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

Act 1, Scene 1 (146-157, Bassianus and Saturninus advance their candidacy to replace the departed emperor; Titus enters with Goth captives and his sons both living and slain; Titus accedes to his sons’ desire to sacrifice Alarbus, Queen Tamora’s eldest son; Marcus offers Titus the imperial title, but Titus chooses Saturninus; Saturninus chooses Lavinia as his empress, but Bassianus absconds with Lavinia, helped by Titus’s sons; Titus kills Mutius for this offense; Saturninus replaces Lavinia with Tamora; Titus grudgingly allows Mutius to be buried; Tamora advises Saturninus to forgive Titus; Titus gratefully invites the royal couple to a hunt.)

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 a historical play in the usual sense, but it nonetheless offers an insightfully layered and complex picture of Rome that may do the great city more justice than some factual histories.

According to the Norton Shakespeare’s editor, Titus Andronicus is set in the fourth century CE, and it depicts a Roman world in which Tamora, a Goth queen only recently brought to the city in chains, is elevated to supreme power alongside the new emperor. [2] A valiant “old-guard” Roman, general Titus Andronicus, is first crushed by his rigid belief in an ancient code of honor that almost nobody else respects, and then spurred to a revenge worthy of the play’s so-called barbarians themselves. Titus Andronicus may well be “the last Roman.”

He may also be the “Roman” who shows us how complicated and cosmopolitan that famous appellation really is. In her introduction to Titus Andronicus, Norton editor Katharine Eisaman Maus observes shrewdly that the temporal setting Shakespeare chose underscores the impermanence and instability of Rome: Early Modern audiences would have known that the great empire’s collapse followed shortly thereafter (Introduction, 138).

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.

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 feels obligated to choose the dead emperor’s first-born, and unfortunately, that’s the selfish, immature failson Saturninus. Between them, Bassianus and Saturninus play out the dilemma of monarchical rule, which is that it often pits virtue and talent against mere entitlement and dishonest scheming. [3]

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 heroic 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) Titus 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 listening.

By request of his remaining sons, 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 that Titus believes in is expansive enough to allow for generosity towards the eldest son of a valiant, defeated queen! Titus is thrice noble, so he ought to be magnanimous in victory. But Titus disagrees: the honor code is strict, and the demand of blood for blood cannot be refused without shame. It would, in fact, constitute an outrage against the memory of Titus’s dead sons. [4]

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

Tamora’s denunciation seems appropriate, and she spits, “Oh, cruel irreligious piety!” (149, 1.1.133). She 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 close to anything like a state of savagery, nonetheless serve as a ground for the anxieties of the Romans—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, and itself?

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, 1.1.146-148). The alliteration of the first line is deliciously absurd, and lets us in on the comic dimension of this otherwise tragic play: Titus Andronicus has an over-the-top feel, 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 tragedies that were already based on the gobsmackingly violent revenge plays of the Roman author Seneca. [5]

“Shakespeare was young when he wrote Titus,” as a professor of mine used to suggest by way of accounting for the play’s exuberance. [6] Well, that’s true, but it’s a masterpiece of its kind—a barbaric masterpiece, perhaps—and it was composed around the time the playwright wrote The Taming of the Shrew and Richard III. 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 and Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta attest. Dexter Morgan and Hannibal Lecter, make room for any number of Elizabethan revenge characters!

With Alarbus’ limbs duly lopped and the Great God Alliteration appeased, 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, 1.1.201-202). As kingmaker he chooses Saturninus, the deceased emperor’s eldest son, who promises to wed Lavinia out of gratitude for this service (151, 1.1.241-243).

Bassianus, however, is by no means at peace with this arrangement. With the aid of Titus’s sons, he escapes with his beloved Lavinia, to whom he is already betrothed. Titus’s descent into misery begins immediately after his ill-fated (yet Rome-ratified) choice of emperors. His son Mutius bars his way in pursuit of the absconders, and—shockingly—Titus kills him on the spot. No hesitation, no reflection necessary (152, 1.1.293-295). All the same, the ungrateful new emperor, Saturninus, takes the event badly. He at once replaces Lavinia with the woman of his fancy, the captured Tamora, lovely Queen of Goths.

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, 1.1.333-335). Titus has given control of Rome to a man who seeks a mother in the “barbarian” woman who wants to destroy it as a means of revenging her losses in battle and the slaughter of her son. Perhaps, though, this elevation of a ruthless Goth to rule beside the Roman emperor is Rome’s confession as to what kind of place it really is, and always has been. [7]

As empress, Tamora deviously smooths things over for Titus, who has been left to lament the betrayal by his sons of the reputation he held dear (155, 1.1.430-440 inclusive). 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, 1.1.452-453). And so the act ends with Tamora’s chilling pronouncement, Saturninus’s offer of a double wedding, and Titus’s promise of fine hunting to bring them all together in a pleasurable series of pursuits.

Once again, it may be worth noting that speech such as the lines by Tamora quoted just above have a soliloquy-like quality; the Queen of Goths is 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 most destructive manner.

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” who promises to be the ruin of the hated Romans and their emperor (157, 2.1.19, 21). [8] 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 much concentration by ancient authors such as Plutarch, Diodorus Siculus, and Eusebius. [9]

Chiron and Demetrius enter the second act at their most rash and immature, squabbling and drawing their swords on each other. Aaron steers them away from this behavior and turns their energies towards something useful to him and Tamora. When he realizes both young men are smitten with Lavinia, he declares slyly, “Why, then, it seems some certain snatch or so / Would serve your turns,” and broaches to them a scheme whereby they may both ravish her (159, 2.1.96-97). Chiron and Demetrius don’t even realize he is insulting them — his assumption is that their only chance of success is to rape her; courtship would prove fruitless.

Says Aaron the strategist, “The woods are ruthless, dreadful, deaf, and dull” (160, 2.1.129). He means that they can function as gigantic sound-dampeners, absorbing in silence the savage crime these young men now intend to commit against Lavinia. Nothing like what they have in mind would be possible within the court’s walls, which Aaron calls a “house of Fame, / The palace full of tongues, of eyes and ears…” (One 60, 2.1.127-128). They will all conspire with Tamora to refine the plot. It is not so much the animals in this wood that are vicious, it’s the people.

Chiron approves of Aaron’s advice, and Demetrius agrees as well, doing so in a pastiche of English and Latin: “Sit fas aut nefas, till I find the stream / To cool this heat, a charm to calm these fits, / Per Stygia, per manes vehor” (160, 2.1.134-136). Translated, this means that whether what they’re doing is right or wrong, Demetrius feels as if he is being dragged through hell itself. The Norton editor notes that the latter quotation is drawn from Seneca’s tragedy Hippolytus. The young Goth’s fondness for Latin citations reminds us that this is a play filled with polyglot, cosmopolitan characters, not “civilized” Romans and primitive “Others.”

Scene 2 tells us of the hunting party’s beginning. Demetrius speaks privately to his brother about the “sport” they both have in mind: “Chiron, we hunt not, we, with horse nor hound, / But hope to pluck a dainty doe to ground” (160, 2.2.25-26). This reinforces our sense of the unwholesome melding of human traits with animal traits that pervades this play.

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. Aaron admonishes his lover, “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.

Modern viewers and readers will no doubt find it unsettling that Lavinia and Bassianus seem to be set up for the crimes committed against them by their own high-handed treatment of Tamora before her sons arrive. Both characters hector the unlikely Empress in an ethnically/racially charged manner, mocking her for having a “Moorish” lover and for being so sexually unrestrained. It is easy to imagine how this entire scene might have been played to emphasize the innocence of Lavinia and Bassianus and thereby heighten the depravity of the crime that Chiron, Demetrius, Aaron, and Tamora together accomplish, but that is not Shakespeare’s choice. He muddies the moral water, so to speak.

Chiron and Demetrius rape and mutilate Lavinia, with Tamora’s explicit and sadistic approval (163, 2.3.114-115). 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, 2.3.161-165). 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, 2.3.190-191).

This is a horrifying but fascinating moment in terms of Shakespeare’s representation of Roman history. We know that the Roman Republic was founded upon the exploitation of the rape of the virtuous Roman matron Lucretia by Sextus Tarquinius, the son of the last Tarquin king, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus.

We know, too, that Greek civilization was grounded in acts of violence against women: Zeus as the Swan violating Leda, and the sacrifice of Iphigeneia so that the Greek fleet could make its way to Troy. Helen of Sparta is at the center of the most violent foundational moment in Greek history, the Trojan War. Here, we have Tamora—a powerful woman, and a so-called barbarian woman at that—joining in and directing such violence herself, partly against another woman.

Dimwitted Saturninus is easily duped by Aaron’s forged letter and planted bag of gold into thinking that Titus’s sons Martius and Quintus have murdered Bassianus (167, 2.3.281-285). 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, 2.3.304-305), but we know it’s another clever lie in the service of wiping out the Andronici.

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). [10]

Marcus will escort Lavinia into the presence of her father, whom she will afflict with the sight of a ruined daughter, as if he hadn’t suffered enough already. As usual, the reference to misery is harshly physical: “Come, let us go, and make thy father blind …” (168, 2.4.52).

Disturbingly, Marcus, though clearly horror-stricken at the crime committed against his niece, does little to try to mitigate her suffering. He spends his time at the scene offering a long-winded literary gloss on the crime and the suffering young woman before him. It’s no help to Lavinia that Marcus asks her, “What stern ungentle hands / Hath lopped and hewed and made thy body bare / Of her two branches …” (168, 2.4.16-18).

ACT 3

Act 3, Scene 1 (168-75, Martius and Quintus are led away to their execution; Titus remonstrates with the Tribunes, and soon beholds the ravished, disfigured Lavinia; Aaron offers to save Titus’s condemned sons if one of the free Andronici chops off his hand; Titus, Lucius, and Marcus vie to 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 have just left the scene, so he tells his “sorrows to the stones” instead (169, 3.1.37), reasoning that at least they will not “intercept” (i.e., interfere with, cut short) his tale of woe. Lucius informs his father that he has been banished for trying to assist his brothers (169, 3.1.49-51). Titus’s entire world view has crashed, and Rome seems “a wilderness of tigers” (169, 3.1.54) intent on devouring only him and his kin: as he says, “Tigers must prey, and Rome affords no prey / But me and mine” (170, 3.1.55-56).

We already pity Titus, but now, to top off his grief, he is shown his damaged daughter. 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). Was this Shakespeare’s way of lightening the impact of the dreadful violence staged during the play, or was that kind of tactic unnecessary due to the wide capacity of Elizabethan audiences for violent representations? [11] Titus exclaims in his wretchedness, “that which gives my soul the greatest spurn / Is dear Lavinia” (170-171, 3.1.101-102).

Titus’s sacrifice of Tamora’s son Alarbus in the name of piety now appears worthless since piety, pietas, is dead in Rome. In his misery, Titus turns his thoughts to how he and his family can destroy Tamora and any other guilty parties. As he says to Marcus, “Let us that have our tongues / Plot some device of further misery / To make us wondered at in time to come” (171, 3.1.133-135). Titus responds from his unspeakable suffering. He will soon reach a point at which there are no more tears, only vengeance. For now, he is still processing his grief.

On more than one occasion, as here with Titus, Shakespeare’s portrait of a Roman man seems 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, [12] and equally true of Caius Martius in Coriolanus. [13] 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 general jettisons his pious beliefs and devotes himself to a depraved pursuit of vengeance by any means necessary.

Soon enough, Aaron enters and offers to lend the Andronici a hand—or rather take one, in exchange for the freedom of Titus’s two accused sons. Titus, who had already thought it appropriate to “chop off” one of the hands that had defended Rome, falls for this vicious ruse (170, 3.1.72, 150-156 inclusive). In spite of all that’s happened, he apparently still thinks that when a man has given his word, honor will bind him to keep it. Titus’s behavior at this point sounds a great deal like the famous definition of insanity as “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” [14]

Aaron’s pitch to any of the Andronici is, “chop off your hand / And send it to the King” (172, 3.1.153-54). If one of them does that, Titus’s sons will be returned to him. As always, Aaron is the ultimate stage villain: in soliloquy, he glosses his current trick by saying, “Let fools do good and fair men call for grace, / Aaron will have his soul black like his face” (173, 3.1.203-204). [15] Aaron’s cynical, selfish perspective is that ethical codes exist only to get others to do what benefits you.

We should note Aaron’s racially aware usage of the binary “black/fair” in the passage cited just above, with the first term clearly indicating wickedness and depravity. At the same time, it seems that this character self-consciously wrangles such oppositions to his own liking. He embraces a racially fraught binary ordinarily wielded by “fair” Romans, but he means to do as much damage to the Romans as he can so long as he has life and breath. Aaron is at war with the self-image that a dwindling number of Roman pietists cultivate to shield themselves from their own badness and the unstable condition of late-imperial Rome.

Titus’s rigidity in adhering to the ancient Roman honor and morality codes has opened a window for Aaron’s excesses, and to the indulgence of that bad actor’s own sadistic brand of individualism in the absence of solid Roman morality.

A messenger soon undeceives Titus about Aaron’s true intentions (173, 3.1.233-239). The absurd spectacle of “thy two sons’ heads, / Thy warlike hand, thy mangled daughter here,” as Marcus describes the sight (174, 3.1.253-254), now elicits not weeping but instead determination to plan the destruction of Tamora and the Emperor: “Why, I have not another tear to shed,” says Titus (174, 3.1.265). This is a critical Senecan turning point in the play: The old general 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. He will be ready for action when the action is ready.

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, 3.1.278-279). 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 against Titus for his violent language in Lavinia’s presence, “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 woes. [16]

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 tries to explain by gestures what happened to her, but runs up against severe limits in her expressive capacity. She then turns to Ovid’s tale in the Metamorphoses about Procne, Philomel, and the wicked Thracian King Tereus. She does this by using a stick to rifle through to the pages until she comes to the story. Titus recognizes it, exclaiming, “This is the tragic tale of Philomel, / And treats of Tereus’ treason and his rape— / And rape, I fear, was root of thy annoy” …” (176, 4.1.47-49). Lavinia writes “Stuprum–Chiron–Demetrius” (177, 4.1.78). Stuprum means rape, as in the Latin phrase, per vim stuprum, “violation by main force.”

As for Ovid’s “Tereus, Procne, and Philomela” from Book 6 of The Metamorphoses, [17] 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 violation of his sister-in-law Philomela, and so forth.

Processing this revelation, Titus says he will be another Lucius Junius Brutus, this time expelling not Tarquins but Goths (177, 4.1.87-94 inclusive). Kneeling with his family, Titus vows, “we will prosecute by good advice / Mortal revenge upon these traitorous goths / And see their blood or die with this reproach” (177, 4.1.92-94). He writes a note to be carried by the boy Lucius along with gifts to Tamora’s sons at the palace (177, 4.1.113-117 inclusive).

It is a stroke of genius on Shakespeare’s part to have linked Ovid’s story from The Metamorphoses with the rape and suicide of Lucretia, the violent foundational myth of the Roman Republic. In this momentous story from Titus Livius’ History of Rome as told in Book 1, Chapters 57-60, [18] Lucretia, who has been sexually assaulted 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 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 the Etruscan King Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, thereby paving the way for Rome’s glorious history as a republic and then as 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 almost two-and-a-half centuries of Tarquin rule.

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. [19] The same might be said on behalf of the Stoic Seneca, author of such revenge plays as Thyestes. [20]

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

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, kills the nurse to keep her from tattling, and arranges for a fair-skinned infant to be substituted as the emperor’s heir; Aaron then takes his child and seeks safety among the Goths.)

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

Soon, Empress Tamora delivers a child by Aaron, who protects his newborn son fiercely when Chiron and Demetrius think to kill the infant (180, 4.2.86-104 inclusive). Aaron plans to take him away to the Goths with the intention of raising the child as a warrior. But first he ruthlessly kills the Nurse, horrifying even the wicked sons of Tamora (181, 4.2.144-145, stage direction). 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, 4.2.106-108). Rome and its politics can go hang. Aaron’s main concern is to take and protect the portion of immortality that his own child promises. As for “blackness,” which others in Rome (including Chiron and Demetrius) are so determined to make much of, Aaron has an answer: “Coal-black is better than another hue / In that it scorns to bear another hue” (180, 4.2.198-199).

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, but in the next scene, the rustic will be hanged for his innocent efforts (183-84, 4.3.78-118 inclusive).

All the same, perhaps we shouldn’t dismiss the notion that there’s something insane about Titus’s behavior throughout 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 will be kept. He also supposes that if somebody is legally entitled to an office, he’ll do his duty rather than taking advantage of the situation. Such persistence 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 home; Tamora tries to entice Titus to make Lucius end his advance on Rome.)

Saturninus is enraged in an 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, gloating, “Titus, I have touched thee to the quick” (185, 4.4.36). This is a mistake on the Empress’s part. Even if the general were mad, he would still be quite dangerous.

The Emperor is frightened upon hearing that Lucius is headed for Rome with an army of Goths, but he misunderstands Titus’s motive, which is revenge of a sort not reducible to politics (186, 4.4.68-72). Titus doesn’t want to rule Rome—what good would that do his battered spirit, maimed body, and grief-stricken heart 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).

Saturninus has made the un-Machiavellian mistake of leaving his enemy, Titus, in control of his estate and in possession of his honorable title as he sets about destroying Tamora and him. [22] As so often in Shakespeare, bad rulers are defined and brought down not only by their lack of moral probity—though that matters—but by their incapacity to exercise power in a way that allows them to manage their enemies and friends alike. Again and again, Shakespeare makes the point that those who can’t use power efficiently or wisely will lose it.

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 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. But the “Rome” that Shakespeare presents is obviously not solid in terms of its temporality—it is a bricolage or prismatic representation that we are given, not a unitary one.

Well, all the plotting Aaron recounts (188-189, 5.1.87-120 inclusive)—his getting a child by Tamora; the murder of Bassianus and the rape and mutilation of Lavinia that he inspired Chiron and Demetrius to commit; his own gleefully fraudulent taking of Titus’s hand—all this 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 thoroughly implausible supervillain rhetoric (189, 5.1.124-144 inclusive). 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, 5.1.135-136). One can almost imagine this rascal selling franchises of “Aaron’s Evil Deeds, Inc.,” so busy does he boast himself to be in the plotting and doing of depraved acts. How else could he find the time to do so much evil by himself?

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, the cult of the family, and piety towards the state.

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 are 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” (190-191, 5.2.1-69 inclusive). 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, 5.2.115-120).

Titus insists that Rapine and Murder stay with him, 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, 185-186). 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 so. (194, 5.2.190) [23]

Act 5, Scene 3 (194-198, 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.

It’s time for the fine banquet Titus has promised the Emperor and his Goth Empress, and sure enough, Titus enters dressed as a cook. (Julie Taymor’s 1999 production Titus, by the way, hilariously sets much of this scene to Cesare Bixio’s upbeat 1937 Italian film song Vivere! sung by Carlo Buti. It’s a nice touch!) The table is set and dinner is served (195, 5.3.25ff). Seemingly out of nowhere, Titus asks Saturninus if the soldier Virginius [24] was right to kill his daughter for chastity’s sake (195, 5.3.35-38).

As the story goes in Livy’s History of Rome, Book 3, Chapter 44, Appius Claudius 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. After posing his question to Saturninus and receiving an affirmative answer, Titus 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, Titus 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). Shakespeare may well have congratulated himself on providing an appropriately sized heap of corpses for his revenge tragedy. Thomas Kyd and Kit Marlowe would certainly approve, and so would John Webster a few decades after Titus Andronicus’s successful stage run. [25]

Aemilius asks for a full account of all the misdeeds that have occurred, and receives it from Lucius (196-97, 5.3.95-107 inclusive), 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, 5.3.130-131). Shakespeare just couldn’t resist a final quibble on “hands” and “heads,” could he! But no such call is made.

Aaron is carried in and judgment is sought against him (198, 5.3.175-177). He is sentenced to starve while buried “breast-deep in earth,” which seems like a spiteful way of denying him the sustenance that cannot be denied his child (198, 5.3.178). Still, Aaron maintains his standing as the play’s most remorseless evildoer, declaring publicly: “If one good deed in all my life I did, / I do repent it from my very soul” (198, 5.3.188-189). [26] 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, knowledgeable about, but unbounded 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 rivetingly outrageous, bloody instance of Elizabethan revenge tragedy in the tradition of Seneca’s Thyestes, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, and Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. In Kyd’s play, the protagonist Hieronymo seeks wild, violent justice for the vengeful murder of his son. [27] 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 doesn’t rise to the level of the metadramatic extravaganza that is Hamlet, but like Kyd’s famous Spanish Tragedy, 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 second since 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 possible: excessive, bloody, and barbarous in his revenge. Tamora is more than a stage barbarian; her motive for revenge is legitimate, and she shows herself a skilled manipulator of Roman politics. In a sense, then, she is as much Roman as Goth.

Aaron the Moor 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. He is in his own lane, so to speak, and audiences may find him a compelling figure who holds his own among the Romans and Goths.

FINAL REFLECTIONS [736] []

Moreover, while Shakespeare may not be subjecting the revenge code itself 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. [28]

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. Mussolini took this “Roman revival” act so far as to invade 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 more of a fashion statement than anything else. There has always been a strong element of “self-fashioning” [29] 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 numerous plays set in Italy. [30]

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 already 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, history, and literature, 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 is implied to be the victor, the one who will inherit the millennia beyond the Roman 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. Though there is some laugh-out-loud material in this play, it is ultimately nothing like comedy since its world and human desire patently do not run parallel or harmonize 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. [31] This sort of grim endurance is the stuff of Senecan revenge tragedy and Roman myth, to which we should add a good deal of impressively high-impact imagery. [32]

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 of exploring the limits of pain and injustice, the better to inure an audience to its own sufferings. Titus Andronicus may be substantially parodic of its genre, but that does not disqualify it as deserving 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.

Edition. For the very brief Act 3, Scene 2, which is not in the Norton Shakespeare 3rd edition, the text at the online Folger Shakespeare Library has been used.

Document Timestamp: 07/29/2025 10:43 AM

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] A war against the Goths would seem to suit Shakespeare’s broad representation of Rome since Roman armies clashed with various Gothic groups for some three centuries, from the middle of the 3^rd century CE through the middle of the 6^th century CE.

[3] Surrounding the monarchy and its traditions and symbols, it is felt, must be nothing but chaos and anarchy. Titus evidently believes that no good can come of allowing Saturninus and Bassianus to argue over the imperial crown when there is a longstanding, valid principle whereby a neutral third party may settle their dispute. Competition between powerful people, Shakespeare knew from observing the politics of his own society, always threatens to unleash great suffering upon the base and even the great.

[4] 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.

[5] 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 Bloom’s essay on Titus Andronicus, pp. 77-86.

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

[7] In Rubicon: the Last Years of the Republic (New York: Anchor Books, 2005), Tom Holland considers the insistence of the Romans on preserving their city’s physical and spiritual past even in the midst of clamor and change. He writes that “The Republic was both a building site and a junkyard” (4). Romans held an “idealized vision of Rome” (13) even as change and challenges came. Educated Romans, especially, would have been sophisticated and self-conscious about this balancing act between idyll and reality. Shakespeare’s portrait of the Eternal City, then, is perhaps more honest than not: he shows us the shock to Titus’s naïve faith in Rome and its traditions when he is confronted with a radically cosmopolitan, but also thoroughly opportunistic and corrupt, society and political culture. He also shows us the tenacity of this “old guard” Roman when it comes time to seek revenge against his tormentors. Titus’s willingness to adopt “un-Roman” ways for a purpose, we might say, may be his most genuinely Roman quality.

[8] With regard to Aaron, we may plausibly suppose that this character developed from Shakespeare’s familiarity with “black” characters in medieval mystery and cycle plays. See, for example, this excerpt from Virginia Mason Vaughan’s Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500–1800. See also Smithsonian Magazine’s 2021 article by Ayanna Thompson titled, “Blackface Is Older Than You Might Think.” (Accessed 7/27/2025.)

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

[10] Ovid’s “Tereus, Procne, and Philomela” story is located in Book 6 of The Metamorphoses. Metamorphoses, 1567 Arthur Golding trans. (Perseus). (Accessed 7/27/2025.)

[11] The latter supposition—that alleviating the play’s violence was unnecessary—is probably correct since, after all, Shakespeare’s audiences contained many people who found “bear-baiting” excellent sport, and no doubt they even took in the occasional grisly real-life execution. Delicate sensibilities would not have been a major problem for the Elizabethans.

[12] While in Egypt with Cleopatra, Antony says near the beginning of Antony and Cleopatra, “Let Rome in Tiber melt and the wide arch / Of the ranged empire fall! Here is my space.” Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra. (The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, 3rd ed. 982-1060.) 984, 1.1.34-35.

[13] Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Coriolanus. (The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, 3rd ed. 1072-1152.) When Coriolanus is finally rejected by the plebeians, he allows his ultra-patrician starchiness to lead him into rejecting the lower orders altogether, and goes over to the Volscian enemy. He says of base-born Romans, “I would they were barbarians, as they are, / Though in Rome littered; not Romans, as they are not, / Though calved i’th’porch o’th’ Capitol” (1113, 3.1.231-233).

[14] This description is often attributed to Albert Einstein, whether accurately or otherwise.

[15] As in the note above, see Smithsonian Magazine’s 2021 article by Ayanna Thompson titled, “Blackface Is Older Than You Might Think.” (Accessed 7/27/2025.)

[16] For this scene, see pp. 649-670, Titus Andronicus, of the Folger Shakespeare Library’s 1623 Folio copy. (Accessed 7/27/2025.)

[17] Ovid. Metamorphoses, 1567 Arthur Golding trans. (Perseus). (Accessed 7/27/2025.)

[18] 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.) (Accessed 7/27/2025.)

[19] Preston, Thomas. Cambises. (circa 1570, EEBO2 U-Mich.) John Pickering. Horestes. (1567, sourcetext.com.) (Accessed 7/27/2025.)

[20] Seneca. Seneca’s Tragedies. (Gutenberg e-text.) (Accessed 7/27/2025.)

[21] Horace, Odes. Ode XXII is the poem Titus cites. (Gutenberg e-text.) (Accessed 7/27/2025.)

[22] See Machiavelli’s The Prince, Ch. III. “Of Mixed Principalities.” The author writes, “men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.” (Accessed 7/27/2025.)

[23] See Sir Francis Bacon’s Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral. Specifically, in “Of Revenge,” he writes, “Revenge is a kind of wild justice; which the more man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.” Gutenberg e-text. (Accessed 7/27/2025.)

[24] Titus Livius. History of Rome, Bk. 3, Ch. 44. History of Rome, Books 1-8. (Gutenberg e-text.) (Accessed 7/27/2025.)

[25] In the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love, a very young John Webster speaks briefly with Shakespeare and commends him on the outrageous bloodiness of Titus Andronicus. “That’s the only writing!” exclaims little John, future author of the excellent Jacobean revenge tragedies The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi.

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

[27] Kyd, Thomas. The Spanish Tragedy. (Gutenberg e-text.) (Accessed 7/27/2025.)

[28] 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 is located at 320-24, 3.2.71-259.

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

[30] Aside from the plays that focus mainly on ancient Rome (Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus) ten are set wholly or partly in Italy: Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Two Gentlemen of Verona, All’s Well That Ends Well, Much Ado About Nothing, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. In all, around 37-38% of Shakespeare’s output involved Italian settings.

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

[32] Muriel Bradbrook writes that 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