Marjorie Garber on Titus Andronicus

Many of you probably already know that Titus Andronicus is the one I like the least among Shakespeare’s plays (I would, in fact, go as far as disregarding the opinions of anyone who calls it their favourite Shakespeare—I mean, really?). After Seneca, I should perhaps read the most Senecan of Shakespeare’s plays but don’t want to—could you blame me?—so I read Marjorie Garber’s essay about it in Shakespeare After All. 

As usual, she’s very good. 

“SATURNINUS Thanks, noble Titus, father of my life.

How proud I am of thee and of thy gifts

Rome shall record.—And when I do forget

The least of these unspeakable deserts,

Romans, forget your fealty to me.” 

(Act 1 scene 1) 

Garber makes an interesting point: 

“… at this point in the play, words like ‘headless’ and ‘unspeakable’ are metaphors, and metaphors only, parts of the ordinary language of imagery with which we ornament our daily conversation. Before long, when the play’s action turns to tragedy, these dead or sleeping metaphors will come to grisly life, with famous (or notorious) stage directions like ‘Enter a Messenger with two heads and a hand’ (3.1.233).” 

Every word counts.  

She also refers to the traditional image of the body politic—the emperor is the head, the ministers and dependents are limbs, etc.—and says: 

“…. this apparently conventional metaphor will take off, will virtually explode into a nightmare of literalization, once the protagonist makes a bad choice. […] Titus’s refusal to be the ‘head’ leads, inexorably, to a set of stage directions in which two of his sons are beheaded, his daughter’s hands and tongue are brutally removed, and he himself is tricked into asking Aaron to help him chop off his own hand.” 

Later she says: 

“The ill-assorted body parts—decapitated heads in the two elder brothers’ hands, a hand in Lavinia’s mouth—are a speaking picture of the breakdown of the body politic.” 

She quotes Titus saying to Aaron the Moor “Lend me thy hand, and I will give thee mine”, saying: 

“Again the literalizing of language that is conventionally figurative (to lend a hand; to give one’s hand) adds to the Grand Guignol quality of the scene, but also to its powerful point: nothing is merely a figure, especially on the stage. Poetry and language are deadly earnest.” 

I don’t have anything to say, so I’m just going to quote Marjorie Garber: 

“Later Shakespearean tragedies, though they contain key moments of unspeakable bodily violation (the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear; the massacre of Macduff’s wife and children in Macbeth), often tend to translate and internalize such physical degradations as metaphors, rendering them metaphysical (‘filial ingratitude/ Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand/ For lifting food to’t?’ [Lear 3.4.14-16]). But Titus Andronicus is in a way the radical—the root—of Shakespearean tragedy, the dreamscape or nightmare world laid out for all to see, not disguised by a retreat into metaphor.” 

What do you think?