Thank you to Ayanna Thompson for offering a video introduction for Titus Andronicus.
Ayanna Thompson is Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies (ACMRS) at Arizona State University. She is the author of Shakespeare in the Theatre: Peter Sellars (Arden Bloomsbury, 2018), Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student-Centred Approach (Arden Bloomsbury, 2016), Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (Oxford University Press, 2011), and Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage (Routledge, 2008). She wrote the new introduction for the revised Arden3 Othello (Arden, 2016), and is the editor of Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance (Palgrave, 2010) and Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance (Routledge, 2006). She is currently working on a collection of essays for Cambridge University Press on Shakespeare and race, and is collaborating with Curtis Perry on the Arden4 edition of Titus Andronicus. She was the 2018-19 President of the Shakespeare Association of America, and served as a member of the Board of Directors for the Association of Marshall Scholars. She was one of Phi Beta Kappa’s Visiting Scholars for 2017-2018. She has conceived and organized large-scale interdisciplinary conferences like RaceB4Race. And her work is regularly featured in the popular media, including NPR’s “Code Switch” (2019), PBS’s Shakespeare Uncovered (2018), Slate’s “Lend Me Your Ears” (2018), and the Criterion Collection’s DVD release of Orson Welles’s Othello (2017).
Many thanks to my friend Joey Bianco of Whim Wham for the animated video elements.
Thank you for really adding some perspective and alternative questions to ask of the play!
Upon first reading, the play is so brutal and shockingly violent, that my first response was to hate it. But I agree that I was struck by the “modern” way it discusses sexual and racial identity and politics. Definitely worth a re-read!