SOURCE: Welsh, Jim and John Tibbets. “‘To Sup with Horrors’: Julie Taymor's Senecan Feast.” Literature/Film Quarterly 28, no. 2 (April 2000): 155-56.

In the following review of Julie Taymor's 2000 film adaptation of Titus Andronicus, Welsh and Tibbets encapsulate the plot of Shakespeare's “cruelest and crudest” play, praise the film's outstanding cast, and find Taymor's interpretation perhaps too effective in conveying the grotesque excesses of the original drama.

Shakespeare's early tragedy was staged on 24 January 1594 by the Earl of Sussex's men at the Rose Theatre. It was published later that year then reprinted in 1600 and 1611. The 1611 quarto was later reprinted in the First Folio of 1623. Dating its composition is problematic. Some scholars have questioned whether Shakespeare wrote all of it. As one of his earliest works, it has all the faults to be expected from an inexperienced, thirty-year old playwright. Its violence and butchery were clearly modeled after that exemplar of...