Titus Andronicus

“Now is a time to storm. Why art thou still?”  Act III, Scene 1

     Sex and violence as entertainment was as popular in the 1590’s as they are today. So when the English theaters re-opened after plague swept though London in 1593, it made proper business sense to offer whatever would bring in the largest crowds possible. Many companies responded by providing revenge plays , old and new, for as long as the public would buy tickets for them. 

     They bought a lot of tickets.

     Thus, Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s contribution and comment on the genre. The Reduced Shakespeare Company refers to “Titus” as “Shakespeare’s brief Tarentino period.”   The result was one of the most popular plays of the 1590’s, one that consistently drew large crowds for two decades and was the first of Shakespeare’s play to be published.

     So why do scholars and critics revile this play?  Because reading “Titus Andronicus”  as a serious tragedy misses the point. It’s not a hard rule, but tragedies seldom include giant vaginas swallowing men to their doom in the second act.  And lines such as:

A goodly lady, trust me; of the hue

That I would choose, were I to choose anew.

can’t be taken seriously because they weren’t intended to be taken seriously.

     Titus Andronicus is a throw away, a sort of Gruesome’s Greatest Hits; it’s a parody of the revenge plays and the people who wrote them.  The reference to Tarentino may get a contemporary laugh, but the more accurate comparison is to the  “Scary Movie” series.  Red flags scream sources, from Aesop and the Bible; from Seneca to Titus Livius (Livy), and Ovid’s “Metamorphosis.”  Also cited are Plutarch, Chaucher, George Peele, Marlowe’s “Jew of Malta” and Kyd’s “Spanish Tragedy,”  along with various myths, anecdotes and wive’s tales.  Not to mention references to “Henry VI, Part 3” “Richard III,” and “The Two Gentlemen of Verona.”

      But these are not sources, so much as reference points, points that audiences of the 1590’s readily recognize and appreciated.  It’s Shakespeare being playful and experimenting with language, stagecraft, and genre. It succeeds as parody by exaggerating what audiences were already familiar with, and fails because parody, by its nature, does not age well.

     Compared to his earlier attempt at parody (The Two Gentlemen of Verona)  “Titus” is better organized, more accessible and much more effective.  It’s not a great play, but it’s better than scholars give it credit for.   

     “Honor,” “Virtue,” and “Justice” are mentioned repeatedly throughout the play-- “honor” is mentioned 34 times in the first act alone-- and Shakespeare devotes the first three acts to explore how these honorable virtues are perverted in order to justify revenge.

     Act One explores the justification of revenge in the name of honor and, for all the formal declamations, the answer is hypocrisy. One minute, Titus bids his latest departed son to join his dead brothers and:

 “There greet in silence as the dead are wont,

And sleep in peace,...”

And the very next Lucious demands that Tamora’s son be sacrificed to appease the silent souls of his brothers. It’s revenge justified by religion. When Titus kills Mutius, another of his sons, it’s in the name of Roman law. Titus won’t allow Mutius to be entombed with his other, more nobly slain sons, because he died in a brawl.  By his own hand.  He eventually relents, but adds:

“Well, Bury him, and bury me the next.”

Titus is no only a hypocrite, but a bit of a Jewish mom.

     In Act Two,  human “Virtue” is reduced to lust.  From Aaron’s wonton desires of the flesh and mischief, to the rape of Lavinia by Demetrius and Chiron, and several references to cuckoldry Shakespeare shows men at their penis-driven worst.  Lavinia is never really a character, but an object, prey for the hunters who speak of her in terms of love, but view her as sport. Can one blame the man-eating vagina?

     Justice, in the form of Judges and Senators, takes the stage at the beginning of Act Three and quickly, silently leaves. It is as blind, deaf, and mute as the gods.  After dedicating his life to the defense of Rome, and losing twenty-one sons to that cause, Titus is left to plead to stones for justice.  Traditionally, the third act culminates in the first climax of the play.  When Aaron tricks him into cutting off his hand to save his sons, Titus readily believes that taking revenge on himself will result in justice.  When he discovers the truth, Titus spends the rest of the play in feigned madness.  He will plead to the gods, conspire against Rome, seek closure through pie making, and slay his daughter. But the delusion that revenge achieves justice is his true madness.

Learning Points:

Turning Point: In traditional tragedy, the hero is a victim of his actions, yet Shakespeare  makes Titus a victim of his own rationale.  He’s a victim not of a character flaw, but a flaw of irrational thinking.  His rhetoric-- the argument that justifies his acton-- denies his humanity.  Titus Andronicus marks a huge change in Shakespeare’s understanding of drama.  He’s no longer interested in the demands of morality plays nor the traditions of tragedy.  From this point on, his interest is in the hows and whys of personal action and thought.    

Character Development: That characters don’t change is a common complaint about “Titus Andronicus”, but possibly a point as well.  Only Young Lucious changes and it’s to learn revenge from his elders.  Had Aaron lived to raise his son, God knows how that child would have turned out. Revenge perverts justice, it’s man playing God.

180 Degrees of Separation: Whatever’s popular, run away from it.  Conventional wisdom is 100% conventional and 0% wisdom.  Your best bet is to explore the opposite direction.

Next: The Taming of the Shrew