Feore) who stabs the fly and receives Titus' (Anthony Hopkins) rebuke, but in the film it is Young Lucius. Another difference concerns the initial Roman scenes in the film. Taymor has restructured the opening of the play to begin with Titus' return, which is then followed by the political wrangling between Bassianus (James Frain) and Saturninus (Alan Cumming). In the original play, this happens the other way around; the play opens with Bassianus and Saturninus arguing only to be interrupted by Titus' return. It is worth noting that in this respect, as in others, Taymor's film is remarkably similar to Jane Howell's 1985 adaptation for the BBC Television Shakespeare, which begins with an identical re-arrangement of the opening scenes.

On her DVD commentary, Julie Taymor says of this scene:

I wanted to start in a 1950s/60s kitchen with these toy soldiers that are Roman soldiers, Star Wars, G.I. Joes; just a combination of toys from all times. And it begins with an innocent play, the child playing with his food, and then escalates very quickly into actual violence. So it starts with innocent TV violence; the sounds of The Tree Stooges and cartoons that we heard in our childhood. And he's almost like a god with this paper bag over his head, manipulating and violently playing with all the food on the table. But then it becomes true violence around him and it's as if his entire kitchen is being bombed - it's very abstract and finally, it's totally bombed, it's on fire. The clown, who is a kind of an intervention, a supernatural intervention in Shakespeare, takes this child, and rips the paper bag off, and you see it's just a boy, crying. So in a way, he very innocently has created this violence, and then as in Alice in Wonderland, we go down this hole, this surreal hole, burst through the door and we're into the Roman coliseum [...] The child finds his toy soldier, one of them, the Roman, and as he brings it back to life by touching it, the entire army comes and enters into the coliseum. This is a whole concept that is not in the Shakespeare play; this is a prologue that I created to blend and collide time. So we have Roman soldiers caked in clay [...] and they are almost like being brought to life by this boy's vision; it is from his perspective. It's through his eyes that this entire story of extraordinary human violence is seen.

In his review of the film for the Boston Review, Alan A. Stone writes of this scene,

The opening scene shows us an androgynous child at a table heaped with action toys. Taymor-as-child is imagining a puppet theatre battle. There is a paper bag helmet over his/her head with holes torn for the eyes and the mouth. A portion of a hot dog protrudes from his/her mouth. Taymor wants every image projected on the screen to have levels of meaning and she starts in this first scene. The child's imaginary battle gets out of control as it often does when children pursue violent fantasies. He/she begins to knock the toy figures about, squeezes catsup at them, attacks a piece of cake. As the child explosively destroys the toy battlefield, the room explodes with a real bomb; a real war is at hand. A giant figure breaks into the room. Identified in the credits as a clown, the figure more closely resembles the strong man of Fellini's great film, La Strada (1954). This figure takes the child in his arms and goes rushing downstairs out of the modern apartment. The door slams behind them like a vault and the giant stands in Rome's empty Coliseum. He lifts the terrified child over his head and the ghosts of Ancient Rome roar. Taymor has arrived in Shakespeare's Rome and in the Coliseum - the first great theatre of cruelty. here]

According to Lisa S. Starks, "the opening scene highlights the film's emphasis on the act of viewing horror" (p. 134). Carol Chillington Rutter writes,

The film's opening sequence, an extra-textual riff proleptic of things to come, establishes a boy's own world where violence has been naturalised to domestic interiors. An eight-year-old kid, home alone, sits at a 1950s American kitchen table that's covered with after-school food and toys, a miniature military arsenal in plastic: tanks and aeroplanes, gladiators, GI Joes, futuristic robots. The scene frames a continuity between history, consumption, violence and play. When play tips into frenzy and the child begins trashing the table, he triggers (somehow) apocalypse.

["Looking at Shakespeare's Women on Film", in Russell Jackson (editor), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 263]

Taking these comments into consideration then, the opening scene seems to serve something of a dual purpose. Firstly, it introduces the structural device of purposeful anachronisms, which remain a vital part of the aesthetic design of the film for its duration. Here, we see a kitchen from the 1950s, but the child is playing with toys from the 1980s, then suddenly, he is in Ancient Rome where the soldiers are on motorbikes; the scene essentially captures, in microcosm, the anachronistic design used throughout the film, and as such, introduces it to the audience. Secondly, it depicts a world where violence is often treated as play, as nothing more than a child's diversion, something innocent and without repercussions, but something which can quickly get out of hand. The child begins by watching violence, then he starts to play with his toys, then his play becomes more and more violent until suddenly, he is caught up in real violence. There is a strong suggestion in the film, which is partly confirmed by Taymor, that the child's play has somehow manifested or created the real violence which destroys his kitchen. Here, the child is unaware of how dangerous violence actually is, of what it can lead to. Because violence, especially the unexpected consequence of violence, is a major theme throughout the film, the opening scene thus serves to encapsulate that theme by metaphorically depicting the innocence of a child juxtaposed with the violence such a child can (innocently) create.

In the play, the young boy is simply son of Lucius (Angus Macfadyen), but in the film, he is much more; the film both begins and ends with him, and there is a strong suggestion that he is somehow responsible for the entire narrative itself. Exactly what he represents though can be difficult to pin down, and has prompted some considerable debate amongst fans. Perhaps the most straightforward theory is simply that he is an observer; he represents the audience, and it is through his eyes we see the narrative events. In narratology, the consciousness through which a narrative is filtered is known as the focaliser, everything the audience sees is coloured by the focaliser's consciousness and ideology, and it could be argued that in the film, this is the role of the boy. Lisa S. Starks subscribes to this theory, and argues that...

Taymor uses this character to structure the audience's point of view; she frames the film with Young Lucius, so that the events unfold before his sensitive gaze in a self-conscious foregrounding of spectatorship. [p. 136]

  In a Q&A session at Columbia University, which is available on the special edition DVD, Julie Taymor says of the boy,

When I came to do the film, I started to think about point of view; could I just tell this story the way it is? Of course you can, it's Shakespeare, why not? On the other hand, the way it's rounded up at the end is very Elizabethan. It's not particularly meaningful for us now and the idea of a child, this twelve-year-old boy watching his family go at it, watching these blood lines, these tribes, these religious rites, this whole event, what is it that we put the children through and what is the legacy that they're left with [...] The arc of the story is the child's, it's a parallel story to the story of the Andronici. He starts as an innocent, then he becomes a participant, and by the end, he is active, he has choice.

In this sense, the boy is not simply a passive focaliser, but an active participant who learns from the narrative events (in narratological terminology the raw narrative events are known as the fabula, the organisation of those events into a narrative and their presentation in narrative form is known as sjuzet). As such, the boy sees the carnage in the fabula, sees the hatred, and actively chooses to reject it; he is the focaliser, the audience's point of view, but he is also a narrative agent himself, capable of responding to the fabula.

Interestingly enough, this is identical to the role of the boy in Jane Howell's 1985 adaptation for the BBC Television Shakespeare, where young Lucius (played by Paul Davies Prowles) also acts as the focaliser, observing the fabula unfolding, often aghast at what he is witnessing. It is also worth noting that Howell sounded a very similar note to Taymor when she wrote in her notes for the adaptation that the reason she filtered everything through the child was to raise the question of "what are we doing to the children" (quoted in Alan C. Dessen, Shakespeare in Performance: Titus Andronicus; Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989, 44). In this sense then, the boy is also a symbol of the next generation, a representative of the future.

It could also be argued, as Taymor hints, that the child symbolises innocence, and his play with the toy soldiers is a metaphor for one of the primary themes of the film; that violence can be passed on to the next generation, however initially innocent that generation may be. In the opening scene, he is depicted as not responding to the violence on TV, he is deadened to it, but he plays violently with his toys (has the violence on TV "inspired" him to play violently?). He is ignorant of the effect violence can have because he is inured to it by overexposure and trivialisation in TV and film. However, when confronted with real violence, he is very clearly disturbed. This shows the danger of exposing children to violence in the media to such an extent that they become immune to it, as such a situation can lead to them creating violence without even realising that they are doing so; they remain innocent, but nevertheless, due to their ignorance, they create something they don't understand and cannot control. The story thus traces the child's dawning awareness that violence, real violence, is horrifying, and as such, at the end, he rejects it. In this sense then, as well as representing innocence, he could also be seen as representing a sense of hope for the future, the breaking of the chain of violence.

A further theory, connected to the notion that his violent play gives rise to the violence in the fabula, is that he serves as the "creator" of the story itself, a kind of omniscient authorial presence beyond the role of passive spectator; for example, when he touches the toy Roman soldier, the coliseum immediately fills with real Roman soldiers, the implication being that he has resurrected them.

Some, none or all of these theories are justifiable possibilities, and in the end exactly what the boy represents is left vague. It is just as likely that he represents many things as that he represents something specific, and, ultimately, it remains up to each viewer to decide for himself/herself exactly what role, metaphorical or otherwise, the boy plays in the film.

When the film was released, many reviewers commented on the fact that a major structural element was the use of foregrounded anachronisms, with some championing it, and others finding it distracting. Unlike in other modernisations of Shakespeare, such as Derek Jarman's The Tempest (1979) (1979), Richard Loncraine's Richard III (1995) (1995), Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (1996) (1996), Kenneth Branagh's Love's Labour's Lost (2000) (2000) or Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000) (2000), the temporal setting of the film is actually inconsistent within the film itself. This is in contradistinction to, for example, Love's Labour's Lost, which is set in the 1930s, with the costumes, props and production design appropriate to that time. In Titus however, widely divergent epochs are represented throughout the film, existing side by side without any commentary on why, or how. Examples include some characters in chariots, others on motorbikes and in cars; some characters with guns, others with spears and swords; some characters in togas, some in leather; a modern microphone appears alongside an old parchment; the interior design of some buildings is clearly postmodern, of others, classical. It is also worth noting that Elliot Goldenthal's music follows a similar anachronistic pattern.

On this issue, Taymor says on her DVD commentary, Costume, paraphernalia, horses or chariots or cars; these represent the essence of a character, as opposed to placing it in a specific time. This is a film that takes place from the year 1 to the year 2000. In relation to this, some specific examples mentioned are the 1950s kitchen representing the innocence of that era; the 1930s car in which Saturninus rides representing fascism; the 1960s car in which Bassianus rides representing playfulness; and the 1990s video games played by Chiron (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and Demetrius (Matthew Rhys) representing the acceptance of violence as entertainment.

As such, a common interpretation of the temporal dislocation of the film is that the opening scene depicts the boy being removed from real time and placed in some other temporal setting (a sort of "every-time"). This serves to show that the themes depicted in the film, violence, revenge etc are timeless and can manifest themselves in any historical or contemporary milieu. Nothing has changed in the last 2,000 years; this story of incredible violence and hatred is timeless because it is contemporary to every generation, every age can relate to it. The film is not about violence in ancient Rome, or any other specific period, it is about Human Violence, an immortal violence, unchanging and unchangeable. To set the play exclusively in ancient Rome would have allowed the audience to distance itself from the narrative, to pretend that modern society is somehow less violent and therefore more enlightened. Clearly Taymor does not feel this is case, and as such, she removes that outlet for the audience, instead presenting a temporal metaphor for all time, and thus making the audience, any audience, culpable.

During the scene in the crypt, Titus lines up the boots of his dead sons, and pours sand into them. This is not a known ritual, but is instead a metaphorical act, as explained by Taymor on her commentary track, these are boots of the twentieth century and there's something that echoes the holocaust in this, the boots of the dead soldiers. We made up our own ritual; Shakespeare had written a play that combines Catholicism, Christianity, Greek mythology, archaic Roman ritual and made up ritual, so we felt it was very natural to create our own ritual for this scene.

This is an adaptation of a common device in Shakespearean work, and in Elizabethan drama in general; the soliloquy, when a character speaks aloud and can be heard by the audience, but not the other characters. Oftentimes in the theatre, soliloquies are performed to the audience, the effect of which is reproduced in the film by way of performing direct to camera. The technique is believed to have been first used in Laurence Olivier's Richard III (1955) (1955).

Over the course of the film, there are four non-naturalistic scenes which could be said to be strongly impressionistic and, perhaps, metaphorical. Each one depicts something surreal and beyond the boundaries of reality and as such, they stand out sharply from the rest of the film. Taymor refers to these scenes as "penny arcade nightmares" explaining on her commentary track that they are... surreal moments of violence and memory; things that you couldn't literally stage or couldn't literally see, like dream nightscapes and nightmare scapes, to know that the inner consciousness of the characters was vital and alive and not just the exterior of what you see.   The first one depicts Titus and Tamora (Jessica Lange) in flames with a marble statue hovering in the background, which then has a wound cut into its chest. According to Taymor,

You see the fire between Tamora and Titus and these body parts that represent the limbs that were "lopped and hewed" from Alarbus (Raz Degan), Tamora's eldest son. And the image of the chest, that we saw when he said "now your son is marked", we see that chest being ripped, but its not marble, it's a human and it breathes. And this is almost a common nightmare that's occurring between Titus and Tamora, so you know that even though Tamora has played this extraordinary game of making everybody happy, of appeasing the acrimony and the hostility between the parties, nothing has changed, it's even worse, and they know it; she and Titus are sharing this common history, this common nightmare together.

The second one depicts an angel approaching Titus, and a lamb on a sacrificial table with Mutius' (Blake Ritson) head. Taymor says,

He looks down the road and in front of him a kind of angel of mercy comes with a trumpet and I wanted to recall the killing of his son, of Mutius, so as he looks behind him he sees this altar, with a sacrificial lamb and at a certain moment, the lamb becomes Mutius, his son. The head of Mutius is on the lamb and the sacrificial sword that we saw cut the chest of Alarbus reappears.

According to Lisa S. Starks: The first and second nightmare sequences invoke the abject in the boundaries between human/nonhuman or animal and clean/unclean body; they also play on the theme of dismemberment and human flesh as meat. [p. 130]   The third one depicts the rape, but with Lavinia (Laura Fraser) as a doe and Chiron and Demetrius as tigers. Taymor says,

It's really a flashback; I again used the imagery of the tigers, the boys as tigers and Lavinia as the doe for this flashback. So it's much more stylized, not direct, there's no reason to show the rape directly, we feel it through the music and through the imagery.

Lisa S. Starks writes of this nightmare,

Lavinia appears posed on a column wearing the head of a doe trying to hold down her petticoats in a pose that should remind us of the iconographic image of Marilyn Monroe holding her dress down over the subway grating. This pose [...] comments on representations of the female form [...] The famous Marilyn pose suggests the woman as visual icon and sexual "sacrifice", the collision of vulnerability and sexuality and the accumulated cultural meanings generated by Marilyn as icon the ultimate image of woman as sexual commodity. This image, combined with the MTV style in which the nightmare is filmed creates a chilling parody of representations in a dominant media: Lavinia/Marilyn becomes the fetishized object of the media gaze [...] bringing the spectator into a critical reflection of the exchange of such commodified images and the implications of the act of viewing itself. [p. 129 - p. 130]

The fourth one is depicts Tamora as revenge, Chiron as Rape and Demetrius as Revenge. According to Taymor,

I wanted the audience to feel it was a figment of his mad imagination; that now real madness has taken over reality and we cannot tell what is real and what isn't, that we're with Titus now [...] This is the true penny arcade nightmare, it's like a carnival in his mind; the goddess of vengeance has a crown of kitchen blades. The image of Chiron as the owl comes from mythology; the owl is rape and the tiger is murder, and murder is smoking on a plastic opium pipe from the breast of vengeance [...] When he looks out, what are we to think? Did he really see them, or is this his imagination? In fact, they are truly in the garden; rape, revenge and murder. It's absolutely the most surreal, outrageous, Theatre of the Absurd that Shakespeare has written here.

On her commentary track, Taymor says she represents an angel of mercy.

No. He is sending messages to the gods, telling them of the wrongs his family has suffered and asking for their assistance in exacting revenge. The dialogue explains exactly what he is doing; And sith there's no justice in earth nor hell, / We will solicit heaven and move the gods / To send down justice for to wreak our wrongs.

Like the opening scene, the closing scene focuses on Young Lucius, as we see him walking out of the coliseum with Aaron's child, as the sun rises in the far distance.

On her commentary track, Taymor says of this scene; Because I started with the boy and this is the arc of the story, this tragic story of family, and the counter arc here is almost the coming of age of this child and as he opens the cage, the crying of this one baby multiples into hundreds of thousands of babies, and then babies into birds, into the tolling of bells, the mourning bells. The consciousness of this child is what this is about; his understanding, his involvement and his true understanding of this story is ultimately what I wanted to tell, and he takes that baby in his arms exactly the same way that he was held by the clown who brought him down those burning stairs into the coliseum. Now this child moves towards the exit of this arena [...] and as he moves we start to go into dawn so the child moves into a certain kind of knowledge at this point, through the journey and then potentially, hard to say it in words, but potentially, to redemption.

Lisa S. Starks reads the scene in a similar manner, He has confronted and examined the horrific consequences of violence through his inward, nightmarish journey and has clearly rejected the world he has inherited. [p. 136]

  As such, the scene could be argued to depict how the two children, the next generation, are escaping the world represented by the coliseum, i.e. violence and hatred. Young Lucius is an innocent who has witnessed extraordinary violence, and a casual disregard for human life. However, he has learned from this, learned not to embrace it, and he has the power to not repeat it. Young Lucius enters the story unaware of the real effects of violence, but having seen what violence can do, he is no longer ignorant of its devastating power, and has seen enough to be able to reject it. He now understands, unlike in the opening scene, that violence is not entertainment, that the acceptance of violence as entertainment leads down an extremely dangerous path. But it is a path he, and Aaron's son, do not take. As such, the sun rise is a symbol of a new dawn, and the scene as a whole essentially represents the likelihood of peace in the next generation, however tentative it may be.

It is perhaps worth noting that in Taymor's 1994 stage production of the play (on which the film is heavily based), and in the 1985 Jane Howell BBC adaptation, Aaron's child is dead at the end, much to the horror of Young Lucius.

• The two-disk Special Edition DVD released by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment in 2000 contains the following special features:

• Feature length audio commentary with screenwriter/producer/director Julie Taymor

• Scene specific commentary with actor Anthony Hopkins

• Scene specific commentary with actor Harry Lennix

• Music only audio track with scene specific commentary from composer Elliot Goldenthal

• Q&A session with Julie Taymor at Columbia University (34:32)

• The Making of 'Titus' (2000) (49:07)

• "Penny Arcade Nightmares" (a behind-the-scenes look at the Penny Arcade Nightmare scenes with the designer Kyle Cooper (5:16)

• Costume Gallery

• "A Timeless Tale of Revenge" and "From Stage to Screen"; two essays by Stephen Pizzello from American Cinematographer, 81:2 (February, 2000)

• Theatrical trailer

• DVD Trailer

• 4 TV spots

• 6-page booklet with an essay by Shakespearian scholar Jonathan Bate

Yes. The US edition released by Twilight Time in 2014 contains the same special features as the two disc special edition DVD, with the exception of the booklet. The disk is also region free.