Michael D. Friedman "Editing a Collaborative Text: Titus Andronicus and the Demise of Mutius"

I will be writing about the potential impact of collaboration theories on the editing and performance of Shakespeare's plays, particularly Titus Andronicus, by focusing on recent editorial and performative treatments of the death of Mutius at the hands of his father, Titus. In the late twentieth century, scholarly versions of the play (such as Eugene Waith's Oxford edition [1984], Alan Hughes's New Cambridge edition [1994], and Jonathan Bate's Arden edition [1995]) began to break with previous editorial tradition by suggesting that the murder of Mutius and the ensuing argument among the Andronici over his burial was a late, and somewhat clumsy, Shakespearean interpolation. Director Gregory Doran, using Waith's edition as his base text, cut Mutius from his 1995 South African production entirely, while Julie Taymor, absorbing the commentary in Bate's edition, retained the sacrifice and burial of Mutius, but added a significant amount of non-Shakespearean material to her film Titus (1999) in order to counteract some of Bate's objections to the Mutius episodes. In 2002, Brian Vickers published Shakespeare, Co-Author, which established, in the minds of many scholars (including Bate) that Titus Andronicus is the product of a collaboration between Shakespeare and George Peele, who was responsible for all of the Mutius material. Subsequently, director Bill Alexander cut Mutius from his 2003 RSC production of the play, using Vickers' attribution of the character's appearance to Peele, not Shakespeare, as part of his justification. One year later, critic Brian Boyd proposed that Mutius be purged from the text of Titus Andronicus altogether, since his existence runs counter to Shakespeare's apparent intentions. On the basis of this example, my essay will speculate about the ramifications for the next scholarly edition of Titus Andronicus (and performances based upon it) if Shakespeare's collaboration with Peele endures as part of the scholarly consensus about the play.