Titus Andronicus

So much memorably awful stuff happens in Titus Andronicus that it is an embarrassment of riches if you are doing a project like this one. For instance, in no particular order: Titus’ daughter Lavinia is raped in the woods, after which her rapists cut out her tongue and cut off her hands so that she may not reveal their identities; Titus murders the two sons of his enemy Tamora, bakes them into a pie and then feeds them to their mother; people dress up as the spirits of Rape, Murder, and Revenge to drive Titus mad; Titus kills Lavinia as a sort of honour killing and – well I could go on but there’s only so much space on the back of these cards. Needless to say Titus Andronicus, was very popular in its day and fit snugly into the thriving ‘gore’ category of Elizabethan entertainment. But what was I to do? Show pies? Some sort of horribly mutilated little figurine with no hands? The three ghosts of sins past? Then I learned that Titus Andronicus (unsurprisingly) has the highest body count of all of Shakespeare’s plays, clocking in at 14. My first thought was to show a little blackboard with tally marks, but then I found these tiny figures at a hobby shop. Each one is just under half an inch tall. Two more than a dozen of them did the trick.