Almost none of Shakespeare's stories are original.
My name is Charlotte Scott and I'm a senior lecturer in Shakespeare at Goldsmiths University.
Shakespeare borrowed 34 of the 38 plays that he wrote from somebody else.
In fact, a contemporary of Shakespeare's, Robert Green, went so far as to nearly call Shakespeare a plagiarist
when he described him as an 'upstart crow, beautified with our feathers'.
But like almost every story that Shakespeare borrowed, he made it his own.
He created emotional depth, he created character, and he created the ability for
characters to interact and create emotion, conflict, horror and humor.
Titus [Andronicus] is one of Shakespeare's most bloody, most gruesome, most visually horrific plays.
In the centre of the drama, we see a mutilated young woman who has been raped and had her
hands cut off, running after her nephew. He runs away and he drops his books in the
middle of the stage, and we see her fall to her knees upon this collection of books and
frantically search, with her mutilated arms, a copy of Ovid's Metamorphoses.
In that book, she directs her father and her uncle to the tale of Philomela in book six.
And it's the first moment in the play that they realise what has happened to her.
It's a spectacular moment on stage because what it
dramatises above all is the power of the story to both liberate but also to destroy.
The story that Lavinia points to is a story through which she was raped and mutilated.
It's also the story through which she finds her voice again in the rest of the drama.
If you were going to the theatre in the 16th and 17th centuries,
if you had walked along Tower Bridge on your way to the theatre, you would have seen a number of
decapitated heads preserved in tar on spikes.
This was the punishment for those accused of treason.
So, for us to experience the reality of theatrical violence
is astonishing, and terrifying and often appalling,
but for Shakespeare's audience, it was often in a day's work.