SOURCE: “Sources and Meanings in Titus Andronicus,” in Mirror Up to Shakespeare: Essays in Honor of G. R. Hibbard, University of Toronto Press, 1984, pp. 171-88.

[In the following essay, Hunter finds that despite the lack of indisputable evidence regarding the sources for Titus Andronicus, the influences of Livy and Herodian can clearly be seen in the play.]

The belief that Shakespeare preferred to ‘borrow’ his plots instead of ‘inventing’ them (both words are highly culture-determined) might seem difficult to sustain today in the face of the complex picture of adaptation and refashioning we find, for example, in Kenneth Muir's Shakespeare's Sources or in more detailed studies of the kind of C. T. Prouty's The Sources of ‘Much Ado about Nothing.’ But mere details have little power to deflect our necessary myths; and the myth of Shakespeare the ‘all-natural’ bard, though unfashionable in its explicit form, clearly continues to sustain a preference for a Shakespeare with a passive relationship to the cultural context in which he worked.

Titus Andronicus is something of a special case inside this general situation. The play has no indisputable source, and most scholars, it seems, would be happy to learn that it was not by Shakespeare at all; it is the mark of their professionalism that they are not content just to register taste but seek to prove it. One way of exonerating Shakespeare from the exercise of personal responsibility that is implied by his ‘invention’ of the story of Titus Andronicus is to discover a source that the young author could be thought to have followed with the simple fidelity of an immature mind (Shakespeare was probably about thirty at the time). It is an additional advantage of this explanation that it allows the gruesome events of the Titus story to be incorporated inside another well-loved myth—that of the barbarism of Elizabethan popular taste, force-fed by decadent Italian novelle. H. D. Fuller, writing in 1901, remarked that ‘though no novel of Titus Andronicus appears to have existed prior to the play, yet when we recall the origin of most dramas of that time, it is natural to suppose that the main outlines of the plot were not invented by the author of the extant text.’¹ No novella of Titus Andronicus has ever appeared, but R. M. Sargent is not far from the limits of the genre when he declares, having quoted Fuller, ‘just such a “novel of Titus Andronicus” is known to be still in existence, in the form of a short, simple prose history.’² The so-called ‘prose history’ of Titus Andronicus (extant in the form of an eighteenth-century chap-book)³ thus appears as a kind of Messiah, the answer to a mythic need.⁴ It behoves the rational mind to examine such fulfilments of prophecy with the utmost scepticism.

Sargent's article arguing for the prose history as the source of Titus Andronicus has, however, been received (as Marco Mincoff remarks) ‘with excessive credulity.’ Mincoff's reply⁵ somewhat overstates the opposite case, but the world of scholarship is much indebted to Professor Mincoff for pointing out the flimsiness of the received argument, however fulfilling it may be.⁶ Sargent's argument is indeed grossly faulty both in its identification of ‘facts’ and in the logic of its process. Mincoff has demolished it substantially; my own notes multiply the instances of error, but there seems little point in pounding a building already in ruins. In what follows I take it for granted that there is no hard evidence that requires us to believe that the eighteenth-century prose history reflects an earlier (now lost) version which provided source for both the play of Titus and the ballad on the same subject.⁷ Mincoff's alternative order (play reported by ballad; ballad reported by prose history) has at least as much probability, even if less mythic resonance. My argument therefore aims to explore the literary consequences of assuming Mincoff's order, always taking into account the generic requirements of each literary document and remembering that each was written to make its own unique effect, not simply to create a link in a chain or provide fodder for source analysts.

The publication of ballads based on stories made popular by plays is a recurrent feature of Elizabethan printing,⁸ and the assumption that the ballad on the story of Titus Andronicus was written to cash in on the play fits with the prevailing evidence more clearly than it defies it. But it is hard to take the argument any further than this, for none of the texts of the ballad entries I cite in note 8 has survived. The ballad on Titus Andronicus seems only to be extant today because it was reprinted in 1620 in Richard Johnson's anthology The Golden Garland of Princely Pleasures, along with an unentered ballad on King Lear,⁹ clearly derivative from Shakespeare's play. The presence of this twin might seem to increase the likelihood that the Titus ballad is also derivative.

It is not the business of the broadside ballad writer to be inventive (in the modern sense) but to catch up whatever is currently notorious in the public mind. But the balladeer has another and more creative aspect to his trade in that he is expected to render the complex issues of local scandals and popular narratives into the generalizing oral style that characterizes the broadside no less than the traditional ballad. The main features of that rendering are well shown in the ballad of Titus Andronicus (as in that of King Lear), and the omissions and transpositions that we can see differentiating the play and the ballad of Titus Andronicus are clearly connected to the requirements of the different genres. The ballad has a tendency to address itself to an audience that accepts conservative military values; and so the Titus Andronicus ballad begins, ‘You noble minds and famous martial wights,’ and tells its story exclusively from the point of view of a military hero of old who (like the heroes of The Mirror for Magistrates) speaks from the grave and recounts the events leading to it from his own exclusive angle of vision¹⁰: ‘I conquest home did bring [Tamora, Aaron, et cetera]’; but they ‘consented … against myself, my kin and all my friends … My Lavinia was betrothed then to … He being slain … my three sons … But now … My daughter ravished … My brother Marcus found her … But when I found her … I tore the milk-white hairs …’ Inevitably, this single-focus narrative reduces the other characters in the story to cartoon-like simplicity. The separate motives that Shakespeare provides for Tamora, Saturninus, Aaron, and others are not present. We hear now that they are ‘proud’ (line 23), ‘adulterous’ (27), ‘murderous’ (29); but these are the flat characteristics of a two-dimensional world of action which inhibits any attempt on our part to ‘understand’ them. They are the nightmare that Titus sees (and tells), but they occupy no space of their own and can only mean what his perspective allows them to mean. The lack of connection between events and lack of motivation are, of course, among the most remarked of ballad characteristics (see, for example, G. H. Gerould The Ballad of Tradition 1932) and cannot be used to point to a particular position in a chain of sources. Gerould speaks of the ballad's events as ‘flashes … directed on what is essential to our imaginative and emotional grasp’ (page 89). What is essential in the ballad of Titus Andronicus is our grasp on Titus's emotional state; and to sustain the genre everything else must be subordinated to that.

If one is to tell the same story in a different genre (and do so effectively), one must make connections between the parts that ballad technique has kept asunder. The prose history of Titus Andronicus is clearly enough organizing the focus to procure a different kind of unity, but the nature of the genre which defines the unity is not at all clear. J. Q. Adams, in the introduction to his facsimile text of the play,¹¹ quotes a set of ‘history’ titles from the catalogue of Cluer Dicey, the publisher of the eighteenth-century chap-book which contains the prose history of Titus, with the implication that the Titus history belongs with these others—and certainly many of these were tried favourites since the sixteenth century: Thomas of Reading, Patient Grissil, Mother Shipton, Long Meg of Westminster, Groatsworth of Wit, Reynard the Fox. But these works are radically different from the prose history of Titus Andronicus and do not give us normative standards by which we can judge what its author was trying to do. They show genuinely ‘popular’ features, which are absent from the prose history. They display a mixture of bourgeois realism and chivalric romance which allows strange or comic events to disrupt and transform the tenor of ordinary life. The Titus Andronicus history, on the other hand, has as little taste for the domestic as for the chivalric. Its handling of characters and events reflects an interest in political explanation which takes it far outside the normal definition of ‘popular.’ The generic focus that seems most relevant is that of history in the narrow or scholarly sense. And the author seems to be a man with an unusual grasp of later Roman history; an analysis of what is additional to the ballad story gives us a consistent image of his intention and achievement and justifies us in thinking, once again, that this is a work with its own rationale, not simply a link in the chain of versions.

‘Give ear to me that Ten Years fought for Rome … / In Rome I lived in Fame, full threescore years … / When Rome's foes … my sons and I were sent; / Against the Goths full ten Years weary War / We spent’—thus runs the ballad's wholly traditional method of establishing place and time. The numbers are precise, but their function is not to establish precise historical data but to present traditional signals for old (‘full three-score’) and long (‘ten Years weary War’). Note the contrast in the opening scene of the prose history:

When the Roman Empire was grown to its Height, and the greatest Part of the World was subjected to its imperial Throne, in the Time of Theodosius, a barbarous Northern People out of Swedeland, Denmark, and Gothland, came into Italy … under the leading of Tottilius, their King.

This author is trying to place his action inside a chronology which can be believed to be ‘true.’ He knows a number of relevant, and fairly obscure, names, by whose power he can give an appearance of historical accuracy to processes that are only evocative in the ballad telling. I am not, of course, claiming that the author of the prose history is a historian in the same sense as Mommsen or Gibbon. I can speak only of an appearance of accuracy, for the historical development he sets out is derived from different periods and is not an accurate depiction of any one. But the names he gives to the largely fictional or anonymous figures in the ballad are sufficiently the real names of Romans who were caught up, at one time or another, in the wars of the crumbling empire against the Goths. In the prose history the sons of the Gothic king are called Alaricus and Abonus. Alaric was of course the Gothic leader who sacked Rome in 410. His brother [in law] and successor was, however, called Adolphus, not Abonus.¹² Their father is called Tottilius, and Totila is another effectively placed historical figure. He was the king of the Goths who sacked Rome in 546, one hundred and thirty-six years after Alaric. But the situations of the two Goths were close enough to make the conflation true enough about either. Geoffrey Bullough quotes Gibbon's account of the horror in Rome when Alaric beseiged it (Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare VI.9), but Gibbon's account of the siege by Totila is much closer to what is said in the prose history. Gibbon says that by

the progress of the famine … the poor … were gradually reduced to feed on dead horses, dogs, cats, and mice … A crowd of spectres, pale and emaciated … surrounded the palace of the governor … and humbly requested that he would … provide for their subsistence, permit their flight, or command their immediate execution. [The governor said he could not do this because] it was impossible to feed, unsafe to dismiss, and unlawful to kill, the subjects of the emperor.

(chapter 43)

Compare with this the first chapter of the prose history:

The Siege lasting ten Months, such a Famine arose, that no unclean Thing was left uneaten, Dogs, Cats, Horses, Rats and Mice, were curious Dainties … most of those that were alive, looked more like Glass than living Creatures; so that … the vulgar Sort came about the Emperor's Palace, and with piteous Cries implored him either to find some means to get them Food, to stay their fleeting Lives, or to make the best Terms he could, and open the Gates to the Enemy. This greatly perplexed him; the former he could not do and the latter he knew would only uncrown him.

I do not quote these parallel passages to argue that the prose historian must have read Gibbon. But there is a strong suggestion, in these and other matters, that he had an unusual knowledge of historical details that only became common property after Gibbon had published. Thus the opening sentence (‘When the Roman Empire was grown to its Height, and the greatest Part of the World was subjected to its imperial Throne, in the Time of Theodosius …’) seems to offer us carelessly the knowledge that Theodosius was the last emperor to rule a combined empire. Theodosius the Great was in fact dead before Alaric besieged Rome; but as the story is one of imperial breakdown it seems just enough to allow him to preside over the reigns of his sons. The role of Titus in the story is parallel to that of Theodosius's great general, Stilicho the Vandal, whose campaigns seem to be remembered in the account given of Titus in the first two chapters of the prose history. The seige of Florence by Radagaisus in 406 was ended in much the same way as appears in the chap-book. Stilicho collected an army by purchase and persuasion, broke the siege, and killed the king, appearing suddenly before the walls of the city and astonishing the citizens by giving news of their salvation. In 403 Stilicho had defeated Alaric at Pollentia and captured the wife of the overthrown Gothic leader. He forced his enemy to flee through the mountains, and near Verona he defeated him again and comprehensively. In the prose history Titus defeats his Gothic enemy (‘Tottilius’); ‘he fled in great Confusion, and left the rich Spoils of his Camp, the Wealth of many plunder'd Nations, to Andronicus and his Soldiers.’ (Compare Gibbon on Pollentia: ‘The spoils of Corinth and Argos enriched the veterans of the West.’) Titus and the Romans pursue the Goths through the mountains and defeat them comprehensively, killing Tottilius and capturing his queen. Only much later in both histories do the Goths recover power, and then by court intrigue, when the Roman hero, Titus or Stilicho, is overthrown by the hostility of a weak emperor, Saturninus or Honorius.

Detailed knowledge of such events in the history of the later Roman Empire was a rather rare commodity in the Elizabethan period, and the odds seem to me to lie against a chap-book writer having access to them in the years before the publication of Titus Andronicus. Pedro Mexia's Historia Imperial y Cesarea had been partly rendered into English (without acknowledgment) in Richard Reynolde's 1571 A Chronicle of All the Noble Emperors of the Romans (as has been pointed out to me by Professor A. R. Braunmuller). But Reynoldes, though he talks about Theodosius, ‘Stilicon,’ and ‘Totile,’ does not supply the detail, parallel to that in the prose history, which I derive above from Gibbon. These details come from a great variety of ancient sources, very few of which were available in English before 1594. One must assume either that the chap-book author was a learned man or that a learned intermediary (learned, perhaps, in ‘the Italian copy printed at Rome’ cited in the heading) had already digested the sources into a form which could be applied to the Titus Andronicus story.

But it is not the author's knowledge as a historian that gives us our principal insight into his aims in telling the story of Titus. We must, even more intently, observe his historical attitude as he substitutes for the impressive bareness of the ballad a system of explanations, a set of political and prudential motives, and a careful sequential ordering. The ballad simply tells us, ‘When wars were done I conquest home did bring.’ The historian knows that the invasions (after the Goths had seen Italy) did not end so easily. Even after the victory, the war goes on for ten years, and politics has to patch up what conquest cannot achieve. Thus the marriage of the emperor to the Gothic queen becomes what it is not in either the play or the ballad—a political act. The play makes the marriage an act of pique directed against the Andronici; the ballad simply says, ‘The Emperor did make the Queen his Wife,’ but in the prose history the marriage only ends the Gothic wars at the cost of promising a Gothic succession, to the scandal of the patriotic party represented by Andronicus. The hostility between Andronicus, striving to preserve Roman rule, and the queen, seeking to place Goths in all positions of authority, thus becomes a political hostility. In the ballad, the queen's hostility exists simply because her ‘thoughts to murder were inclined’ and the Andronici happened to be in the way. So with the murder of Bassianus:

My Lavinia was betrothed then
To Caesar's Son, a young and noble Man,
Who in a Hunting, by the Emperor's Wife,
And her two Sons, bereaved was of Life.

Once again the prose historian substitutes for ballad inconsequence (and for the play's personal relations) a wholly political motivation. Lavinia is here betrothed to the emperor's only son by a former marriage; ‘The Queen of Goths hearing this, was much enraged, because from such a Marriage might spring Princes that might frustrate her ambitious Designs, which was to make her Sons Emperors.’ It is only when political pressure fails that she turns to murder. And this political end seems to be sufficient satisfaction in itself, at least up to the point where the Andronicus boys, persuaded by Lavinia to look for her betrothed, ‘unluckily coming in the Way where the Pit was digged, they both fell in.’ It seems to be only at this point that the queen, her sons, and the Moor see the advantage of false accusations against the Andronici. And it is at this point that the prose history shows the most radical difference from the sequence of events in the ballad. The ballad is like the play in that the death of ‘Caesar's son,’ the accusation against the Andronici, and the rape of Lavinia form a confusedly interrelated but powerfully incremental set of events, only completed when the three heads and the amputated hand are returned to Titus and the mutilated Lavinia. This allows the play to take off into its arias of madness and despair. It is typical of the prose history that it separates out these elements and rationalizes the relationship between them. The author uses his chapter four to deal with the matter of Titus and his sons. We hear the detail of the false legal process, of the emperor's grief for his son, of the promise to spare the sons if Titus cuts off his own hand, and of the cruel hoax that returns the hand with the heads. ‘Yet this was not all,’ the chapter ends, ‘for soon after another to be deplored Affliction followed, as shall in the next Chapter be shewn.’ Chapter five is thus clear to deal separately with the matter of Lavinia. Her rape is again something that may begin by accident, but this also is given a separate and consecutive explanation. Her grief at the loss of her betrothed and her brothers leads her to frequent the lonely woods ‘to utter her piteous Complaints and Cries to the sensless Trees.’ This undefended loneliness is noted by the Moor and exploited by the queen's sons. And this it is (in the prose history) that is the immediate cause of Titus's madness, which affliction appears in the ballad (as in the play) after the hand and heads episode (visually powerful but less effective in telling).

In the ballad, the queen's appearance as Revenge is given a picturesque but mysterious relationship to Titus's madness:

The Empress thinking then that I was mad,
Like Furies she and both her Sons were glad,
So nam'd Revenge, and Rape, and Murder, they
To undermine and hear what I would say.

This is, as Bullough's meiotic expression has it, ‘obscure.’ If one does not know the play, it is difficult even to guess at what is going on. In the prose history, however, all mystery has gone; the motives behind the action have once again been rendered as explicit and political. The queen has neutered the Andronicus opposition, and now she becomes generally oppressive and impatient of all insubordination. No political function can be served by the bizarre visit to Andronicus, disguised as Revenge; and so this episode disappears. The plot against the sons has a straightforward basis. The ‘friends’ (relatives?) of Andronicus, ‘finding they were in a bad Case, and that in all Probability their Lives would be the next, they conspired together to prevent that Mischief.’ And so, ‘lying in Ambush in the Forest when the two Sons went a hunting, they surprized them.’ Then follows the cannibal banquet as in all three versions. But even at this point the prose historian manages to see the actions as part of a calculated political reality. In Shakespeare, Titus is killed by Saturninus; in the ballad, ‘I stabbed … myself, even so did Titus die.’ In the prose history, however, we are given a rational explanation, as usual: ‘After this, to prevent the Torments he expected, when these Things came to be known, at his Daughter's Request, he killed her; and so, rejoicing he had revenged himself on his Enemies to the full, fell on his own Sword and died.’ The punctuation here raises some problems, but I think we can see what the author expects us to understand: Titus foresaw that his action against the royal family would expose his own family to judicial torture, and so he forestalled that by killing himself and Lavinia. It is entirely characteristic of this version of the story that its final action should be made a rational and self-conscious calculation. The prose historian joins other more professional historians in his effort to show that the bizarre story in the ballad is as capable of explanation as other bizarre episodes that historians (such as Gibbon) deal with, rendering the crazy actions of the present as the natural consequence of rational intentions and political understanding.

To explain both the ballad and the prose history as committed to change what they received because of the generic assumptions within which they were working avoids some rather naive questioning of the kind of ‘Why shouldn't b be more like a if it was in fact derived from it?’ A more important consequence remains behind. If we see the ballad and the prose history committed to their generic versions, what are we to say of the version that appears in the play? If there is no reason to suppose that the play simply followed what it found in the history (no one has yet proposed the ballad as a source), we should complete this survey by considering the genre of the play seen as an independent invention, to investigate what relation can be established between that genre and the various alternative sources available to Shakespeare.

To call Titus Andronicus a ‘Roman play’ (and therefore comparable to Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra) might seem to be bringing it into a league where it cannot hope to survive. If it is a Roman play it is certainly a very different kind of Roman play from these Plutarchan models. Its ‘history’ is impossible to locate in time, and its actions demand an extreme range of contradictory responses. This point has been wittily made by the late T. J. B. Spencer:

Titus is a devoted adherent (not to say a maniacal one) of the hereditary monarchical principle, in a commonwealth that only partly takes it into account … [the play] passing to a world of Byzantine intrigue in which the Barbarians (Southern and Northern, Moors and Goths) both by personalities and arms exert their baneful or beneficent influence. And finally, by popular acclaim, Lucius is elected Emperor … Now all these elements of the political situation can be found in Roman history, but not combined in this way. Titus … includes all the political institutions that Rome ever had. The author seems anxious not to get it all right, but to get it all in.¹³

As long as one can think of Titus Andronicus as a radically incoherent, juvenile, patched-up, or semi-revised play, or one produced by some other equally debilitating method, so long can this comic and slightly condescending view of its materials seem the right one. But if Titus's manifestly ‘unhistorical’ Romanness is found a powerful or affecting vision of the world (as thousands found it in the great Brook-Olivier production of 1955), then Spencer's treatment seems inadequate. But the positive side of the question remains: how can the treatment of Rome in Titus Andronicus be described in ways that match with that theatrical experience? The second part of this paper is an effort to answer that question.

It is a commonplace of Roman history that its most admired historians presented an image of a bifurcated culture. On the one side we have an evocation of austere republican virtue, presented either in process by Livy or in retrospect by Tacitus and endlessly brought to the attention of later ages in the gallery of great ethical heroes, Scipio, Regulus, Brutus, and so on, who appeared as standard motifs in tapestries, engravings, illuminations, paintings. On the other hand we have the picture of the Roman emperors in Tacitus and Suetonius and later chroniclers … decadent, corrupt, tyrannical, and lip-smackingly sensational (the I Claudius world). The problem for the inheritors of Roman Europe was to keep these two images inside a single frame, to connect Camillus with Caligula, Horatius with Heliogabalus, Cato with Commodus. This is not a problem that keeps many persons awake at night in the twentieth century, but the pressures on Renaissance writers to fulfil the promise of the Roman inheritance must have made it inescapable in the age of Shakespeare.¹⁴ It must have been a complex business to evade the simple perception that Henry VIII and Elizabeth (not to mention Henri IV and Charles V) were more like Tiberius or Theodoric in function than like Scipio or Brutus, their courtiers more like Petronius than Cicero; and to incorporate that political reality into the rhetoric of the republican ethos must have strained all the powers of inventio the Elizabethan authors possessed. It is my contention that Titus Andronicus shows this compacting of primitive republican virtue and decadent imperial miscegenation in a particularly obvious form, and I propose to use this perspective as a means of explicating what I take to be the purpose and shape of Shakespeare's invention.

The basic pattern of Titus Andronicus is supplied by material which lay close to Shakespeare's hand and has always been visible,¹⁵ though not used (perhaps for reasons I have touched on at the beginning of this paper). If Titus Andronicus was written for first production in 1594 (a highly plausible proposition), it was written close in time to a much better-documented Roman work—Lucrece, published in 1594. The main source of Shakespeare's poem is, of course, Ovid's Fasti; but students of the poem point out that he also drew on Livy's account of the Lucrece story. The genre of Shakespeare's poem naturally emphasizes connection with the brilliant rhetoric of the Roman poet; but it is reasonable to suppose that the political context in Livy remained somewhere inside his mind. For Livy the rape is less a personal tragedy than a political exemplum; punishment of the royal rapist and expulsion of his family are absorbed into the larger story of unruly despotism being replaced by the rational forces of democracy and order.

The extent to which these political themes could find expression in an Elizabethan theatrical structure is made clear to us by a play based squarely on Livy's story—Thomas Heywood's The Rape of Lucrece (1607). Heywood begins his play with the rape's political causes. The wicked Queen Tullia is presented as a driving force behind the usurpation and parricide of Tarquinius Superbus. Her sons, the violent Sextus and Aruns (reduced from Livy's three to a more effective binary model), are younger versions of the same attitude to society, insanely competitive, posturing, and lustful. Opposite to these royal monsters are placed the noble families of Rome, kept by duty from tyrannicide but driven to divergent forms of passive resistance, lunacy, silence, or even song. Lucrece, as the daughter of one such nobleman (Lucretius) and the wife of another (Collatinus), is an integral member of this political group. The sexual attack on her is an attack on the whole aristocratic ethos and breaks down its noblesse oblige passivity, promotes the political revolution, and so establishes the great and good republic. Seen in this light the Lucrece story and the Titus Andronicus story look like alternative versions of the same archetype. In both cases we see an ambitious queen (Tullia/Tamora) with violent and ambitious sons (Sextus and Aruns/Chiron and Demetrius) encouraging a not-too-reluctant husband (Tarquinius Superbus/Saturninus) to exercise tyranny. The tyranny drives the traditional nobility (Collatinus, Lucretius, Brutus, Publicola/the Andronici) into distracted and even lunatic opposition, but which yet stops short of tyrannicide. The royal son(s)' rape of the young wife (Lucrece/Lavinia) whose husband and father belong to the opposition group is then the key event that turns opposition into bloody insurrection, ending with the establishment of a juster society.

The hypothesis that Shakespeare had the early books of Livy in his mind while writing Titus Andronicus seems to be borne out by some further details. In act I the sons of Andronicus demand ‘the proudest prisoner of the Goths’ as a religious sacrifice whose blood needs to be shed if they are to appease the spirits of their twenty-two dead brothers. For no obvious reason they drop into Latin to describe what they want:

Give us the proudest prisoner of the Goths,
That we may hew his limbs, and on a pile
Ad manes fratrum sacrifice his flesh.

(lines 96-8)

The Latin phrase may just be part of Shakespeare's creativity, but it sounds like a quotation, and if so it would be interesting to know where it comes from. The nearest I have found appears in Livy's book I, in the famous story of the three Horatii and three Curiatii, who fought for the precedence of Rome or Alba Longa. At the end of the combat only one Curiatius is alive. Horatius stands over him, ‘… exultans “Duos” inquit “fratrum manibus dedi: tertium causae belli huiusce … dabo.”’ (Leaping up … he said, ‘I have given [or dedicated] two men to the shades of my brothers; the third I will dedicate to the cause this war is being fought for.’) The grimness of the Horatius story and the grimness of the Andronicus religion certainly belong together. And other key moments in the Andronicus story seem to point to other key instances of the early Roman ethos. Titus kills his daughter to expunge her dishonour not simply on the model of Lucrece but with a direct reference to Virginius, who killed his daughter to save her from the lustful possession of Appius Claudius. He asks the emperor,

Was it well done of rash Virginius.
To slay his daugher with his own right hand,
Because she was enforc'd, stain'd, and deflower'd?

(V.iii.36-8)

and being told that the precedent is good, he follows it. Likewise we find in Livy's story of Titus Manlius Torquatus a precedent for Andronicus's killing of his disobedient son, Mutius. The model is indeed even more extreme. Torquatus killed his son for successfully engaging in combat with the enemy after the order had been given that the army should not break ranks.

If these sources and allusions have the cumulative force I have suggested, one must allow that Shakespeare was presenting the Andronici as shaped to the model of the granitic founders of the republic, with their dedication to military discipline, to a harsh family ethic, and a contempt for individualism. But this primitive virtue is only part of the play. In the Lucrece story the disordered violence of the Tarquins is every bit as local and primitive as the ferocity for order that appears among their opponents. Shakespeare makes his picture of tyranny more colourful and yet equally authentic by feeding into it the cosmopolitan decadence of the later empire. A suggestion of the source for these effects is offered to us by the names he uses. And again we seem to find evidence of a careful attention to actual Roman history retailed by the best authorities. The name Bassianus is the most obvious clue. Many commentators have noted that Bassianus was the given name of the emperor better known as Caracalla, who reigned 211-17 ad. As long as Shakespeare is supposed to be following the chap-book, no sense of creative intent can be attached to the name; but if we think of him creating a structure out of opposed images of republican austerity and imperial decadence, then the history of the real Bassianus becomes obviously significant. Bassianus was the elder of the two sons of Septimius Severus, the younger being called Geta. The situation may have come to Shakespeare's attention in one of his favourite sources—Holinshed's Chronicles—for Severus died in Britain and the conflict between his two sons began at that point. The two sons seem to have been left with some degree of joint power (a recurrent problem in the later empire), and each, naturally enough, sought to improve his individual position by appealing to a separate constituency. Gibbon sums up their positions in a characteristic antithesis: ‘The fierce Caracalla asserted the right of primogeniture, and the milder Geta courted the affections of the people’ (chapter 6). It will be noticed that this is precisely the conflict that Shakespeare sets up in act I between the elder son (now called Saturninus) and the younger son (now called Bassianus). The introduction of the new name Saturninus and the switch of the name Bassianus from the fierce to the mild side, the elder to the younger son, may be due to the association of the word ‘saturnine’ with the planet or god Saturn, who signifies, Aaron tells us in this very play, ‘a deadly standing eye … cloudy melancholy … fatal execution’ (II.iii.30-6). In that case the appearance together of the two names Bassianus and Saturninus in the best account of the period is an extraordinary coincidence; and it may be easier to suppose that Shakespeare looked beyond Holinshed into Herodian's History (translated into English about 1550).¹⁶ Herodian tells us (folio xli ff in the translation) the story of a tribune Saturninus who was sent to assassinate Bassianus and his father Severus. Instead of fulfilling the plot, he revealed it. Nevertheless Bassianus had him killed early in his reign, just about the time he killed his younger brother, in a fashion spectacular enough to justify an academic Latin play, written in the early seventeenth century.¹⁷ It is not at all difficult to imagine a conflation of the two killings and a switch of names as a part of Shakespeare's creative process. But in the end creativity can only be measured by conjecture. The evidence may be plausible, but it cannot be coercive.

If I am right in my overall conjecture that Shakespeare took his image of the severe virtue of the Andronici from Livy (particularly from book 1) and his picture of decadent imperial family disputes from Herodian, then one gets a good general sense of the ethico-historical structure he has set up for Titus Andronicus. Into the mould of the more unified Roman world of Lucrece he has poured much of the humanist's natural fascination with imperial wickedness, under which oppression was not merely political but insidiously anti-moral. As the well-documented case of Tiberius makes clear, the representatives of the old order were then not simply deprived of power; they had to be degraded, betrayed by their trusted associates, revealed as no better than those in charge. Flatterers, pandars, catamites, and eunuchs (even barbers) were given access to the power that was denied to a traditional aristocracy, which was compelled to praise flagrant decadence as if it represented traditional values. Shakespeare is not, of course, writing anything like Jonson's Sejanus, which documents the collapse of order before decadence with painstaking historical accuracy. Shakespeare invents a fable which will allow the expression of this theme by means of the popular techniques of the theatre (Sejanus was a theatrical failure). A set of simple opposites is used to keep the tension clear in outline though complex in detail: patriotic war against barbarians is set in opposition to miscegenation and weak acceptance of infiltration by lesser breeds; unbroken family loyalties are put against mutilating lust; political self-abnegation faces ruthless self-aggrandizement; the pieties of traditional religion are met by atheistic naturalism. And these thematic oppositions are presented here by groupings of persons with clear and differentiated natures and expectations, visible in their human and symbolic meaning to eye no less than ear.¹⁸ Marcus is set against Saturninus, Saturninus against Titus, Titus against Bassianus and Mutius, the whole Gothic clan against the Andronicus family, Aaron and Tamora against Bassianus and Lavinia, Lavinia against Tamora with Chiron and Demetrius, Aaron against Titus, et cetera. The loss of actuality in historical connections is compensated for by the insight we are given into recurrent meanings in Roman history. The context, in other words, is sacrificed to the basic conflict and to the violently theatrical emotions that project the conflict. The mode of the play is undoubtedly spectacular; and the Brook-Olivier Titus (if I may return to that touchstone) did not make its effect by denying the spectacle. My argument is that the play reveals a mind not simply seeking spectacle but everywhere using the spectacular to indicate the general lesson of Roman history and, even further, the relationship of primitive and decadent, whenever and wherever they occur. That this was a task whose achievement was entirely worthy of Shakespeare's inventive powers seems to me not to be open to doubt.

Notes

1. H. D. Fuller ‘The Sources of Titus Andronicus’ PMLA 16 (1901) 8-9

2. R. M. Sargent ‘The Source of Titus Andronicus’ SP 46 (1949) 167 2

3. Reprinted in Geoffrey Bullough Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare VI (1966) 34-44

4. The pressure to find such evidence shows itself again, but even earlier, in George Steeven's statement that Painter's Palace of Pleasure (the principal collection of novelle) speaks of the Titus Andronicus story as well known. Painter is in fact entirely innocent of any such report.

5. Marco Mincoff ‘The Source of Titus Andronicus’ N&Q 216 (1971) 131-4

6. G. Harold Metz, ‘The History of Titus Andronicus and Shakespeare's Play’ N&Q 220 (1975) 163-6, has sought (unsuccessfully, I believe) to reinstate the earlier view. My own comment on Metz: ‘The “Sources” of Titus Andronicus—Once Again’ N&Q April 1983.

7. Reprinted in Bullough Narrative and Dramatic Sources 44-8

8. Most Elizabethan broadside ballads have not survived. The texts of such as have survived are usually undated and undateable (except within very wide limits). One is therefore obliged to rely on the entries in the Stationers' registers. In this investigation I have depended largely on Hyder Rollins, An Analytical Index to the Ballad Entries in the Stationers' Registers 1557-1709 reprinted 1967 from SP 21 (1924) 1-324, but I have checked the material used in the relevant authorities—Greg's Bibliography, Chambers's Elizabethan Stage, the Harbage-Schoenbaum Annals, the Short-Title Catalogue. The following list gives the most obviously relevant entries of the period before the entry of Titus Andronicus (together with ‘the ballad thereof’) on 6 Feb 1594:

   1 The story of Tamburlayne the Greate was entered on 6 Nov 1594. The play had been printed in 1590.

   2 The murtherous life and terrible death of the riche Jewe of Malta was entered on 16 May 1594. The play is usually dated 1589/90, but it was not printed till 1633. It is probably worth noticing that Marlowe's play was entered in the register one day after the ballad (on 17 May 1594), though not to the same stationers.

   3 The Terannye of Judge Apyus was entered 1569/70. The play of Apius and Virginia (by R. B.) was entered in 1567/68. It was not printed till 1575.

   4 A newe ballad of Romeo and Juliett was entered on 5 Aug 1596. Shakespeare's play was not entered. It is usually dated 1595. It was printed in 1597.

   5 A ballad wherein is shewed a knacke how to knowe an honest man from a knave was entered on 5 Nov 1594. The anonymous play of A Knack to Knowe an Honest Man was acted in Oct 1594. It was entered on 26 Nov 1595 and printed in 1597.

9. Reprinted in Percy's Reliques ed Wheatley, 1876, I.231ff

10. A quick glimpse into the popularity of this mode is provided by Rollins's Index sv ‘Lamentation.’

11. Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, The First Quarto, 1594 1930, p 8

12. Another possibility is that ‘Abonus’ is some reminiscence or distortion of Alboinus (or Albovinus), king of the Lombards in the reign of Justinian.

13. ‘Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Romans’ Shakespeare Survey 10 (1957) 32

14. See G. K. Hunter ‘A Roman Thought: Renaissance Attitudes to History Exemplified in Shakespeare and Jonson’ An English Miscellany Presented to W. S. Mackie ed Brian Lee, 1977, pp 93-118.

15. See (for example) J. C. Maxwell's introduction to his New Arden edition of the play (1953), p xxiv: ‘it is linked in subject with Lucrece’; and p xxx: ‘… the story of Lucrece, which Shakespeare clearly had in mind while writing the play.’

16. Herodian of Alexandria, his History of 20 Roman Caesars trans N. Smyth (1550?)

17. Antoninus Bassianus Caracalla extant in Bodleian ms Rawlinson C 590 and Harvard University ms Thr 10 1, ed W. E. Mahaney and W. K. Skinner, Salzburg Studies 52, 1976

18. For an exploration of some of the ways in which stage space is used for this purpose see G. K. Hunter ‘Flatcaps and Bluecoats: Visual Signals on the Elizabethan Stage’ Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association 1980 ed I. S. Ewbank, pp 16-47.