SOURCE: Duncan-Jones, Katherine. Review of Titus Andronicus. Times Literary Supplement, no. 5244 (3 October 2003): 19.

In the following review of Bill Alexander's 2003 Royal Shakespeare Company staging of Titus Andronicus, Duncan-Jones finds the production lacking in plausibility, pacing, lyricism, and interpretive coherence.

As a “Roman play”, Titus Andronicus is a one-off. Rather than staging famous historical persons and events, Shakespeare—and perhaps George Peele—at the beginning of the 1590s explored political and social ideals in terminal decline. “Rome” in her heyday vaunted highly recognizable values: military valour, efficient empire-building, patriotism, rich literary culture, piety, strong family bonds. But in Titus, Rome's military valour has been reduced to bully-boy brutality, her piety to lunacy, her literary culture to a single tale of incest and rape—that of Philomel—and her family values to cruel patriarchal tyranny. Like Shakespeare's chronologically adjacent plays on the Wars of the Roses, Titus chronicles the sufferings of...