The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus
Earlier this year, I published a post called "Shakespearean comedy and Rio" in which I talked about the various tropes of Shakespearean comedy and how they can be identified in Blue Sky Studio's modern computer-animated film series Rio. That post was a massive effort. It took more than a year of on-and-off writing to finish. The post was informed by my study of Shakespeare at The Ohio State University in the fall of 2016 and later my study of Shakespeare at the University of California, Berkeley, in the fall of 2017.
In my original draft of the post, I started writing along a tangent about Shakespearean tragedies. I wanted to compare some of the tropes of Shakespearean comedies I was learning to the tropes of Shakespearean tragedies I was learning at the same time, but I found that it was too off-topic and would have made the post too massive (the final result was already quite massive, especially with the analysis of Rio!), so I ended up cutting the discussion of Shakespearean tragedy and saving it to my computer. In the discussion that I cut out, I primarily discuss one of Shakespeare's early tragedies, Titus Andronicus.
I was looking over the text earlier today; it was still incomplete, but it turns out, it didn't take too long to finish and polish a bit to turn it into a state that I could just publish without much modification. This post isn't as detailed or as analytical as I would have wanted it to be back when I was actually interested in Shakespeare (i.e. when I was taking those classes). Sadly, I've probably forgotten a chunk of what I've learned simply from not thinking about it. In any case, here is what I do remember. I apologize, as it's kind of roughly strung together, and there's a bit of unnecessary repetition/redundancy. Hopefully, it's kind of interesting, though.
William Shakespeare lived 400 years ago—2016 was the 400th anniversary of his death—so it is no surprise that his texts pose challenges to readers today. While theatrical plays today are typically regarded as an elegant, more sophisticated pastime, plays in Shakespeare’s time were the modern equivalent of a huge party. They were often held outdoors in the afternoon to take advantage of the natural light, and religious institutions and law enforcement officials were wary of them because they often attracted great crowds, and with great crowds always comes the potential for uncontrollable violence, disorder, and illness. In Shakespeare's England, actresses were not a thing—female roles were played by crossdressing boys, a practice frowned upon by the church. While today, plays compete primarily in the market with movies, sporting events, and music concerts, plays in Shakespeare’s time competed with public spectacles like bear-baiting (in which dogs were unleashed to torment and kill chained-down bears), cockfighting (in which two roosters were bred to fight each other), and public executions.
As a result, plays often had to maintain a similar aura of bloody spectacle—Shakespeare’s darkest, most excessively violent play, Titus Andronicus, has characters performing human sacrifice, gang rape, cutting off each others’ tongues and hands, and tricking a mother to eat the organs of her own sons without her knowledge. Society was different—people were different—and these differences create challenges for modern audiences to approach Shakespeare’s work. Despite these challenges, Shakespeare continues to be performed in theaters worldwide, and works like Hamlet have so deeply ingrained themselves within Western culture that they continue to influence modern works. Romeo and Juliet is standard course curriculum for innumerable high schoolers in the United States, and an entire field of scholarship has opened specifically to study Shakespearean literature.
Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, and Romeo and Juliet are all examples of Shakespearean tragedies. On the other hand, plays like As You Like It and The Merchant of Venice are typically termed as Shakespearean comedies. The differences between the genres are seldom clear cut, as Shakespeare often crossed genre lines. They may be identified, however, as they contain various tropes that have come to define the genres. In the case of Shakespearean tragedies, each typically follows the Renaissance tragic tale of "great men falling to a state of wretchedness".
In Titus Andronicus, the eponymous main character Titus Andronicus is a general in the army of the Roman Empire, dedicating his entire long-lived life in service of Rome. In the first act of the play, Titus returns victoriously to Rome after years of war with the Goths, and he is glorified by the people of Rome, who want to make him the Emperor. Humbled, Titus declines the offer of the imperial throne and endorses Saturninus, the eldest son of the previous emperor, to succeed instead. When the newly crowned Emperor Saturninus asks for Titus’s blessing to marry Lavinia, Titus’s daughter, he obliges, but before the marriage can be completed, Saturninus’s younger brother, Bassianus, protests—he had already been betrothed to Lavinia! Titus’s four sons recognize that under Roman law, Bassianus is correct, and Saturninus cannot marry Lavinia, so they defend Bassianus against the will of their father. Titus is apoplectic. His sons’ defense of Bassianus went against the will of the Emperor, and in his eyes, that constituted treason. In the space of a few lines, Titus disowns his sons, then proceeds to attack and murder one who stands in his way.
Meanwhile, Emperor Saturninus resents the fact that he was given the throne by Titus, rather than inheriting it on his own right, and he does not hesitate to use the actions of Titus’s sons against him. To Titus’s utter shock and despair, Saturninus decides to marry Tamora, the queen of the Goths, whom Titus had just spent years fighting. In just the first few scenes, all of Titus’s military efforts have been negated, thus beginning his tragic decline from greatness to wretchedness. Tamora, who is now Empress, obviously resents Titus, especially for having killed her eldest son, Alarbus. She vows revenge, and she gets it by allowing her two sons—Chiron and Demetrius—to rape and mutilate Titus’s daughter, Lavinia. Titus likewise vows revenge, and he gets it by killing Chiron and Demetrius and tricking Tamora to eat a pie stuffed with her sons’ organs. By the play’s end, Titus Andronicus went from being the most likely candidate for Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire to a barbaric outcast, who has lost everything.
Some Shakespeareans argue that Titus Andronicus was one of Shakespeare's "immature" plays, written at a time when Shakespeare was still inexperienced in the business. The excessiveness of the violence in the play could be construed as pandering to theatergoers' desire for the kind of spectacles to compete with bear-baiting and public executions. Some of Shakespeare's language in the play comes across as more crude and almost inappropriate at times – when Marcus Andronicus finds Lavinia in an open field with her tongue cut out and her hands chopped off, he spends dozens of lines describing her appearance in flowery terms. Here is less than half of the excerpt:
One social issue challenged by the play is primogeniture. In Shakespeare's England, when a father dies, his entire estate and property is customarily inherited by his eldest son, who may or may not decide to share some of the inheritance with his other siblings. This practice is known as "primogeniture", and it would have been second-nature to Shakespeare's contemporaries. Even before the title character is introduced, Titus Andronicus opens with a quarrel between two brothers over who should inherit the throne of their late father. The play is set in the Roman Empire, which did not practice the sort of automatic inheritance embodied by primogeniture. Instead, the emperor was sometimes elected by tribunes, Roman officials similar to representatives in today's legislatures.
Titus Andronicus begins with Saturninus, the elder brother, and Bassianus, the younger, giving speeches to their followers and the tribunes, asking for their support for the throne. Under Shakespeare's English customs, Saturninus would've been thought to have been entitled to the imperial throne. In fact, however, he almost loses the throne. Just before the tribunes are set to vote on the matter, Roman general Titus Andronicus appears. He had been fighting against the Goths of the north for several years now, and he proudly returns to Rome, victorious. His exciting return skyrockets his own popularity, and it is he whom the tribunes unanimously favor for the imperial throne, not either Saturninus or Bassianus. Not only does this attack English primogeniture, it is contrary to the English idea of a hereditary monarchy, where at least someone from the royal family succeeds the throne. Titus, however, states that he does not want to be the emperor:
Another social issue challenged by the play is the role of women. One of the key female characters in Titus Andronicus is Lavinia, Titus's only daughter. From the outset, Lavinia is characterized as an "ornament" by Bassianus (1.1.55). While used as a term of endearment, "ornament" still implies a merely decorative nature to Lavinia's existence, one that objectifies her and insinuates a lack of agency. When Saturninus takes the throne, his first act is to make Lavinia his wife, which Titus supports in deference to the emperor. However, Lavinia is already betrothed to Bassianus, and the two love each other. The whole exchange is done with little regard for Lavinia's consent or opinion in the matter; they don't ask beforehand whom she wants to marry. Saturninus does eventually ask Lavinia, "you are not displeased with this?", to which she responds, "Not I, my lord, sith true nobility / Warrants these words in princely courtesy" (1.1.273-75). Saturninus and Bassianus quarrel over who gets to marry Lavinia, and then in the beginning of the second act, Chiron and Demetrius also quarrel over who deserves Lavinia's "love". The quarrel between Chiron and Demetrius over Lavinia is an interesting mirror of the fight between Saturninus and Bissianus over Lavinia—indeed, it makes these two stately Roman officers look like the barbarians that Chiron and Demetrius are.
The other key female character in Titus Andronicus is Tamora, the Queen of the Goths. At first glance, Tamora seems to have more agency than Lavinia. At the beginning of the play, she is a captive prisoner of war, having been defeated by Titus Andronicus's forces during events prior to the start of the play. However, she quickly goes from the lowest state of agency (prisoner) to one of the highest for a female character: after Titus's sons defend Bassianus, Saturninus jumps on his chance to unleash his resentment of Titus by condemning Titus's family and marrying Tamora instead. Indeed, to Titus's utter shock and horror, Tamora—the enemy he fought years to capture—is now the empress of the empire he fought to the death for. Nothing could be more belittling. However, while Tamora occupies a position of power, she often requires the help of men to execute her dark plans to take revenge on Titus Andronicus for killing one of her sons at the start of Act I. In a similar sense, Lavinia does have some indirect agency. Even after her tongue is cut off so she cannot speak and her hands are cut off so she cannot use a pen to write, she manages to use a stick to scribble a message in the dirt explaining who defiled her. This allows the men of the play to exact revenge on her behalf.
Needless to say, Titus Andronicus is by far the bloodiest and most violent play that Shakespeare has written. In fact, for a time, it was ranked as one of his weaker plays by literary experts. However, recently it has been given some scholarly attention for the various social issues that it calls attention to.
Note: All citations in this post refer to the line numbers in the quarto edition of Titus Andronicus in the online version of The Norton Shakespeare, Third Edition.
In my original draft of the post, I started writing along a tangent about Shakespearean tragedies. I wanted to compare some of the tropes of Shakespearean comedies I was learning to the tropes of Shakespearean tragedies I was learning at the same time, but I found that it was too off-topic and would have made the post too massive (the final result was already quite massive, especially with the analysis of Rio!), so I ended up cutting the discussion of Shakespearean tragedy and saving it to my computer. In the discussion that I cut out, I primarily discuss one of Shakespeare's early tragedies, Titus Andronicus.
I was looking over the text earlier today; it was still incomplete, but it turns out, it didn't take too long to finish and polish a bit to turn it into a state that I could just publish without much modification. This post isn't as detailed or as analytical as I would have wanted it to be back when I was actually interested in Shakespeare (i.e. when I was taking those classes). Sadly, I've probably forgotten a chunk of what I've learned simply from not thinking about it. In any case, here is what I do remember. I apologize, as it's kind of roughly strung together, and there's a bit of unnecessary repetition/redundancy. Hopefully, it's kind of interesting, though.
William Shakespeare lived 400 years ago—2016 was the 400th anniversary of his death—so it is no surprise that his texts pose challenges to readers today. While theatrical plays today are typically regarded as an elegant, more sophisticated pastime, plays in Shakespeare’s time were the modern equivalent of a huge party. They were often held outdoors in the afternoon to take advantage of the natural light, and religious institutions and law enforcement officials were wary of them because they often attracted great crowds, and with great crowds always comes the potential for uncontrollable violence, disorder, and illness. In Shakespeare's England, actresses were not a thing—female roles were played by crossdressing boys, a practice frowned upon by the church. While today, plays compete primarily in the market with movies, sporting events, and music concerts, plays in Shakespeare’s time competed with public spectacles like bear-baiting (in which dogs were unleashed to torment and kill chained-down bears), cockfighting (in which two roosters were bred to fight each other), and public executions.
As a result, plays often had to maintain a similar aura of bloody spectacle—Shakespeare’s darkest, most excessively violent play, Titus Andronicus, has characters performing human sacrifice, gang rape, cutting off each others’ tongues and hands, and tricking a mother to eat the organs of her own sons without her knowledge. Society was different—people were different—and these differences create challenges for modern audiences to approach Shakespeare’s work. Despite these challenges, Shakespeare continues to be performed in theaters worldwide, and works like Hamlet have so deeply ingrained themselves within Western culture that they continue to influence modern works. Romeo and Juliet is standard course curriculum for innumerable high schoolers in the United States, and an entire field of scholarship has opened specifically to study Shakespearean literature.
Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, and Romeo and Juliet are all examples of Shakespearean tragedies. On the other hand, plays like As You Like It and The Merchant of Venice are typically termed as Shakespearean comedies. The differences between the genres are seldom clear cut, as Shakespeare often crossed genre lines. They may be identified, however, as they contain various tropes that have come to define the genres. In the case of Shakespearean tragedies, each typically follows the Renaissance tragic tale of "great men falling to a state of wretchedness".
In Titus Andronicus, the eponymous main character Titus Andronicus is a general in the army of the Roman Empire, dedicating his entire long-lived life in service of Rome. In the first act of the play, Titus returns victoriously to Rome after years of war with the Goths, and he is glorified by the people of Rome, who want to make him the Emperor. Humbled, Titus declines the offer of the imperial throne and endorses Saturninus, the eldest son of the previous emperor, to succeed instead. When the newly crowned Emperor Saturninus asks for Titus’s blessing to marry Lavinia, Titus’s daughter, he obliges, but before the marriage can be completed, Saturninus’s younger brother, Bassianus, protests—he had already been betrothed to Lavinia! Titus’s four sons recognize that under Roman law, Bassianus is correct, and Saturninus cannot marry Lavinia, so they defend Bassianus against the will of their father. Titus is apoplectic. His sons’ defense of Bassianus went against the will of the Emperor, and in his eyes, that constituted treason. In the space of a few lines, Titus disowns his sons, then proceeds to attack and murder one who stands in his way.
Meanwhile, Emperor Saturninus resents the fact that he was given the throne by Titus, rather than inheriting it on his own right, and he does not hesitate to use the actions of Titus’s sons against him. To Titus’s utter shock and despair, Saturninus decides to marry Tamora, the queen of the Goths, whom Titus had just spent years fighting. In just the first few scenes, all of Titus’s military efforts have been negated, thus beginning his tragic decline from greatness to wretchedness. Tamora, who is now Empress, obviously resents Titus, especially for having killed her eldest son, Alarbus. She vows revenge, and she gets it by allowing her two sons—Chiron and Demetrius—to rape and mutilate Titus’s daughter, Lavinia. Titus likewise vows revenge, and he gets it by killing Chiron and Demetrius and tricking Tamora to eat a pie stuffed with her sons’ organs. By the play’s end, Titus Andronicus went from being the most likely candidate for Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire to a barbaric outcast, who has lost everything.
Some Shakespeareans argue that Titus Andronicus was one of Shakespeare's "immature" plays, written at a time when Shakespeare was still inexperienced in the business. The excessiveness of the violence in the play could be construed as pandering to theatergoers' desire for the kind of spectacles to compete with bear-baiting and public executions. Some of Shakespeare's language in the play comes across as more crude and almost inappropriate at times – when Marcus Andronicus finds Lavinia in an open field with her tongue cut out and her hands chopped off, he spends dozens of lines describing her appearance in flowery terms. Here is less than half of the excerpt:
Speak, gentle niece, what stern ungentle handsPeople just don't talk like this! Not in such a horrifying situation! I would be surprised if anyone could immediately find words in the face of such cruelty. Other Shakespeareans, however, disagree with this assessment. While the violence is undeniably gratuitous by today's standards, the play still contains intelligent themes and social issues. Some of these themes are revisited by Shakespeare in his later works.
Have lopp'd and hew'd and made thy body bare
Of her two branches, those sweet ornaments,
Whose circling shadows kings have sought to sleep in,
And might not gain so great a happiness
As have thy love? Why dost not speak to me?
Alas, a crimson river of warm blood,
Like to a bubbling fountain stirr'd with wind,
Doth rise and fall between thy rosed lips,
Coming and going with thy honey breath. (2.4.16-25)
One social issue challenged by the play is primogeniture. In Shakespeare's England, when a father dies, his entire estate and property is customarily inherited by his eldest son, who may or may not decide to share some of the inheritance with his other siblings. This practice is known as "primogeniture", and it would have been second-nature to Shakespeare's contemporaries. Even before the title character is introduced, Titus Andronicus opens with a quarrel between two brothers over who should inherit the throne of their late father. The play is set in the Roman Empire, which did not practice the sort of automatic inheritance embodied by primogeniture. Instead, the emperor was sometimes elected by tribunes, Roman officials similar to representatives in today's legislatures.
Titus Andronicus begins with Saturninus, the elder brother, and Bassianus, the younger, giving speeches to their followers and the tribunes, asking for their support for the throne. Under Shakespeare's English customs, Saturninus would've been thought to have been entitled to the imperial throne. In fact, however, he almost loses the throne. Just before the tribunes are set to vote on the matter, Roman general Titus Andronicus appears. He had been fighting against the Goths of the north for several years now, and he proudly returns to Rome, victorious. His exciting return skyrockets his own popularity, and it is he whom the tribunes unanimously favor for the imperial throne, not either Saturninus or Bassianus. Not only does this attack English primogeniture, it is contrary to the English idea of a hereditary monarchy, where at least someone from the royal family succeeds the throne. Titus, however, states that he does not want to be the emperor:
A better head her glorious body fitsTitus is essentially stating, "I'm too old for this emperor thing." In the end, Saturninus does become emperor, but only because Titus Andronicus recommended that he become so to the tribunes. Saturninus resents this endlessly – he wanted to be respected as the emperor, yet it seems that he won the throne solely because the Romans respected someone else. Saturninus likely felt inferior to Titus because Titus had basically gifted him the throne. Saturninus's resentment sparks a grudge in his relationship with Titus, one which quickly spirals out of control and contributes to Titus's fall to wretchedness. Remarkably, it is Titus's act of indirectly confirming primogeniture – of giving the throne to the eldest son – which is one of the impetuses for his tragic decline.
Than his that shakes for age and feebleness.
What, should I don this robe and trouble you,
Be chosen with proclamations today,
Tomorrow yield up rule, resign my life,
And set abroad new business for you all? (1.1.190-195)
Another social issue challenged by the play is the role of women. One of the key female characters in Titus Andronicus is Lavinia, Titus's only daughter. From the outset, Lavinia is characterized as an "ornament" by Bassianus (1.1.55). While used as a term of endearment, "ornament" still implies a merely decorative nature to Lavinia's existence, one that objectifies her and insinuates a lack of agency. When Saturninus takes the throne, his first act is to make Lavinia his wife, which Titus supports in deference to the emperor. However, Lavinia is already betrothed to Bassianus, and the two love each other. The whole exchange is done with little regard for Lavinia's consent or opinion in the matter; they don't ask beforehand whom she wants to marry. Saturninus does eventually ask Lavinia, "you are not displeased with this?", to which she responds, "Not I, my lord, sith true nobility / Warrants these words in princely courtesy" (1.1.273-75). Saturninus and Bassianus quarrel over who gets to marry Lavinia, and then in the beginning of the second act, Chiron and Demetrius also quarrel over who deserves Lavinia's "love". The quarrel between Chiron and Demetrius over Lavinia is an interesting mirror of the fight between Saturninus and Bissianus over Lavinia—indeed, it makes these two stately Roman officers look like the barbarians that Chiron and Demetrius are.
The other key female character in Titus Andronicus is Tamora, the Queen of the Goths. At first glance, Tamora seems to have more agency than Lavinia. At the beginning of the play, she is a captive prisoner of war, having been defeated by Titus Andronicus's forces during events prior to the start of the play. However, she quickly goes from the lowest state of agency (prisoner) to one of the highest for a female character: after Titus's sons defend Bassianus, Saturninus jumps on his chance to unleash his resentment of Titus by condemning Titus's family and marrying Tamora instead. Indeed, to Titus's utter shock and horror, Tamora—the enemy he fought years to capture—is now the empress of the empire he fought to the death for. Nothing could be more belittling. However, while Tamora occupies a position of power, she often requires the help of men to execute her dark plans to take revenge on Titus Andronicus for killing one of her sons at the start of Act I. In a similar sense, Lavinia does have some indirect agency. Even after her tongue is cut off so she cannot speak and her hands are cut off so she cannot use a pen to write, she manages to use a stick to scribble a message in the dirt explaining who defiled her. This allows the men of the play to exact revenge on her behalf.
Needless to say, Titus Andronicus is by far the bloodiest and most violent play that Shakespeare has written. In fact, for a time, it was ranked as one of his weaker plays by literary experts. However, recently it has been given some scholarly attention for the various social issues that it calls attention to.
Note: All citations in this post refer to the line numbers in the quarto edition of Titus Andronicus in the online version of The Norton Shakespeare, Third Edition.