SOURCE: “The Sacrificial Crisis in Titus Andronicus,” in University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. 49, No. 1, Fall, 1979, pp. 18-32.

[In the following essay, Slights studies the role and nature of the cycle of revenge that commences when the boundaries between sacred violence and vengeful violence are blurred in Titus Andronicus.]

In the first scene of Titus Andronicus one of Titus's sons—only four of twenty-five remain alive after ten years of Gotho-Roman wars—piously proposes to sacrifice the eldest son of the captured Gothic queen: ‘Let's hew his limbs till they be clean consum'd’ (I.i.129).¹ The Andronicus boys exit with their victim and return shortly with bloody swords, their hewing done. Such acts of violence spread like a blot through Shakespeare's first tragedy, and their dramatic function has been debated by generations of critics. Was Shakespeare competing for spectators in a bloody entertainment market that featured bear and dog dismemberment as well as public executions? Was he imitating classical models—Seneca's reworkings of Greek cyclical revenge stories or Ovid's tales of sudden transformations precipitated by violent emotional attacks? And if these are all partial explanations, what resonant chord in the nature of civilized human beings is sounded by an art form that dwells so insistently on cruelty, physical pain, and consequent mental anguish?

Explanations of emotional response to tragic art are plentiful, sometimes doctrinaire, and often mutually contradictory. Literary critics frequently rely on Aristotle's notion of catharsis, but the term seems at times to require more explanation than it affords. The search for a satisfactory account of the origins of a particular tragedy, its fascination, and its final effects on an audience has seen disciplines as varied as religion, psychology, and aesthetic philosophy hastening to remedy or, inadvertently, to compound the confusions surrounding tragic literature. An especially rich source of illumination has been the work of cultural anthropologists, some of whose theories have recently made considerable strides beyond the early speculations of Fraser and the Cambridge ritualists. A key figure in this revisionist attempt to clarify connections between social ritual and tragedy is René Girard. His recently translated Violence and the Sacred gives a lucid account of the initiation and conclusion of violence that may, I believe, shed new light on Shakespeare's tragedies. Combining Girard's explanation of societies in the throes of sacrificial crisis with more familiar notions of the tragic hero's purposeful movement towards calamity can sharpen our understanding of Shakespeare's achievement as he fuses, even in a tragedy as early as Titus Andronicus, two very different emotional responses to tragic crisis and closure. Though this dual sense of an ending is present as well in later tragedies such as Hamlet and King Lear, I have chosen Titus Andronicus as a more streamlined paradigm of a tragedy forged from sacred violence.

If we flip the generic coin to its other side for just a moment, we see that much of Shakespearean comedy deals with the execution of justice. Meting out measure for measure, punishing a usurer, or forgiving a wicked brother provide comic reversals, liberation from ritual bondage, and a hopeful communal future. Smooth-running judicial machinery implies a continuing potential for the fair play and the redress of wrongs that appeal to the audience of comedy. Tragedy, however, turns less on justice than on violence; the ‘promis'd end’ of tragedy is violent death. Its beginning too is rooted in violence, actually in a failed attempt to prevent or contain violence in a fictional community whose leaders have been charged with the safety of their people. Once ‘impure’ violence of a kind unsanctioned by those duly appointed keepers of the peace breaks out, there will begin a circle of revenge that can wipe out whole families or tribes and radically deplete a larger community. To preclude such regressive and self-consuming acts of vengeance, according to René Girard, the community requires clearly distinguishable acts of ‘pure,’ sacrificial violence. ‘Only by opting for a sanctioned, legitimate form of violence and preventing it from becoming an object of disputes and recriminations,’ Girard writes, ‘can the system save itself from a vicious circle of revenge’ (p 24).² But in the sacrificial rite of purification itself something may go wrong and the distinction be lost between sacred violence that displaces communal hostility unanimously to a championless victim and the vengeful, competitive violence that places blame within the community and is self-perpetuating. This breakdown is the sacrificial crisis. Girard uses as an example of the tragedy-initiating sacrificial crisis Sophocles' The Women of Trachis:

The subject of the tragedy, as in Euripides' Heracles, is the return of the hero. In this instance Heracles is bringing with him a pretty young captive, of whom Deianira is jealous. Deianira sends a servant to her husband with a welcoming gift, the shirt of Nessus. With his dying breath the centaur had told her that the shirt would assure the wearer's eternal fidelity to her; but he cautioned her to keep it well out of the way of any flame or source of heat.

Heracles puts on the shirt, and soon afterwards lights a fire for the rites of sacrificial purification. The flames activate the poison in the shirt; it is the rite itself that unlooses the evil. Heracles, contorted with pain, presently ends his life on the pyre he has begged his son to prepare. Before dying, Heracles kills the servant who delivered the shirt to him; this death, along with his own and the subsequent suicide of his wife, contributes to the cycle of violence heralded by Heracles' return and the failure of the sacrifice.

(P 41)

As the analysis suggests, violence that should be present in but contained by the religious ritual is released into the community; unmotivated violence gives way to a violent act whose motivation is all too clear and easily traceable back to others who must now pay with their lives. A cycle of revenge that will end tragically for all has been initiated.

Girard's theory of sacred violence and the sacrificial crisis derives from sources as apparently disparate as Greek tragic myth and bovine sacrifices among the Dinka. Even a brief outline suggests the applicability of Girard's theory to a seminal tragic myth like that of Oedipus, in which a hero tainted with impure violence turns against his own people, is banished and mocked in an act of purification, and is eventually welcomed back after a period of regressive, interfamily revenge. Two corollaries to the theory will, I believe, prove useful in considering the case of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. The first is the calamitous loss of distinction at the moment of sacrificial crisis between agreed-upon, sacrificial victims and bona fide members of the community as well as between acceptable and unsanctioned celebrants. The second, related point concerns the inevitable yet basically illogical selection of a scapegoat whose death alone can end the circle of vengeance:

If violence is a great leveler of men and everybody becomes the double, or ‘twin,’ of his antagonist, it seems to follow that all the doubles are identical and that any one can at any given moment become the double of all the others; that is, the sole object of universal obsession and hatred. A single victim can be substituted for all the potential victims, for all the enemy brothers that each member is striving to banish from the community; he can be substituted, in fact, for each and every member of the community … The firm conviction of the group is based on no other evidence than the unshakable unanimity of its own illogic.

(P 79)

Here, in pure theory, is one of the senses of tragic ending that I have already spoken of, and I shall find it necessary to return to it in speaking of the particular death of Titus Andronicus.

The figure of the returning hero, be it Sophocles' Heracles or Shakespeare's Titus or the blood-drenched Macbeth, is in grave danger and requires ritual purification lest former military violence taint his future civil proceedings. For Titus the initial sacrifice is also intended to pacify the restless shades of twenty-one battle-slain sons.

Lucius. Give us the proudest prisoner of the Goths,
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 to you, the noblest that survives,
The eldest son of this distressed queen.

(I.i.96-103)

The sacred place selected for the ritual is the tomb of the Andronici; the human sacrifice is to appease the dead but more vitally to shelter the living from ‘prodigies’ of continuing violence. This ritual functions in precisely the opposite way, however, because its victim, Alarbus, is not without champions. His mother pleads persuasively: ‘must my sons be slaughtered in the streets / For valiant doings in their country's cause?’ (I.i.112-13), and Titus makes all too clear the essentially retributive nature of the proposed sacred mystery:

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)

The defenders of the ‘mark'd’ man will gain considerable power in the Roman community through the subsequent marriage of Tamora with the newly made Roman emperor Saturninus. Rome will then turn its violence inward upon itself in acts described by Demetrius as ‘sharp revenge’ against tyranny in the following speech of consolation to his mother, Tamora:

                              madam, stand resolv'd, but hope withal
The self-same gods that arm'd the Queen of Troy
With opportunity of sharp revenge
Upon the Thracian tyrant in his tent
May favor Tamora, the Queen of Goths
(When Goths were Goths and Tamora was queen),
To quit the bloody wrongs upon her foes.

(I.i.135-41)

Here Shakespeare has neatly outlined the displacement of purification to revenge; he further accelerates the cycle of vengeance through a tense rivalry for leadership in Rome.

The play has opened with the balanced speeches of the fraternal rivals for the Roman empery: Saturninus claims the diadem as the ‘first-born son’ while Bassanius bases his claim on ‘desert.’ The mediating voice here as elsewhere in the play is that of Marcus Andronicus, announcing that the senate has chosen his brother Titus to lead Rome in peace as he has in war. When the potentially violent Saturninus commands his followers to ‘draw your swords, and sheathe them not / Till Saturninus be Rome's emperor’ (I.i.204-5), Titus supports his primogenitive claim and consents to Saturninus's proposal to marry his daughter Lavinia. A renewed outbreak of domestic violence occurs when the disgruntled Bassanius, Lavinia's lover, seizes her while his brother courts the Gothic queen in dumb show. When Titus moves to forestall this assault on his own and the new emperor's honour, his son Mutius intervenes and Titus kills him.³ The crucial distinctions between friends and enemies of the state, between the prerogatives of the ruler and the responsibilities of his subjects, between familial bonds and personal honour have been dissolved. In these events we may perceive the same crisis naively iterated by Gloucester in King Lear:

Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide: in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond crack'd 'twixt son and father. This villain of mine comes under the prediction; there's son against father: the King falls from bias of nature; there's father against child. We have seen the best of our time.

(I.ii.106-12)

Child against father, father against child—these are the violations of the primal bonds that spell disaster for the houses of Oedipus, Atreus, and Andronicus. Shakespeare is clearly working out a hybrid form of classical tragedy with its roots in the myths of violent loss of distinction such as caught the imaginations of Sophocles and Seneca. As Girard summarizes the situation, it is not cultural ‘distinctions but the loss of them that gives birth to fierce rivalries and sets members of the same family or social group at one another's throats’ (p 49).

In the opening sacrificial action Titus has very nearly become anathema; in the political action he has nearly become an outcast as first Bassanius, then Saturninus, and finally even his own sons turn violently against him. The Andronicus family momentarily withstands the threat of violent disintegration when Titus reluctantly agrees—unlike his Greek counterpart, Creon, whose preference for state over family Titus at first imitates—to have Mutius buried in the family vault. But the motive for cyclical revenge has already been loosed in the community by the miscarriage of the earlier sacrifice for peace. Already it is inevitable that Titus will be designated pharmakos in Rome.

Act II of Titus Andronicus demonstrates the similarities between the new Gothic revenge and the old Roman justice, proper distinctions having been lost. It does so by stressing the perverse sacramentalism inherent in the new reign of terror. The destructive uses of formalized violence are expressed through setting (an inverted pastoralism), myth (Actaeon), dramatic iconography (the pit-fall), and theme (the perfect crime and the imperfections of justice). Aaron the Moor is the chief architect of revenge against the house of Andronicus. When the Gothic brothers Chiron and Demetrius fall to bickering over their claims to Lavinia, Aaron intervenes as surrogate father and convinces them that internecine quarrels will ‘undo us all’ (II.i.62). By joining his conspiracy against Bassanius both Tamora's sons can enjoy the honey-body of Titus's daughter at the same time as they help to ‘rase [the Andronici] faction and their family’ (I.i.451). The setting for their sacrifice of Lavinia's ‘nice-preserved honesty’ (II.iii.135) is an inverted pastoral retreat that Aaron describes in the language of the new sacramentalism of vengeance:

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.
Come, come, our empress, with her sacred wit
To villainy and vengeance consecrate,
Will we acquaint withal what we intend,
And she shall file our engines with advice,
That will not suffer you to square yourselves,
But to your wishes' height advance you both.
The Emperor's court is like the house of Fame,
The palace full of tongues, of eyes, and ears;
The woods are ruthless, dreadful, deaf, and dull.
There speak, and strike, brave boys, and take your turns,
There serve your lust, shadowed from heaven's eye,
And revel in Lavinia's treasury.

(II.i.114-31)

The ‘dainty doe,’ emblematic of chastity, will be hunted in a verdant garden that has been transformed to an engine of destruction where ‘nothing breeds’ (II.iii.96) by the black, stealthy panther, Aaron. Shakespeare creates an effective generic inversion of pastoral setting by inserting the animal icon of panther and doe. All this in turn is part of the consecration of vengeance. Aaron rejects the amorous rites of Venus in favour of the violent ones of Saturn when he meets Tamora in the wood:

Madam, though Venus govern your desires,
Saturn is dominator over mine:
What signifies my deadly-standing eye,
My silence, an' my cloudy melancholy,
My fleece of woolly hair that now uncurls,
Even as an adder when she doth unroll
To do some fatal execution?
No, Madam, these are no venereal signs.
Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand,
Blood and revenge are hammering in my head.

(II.iii.30-9)

The serpent is loose in this garden, and the impure violence of rape and murder are being designed with ritual precision.

The paradigm of violent action in Act II changes from sacrifice to the hunt. Tamora, discovered at her woodland assignation with Aaron, wishes she had power to metamorphose the hunter Bassanius into the hunted stag, as in Ovid's tale of Actaeon:

Had I the pow'r that some say Dian had,
Thy temples should be planted presently
With horns, as was Actaeon's, and the hounds
Should drive upon thy new-transformed limbs,
Unmannerly intruder as thou art!

(II.iii.61-5)

Lavinia neatly turns back the curse with a punning reference to another kind of horning.

'Tis thought you have a goodly gift in horning,
And to be doubted that your Moor and you
Are singled forth to try thy experiments.
Jove shield your husband from his hounds to-day!
'Tis pity they should take him for a stag.

(II.iii.67-71)

But it is Lavinia herself, the ‘dainty doe,’ and her husband who are brought to ground by Tamora's sons. Bassanius is sacrificially stabbed ‘like to a slaughtered lamb’ (II.iii.223) and cast into a deep pit; Lavinia is ravished and, like Philomel in Ovid's most violent tale, mutilated so that she cannot reveal the identity of her assailants. Bassanius's body in turn becomes bait for Aaron's next trap as the circle of vengeance widens to include Titus's sons, Martius and Quintus. The first boy blindly stumbles into the pit containing Bassanius's body; the second is pulled in as he attempts to extract his brother from the place of violent death. The action is highly formalized, balanced, emblematic. The clear moral that emerges is that good in the play is either too blindly naive or too weak to preserve itself from the pit of evil. The innocent sons of Titus appear to be Bassanius's murderers when the new emperor and his hunting party arrive on the scene. A sack of gold and an incriminating letter planted earlier by Aaron provide further circumstantial evidence that leads to a miscarriage of justice as destructive as the initial, failed religious sacrifice. Indeed, as Titus pleads in vain for the lives of his sons, we are reminded of Tamora's earlier pleas for her son's life. The failure of both petitions for mercy accelerates the process of revenge. The renowned system of Roman jurisprudence has produced a result no more equitable and no less violent than barbaric war, ritualistic sacrifice, and cyclic revenge. As Girard points out, there goes but a pair of shears between so-called primitive ways of controlling violence and the most sophisticated judicial machinery (pp 15ff). Certainly in Shakespeare's play the distinction between Gothic horde and Roman civilization becomes progressively obliterated. As the Roman judges pass heedlessly by Titus, he feels that the earth itself has, in some primal way, demanded the sacrifical blood of his condemned sons.

For these, tribunes, in the dust I write
My heart's deep languor, and my soul's sad tears:
Let my tears staunch the earth's dry appetite,
My sons' sweet blood will make it shame and blush.
O earth, I will befriend thee more with rain,
That shall distill from these two ancient [urns],
Than youthful April shall with all his show'rs.
In summer's drought I'll drop upon thee still,
In winter with warm tears I'll melt the snow,
And keep eternal spring-time [on thy] face,
So thou refuse to drink my dear sons' blood.

(III.i.12-22)

Titus's attenuation of the tears/rain conceit verges on madness. With the accumulation of crises in Titus's mind uncontrolled metaphor threatens to blur the distinctions on which rationality itself, as much as community, rests. The only salvation for Titus's last son, Lucius, is banishment from this irrational ‘wilderness of tigers’ (III.i.54). This famous phrase crystallizes for the audience the loss of distinction between man and beast that has been sounding insistently through the imagery of the first two acts. The motif of lost distinctions, critical in the time of sacrificial crisis as we have seen, is reiterated in the imagery of shifting and dissolving flood waters. Seeing his mutilated daughter, Titus moans, ‘My grief was at the height before thou cam'st, / And now like Nilus it disdaineth bounds’ (III.i.70-1), and

                                                                      now I stand as one upon a rock,
Environ'd with a wilderness of sea,
Who marks the waxing tide grow wave by wave,
Expecting ever when some envious surge
Will in his brinish bowels swallow him.

(III.i.93-7)

The wild and brinish sea is, by extension from Titus's earlier speeches, a sea of tears figuring metaphorically the pity of the scene.⁴ But the loss of distinctions in the watery element is more than a sign of pity; it leads to further self-mutilation by the Andronici. Titus offers to chop off his hands in order to identify himself more closely with the plight of his daughter, the virginal victim of a parodic sacrifice to vengeance. Just as Titus's tears breed fresh tears in Lavinia (III.i.136-7), so her bloody stumps will be echoed in Titus's mutilation when Aaron falsely promises life for the condemned sons if a relative will sacrifice a hand. Titus, Lucius, and Marcus all volunteer for the grisly sacrificial role, Marcus making the point that Titus's hands are already bloody enough:

Which of your hands hath not defended Rome,
And rear'd aloft the bloody battle-axe,
Writing destruction on the enemy's castle?

(III.i.167-9)

The failure of the first sacrificial rite to purge the returning general of battle-blood and to still the shades of the slaughtered Andronici has resulted in Titus turning destructively against his own state, family, and body. He severs his hand and sends it to Saturninus as an offering, but it is returned in mockery with the heads of his sons. Titus exits in search of ‘Revenge's cave’ (III.i.270), and Lucius resolves,

Now will I to the Goths and raise a pow'r,
To be reveng'd on Rome and Saturnine.

(III.i.299-300)

When Rome's noble son takes the Goths as allies, normal distinctions cease to function, and the sacrificial crisis is nearing its peak.

One of the play's most puzzling scenes, the fly-killing episode of III.ii, takes on a new significance in light of the loss of distinctions occasioned by the sacrificial crisis. At their tearful banquet Titus berates Marcus for killing a fly on his plate:

A deed of death done on the innocent
Becomes not Titus' brother.

(III.ii.56-7)

The fly appears human to the distraught Titus, who turns against the creature only when Marcus insists that ‘it was a black ill-favor'd fly, / Like to the Empress' Moor’ (III.ii.66-7). Titus in turn stabs at the fly that has ‘Come hither purposely to poison me’ (73), and pitifully struggles to understand the limits of his power:

Yet I think we are not brought so low,
But that between us we can kill a fly
That comes in likeness of a coal-black Moor.

(III.ii.75-7)

Though he has mistaken ‘false shadows for true substances,’ Titus dodges in and out of madness and will regain his sense of discrimination fully in Act V where he easily penetrates the ‘device’ or masque of Revenge engineered by Tamora.

The accumulation of sorrows in Titus's mind eases briefly in Act IV while Shakespeare works out the conditions for Rome's redemption. The arch-villain Aaron proves to be vulnerable through his child, Tamora's bastard, much as Titus was most susceptible to attack through his sons. Aaron brutally murders the nurse in IV.ii to protect the secret of the child's birth. A similarly gratuitous act of violence is committed by the Roman tyrant Saturninus when he condemns to death the Clown who bears Titus's mad but emblematic threats of revenge in IV.iv. The ‘civilized’ leader seems unconsciously to be imitating the barbarian in an endless cycle of violence. Gentle Lucius threatens to ‘hang [Aaron's] child, that he may see it sprawl’ (V.i.51) and in this inhumane fashion coerces a full confession from the Moor. For the first time in the play a suppliant parent's words save a child. Armed with Aaron's confession and newly allied with his traditional enemies the Goths, Lucius is able subsequently to liberate Rome from Saturninus's tyranny. We have here, then, the possibility for plot-closure though not the necessary sense of emotional completion that can come only from the resolutions of the sacrificial crisis. For this Shakespeare must return to his titular hero, Titus.

We have seen developing in the tragedy a situation in which ‘violence is a great leveler of men and everybody becomes the double, or “twin,” of his antagonist’ (Girard, p 79). The brothers Bassanius and Saturninus have squared off to rend the peaceful fabric of Roman society; two pairs of fraternal hunters—Martius and Quintus, Chiron and Demetrius—have made sport into vengeance; Lavinia and Alarbus have been twinned as sacrificial victims; Lucius has adopted the bloodthirsty rhetoric of his opponent Aaron; and in the closing act Titus will devise a banquet to out-revenge Revenge herself, the bloody Tamora. In each case the first-mentioned character in the pair is morally preferable to the second, but finally a sacrificial rather than a moral vision predominates in the play. As the time of sacrificial crisis draws to a close, an awareness of true distinctions returns to Titus, though he retains the guise of lunacy. When Tamora, personating Revenge, introduces her two sons to Titus, he replies with stunning, nearly comic clarity:

Tit. What are they call'd?
Tam. Rape and Murder, therefore called so
'Cause they take vengeance of such kind of men.
Tit. Good Lord, how like the Empress' sons they are!
And you, the Empress! but we worldly men
Have miserable, mad, mistaking eyes.

(V.ii.61-6)

Having hit upon a sacrificial ceremony to ‘o'erreach them in their own devices’ (V.ii.143), Titus, the vengeful overreacher, addresses first his victims, Chiron and Demetrius, then his acolyte, Lavinia:

And now prepare your throats. Lavinia, come,
Receive the blood, and when that they are dead,
Let me go grind their bones to powder small,
And with this hateful liquor temper it,
And in that paste let their vile heads be bak'd.
Come, come, be every one officious
To make this banket, which I wish may prove
More stern and bloody than the Centaur's feast.
He cuts their throats.
So now bring them in, for I'll play the cook,
And see them ready against their mother comes.

(V.ii.196-205)

The Thyestean banquet at which Titus officiates is, as Robert Hapgood reminds us, a maimed rite.⁵ There follows an orgy of killing in V.iii, but the forms of ceremony are, in a sense, re-established when Titus asks and receives from the Emperor permission to make Lavinia an approved victim of violent sacrifice.

Tit. My Lord the Emperor, resolve me this:
Was it well done of rash Virginius
To slay his daughter with his own right hand,
Because she was enforc'd, stain'd, and deflow'r'd?
Sat. It was, Andronicus.
Tit. Your reason, mighty lord?
Sat. Because the girl should not survive her shame,
And by her presence still renew his sorrows.
Tit. A reason mighty, strong, and effectual,
A pattern, president, and lively warrant
For me, most wretched, to perform the like.
Die, die, Lavinia, and thy shame with thee,
And with thy shame thy father's sorrow die!

(V.iii.35-47)

This sacrifice to honour made, Titus informs Tamora that she has banqueted on her sons' flesh and then kills her. The cycle of revenge is complete when Saturninus immediately retaliates by killing Titus. As initiator of the sacrificial crisis, Titus can best function as pharmakos, the personified societal poison that, according to Greek socio-medical theory, was its own antidote. Titus has caused grief, borne grief, and here, at the end of his life, has conspicuously become the author of unendurable, impure violence. His death is not so much just as it is wearily required.

I am aware, of course, that the process of victimization in V.iii is not complete with the death of the hero-victim. But Lucius's murder of the Emperor goes beyond the initial crisis, linking the end of the play with the beginning through what E. M. W. Tillyard calls the ‘high political theme’ of civil war and leadership in Rome.⁶ Titus's death has triggered Lucius's fatal assault on the centre of licensed corruption in Rome, the Emperor himself. Saturninus's assassination goes unrevenged for want of a blood-relation, and the time is ripe for social consolidation. Girard's conclusion about ritual scapegoats is relevant here:

At present we have good reason to believe that violence directed against the surrogate victim [in this case Titus] might well be radically generative in that, by putting an end to the vicious and destructive cycle of violence, it simultaneously initiates another and constructive cycle, that of the sacrificial rite—which protects the community from that same violence and allows culture to flourish.

(P 93)

The rhetoric of communal harvest and physic is initiated immediately by Marcus:

O, let me teach you how to knit again
This scattered corn into one mutual sheaf,
These broken limbs again into one body.

(V.iii.70-2)

It is opposed to the dread threat of regressive violence in the tribune Aemilius's lines:

Let Rome herself be bane unto herself,
And she whom mighty kingdoms cur'sy to,
Like a forlorn and desperate castaway,
Do shameful execution on herself,
But if my frosty signs and chaps of age,
Grave witness of true experience,
Cannot induce you to attend my words.

(V.iii.73-9)⁷

The curative process has begun with the redirecting of violence. The precise mechanism for this redirection is the inflicting of non-fatal wounds on the body of Titus's last-remaining son, returned exile and saviour, who absorbs with his own body the intestine shocks directed at the entire body politic:

I am the turned forth, be it known to you,
That have preserv'd her welfare in my blood,
And from her bosom took the enemy's point,
Sheathing the steel in my advent'rous body.

(V.iii.109-12)

These scars speak with a silent eloquence that stills the clamour of vengeance. Lucius is spared by the designation of a substitute victim, in this instance the dark-skinned and conscienceless outsider, Aaron.

There is an alternative way to stop cyclic vengeance, different from sacrificial violence but not incompatible with it. It is the solution devised in the Oresteia to save what remains of the house of Atreus. Since there can be no reasoned way out for familial participants whose dilemma requires simultaneous action and inaction—to ignore a close relative's murder is to violate the expressed will of Apollo; to avenge the murder is to offend the vengeful Eumenides—the only possible solution is a tribunal of uninvolved sages, the Areopagus. In one sense Shakespeare also uses closure through an appeal to justice when he has the respected tribunes Marcus and Aemilius enter ‘above’ (stage direction, V.iii.66) to offer a prescription for peace to the people of Rome. Later, too, Aemilius transfers the judicial authority of the tribunes to the new emperor, Lucius, saying, ‘Give sentence on this execrable wretch [Aaron]’ (V.iii.177).

Although justice is finally done with the elimination of a tyrant and an agent provocateur, the ceremonial explanation for the sense of closure seems more persuasive than the judicial. For example, the death of Titus, a man tainted by impure violence yet still more sinned against than sinning, is more acceptable as a necessary act of sacrifice than as an expression of justice. We should notice, moreover, that when Marcus offers to make a suicidal, ‘mutual closure of our house’ (V.iii.134), he gains instead the unanimous consent of Rome that the Andronici should live and rule. The total eradication of a society, tribe, or lineal family is unacceptable, and all Rome unites against the threat. When the judges banished Lucius in III.i, no voice but Titus's was raised in his defence; now he is universally embraced as Rome's leader. There is violence implicit in this unanimity, but it can be channelled against Aaron while Titus's memory is purified with the tears of his grandson, young Lucius.

Drama, unlike ritual, can end on a note of ambiguity because it imitates the unpredictable shifts of human history, not the absolute, immutable truths of holy mystery. One such vestigial remnant of ambiguity at the end of Titus Andronicus is the presence on stage of Aaron's bastard child. He is ‘witness’ (V.iii.124) both to the truth of Lucius's public account of the violent times recently concluded and to the need for vigilance and purgative sacrifice in the future. Like his opposite number, Titus's grandson, this child is spared now that the cycle of revenge is finished. Still, we recall the adage, cited at IV.ii.102, that the swan's black legs can never be changed. Amendment of life is beyond Aaron and his seed. The black baby, then, symbolizes both humanitarianism and germinal evil.

When I spoke earlier of the dual sense of an ending in Titus Andronicus, I was referring not to the moral ambiguity embodied in Aaron's progeny but rather to the audience's sense of identification with the survivors of the tragedy and also with its hero. Adopting the perspective of the survivors, those who, in the closing words of King Lear, ‘Shall never see so much, nor live so long,’ the audience experiences both relief and mystery. The reasons for the last death in a series of regressive revenges cannot be fully understood, indeed must remain hidden because if known they would lead to further reciprocal violence. We shall never know so much as the dead tragic hero because such knowledge is fatal. Moreover, the brutality of the group acquiescing in the hero's sacrifice, a group that includes the audience, must be obscured to us. The object is not to assign blame or instil guilt, and to this end the audience's attention at the end of a tragedy like Titus Andronicus is diverted to the future of the purged society.

From the opposite perspective, that of the purposeful hero whose striving entails his suffering and death, the closure through ritual purgation is disconcertingly unjust.⁸ With him we rage against the coming of death's dateless night. The hero's violent end, the sine qua non of Renaissance tragedy, is not part of a natural, seasonal cycle as suggested by most current theories of the origins of tragedy.⁹ As Girard says, ‘there is nothing in nature that could encourage or even suggest such an atrocious sort of ritual killing as the death of the pharmakos’ (p 96). We howl with Lear, chiding under the injustice of a hero's end, but we recognize too that, his purpose ended, there is no future for the marked man. He has completed his own individual life-cycle, as Susanne Langer recognizes in her theory of tragedy.¹⁰

Among the very different tragedies of Shakespeare, some end with ritual closure, others with heroic finality foremost, but both are always present to some degree. In Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, and the tragedies based on English history the survivor's view of an efficacious ritual of purgation somewhat overshadows the hero's accomplishments. In Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear the primary emphasis falls the other way. But whichever element in the Shakespearean dual closure predominates, the human impulse that begins and ends the tragedies is violence, not justice, order, or charity.

Notes

1. References are to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1974).

2. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1977); originally published as La Violence et le sacré (Paris: Bernard Grasset 1972).

3. This murder is reminiscent of Heracles' attack on the servant who brought him the shirt of Nessus, mentioned by Girard in the analysis quoted above.

4. The word ‘tears’ occurs with significantly greater frequency in Titus Andronicus than in any other of Shakespeare's plays, fourteen times in III.i alone.

5. Robert Hapgood, ‘Shakespeare's Maimed Rites: The Early Tragedies,’ Centennial Review, 9 (1965), 494-508.

6. E.M.W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (London: Chatto & Windus 1944), p 139.

7. This speech, attributed variously to Marcus (modern editors), a ‘Romane Lord’ (Q1-3), and a ‘Goth’ (F1), may seem incomplete because the conditional clause beginning ‘But if’ appears to start a new thought. In fact, it simply completes the preceding warning: Rome will destroy itself unless the people heed the aged speaker's wisdom.

8. I am drawing here on Oscar Mandel, A Definition of Tragedy (New York: New York University Press 1961), p 20.

9. I am thinking of the theories of Cornford, Murray, Frazer, and, to a certain extent, Frye. Working from similar assumptions about the ritual origins of drama, William H. Desmonde asserts: ‘Psycho-analytically, the plot of Titus Andronicus may be interpreted from either of the two following standpoints: (i) as a dramatic re-enactment of the circumstances in the primal horde, in which the father kills all of his male progeny, until vanquished by the youngest, who then comes into possession of the females and becomes leader of the horde, after murdering and eating the father; or (ii) as the survival, through the centuries, of the primitive death-and-resurrection ceremony at an initiation or inauguration’ (‘The Ritual Origin of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus,’ International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 36 [1955], 63).

10. Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Scribner's 1953), pp 351-66.