Rating: 
Summary: Excellent
Review: Since this was Shakespeare's first tragedy - it's understandable how he could write something so utterly out of character for him. Everyone must find their own feet to stand on. I find that the college students I teach respond well to this particular piece. The violence, gore and blood keep our up-to-date students involved. They also seem to respond well to Aaron. They are amazed at the evilness and the twisted plot. I will continue to teach this in my classroom and think this version is just fine for the beginning Shakespeare student.
Rating:
Summary: Great
Review: So it's a rather repetitive play emotionally: revenge, revenge, revenge. Well, Shakespeare does revenge better than anybody, so it's still a great play. When Quentin Tarentino got a chance to meet Peter O'Toole, O'Toole was asked what he thought of PULP FICTION, since it was so vastly inferior to LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. O'Toole said, "I liked PULP FICTION. It's the modern TITUS ANDRONICUS."
Rating: 
Summary: Shakespeare's 1st Tragedy
Review: This is a good play, but it does not represent Shakespeare's best efforts. The genius that he displayed in the previously written "Henry VI" plays takes a back seat to blood and gore. While a certain amount of violence is required for a good drama, it seems graphic horror is here for the mere sake of graphic horror. Neither do the villains represent Shakespeare's best efforts. Aaron, Tamora, Chiron, or Demetrius are not chilling or captivating in their evil the way King Richard III is. Nor do they grab our attention with a crisis of conscience. (Claudius and Macbeth do) On the positive side, the play moves at a good pace. Lavinia is fine as the innocent martyr. Saturnius is memorable as the poor man caught in the middle. Titus, Lucius, and Marcus are fine as the heroes.
Rating:
Summary: The First Wizard of Gore
Review: This is perhaps The Bard's least well known work, but a classic nonetheless. If H. G. Lewis had been a playwrite living in Old England, this is no doubt the kind of drama he might have produced. It has more blood & violence than the most exploitive exploitation film. Heads severed off, murdered children baked into a stew & served to their father, rape, vengeance, mayhem, insanity... all served up in the guise of classic literature. PERFECT!
Rating:
Summary: Bloody, but great
Review: this was shakespeares first play and one of his best ever. i have to agree with the guy below me
Rating:
Summary: Blood, guts and gore: a satire of revenge
Review: Titus Andronicus is a tragedy of comical proportions. People are easily raped, maimed, and murdered at the drop of a tongue or arm throughout. Titus' feigned insanity brings wretched results for his edible enemies. The request for a detached hand results in hilarious conversation among a handful of volunteers. This play reminds me of the scene from the Monty Python and the Holy Grail film where the knight has been chopped arm and limbless but still wants to keep fighting. Revenge ends in a heap of chopped up bodies in Titus. No, the characters are not fleshed out and in great opportunity of winning your sympathoies; they are not supposed to be. The plot is bigger than the players in this one, and it works this way. Revenge does not take much about a person into account. In the end, only the demonlike Aaron keeps his tongue, but who will listen to him? That, dear reader, is the point.
Rating:
Summary: Blood, guts and gore: a satire of revenge
Review: Titus Andronicus is a tragedy of comical proportions. People are easily raped, maimed, and murdered at the drop of a tongue or arm throughout. Titus' feigned insanity brings wretched results for his edible enemies. The request for a detached hand results in hilarious conversation among a handful of volunteers. This play reminds me of the scene from the Monty Python and the Holy Grail film where the knight has been chopped arm and limbless but still wants to keep fighting. Revenge ends in a heap of chopped up bodies in Titus. No, the characters are not fleshed out and in great opportunity of winning your sympathoies; they are not supposed to be. The plot is bigger than the players in this one, and it works this way. Revenge does not take much about a person into account. In the end, only the demonlike Aaron keeps his tongue, but who will listen to him? That, dear reader, is the point.
Rating:
Summary: One of Shakespeare's best but always misunderstood plays
Review: Titus Andronicus is one of Shakespeare's finest plays. However, most people don't understand what it's really about. It is about love and how hate is born of love and how one cannot hate without the depth of love. But it is also a comedy, in a way. The things that happen are so horrible that the only thing you can do is laugh. But this is not the case dearing the scene were one of the characters, Lavinia Andronicus, is raped by Demetrius and Chiron the youngest sons of the Queen of the Goths. In that scene the last thing you can do is laugh. It is so powerful that you just have to cry and shrink into a ball. This is Shakespeare's most powerful play but people over look it because they don't understand it. But none the less this play is a masterpeice and my favorite play ever.
Rating:
Summary: A useful and handsome edition of an under-rated classic.
Review: TITUS ANDRONICUS. Edited by Eugene M. Waith. 226 pp. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1984 and Reprinted. Hearsay wreaks an incalculable amount of harm in the world, and all of us are, to a greater or lesser extent, its victims. We entertain the most inaccurate opinions about many things of which we have no real knowledge or experience - entire races and nations, individuals, happenings, places, books, etc., - often without either knowing or caring where these opinions came from. And it can be a shock to discover just how wrong we are. Like almost everyone else, somewhere along the line I picked up the notion that Shakespeare's early tragedy, 'Titus Andronicus,' was a very inferior work and was hardly worth reading. What a jolt I got when, quite by accident, I had a chance to watch the video of TITUS, the recent brilliant adaptation of 'Titus Andronicus' by Julie Taymor in which an even more brilliant Anthony Hopkins plays the leading role. I don't know how many minutes of viewing it took to reduce my previous 'opinion' to tatters, and it certainly had something to do with the superb acting, the original costumes, the well-designed settings, and Elliot Goldenthal's impressive musical score. And Eugene Waith, in his interesting Introduction to the present edition, does make the point that this is a play which really has to be seen to be fully appreciated. But apart from enjoying the play as dramatic spectacle, I also found myself greatly enjoying the poetry. No-one would pretend that it reaches the heights of 'Hamlet' or 'King Lear,' but it's very far from the contemptible stuff it's generally reckoned to be. Who, for example, could forget Hopkins' pacing and shading of Shakespeare's marvelous lines - those, for example, in the kitchen scene - his finding of precisely the right rhythms and emphases and intonations preparatory to his calm gutting of the degenerate and worthless offspring of Tamura : "Come, come, Lavinia ; look, thy foes are bound. . . . O villains, Chiron and Demetrius, / Here stands the spring whom you have stained with mud, / This goodly summer with your winter mixed. . . " (5.2.166-71). After this, I just had to read the play, and was lucky to find a bargain copy of the Waith. The series in which Waith's edition appears, 'The Oxford Shakespeare,' seems to have been designed as a rival or competitor to the well-known Arden series. Both are scholarly editions, although the Oxford seems lighter in its demands on the reader, its spelling has been modernized, and its footnotes are far more concise and much easier to take in. With regard to the latter, The 'Times Literary Supplement' remarked of the Oxford series : "... an unacknowledged genius has solved the problem of printing footnotes so that they can be understood and read with pleasure." Waith's 69-page Introduction is quite full, and I found his discussions of 'The Play in Performance' and its 'Reception and Interpretation' especially interesting. Personally I think he makes a very good case for considering 'Titus Andronicus' a far more significant work of art than received opinion would have it. The book is rounded out with five Appendices and an Index, enriched with ten interesting Illustrations including the famous 'Peacham Drawing,' which is given its own 7-page discussion in the Introduction, is beautifully printed on excellent paper, and is also stitched. As editions of Shakespeare go, the Waith seems to me to strike a nice balance between the needs of the scholar and those of the general reader, and it would make a handsome addition to the bookshelves of either. But whether you get Waith's 'Titus Andronicus' or some other, you ought certainly to read this play, though not perhaps until after having listened to a recording of a good production or seen Anthony Hopkin's marvelous TITUS. I think if you do you may find yourself changing your opinion of 'Titus Andronicus' too.
Rating:
Summary: One of Shakespeare's Best Tragedies...
Review: Titus has been maligned by many who have read the better known works of Shakespeare as a violent and gruesome play. That it is, but it is precisely that and other elements that make it remarkable. To truly appreciate Titus one must have read some Roman plays (specifically Seneca's early tragedies) and be relatively well versed in Greek mythology and Roman history. In Titus, Shakespeare gives the audience a great deal of Greek mythology via Ovid's Metamorphoses (compare Lavinia with Philomela and the final "feast" with the infamous dinner that Thyestes had with his brother Atreus). But the play is not only a classic in this sense. It addresses the timeless theme of revenge and the endless cycle of violence begetting violence that ensues as the charachers seek "wreakful vengance" for each horrific deed and pain that one causes the other. There are no heroes in Titus and no "good guys" just raw emotion and passion laid bare. It is at once the worst of humanity recounted with some of the most beautiful poetry that has ever been written.
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