Tragedy Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Netflix TV Drama Copycat Killer

Shakespeare’s tragedies have been esteemed high value, for example, King Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello. This chapter explores Shakespeare’s tragedy Titus Andronicus and comments on the theater performance Titus staged in Taiwan (restaged in National Theater in Taipei, 2023) filled with a series of revenge and a cycle of violence. Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s most cruel, bloody, and violent tragedy, including Lavinia’s rape and mutilation by the barbarous Demetrius of the Goths and his ferocious brother Chiron. Adapted from Shakespeare’s tragedy Titus Andronicus, Taiwan Theater Director Wang Chia-Ming’s “Shakespeare’s Wild Sisters Group” (SWSG) restaged Titus (debut 2003, restaged again in May 2023) in the Experimental Theatre of National Theatre in Taipei. Performing such a bloody tragedy, I think, in German Playwright Bertold Brecht’s word of Verfremdung, that is, “detachment, estrangement, alienation” (2001: 1007), the actors and actresses wear masks as if puppets without facial expressions to represent this monstrous dystopian horrible revenge tragedy full of deaths, killing, rape, and mutilation. Connecting with the monstrous dystopian, deaths and mutilation, this chapter also explores the Netflix TV drama episodes Copycat Killer (2023). It rings true as Aristotle’s Poetics indicates that tragedy arouses “pity and fear.” Fear of serial killers, fear of the pervert, and fear of the deformed face and appearance are those forms of fear-based social disqualification in the TV drama case study Copycat Killer, Netflix Top #2 within world Top 10, Netflix # 1 in Taiwan around the period of April 19, 2023. I argue that tragedies like Titus Andronicus and Copycat Killer both cases connote social chaos, insecurity, and instability.