[In the following excerpt, Waith examines the use of ceremonial gestures in Titus Andronicus to dramatize conflicts between opposing sets of values and to present differing perspectives on the actions of the characters.]

Burley-on-the-Hill, where James I was to be so delighted by the masque of The Gypsies Metamorphosed, was the scene of Christmas holiday festivities in 1595-6 which included a performance of Titus Andronicus on 1 January. The choice of this play for such an occasion now seems very odd, to say the least, but perhaps less so when we notice that in the one known account of the occasion, the tragedy is valued mainly as a 'show.' Jaques Petit, the Gascon servant of Anthony Bacon, writes to his master: 'on a aussi ioué la tragedie de Titus Andronicus mais la monstre a plus valeu que le suiect.' To some critics the word 'monstre' may seem to have an unintended appropriateness, but even those who do not consider the play merely monstrous will agree that spectacles of one sort or another constitute an unusually important element of its stage presentation. It is tempting to suppose that the performance at Burley-on-the-Hill inspired Henry Peacham's famous drawing of Titus Andronicus, if the date on the manuscript is 1595, though we have no proof that Peacham was there. In any case, whenever and wherever it was executed, it suggests, in the variety of costume and gesture, something of the visual impact the play had. Many of the most striking appeals to the eye are made by ceremonies—the election of an emperor, a triumphal procession, prayers, a sacrifice, and burial rites, to go less than half-way through the opening scene. I believe that these ceremonies and other closely related visual effects make a vital contribution to the meaning of the play. 'La monstre' may be more directly related to 'le suiect' than Petit realized.

The play opens with a flourish of trumpets followed by the arrival at opposite doors of the rival candidates for the office of emperor, accompanied by drummers, trumpeters, and flag-bearers, while senators and tribunes enter 'aloft.' The contenders, Saturninus and Bassianus, with their friends and soldiers, face each other across the stage as do opposing armies in some history plays, clearly presenting the threat of violence. But the tribune Marcus Andronicus, holding in his hands a crown, the emblem of rule, persuades them to 'plead [their] deserts' peacefully. He also announces that the people's candidate is his brother Titus, who has saved Rome from the Goths. The forms of a democratic election are thus preserved and are dramatized by the spectacle of an incipient brawl turning into a political ceremony. G.K. Hunter [in Shakespeare Survey, 1974] has shown the remarkable similarity of this opening to that of Romeo and Juliet, where Montagues and Capulets enter at opposite doors and begin a fight which the prince ends, standing above, like Marcus, as an embodiment of civil order. In Titus Andronicus ceremonies which order or partly conceal discordant energies are of special importance.

When most of the first group of characters has left the stage to continue the process of election, a second ceremony, more spectacular than the first, supervenes—the triumphal return of Titus. Heralded by more drums and trumpets and preceded by four of his sons, as pallbearers with one or more coffins, the victorious general is drawn on stage in a chariot, behind which march the most distinguished of his prisoners, Tamora, the queen of the Goths, her three sons, and Aaron the Moor. For this is both a triumph and a funeral: the bodies of Titus's sons, who have died pro patria, are being taken to the tomb of the Andronici, a structure set up at the centre of the back wall of the stage. After a solemn march around the stage Titus alights from his chariot near the entrance of the tomb with his living sons on one side of him and his prisoners on the other. The stage picture powerfully asserts his centrality as the chief support of Rome, while the combined ceremony of victory and burial shows how aptly he is 'surnamed Pius' (I.i.23), like Aeneas. The tomb becomes an emblem of devotion to family, fatherland, and the gods.

In the context of the feelings generated by this pageantry the demand of Titus's son Lucius that 'the proudest prisoner of the Goths' be sacrificed 'Ad manes fratrum ' (lines 96-8) has an appropriateness which at first inhibits the reaction of shock at the idea of human sacrifice. Are we (and were Elizabethans) being asked to give imaginative assent to the customs of another time and place? Before such a question can be answered, it is greatly complicated by the plea of Tamora for her son Alarbus, whom Titus has immediately handed over to Lucius. On her knees the queen puts her feelings as a mother against the demands of Roman piety and further reminds Titus that by being merciful he might rise to an even higher religious standard. The Peacham drawing is evidence that her prayer was, not only verbally but visually, an arresting moment.

When Titus dismisses it with a reassertion of piety—'Religiously they ask a sacrifice' (line 124)—and Tamora says, 'O cruel, irreligious piety!' (130), the play presents the first of many double visions of its hero. His self-dedication to certain principles has produced a shocking loss of humanity, and yet this is no clear-cut case of the good man going wrong. We see a collision of two sets of values, neither of which should necessarily prevail in all circumstances. Of such conflicts the rhetorical controversiae were made, and Titus Andronicus often reminds one of those cases, where arguments of almost equal force can be brought to support opposing judgments.

In the main the ceremony of triumph and burial tells in favour of Titus's view of the situation, and so does much of the language of the scene. The death of Alarbus is described by Lucius as 'Our Roman rites,' and the 'sacrificing fire' to which his body has been consigned is said to produce smoke which 'like incense doth perfume the sky' (lines 143-5). In the midst of this speech, however, is the disturbing clause, 'Alarbus' limbs are lopp'd' (Lawrence Danson [in Tragic Alphabet: Shakespeare's Drama of Language, 1974] thinks it may be Shakespeare's worst half-line), which plays the brutal facts against the ceremonial way of interpreting them. And even the stage picture is not unambiguously pro-ritual, for as the rites are being described and as the bodies of Titus's sons are being laid in the tomb, the queen of the Goths and her sons are still there as reminders of the rejected plea for mercy, and with them the silent but surely (for an Elizabethan audience) ominous figure of Aaron the Moor.

The solemn words with which Titus now commits the bodies of his dead sons to the tomb gain an extraordinary power from the cross-currents of feeling inspired by the immediately preceding actions and dialogue. Rapt in contemplation of death, where one is 'Secure from worldly chances and mishaps' (line 152), Titus projects an admirable serenity, which we already see to be resting on shaky foundations. Shakespeare makes us aware of an unspoken counterpoint to this moving speech.

Violence again threatens ceremonial order when Marcus, as spokesman for the Roman people, asks Titus to be a candidate and assures him of election to the 'empery.' Saturninus, the eldest son of the dead emperor, immediately asks his followers to support his claim with their swords. Now Titus assumes the role of peacemaker and judge, and once again the ceremony, in which he plays the central part, shows him in a mainly favourable light, while at the same time it is obvious that he is making a foolish mistake. Bassianus, Saturninus's younger brother, making no threat of force, asks with perfect civility for Titus's support, but Titus hardly seems to hear him. As if there could be but one proper solution, he asks the people to choose Saturninus, who, a moment later, is acclaimed emperor. Declining the honour for himself, upholding the forms of election, and speaking reasonably in favour of the eldest son, Titus cannot seem entirely misguided (Shakespeare could count on widespread acceptance of the right of primogeniture), and yet Saturninus has already been established as wilful and violent in contrast to his law-abiding brother. When Titus instantly assents to Saturninus's proposal to marry Lavinia, with whom we know that Bassianus is in love, Titus's readiness to sacrifice everything to principle is painfully clear. Folly and self-righteousness are the obverse of his piety.

The ceremony of electing a new emperor is barely concluded before violence disrupts the established order as Bassianus, pointedly ignored in the preceding action, seizes his brother's bride. In the ensuing mêlée Titus is the only one of the Andronici to condemn Bassianus. To the others he is taking what belongs to him, but Titus's loyalty to the new emperor and to his own promise carry him to the point of killing his son Mutius for covering the escape of Bassianus. So completely does he identify himself with the course of action he has chosen that when Lucius tells him he has slain his son 'in wrongful quarrel,' he replies, 'Nor thou, nor he, are any sons of mine' (lines 293-4). Like Tamburlaine, he kills his son for being unworthy of him, but where Marlowe partly justifies his hero by making a comical coward of the son and discrediting Tamburlaine's enemies, Shakespeare creates a starker contrast. Only Titus can see the murder as an assertion of family honour. To everyone else it is a piece of wilful violence based on a hideous error of judgment. For the first time Titus is clearly wrong. Less clearly we may see a parallel between this sacrifice and that of Alarbus. When Titus is brutally spurned a few minutes later by Saturninus, sympathy for the hero is inevitably qualified. As in a controversia, the emperor's ingratitude must be weighed against Titus's self-deluded brutality.

The ceremony which immediately follows presents Titus's brother and remaining sons on their knees, begging him to allow the burial of Mutius in the family tomb. His initial angry rejection of his entire family is followed by reconciliation. The petitioners rise from their knees, place the body in the tomb, and kneel to say, 'He lives in fame that died in virtue's cause' (line 390). The ritual at least partially revalidates the piety of the Andronici.

It has been noted [by J. Dover Wilson, Titus Andronicus, 1948] that the fifty-line episode of the burial of Mutius, like the equally brief one of the sacrifice of Alarbus, seems to have been added to a pre-existing text. Both introduce visually striking ceremonies in which petitioners kneel to Titus. On one occasion he refuses; on the other he reluctantly accedes. Both complicate our understanding of the hero. These bits of evidence seem to show us an author increasing his use of what he sees as an effective device.

At the end of this long first movement the stage is again crowded with all the major characters, and Shakespeare gives us what could be seen as mockery of the preceding intercession followed by reconciliation. Here Tamora pretends to intercede with the emperor on behalf of Titus and his family; the Andronici kneel, and Saturninus feigns renewed friendship with them. That this spectacle is mere show we know from a long aside in which Tamora tells of her hopes for revenge and from Aaron's soliloquy, which follows when everyone else has left the stage. When the ominous black figure speaks at last, he adds a dimension to the political reality which some of the ceremonies have partially concealed. He may even act out a metaphor of revealing an unsuspected reality by discarding the drab clothing of a prisoner and putting on more brilliant attire as he says,

Away with slavish weeds and servile thoughts!
I will be bright, and shine in pearl and gold.
                                       (lines 18-19)

His speech ends with a prophecy of the 'shipwrack' of the Roman commonweal.

The 'solemn hunting' of the panther and the hart, which occupies much of act II, is not presented on stage in a spectacular way, though we hear horns and may see the dogs (in the second scene). The main stage action is the hunting of Bassianus, Lavinia, and the sons of Titus, in the presentation of which Shakespeare introduces another kind of picture—the formal description which conjures up an imagined scene. The first instance is Tamora's attractive description of the woods (II.iii. 10-29), which John Monck Mason [in Comments on the Last Edition of Shakespeare 's Plays, 1785] considered the only speech in Shakespeare's style in the entire play. This might be taken as a standard instance of verbal scene-painting if it did not contradict descriptions of the same woods that precede and follow it. Aaron has assured Chiron and Demetrius that 'the woods are ruthless, dreadful, deaf, and dull' (II.i.128). Tamora herself is to call them 'A barren detested vale' (II.iii.93), and later Titus will identify them with the 'ruthless, vast, and gloomy woods' where Philomela was forced (IV.i.53). To Tamora, in her anticipation of Aaron's embraces, all animate and inanimate nature 'doth make a gleeful boast' (II.iii. 11). The subjectivity of these views can hardly escape notice.

Much more striking is the contrast between the mutilated Lavinia who appears on stage and Marcus's Ovidian description of what he sees as he stands looking at her, comparing her missing hands to branches cut from a tree, the blood flowing from her mouth to a bubbling fountain, and her cheeks to the sun (II.iv. 16-51). The inappropriateness of such a response to Lavinia's situation poses a staggering problem for the director. Lyric and dramatic modes seem to collide; 'the action,' I once said [in Shakespeare Survey, 1957] 'frustrates, rather than re-enforces, the operation of the poetry.' The solution of some directors is to cut most or all of the Ovidian poetry, but a rejection of the contradiction is not inevitable. Another way of interpreting the scene is to take the discrepancy between what we see on the stage and what Marcus says as a kind of double vision, analogous to those ritual gestures in the first act which make piety of human sacrifice or honour of the murder of a son. The strange images which Marcus substitutes for the mangled body of his niece provide a way of holding the experience off rather than expressing the emotions it arouses. He longs to rail at the unknown perpetrator of this horror to ease his mind, and he knows that 'Sorrow concealed, like an oven stopp'd, / Doth burn the heart to cinders where it is' (lines 34-7), but this sanative release is denied him. The fanciful picture he creates offers a temporary refuge even though the frustration of a more natural response threatens to intensify the repressed emotion. The double vision provided by this elaborate picture is neither rationalization nor wishful thinking but may be a desperate effort to come to terms with unbearable pain.

In the central scene of the play, where, after meeting Lavinia, Titus tries to save the lives of his sons by allowing his hand to be chopped off, only to have the hand returned to him with the heads of his sons, stage ceremonies and the analogous operation of pictorial poetry more and more transform reality into fantasy. A brief procession opens the scene, 'the Judges and Senators, with Titus ' two sons, bound, passing on the stage to the place of execution, and TITUS going before pleading' (III. i. first stage direction). The victorious general and king-maker prostrates himself before officials who totally ignore him. The pantomime is complemented by Titus's conceit that the stones to which he has addressed his plea 'are better than the tribunes,' more sympathetic and softer-hearted (lines 37-47). When he thus explains his talking to the stones after the judges and senators have walked off, he is doing something stranger than justifying cruel behaviour as adherence to lofty ideals, but not altogether different.

His bitter outburst,

                  dost thou not perceive
That Rome is but a wilderness of tigers?
Tigers must prey, and Rome affords no prey
But me and mine
                                   (lines 53-6),

is a shrewd appraisal of the actual situation, but also one of a series of vivid images which tend to push the action into an imaginary space—to offer a metaphorical reality which competes with what we see. The image of the hunting-down of the Andronici has been prepared for by the cynical references to Lavinia as the 'dainty doe' that Chiron and Demetrius seek to 'pluck to ground' (II.i. 117; II.ii.26). Soon Titus is comparing himself to 'one upon a rock / Environ'd with a wilderness of sea' (III.i.93-4). These self-comparisons are, of course, examples of a kind of heightening often used by the poetic dramatist and need not be attributed to the speaker. In this play, however, where the difference between the hero's view and that of others is frequently an issue, these pictorial representations of Titus may be taken, at least in part, as his own. Like Marcus's description of Lavinia, they may constitute a way of dealing with a reality too horrible to face directly, and they also suggest powerfully the process by which Titus is being transformed from a victim into a revenger. As the prey of tigers, as one about to be swept away by the sea, he is the helpless object of powerful forces, though already his grief, like the Nile, 'disdaineth bounds' (line 71). In his fantasy of the Andronici sitting around a fountain, their tears will make a 'brine-pit' of it (129): sheer quantity can have its effect. Soon he imagines that 'with our sighs we'll breathe the welkin dim' (211), to which Marcus replies, 'O brother, speak with possibility, / And do not break into these deep extremes' (214-15). But Titus's passions have no bottom. No longer a man who is simply at the mercy of tigers or the sea, he is now the sea or the earth, responding to the wind and rain of Lavinia's sighs and tears:

When heaven doth weep, doth not the earth
  o'erflow?
If the winds rage, doth not the sea wax mad,
Threat'ning the welkin with his big-swol'n face?
                                                       (221-3)

In these images of himself the responsive and dangerous power of the revenger begins to appear. When the final blow falls with the delivery of his sons' heads, his memorable question, 'When will this fearful slumber have an end?' (252) and his chilling laughter show us that he will now live mainly in the alternative world of his fantasies.

The next scene (III.ii) presents us with a banquet, one of the standard forms of Elizabethan stage ceremony. The scene appears only in the Folio text and was probably a late addition, made to provide an effective instance of Titus's fantasizing. It is not a state occasion like the banquet in Macbeth or the one to which Titus later invites the emperor and empress. Nevertheless, a certain formality is inevitable with the bringing in of a table and benches and the seating of the four Andronici, Titus, Marcus, Lavinia, and the young son of Lucius. Titus grieves; the boy comforts him, and then comes the one action of the brief scene: Marcus kills a fly with his knife. Titus at first protests this 'deed of death done on the innocent' (56), but when Marcus explains that it was a 'black ill-favoured fly, / Like to the empress' Moor' (66-7), Titus suddenly borrows the knife so that he can 'insult on' the fly's corpse, 'as if it were the Moor' (71-2).

The killing of the fly becomes a ritual of revenge:

Alas, poor man! grief has so wrought on him,
He takes false shadows for true substances
                                          (79-80)

The episode not only anticipates the final banquet but also prepares for the enactment of other fantasies such as the sending of Titus's messages. Young Lucius delivers to Chiron and Demetrius a bundle of weapons wrapped in a scroll with a famous quotation from Horace (IV.ii). Titus dispatches kinsmen to find Astraea and to deliver a petition to Pluto; he gives the Clown an 'oration' to present to the emperor (IV.iii). Visually more impressive is the mad ceremony which takes place in the middle of this scene of message-sending: at Titus's command Marcus, young Lucius, and the other kinsmen shoot arrows into the palace grounds 'with letters on the ends of them' addressed to various gods.

The initial ceremonies of act I, whether political, military, or religious, are all genuine ceremonies with traditional forms embodying the ideals to which the hero subscribes. Even when their validity, appropriateness, and applicability are questioned, the forms continue to sustain one side of the dialectic by reminding us of the hero's essentially noble nature. The ceremonies of the middle of the play serve a different, but related, function. Prayers to the paving stones, the ritual murder of a fly, and the dispatch of messages to the gods are form without substance. They express, not ideals with a questionable relationship to the situation at hand, but fantasies, clearly separated from external reality. All of them reflect the hero's obsession with redress of some sort; some show his abiding concern with justice; one specifically adumbrates his revenge. At this point in the play, when Titus's failings have come to seem less important than the horrible way in which his enemies have taken advantage of him, it is appropriate to focus attention not on moral dialectic but on the traumatic consequences of his experience. The mad games in which Titus engages his kinsmen have the additional function of preparing for yet another kind of ceremony—the purely deceptive one by means of which he carries out his revenge.

For the final ceremony Shakespeare reassembles all the surviving major characters and, as befits the author of a revenge play, kills off a large proportion of them. The Thyestean banquet, however, is preceded by a ceremony devised by Tamora to complete the ruin of the Andronici. It is brilliant not only in its staging (it must have contributed significantly to the 'monstre' noted by Petit) but also in its multiple perspectives on character and theme.

When Tamora, disguised as Revenge and accompanied by her two sons as Rape and Murder, visits Titus, she apparently has herself drawn in a chariot (V.ii.47ff), as such allegorical personages often are in a masque. The spectacle recalls the triumphal procession of the opening scene, when Titus rode in the chariot while Tamora and her sons walked behind as prisoners of war. The situations are not precisely reversed, however, for now Titus appears above, as at the door of his study, and Tamora entreats him to come down: she is again the petitioner. Her plan for persuading him to invite Lucius to his house is as mad as any of his, though Tamora is repeatedly described as unusually clever. So she obviously considers herself, taking great pride in this invention, which 'fits his lunacy' (line 70). Only her sublime self-confidence blinds her to the plain fact that Titus instantly knows who she is. In a play which repeatedly shows how 'pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall,' she proves to be, if anything, a more egregious example than the hero. When she rides away in triumph, leaving her sons with Titus, she gives him his second victory over her and hers. Throughout the brief episode this spectacle is not merely form without substance but a sign that means the exact opposite of what it seems to signify.

The banquet, which is conclusive in so many ways, is an exceedingly grand affair. Trumpets not only announce the arrival of Saturninus, Tamora, and their train but, a moment later, the entrance of Titus, dressed as a cook and bearing one of the fatal 'pasties' in his hand. He then places the dishes on the table, perhaps with such assistance as Lavinia can give. His welcome is ceremonious, and he explains his unusual costume by his wish 'to have all well' (V.iii.31) to entertain the emperor and empress. The guests are seated in their appointed places, and the banquet begins. The contrast beween these ceremonial gestures and the ensuing carnage fits perfectly in a play where every ceremony is in some way at odds with the situation which it solemnizes. The first death—Lavinia's at the hand of her father—is presented by Titus as a re-enactment of the killing of Virginia to wipe out her shame. Here Saturninus is ironically cast in the role of shocked spectator and spokesman for propriety (lines 35-48). Next comes Titus's revelation of the true nature of the banquet, and then in rapid sucession the stabbings of Tamora, Titus, and Saturninus, leading to 'a great tumult' (in the appropriate words of Capell's stage direction). It subsides as the stage picture recalls the opening of the play. Marcus and Lucius, standing above the assembled crowd, where Marcus stood once before, calm them with an explanation of what has happened and call for the reintegration of the Roman body politic. When Lucius is acclaimed emperor, the ceremonial order again prevails.

One of the most satisfying (and occasionally puzzling) characteristics of Shakespeare's mature writing is his extraordinary even-handedness with his characters, bringing out a great man's folly or blindness and a villain's moments of appealing humanity. When these antithetical qualities appear in a good actor's interpretation, they demand a corresponding complexity in the response of the spectator. In Chapman's words [in Byron's Tragedy], 'Oh of what contraries consists a man! / Of what impossible mixtures!' In its most impressive moments Titus Andronicus anticipates these later developments by offering simultaneously two contrary views of the hero, his family, and his enemies. Spectacular ceremonies and the closely related images of a pictorial poetry are the most conspicuous means of stimulating an awareness of these contradictions.