Titus Andronicus: one of Shakespeare’s weakest plays, or a misunderstood play?

1/ First, let’s get the who’s who questions out of the way. 

Saturninus is son to the late Emperor of Rome, afterwards Emperor. 

Bassianus is his younger brother.  

Titus Andronicus is a noble Roman. He has a brother called Marcus, a tribune. Marcus has a son called Publius. 

At the beginning of the play, Titus has lost 21 sons for Rome, and his 4 surviving sons are Lucius, Quintus, Martius, and Mutius. Titus also has a daughter named Lavinia, who marries Bassianus. 

Tamora is the Queen of Goths (this is a Germanic tribe, not the goth subculture). At the beginning of the play, she is one of Titus’s prisoners, but Saturninus marries her (out of lust?) and makes her the new Empress. She however has an affair with Aaron, a Moor. 

Tamora has 3 sons: Alarbus, Demetrius, and Chiron.  

And other characters. 

2/ Titus Andronicus has the reputation as one of Shakespeare’s worst plays. The first impression is that that’s correct, in terms of language.  

Look, for example, at Titus’s speech to his dead sons: 

“TITUS […] There greet in silence, as the dead are wont, 

And sleep in peace, slain in your country’s wars! 

O sacred receptacle of my joys, 

Sweet cell of virtues and nobility, 

How many sons hast thou of mine in store, 

That thou wilt never render to me more!” 

(Act 1 scene 1)  

I know I’m being unfair and unreasonable, but it’s hard to look at that without thinking of the “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun” speech in Cymbeline. 

Or later, when Tamora’s son Demetrius and Chiron fight over Lavinia (who isn’t even single) and Aaron asks how they intend to “achieve” her, this is the response: 

“DEMETRIUS Why makes thou it so strange? 

She is a woman, therefore may be wooed; 

She is a woman, therefore may be won; 

She is Lavinia, therefore must be loved. 

What, man! More water glideth by the mill 

Than wots the miller of, and easy it is 

Of a cut loaf to steal a shive, we know: 

Though Bassianus be the Emperor’s brother, 

Better than he have won Vulcan’s badge.” 

(Act 2 scene 1) 

(Vulcan’s badge is the horns of cuckoldry, as Vulcan’s wife, Venus, deceives him with Mars). 

The passage makes me think of Iachimo in Cymbeline in its misogyny, but the language is much, much inferior. I couldn’t help thinking, is this really Shakespeare? 

But let’s not think of the late plays, when Shakespeare’s at the peak of his career. Even if you compare it to some relatively early plays such as Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Romeo and Juliet, the exuberance of language in these plays makes the language in Titus Andronicus appear quite coarse and simple. Anyone who names it as their favourite Shakespeare play is just a contrarian.

The opening scene is quite ridiculous. The only thing of interest is that it makes me think of King Lear, partly because of Titus’s blindness; Tamora’s calculating mind makes me think of Lady Macbeth, Goneril, and Regan; and Aaron seems to be a proto-Iago. 

Once in a while, there’s a curious passage. 

“LAVINIA Under your patience, gentle Empress, 

’Tis thought you have a goodly gift in horning, 

And to be doubted that your Moor and you 

Are singled forth to try experiments: 

Jove shield your husband from his hounds today! 

’Tis pity they should take him for a stag.” 

(Act 2 scene 3) 

That is when she and Bassianus catch Tamora and Aaron together—isn’t that very coarse for a young lady? 

“LAVINIA And, being intercepted in your sport, 

Great reason that my noble lord be rated 

For sauciness. I pray you, let us hence, 

And let her joy her raven-colored love; 

This valley fits the purpose passing well.” 

(ibid.) 

That’s coarse, no? 

This is also strange, when Aaron leads Titus’s sons Quintus and Martius to the pit: 

“QUINTUS […] What subtle hole is this,

Whose mouth is covered with rude-growing briers, 

Upon whose leaves are drops of new-shed blood

As fresh as morning dew distilled on flowers?...” 

(ibid.) 

“As fresh as morning dew distilled on flowers” is a strange comparison for blood. But look again—that is clearly a sexual image, that is Lear’s sulphurous pit. 

As I read more, I refuse to accept Titus Andronicus as a straight tragedy—it can’t be—if it’s indeed a Shakespeare play, it must either be a black comedy or a parody. Why? Look at the moment Quintus asks Martius, who has fallen into the pit, how he recognises Bassianus’s body if it’s so dark down there:  

“MARTIUS Upon his bloody finger he doth wear 

A precious ring that lightens all this hole, 

Which, like a taper in some monument, 

Doth shine upon the dead man’s earthy cheeks, 

And shows the ragged entrails of this pit: 

So pale did shine the moon on Pyramus,

When he by night lay bathed in maiden blood…” 

(ibid.) 

Surely Shakespeare can’t be serious! 

The scene of Titus meeting his daughter Lavinia after the rape however is sad. 

3/ I complained, but once in a while there’s an interesting line. 

“TITUS When will this fearful slumber have an end?” 

(Act 3 scene 1) 

This speech is also interesting: 

“TITUS […] Therefore I tell my sorrows to the stones, 

Who though they cannot answer my distress, 

Yet in some sort they are better than the tribunes, 

For that they will not intercept my tale: 

When I do weep they humbly at my feet 

Receive my tears and seem to weep with me; 

And were they but attirèd in grave weeds, 

Rome could afford no tribunes like to these.

A stone is soft as wax, tribunes more hard than stones: 

A stone is silent and offendeth not,

And tribunes with their tongues doom men to death…” 

(ibid.) 

In the following scene, Titus chides his brother Marcus for killing a fly, saying “How, if that fly had a father and mother!”, but immediately changes his mind and strikes at the fly because of its likeness to “a coal-black Moor”.  

“MARCUS Alas, poor man! Grief has so wrought on him, 

He takes false shadows for true substances.” 

(Act 3 scene 2) 

That’s a good line, but when I look at the scene again, a question arises: is Shakespeare serious, depicting Titus’s descent into madness (which prefigures King Lear), or is he parodying something in contemporary revenge plays and having a laugh? Is the detail of the fly ridiculous because the play’s one of the sins of Shakespeare’s youth (to steal William Hazlitt’s phrase), or because it’s deliberate mockery? 

It is hard to know what to do with Titus Andronicus, as some parts seem serious and some are just grotesque. Lavinia, after the rape, also loses her tongue and hands so she can’t identify the rapists. Two of Titus’s sons are wrongfully condemned to death for killing Bassianus; the remaining one is banished; and Titus is tricked by Aaron to have his hand chopped off and sent to Saturninus in the hope of exchanging it for his sons’ lives, only to see his hand sent back to him in scorn together with the heads of his sons. These are horrific scenes—are the horrors and savagery more like King Lear, or more like The Jew of Malta? I have no idea. But then comes this line: 

“TITUS […] And Lavinia, thou shalt be employed in these arms, 

Bear thou my hand, sweet wench, between thy teeth…” 

(Act 3 scene 1) 

That’s just ludicrous. The editor of my Everyman copy says that perhaps Shakespeare intended to delete “teeth” from his manuscript and substituted “arms” above it, then the compositor mistakenly took “arms” to be part of the previous line and changed “employed in this” to “employed in these arms”, but even if that were the case, the image of the father telling his handless daughter to carry his hand is quite absurd. And later, he says to her: 

“TITUS […] When thy poor heart beats with outrageous beating, 

Thou canst not strike it thus to make it still. 

Wound it with sighing, girl, kill it with groans; 

Or get some little knife between thy teeth, 

And just against thy heart make thou a hole…” 

(Act 3 scene 2) 

Here is another line of Titus telling Lavinia to do something with her teeth. I can’t take the play seriously—but is it meant to be? 

4/ Everything can be found in Shakespeare. 

“AARON Villain, I have done thy mother.” 

(Act 4 scene 2) 

HAHAHAHA. 

Even though there’s much absurdity, there’s much more sense in Titus Andronicus than in Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. I also enjoy it a lot more. The characters are more individualised, and overall, more believable. 

Just compare the two villains Aaron and Tamora to Marlowe’s Barabas. 

Tamora is motivated by revenge and the sense of humiliation, as she was the Queen of Goths and had to kneel and beg for her son’s life, in vain. She also has to be more calculating with Saturninus because she’s an outsider. Similarly, her sons Demetrius and Chiron are motivated by revenge, and lust. 

Aaron is more like Iago in his motiveless malignity (to use Coleridge’s phrase). 

“AARON […] I played the cheater for thy father’s hand, 

And when I had it drew myself apart, 

And almost broke my heart with extreme laughter. 

I pried me through the crevice of a wall, 

When for his hand he had his two sons’ heads; 

Beheld his tears and laughed so heartily 

That both mine eyes were rainy like to his…” 

(Act 5 scene 1) 

What a sociopath. He also makes me think of Goneril and Regan—they’re evil just because they’re evil. But Aaron is not a two-dimensional villain with nothing but hate in his heart: there’s also love, for Tamora and their child. Barabas in contrast kills the man his daughter loves, and later kills her—there is no humanity in Barabas, no love but the love of gold and ducats.  

Shakespeare also gives him some thought-provoking lines: 

“AARON Zounds, ye whore! Is black so base a hue?...” 

(Act 4 scene 2) 

Later, to Demetrius and Chiron:

“AARON […] What, what, ye sanguine, shallow-hearted boys! 

Ye white-limed walls! Ye alehouse painted signs! 

Coal-black is better than another hue, 

In that it scorns to bear another hue; 

For all the water in the ocean

Can never turn the swan’s black legs to white, 

Although she lave them hourly in the flood…” 

(ibid.) 

Shakespeare must have thought about Aaron when he decided to write Othello. 

 

5/ I like that the characters in Titus Andronicus mention Hector, Brutus, and Coriolanus, about whom Shakespeare wrote in later plays. 

It also amuses me that there is disguise, as in almost every other Shakespeare play, but it’s the only play in which the disguise is so bad that the person meant to be tricked easily sees through it. It’s almost like Shakespeare is having a laugh, even if in later plays, he constantly uses the disguise plot device. 

6/ When I was reading the ending, my reaction was: what the fuck is going on? 

Is Titus Andronicus a serious tragedy? A black comedy? A parody? It should be noted that most of the most graphic and violent images in the play are classical allusions: they come from Ovid, or Seneca, or the story of Virginius. 

One thing I can say is that, whatever Shakespeare’s intentions for the play as a whole, he raises some interesting questions about the cycle of revenge. Titus demands the sacrifice of Tamora’s eldest son for the loss of his own sons in battle, then Tamora takes revenge, then Titus takes revenge, then what? They all kill each other in the end, but Lavinia, who has had nothing to do with any of it, also ends up dead. And even with the new Emperor, there is a sense of uncertainty about the future of Rome.