SOURCE: “The Forest, Hunting and Sacrifice in Titus Andronicus,” in New Perspectives on the Shakespearean World, translated by Janet Lloyd, Cambridge University Press, 1985, pp. 40-47.

[In the essay below, originally published in 1981, Marienstras demonstrates the way in which Titus Andronicus uses the violence that occurs in the name of hunting and sacrifice to explore the dichotomy between “civilized” Rome and the “wildness” of nature.]

Shakespeare's interest in the themes of hunting, the forest and sacrifice—or the sacrificial act insofar as it can be represented or evoked on stage—can be clearly seen in Titus Andronicus.¹

While Saturninus and Bassianus are engaged in a struggle for power, Titus makes his triumphal entry into Rome. He has conquered the Goths and brings back prisoners with him: Tamora, queen of the Goths, her three sons Alarbus, Chiron and Demetrius, and Aaron the Moor. Alongside four living sons, he also brings back the bodies of his own twenty-one sons who have been killed. To appease their shades, Lucius asks that a Goth be sacrificed before the bier of his brothers and Titus grants his request:

Lucius: A reason mighty, strong, and effectual,
That we may hew his limbs, and on a pile
Ad manes fratrum sacrifice his flesh
Before this earthy prison of their bones,
That so the shadows be not unappeas'd,
Nor we disturb'd with prodigies on earth.
Titus: I give him you, the noblest that survives,
The eldest son of this distressed queen.

(I, i, 96-103)

This sacrifice corresponds to what Shakespeare and his audience considered to be Roman custom.² Its purpose was to spare the living the anger of the dead and prevent the occurrence of disastrous prodigies.

Tamora begs that her eldest son be spared:

Stay, Roman brethren! Gracious conqueror,
Victorious Titus, rue the tears I shed,
A mother's tears in passion for her son:
And if thy sons were ever dear to thee,
O, think my son to be as dear to me.
Sufficeth not that we are brought to Rome,
To beautify thy triumphs, and return
Captive to thee and to thy Roman yoke;
But must my sons be slaughtered in the streets
For valiant doings in their country's cause?
O, if to fight for king and commonweal
Were piety in thine, it is in these.
Andronicus, stain not thy tomb with blood:
Wilt thou draw near the nature of the gods?
Draw near them then in being merciful;
Sweet mercy is nobility's true badge:
Thrice-noble Titus, spare my first-born son.

(I, i, 104-20)

First Tamora refers to the similarity of the feelings that a father and a mother should feel for their respective children. To this argument, which appeals to the humanity common to both conqueror and conquered, she then adds another: patriotism should be respected even in an enemy. She adjures Titus not to defile this tomb with blood: pity, not intransigence or harshness, is a virtue worthy of the gods and it is also a sign of true nobility.

A few comments are necessary at this point. Although the Elizabethan public may have believed that the souls of the dead sometimes returned to harass the living,³ it could hardly have believed that a human sacrifice had ever really been necessary to appease the anger of the dead. In the words of Philip Brockbank: ‘Resistance to the ancient cult of sacrifice is an important and necessary strain in both humanist and Christian tradition’.⁴ On the other hand, revenge, which is a disguised form of sacrifice and which obliges the avenger to ‘take the law into his own hands’ even though he has no legal (or possibly even moral) right to set himself up as an agent of justice, did sometimes take place in real life and was often acted out with great success in the theatre.⁵

Tamora's arguments—humanitarian, patriotic and with their appeal to the virtues of nobility—were familiar and probably convincing to the Elizabethan public. In contrast, Titus' reply:

Patient yourself, madam, and pardon me.
These are their brethren whom your Goths beheld
Alive and dead, and for their brethren slain
Religiously they ask a sacrifice:
To this your son is mark'd, and die he must,
T'appease their groaning shadows that are gone.

(I, i, 121-6)

must have seemed specious in the eyes of Christians. ‘Religiously they ask a sacrifice’: that calls to mind Lopez de Gomara's remark that the Indians ‘were growne even to the highest hill of crueltie under the colour of devout and religious persons’.⁶ Tamora's exclamation: ‘O, cruel, irreligious piety!’ may well have been in tune with the feelings of some of the public even if that public could understand that the sacrificial act simply masked a desire for vengeance. Lucius' two rejoinders must have confirmed those feelings:

Away with him, and make a fire straight,
And with our swords, upon a pile of wood,
Let's hew his limbs till they be clean consum'd.

(I, i, 127-9)

See, lord and father, how we have perform'd
Our Roman rites: Alarbus' limbs are lopp'd,
And entrails feed the sacrificing fire,
Whose smoke like incense doth perfume the sky.

(I, i, 142-5)

In The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), Reginald Scot speaks of the ‘barbarous impiety’ of the Indians who ‘sacrifice such of their enemies as they have taken in warre’.⁷ In Titus Andronicus, the emphasis placed on dismemberment, on entrails burning on the sacrificial fire and perfuming the heavens like incense, must have been shocking to a public which disapproved of the cruelty of pagan customs and whose own religious ceremonies, moreover, had been made more sober after the Reformation. Furthermore, the barbarity of Rome is compared in the play by Chiron to that of the Scythians, and Demetrius assimilates Titus to the tyrant of Thrace, promising his mother that the day will come when vengeance will be possible.

This human sacrifice takes place at the moment when the power in Rome is in dispute; it may be seen as Titus' first mistake. The second is his refusal to assume the power that is offered to him and his decision to get his supporters to vote for Saturninus. The third is to take Saturninus' side when the latter seeks to marry Lavinia, already promised to Bassianus, and to kill his son Mutius because he revolts at this breaking of an earlier promise. All the horrors that are then perpetrated in the play have these events as their origin: the dismemberment of Alarbus is followed by the severing of the hands and tongue of Lavinia, the hand of Titus and the heads of Quintus, Martius and finally also of Demetrius and Chiron. Despite the often precious language and verbal flourishes which have surprised or shocked so many commentators,⁸ it was hardly possible to take a detached attitude before the horror of this series of mutilations, the climax of which is the cannibal meal that Titus offers Tamora. ‘To chop, to lop, to hew, to cut’—the words recur so often, accompanied by images or visible ‘tableaux’ produced on the stage, that the text propped up by these visible signifiers which have a greater force and longer lasting impact than the words themselves, acquires an almost realistic violence.

Although the human sacrifice does not occur on stage it is clearly introduced into the play to produce a shock effect. The fact that an act of ‘religious barbarity’ takes place in a city regarded in the sixteenth century as the very symbol of civilisation suggests that Shakespeare was already adopting a Christian point of view to judge and describe events happening before the advent of Christianity. But were such horrors really only conceivable in a pre-Christian civilisation? In Henry VI, Part III, the great families of England contending for power perpetrate similar cruelties. Thus, when Queen Margaret, Clifford and Northumberland have taken the duke of York prisoner (I, iv), the queen orders that he be stood on a molehill, he who

… raught at mountains with outstretched arms,
Yet parted but the shadow with his hand.(9)

Then she insults him at length, mocking his sons, particularly the youngest one, Edmund, duke of Rutland, assassinated though still a child. The queen hands York a handkerchief soaked in Rutland's blood, for him to wipe away his tears. And so that the analogy with the crucifixion should not pass unnoticed, after the handkerchief, which recalls the sponge proffered to Christ, a crown (or a garland) made of paper is offered to York:

York cannot speak unless he wear a crown.
A crown for York! and, lords, bow low to him:
Hold you his hands whilst I do set it on.

(I, iv, 93-5)

The queen stays the hand of Clifford—who is for striking York down immediately—so as to prolong his torments. Thereupon York laments the death of Rutland so poignantly that Northumberland can barely ‘contain his tears’. Then York compares his enemies to cannibals:

That face of his the hungry cannibals
Would not have touch'd, would not have stain'd with blood;
But you are more inhuman, more inexorable,
O, ten times more than tigers of Hyrcania.

(I, iv, 152-5)

Revolting as the attitude of the queen and Clifford is, it is nevertheless in conformity with the inexorable fatality that rules the actions of avengers. In a similar fashion, in Titus Andronicus, sacrifice, which is in conformity with the customs of the city, is an expression of family piety. However, as Alan Sommers points out, that piety is an ‘insufficient virtue’ for it is devoid of pity;¹⁰ Shakespeare himself, in making Northumberland react with such emotion, clearly makes the point that vengeance should have its limits.

Having shown himself pitiless with regard to Tamora and blind where Saturninus is concerned, Titus later finds himself at the mercy of the woman whose pleas he so implacably rejected. Political authority in Rome falls into the hands of his enemies. There then ensues a reign of injustice, that is to say chaos. Altogether in conformity with habitual cycles of revenge, a chain of reprisals and counter reprisals is set in motion. But the acts of revenge which punctuate the play should not be considered simply as criminal for here the atrocities also have a mediating value, similar to that of sacrifice, and when the cycle is completed it restores order to Rome ‘through the sacrificial tragedy and the death-ritual of the feast’.¹¹

The action now moves from Rome to the forest. At the end of the first act Titus invited Saturninus to hunt the panther and the stag with him (I, i, 494). But Titus, who sees himself as the hunter, is soon to become the hunted beast. The monologue delivered by Aaron, who remains on stage alone after the first act, represents the pivot of the action. Servility is no longer appropriate since now Titus holds his imperial mistress captive (II, i. 13). The plan of revenge now put forward is not simply to strike the Andronicus family, as Tamora had suggested to Saturninus. It is to drag the whole of Rome down into chaos and also to strike at Saturninus. Aaron thus declares himself as the perfect villain: he has also the negative and satanic characteristics of the conventional Moor, together with his guilty lust: he plans to have his pleasure with this queen,

This goddess, this Semiramis, this nymph,
This siren that will charm Rome's Saturnine,
And see his shipwrack and his commonweal's.

(II, i, 22-4)

But personal—and, in Aaron's case, gratuitous—revenge comes first. He suggests to Chiron and Demetrius that they violate Lavinia. The parallel between the woman-hunt and the doe-hunt is thus established. And furthermore Aaron defines the forest as a place predestined by nature to the release of savagery:

My lords, a solemn hunting is in hand;
There will the lovely Roman ladies troop:
The forest walks are wide and spacious,
And many unfrequented plots there are
Fitted by kind for rape and villainy:
Single you thither then this dainty doe,
And strike her home by force, if not by words:
This way, or not at all, stand you in hope.

(II, i, 112-19)

What is being prepared will be ‘a solemn hunting’, a ceremony¹² but an atrocious one, ‘a triumph of the forces of evil’, to use Antonin Artaud's phrase,¹³ a kind of spiritual plague: ‘the troubled humours of the plague-ridden [are], as it were, the solid and material side to a disorder which, on other levels, is equivalent to all the conflicts, struggles, cataclysms and disasters that events bring us’.¹⁴

‘The dainty doe’ says Aaron. And Demetrius repeats it, when Titus invites him to the hunt:

Chiron, we hunt not, we, with horse nor hound,
But hope to pluck a dainty doe to ground.

(II, ii, 25-6)

The adjective is the same, ‘dainty’, a word used to describe an object of choice, something to eat, to hunt, to possess, to violate, to enjoy.¹⁵

Tamora, in her turn, enters the forest, there to meet Aaron. This natural setting in which she desires to sport with her lover is agreeable and pleasing, with birds singing in every bush and a breeze making the green leaves quiver (II, iii, 12-15). But that is a subjective view. Aaron tells Tamora that his thoughts are not of love: revenge is in his heart, death in his hand. Perfect villain that he is, he has thought it all out: the rape, the murder and the false accusations. The two lovers are surprised by Bassianus and Lavinia. Lavinia accuses Tamora of changing Saturninus into a stag and prays to Jupiter for the hounds to spare him! Chiron and Demetrius arrive upon the scene. Tamora, like an outraged Diana, urges her sons on to vengeance, that is to say to rape and murder. The forest reveals its evil power. It is a place where the violence of the instincts can be unleashed without restraint. Bassianus is assassinated by Demetrius and Chiron. And under the very eyes of Tamora, and with her approval, the two sons drag Lavinia off to rape her (offstage). To prevent her revealing the identity of her aggressors, they cut off her hands and remove her tongue. In an extra piece of plotting Aaron has buried some gold in the forest as a lure and thereby makes the blame for the assassination fall upon Martius and Quintus (two of Titus' sons).

The forest in which this hunt of the human doe takes place and where a man is thus killed like a beast symbolises an instinctual, evil and fatal force. Aaron is under the sign of Saturn, like Saturninus. Tamora is compared to Diana surprised by voyeurs, and the myth of Acteon to which she refers is transposed literally by Shakespeare, who has the doe violated and Bassianus killed by those dogs, Chiron and Demetrius. Aaron himself plays the role of an evil hunter, forcing Quintus and Martius into a trap, making them fall into the pit in which the body of Bassianus has been placed. Shakespeare makes considerable use of Ovidian themes: not just the story of Acteon, but that of Philomel too.

As mentioned above, some critics consider that the violence is somewhat distanced by the preciosity of the language. But that is to underestimate the theatrical force of the murders committed before the very eyes of the spectators, and above all the impact of the scenes of mutilation. Lavinia appears, her mouth bloodied and her hands severed. When Aaron suggests to Titus that he could save the heads of his sons by cutting off his hand, Titus agrees and mutilates himself right there before the audience. And it is before the spectators too that the heads of his sons together with his own severed hand are presented to him. The culmination of all these horrors is when Titus cuts the throats of Tamora's two sons, while Lavinia catches their blood in a basin. The cannibal feast is then prepared by Titus, dressed as a cook. The bones, ground to ‘dust’, are mixed with the blood to make a paste in which the heads of Chiron and Demetrius are cooked. They are then offered as a meal to Saturninus and Tamora, and Titus is careful to note that it is a meal ‘whereof their mother daintily hath fed’ (V, iii, 61). Titus is jubilant: the mother has eaten ‘the flesh that she herself hath bred’. Tamora is then stabbed to death by Titus who has earlier also killed his own daughter to spare her living with the memory of the defilement she suffered.

Titus and Saturninus die, in their turn. When the cycle of family and personal violence comes to an end, so do the chaos and injustice that have ruled in Rome. Thanks to an army of Gauls which, for reasons that are none too clear, has agreed to march on Rome under the command of the last of Titus' sons, the city is restored to order and civil conviviality.

Marcus: You sad-fac'd men, people and sons of Rome,
By uproars sever'd, as a flight of fowl
Scatter'd by winds and high tempestuous gusts,
O, let me teach you how to knit again
This scattered corn into one mutual sheaf,
Those broken limbs again into one body;
Lest Rome herself be bane unto herself …

(V, iii, 67-73)

Aaron and Tamora are punished as befits their crimes; Aaron is buried alive and Tamora denied burial and thrown to the beasts and birds of prey, for ‘her life was beast-like and devoid of pity’ (V, iii, 198).

The connections and comparisons in the narrative are most interesting in this early work. The play begins at the moment when two rivals are contending for power and Titus returns in triumph to Rome. The opposition between the two candidates is also an opposition between two types of government: the one, Saturninus', is evil for it contains all the seeds of tyranny; the other, through Bassianus, represents the Roman empire as seen by medieval tradition, with an addition of republican ideals.¹⁶ Shakespeare is at pains to show us the complex origins of the disorders that ensue. A sacrifice, in conformity with the traditions of family and city, but pitiless nonetheless; an ill-omened choice which places Titus at the mercy of the barbarism that he has just vanquished outside Rome but traces of which still exist in the heart of the city itself. Although the major opposition between the first and second acts is between the civilised and the wild—between the city and the forest—one can also discern the minor theme that wildness is not absent from the customs of Rome while nature is not invariably a sombre and doom-laden scene. The fact is that Tamora finds civilised arguments to plead for the life of her son whose sacrifice Titus orders. And even Aaron is concerned about what will happen to the child Tamora has conceived by him and that he takes care of after leaving Rome.

In the forest, the hunt unfolds back to front in the manner made famous by the myth of Acteon. The mutilations and dismemberments take place both in the wild forest and in the now-barbarous city. The cannibal meal is as it were an emblem of the events of the play as a whole: it is a hideous perversion of all relationships of proximity and it is, in effect, just such relationships of proximity and conviviality, so necessary to civilised life, that are transformed, frustrated and undermined every time some bloody event takes place on the stage. The close connection between—or succession of—social disorder, sacrifice, hunting, defloration, madness, mutilation, murder and cannibalism is thus not simply a chain of events representing a concession to a public thirst for sensationalism; it is a series with a significance of its own: Titus Andronicus can be seen as a structured repertory of the themes that Shakespeare was to exploit with greater maturity and depth in his later works.

Notes

1. The edition used is that of J. C. Maxwell (1953), amended edn 1968 (IV).

2. A Rome that, if we are to believe Terence J.-B. Spencer, 1957 (VI), would have seemed altogether believable to the cultivated Elizabethan public which had read Edward Hellowes, A Chronicle, conteyning the lives of tenne Emperours of Rome (1577), a translation of the Decada of Antonio de Guevara. Both the institutions and the mores of Rome depicted in the play represent a kind of summary of Roman politics as if the author had been eager to include, in the words of Spencer, ‘all the political institutions that Rome ever had’ (p. 32).

3. The Ghost that appears in Hamlet and the one in The Spanish Tragedy show that there was still belief in the anger of the dead. Keith Thomas notes that medieval ghosts would appear in order that some sin committed be confessed and absolved. In the Reformation period, the view was rather that ghosts appeared for the purpose of denouncing some misdeed (Thomas, 1971, p. 597 (III)). George K. Hunter, 1974 (VI), says that the sacrifice in Titus Andronicus was seen as a legitimate religious act, made necessary by the cult of the family, and would not have been seen critically by the audience. He claims that the importance of the cult of the family can be seen from the reiteration of the theme of burial.

4. Brockbank, 1976, pp. 9-10 (VI).

5. The Spanish Tragedy is a striking example. Bowers (1940), 1966, p. 38 (VI), notes that in his treatise against Machiavelli, I. Gentillet maintains that Roman law disinherited the son who refused to avenge his father. A similar declaration, dated 1612, can be found in a manuscript that Bowers attributes to the count of Northampton. On revenge, see the points made by Fuzier, 1965 and 1968 (VI).

6. Lopez de Gomara (1578), 1596, p. 398 (V).

7. Scot (1584), 1972, XI, i, p. 108 (V).

8. For example, J. Dover Wilson, in his edition of the play, 1948, pp. xi-xii (IV). For Bradbrook, the decorous and decorative imagery is there to mask the tragedy, which is ‘an exercise in the manner of Seneca’: (1935), 1960, pp. 98-9 (VI). This is an idea that she develops in her introduction to the play, where she describes the various characters as emblems or badges, who make up ‘tableaux’ or ‘moral emblems’. Waith, 1957 (VI), for his part, remarks that in the interpretative tradition of the Renaissance, Ovid was seen as a teller of tales who took as his theme the moral transformation of man into beast, the passing from order to chaos. He stresses that the ‘metamorphosis’ of the characters in Titus Andronicus comes about under the effects of passion, pain or despair. The ornate narrative style reinforces the impact of horror. The play is a contribution to a particular tragic mode: it is a spectacle ‘both horrible and pathetic, but above all extraordinary’ (p. 48). See also Reese, 1970 (VI).

9. The quotations from Henry VI, Part III are taken from A. S. Cairncross' edition, London, 1964. On the opposition between the civilised and the barbarous, see Zeeveld, 1974, pp. 207-10 (VI), who stresses the bond of barbarity shared by Goths and Moors. For a different view of the Goths, see Broude, 1972 (VI).

10. Sommers, 1960, p. 277 (VI).

11. Ibid., p. 283.

12. According to J. C. Maxwell's gloss in this edition of the play: ‘solemn’, here, means ‘ceremonial’.

13. Artaud, 1964, p. 42 (VIII).

14. Ibid., p. 35. Kurosawa made use of the opposition between the forest and the ritual in The Spider's Castle. See Marienstras, 1979b (VI).

15. The word was later used by Giovanni in a murderous (and sexual) context in 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, at the point when he is proferring Annabella's bleeding heart: ‘You come to the feast, my lords, with dainty fare’ (V, vi, 26). Neither Colman nor Partridge comment upon it. Alfred Harbage (1947), 1961, p. 14 (VI), notes ‘the presence of episodes habitually eliminated from all other plays of the dramatist … : a rape attempted and accomplished, an adulterous relationship entered into with thoughtless alacrity, a mother disposed toward infanticide’, etc.

16. From this point of view, Sommers' contrastive analysis of the speeches of Saturninus and Bassianus is convincing (1960, n. 10 (VI)). I also found Nicholas Brooke (1968), 1973 (VI), and Tricomi, 1974 (VI) useful in writing this chapter.