Titus Andronicus

• 1. Introduction

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  Titus Andronicus begins with a question no audience expects to face: what does a man do when Rome itself betrays him? William Shakespeare wrote this tragedy somewhere between 1588 and 1593, and it arrived on the London stage as something raw and confrontational, a play that critics would spend the next four centuries trying to explain away. On the 24th of January 1594, Philip Henslowe noted a performance by Sussex's Men at what was most likely The Rose, and that night's show earned three pounds eight shillings, making it the most profitable play of its season. Audiences came in numbers. They kept coming. And then, slowly, they stopped defending it.

  At its center is Titus, a Roman general who has lost twenty-one sons in a war against the Goths. He returns to Rome bearing prisoners, among them Tamora, the Gothic queen, and her secret lover, a Moor named Aaron. What unfolds is a cycle of sacrifice, betrayal, mutilation, and revenge so extreme that it drove generations of critics to doubt Shakespeare had written it at all. T. S. Eliot, in 1927, called it one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written. The Victorians largely refused to stage it. Yet by the later decades of the twentieth century, the play had begun to find its defenders, and its advocates argued that the violence was not the failure of the work but its point.

  What makes a play so brutal that scholars doubt its author? What literary traditions shaped it? And why, after centuries of contempt, did Titus Andronicus start to look, to some viewers, like a mirror held up to modern times?

• 2. A Cycle of Blood

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  Titus arrives in Rome after a ten-year campaign against the Goths, and his first act sets the catastrophe in motion. Despite Tamora's desperate pleas, he sacrifices her eldest son, Alarbus, to avenge the deaths of his own sons in the war. Tamora and her two surviving sons, Chiron and Demetrius, vow revenge from that moment forward.

  The political situation in Rome compounds everything. Two brothers, Saturninus and Bassianus, are disputing succession when Marcus Andronicus announces that the people want Titus as emperor. Titus declines and backs Saturninus, who promptly claims Titus's daughter Lavinia as his intended bride, though Lavinia is already betrothed to Bassianus. When Bassianus refuses to surrender her, a scuffle breaks out and Titus kills his own son Mutius, who had sided against him. Saturninus then shocks Titus further by marrying Tamora instead.

  Tamora, now empress, moves carefully. She counsels Saturninus to pardon the Andronici family, which he reluctantly does, and in doing so, she buys herself the position and patience she needs to act. During a royal hunt, Aaron persuades Chiron and Demetrius to murder Bassianus and rape Lavinia. They do so, throwing Bassianus's body into a pit. To prevent Lavinia from revealing what happened, they cut out her tongue and cut off her hands. Aaron simultaneously forges a letter framing Titus's sons Martius and Quintus for Bassianus's murder. Saturninus has them arrested and sentenced to death.

  When Aaron tells Titus that the emperor will spare his sons if one of the Andronici cuts off a hand, Titus has Aaron cut off his own left hand and sends it to the court. A messenger returns with the severed heads of Martius and Quintus, along with Titus's own hand. Titus then orders his surviving son Lucius to leave Rome and raise an army among the Goths, the same people they had conquered.

• 3. Ancient Templates

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  Ovid's Metamorphoses, completed around 8 AD, is the primary source for the rape and mutilation of Lavinia, and the play makes that borrowing visible. When Lavinia needs to communicate what happened to her, she turns to a copy of the Metamorphoses herself, using it to point Marcus and Titus toward the story of Philomela in Book Six. In Ovid's telling, Tereus of Thrace rapes Philomela, the sister of his wife Procne, and cuts out her tongue to silence her. Philomela weaves a tapestry naming her attacker and has it sent to Procne. The sisters then kill Procne's son Itys and bake his body in a pie, which Procne serves to Tereus.

  The scene where Lavinia writes her attackers' names in the dirt traces back to a different passage in the Metamorphoses, the story of Io from Book One. Zeus turns Io into a cow to prevent her from revealing his assault, and she can only identify herself to her father by scratching her name in the dirt with her hoof.

  For the climactic revenge feast, Shakespeare drew on Seneca's Thyestes, written in the first century AD. In the myth of Thyestes, Atreus secretly kills his brother's sons and cooks their bodies in a pie, which he then serves at a reconciliatory feast before producing their hands and heads. Shakespeare mapped this template directly onto Titus's revenge against Tamora, whose sons Chiron and Demetrius are killed, ground up, and baked into pies that their mother eats at Titus's feast.

  Another source shapes the moment when Titus asks Saturninus whether a father should kill his daughter when she has been raped. This references the story of Verginia from Livy's Ab urbe condita, written around 26 BC. Around 451 BC, the centurion Lucius Verginius stabbed his own daughter Verginia in the Forum, determining that death was the only means of securing her freedom from the decemvir Appius Claudius Crassus. Shakespeare used the story not as backstory but as a question put directly to the emperor, planting the outcome of the scene in an audience already familiar with Livy.

• 4. Names and Their Origins

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  Jonathan Bate, Geoffrey Bullough, and other scholars have traced Shakespeare's character names with considerable specificity, and the results reveal a playwright who constructed his fictional Rome from fragments of real history and ancient literature. Titus himself may have been named after the Emperor Titus Flavius Vespasianus, who ruled Rome from 79 to 81. The name Andronicus has prompted speculation that Shakespeare had in mind Andronicus Comnenus, the Byzantine emperor who ruled from 1183 to 1185. Like Titus Andronicus, Andronicus Comnenus was a violent ruler overthrown and brutally killed by his own people, and he too was known to shoot arrows with messages attached, a detail that appears in the play. Both men also lost their right hand shortly before their deaths.

  Bate raises another possibility: a story in Antonio de Guevara's Epistolas familiares, which features a sadistic emperor named Titus who throws slaves to wild animals, and a slave named Andronicus who is embraced by a lion rather than killed. Bate speculates this pairing of the two names in one tale could explain why several contemporary references to Shakespeare's play take the form Titus and Ondronicus rather than a single title.

  For Lucius, Frances Yates proposed a link to Saint Lucius, who brought Christianity to Britain, while Jonathan Bate favors a connection to Lucius Junius Brutus, founder of the Roman Republic. Bate argues that Lucius's arc in the play, banished son who returns to avenge his family and is proclaimed emperor, mirrors the role Brutus played in Roman historical myth. Geoffrey Bullough pointed out that Lucius's broader character arc, estrangement from his father followed by banishment and glorious return, was likely shaped by Plutarch's Life of Coriolanus.

  Saturninus may have been drawn from Herodian's History of the Empire from the Death of Marcus, which features a jealous and violent tribune named Saturninus. Eugene M. Waith proposed an astrological dimension: Guy Marchant's The Kalendayr of the shyppars, published in 1503, describes men born under Saturn as false, envious, and malicious, a profile that fits the character precisely.

• 5. A Play Nobody Claimed

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  None of the three quarto editions of Titus name the author, which was standard practice for Elizabethan plays. The first edition was published by John Danter in 1594 under the title The Most Lamentable Romaine Tragedie of Titus Andronicus, making it the first of Shakespeare's plays to appear in print. Francis Meres did list it as one of Shakespeare's tragedies in Palladis Tamia in 1598, and John Heminges and Henry Condell included it in the First Folio of 1623.

  Edward Ravenscroft was the first to publicly question Shakespeare's authorship, in 1678, calling the original play "a heap of rubbish rather than a structure." Over the following century, the list of Shakespeareans who doubted his involvement grew to include Nicholas Rowe, Alexander Pope, Lewis Theobald, Samuel Johnson, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, among many others. By 1794, Thomas Percy wrote in the introduction to Reliques of Ancient English Poetry that Shakespeare's memory had been fully vindicated from the charge of writing the play, treating the question as essentially settled in the negative.

  Twentieth-century scholarship shifted the debate toward co-authorship rather than wholesale denial. John Mackinnon Robertson argued in 1905 that much of the play was written by George Peele. T. M. Parrott reached the conclusion in 1919 that Peele wrote Act 1, sections 2.1 and 4.1, and subsequent scholars using rhetorical analysis, rare-word tests, metrical analysis, and function-word distribution repeatedly converged on the same passages. In 1987, Marina Tarlinskaja used quantitative analysis of stresses in iambic pentameter and arrived at the same conclusion as Parrott. Macdonald Jackson reached identical findings in 1979 and again in 1996 using different methods each time.

  Brian Vickers's 2002 book Shakespeare, Co-Author assembled the case for Peele's authorship of Act 1, 2.1 and 4.1 using three new tests: an analysis of polysyllabic words, an analysis of alliteration, and an analysis of vocatives. The New Oxford Shakespeare's Authorship Companion subsequently found that scene 4.1 is more likely Shakespeare's than Peele's, and proposed that the Fly Scene, Act 3 Scene 2, present only in the 1623 Folio, was probably a late addition by Thomas Middleton. Darren Freebury-Jones disputed both conclusions in Shakespeare's Borrowed Feathers, arguing fresh evidence supports Peele's authorship of 4.1 and that the Fly Scene likely formed part of the original play.

• 6. The Problem of Marcus's Speech

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  When Marcus discovers Lavinia after her rape, he delivers a long and formally ornate speech describing her injuries in florid, image-laden language. The speech has become one of the most debated passages in all of Shakespeare, precisely because it seems so tonally wrong. John Dover Wilson called it a bundle of ill-matched conceits held together by sticky sentimentalism. Eugene M. Waith concluded it was an aesthetic failure that might have read well on the page but was incongruous in performance. In the 1955 RSC production, director Peter Brook cut the speech entirely.

  Yet the defenders of the speech have accumulated a range of competing interpretations. Nicholas Brooke argued it functions as a choric commentary, making an emblem of the mutilated woman for the audience. The actress Eve Myles, who played Lavinia in the 2003 RSC production, described Marcus as trying to bandage her wounds with language, treating the speech as a calming act rather than an aesthetic failure. Anthony Brian Taylor proposed that Marcus is simply babbling, that a man in shock has drifted inward and cannot confront the horror before him. Jonathan Bate read the speech as language's attempt to give back what has been taken, returning Lavinia's beauty and innocence figuratively through the beauty of the words themselves.

  D. J. Palmer argued that Marcus's ornate conceits do not retreat from the awful reality but instead dwell on a figure that is simultaneously familiar and strange, fair and hideous, living body and object. He concluded that Lavinia's plight is literally unutterable, and that the speech articulates what cannot be spoken directly. In the 1987 RSC production at The Swan, directed by Deborah Warner, Donald Sumpter delivered the speech unedited. Stanley Wells wrote that the effect became a deeply moving attempt to master the facts, as if the speech represented a sequence of thoughts that might have taken a second or two to flash through the character's mind, like a bad dream.

  Alan C. Dessen, also writing about the Warner production, described watching Marcus work through his logic step by step, using Lavinia's reactions to reconstruct what had happened, so that the horror was filtered through a human consciousness in a way difficult to describe but powerful to experience. The Deborah Warner production at The Swan remains one of the key pieces of evidence for those who argue the speech works in performance even when it fails on the page.

• 7. From Rubbish to Relevant

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  In 1687, Edward Ravenscroft staged a theatrical adaptation called Titus Andronicus, or the Rape of Lavinia and declared the original a heap of rubbish. Samuel Johnson, in 1765, questioned whether the play could even be staged, given what he called the barbarity of its spectacles. August Wilhelm Schlegel, in 1811, argued it had degenerated into the horrible without leaving any deep impression. By the Victorian era, the graphic violence had made the play essentially unstable, and it disappeared from the stage with near-total regularity.

  T. S. Eliot's 1927 verdict that the best passages would be too highly honoured by the signature of George Peele was widely shared and long repeated. John Dover Wilson, in 1948, wrote that the play seemed to jolt and bump along like a broken-down cart laden with bleeding corpses, driven by an executioner dressed in cap and bells. He argued it was only remembered because of Shakespeare's name attached to it, not for any intrinsic quality.

  The rehabilitation began after the Second World War, and A. L. Rowse articulated the shift precisely in his 1987 edition. In the Victorian age, he wrote, the play could not be performed because it could not be believed; the horror of the twentieth century, with the barbarities of prison camps and resistance movements, had made the violence no longer improbable. The Polish critic Jan Kott made a similar observation from a different direction, arguing that Titus is by no means the most brutal of Shakespeare's plays and that Richard III contains more deaths, while King Lear is crueler. He wrote that on stage, unlike on the page, the cruelties of Titus become a moving experience, because Shakespeare discovered what Kott called the moral hell.

  Director Julie Taymor staged the play Off-Broadway in 1994 and directed a film version in 1999. She described it as the most relevant of Shakespeare's plays for the modern era. Harold Bloom, in his 1998 book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, defended it as a parody, arguing the play is only bad if you take it straight, and that its only suitable director would be Mel Brooks. Jacques Berthoud noted in 2001 that until shortly after World War II, the play was taken seriously only by a handful of textual and bibliographic scholars, but that by the time he was writing, many prominent scholars had come out in its defense. Jonathan Forman, reviewing Taymor's film, called it the Shakespeare play for our time, a work that speaks directly to the age of Rwanda and Bosnia, and Aaron's final moment, unrepentant to the end, regretting only that he did not commit more evil in his life, holds a particular charge in that context.