All Program Dates
October 7, 2026 | 7:30pm - 9:00pm ET
October 14, 2026 | 7:30pm - 9:00pm ET
October 21, 2026 | 7:30pm - 9:00pm ET
October 28, 2026 | 7:30pm - 9:00pm ET
November 4, 2026 | 7:30pm - 9:00pm ET
Registration
Tuition for this course is $300. Members receive exclusive discounts on our programs and courses. Not a member? Learn more.
Please check your spam folder for your email confirmation. If you have questions, please call (215) 732-1600 or email rsvp@rosenbach.org.
To promote access to onsite and virtual Rosenbach experiences, we offer scholarships for each Signature Program. To inquire, email Sunstein Senior Manager of Digital Initiatives Edward G. Pettit at epettit@rosenbach.org.
This program is for those 18 and older.
Registration opens for Delancey Society members on Thursday, August 27, for Rosenbach members on Thursday, September 3, and for the general public on Thursday, September 10.
Description
Titus Andronicus is Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy and possibly his first published play. It is certainly his bloodiest and is perhaps the most disturbing of all his texts, seeming to some playgoers to be more like an early modern version of a Quentin Tarantino movie than what they normally associate with Shakespeare. In addition to the horrific off-stage rape and mutilation of Titus’s daughter, the play features the reported deaths of Titus’s twenty-one soldier-sons, the ritualized killing of an enemy, the filicide of Titus’s own son, the murder of the emperor’s brother, Titus’s own self-maiming, the beheadings of two of his sons, the stabbing of a nurse, the hanging of a clown, cannibalism, the honor-killing of Titus’s daughter, a climactic triple murder, and the live burial of a Iago-like Moor (not to mention the death of a fly). In this course, we will explore the impact of all this terrible violence in the text, paying close attention to issues related to language, allusion, honor, virtue, gender, embodiment, and more.
Instructor
Dr. Jim Casey is a Fulbright Fellow, National Endowment for the Humanities grant recipient, Past President of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, editor of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen (2019), and co-editor of the collections Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare (2017) and Shakespeare and Comics (2024). Before retiring from full-time teaching in 2020, he taught more than 100 graduate and undergraduate courses over more than 20 years. Although primarily a Shakespearean, he has published peer-reviewed essays on such diverse topics as fantasy, monstrosity, early modern poetry, medieval poetry, pedagogy, textual theory, performance theory, postmodern theory, adaptation theory, digital humanities, old age, comics, film, anime, masculinity, grief, the supernatural, Chaucer, Ovid, Firefly, and Battlestar Galactica. His current projects include Shakespeare and Science Fiction, co-edited with Brandon Christopher, and Fantasy Literature through History. This is his fifth time teaching for the Rosenbach, following courses on Shakespeare and the Fantastic, Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and King Lear.