SOURCE: "Shakespeare's First Roman Tragedy," in ELH, Vol. 37, 1970, pp. 325-41.

In the following excerpt, Ettin suggests that in Titus Andronicus Shakespeare uses his Roman setting and sources to explore the limitations of received artistic and intellectual ideas.

Even the many critics who regard Titus Andronicus as definitely a work of Shakespeare find it in many respects atypical. Yet I believe we can detect in this early work a characteristically Shakespearean habit of mind: the exploration of the conflicts, contradictions, and insufficiencies in received artistic and intellectual traditions and images. Always fascinated with testing the literary conventions that attempt to structure experience, Shakespeare seldom permitted them to remain simple "counters" that could conveniently signify an expected set of responses. One need think only of the ways in which he tests and complicates the mode of pastoral romance in As You Like It, or of the complex relationship he evolves...