Titus Andronicus: The New Oxford Shakespeare

’Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand,
Blood and revenge are hammering in my head.’

In Shakespeare’s first tragedy, Titus Andronicus, the Roman general Titus incurs the wrath of the Queen of the Goths when he enslaves her and kills one of her sons. The shocking violence of her revenge and his retaliation earn Titus its reputation as Shakespeare’s bloodiest play. This New Oxford Shakespeare edition offers a range of critical approaches to the play, considering its initial popularity in the theatre, the authors’ engagement with narrative sources and Roman history, and the ongoing problems scholars and theatremakers have had with the play’s presentation of violence, rape, and racial difference. Throughout, it incorporates up-to-date scholarship and close readings of a number of landmark productions to consider the play’s place in Shakespeare’s canon and to illustrate Titus Andronicus’s enduring value in interrogating some of wider culture’s darkest and most challenging concerns.

The New Oxford Shakespeare offers authoritative editions of Shakespeare’s works with introductory materials designed to encourage new interpretations of the plays and poems. Using the text from the landmark The New Oxford Shakespeare Complete Works: Modern Critical Edition, these volumes offer readers the latest thinking on the authentic texts (collated from all surviving original versions of Shakespeare’s work) alongside innovative introductions from leading scholars. The texts are accompanied by a comprehensive set of critical apparatus to give readers the best resources to help understand and enjoy Shakespeare’s work.

ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

William Shakespeare

Harry R. McCarthy is Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at the University of Exeter (UK). He previously held a Research Fellowship at Jesus College (University of Cambridge, UK), and is the author of author of Boy Actors in Early Modern England: Skill and Stagecraft in the Theatre (2022) and Performing Early Modern Drama Beyond Shakespeare: Edward’s Boys (2020). His articles on boyhood, theatre history, contemporary performance of early modern plays, and racial justice in early modern studies, have appeared in journals including Early Theatre, English Literary History, Shakespeare, and Shakespeare Survey, on whose Editorial Board he currently sits.

Gary Taylor is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor at Florida State University. He is a General Editor of The New Oxford Shakespeare and has written, edited, and co-edited numerous other volumes including The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton (2012), Moment by Moment by Shakespeare (1985), and Reinventing Shakespeare (1989). He general-edited the Signs of Race and History of Text Technologies series, founded the interdisciplinary History of Text Technologies program at FSU, and has written about the practice and theory of editing in various periods and genres. Taylor has also worked to communicate contemporary literary theory and criticism to a mass audience in newspapers, radio, TV, museums and theatres in North America and the UK.

Terri Bourus is Professor of Theatre and Professor of English at Florida State University. She is a General Editor of The New Oxford Shakespeare and the author of Young Shakespeare’s Young Hamlet (2014). She has written essays on stage directions, the performance of religious conversion, Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Cardenio, the role of Alice in Arden of Faversham, and Middleton’s female roles. Bourus is an Equity actor, and has directed and acted in, two very different productions of Hamlet, both based on Q1.

Rory Loughlane is Reader in Early Modern Studies and Co-Director of the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, University of Kent. He is an award-winning scholar of early modern textual studies, authorship, intellectual history, theatre history, and literary criticism. He is an Associate Editor of The New Oxford Shakespeare and co-authored with Gary Taylor a book-length study about ’The Canon and Chronology of Shakespeare’s works’ and, in a series of attribution studies, he first identified Thomas Middleton as adapter of All’s Well That Ends Well.

Anna Pruitt is the Managing Editor of Giving USA at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University. She is an Associate Editor of The New Oxford Shakespeare.

Francis X. Connor is Associate Professor of English at Wichita State University, where he teaches courses in Shakespeare, Early Modern Literature, and the history of the book. An associate editor for The New Oxford Shakespeare, he is the author of Literary Folios and Ideas of the Book in Early Modern England (2014), and his work has appeared in Shakespeare Survey, PBSA, Sidney Journal, and elsewhere.