A Shakespeare play is a dangerous place. Swords can kill you. So can poison, grief and bears. Eleven corpses crowd the stage in “Richard III.” “King Lear” does away with 10 characters.
But at 14 deaths, “Titus Andronicus” — with its beheadings, live burial and disgustful approach to pastry-making — takes the Shakespearean cake.
T.S. Eliot called “Titus Andronicus” “one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written.” That doesn’t mean it hasn’t inspired others. The image of a mother made to eat her children was hard to shake, and a couple of decades after its 1594 premiere, artists had already begun to appropriate — O.K., fine, cannibalize — its plot for uses comic, tragic and savagely satirical.
Directors have staged it with almost no gore and with nothing but gore. It has been modernized, musicalized, performed by puppets and adapted to Kabuki. Stephen K. Bannon sent it into space.
Its blood has spattered everything from bootleg Dutch tragedies to Japanese anime to “Game of Thrones.” “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” gifted us the character Titus Andromedon, played by Tituss Burgess. (His rival: Coriolanus Burt.)
Now comes Taylor Mac’s “Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus,” which picks up, figuratively and literally, after the final murders.
It opens on April 21 at Broadway’s Booth Theater. But before audiences tally whether Mac outdoes Shakespeare on the body count, let’s look back at some of the play’s more memorable appearances in culture, pop and otherwise.
‘Titus Andronicus’ (1850)
In the mid 19th century, the African-American actor Ira Aldridge and the English playwright C.A. Somerset collaborated on a new version that transformed Aaron, a Moor and the lover of the barbarian queen Tamora, from villain to hero, subverting racial stereotype. Aldridge and Somerset cut out most of the carnage and interpolated at least one scene from a contemporary melodrama that Aldridge had also starred in. Aldridge’s opinion: “I will venture to say that there is not a play on the stage with a more powerful climax.” A Scottish critic praised Aldridge’s performance as Aaron as “remarkable for energy, tempered by dignity and discretion.”
‘Theater of Blood’ (1973)
A British horror comedy beloved of theater reviewers and the people who hate them. “Theater of Blood” stars Vincent Price as Edward Kendal Sheridan Lionheart, a depraved classical actor, bad in every sense. After faking his death Lionheart revenges himself on his critics, with murders inspired by Shakespeare. After executing six critics and convincing a seventh to kill his wife Othello-style, Lionheart turns to “Titus Andronicus” to snuff the eighth. Meredith Merridew (Robert Morley), who refers to his poodles as babies, is invited onto a cooking show and served a pie. No prizes for guessing the filling. Lionheart suffocates him with the crust.
‘Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street’ (1979)
Stephen Sondheim’s Tony-winning chiller, written with Hugh Wheeler, doesn’t directly descend from Shakespeare. An adaptation of Christopher Bond’s 1973 play, its key source is a gristly 19th-century penny dreadful, “The String of Pearls: A Romance,” which describes a homicidal barber and the baker Mrs. Lovett, his unsavory accomplice. Still, the revenge plot, with its abductions and threats of rape, echoes “Titus Andronicus” and the use of human mincemeat as the symbol of ultimate inhumanity smacks of homage. As Mrs. Lovett sings, “It’s man devouring man, my dear/And who are we to deny it here.”
‘Anatomy Titus Fall of Rome: A Shakespeare Commentary’ (1984)
Heiner Müller, the experimental German playwright who specialized in grimly absurdist Shakespeare rewrites, refashioned “Titus Andronicus” as a postmodern, postcolonial debauch. His version lays bare the violence of the original (arguably pretty bare already) while reframing it as a political allegory of how wealthier nations exploit impoverished ones. Drawing on the 1973 Chilean coup and a divided Berlin, Müller explores the failure of culture and human progress to make the world a less brutalized place. As one character says, “Poetry is murder.”
‘Andronicus’ (1990s, unproduced)
Before Mr. Bannon became Donald J. Trump’s chief strategist, he fell for another populist leader, albeit one with more military experience: Titus. The play obsessed him and in the early ’90s, he and the screenwriter Julia Jones collaborated on an interplanetary adaptation of “Titus Andronicus.” Here, Titus is the leader of the Andronicii, incorporeal beings who come to earth and take on human form. Shakespeare never included erotic scenes of ectoplasmic sex. Mr. Bannon did. Shockingly, studios passed. He and Ms. Jones also rewrote “Coriolanus” as a rap musical set during the Los Angeles riots.
‘Titus’ (1999)
Though Mr. Bannon’s space guignol wouldn’t fly, he is listed as an executive producer on Julie Taymor’s 1999 film version of the tragedy, which reset the play in a Rome both ancient and modern. Anthony Hopkins said that his Titus referenced both King Lear and Hannibal Lecter, another character with outré taste in fine dining. Reviews were generally positive, with a Times critic writing that the movie “makes the best possible argument for a cautionary drama that contemplates the absolute worst in us.” But not only Rome loses big in “Titus.” The movie cost $25 million and made back just $2 million at the box office.
In the 69th episode of “South Park,” a middle schooler, Scott Tenorman, convinces Cartman to buy his pubic hair. When his friends set Cartman straight on how puberty actually works, Cartman asks for his money back. Then he vows revenge. After various plans fail, including one involving guest stars Radiohead, Cartman arranges for the murder of Scott’s parents, lures Scott to a Chile Con Carnival and feeds him a dastardly bowl of chili. “Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah, I made you eat your parents,” Cartman gloats.
Titus Andronicus (2005 to present)
Founded in 2005, Titus Andronicus, which now styles itself +@, is a post-punk Brooklyn outfit led by Patrick Stickles. The name celebrates Shakespeare’s crowd-pleasing appeal and if serving a mother the pastry-encased corpses of her children isn’t punk rock, I mean what even is? The band’s first song on their debut album, 2008’s “The Airing of Grievances,” quotes liberally from Aaron’s Act V speech. Their fourth album, 2015’s “The Lamentable Tragedy,” a 29-song rock opera about Mr. Stickles’s manic depression, name-checks the “Titus Andronicus” title page in the 1623 folio, though honestly quarto editions are way more rock ’n’ roll.
