Titus Andronicus – A. J. Drake's Shakespeare Site

Act 1, Scene 1 (146-157, Bassianus and Saturninus advance their candidacy to replace their father the departed emperor; Titus enters in triumph with Goth captives and his sons both living and slain; Titus accedes to his sons’ desire to sacrifice Alarbus, the eldest son of the captured Goth Queen Tamora; Titus’s brother Marcus tries to set him up as emperor, but Titus chooses the dead emperor’s eldest son, Saturninus instead. Saturninus chooses Titus’s daughter Lavinia as his empress, but Bassianus absconds with Lavinia (to whom he was already betrothed) with the help of Titus’s own sons. (SYNOPSIS CONTINUES …)

A good starting-point for thinking about Titus Andronicus is T. J. B. Spencer’s often cited observation that the play is “a summary of Roman politics.” He continues, “It is not so much that any particular set of political institutions is assumed in Titus, but rather that it includes all the political institutions that Rome ever had. The author seems anxious, not to get it all right, but to get it all in.” [1] Titus is not really an “historical” play in the usual sense, but we may find that it nonetheless offers an insightful and complex picture of Rome.

The play seems to be set late in the fourth century CE, or a little afterwards, and it depicts a Roman world in which a Goth leader only recently brought to the City in chains is elevated to nearly supreme power, and a valiant “old-style” Roman is crushed by his rigid belief in an ancient code of honor that virtually no-one around him respects. Titus Andronicus may well be “the last Roman.”

In the eventful first scene, Titus, a soldier of forty years’ standing, returns to Rome with his trophy Goths Tamora and her sons, only to be confronted with the bickering of Saturninus and Bassianus over the imperial succession. While Saturninus proclaims his right as the first-born son of the late emperor, Bassianus advances his cause in the name of virtue: “suffer not dishonor to approach / The imperial seat …” (146, 1.1.13-14), he pleads to the Tribunes, Senators, and his own followers. Of course, Bassianus’s claim seems to us the better one, but it cuts against the basic assumptions of an imperial system of inherited rule. Titus is a traditionalist, so he can’t help but choose the dead emperor’s first-born, and unfortunately, that’s the selfish, immature failson Saturninus.

Titus has just returned from ten years of fighting in Rome’s cause, and all ears await his sentence as to who should take the throne. The general’s speech to the assembled Romans is magnificent in its honest reckoning of the losses he has willingly borne for his country, and moving in its attention to the children he has lost: “Titus, unkind and careless of thine own, / Why suffer’st thou thy sons unburied yet, / To hover on the dreadful shore of Styx?” (148, 1.1.89-91) The general is a Roman of the old school, a believer in pietas to family and state.

It’s interesting to note that the exact composition of the gathering to whom Titus speaks is not entirely clear; the language just quoted sounds almost like material for a soliloquy—it’s a remarkably intimate thing for him to say if others are indeed listening.

At his remaining sons’ request, therefore, Titus will sacrifice conquered Tamora’s eldest son. Titus’s sons explain clearly why they want to commit this act: “so the shadows be not unappeased, / Nor we disturbed with prodigies on earth” (148, 1.1.103-104). Titus agrees to this demand without hesitation, but Tamora is quick to see the affair as hypocrisy: “must my sons be slaughtered in the streets / For valiant doings in their country’s cause?” (148, 1.1.115-16) Her sons have only done what Titus’s would do in defense of their homeland.

Tamora’s plea, “Thrice-noble Titus, spare my first-born son” (149, 1.1.123) is revealing in that its numerical quality suggests a world in which everything can be quantified or accounted for: surely, this strange honor code in which Titus believes is expansive enough to allow for generosity towards the eldest son of a valiant, defeated queen! Titus is thrice noble, and ought to be magnanimous in victory. But Titus disagrees: the honor code is strict, and a demand by blood for blood cannot be refused without shame. It would, in fact, constitute an outrage against the memory of Titus’s dead sons. [2]

So Tamora’s individual heartache, her natural appeal as a mother, must be subordinated to Roman ritual: piety must be upheld, and the general tells her to “Patient” (149, 1.1.124) or calm herself while this supposed act of Roman religiosity is accomplished.

Tamora’s denunciation seems appropriate: “Oh, cruel irreligious piety!” (149, 1.1.133) Tamora may be a barbarian queen, but she is no fool. “Barbarism” is a worthy concept in Shakespeare’s play: the powerful Goths, while not being even close to anything like a state of savagery, serve as a ground for the anxieties of a storied, “civilized” people about their relationship to violence, their sense of identity, and the efficacy of their own language. Tamora and her sons both do and do not understand Rome. The question is, how well does Rome understand them?

The aftermath of the deed done by Titus’s sons is announced with the words, “Alarbus’ limbs are lopped / And entrails feed the sacrificing fire, / Whose smoke like incense doth perfume the sky” (149, 1.1.146-48). The alliteration of the first line is deliciously absurd, and lets us in on the comic undertone or quality of this otherwise tragic play: Titus Andronicus has an over-the-top quality, a tendency to revel in its scenes of violence and criminality, that mark it as a fine example—and more to the point, even a parody—of Elizabethan revenge tragedy. [3]

“Shakespeare was young when he wrote Titus,” as a professor of mine used to suggest by way of accounting for the play’s exuberance and outright silliness, [4] but we might as well admit that it’s a masterpiece of its kind. The Elizabethans loved this kind of limb-hacking, blood-spattered spectacle, as the popularity of other plays such as Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy attests. Dexter Morgan and Hannibal Lecter, eat your hearts out!

With Alarbus’ limbs duly lopped, Titus must return to public responsibility. Offered the throne in his own right, he magnanimously turns it down with the utterance, “Give me a staff of honor for mine age, / But not a scepter to control the world” (150, 1.1.201-02). As kingmaker he chooses Saturninus, who promises to wed Lavinia out of gratitude for this service (151, 1.1.241-43).

But Bassianus, with the aid of Titus’s sons, escapes with his beloved Lavinia, to whom he is already betrothed. Titus kills his son Mutius when the latter bars his way in pursuit of the absconders (152, 1.1.293-95), but Saturninus takes the event very badly, and flies into a rage. Almost immediately, he takes Tamora for his empress in place of Lavinia.

The perverse nature of this choice is implied in Tamora’s promise to the young man: “If Saturnine advance the Queen of Goths, / She will a handmaid be to his desires, / A loving nurse, a mother to his youth” (153, 1.1.333-35). Titus has given control of great Rome to a man who seeks a mother in the “barbarian” woman who wants nothing more than to destroy it as a means of revenging her losses in battle and the slaughter of her child.

As empress, Tamora deviously smooths things over for Titus (155, 1.1.430-40), who has been left to lament the betrayal by his sons of the reputation he held dear. As she explains to the inexperienced young emperor, she does this the better to crush Titus and his entire line when Saturninus is secure on the throne: “I’ll find a day to massacre them all / And raze their faction and their family …” (156, 1.1.452-53). And so the act ends with Saturninus’ offer of a double wedding, and Titus’s promise of fine hunting.

Once again, it may be worth noting that speech such as the lines by Tamora quoted just above have an almost soliloquy-like quality; the Queen of Goths is essentially uttering her own originally private grievance in a way that colonizes the will of Saturninus and the Roman state. The personal has become the political in a very destructive way, it seems.

ACT 2

Act 2, Scenes 1-2 (157-60, Aaron the Moor, Tamora’s lover, exults in her success; Aaron quells the fighting between her sons Chiron and Demetrius over Lavinia, and helps them plot to rape her; in Scene 2, the hunting party gets under way.)

Aaron is exultant at Tamora’s advancement because it means great rewards for him, not only in terms of wealth but also personal pride: he will “be bright, and shine in pearl and gold,” but more than that, he will “wanton with this queen” (157, 2.1.19, 21) who promises to be the ruin of the hated Romans and their emperor. Aaron even compares his impressive lover to the ancient semidivine Assyrian ruler Semiramis, whose rule as a female would have been profoundly transgressive within her nation and whose exploits were the subject of an amazing amount of discourse by illustrious ancient authors such as Plutarch, Diodorus Siculus, and Eusebius. [5]

Chiron and Demetrius scheme with Aaron’s aid to ravish Lavinia: says Aaron the strategist, “The woods are ruthless, dreadful, deaf, and dull” (160, 2.1.129), and therefore they can absorb in silence the savage crime these young men desire to commit against Lavinia. They will all conspire with Tamora to refine the plot. It is not the animals in this wood that are vicious—it’s a number of the humans who deserve that title. Scene 2 tells us of the hunting party’s beginning.

Act 2, Scene 3 (161-67, Bassianus and Lavinia discover Tamora and insult her; Aaron brings in Chiron and Demetrius, who kill Bassianus and rape and mutilate Lavinia with Tamora’s approval; Aaron uses a forged letter and a buried bag of gold to dupe Saturninus into arresting Martius and Quintus—who have fallen into the pit where Bassianus’s body lies—for Bassianus’s murder.)

Tamora and Aaron converse in the woods, with Aaron counseling sexual restraint while revenge is yet to be had: “Madam, though Venus govern your desires, / Saturn is dominator over mine” (161, 2.3.30-31). Then Bassianus and Lavinia discover Tamora and insult her at length (162, 2.3.55-87). Aaron brings back Chiron and Demetrius, who kill Bassianus and dump him in a pit.

They then rape and mutilate Lavinia, with Tamora’s explicit and sadistic approval (163, 2.3.114-15). Tamora mocks Lavinia’s appeals to feminine compassion, reminding all present of Titus’s utter lack of compassion for her own heartrending pleas in support of her son (164, 2.3.161-65). She admonishes Chiron and Demetrius, “The worse to her, the better loved of me” (164, 2.3.167). Then Tamora goes off to enjoy herself sexually with Aaron while the deed is done (165, 2.3.190-91).

Saturninus is easily duped by Aaron’s forged letter and planted bag of gold into thinking that Titus’s sons Martius and Quintus are Bassianus’ murderers (167, 2.3.281-85). They are dragged from the pit into which they have fallen and brought to prison. Tamora pretends to Titus that she will yet again assist him (167, 2.3.304-05).

Act 2, Scene 4 (167-68, Marcus finds his ravished and mutilated niece Lavinia in the woods, and likens her to Ovid’s similarly violated Philomel; Marcus determines that he must now inform her father Titus.)

Titus’s brother Marcus finds Lavinia and wonders what has happened. Waxing poetical, he likens the scene to the story of Tereus, Procne, and Philomel: “But sure some Tereus hath deflowered thee …” (168, 2.4.26). Worse yet, he says, the ravishers have intensified the dastardly practice of the original: “he hath cut those pretty fingers off / That could have better sewed than Philomel” (168, 2.4.42-43).

Off they’ll go to afflict Titus with the sight of his ruined daughter, as if he hadn’t suffered enough already. As usual, the reference to suffering is harshly physical: “Come, let us go, and make thy father blind …” (168, 2.4.52).

ACT 3

Act 3, Scene 1 (168-75, Martius and Quintus are led away to their execution; Titus remonstrates with the indifferent Tribunes, and soon beholds the ravished and disfigured Lavinia; Aaron offers to save the condemned sons if one of the free Andronici men chops off his hand; Titus, Lucius, and Marcus vie over who will provide this ransom; Titus wins, but receives from Aaron’s messenger only Quintus and Martius’s heads along with his own severed hand; Titus vows revenge, and orders the now-exiled Lucius to invade Rome with a Goth army.)

Everyone ignores Titus’s self-sacrifice of four decades, and the tribunes he implores are nowhere to be found, so he tells his “sorrows to the stones” instead (169, 3.1.37). His entire world view has crashed, and Rome seems “a wilderness of tigers” (169, 3.1.54) intent on devouring only Titus and his kin. Lucius has been banished for trying to assist his brothers.

At this point, we pity Titus already, but now he is shown Lavinia to top off his grief: “But that which gives my soul the greatest spurn / Is dear Lavinia” (170-71, 3.1.101-02). Of course, pity has its limits when a man insists on serving up puns such as the one Titus offers Lavinia: “what accursèd hand / Hath made thee handless in thy father’s sight?” (170, 3.1.66-67)

Titus’s sacrifice of Tamora’s son in the name of piety now appears worthless since piety is dead in Rome. To be “wondered at in time to come” (171, 3.1.135) for the intensity of his wretchedness now seems appropriate to Titus, and his thoughts turn to what they can do to bring this about, by any means necessary. Here Titus responds to unspeakable pain, both physical and mental. He will soon reach a point at which there are no more tears, only vengeance, but not in the present scene; he is still processing his raw grief.

We might observe here that Shakespeare’s portrait of a Roman man seems on more than one occasion, as here with Titus, to include a paradoxical embrace of qualities which, strictly speaking, ought to be condemned as shockingly un-Roman. This is true of Mark Antony in Antony and Cleopatra, and equally true of Caius Martius in Coriolanus. Antony takes into his Roman self the experience of the Near East, while Martius turns traitor to the City he has come to resent bitterly. So too, Titus the grizzled, upright Roman jettisons his pious beliefs and becomes a devotee of a deeply depraved project of vengeance.

Soon enough, Aaron enters and offers to lend the Andronici a hand—or rather take one—and Titus, who had already thought it appropriate to “chop off” (170, 3.1.72) one of the hands that had defended Rome, falls for this cruel ruse: in spite of all that’s happened, he still thinks that when a man has given his word, honor will bind him to it. Titus’s behavior sounds a lot like the famous definition of insanity as “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” [6]

Aaron’s pitch to any one of the Andronici is, “chop off your hand / And send it to the King” (172, 3.1.153-54). Aaron is, as always, the ultimate stage villain: he glosses his current dirty trick by saying, “Let fools do good and fair men call for grace, / Aaron will have his soul black like his face” (173, 3.1.203-04). Aaron’s cynical, selfish perspective is that ethical codes exist only to get others to do what you want them to do.

But Aaron also pledges allegiance to pure wickedness. As we can see from his exultant comments when he is in great danger later on, he is almost religious in his devotion to evil, or at least to claiming he possesses such devotion. Titus’s rigidity in adhering to old Roman honor and morality has opened a window for Aaron’s excesses, and the man indulges his sadistic brand of individualism when Roman morality breaks down.

A messenger soon undeceives Titus (173, 3.1.233-39) about Aaron’s true intentions, and the absurd spectacle of “thy two sons’ heads, / Thy warlike hand, thy mangled daughter here,” as Marcus describes the sight (174, 3.1.253-54), brings no more weeping from the old man but instead determination to plan the destruction of Tamora and the Emperor: “Why, I have not another tear to shed” (174, 3.1.265). This is a critical Senecan turning point in the play: Titus has pivoted from grief to an icy desire for revenge, and he will not look back. He has faced the worst and mastered his passions.

In the service of this revenge, Lucius is instructed to go to the Goths and raise an army (174, 3.1.284). Titus, Marcus and Lavinia continue the grotesque body parts motif by carting their dismembered kinsmen’s particulars off the stage: “Come, brother, take a head, / And in this hand the other I will bear …” (174, 3.1.278-79). Even Lavinia is asked to pitch in and carry the severed hand of Titus.

*Act 3, Scene 2 (only in 1623 First Folio; our Norton edition is based on Q1; Marcus kills a fly; Titus is angry until he’s told that the fly looks like the Moor, so the killing was revenge; Titus goes off with Lavinia to read “Sad stories.”)

Just when we thought the hand theme couldn’t be more over-the-top, along comes the second scene (at least in the First Folio of 1623), with Titus and family seated at a banquet. When Marcus clumsily blurts out, “Fie, brother, fie, teach her not thus to lay / Such violent hands upon her tender life” (3.2.21-22), Titus responds with the immortal lines, “O, handle not the theme, to talk of hands, / Lest we remember still that we have none” (3.2.29-30).

Titus continues to think on revenge, connecting even Marcus’s killing of a fly to this imperative: the family is not yet so reduced, he says, “But that between us we can kill a fly / That comes in likeness of a coal-black Moor” (3.2.76-77).

Marcus thinks Titus is out of his mind, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. It’s just that by now his overflowing pain and grief have been transformed into a macabre sense of humor. Titus and Lavinia soon go off to read “Sad stories chanced in the times of old” (3.2.82). Titus doesn’t know yet how informative those stories will turn out to be, but Ovid is about to provide some enlightenment about Lavinia’s travails. [7]

ACT 4

Act 4, Scene 1 (175-78, Lavinia uses a stick and Ovid’s tale “Tereus, Procne, and Philomel” in Metamorphoses to reveal the truth about who raped her, spurring Titus’s revenge.)

An excited Lavinia explains what happened to her via Ovid’s tale in the Metamorphoses about Procne, Philomel, and the wicked Thracian King Tereus, which Titus recognizes easily: “This is the tragic tale of Philomel …” (176, 4.1.47), and she writes “Stuprum–Chiron–Demetrius” (177, 4.1.78). Stuprum means rape, as in the Latin phrase, per vim stuprum, “violation by main force.”

Titus says he will be another Lucius Junius Brutus, this time expelling not Tarquins but Goths (177, 4.1.87-94), and he writes a note to be carried along with presents by the boy Lucius to Tamora’s sons at the palace (177, 4.1.113-17).

As for Ovid’s “Tereus, Procne, and Philomela” from Book 6 of The Metamorphoses, [8] many of the details from this story seem to be distributed among the revenging factions of Titus and Tamora—the wooded setting for the rape of Lavinia mirrors the forest setting of the Thracian King Tereus’s rape of his sister-in-law Philomela, and so forth.

The strange disguises that Tamora and her sons put on later (in Act 5, Scene 2) evoke the Bacchanalian deception involved in Procne and Philomela’s ruse against Tereus: he’s served a cannibal pie during the course of a Bacchanalian festival. Ovid’s Latin story is at least as deliciously barbarous—pun intended—in its details as anything Elizabethans such as Thomas Preston (Cambises, 1561) or John Pickering (Horestes, 1567) or Shakespeare himself ever wrote. [9] The same might be said of the Stoic Seneca, author of such bloody plays as Thyestes. [10]

Marcus continues to believe that Titus has gone insane: “Marcus, attend him in his ecstasy” (178, 4.1.125), he says to himself, but it may not be so. Titus’s behavior is so different from what Marcus is used to, perhaps, that he simply can’t process it as other than madness.

Shakespeare has cleverly combined Ovid’s story from The Metamorphoses with the violent foundational myth of the Roman Republic: the rape and suicide of Lucretia. In the momentous tale from Titus Livius’ History of Rome, [11] Lucretia, who has been violated by the lust-inflamed son of Rome’s Etruscan King Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, lets suicide attest to her adherence to the female code of married chastity that preserves dynastic Roman bloodlines.

The matron’s suicide allows her determined husband Collatinus, Lucius Junius Brutus, and others to use her outraged corpse as a prop for the expulsion of Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, thereby paving the way for Rome’s glorious history as a republic and then an empire. Lucretia, more insightful about the severe implications of the rigid Roman honor code than her own husband, provides the blood that spurs Roman valor into throwing off 244 years of Tarquin rule.

Act 4, Scene 2 (178-81, Aaron is learned enough in Latin to scan Titus’s threatening Horatian note to Chiron and Demetrius; Tamora bears Aaron’s child and sends it to him via a nurse, with instructions to destroy it; Aaron fiercely defends the child, even killing the nurse, and arranges for a white infant to be substituted as the emperor’s heir; Aaron then takes his child and seeks safety among the Goths.)

Titus’s note to Chiron and Demetrius reads “Integer vitae, scelerisque purus, / Non eget Mauri jaculis, nec arcu” (178, 4.2.20-21; [the man who’s] upright in his life and free of vices has no need of Moorish spears or bows”). [12] But the boys aren’t good enough readers of Horace’s Odes to realize that Titus knows they conspired with the Moor. Aaron is clearly out for himself—he doesn’t even tell Tamora about this new information.

The Empress delivers a child by Aaron, who protects his newborn son fiercely (180, 4.2.86-104) when Chiron and Demetrius think to kill the infant. Aaron bears him away to the Goths with the intention of raising the child as a warrior. He then ruthlessly kills the Nurse (181, 4.2.144-45, stage dir.), horrifying even the wicked sons of Tamora. A countryman’s fair-skinned baby will be substituted and presented as Saturninus’ legitimate heir.

What is the child to Aaron? He makes the point succinctly: “My mistress is my mistress, this myself … / … / This before all the world do I prefer” (180, 4.2.106-08). Rome and its politics can go hang; Aaron’s main concern is to take the portion of immortality that a child of one’s own promises.

Act 4, Scene 3 (182-84, Titus aims his arrows for justice to heaven, at Saturninus’ palace; Titus espies a rustic and gives the man a letter for Saturninus to read at court.)

Titus’s arrows bear messages soliciting the gods for justice nowhere to be found on earth: “sith there’s no justice in earth nor hell, / We will solicit heaven and move the gods …” (183, 4.3.50-51). The whole scene seems to show him both unhinged and yet canny: he tells Publius and Sempronius, “when you come to Pluto’s region, / I pray you deliver him this petition” (182, 4.3.13-14). His stratagem, though, is to shoot arrows towards Saturninus’ palace, and thereby to unsettle the young Emperor. Titus also pays a rustic or “clown” to present Saturninus with a short speech and some pigeons (183-84, 4.3.78-118).

All the same, perhaps we shouldn’t dismiss the notion that there’s something insane about Titus’s behavior all through the play: if, as already mentioned, insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results, Titus is at times close to a madman: he keeps supposing that if somebody makes a promise, it must be kept. And if somebody is legally entitled to an office, he’ll do his duty rather than taking advantage of the situation. Such persistence in doing the honorable thing would make sense in a normal setting, but in decadent Rome it can only destroy the person who practices it.

Act 4, Scene 4 (184-87, Saturninus rages at Titus over the arrow-messages and the letter, and orders the messenger killed; Saturninus, frightened of Lucius and his approaching Goths, sends word that he wants to meet him at Titus’s place; Tamora tries to entice Titus to get Lucius to end his advance on Rome.)

Saturninus is enraged in audience with the Senate over Titus’s “blazoning our unjustice everywhere” (185, 4.4.18), and then has the clown hanged after reading the letter Titus wrote. Tamora thinks she has at last driven Titus off the deep end: “Titus, I have touched thee to the quick” (185, 4.4.36).

The Emperor is frightened upon hearing that Lucius is headed for Rome with an army of Goths (186, 4.4.68-72), but he misunderstands Titus’s motive, which is revenge of a sort not reducible to politics. Titus doesn’t want to rule Rome—what good would that do his battered spirit and maimed body now? Tamora promises to soothe Titus’s anger, and thereby get him to separate Lucius from his invading force: “I will enchant the old Andronicus …” (186, 5.1.88; see 88-92).

ACT 5

Act 5, Scene 1 (187-90, The Goths agree to follow Lucius; Aaron is captured by Lucius’s army, and, having extracted a promise to save his baby, exults in his many villainies; Lucius agrees to meet Saturninus at the Andronici home.)

The Goths swear loyalty to Lucius: “Be bold in us. We’ll follow where thou lead’st …” (187, 5.1.13). Aaron, captured with his child, is brought in. He did not know about this new development regarding the Goths. Lucius threatens the child, so Aaron promises to reveal everything about his plots with Tamora and her sons, but Lucius must swear by the Christian god—for it seems that’s what Aaron attributes to Lucius by way of faith, based on his reference to Lucius’ ritualistic “popish tricks” (188, 5.1.76; see 74-85).

This is obviously a strange moment in the play since the ritual sacrifice in Act 1 has absolutely nothing to do with Christianity or, indeed, with properly pagan Roman ritual. Well, all the plotting Aaron recounts (188-89, 5.1.87-120)—his getting a child by Tamora, the murder of Bassianus and the rape and mutilation of Lavinia that he inspired Chiron and Demetrius to do, and his own gleefully fraudulent taking of Titus’s hand—is news to Lucius because he left to raise an army of Goths before Lavinia revealed what had happened to her and who did it.

When asked if he’s sorry, Aaron outdoes himself with a flourish of supervillain rhetoric (189, 5.1.124-44). It would be hard to top the following claim for sheer malice: “Oft have I digged up dead men from their graves / And set them upright at their dear friends’ door …” (189, 5.1.135-36; see 124-44). One can almost imagine this rascal serving up franchises of “Aaron’s Evil Deeds, Inc.,” so busy does he boast himself to be in the plotting and doing of depraved acts.

Aaron seems dedicated not so much to the kind of violence that furthers his self-interest or ambition but rather to outrages that allow him to vent his longstanding hatred for the Romans. In the outrageous line quoted above, friendship is the target of Aaron’s alleged stratagem, and readers of classical history and culture will know that loyalty in the cause of amicitia was among the primary Roman virtues. More than that, Aaron asserts a fierce liberty in the face of a Roman culture that depends upon the ties that bind people: ties of memory, friendship, and honor.

To round off the scene, Lucius hears that Saturninus “craves a parley at your father’s house” (190, 5.1.159), and agrees to hear the emperor out if proper pledges be given.

Act 5, Scene 2 (190-94, Tamora appears to Titus disguised as “Revenge,” and promises to assist him by inviting Saturninus and Tamora to a dinner if he will get Lucius to show up; Titus demands that “Rape” and “Murder”—Chiron and Demetrius, that is—stay with him at his home until “Revenge” returns; he slaughters both of the boys, explaining to them as he does so that he will mingle their blood with their ground bones to make the filling for a pie that will be fed to Tamora and Saturninus.)

Tamora and sons show up at Titus’s place dressed as “Revenge,” “Murder,” and “Rapine” (190-91, 5.2.1-69). He doesn’t believe them, but they consider him mad in spite of the clues he lets slip. “Revenge” wants Titus to send for Lucius, and promises that when they are all at a banquet at Titus’s home, she will reel in Tamora, Chiron, Demetrius, the Emperor and any other foes so that he may take revenge upon them (192, 5.2.115-20).

Titus insists that Rapine and Murder stay with him (193, 5.2.134) and then kills them, though not before he fully informs them that they are literally on the banquet menu: “Hark, wretches, how I mean to martyr you. / … / “… I will grind your bones to dust, / And with your blood and it I’ll make a paste …” (194, 5.2.179, 185-86). Like the Thracian King Tereus in the legend Ovid recounts, Tamora will first “swallow her own increase” and then be made to know that she has done it. (194, 5.2.190)

Act 5, Scene 3 (194-98, Titus serves the pie as planned, and kills the ruined Lavinia; Titus taunts Tamora with what her sons have done, reveals where they are now—in the pie—and stabs her to death; Saturninus kills Titus, and Lucius kills him; Marcus and Lucius address the Roman people, and Lucius becomes emperor; Aaron is partially buried alive and condemned to starve; Tamora’s corpse will be fed to the scavenger birds; Marcus, Lucius, and Young Lucius grieve the death of Titus.

Titus enters dressed as a cook. The table is set and dinner is served (195, 5.3.25ff). Titus asks Saturninus if Virginius (a decemvir from 451-449 BCE) [13] was right to kill his daughter for chastity’s sake (195, 5.3.35-38). As the story goes, Appius had used legal trickery in an attempt to force himself on Virginius’s daughter, claiming that she was actually his slave; Virginius, disguised as a slave, killed her just after Appius’s co-conspirator Marcus Claudius judged in favor of Appius. Titus then kills Lavinia, saying “Die, die, Lavinia, and thy shame with thee,” explaining to all present that Chiron and Demetrius had ravished her (195, 5.3.45ff).

Asked where these two ruffians are, he informs Tamora and Saturninus with an unforgettably gleeful rhyme: “Why, there they are, both bakèd in this pie / Whereof their mother daintily hath fed, / Eating the flesh that she herself hath bred” (196, 5.3.59-61). Titus immediately stabs Tamora, and Saturninus kills him, whereupon Lucius kills Saturninus (196, 5.3.65).

Aemilius asks for a full account of all the misdeeds that have occurred, and receives it from Lucius (196-97, 5.3.95-107), who is chosen emperor. Marcus asks all assembled if the Andronici have done wrong in exacting revenge; if they have, he offers that “The poor remainder of Andronici / Will hand in hand all headlong hurl ourselves …” (197, 5.3.130-31). But no such call is made.

Aaron is carried in and judgment is sought against him (198, 5.3.175-77). He is sentenced to starve while buried “breast-deep in earth” (198, 5.3.178), which seems like a spiteful way of denying him the sustenance that cannot be denied his child. Still, Aaron maintains his standing as the play’s most remorseless evildoer: “If one good deed in all my life I did, / I do repent it from my very soul” (198, 5.3.188-89). [14] At least he’s consistent.

The savage irony of this punishment is that, as mentioned earlier, Aaron had set himself up as a free spirit, unbound and untouched by Roman customs or values. The Emperor will be properly buried, but Aaron will be pinned down to this lean fate and “that ravenous tiger, Tamora” (198, 5.3.194) will feast the birds.

All in all, the play is a delightfully outrageous, bloody instance of Elizabethan revenge tragedy in the tradition of Seneca and Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, in which the protagonist Hieronymo seeks wild, violent justice for the vengeful murder of his son. [15] Melodramatic as it may seem, Kyd’s early revenge tragedy is serious and philosophical. It considers life’s great questions, above all what constitutes justice in a wicked world, and is at least in that regard perhaps worthy of comparison with similar efforts by Aeschylus and Sophocles.

Shakespeare’s play is sometimes dismissed as frivolous, and of course it isn’t exactly the metadramatic extravaganza that is Hamlet, but it has a serious dimension that repays study. Titus is no mere villain, and neither is Tamora. Only Aaron seems to be a thoroughgoing dastard, with Tamora’s foolish sons coming in a distant second—they lack Aaron’s cunning.

Shakespeare’s genius leads him to employ the Romans versus Goths theme in a manner that confounds any simple opposition between Roman and Goth. Titus turns out to be more of a Goth than we might have thought: excessive, bloody, and barbarous in his revenge. Tamora is more than a cardboard or stage barbarian; her motive for revenge is at least legitimate, and she shows herself a skilled manipulator of Roman politics. In a sense, then, she is at much Roman as Goth.

Aaron’s race adds yet another perspective on the Goth/Roman opposition: it’s true that the “villain plot” he drives sets itself up against the twin revenge plots of Titus and Tamora and in part displays the man’s dedication to wickedness, but Aaron shows considerable loyalty to his child as the image of himself, and exults in his blackness.

Moreover, while Shakespeare may not be subjecting the revenge code to the kind of scrutiny it receives in Hamlet (where it’s understood that revenge is against God’s law), he seems quite interested in the complexities of Roman honor. The allusions he makes to the Lucretia story from Livy’s History of Rome and to the Philomela tale from Ovid’s Metamorphoses allow him to explore the significance of those key Roman myths.

What is the play suggesting about moral codes? Perhaps that people must live by them and within them, but also that they must not be imprisoned by them. Rigidity, failure to reflect on one’s values, allows cynicism and outrage to flourish: extremes beget counter-extremes. Titus is an “honorable man,” to be sure, but the play as a whole keeps reiterating that claim until the actions that instantiate it lead to a “Mark Antony effect”: by the fourth and fifth acts, what’s needed—and supplied—isn’t more old-fashioned honor but a plan for revenge against the barbarous Goths and Moors who have taken advantage of Titus’s stiff morality. [16]

What of the historical significance of Shakespeare’s representation of Rome? Julie Taymor’s 2000 production Titus sets the play in a neo-fascist Italy, with its futuristic architecture and art ironically looking back to the age of Mussolini, il Duce. Taymor’s choice makes sense because the 1920’s-40’s dictator and Hitler ally Benito Mussolini appropriated the ancient Roman symbols of power and tried to turn Italy into an empire, even invading Ethiopia.

Even in ancient times, the image of Rome in its imperial phase was due at least partly to the well-oiled propaganda machine of Augustus Caesar and the wisest of those who followed him as rulers. Augustus promoted the idea that Rome’s anachronistic republican values were still operative, even though by his day, such values were probably more of a fashion statement than anything else. There has always been a strong element of “self-fashioning” [17] in Rome and Italy’s presentation of itself to the rest of the world, and that tendency is something that Shakespeare seems to have picked up on when he turned to writing plays set in Italy.

By Titus’s era, his Rome no longer exists, in spite of his stubborn (if stylized) adherence to it. Titus’s stylization, its earnestness aside, is itself decadent and not much more than an anachronistic fashion. Of course, fashion statements, whether sincere or not, can have political implications and reflect political facts on the ground. Perhaps Shakespeare would praise Taymor’s concentration on the role of fabrication and stylistic borrowing and recycling in politics and history, with the definition of “reality” as consisting significantly (though not necessarily entirely) in a people’s perception of themselves rather than being reducible to some external standard.

Taymor’s 2000 film production Titus ends by opening out onto the future; Aaron’s barbarian child seems the victor, the one who will inherit the time beyond the play’s frame. In this way, Taymor’s version takes up a significant attitude towards the pageant of destruction and creation, struggle and lapse, memory and loss that we call history.

Titus Andronicus revels in violence, but the celebration is a response to the pain of life, a response to outrage and unfairness and to the tragic dimension of life: the world and human desire do not run parallel or accord with each other. We may remember the scene in Martin Scorsese’s film Taxi Driver where the antihero Travis Bickle forces himself to hold his hand over an open flame for as long as he can. [18] This sort of grim endurance is the stuff of Senecan revenge tragedy, to which we should add a big heap of gallows humor and high-impact imagery. [19]

Shakespeare’s adaptation of the revenge tradition may amount to a surprisingly sophisticated protest with regard to the human condition in all its rawness and cruelty. Some modern people’s sensibilities may be too delicate to welcome Elizabethan-Jacobean revenge tragedy, but the plays themselves are serious efforts in the tragic and philosophical mode, with the aim being to explore the limits of pain and injustice, the better to inure an audience to its own sufferings without resorting to despair. Titus Andronicus may substantially parodic on its genre, but that does not disqualify it as deserving of serious consideration in the philosophical tradition allied with revenge fiction.

Edition. Greenblatt, Stephen et al., editors. The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies + Digital Edition. 3rd ed. W. W. Norton, 2016. ISBN-13: 978-0-393-93860-9.

ENDNOTES

*To return to exact part of the text referenced by the endnotes below, left-click on the endnote’s numbered link. By contrast, the blue scroll-up button at the bottom right of the page returns to the top of the document.

[1] Spencer, T. J. B. William Shakespeare: the Roman Plays: Titus Andronicus; Julius Caesar; Antony and Cleopatra; Coriolanus. Longman, rev. ed. 1966.

[2] It is hardly plausible that the Romans would have practiced human sacrifice at such a late date in their history as Shakespeare’s play seems to be set, but this is the sort of transhistorical mingling and capture that T. J. B. Spencer’s remark, quoted just above, refers to.

[3] In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Riverhead Books, 1998, Harold Bloom deftly makes the point that Titus Andronicus is only a “bad” play if we insist that it must be taken as grim, straight-faced tragedy, when it is better understood as a sharp piece of parodic one-upmanship on Shakespeare’s part in relation to Kyd, Marlowe, and probably other Elizabethan playwrights. See the essay on Titus Andronicus, pp. 77-86.

[4] There are approximately 217 references to body parts in Titus Andronicus—surely no accident.

[5] On Semiramis, see https://www.worldhistory.org/Semiramis/. (Accessed 7/21/2024.)

[6] This witticism is often attributed to Albert Einstein, whether accurately or otherwise.

[7] For this scene, see pp. 649-670, Titus Andronicus, of the Folger Shakespeare Library’s 1623 Folio copy.

[8] Ovid. Metamorphoses, 1567 Arthur Golding trans. (Perseus).

[9] Preston, Thomas. Cambises. (circa 1570, EEBO2 U-Mich.) John Pickering. Horestes. (1567, sourcetext.com.)

[10] Seneca. Seneca’s Tragedies. (Gutenberg e-text.)

[11] Titus Livius, History of Rome, Bk. 1, Chs. 57-60. From The History of Rome, Vol. I, Titus Livius. Editor Ernest Rhys. Trans. Rev. Canon Roberts. Everyman’s Library. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1912. For an online edition, see History of Rome Books 1-8. (Gutenberg e-text.)

[12] Horace, Odes. (Gutenberg e-text.)

[13] Titus Livius. History of Rome, Bk. 3, Ch. 44. History of Rome Books 1-8. (Gutenberg e-text.)

[14] In Julie Taymor’s 2006 film adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, called simply Titus, Aaron’s child is also brought in with him.

[15] Kyd, Thomas. The Spanish Tragedy. (Gutenberg e-text.)

[16] With regard to Antony’s famous speech against the conspirators who killed Caesar, see Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. In The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, 3rd ed. 288-343. The speech may be located at 320-24, 3.2.71-259.

[17] See Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. U of Chicago Press, 1980.

[18] Taxi Driver. Dir. Martin Scorsese, 1976.

[19] As Muriel Bradbrook would suggest, the Elizabethans valued imagery and direct moral statement over narrative and characterization. See Bradbrook, Muriel. Muriel Bradbrook on Shakespeare. Barnes & Noble, 1984.

Commentaries onShakespeare’s Tragedies

ACT 1

ACT 2

ACT 3

ACT 4

ACT 5

ENDNOTES

Commentaries on
Shakespeare’s Tragedies