It’s also an incredibly smart, allusive play-Shakespeare positively cannibalizes the classical tradition, breaking it into fragments and claiming it for his own purposes, just as the play’s human bodies are broken apart. There are severed heads aplenty, a woman who is raped and has her hands cut off and her tongue cut out, a cannibalistic revenge banquet, and a man who is buried “breast-deep in earth” (5.3.178) and left to starve. It’s so absurdly, gruesomely over-the-top that some critics simply couldn’t believe that he had written it. Shakespeare wrote this Roman play early in his career, and it was almost universally critically loathed until the last few decades. So here are some suggestions for great “minor Shakespeare.” 1. This year marks the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, and he would probably like us all to set aside Henry V and read something like Titus Andronicus, which was incredibly popular in its day. But there is much to be gained by turning our attention to plays that might not be quite so major. It’s an undeniable pleasure to read-and re-read-major works, and King Lear, Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth are called Shakespeare’s “major tragedies” just to remind us of their major-ness. Yet certain plays tend to dominate bookshelves, stages, and classrooms, leaving many others largely unread and unperformed. He doesn’t need to be rescued from obscurity. Shakespeare’s cultural position is pretty secure.
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