Titus Andronicus

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by William Shakespeare


Context

Likely the most influential writer in all of English literature and certainly the most important playwright of the English Renaissance, William Shakespeare was born in 1564 in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, England. The son of a successful middle-class glove-maker, Shakespeare attended grammar school, but his formal education proceeded no further. In 1582, he married an older woman, Anne Hathaway, and had three children with her. Around 1590 he left his family behind and traveled to London to work as an actor and playwright. Public and critical success quickly followed, and Shakespeare eventually became the most popular playwright in England and part owner of the Globe Theater. His career bridged the reigns of Elizabeth I (ruled 1558-1603) and James I (ruled 1603-1625); he was a favorite of both monarchs. Indeed, James granted Shakespeare's company the greatest possible compliment by endowing them with the status of king's players. Wealthy and renowned, Shakespeare retired to Stratford, and died in 1616 at the age of fifty-two. At the time of Shakespeare's death, such luminaries as Ben Jonson hailed him as the apogee of Renaissance theatre.

Shakespeare's works were collected and printed in various editions in the century following his death, and by the early eighteenth century his reputation as the greatest poet ever to write in English was well established. The unprecedented admiration garnered by his works led to a fierce curiosity about Shakespeare's life; but the paucity of surviving biographical information has left many details of Shakespeare's personal history shrouded in mystery. Some people have concluded from this fact that Shakespeare's plays in reality were written by someone else--Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford are the two most popular candidates--but the evidence for this claim is overwhelmingly circumstantial, and the theory is not taken seriously by many scholars.

In the absence of definitive proof to the contrary, Shakespeare must be viewed as the author of the 37 plays and 154 sonnets that bear his name. The legacy of this body of work is immense. A number of Shakespeare's plays seem to have transcended even the category of brilliance, becoming so influential as to affect profoundly the course of Western literature and culture ever after.

In 1687, a full hundred years after the first performance of Titus Andronicus, Edward Ravenscroft adapted the play for a different audience. In an introduction to his more refined version, he wrote, "I have been told by some anciently conversant with the stage, that it was not originally his [Shakespeare's], but brought by a private author to be acted, and he only gave some Master-touches to one or two of the principal parts of characters; this I am apt to believe, because 'tis the most incorrect and indigested piece in all his works; it seems rather a heap of Rubbish than a structure."

More interesting than the fact that Ravenscroft thought the play was bad enough to merit "Rubbish" with a capital "r," is the determination of the author to rescue the good name of Shakespeare. This captures the essence of the history of the play Titus Andronicus, in which admirers of Shakespeare venture to deny his authorship of such a bad, probably his worst, play. This debate has carried over into this century. If scholars acknowledge the hand of the great master in this work at all, they usually point to his youth as an excuse for the assumed poverty of its quality (Shakespeare would have been 26 at the time, with Titus Andronicus marking his first attempt at writing tragedy). This controversy rages despite the fact that Meres publicly named Shakespeare as the play's author in Palladis Tamia (1598), and that the play is included in the First Folio.

Perhaps one of the reasons Titus Andronicus has sparked such contention rests on its resistance to easy categorization. Portraying events supposedly derived from the history of the late Roman empire, but which are entirely fictitious, the play clings barely to the genre of both history play and Roman play. It also bears some elements of a tragedy, but can make little claim of offering its audience catharsis. The best description of the play would be that of a revenge tragedy, a genre defined by a hero who doggedly pursues vengeance and perishes at his moment of success. On many counts, Titus Andronicus follows the conventions of the Elizabethan revenge play; yet in its massive excess the play seems less an imitation of the Elizabethan revenge drama than a deliberate parody of that form.

Whether Rubbish or revenge, the play met with great public support upon opening. Books of the Elizabethan era testify to a public audience with particularly bloody tastes, and Titus Andronicus was received with great applause, remaining a favorite for over a decade. Though certainly not one of Shakespeare's top tier plays, the poetry of Titus Andronicus nevertheless displays specifically Shakespearean traits that needed only to mature before forming the foundation of his many masterpieces.

 

Summary

By S. Clarke Hulse's count, Titus Andronicus is a play with "14 killings, 9 of them on stage, 6 severed members, 1 rape (or 2 or 3, depending on how you count), 1 live burial, 1 case of insanity and 1 of cannibalism--an average of 5.2 atrocities per act, or one for every 97 lines." Reviewer Mike Gene Wallace adds, "This is a great play. We're talking fourteen dead bodies, kung-fu, sword-fu, spear-fu, dagger-fu, arrow-fu, pie-fu, animal screams on the soundtrack, heads roll, hands roll, tongues roll, nine and a half quarts of blood, and a record-breaking 94 on the vomit meter." Really, there's not much more to say; that is the essence of the play. Titus Andronicus is a non-stop potboiler catalog of abominations (with the poetry itself counted as a crime by many critics).

Titus Andronicus, Roman general, returns from ten years of war with only four out of twenty-five sons left. He has captured Tamora, Queen of the Goths, her three sons, and Aaron the Moor. In obedience to Roman rituals, he sacrifices her eldest son to his own dead sons, which earns him Tamora's unending hatred and her promise of revenge.

Tamora is made empress by the new emperor Saturninus. To get back at Titus, she schemes with her lover Aaron to have Titus's two sons framed for the murder of Bassianus, the emperor's brother. Titus's sons are beheaded. Unappeased, she urges her sons Chiron and Demetrius to rape Titus's daughter Lavinia, after which they cut off her hands and tongue so she cannot give their crime away. Finally, even Titus's last surviving son Lucius is banished from Rome; he subsequently seeks alliance with the enemy Goths in order to attack Rome. Each new misfortune hits the aged, tired Titus with heavier impact. Eventually, he begins to act oddly and everyone assumes that he is crazy.

Tamora tries to capitalize on his seeming madness by pretending to be the figure of Revenge, come to offer him justice if Titus will only convince Lucius to cease attacking Rome. Titus, having feigned his madness all along, tricks her, captures her sons, kills them, and makes pie out of them. He feeds this pie to their mother in the final scene, after which he kills both Tamora and Lavinia, his own daughter. A rash of killings ensue; the only people left alive are Marcus, Lucius, Young Lucius, and Aaron. Lucius has the unrepentant Aaron buried alive, and Tamora's corpse thrown to the beasts. He becomes the new emperor of Rome.

 

Characters

Titus Andronicus  -  General of Rome and tragic hero of the play. Father of Lavinia and Lucius. Titus has spent the last ten years fighting Rome's enemies and winning honor for his country, yet his heroic deeds have taken so much out of him that he feels incapable of leading his country despite its desire that he be its new emperor. He is first held up as a model of piety for his staunch reverence for traditions, but it is this strict adherence to tradition that causes his enemies to take revenge against him. A Senecan hero, he pursues revenge to the end, and dies in the process.

Tamora  -  Queen of the Goths, mother of Chiron and Demetrius. Though her very first speech shows her to be a caring mother who has an appreciation of the nobility of mercy, Tamora is associated with barbarism, savagery, and unrestrained lasciviousness. Indeed, Tamora exhibits extreme ruthlessness, particularly when she encourages her sons to rape Lavinia, and says that she knows not the meaning of pity. Even though she is opposite in everything to the archetypal victim Lavinia, feminist theorists like to cast her in the position of a victim of a male law of order. In this light, she becomes the dartboard for misogynistic fear of sexual appetite.

Aaron  -  Tamora's Moorish lover. Shakespeare only created four other black characters before the tragic hero Othello, and Aaron is the most substantial of the four. As he himself admits, there is not a crime in Titus in which he has not had a hand. He is practically the engine of action in Act II, bringing Tamora's dream of revenge to reality. This simplistic, depthless portraiture of evil is a descendant of the "Devil" or "Vice" from early Elizabethan morality plays, created only to move the audience to contempt. For that reason, there is little about Aaron to win our sympathy or to even explain the motivation for his evil. His protectiveness of his child presents an interesting contrast in parenthood to Tamora and Titus.

Lavinia -  The only daughter of Titus Andronicus, she spurns Saturninus's offer to make her his empress because she is in love with Bassianus. She is brutally raped and disfigured by Chiron and Demetrius in the forest during the hunt. Thereafter, she is a mute and horrifying presence constantly on stage, complement to her father's loquacious sufferings, and accomplice to his bloody vengeance. Deprived of every means of communication, and robbed of her most precious chastity, she comes across as one of Shakespeare's most incapacitated heroines. Yet, as she is physically pared down, her narrative and thematic importance escalates, drawing our attention to the importance of pantomime on the stage. The rape of Lavinia is undoubtedly the central and most horrific crime of the play, which is why Edward Ravenscroft's adaptation of the play has the alternate name of "The Rape of Lavinia." For this reason, her character invites especially careful scrutiny.

Marcus Andronicus -  Roman Tribune of the People. Brother of Titus Andronicus. Unlike the other Andronici, he never participates in the war. Where everyone else has had a hand in at least one murder or crime, he remains conspicuously removed from the bloodshed. Every time he speaks, he is the sound of reason and calmness, standing in stark contrast to the ravenous and crazed speeches of the other characters.

Saturninus -  The eldest son of the late Emperor of Rome. Titus successfully advocates for him to be the new emperor. However, Saturninus shows no gratitude. He is impatient with the Andronici and would rather have them out of his way; he feels threatened by the genuine honor and people's support that they have won for themselves. He chooses the captive Tamora, Queen of the Goths, for his empress, thereby giving her the power to wreak havoc on Rome and Titus's family.

Bassianus -  The younger brother of Saturninus. It is to him that Lavinia is betrothed. He steals her away when Saturninus wants to make her his empress, which sets into motion the events that lead Titus to kill his own son, and Saturninus to despise the Andronici. He is murdered by Chiron and Demetrius, but Quintus and Martius are framed for his murder, which leads to their beheadings. As the representative of grace and virtue, his failure to become emperor in the first act is the sign of a degenerate Rome.

Lucius -  Titus's only surviving son. He defends his sister, Lavinia, from their father after she runs away with Bassianus. He tries to free his captive brothers Quintus and Martius, for which he is banished from Rome. The people of Rome support him over Saturninus. He is probably the one character to undergo a substantial psychological transformation over the course of the play, moving from bloodthirsty youth to sober leader.

Chiron and Demetrius  -  Two Goth princes. Sons of Tamora. They squabble over who loves Lavinia more, when really they are merely guided by lust. They murder Bassianus and then brutally rape and disfigure Lavinia. They are shown in this play to be nothing more than engines of lust, destruction, and depravity, empty of even the basic wit that makes Aaron a more compelling villain. They are finally killed by Titus, who has their blood and bones made into a pastry to be fed to their mother.

 

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