SOURCE: Berthoud, Jacques. Introduction to Titus Andronicus, by William Shakespeare, edited by Sonia Massai, pp. 7-58. London: Penguin Books, 2001.

In the following excerpted introduction to Titus Andronicus, Berthoud considers the drama's depiction of a culture disrupted by violent internal conflict.

Shakespeare's attempt to imagine Roman culture [in Titus Andronicus] from the inside is of course that of a man whose orientation is Tudor-Christian. In culturally naïve writers, who take their own environment as the norm of reality, the imagining of another world retains no essential distinguishing marks, and achieves no genuine otherness. Such writers cannot solve the problem by seeking to become culturally neutral. On the contrary, it is precisely because of his grip on his own social perspective that Shakespeare is able to perceive Rome as something other. Shakespeare's England is part of the differential equation. But his Rome is also distinguished internally in various ways...