Penguin Classics: Titus Andronicus

‘Hark, villains, I will grind your bones to dust, And with your blood and it I’ll make a paste’

An embittered Roman general returns from war, having captured the Queen of the Goths and her three sons. Sacrificing the eldest, in memory of his own sons killed in battle, he provokes the queen’s unending hatred. And when she gains power by her marriage to the new emperor of Rome, she quickly begins to plot a murderous revenge of barely conceivable cruelty, in Shakespeare’s first and most savagely bloody tragedy.

‘This is tragedy naked, godless and unredeemed.’ Kenneth Tynan

General Editor Stanley Wells
Edited by Sonia Massai
Introduction by Jacques Berthoud