In 1957, the BBC program Panorama aired one of the first televised April Fools’ Day hoaxes. Above, you can watch a faux news report from Switzerland narrated by respected BBC journalist Richard Dimbleby. Here’s the basic premise: After a mild winter and the “virtual disappearance of the spaghetti weevil,” the residents of Ticoni (a Swiss canton on the Italian border) reap a record-breaking spaghetti harvest. Swiss farmers pluck strands of spaghetti from trees and lay them out to dry in the sun. Then we cut to Swiss residents enjoying a fresh pasta meal for dinner—going from farm to table, as it were.
The spoof documentary originated with the BBC cameraman Charles de Jaeger. He remembered one of his childhood schoolteachers in Austria joking, “Boys, you are so stupid, you’d believe me if I told you that spaghetti grew on trees.” Apparently he was right. Years later, David Wheeler, the producer of the BBC segment, recalled: “The following day [the broadcast] there was quite a to-do because there were lots of people who went to work and said to their colleagues ‘did you see that extraordinary thing on Panorama? I never knew that about spaghetti.’ ” An estimated eight million people watched the original program, and, decades later, CNN called the broadcast “the biggest hoax that any reputable news establishment ever pulled.”
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
Certain cult historical figures have served as prescient avatars for the techno-visionaries of the digital age. Where the altruistic utopian designs of Buckminster Fuller provided an ideal for the first wave of Silicon Valley pioneers (a group including computer scientist and philosopher Jaron Lanier and Wired editor Kevin Kelly), later entrepreneurs have hewn closer to the principles of brilliant scientist and inventor Nikola Tesla, who believed, as he told Liberty magazine in 1935, that “we suffer the derangement of our civilization because we have not yet completely adjusted ourselves to the machine age.”
Such an adjustment would come, Tesla believed, only in “mastering the machine”—and he seemed to have supreme confidence in human mastery—over food production, climate, and genetics. We would be freed from onerous labor by automation and the creation of “a thinking machine,” he said, over a decade before the invention of the computer. Tesla did not anticipate the ways such machines would come to master us, even though he cannily foresaw the future of wireless technology, computing, and telephony, technologies that would radically reshape every aspect of human life.
In an earlier, 1926, interview in Collier’s magazine, Tesla predicted, as the editors wrote, communicating “instantly by simple vest-pocket equipment.” His actual words conveyed a much grander, and more accurate, picture of the future.
When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is…. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.
The complexity of smartphones far outstrips that of the telephone, but in every other respect, Tesla’s picture maps onto the reality of almost 100 years later. Other aspects of Tesla’s future scenario for wireless also seem to anticipate current technologies, like 3D printing, though the kind he describes still remains in the realm of science fiction: “Wireless will achieve the closer contact through transmission of intelligence, transport of our bodies and materials and conveyance of energy.”
But Tesla’s vision had its limitations, and they lay precisely in his techno-optimism. He never met a problem that wouldn’t eventually have a technological solution (and like many other techno-visionaries of the time, he heartily endorsed state-sponsored eugenics). “The majority of the ills from which humanity suffers,” he said, “are due to the immense extent of the terrestrial globe and the inability of individuals and nations to come into close contact.”
Wireless technology, thought Tesla, would help eradicate war, poverty, disease, pollution, and general discontent, when we are “able to witness and hear events—the inauguration of a President, the playing of a world series game, the havoc of an earthquake or the terror of a battle—just as though we were present.” When international boundaries are “largely obliterated” by instant communication, he believed, “a great step will be made toward the unification and harmonious existence of the various races inhabiting the globe.”
Tesla did not, and perhaps could not, foresee the ways in which technologies that bring us closer together than ever also, and at the same time, pull us ever further apart. Read Tesla’s full interview here, in which he also predicts that women will become the “superior sex,” not by virtue of “the shallow physical imitation of men” but through “the awakening of the intellect.”
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019.
Michael Jackson’s Thriller is the best-selling album of all time, and not by a particularly slim margin. The most recent figures have it registered at 51.3 million copies, as against the 31.2 million notched by the runner up, AC/DC’s Back in Black. But it would surely be a closer call without the title song’s celebrated music video, thirteen John Landis-directed minutes full of not just singing and dancing, but also classic-style Hollywood monsters, some of them doing that singing and dancing themselves. Halloween night is, of course, the best time to revisit Michael Jackson’s Thriller, as it’s officially titled. This year, why not chase it with the behind-the-scenes documentary below, Making Michael Jackson’s Thriller?
Younger fans may not know that “Thriller” wasn’t even released as a single until November of 1983: about a year after the album itself, which had already spun off six songs, including enormous hits like “Billie Jean” and “Beat It.” In fact, Jackson’s unprecedented vision for the album had been that every song could be a hit, with no filler in between.
The higher-ups at Epic Records felt that its popularity, however sensational to that point, had just about run its course. That made them unwilling, at first, to put out “Thriller” on its own, as did the song’s campy scary-movie lyrics, sound effects, and “rap” by none other than Vincent Price, the embodiment of old-Hollywood horror. (This sort of thing wasn’t without precedent: with his siblings, Jackson had created a similar spooky atmosphere in “This Place Hotel,” from 1980.)
Still, at that point in his rise to the kind of fame no cultural figure may ever know again, Jackson understood much that the old guard didn’t. He knew that “Thriller” could succeed, not just as a song on the radio, but a multimedia cultural phenomenon. It would, of course, need a music video, but not one that merely met the (still fairly lax) standards of MTV. Impressed by the horror, comedy, and visual effects of John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London, Jackson called up Landis and asked him to direct what he’d been envisioning for “Thriller” at feature-film production values. The $500,000 budget came from television networks like MTV and Showtime, officially for broadcasting rights to Making Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
The documentary captures various aspects of the video’s creation, from casting to choreography to shooting to makeup, that last being an especially painstaking process overseen by industry master Rick Baker. Whatever the rigors of the production, Jackson displays undisguised enjoyment of it all in this footage, perhaps foreseeing that it would culminate in the kind of expression that could come from no other artist. Though an intensely collaborative effort, Michael Jackson’s Thriller is true to its name in ultimately being the product of a single, guiding performative sensibility, somehow both universally appealing and highly idiosyncratic at the same time. Jackson’s insistence on calling his music videos “short films” may have been regarded as a typical eccentricity, but never was the label more appropriate than when he brought back the old-school monster movie one last, funky time.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Of the many readings and adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s classic moody-broody poem “The Raven,” none is more fun than The Simpsons’, in which Lisa Simpson’s intro transitions into the reading voice of James Earl Jones and the slapstick interjections of Homer as Poe’s avatar and Bart as the titular bird. Jones’ solo reading of the poem is not to be missed and exists in several versions on YouTube.
But Jones is not the only classically creepy actor to have mastered Poe’s diction. Above, we have Christopher Walken, whose unsettling weirdness is always tinged with a certain wry humor, perhaps an effect of his classical New York accent.
Accompanying Walken’s reading are the standard eerie wind sounds and the unusual addition of some distorted metal guitar: perhaps an intrusion, perhaps a unique dramatic effect. The visual component, a montage of expressive pencil drawings, also may or may not work for you.
You may wish to contrast this production with what may be the locus classicus for televisual interpretations of “The Raven.” Of course I mean the hammy Vincent Price reading (above), which lent so much aesthetically to The Simpsons parody. One of my favorite little in-jokes in the latter occurs during Bart and Lisa’s introduction. Bart whines, “that looks like a school-book!” and Lisa replies, “don’t worry, Bart. You won’t learn anything.”
Lisa’s rejoinder is a sly reference to Poe’s contempt for literature meant to instruct or moralize, a tendency he called “the heresy of the Didactic.” Poe’s theory and practice grew out of his desire that literature have a “unity of effect,” that it produce an aesthetic experience solely through the author’s skillful use of literary form. Poe may have anticipated and directly influenced the French symbolists and other aesthetes like Oscar Wilde, but his assured place in high culture has thankfully not gotten in the way of pop appropriations of his more oddball tales, like “The Raven.” A perennial favorite reading of the poem is classic horror actor Christopher Lee’s (below), which may be the most straightforwardly creepy of them all.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2013.
Apart from certain stretches of absence, Leonardo’s Mona Lisa has been on display at the Louvre for 228 years and counting. Though created by an Italian in Italy, the painting has long since been a part of French culture. At some point, the reverence for La Joconde, as the Mona Lisa is locally known, reached such an intensity as to inspire the label Jocondisme. For Marcel Duchamp, it all seems to have been a bit much. In 1919, he bought a postcard bearing the image of that most famous of all paintings, drew a mustache and goatee on it, and dubbed the resulting “artwork” L.H.O.O.Q., whose French pronunciation “Elle a chaud au cul” translates to — as Duchamp modestly put it — “There is fire down below.”
A century ago, this was a highly irreverent, even blasphemous act, but also just what one might expect from the man who, a couple years earlier, signed a urinal and put it on display in a gallery. Like the much-scrutinized Fountain, L.H.O.O.Q. was one of Duchamp’s “readymades,” or artistic provocations executed by modifying and re-contextualizing found objects.
Neither was singular: just as Duchamp signed multiple urinals, he also drew (or didn’t draw) facial hair on multiple Mona Lisa postcards. In one instance, he even gave the okay to his fellow artist Francis Picabia to make one for publication in his magazine in New York as, nevertheless, “par Marcel Duchamp” — though it lacked a goatee, an omission the artist corrected in his own hand some twenty years later.
In the 1956 interview just above, Duchamp describes L.H.O.O.Q. as a part of his “Dada period” (and, with characteristic modesty, “a great iconoclastic gesture on my part”). He also brings out a fake check — belonging to “no bank at all” — that he created to use at the dentist (who accepted it); and a system designed to “break the bank at Monte Carlo” (which stubbornly remained unbroken). “I believe that art is the only form of activity in which man, as a man, shows himself to be a true individual, and is capable of going beyond the animal state,” he declares. With his collision of Jocondisme and Dada, among the other unlikely juxtapositions he engineered, he showed himself to be the premier prankster of early twentieth-century art — and one whose pranks transcended amusement to inspire a scholarly industry that persists even today.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
To many longtime fans, there are — at the very least — two Pink Floyds. The first is the rock band that in 1965 took the name the Pink Floyd Sound, an invention of its newest member Syd Barrett. A guitar-playing singer-songwriter, the young Barrett soon became the group’s guiding creative intelligence, albeit of a cracked kind. It was under his influence that, two years later, the Floyd released their first two hit singles,“Arnold Layne” and “See Emily Play,” as well as their debut studio album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. This early material exhibits a kind of darkly whimsical English eccentricity that turned out to fit neatly indeed with the psychedelia of the music-driven late-sixties counterculture.
This first Pink Floyd lasted until partway through the production of their second album, A Saucerful of Secrets. Up to that point, Barrett’s behavior had been turning ever stranger and less manageable; eventually, he passed entire concerts in a state of near catatonia onstage (with the occasional spasm of a deep-seated tendency to practical jokes).
After considering and finding unfeasible the option to retain him as a non-touring contributor, the other members decided simply to eject him from the band. Thus began the Floyd’s second iteration, which, despite the loss of the man who’d been writing 90 percent of their songs, did nevertheless manage to come up with albums like Atom Heart Mother, The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, and The Wall.
When Barrett died in 2006, after decades of life as a recluse (and, ever the Englishman, an enthusiastic gardener), he was widely remembered as a casualty of the psychedelic drug wave. But according to Roger Waters, who took the band’s reins, “LSD was not solely responsible for Syd’s illness.” He says so in the video above, a compilation of his recollections of Barrett’s decline. “It felt to me at the time that Syd was drifting off the rails, and when you’re drifting off the rails, the worst thing you could do is start messing around with hallucinogenics.” There was “no doubt that Syd was schizophrenic, and that he was taking those drugs at the same time.” It could well have been that Barrett’s state of mind allowed him to voyage into realms that the Floyd could otherwise never have accessed. But whatever the causal factors and their proportions, he eventually found himself unable to come back home.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
American is a tricky word. It can refer to everyone and everything of or pertaining to all the countries of North America — and potentially South America as well — but it’s commonly used with specific regard to the United States. For Frank Lloyd Wright, linguistic as well as architectural perfectionist, this was an untenable state of affairs. To his mind, the newest civilization of the New World, a vast land that offered man the rare chance to remake himself, needed an adjective all its own. And so, repurposing a demonym proposed by geographer James Duff Law in the nineteen-hundreds, Wright began to refer to his not just architectural but also broadly cultural project as Usonian.
Wright completed the first of his so-called “Usonian houses,” the Herbert and Katherine Jacobs House in Madison, Wisconsin, in the middle of the Great Depression. Challenged to “create a decent home for $5,000,” says the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation’s web site, the architect seized the chance to realize “a new affordable architecture that freed itself from European conventions and responded to the American landscape.”
This first Usonian house and its 60 or so successors “related directly to the earth, unimpeded by a foundation, front porch, protruding chimney, or distracting shrubbery. Glass curtain walls and natural materials like wood, stone and brick further tied the house to its environment.” In Pleasantville, New York, there even exists a Usonia Historic District, three of whose 47 homes were designed by Wright himself.
The BBC Global video at the top of the post offers a tour of one of the Usonia Historic District’s houses led by the sole surviving original owner, the 100-year-old Roland Reisley. The Architectural Digest video above features Reisley’s home as well as the Bertha and Sol Friedman House, which Wright dubbed Toyhill. Both have been kept as adherent as possible to the vision that inspired them, and that was meant to inspire a renaissance in American civilization. The Usonian homes may have fallen short of Wright’s Utopian hopes, but they did have a certain influence on postwar suburb-builders, and have much enriched the lives of their more appreciative inhabitants. The centenarian Reisley credits his startling youthfulness to the man-made and natural beauty of his domestic surroundings — but then, this last of the Usonians also happens to be one of the rare clients who could get along with Frank Lloyd Wright.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
We all know the manchild Mozart of Milos Forman’s 1984 biopic Amadeus. As embodied by a manic, braying Thomas Hulce, the precocious and haunted composer supposedly loved nothing more than scandalizing, amusing, or exasperating friends and enemies alike with juvenile pranks and scatological humor. Surely a fiction, eh? Gross exaggeration, no? Undoubtedly Mozart comported himself with more dignity? Those familiar with the composer’s biography know otherwise.
We have, for example, a ridiculously dirty letter that the 21-year-old “poop-loving musical genius” wrote to his 19-year-old cousin Marianne—a missive Letters of Note prefaces with the disclaimer “if you’re easily offended, please do not read any further” (oh, but how can you resist?). This piece of correspondence is but one of many “shockingly crude letters” Mozart wrote to his family. And if these slightly insane documents don’t convince you, we offer as further evidence of Mozart’s exuberantly childish sensibility the above canon in B flat for six voices, Leck Mich Im Arsch, which translates roughly to “Kiss My Ass.”
One of three naughty canons composed in 1782 with lyrics like “Good night, sleep tight, / And stick your ass to your mouth,” this piece was discovered in 1991 at Harvard University. Harvard librarian Michael Ochs, with a clear penchant for understatement, said at the time: “These are minor works. They’re not the Requiem, or ‘Don Giovanni.’ They were written for the amusement of Mozart and his friends, and they show another side of him.” The first edition of Mozart’s complete works, published in 1804, bowdlerized the texts and removed the racy humor, changing the title of Leck Mich Im Arsch to “Let us be glad!”—likely, writes Lucas Reilly at Mental Floss, “the complete opposite of what this tune means.”
Reilly also points out that Mozart’s “potty mouth” was probably not, as some have supposed, evidence of Tourette’s syndrome, but rather of an especially strong current in German humor, shared by Johannes Gutenberg, Martin Luther, and Mozart’s equally brilliant contemporary, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In fact, Leck Mich Im Arsch alludes to Goethe’s serious dramatic work, Götz Von Berlichingen. The chorus reads as follows in English:
Kiss my arse! Goethe, Goethe! Götz von Berlichingen! Second act; You know the scene too well! Let’s sing out now summarily: Here is Mozart literary!
Hear two additional dirty choral pieces—Bona Nox and Difficile Lectu—at Mental Floss. Some other scatological canons thought to be Mozart’s, such as Leck mir den Arsch fein recht schönsauber (“Lick my ass right well and clean”), have since been attributed to amateur composer and physician Wenzel Trnka, yet it appears that the three featured at Mental Floss are genuine.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.
As an exercise draw a composition of fear or sadness, or great sorrow, quite simply, do not bother about details now, but in a few lines tell your story. Then show it to any one of your friends, or family, or fellow students, and ask them if they can tell you what it is you meant to portray. You will soon get to know how to make it tell its tale.
- Pamela Colman-Smith, “Should the Art Student Think?” July, 1908
A year after Arts and Crafts movement magazine The Craftsman published illustrator Pamela Colman-Smith’s essay excerpted above, she spent six months creating what would become the world’s most popular tarot deck. Her graphic interpretations of such cards as The Magician, The Tower, and The Hanged Man helped readers to get a handle on the story of every newly dealt spread.
Colman-Smith—known to friends as “Pixie”—was commissioned by occult scholar and author Arthur E. Waite, a fellow member of the British occult society the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, to illustrate a pack of tarot cards.
In a humorous letter to her eventual champion, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, Colman-Smith (1878 – 1951) described her 80 tarot paintings as “a big job for very little cash,” though she betrayed a touch of genuine excitement that they would be “printed in color by lithography… probably very badly.”
Although Waite had some specific visual ideas with regard to the “astrological significance” of various cards, Colman-Smith enjoyed a lot of creative leeway, particularly when it came to the Minor Arcana or pip cards.
These 56 numbered cards are divided into suits—wands, cups, swords and pentacles. Prior to Colman-Smith’s contribution, the only example of a fully illustrated Minor Arcana was to be found in the earliest surviving deck, the Sola Busca, which dates to the early 1490s. A few of her Minor Arcana cards, notably 3 of Swords and 10 of Wands, make overt reference to that deck, which she likely encountered on a research expedition to the British Museum.
Mostly the images were of Colman-Smith’s own invention, informed by her sound-color synesthesia and the classical music she listened to while working. Her early experience in a touring theater company helped her to convey meaning through costume and physical attitude.
Here are Pacific Northwest witch and tarot practitioner Moe Bowstern’s thoughts on Smith’s Three of Pentacles:
Pentacles are the suit of Earth, representative of structure and foundation. Colman-Smith’s theater-influenced designs here identify the occupations of three figures standing in an apse of what appears to be a cathedral: a carpenter with tools in hand; an architect showing plans to the group; a tonsured monk, clearly the steward of the building project.
The overall impression is one of building something together that is much bigger than any individual and which may outlast any individual life. The collaboration is rooted in the hands-on material work of foundation building, requiring many viewpoints.
A special Pixie Smith touch is the physical elevation of the carpenter, who would have been placed on the lowest rung of medieval society hierarchies. Smith has him on a bench, showing the importance of getting hands on with the project.
For years, Colman-Smith’s cards were referred to as the Rider-Waite Tarot Deck. This gave a nod to publisher William Rider & Son, while neglecting to credit the artist responsible for the distinctive gouache illustrations. It continues to be sold under that banner, but lately, tarot enthusiasts have taken to personally amending the name to the Rider Waite Smith (RWS) or Waite Smith (WS) deck out of respect for its previously unheralded co-creator.
It’s sad, but not a total shocker, to learn that this interesting, multi-talented woman died in poverty in 1951. Her paintings and drawings were auctioned off, with the proceeds going toward her debts. Her death certificate listed her occupation not as artist but as “Spinster of Independent Means.” Lacking funds for a headstone, she was buried in an unmarked grave.
With Halloween just days away, many of us are even now readying a scary movie or two to watch on the night itself. If you’re still undecided about your own Halloween viewing material, allow us to suggest The Shining, Stanley Kubrick’s “masterpiece of modern horror.” Those words come straight from the original poster hung up at theaters when the film was released in 1980, and presumptuous though they may have sounded at the time — especially considering the mixed first wave of critical reception — the decades have proven them right. Even if you’ve watched it for ten, twenty, forty Halloweens in a row, The Shining remains frightening on both the jump-scare and existential-dread levels, while its each and every frame appears more clearly than ever to be the work of an auteur.
One could hardly find a more suitable figure to represent the notion of the auteur — the director as primary “author” of a film — than Kubrick, whose aesthetic and intellectual sensibility comes through in all of his major pictures, each of which belongs to a different genre. Kubrick had tried his hand at film noir, World War I, swords-and-sandals epic, psychological drama, Cold War black comedy, science fiction, dystopian crime, and costume drama; a much-reworked adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, The Shining represents, of course, Kubrick’s foray into horror.
Despite the famously quick-and-dirty tendencies of that defiantly unrespectable cinematic tradition, Kubrick exercised, if anything, an even greater degree of meticulousness than that for which he was already notorious, demanding perfection not just on set, but also in the creation of the marketing materials.
According to the new Paper & Light video above, famed designer Saul Bass (who’d previously created the title sequence of Kubrick’s Spartacus) did more than 300 drawings for The Shining’s movie poster. The only concept that met with the director’s approval placed a terrified, vaguely inhuman visage inside the lettering of the title. We don’t know whose face it’s supposed to be, but Paper & Light hazards a guess that it may be that of Danny, the young son of the Overlook Hotel’s doomed caretaker Jack Torrance, or even Danny’s invisible friend Tony. (Note the containment of all of its features within the T.) Though Kubrick credited Bass’ final design with solving “the eternal problem of trying to combine artwork with the title of the film,” The Shining’s bright yellow poster now sits somehow uneasily with the movie’s legacy, more as a curiosity than an icon. Nevertheless, it does evoke — and maybe too well — what we’ll all hope to feel when we press play this, or any, Halloween night.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
In the graduate department where I once taught freshmen and sophomores the rudiments of college English, it became common practice to include Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus on many an Intro to Lit syllabus, along with a viewing of Julie Taymor’s flamboyant film adaptation. The early work is thought to be Shakespeare’s first tragedy, cobbled together from popular Roman histories and Elizabethan revenge plays. And it is a truly bizarre play, swinging wildly in tone from classical tragedy, to satirical dark humor, to comic farce, and back to tragedy again. Critic Harold Bloom called Titus “an exploitative parody” of the very popular revenge tragedies of the time—its murders, maimings, rapes, and mutilations pile up, scene upon scene, and leave characters and readers/audiences reeling in grief and disbelief from the shocking body count.
Part of the fun of teaching Titus is in watching students’ jaws drop as they realize just how bloody-minded the Bard is. While Taymor’s adaptation takes many modern liberties in costuming, music, and set design, its horror-show depiction of Titus’ unrelenting mayhem is faithful to the text. Later, more mature plays rein in the excessive black comedy and shock factor, but the bodies still stack up. As accustomed as we are to thinking of contemporary entertainments like Game of Thrones as especially gratuitous, the whole of Shakespeare’s corpus, writes Alice Vincent at The Telegraph, is “more gory” than even HBO’s squirm-worthy fantasy epic, featuring a total of 74 deaths in 37 plays to Game of Thrones’ 61 in 50 episodes.
All of those various demises came together in a 2016 compendium staged at The Globe (in London) called The Complete Deaths. It included everything “from early rapier thrusts to the more elaborate viper-breast application adopted by Cleopatra.” The only death director Tim Crouch excluded is “that of a fly that meets a sticky end in Titus Andronicus.” In the infographic above, see all of the causes of those deaths, including Antony and Cleopatra’s snakebite and Titus Andronicus’ piece-de-resistance, “baked in a pie.”
Part of the reason so many of my former undergraduate students found Shakespeare’s brutality shocking and unexpected has to do with the way his work was tamed by later 17th and 18th century critics, who “didn’t approve of the on-stage gore.” The Telegraph quotes director of the Shakespeare Institute Michael Dobson, who points out that Elizabethan drama was especially gruesome; “the English drama was notorious for on-stage deaths,” and all of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, including Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, wrote violent scenes that can still turn our stomachs.
More recent productions like a bloody staging of Titus at The Globe have restored the gore in Shakespeare’s work, and The Complete Deaths left audiences with little doubt that Shakespeare’s culture was as permeated with representations of violence as our own—and it was as much, if not more so, plagued by the real thing.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
