SOURCE: "Rape and Revenge in Titus Andronicus," in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 8, No. 2, Spring, 1978, pp. 159-82.

In the following essay, Willbern surveys Shakespeare 's imagery of sadistic sexuality and revenge in Titus Andronicus.

Fresh from his recent victory over Hamlet, T. S. Eliot challenged Titus Andronicus. He must have found the play unworthy of critical combat, since he merely pronounced it to be "one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written," and left it to die from the blow.¹ Edward Ravenscroft, the seventeenth-century playwright who loosed the rumor that Shakespeare only "gave some Mastertouches" to a work not his own, would have agreed: he called it, simply, "a heap of Rubbish."²It has since taken the play some time to recover from the embarrassment critics felt when faced with the possibility of considering it seriously. Peter Brook's 1955 Stratford production, with Laurence Olivier as Titus, did much...