Act 4, Scene 1

In Titus’s garden, young Lucius, Titus’s grandson, is perturbed by the behavior of his aunt Lavinia, who is sifting through his schoolbooks and tossing them about distractedly. When she comes to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, she finds the tale of Philomela, who was raped and had her tongue cut out, and shows the story to Titus and Marcus. Lavinia then uses a stick, guided by the stumps of her arms, to write the names of Chiron and Demetrius in the dust on the ground. Titus, Marcus, and even young Lucius swear to be revenged on the empress’s two sons. Titus then sends Lucius to the palace with a cryptic message and gifts for Chiron and Demetrius.

Act 4, Scene 2

Lucius arrives at the palace and presents Chiron and Demetrius with the best weapons from Titus’s armory. When he leaves, the princes read the attached message. It is a quotation from the poet Horace that means “The man who leads an upright life, free from crime, does not need the bows and arrows of the Moor.” Chiron and Demetrius do not understand this, but Aaron, overhearing them, knows that it means that Titus has discovered their guilt.

A nurse enters the room bearing a baby, to which she says Tamora has just given birth. The baby is dark-skinned, meaning that the father must be Aaron, not Saturninus. The nurse, therefore, has orders to kill the child immediately. These instructions are approved by Chiron and Demetrius, but not by Aaron, who takes the child from the nurse and says he will kill anyone who tries to harm him. He kills the nurse anyway, to prevent her from talking, and then makes plans to swap the baby with a fair-skinned child who has recently been born nearby. Chiron and Demetrius go off to dispose of the nurse’s body, and Aaron leaves to put his plan into effect.

Analysis

This section of the play is unusually referential, with the first scene connecting Lavinia’s story explicitly with that of Philomela in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the second involving a surprising knowledge of the Roman poet Horace among the Goths. The University Wits, a group of Oxford- and Cambridge-educated poets with a tendency to look down on Shakespeare—but of whom his collaborator on Titus Andronicus, George Peele, was one—were fond of such references in the midst of their bloodshed.

These particular references to Latin literature, however, could scarcely be more pointless. Lavinia reveals to Titus that her assailants were Chiron and Demetrius by writing their names in the dust with a stick. All her antics with the copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses merely confirm that her story parallels that of Philomela, which is so obvious that it was the first thought to spring into Marcus’s mind upon discovering that his niece had lost her tongue. The reference, therefore, adds nothing to Titus’s understanding. He then sends a quotation from Horace to Chiron and Demetrius. Chiron is sufficiently well-educated to identify the source, but neither one of them is intelligent enough to perceive what it means.

Later, in Hamlet and other plays, Shakespeare was to make fun of pompous courtiers who were fond of quoting Latin, though it served only to obscure their meaning rather than sharpening their point. The suspicion that he may have been doing something similar here raises once again the question of how seriously the audience is intended to take the tragedy of Titus Andronicus and whether the whole play is a parody.

Another theme that connects the two scenes is that of children and their place in a...