Shakespeare, The Way He Intended It

My travel schedule during my European adventure left me in London on a gorgeous Saturday afternoon with nothing to do. So, I walked down the south bank of the Thames to the re-creation of the Globe Theatre. During the summer, Shakespeare's Globe presents performances of his plays in the same enclosed but open-air setting in which his works premiered during the 16th century. For five pounds, you can purchase a standing-room ticket for the yard, allowing you to watch the play mere feet from the stage along with all the other groundlings.

The show I happened upon that Saturday was Titus Andronicus. I have read a fair bit of Shakespeare, but I was unfamiliar with that particular work from the canon. The basic premise is that Titus, a Roman general, returns home victorious from battle, having taken Tamora, Queen of the Goths, and her sons as prisoners. To thank the gods, Titus sacrifices Tamora's eldest son, incurring Tamora's wrath. The remainder of the play centers around the lengths to which Tamora will go to exact her revenge.

In a nutshell, the attraction of the show is that it contains a body count that would make the writers of 24 jealous. The fifth act is to Hamlet what the second act is to Titus Andronicus. It's a gruesome play in which virtually every character meets a hideous, premature demise. Even the characters who manage to evade death initially still end up dead at the end. Nobody is even apologetic in the least about the bloodshed. The company at the Globe did a very nice job carrying the play out. With several exceptions (e.g. female actors, blood capsules, Converse sneakers) the actors stayed true to the same Elizabethan style of performance that Londoners could have seen in the Globe over four centuries ago. I'm a history buff, so to be able to participate in substantially the same activity that folks in the late 1500's enjoyed was truly insightful and rewarding.