SOURCE: Berthoud, Jacques. Introduction to Titus Andronicus, by William Shakespeare, edited by Sonia Massai, pp. 7-58. London: Penguin Books, 2001.

[In the following excerpted introduction to Titus Andronicus, Berthoud considers the drama's depiction of a culture disrupted by violent internal conflict.]

Shakespeare's attempt to imagine Roman culture [in Titus Andronicus] from the inside is of course that of a man whose orientation is Tudor-Christian. In culturally naïve writers, who take their own environment as the norm of reality, the imagining of another world retains no essential distinguishing marks, and achieves no genuine otherness. Such writers cannot solve the problem by seeking to become culturally neutral. On the contrary, it is precisely because of his grip on his own social perspective that Shakespeare is able to perceive Rome as something other. Shakespeare's England is part of the differential equation. But his Rome is also distinguished internally in various ways, notably by means of the inclusion of an alien presence—though scarcely a culture in its own right—in the form of the Gothic captives.

Nothing testifies more subtly to Shakespeare's instinctive grasp of the essentials of romanitas than his placement of the Andronici's mortuary monument within the entrance to his play. No victorious return to Rome is less triumphalist than Titus's. Following the coffins of his dead sons, he greets Rome as if his bereavement were inseparable from hers; he calls on the graciousness of Jupiter; he opens the tomb that contains his earliest ancestors and their descendants, including his score of sons killed in previous campaigns; he ritually sacrifices a prisoner; and he completes the ceremony with a petitionary prayer echoed by his daughter (I.1.73-171).

In just under a hundred powerful lines, Shakespeare has established ancestor worship as the defining principle of the patrilineal Roman family. The tomb of the Andronici unites the living and the dead in a single community. Both rely on each other for pacification and fulfilment: without the performance of prescribed rites (which, according to Fustel de Coulanges's classic study, La Cité Antique, first published in 1864, included in primitive times the slaughter of horses and slaves to serve the dead) the dead would continue to ‘hover on the dreadful shore of Styx’ (91) while the living would be ‘disturbed with prodigies on earth’ (104). The continuity of their history would be broken. Titus receives his authority as priest and father from this monument, which he tends as a sacred duty that he calls a ‘cell of virtue and nobility’ (96; where ‘cell’ evokes the Roman ‘cella’, the body of the temple as opposed to its portico), and which had stood for five hundred years before he ‘re-edified’ it (353-4). It is by virtue of this office that he embodies the family honour and upholds the family name, that he serves Rome and the gods with unswerving fidelity, and that he retains the power of life and death over his dependants. Later in the scene his consent is required before even Mutius, the son who resisted him and paid the penalty, is allowed to enter into the immortality of the monument. The traditional Roman was bound by a sacred tie to his ‘house’ and its ‘sacred receptacle’ (95), as to his City and its Capitol (80), both of which are addressed by name in Titus's salutation speech. This meant that sacredness was linked to a specific spot on the face of the earth. Thus to die in defence of one's ‘altars and fires’ (pro aris et focis) was the supreme mark of piety. In such a context, exile became the cruellest chastisement, for to be banished from ‘home’ was to be excluded from community not only in life but for ever. More than a trace of this can be found in Lucius's exile, to which he is sentenced in part fulfilment of the Tamora-Saturninus plot to ‘raze’ the Andronicus ‘faction and … family’ out of Rome (454). In their vindication speeches to the Roman people after the coup d'état, Marcus and Lucius allude to exile as the worst of fates, the one evoking ‘a forlorn and desperate castaway’ driven to doing ‘shameless execution on himself’ (V.3.74-5), the other describing himself as ‘unkindly [unnaturally] banishèd, ❙ The gates shut on me and turned weeping out’ (V.3.103-4).

The Andronici in general, and Titus in particular, represent the persistence, within decadent imperial Rome, of traditions of ancient virtue receding into the penumbra of prehistory. But the play's mighty opening scene no sooner presents these traditions than it drives them to their limits by making the funeral rites which Titus performs include human sacrifice. As we have just seen, in ancestor worship the dead retain a form of existence responsive to the ministrations of the living. As his dead brothers are about to be consigned to the family sepulchre, Titus's eldest son, Lucius, demands the life of ‘the proudest prisoner of the Goths’ (I.1.99) as a sacrifice ad manes fratrum (‘to the sacred shades of our brothers’). Overriding the pleas of the Gothic queen, Titus grants the brothers Tamora's eldest son Alarbus, who is summarily killed, cut into parts and burnt. It has been argued that Shakespeare could not have written this scene (but Peele, we are told, could), or that he invented an anthropology that had no precedent in Rome. Both claims are surely mistaken. Shakespeare took this barbaric rite seriously enough to treat it as normal Roman, and even more normal British, practice at the end of one of his last plays, Cymbeline (V.5.70-80). Moreover, the literature of antiquity offered several cases, notably in the Iliad (the funeral of Patroclus, XXIII.158-60) and in the Aeneid (the funeral of Pallas, XI.81). Tamora's passionate maternal pleas, inviting the patristic Titus to share her perception of her child's fate, and concluding with the very argument which Portia would use to launch her appeal to Shylock's mercy (The Merchant of Venice, IV.1.184-97), makes any identification of Titus's perspective with Shakespeare's impossible to sustain. The sacrifice of Alarbus marks the limiting point of the lineage-family because to that family it is the fulfilment of its identity (the link between the dead and the living is preserved) while representing its contradiction (one family's piety is another's atrocity). Once again, the audience is placed simultaneously inside and outside a given perspective, the only difference being that now it is the perspective of a clan rather than of an individual. In Shakespeare's dramaturgy, all points of view, whether individual or collective, carry their cultural horizons with them.

Traditional Rome is in deep trouble in this play. Internally, it appears to be falling apart. There are three candidates for the ‘diadem’ (Saturninus, Bassianus and Titus) and three methods of choice (primogeniture, electoral college, plebiscite). The method favoured by traditionalists—primogeniture—produces Saturninus, an unstable hysteric. On the Roman frontier, despite Titus's repeated victories, the human cost of defence has become intolerable. Titus's grand entry (in Olivier's rendering of it) brings into view a ‘battered veteran’, whose every word seems to be ‘dredged up from an ocean-bed of fatigue’ (Kenneth Tynan, Curtains, 1961, pp. 103-5), and whose subsequent decisions in Act I, scene 1—the summary rejection of Tamora's pleas (124-32), the wilful appointment of Saturninus to the purple (206-36), the reckless promise of Lavinia to him (237-60), the savage slaying of Mutius (280-95)—all reinforce the impression of disintegrating control. What are the reasons for this breakdown? Is it that traditional Rome has failed to respond to the pluralism of Empire? That it has clung too long to its absolute sense of identity, refusing to accept its place on the expanding map of the world it has created?

This extra-Roman world is represented in the play by the Goths, who appear in two guises. The Gothic army which the exiled Lucius joins, and which restores the Andronici to power in Rome is ‘warlike’ (II.1.61, IV.4.110, V.2.113, V.3.27)—an epithet which Lucius himself receives (IV.4.69). What we see of them shows that they are respectful of military prowess (V.1.9-11, 20), secure in the simple integrity and vigour of their northern fields and forests (V.1.14-15, 19, 20-21), and sturdily contemptuous of tyrants. (V.1.12, 16). These Goths are Germans, descendants of those tribes depicted by Tacitus in his Germania; and in supporting the Andronici's political cause, they share the values of the common Romans, who, like the compassionate Messenger who returns Titus's severed hand to him, along with the heads of his two sons, grow increasingly restive under Saturninus's incompetent tyrannical rule (IV.4.73-80).

But there is, of course, another group of Goths—as different from the soldier Goths as Saturninus is from Titus—which is given a much higher profile in the play. The defining adjective for them is provided, appropriately enough, by Marcus who, with his equally rational but tougher nephew, Lucius, will help keep the play from spilling into a carnival of butchery. Pleading for the burial of Mutius, he reminds Titus: ‘Thou art a Roman; be not barbarous’ (I.1.381). This says, in effect, ‘Do not become your anti-self.’ In a brilliant study, Inventing the Barbarians (1989), Edith Hall has shown how fifth-century Athenians, in a gesture which we have come to call ‘orientalist’, learnt to define themselves by stereotyping foreigners as their own opposites. Athenian dramatists and historians, prompted perhaps by their heroic resistance to Darius and Xerxes, represented to themselves the populations of the ‘Asiatic vague immensities’ to the North and East of them—especially the Thracians, the Scythians and the Persians—as ‘defeated, luxurious, emotional, cruel, and always dangerous’ (Hall, p. 99). Every one of these epithets is applicable to Tamora.

Tamora and her sons constitute, after all, the royal family of the Goths; yet their relationship with the pastoral warriors who march through the last two acts of the play is not dramatized. Tamora's name is certainly not Germanic. It is related to the Thracian names of ‘Thamyris’ or ‘Thamyras’ and to that of Tomyris, the warrior-queen of the Massagetae—an Asian nation from the unending steppes east of Scythia, whose vengeful ferocity and cunning destroyed the Persian monarch Cyrus. (See Herodotus, The Histories, Penguin Classics, translated by Aubrey de Selincourt, 1954, and revised by John Marincola, 1997, pp. 81-4.) As if to reinforce these associations, Tamora is called Semiramis twice: admiringly by her lover Aaron (II.1.22), who, elated by her sudden transformation into the ruler of Rome, confers on her the opulence, prowess and lustfulness of the legendary Queen of Babylon; and as a term of abuse by the chaste and classy Lavinia:

Ay, come, Semiramis, nay, barbarous Tamora,
For no name fits thy nature but thy own.

(II.3.118-19)

Moreover, Tamora is indeed ‘very dangerous’, not only because of her implacable cruelty, but because that cruelty is linked with what Aaron calls her ‘wit’ (II.1.10), that is, her virtuosity as an histrionic manipulator. This combination of mimicry and sadism is exhibited by the speech in which she publicly urges Saturninus to ‘pardon’ the Andronici while privately assuring him that she will ‘find a day to massacre them all’ (I.1.453). Can this hypocritical eloquence be distinguished from the sincere eloquence of her plea for the life of Alarbus? Or must we conclude that she is a sham, even when she means what she says? But this would be to judge her by Roman standards, which make fidelity to one's word a sacred duty. Her ‘wit’ is accountable not to truth, but to emotion, in this case maternal passion. In a complete negation of the Roman world of the fathers, she turns motherhood into a form of promiscuity, which knows no scruple of restraint, and reduces her sons to vicious puppets. This maternal appetite even enters into her relations with the admittedly infantile Saturninus, as she demonstrates in her spontaneous nuptial ‘contract’ with him—her oath that

She will a handmaid be to his desires,
A loving nurse, a mother to his youth.

(I.1.334-5)

It is tempting to conclude that because the Gothic queen and her sons are not anchored in the culture of the Germanic Goths, they are products of ‘orientalism’, and thus merely melodramatic figures. That, however, would be partially mistaken, for they obviously possess a degree of individual power to which the term ‘melodrama’ does no justice. Tamora is a deviant Goth imagined out of barbarian elements which include sexual appetite, cunning and arrogance. To be sure, she enters the play as the head of a family, to find herself in collision with the Andronici, whose social reality is not in question. Moreover, her attack on them plainly has that status as its target. She contemptuously deconstructs Roman religious practices (‘O cruel, irreligious piety’, I.1.133); she is echoed by Chiron's ‘Was never Scythia half so barbarous’ (134), and by Demetrius's ‘Oppose not Scythia to ambitious Rome’ (135)—which implies that Roman ‘barbarity’ so outstrips Scythia's that comparisons are meaningless. That the charge of barbarism is aimed specifically at Titus, licenser of human sacrifices, is shown by Demetrius's derisive identification of Titus with the savage ‘Thracian tyrant’ Polymestor, killer of the son of the Trojan queen Hecuba, whose revenge Tamora is exhorted to repeat (138-44).

This cultural aggression comes to a climax in Act II with the confrontation of Tamora and Lavinia, who, for a variety of reasons including conflicting ideals of womanly conduct, cannot endure each other. During the hunt celebrating the nuptials of Saturninus and Tamora, Lavinia and Bassianus come upon Tamora as Aaron is taking his leave of her, and turn on her the full weight of Roman sexual contempt, mostly in the form of sarcastic references to the huntress-goddess Diana, salted with racist allusions to the Moor's blackness. They are interrupted by Tamora's sons, whom Tamora incites against Bassianus and, with Bassianus killed, on Lavinia, who is ready for death, but not for what amounts to a gang rape. In the truly harrowing scene that follows, Lavinia's attempts to plead for the values of chastity are systematically counterproductive, only exciting the queen's sadistic appetite, to the point when she has her forcibly silenced and dragged away.

The scene in question also brings out something in Tamora that is more radically disturbing than cultural aggression. It is introduced by two speeches which, as Aaron puts it, place Tamora under the sign of Venus, and himself under that of Saturn—the god of ‘blood and revenge’ that is ‘hammering’ (II.3.39) in his head. This mixture opens up a prospect that instantly heightens Tamora's sexual excitement: ‘Ah, my sweet Moor, sweeter to me than life!’ (51). This excitement continues to rise as the next episode unfolds before her, with her rampant sons, Bassianus's corpse (‘his dead trunk pillow to our lust’, 130) and the frantic Lavinia; and it reaches a climax with:

Now will I hence to seek my lovely Moor,
And let my spleenful sons this trull deflower.

(190-91)

Saturn and Venus have indeed conjoined, but in her.

But this scene's sadism takes an even subtler form. It notoriously contains a pair of contradictory descriptions of a single woodland prospect, first by an amorous Tamora, who depicts for Aaron's benefit the forest glade with its singing birds, its sunlit shadows and the echoing calls of hounds and horns, as a locus amoenus (10-29); then, again by Tamora, but now in a murderous mood, who converts it into a Gothic forest of terror and death, into which she claims to have been enticed by Bassianus, and which so works up her sons that they instantly knife him (91-115). This inconsistency of descriptions of the same landscape has generated a number of inconclusive explanations. From the dramatic perspective I am attempting to develop, this second description, with its luxuriating accumulation of rhetorical imagery designed to provoke a murder, remembers its erotic predecessor as it transforms it, and acquires an expressive layering of sadistic fantasy which an audience, with what is being twice described before them on stage, would be responsive to. A somewhat similar contrapuntal effect is achieved in the next episode, which depicts the entrapment of Martius and Quintus in the hunting pit that already contains Bassianus's freshly killed corpse. Titus's sons are overcome by an ‘uncouth’ (uncanny, 211) lassitude that may seem no more than a convenience to get them into the pit. In the real time of performance, however, we cannot forget that this strange affliction settles on them at the very moment their sister is being raped and dismembered off stage. The sinister double effect once again focuses on a description. Quintus asks Martius who has just fallen into the pit:

What subtle hole is this,
Whose mouth is covered with rude-growing briers,
Upon whose leaves are drops of new-shed blood
As fresh as morning dew distilled on flowers?

(198-201)

This obviously evokes the fate of the freshly slaughtered Bassianus. But, as others have noticed before me, it cannot at the same time fail to remind us of what is simultaneously happening out there in the wings. It is scarcely surprising if Quintus and Martius have the feeling that they have strayed into some sort of magnetic field of malevolence.

Act II of Titus Andronicus enacts scenes of torture and carnage muffled in woods as deep as the Katyn forests of eastern Poland. It therefore invites readings in terms of metaphysical or xenophobic evil. But Shakespeare also seems to be asking for something less. In creating his ‘barbaric’ Goths, he makes a virtue of necessity by exploiting the fact that the concept of barbarism is devoid of social content. What these Goths have revealed about themselves is not that they are possessed by satanic powers, but that they are as it were socially moronic. I have argued that the Romans are Romans by virtue of the fact that they have internalized Rome; at an elementary level, the Germanic Goths, too, are shown to have assimilated the qualities of a real if unsophisticated culture. In contrast, these ‘barbaric’ Goths do not seem to have properly internalized anything, not even Thrace or Scythia. They possess the trappings of a culture, which include the unabsorbed basics of a grammar-school education (IV.2.22-5); they have ferocious maternal-filial affections; but essentially they remain morally incomplete. It is for this reason that they regard the massively integrated Andronici as their pre-ordained foes, and that they pursue them with a visceral as well as an avenging fury.

VI

The one figure of the play who seems entirely to have evaded emotional dependence on others is Aaron. To be sure, he is a Moor (his name is a variant of ‘Haroun’), but one that has no more than a nominal connection with the Muslim world. His literary forebears are less the fiendish villain of Peele's Alcazar, Muly Mahomet, or the truly monstrous eponymous hero of Greene's Selimus, than Marlowe's atheistical Jew, Barrabas, but without even a religion to deride, or a daughter to kill, or an audience to cajole and conspire with. Indeed, in creating Aaron, Shakespeare exploits the strongest theatrical techniques to project an impression of complete autonomy. Because of his colour and stance, Aaron remains extremely visible throughout Act I, but he also remains completely silent. Once the play's great expository scene is over, however, he steps forward and virtually explodes into his soliloquy. This speech, incandescent with the possibilities of Tamora's elevation, is less a tribute to her than to himself. In a mere twenty-four lines, Aaron imprints himself on our perceptions as a resourceful, virile, ruthless and self-exhilarating nihilist. Yet the more we see of him and his exuberant self-delight, the more baffling he becomes. Every moment of his life represents a nullification of those collaborations that build up and preserve human communities. Aaron keeps up a continuous fusillade of self-assertive acts that appear to be wholly self-referential. What matters to him is the perception of his victims' humiliation or pain, rather than the knowledge that he is the cause of it. This holds of his most trivial as of his most destructive performances. At one extreme, his encounters with Tamora's sons are peppered with taunts and sarcasms which they are too dense to register (II.1 and IV.2). At the other extreme, the most cynical of the few actions he performs without intermediaries—the chopping off of Titus's hand at Titus's own request to save the lives of his already executed sons, whom Aaron himself has framed for the murder of Bassianus—may well be the most monstrous practical joke in the history of theatre. But here too my point is that the perpetrator of the ‘joke’ does not require its victim to know the identity of his tormentor in order to relish its effects (III.1.201-4, V.1.111-20). The Messenger that returns Titus's hand to him blames Saturninus and his entourage; nor does Titus ever learn the contents of Aaron's eventual ‘confession’ to Lucius (V.1). Aaron's reticence may seem perverse, but it is not incoherent. To seek to be known for the virtuosity of one's criminal invention is to acknowledge the need for applause, that is to say, to accept dependency. At the same time, such autonomy is a perversion that needs constant reassurance that dependent beings are self-deceived. Aaron's preference is for acting through agents like Tamora (who is never more than a mirror for his exploits), and Demetrius and Chiron (who are merely his butts) in the destruction of Bassianus and of Lavinia, and even at second hand through Saturninus in the inculpation and execution of Martius and Quintus. His relish of the role of invisible power behind far-reaching interlocking plots seems to satisfy his deepest needs. He may be a virtuoso performer of villainies, but it is the pain of others that is the oxygen of his life.

In his contemptuous self-sufficiency Aaron claims to be the author of himself. But within the context of this play, his nullification of social reciprocity cannot be taken as a mere given. There is clearly something obsessive about his general aggressiveness—and in particular about his persecution of the Andronici—which, I repeat, cannot be explained in terms of a commitment to Tamora founded on her appetite for him, and which excludes taking her into his confidence. He comes close to acknowledging this himself when he tells her, in response to a blatant sexual invitation: ‘Blood and revenge are hammering in my head’ (II.3.39). Like Tamora, what he cannot bear about the Andronici is their tradition of rectitude and cultural distinction. Although he, and perhaps Shakespeare, are not yet capable of Iago's awesome justification for killing Cassio (‘He has a daily beauty in his life ❙ That makes me ugly’, Othello, V.1.19-20), his need to humiliate as well as torment them suggests that the claim to self-authorship entails what we have learnt to call repression—what is repressed being the social self whose inevitable ‘return’ must be accompanied by the usual symptoms of psychic damage.

Only by invoking what might be called ‘the social unconscious’ can we begin to account not merely for Aaron's persecution of the Andronici, but also for the famous volte face of Act IV, scene 2. I refer, of course, to Aaron's unconditional acknowledgement of the ‘coal-black’ son (98) that his imperial mistress has just begotten and sent to him for instant extermination. The moment he sees the colour that identifies the child as his own, his acknowledgement of it overrides all other obligations: ‘My mistress is my mistress, this myself’ (106). He discards at once the political programme, such as it is, that he has based on Tamora. In its place, with equal abruptness, arises a new but no less ruthless agenda: the survival of his son. For what the child has done is to convert his father's black skin from a badge of defiant self-sufficiency into a social bond. Indeed, it has turned him inside out, for the social self, until then buried within him, is now in front of him, smiling back at him (119), forcing him into the role of a father who puts down the Gothic brothers' racial threats—Demetrius's ‘I'll broach the tadpole on my rapier's point’ (84)—with the truly ferocious: ‘Sooner this sword shall plough thy bowels up!’ (86). Aaron has been struck by a bolt of ‘parentage’ (to use the term repudiated by Marlowe's Tamburlaine); but if this bolt deprives him of his survivor's flair, it also alerts him to the danger of seeking refuge with a Gothic army now under Lucius's command. After the double murder of the Nurse (144) and the Midwife (166), and the cradle-switching required for the infant's survival (152-60), Aaron is left alone with him:

I'll make you feed on berries and on roots,
And feed on curds and whey, and suck the goat,
And cabin in a cave, and bring you up
To be a warrior and command a camp.

(176-9)

The protective paternal voice marks Aaron's release into family feeling, but also into the culture, if not the comradeship, of those military pastoralists we have identified as the German Goths. The irony, of course, is that it is this ‘humanization’ of Aaron that drives him headlong into the hands of the one man who has the power, as well as the cause, to destroy him. Aaron may have acquired a future, but as he shall shortly discover, he has not thereby lost his past.

When Lucius captures him, Aaron is no longer the self-created plotter who might, like his successor Iago, have sworn:

Demand me nothing; what you know you know;
From this time forth I never will speak word.

(Othello, V.2.304-5)

On the contrary, Aaron now spills the beans, and continues to do so as long as he has breath in his body. Has he taken leave of his ‘character’ of radical independence? It seems to me that his acknowledgement of his child has brought to the surface what before had remained quite unperceived: the contradictions inherent in his stance of autonomy. As soon as he sees who commands the Goths, he knows the game is up; but since, as he has told us, his son is an extension of himself into futurity, that will not matter so long as the child survives. What he has to offer Lucius in exchange for his child's life is the revelation of his part in the destruction of the Andronici. The reason why Lucius is not only ready but eager to accept this deal is that, were the story of the death of his two brothers and his brother-in-law and of the martyrdom of his father and sister to remain suppressed, he would not be able to ensure, as the patrilineal survivor, their rightful place in the ancestral annals. Aaron achieves the survival of his son, but to do so he has to pay the price of consistency. As a ‘misbeliever’ (see V.3.142) or atheist, he is obliged to rely on the piety that guarantees Lucius's word. Lucius questions the logic of Aaron's request: how can he put his trust in what he despises? But Aaron sees at once that what counts is not his word, but Lucius's (V.1.70-85). However, all this does is to relocate the contradiction. Aaron is a metaphysical utilitarian: the value of anything is its usefulness for himself; but Lucius's oath can only be of use to him if Lucius holds it absolutely, that is to say, on grounds that rule out usefulness.

Thus the contract Aaron forces on Lucius ensures his own defeat, and in two ways. On the one hand, it condemns him to a confession of impenitence that, once Lucius has been told what he needs to know (87-120), can only repeat itself with increasing vacuousness, as Aaron's replaying of the gramophone record of Barrabas's catalogue of transgressions (‘Set fire to barns and haystacks in the night’ etc., V.1.124-44) from the Jew of Malta indicates. On the other hand, the survival of Aaron's infant son, depending on the integrity of Lucius's oath, guarantees the survival of those values which Aaron is now condemned mechanically to repudiate. And indeed, this effect is subtly enhanced by Marcus's presentation of the boy to the Roman population, as the play concludes, with the biblical ‘Behold the child’ (V.3.118, cf. Luke 2:34) perceptible only to Shakespeare's audience, not Marcus's, of course, but not the less symbolically redemptive for that.

VII

The intelligibility of a culture presupposes normal states of mind and body. Any radical abnormality, such as dismemberment, puts human beings out of synchronization with their common life. As we have noted, language is defamiliarized by the loss of hands. Marcus, for example, chiding Titus for his extravagant laments over his daughter, warns him not to drive her to lay ‘violent hands upon her tender life’; Titus retorts that this is crazy talk:

Why, Marcus, no man should be mad but I.
What violent hands can she lay on her life?

(III.2.22-5)

Ready-made phrases, unnoticed in daily life, suddenly rear up against their users when that life ceases to be daily. In Titus Andronicus such disruptions can take subtle forms. Lavinia's fate is the result of a decision by Aaron, ‘Chief architect and plotter of these woes’ (V.3.121), to convert a sensational tale by Ovid into a real-life scenario—in other words, to produce a strictly crazy confusion of categories.

Most readers and playgoers recognize that Act III, scene 1, in which Titus as a Roman father is exposed to a succession of Aaron-devised hammer-blows—the sentencing to death of two of his sons, the perpetual banishment of a third, the wrecking of his daughter, the vain act of self-mutilation to reprieve his two sons—represents a high point in the early Shakespeare's representation of suffering. Scholars such as Wolfgang Clemen, who studied the conventions of the pre-Shakespearean set-speech lament (see English Tragedy before Shakespeare, 1955) have provided us with a yardstick for measuring Shakespeare's achievement in transforming what might have been three hundred lines of formal complaint into perhaps the most intense enactment of grief in Elizabethan drama. Every new development ratchets up yet further Titus's psychological anguish, until his moral resistance finally breaks. Although this great scene has to my knowledge not been analysed in detail, its merits challenge the art of the greatest of actors. What is relevant to my argument, however, is its role in the play's structure of meanings.

What the scene offers is a murderous attack on the central pillar of the Roman patrilineal family. This assault on the father is not principally aimed at severing familial attachments, although it certainly tries to do so. Its essential target is what connects that family to the city. Its campaign against the Andronici is an attempt, as it were, to take romanitas out of Rome. To what extent this is consciously calculated is unnecessary to determine: Act II has shown Aaron to be a master-plotter; yet Act IV has also revealed him to possess the defining characteristic of the Shakespearean villain: intellect in the service of unexamined feeling. It may not therefore be possible to disentangle the mix of reason and obsession in him. As far as Titus, his principal victim, is concerned, however, there can be little doubt that what the scene of his agony delivers is a man in whom the need for vengeance takes the form of mental derangement.

An intense experience of grief constitutes a social abnormality. Marcus, who is always in full possession of the norms of rationality, finds Titus's outbursts of anguish difficult to take. In the brief respite provided by Aaron's cynical deal (the father's hand for the sons' lives) Titus, who now shares Lavinia's mutilation, threatens to ‘breathe the welkin dim ❙ And stain the sun with fog’—the fog of their sighs—if heaven does not respond to their prayers (III.1.210-11). Marcus reproves him:

O brother, speak with possibility …
But yet let reason govern thy lament

(213-17)

—to which Titus retorts:

If there were reason for these miseries,
Then into limits could I bind my woes.

(217-19)

But since there are none, the use of outrageous hyperboles is appropriate, even natural: he and Lavinia must respond to each other as the earth to a deluge or the sea to a tempest (218-30).

Titus's extremity of sorrow also possesses a political dimension. The scene under examination opens with his pleas for a reprieve of his ‘condemnèd sons’. This is represented by a scenario or tableau—Titus face-down imploring the earth for pity while the Roman judges pass over the stage with the two prisoners ‘to the place of execution’—which enacts the gap that has opened up between Titus and Rome. Soon afterwards, he tells the banished Lucius that the city is ‘a wilderness of tigers’ (54), that is to say, the very essence of banishment itself. Thereupon Marcus enters with Lavinia. The horror of her condition draws out of Titus a response in which the paternal and the political fuse:

Give me a sword, I'll chop off my hands too:
For they have fought for Rome, and all in vain.

(72-3)

The image of the exile's feral ‘wilderness’ is now no longer adequate to Titus's sense of disorientation; it modulates into the image of a ‘castaway’ clinging to a rock surrounded by a rising ‘wilderness of sea’ (94). Aaron's illusory reprieve momentarily revives Titus's collapsing sense of Roman identity:

Good Aaron, give his majesty my hand.
Tell him it was a hand that warded him
From thousand dangers. Bid him bury it.

(192-4)

But as we know, the Emperor sends it back, and Titus, even though he cannot help being a Roman, ceases to be one.

The ominously prolonged silence with which Titus receives this final reversal, when even Marcus is forced to invoke ‘Etna’ and ‘hell’ (240-41), is something new. He finally breaks it with a yet more ominous burst of laughter, followed by a brief explanation for it that lapses into the predatory ‘Then which way shall I find Revenge's cave?’ (269). The old hyperboles of grief marking the rising tension between fatherhood and ‘romanhood’ have gone. Revenge, the supreme barbarian trait, is now in control. Titus can scarcely be said to have chosen his new role; it rises within him in a surge of madness. The scene is almost over, but it reserves a final surprise. It opened with a poignant tableau, and ends with another: the Andronici make a group exit, with Titus carrying the one head, Marcus the other, and Lavinia her father's hand ‘between [her] teeth’ (281), while Lucius, bound for exile, swears restitution. This is one of the moments which have given this play a bad name. But it is surely possible to perform it, as I think it should be, as a visual representation of a family, though quite literally cut into pieces, refusing to let go, and drifting out of sight still literally holding itself together. The theatrical effect of such visual puns, which are characteristic of the play, may be incongruous, but need not be trivial.

VIII

Aaron's improvement of Ovid's already fearsome tale is etched on Lavinia's living flesh by Tamora and her sons, who have been given a motive by the ritual sacrifice of Alarbus. Aaron, as we have seen, lacks a specific cause. It does not follow, however, that his is a case of motiveless malignancy. As I have argued, he is in a state of generalized aggression produced by a stance of autonomy requiring the repression of the social dimension of the self. Why then does he feel the need to convert his assault on Lavinia into a rewriting of Ovid? It serves no practical purpose: it adds nothing to her physical pain or her moral shame. It may prevent her from communicating her sufferings, but certainly not from putting an end to them herself. If Ovid does nothing for Lavinia, however, he does something for Aaron. By seeking to out-rival the poet in the medium of life rather than art, Aaron adopts before a living woman the posture of the artist before his own handiwork—the product and display of his ‘wit’. In short, he aestheticizes Lavinia's suffering in ways undreamt of by Mallarmé or Wilde, in order to express a contempt for human suffering that can only be called satanic.

The imprinting of a fictional character on a living person is certainly pathological. Although Aaron is technically in control of what he is doing—he has a precise intention which is exactly carried out—morally he does not know what he is doing. Plainly, his notion of the human is deficient; less obviously, so is his notion of art. Ovid's fiction is more than a report of imagined events: it is also a meaningful report, for even if Ovid is no friend of romanitas, his tale shows that Pandion's Athenian family is destroyed by a resurgence in Tereus of Thracian savagery that proves horribly contagious, infecting its two civilized victims, Philomela and Procne, with an even more rabid barbarism. That Shakespeare—who could not have written King Lear unless he had written Titus Andronicus first—was fully aware of this is shown by Lear's assertion, in the play's opening scene, that he is more likely to welcome the ‘barbarous Scythian, ❙ Or he that makes his generation messes ❙ To gorge his appetite’ (I.1.126-8), than his disinherited daughter. Stories by writers like Ovid are not merely virtuoso narratives: they are cultural messages which may explore the limits of civil virtue. In this perspective, Aaron improves not on Ovid but on Tereus, and in so doing puts himself at risk, for by neglecting the status of the Metamorphoses as a significant cultural document, he overlooks the fact that as such it will have found its way into Titus's library, waiting to let the cat out of the bag.

If, as I am implying, the super-self-possessed Aaron is a covert paranoiac, how mad is his arch opponent Titus? (For Titus is indeed Aaron's contrary, since if in Shakespeare's patterning of the action it is Lucius who destroys Aaron (V.1) and Titus Tamora (V.2), in the patterning of the design Aaron is to Tamora what Titus is to Lucius.) This question is smudged by the interpolated scene (III.2) which gives us a seriously disturbed Titus. In the (original) scene that follows Act III, scene 1, namely Act IV, scene 1, which finds Titus and the remnants of his family in his house, his general conduct—his handling of his grandson's fear of his aunt, of Lavinia's impeded attempts to explain what she is trying to do with her copy of Ovid, and of Marcus's inspired solution of her difficulties—seems perfectly rational. But once the terrible truth is disclosed, Titus suddenly becomes a mysterious figure both to Marcus and to us. He utters an appeal, in momentous Latin, ‘Magni dominator poli’ (to ‘the master of the great heavens’, IV.1.80-81), which persuades Marcus that he needs calming. Marcus therefore invites Titus to participate in a formal oath of vengeance. Although Titus does so, he privately suspends collaboration, warning Marcus that he is out of his depth (100), that Tamora remains in power (96-9), and that a long delay must be expected (101-3). Titus decides to send some provocative gifts to the now ‘detected’ Chiron and Demetrius through his grandson, whose combativeness he seems to reprove (118). Marcus interprets this correction as a sign that Titus is too ‘just’ for revenge (127), and thenceforth seeks to manage Titus's illness. Marcus has lost touch with Titus's thoughts; but although we can see this, we do not know what Titus is thinking either. Is the threat conveyed by the gifts to Tamora's sons sinister or merely deranged? (Aaron, who spots at once what the sons do not, that they have been identified, regards the gift as a ‘conceit’ worthy of Tamora's applause (IV.2.30): Shakespeare thus underlines the fact that the arrival of the black infant stops him from warning her against Titus.) Is Titus's archery display (IV.3.50-76)—ostensibly a postal service to the gods above, which, like digging the earth or dragging the seas, is a search for vanished Justice—craziness or camouflage? Marcus and his household, opting for the former, continue to humour Titus's whims; Marcus even redirects, privately, the discharge of the arrows into the Emperor's court (62-3), enraging Saturninus and inadvertently provoking the Clown's execution. (IV.4.45). But what is Titus up to? He highjacks the Clown's petitionary appeal in order to get an extremely threatening message to Saturninus, but in total disregard for the life of his appealing messenger. Is this advertised craziness a cover for an attempt to destabilize the Roman populace, as Saturninus thinks (IV.4.20)? Or is the very pretence of madness—as it is with another of Titus's inheritors, Hamlet—itself a mark of mental disturbance? Caught between the verdicts of the socialized Marcus, who thinks him mad, and the narcissistic Saturninus, who thinks him sane, we are forced to conclude that he is both. But what this means is not revealed until the long-prepared and overwhelmingly shocking coup de théâtre of Act V, scene 2, hot on the heels of scene 1 with its equally unexpected exhibitionistic confession by Aaron.

Until Act IV, scene 2, Aaron and Tamora have been complementary allies. However, the birth of the black child—to Tamora a disgusting as well as a dangerous object, to Aaron the revelation of fatherhood—splits their confederacy, although she does not know it. Even so, their respective fates continue to be structurally related. As we have seen, the autonomous Aaron is turned inside-out by the upsurge of the instinct of paternity; Tamora's power over others, owed to her command of the histrionic and rhetorical arts, converts her into a self-destructive victim. Mistress of virtual reality, she ends by losing her capacity to deal with the real thing.

The consequences of this are shown in the exceptionally sophisticated dramatization of her visit to Titus. That visit is prompted by a political project, which is to use Titus to separate Lucius from the army of advancing Goths. To her, Titus's madness is, as it were, fictional, in that it takes the form of impotent fantasies of revenge. She therefore presents herself to him in the guise of a personified ‘Revenge’, accompanied by her sons as Revenge's agents, ‘Murder’ and ‘Rapine’, who are, of course, what they pretend to be, but who are offered to Titus because ‘they take vengeance on such kind of men’ (V.2.63). She therefore invites Titus to play his part in the make-believe of her masque. However, in a striking reversal of expectations, failure to distinguish between fact and fiction is shown to be hers, not his. The degree to which, despite or perhaps because of her track-record in realpolitik, she is under the spell of wish-fulfilment is probed in the high-wire tension of Shakespeare's dramaturgy, which has Titus again and again tell her to her face that he is ‘not mad’, and that he knows her ‘well enough’ (21), that Rape and Murder are extraordinarily ‘like the Empress' sons’ (64, 84), that she should ‘stab them’ (47), and—when he is ‘assured’ that they are personifications—that they should kill themselves (99-103), and indeed that as Revenge she should give the ‘queen, attended by a Moor … some violent death’ because, as he says with a moving simplicity, they ‘have been violent to me and mine’ (109). Tamora's failure to see what is staring at her in the face, not once but continuously, suggests that it is she, not Titus, who has lost control of her wits.

But this first reversal, dramatic as it is, exists in order to prepare us for a second and this time conclusive one. It takes place in the course of the forty lines during which Titus, with patient explicitness, tells the gagged and bound Demetrius and Chiron—whom he has tricked Tamora into leaving with him—exactly what is going to happen to them, and why. Nothing could be less allegorical than the literalism of this speech, nor starker than the enormity of what it is saying. Titus is preparing to turn his house and its household gods, the source and anchor of Roman piety, into a human abattoir to prepare for a cannibal feast. More generally, he is proposing to convert the social institution of the banquet, traditionally the convivium of communal festivity (which Tamora had herself planned to pervert into an entrapment) into an obscene rite of retro-maternity in which ‘Like to the earth’ Tamora will be made to ‘swallow her own increase’ (V.2.190).

Titus's justification of this grotesque design is explicit and assured:

For worse than Philomel you used my daughter,
And worse than Procne I will be revenged.

(193-4)

He takes up Ovid's master-narrative exactly at the point at which Aaron left it. In one sense, this is a well-merited implied lesson to Aaron, the incompetent critic, who has taken the part for the whole. But in another, it is an amplification, and not a correction, of Aaron's original aestheticism. Like Aaron, Titus conflates the fictional and the real; but he does so for a very different reason. Aaron's was an expression of solipsistic power, Titus's is a symptom of demented suffering. His aggression, unlike Aaron's, is the reflex of a radical injury to personal identity, which this play regards as relational. Thus it is an injury which legal justice, even when it can intervene—as it emphatically cannot in the Rome of Saturninus and Tamora—is unable to heal. It recalls that self-assertion which Gordon Braden, in his revelatory reading of Seneca's tragedies (Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger's Privilege, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1985), finds at the centre of the revenger's madness. Shakespeare, however, makes greater demands than Seneca.

Titus's decision to assume the mantle of Procne is not, as with Aaron's adoption of the role of Tereus, to disregard the meaning of Ovid's tale, but to construct a defiant performance of it. Procne commits what is probably the most barbaric crime in The Metamorphoses, an anthology that does not skimp on outrages; but what she does she has been taught to do by Tereus. Titus learns exactly the same lesson from Aaron and Tamora. But unlike Procne, who abandons herself to the luxury of undiluted vengeance, Titus's revenge purposes to be, as I have implied, an affirmation of ancient virtue. At once chef and host to his guests, he presides over his feast as high priest of romanitas, beginning with a demonstration for the benefit of the Emperor of Roman tradition at its most intransigent (a re-enactment of Virginius's execution of his daughter), and concluding with the performance of a spectacularly barbaric rite (the killing of a mother filled with the cooked flesh of her own sons). Thus Rome and Scythia co-inhabit Titus as implacably as patience and policy do the mad Lear, who starts his sermon to Gloucester with one exhortation: ‘Thou must be patient’, in order to cap it, eight lines later, with another: ‘Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill kill’ (op. cit. IV.6.180, 188). With such contradictions, which are defined by morality but which morality cannot unravel, we are brought into the presence of a tragic impasse.

IX

The final movement of the play sees the surviving Andronici persuade the Roman people to elect Marcus to the supreme office on a platform of reconciliation and reconstruction. It then brings the play to a close by segregating the Andronici and the Goths, which it accomplishes by repeating the ritual that opened the play: the burial of the dead. Titus and Lavinia are laid in the family mortuary monument by their grieving survivors, who, though few, represent three generations: Marcus, Lucius and Young Lucius. As for Tamora and the still-living Aaron, they are denied all ceremony and left uninterred under the sky, prey to scavenging birds. This narrative coda is as theatrically skilful as anything preceding it. However, despite the masterly eloquence of the orations, which persuade their audiences because they deserve to, and the structural relevance and clarity with which the corpses delivered by Titus's banquet are distributed, many productions omit, and commentaries neglect or even disregard, these 130 concluding lines.

Among the several reasons for this indifference, which would include the fear of a theatrical anticlimax, one in particular has prevailed over the last two decades: that the reassurance of this moral tidying-up and closing of ranks is a betrayal of the transgressive imagination that has created the play.

For what the play has revealed is not a conflict between outsiders and insiders, but a radical disconnection within Rome itself, a city which indifferently nurtures a Saturninus and a Marcus, and which generates an ideology, embodied in the military Andronici, in which duty and violence are two names for a single thing. The claim is that in Titus Andronicus Shakespeare's imagination has opened up and stared into a terrifying reality, but that, as the play winds down, and imagination cools down with it, the normal Shakespearean conservatism takes over, battens down the hatches and looks forward to ever-improving box-office takings.

The assumption behind such a critique is that society, in the sense of civility, collaboration and continuity, is at best a necessary illusion which protects its members from knowledge of the repressions and cruelties which these values entail. Such a view, which may well be as religious or moral as it is political, is not one which I wish to contest. My only point is that it is not relevant to an understanding of plays like Titus Andronicus. Such plays are not directly concerned with social diagnosis and reform. Their task is to restore reality to human experience; and this can only be accomplished by the ability to see two things at once. William Blake once noted that no man can understand true art who has not explored and rejected bad art. The reverse is also true: no one will understand the true meaning of violence who does not care for its opposite. To grasp the reality of such phrases as ‘barbaric destructiveness’ or ‘intellectual nihilism’, it is necessary to be able to take delight in the playing of a lute (II.4.44-7) or to feel the past alive in the future (V.3.160-65). It is Shakespeare's unconditional commitment to human society that gives his depictions of its disruptions and disintegrations such power.