Although traditionally Titus Andronicus has been seen as one of Shakespeare's least respected plays, its fortunes have changed somewhat in the latter half of the twentieth century, with numerous scholars arguing that the play is more significant and effective than has been acknowledged in most criticisms. In particular, scholars have argued that the play is far more thematically complex than has traditionally been thought, and features profound insights into ancient Rome, Elizabethan society, and the human condition. Such scholars tend to argue that these previously unacknowledged insights have only become apparent during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries due to newfound relevance in the play's ultraviolent content. For example, in his 1987 edition of the play for the Contemporary Shakespeare series, A.L. Rowse writes; "in the civilized Victorian age the play could not be performed because it could not be believed. Such is the horror of our own age, with the appalling barbarities of prison camps and resistance movements paralleling the torture and mutilation and feeding on human flesh of the play, that it has ceased to be improbable."A.L. Rowse, Titus Andronicus; Contemporary Shakespeare Series (Maryland: University of America Press, 1987), 15 Similarly, director Julie Taymor, who staged a production Off-Broadway in 1994 and directed a film version in 1999, says she was drawn to the play because she found it to be the most "relevant of Shakespeare's plays for the modern era."Julie Taymor, DVD Commentary for Titus; 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2000 She feels that the play has more relevance for contemporary audiences than it had for the Victorians: "it seems like a play written for today, it reeks of now."Charlie Rose interview; 19 January 2000 Because of these newer appreciations of the play's relevance, previously unrecognized thematic strands have thus come to the forefront.
Revenge
The most prominent theme in Titus Andronicus and the one most often dissected in scholarship is revenge. The story of Procne and Philomela is mentioned several times, and just as they are driven by a desire for revenge, so too are the characters in Titus; the entire narrative from midway through Act 1 is built around the plotting of revenge. According to Hereward Thimbleby Price, Shakespeare "is writing a Senecan play according to the rules, that is to say, a play in which the hero is a man who inexorably pursues revenge and who dies in the act of taking it."Price (1943: 62) Bill Alexander, who directed a Royal Shakespeare Company production in 2003, argues that
the play is largely about revenge and the desire to take revenge. I think that everyone understands on some level that revenge is something you might feel from time to time. The play asks the question "At what point is it right for an individual to take revenge because there is no other way of redressing wrongs?" One of the great things about Shakespeare is that he never attempts to answer such questions, he simply poses them. Titus Andronicus poses the question of revenge, so it can't not be relevant. Everyone has an opinion about when revenge becomes justified and whether the nature of being civilised and human demands that something like revenge is excluded, or must be excluded, from the imagination ... In a sense the play is there to evoke our humanity and our sense of pity about what human beings can do to each other and about what revenge does to human souls. Revenge can drive people mad, and madness can drive people to revenge."
The theme of revenge is introduced very early in the play. In the opening scene, we learn that some of Titus' sons have been killed during the war with the Goths, and as a result, Titus feels compelled to sacrifice Tamora's son, Alarbus. Here revenge takes on a religious duty as Titus claims of his dead sons, "Religiously they ask a sacrifice" (l.124). The sacrifice of Alarbus, however, prompts a desire for revenge in his family. As Demetrius tells Tamora immediately after the sacrifice;
The selfsame gods that armed the Queen of Troy With opportunity of sharp revenge Upon the Thracian tyrant in his tent May favour Tamora, the Queen of Goths (When Goths were Goths and Tamora was Queen), To quit the bloody wrongs upon her foes. 1.1.136-141
This ultimately leads to Tamora ordering her sons to rape Lavinia, which in turn leads directly to Titus killing and then cooking Chiron and Demetrius, his eventual murder of both Lavinia and Tamora, his own death at the hands of Saturninus, and Saturninus' death at the hands of Lucius. Revenge runs through the play from beginning to end; Coppélia Kahn argues that the basic trajectory of the plot is "Titus' transformation from Roman hero to revenge hero."Kahn (1997: 55)
After the sacrifice of Alarbus, when Saturninus has taken Tamora as his bride, she asks him to pardon Titus for what Saturninus sees as dishonourable conduct. Incredulous, Saturninus asks, "What, madam, be dishonoured openly,/And basely put it up without revenge" (1.1.432–433); any infraction or insult must be reciprocated. Later, Aaron tells Tamora that he too is preoccupied with revenge; "Blood and revenge are hammering in my head" (2.3.39). Ordering her sons to rape Lavinia, Tamora says "This vengeance on me had they executed./Revenge it, as you love your mother's life" (2.3.114–115). Then, prior to the rape, Tamora responds to Lavinia's pleas for mercy by outlining how important her revenge is, only Lavinia's pain can satiate it;
Hadst thou in person ne'er offended me, Even for [Alarbus'] sake am I pitiless. Remember, boys, I poured forth tears in vain To save your brother from the sacrifice, But fierce Andronicus would not relent. Therefore away with her, and use her as you will; The worse of her, the better loved of me. 2.3.161-167
As Chiron and Demetrius drag Lavinia into the forest, Tamora vows "Ne'er let my heart know merry cheer indeed/Till all the Andronici be made away" (2.3.187–188). Tamora will literally not be happy until she has avenged herself on the whole family.
Later in the play, Titus makes a similar avowal. After the deaths of Martius and Quintus, he asks, "Which way shall I find Revenge's cave?/For these two heads do seem to speak to me,/And threat me I shall never come to bliss/Till all these mischiefs be returned again" (3.1.269–272). As with Tamora, he is here saying that his primary raison d'être has become to seek revenge. Similarly, prior to Lucius' departure to the Goths, he declares;
If Lucius live he will requite your wrongs, And make proud Saturnine and his empress Beg at the gates like Tarquin and his queen. Now will I to the Goths and raise a power, To be revenged on Rome and Saturnine. 3.1.295-299
Immediately after Lucius' departure, Titus prepares a meal, but warns Marcus "Look you eat no more/Than will preserve just so much strength in us/As will revenge these bitter woes of ours" (3.2.1–3). Later, Titus comes to feel that even God has become involved in his desire for revenge; "Here display at last/What God will have discovered for revenge" (4.1.73). Then, upon the discovery of who raped Lavinia, he declares
And swear with me, as, with the woeful fere And father of that chaste dishonoured dame, Lord Junius Brutus sware for Lucrece' rape, That we will prosecute by good advice, Mortal revenge upon these traitorous Goths, And see their blood, or die with this reproach. 4.1.88-93
Young Lucius also becomes involved in a desire for revenge;
BOY I say, my lord, that if I were a man, Their mother's bedchamber should not be safe, For these base bondmen to the yoke of Rome.
TITUS Ah, that's my boy! Thy father had full oft For his ungrateful country done the like.
BOY And, uncle, so will I an if I live. 4.1.106-111
Later, Marcus urges Publius to "Join with the Goths, and with revengeful war/Take wreak on Rome for this ingratitude,/And vengeance on the traitor Saturnine" (4.3.32–34).
The most obvious manifestation of revenge is when it literally enters the play, with Tamora attempting to dupe the apparently insane Titus; "I will encounter with Andronicus,/And say I am Revenge, sent from below/To join with him and right his heinous wrongs" (5.2.2–4). She then introduces herself as
I am Revenge, sent from th’infernal kingdom To ease the gnawing vulture of thy mind By working wreakful vengeance on thy foes. 5.2.32-35
Titus then instructs Revenge that if she encounter Tamora and her sons "I pray thee, do on them some violent death;/They have been violent to me and mine" (5.2.108–109).
Jonathan Bate sees this scene as especially important in the treatment of revenge. On how Titus manipulates the scene and turns the tables, Bate comments "the vehicle of Tamora's revenge against Titus for the death of Alarbus has become the vehicle of Titus' revenge against Tamora for the rape of Lavinia and the deaths of Bassianus, Quintus and Martius." He also finds great significance in the physical entry of Revenge into the play; "by representing Revenge as a character's device rather than a 'reality' outside the action, [Shakespeare] suggests that retribution is a matter of human, not divine will."Bate (1995: 22)
Violence and the audience One of the main reasons that Titus has traditionally been derided is the amount of on-stage violence. The play is saturated with violence from its opening scene, and violence touches virtually every character; Alarbus is burned alive and has his arms chopped off; Titus stabs his own son to death; Bassianus is murdered and thrown into a pit; Lavinia is brutally raped (and has her hands cut off and her tongue cut out); Martius and Quintus are decapitated; a nurse and a midwife are stabbed to death by Aaron; an innocent clown is executed for no apparent reason; Titus kills Chiron and Demetrius and cooks them in a pie, which he then feeds to their mother. Then, in the final scene, in the space of a few lines, Titus kills in succession Lavinia and Tamora, and is then immediately killed by Saturninus, who is in turn immediately killed by Lucius. Aaron is then buried up to his neck and left to starve to death in the open air and Tamora's body is thrown to the wild beasts outside the city. As S. Clark Hulse points out, "it has 14 killings, 9 of them on stage, 6 severed members, 1 rape (or 2 or 3 depending on how you count), 1 live burial, 1 case of insanity, and 1 of cannibalism – an average of 5.2 atrocities per act, or one for every 97 lines."Hulse (1979: 107)
J. Dover Wilson, following John Addington Symonds, defines the play as part of a subgenre called "Tragedy of Blood", directly influenced by Seneca, and places it alongside such plays as Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton's Gorboduc, (c.1561), Thomas Hughes' The Misfortunes of Arthur (1588), Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (c.1588), Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta (1590), Henry Chettle's The Tragedy of Hoffman (1602) and the anonymous Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany (1654). As such, a common theory as to why the play is so violent is that Shakespeare was trying to outdo his predecessors, who catered to the blood-thirsty tastes of the Elizabethan groundlings (Alan C. Dessen refers to Titus as "the most 'Elizabethan' of Shakespeare's plays"Dessen (1989: 4)). In Thomas Preston's Cambyses (1569), for example, a character is brutally flagellated on stage, and various props and theatrical effects are used to simulate dismemberment and several instances of decapitation. In Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, there are several graphic murders, and the protagonist bites out his own tongue. Dover Wilson thus suggests that Shakespeare was giving the audience what it wanted, but by giving it to them in such excessive quantities, he was in effect, mocking them, as he watched them "gaping ever wider to swallow more as he tossed them bigger and bigger gobbets of sob-stuff and raw beef-stake."Dover Wilson (1948: lvii)