SOURCE: Cutts, John P. “Shadow and Substance: Structural Unity in Titus Andronicus.” Comparative Drama 2, no. 3 (fall 1968): 161-72.

[In the following essay, Cutts argues that the theme of false shadows mistaken for real substance provides aesthetic and structural unity in Titus Andronicus.]

If in our discussion of Titus Andronicus we may put aside the vexed authorship question—and to do so is certainly fraught with great difficulties since even the champions of Shakespeare's authorship in the main are reluctant to dismiss in particular the shades of Peele—then there is, it seems to me, a dramatic pattern established which tends to belie the theories of co-authorship. As this pattern emerges, it will become evident that it is based on the renaissance topos which frequently finds representation in iconography: the mistaking of the shadow for the substance. This topos was frequently drawn upon by Shakespeare throughout his career.¹ I should like therefore to cite two examples from iconography as a point of reference for my discussion in this paper. The first, from Fables D'Esope (Paris, 1689), shows a wolf mistaking symbol for substance as he attacks a sculptor's representation of a human head.² The second, from Geoffrey Whitney's A Choice of Emblemes (Leyden, 1587), illustrates a “greedie dogge” losing his bone when he is deceived by its “shaddow” in the “brooke” (p. 39). Significantly, Whitney's use of the topos is specifically directed against ambition, which ultimately pulls a man down rather than lifts him up. The result of mistaking the shadow for substance is quite liable to be tragedy, as indeed is the case in Titus Andronicus.

When we return to Shakespeare's earliest Roman tragedy with the shadow-substance topos in mind, we must confront a startling fact: Titus in taking “false shadows for true substances” (III.ii.80)³ is by no means aware that his seeing has all along been at fault and still is. His lack of understanding remains even in the grief-wrought scene consequent on the mockery of his left-handed sacrifice sent back with the heads of his two sons, Martius and Quintus, who are later symbolized by the Clown's two pigeons in a basket. That his eyes “begin to dazzle” (III.iii.85) he fobs off more as the excuse of age than of fault. That his right hand did not know what his left was doing and is thus as useless as the lopped-off hand is ironically reinforced by his using only his mouth and his feet to guide the staff whereby he writes his name in sand—“in the dust [he] write[s] / [His] heart's deep languor and [his] soul's sad tears” (III.i.12-13). Like a clumsy animal he has nuzzled and stumbled and made his mark, has fallen into the “subtle hole … / Whose mouth is covered with” the “rude-growing briers” (II.iii.198-199) of his own unwitting planting. This is made abundantly clear by the course of his two sons, Martius and Quintus, who are literally brought to the “loathsome pit” (II.iii.176) by Aaron—the “execrable wretch” (V.iii.177), the “black dog (V.i.122), the perpetrator of “Acts of black night” (V.i.64)—and plunged therein; but metaphorically they have been cast there by their father's blindness.

Neither son is characterized for himself but is used dramatically as a shadow of the father. Their literal fall into “poor Bassianus' grave” (II.iii.240) parallels their father's falling into the metaphorical grave which he has dug for Bassianus, first by not championing his candidacy to the emperorship (possibly because he was trying publicly not to be seen as seeking power through Bassianus's betrothal to his daughter Lavinia), and secondly by giving his consent to Saturninus's request for his daughter Lavinia's hand in marriage when it is made perfectly obvious that Lavinia is Bassianus's lawfully betrothed. It is easy to see why Saturninus makes this move in an attempt to strengthen his position; it brilliantly circumvents Titus. Titus like Theseus, might try to excuse his ignorance of the betrothal by pleading that “being over-full of self-affairs, / [His] mind did lose” (Midsummer Night's Dream, I.i.113-114) knowledge of it, but he is belied by the actions of Lavinia's brothers in support of Bassianus's prior claim on her. One of her brothers, Mutius, goes so far as to give his life at Titus's hands in defense of this claim.

Titus's blind killing of his son is destroying the very staff he is trying to lean on. All his railing about Mutius and refusing to allow him to be buried in the family vault because he has not died in his country's honor is a grim comment on his blindness, and is a forecast of his own ignominious death.

That the fall of Martius and Quintus into the “fell devouring receptacle” (II.iii.235) should be likened to Pyramus's disaster, as he “by night lay bath'd in maiden blood” (II.iii.232), is most ironically appropriate. The “fierce vexation of [the] dream” of the house of Titus that it can restore to Saturninus, the late emperor's elder son, the “people's hearts, and wean them from themsleves” (I.i.211) and create an emperor of him “whose virtues will,” it is hoped, “Reflect on Rome as [Titan's] rays on earth, / And ripen justice in this commonweal” (I.i.225-227), is soon shattered. Titus cannot wean his own heart entirely from the emperorship! Somewhat Coriolanus-fashion he hastens not to have his “nothings monster'd” (Coriolanus, II.ii.81), and pleads only for a staff of honor for his age, not a sceptre “to control the world” (I.i.199) when his brother Marcus and the tribunes name him “in election for the empire” (I.i.183). But in his over-forceful championship of Saturninus he is, Warwick-like, making the King and acting as his shadow.

He has a basic reason for standing out against Bassianus's prior claim on Lavinia in favor of granting Saturninus's request that she be made “Rome's royal mistress, mistress of [Saturninus's] heart” (I.i.241). Through Lavinia publicly requested as empress he holds himself highly honored and can consecrate his sword, chariot, and prisoners—offerings “well worthy Rome's imperious lord” (I.i.250)—because he is emperor in all but name. But his very offerings are his downfall, for in his introduction of Tamora, Queen of the Goths, he is Sinon-fashion (like Margaret in 2 Henry VI and Richard in Richard III) bringing “the fatal engine in” (V.iii.86) that begins that “baleful burning night” (V.ii.83) of his own Troy's destruction.

By allowing his sons unnecessarily to butcher Alarbus, Tamora's oldest son, ostensibly for the purpose of “appeas[ing] [the] groaning shadows” (I.i.126) of those of his own sons killed in honorable wars with the Goths, he is trying to appease the groaning shadow of his own ambitions and, moreover, is creating a dreadful ironic precedent. Killing Alarbus in cold blood as a religious sacrifice parallels killing Mutius in cold blood as a sacrifice to his own “irreligious piety” (I.i.130), and is basically self-immolation. Refusing to have Mutius buried in the family tomb “sumptuously re-edified” (I.i.351) by himself, where “none but soldiers and Rome's servitors” (I.i.352) are buried, is a self indictment, because it was at his own hand that his son was “basely slain” (I.i.353) in a brawl. What irony it is, too, that the very sons who religiously asked Titus for the sacrifice of Alarbus for their slain brethren religiously ask Titus for the burial of Mutius “with [their] brethren” (I.i.348). Nothing can appease Titus's groaning shadow, nothing will give his “fearful slumber” (III.i.253) an end, nothing will save him from the accusation by both parties of being “barbarous” (I.i.131;378) till he be eased with being nothing.

By killing his son Mutius for defending Bassianus's abduction of his betrothed Lavinia he is giving further strength to the butchery pattern and unconsciously allying himself with his enemies' destructive intentions for himself. When he gives in to his sons' and brother's supplications and allows Mutius to be buried in the family tomb—“Well, bury him, and bury me the next” (I.i.386)—he little realizes just how much truth there is in the random remark.

The very sight of Tamora as she is handed over by Titus to Saturninus is the undoing of any influence Titus might have had over Saturninus, despite the latter's last words before “seeing” Tamora that Titus is the “father of [his] life” (I.i.253) and despite his injunction to the Romans to forget their loyalty to himself when he forgets the least of Titus's “unspeakable deserts” (I.i.256). Edward IV's and Henry VI's leanings on Warwick are convenient parallels.

That Titus should think Tamora is beholding to him that “brought her for this high good turn so far” (I.i.397) is much more a measure of Lucius's remark about him—“He is not with himself” (I.i.368)—than it is of the remark in its context of Titus's refusal to bury Mutius. Titus cannot give up metaphorical emperorship! He made himself the shadow of an emperor but insists on being treated as if he were the real substance. He not only made Saturninus emperor but made Tamora empress also! The rapidity with which he can shift his stand from Lavinia's potential empress-ship to Tamora's fait accompli indicates well enough that it is his own power through them that matters and not the strength of their individual claims. The rapidity with which Saturninus allows himself to be captivated by Tamora is best understood as the result of his subconscious determination not to be thought of as having “begg'd the empire at [Titus'] hands” (I.i.307). By making Tamora his own and not just Titus's gift he is trying to lay the ghost of power which he feels shadows him.

Hoping to sway through Tamora, that is, taking the false shadow of Tamora for the real substance, Titus is an easy victim to the all too substantive flattery of Tamora's daring to undertake on her honor “For good Lord Titus' innocence in all” (I.i.437), and he is quite unaware of the shadowy Alarbus revenge theme which will raze the “cruel father and his traitorous sons” (I.i.452). The flattery of the empress's prevailing on Saturninus “infuse[s] new life” (I.i.461) in Titus, according to his own verdict, but the kiss of peace is the Judas kiss of a Richard III. The new found amity is to be celebrated at Titus's suggestion by the hunting of the panther and the hart, little aware as he is that the panther is to be Bassianus and the hart Lavinia, and that in the panther's pit he will lose two of his sons and lose himself in grief over their deaths.

The hunt of Act II, rich in the subtle mingling of the Ovidian imagery and language of Venus and Adonis, Diana and Actaeon, and Philomel and Tereus, continues the carefully organized symmetry of Act I. What ironic justice it is that Tamora must also take false shadows for real substances: she is a shadowy empress to Saturnine but a substantive slave to Aaron, whose letter and word of promise she carries so intimately! The situation somewhat resembles Queen Margaret's in 1 and 2 Henry VI, in which Margaret is Suffolk's mistress, though in Titus we are lacking the complications of the particular “joyless, dismal, black, and sorrowful issue” (IV.ii.66).

When Bassianus and Lavinia surprise Tamora in her rencontre with Aaron, they see the substance of a charge against her being conducted by her foul desire to wander to an obscure plot accompanied “but with a barbarous Moor” (II.iii.78). They refer openly to Tamora leaving her “snow-white goodly steed” to enjoy her “raven-coloured love” (II.iii.76;83), but by no means realize that the black and white that are being caught are themselves—the panther and the “dainty doe” (II.ii.26).

Titus salutes the morning of the hunt with a panegyric on nature—“the morn is bright and grey, / The fields are fragrant and the woods are green” (II.ii.1-2)—in very similar terms to Tamora's claim that everything “doth make a gleeful boast. … The birds chant melody on every bush, / The snake lies rolled in the cheerful sun, / The green leaves quiver with the cooling wind” (II.iii.12-14). Her verse is a “nurse's song / Of lullaby to bring her babe asleep” (II.ii.28-29). But the day's soft shadows (“a chequer'd shadow on the ground,” “sweet shade” [II.iii.15;16]) are overcast by Titus's having been “troubled in [his] sleep this night” (II.ii.9) and by Tamora's being thwarted of a Dido and Aeneas “happy storm” (II.ii.23) affaire d'amour by the intrusion of Bassianus and Lavinia. The “gleeful boast” of Tamora's description of nature before the interruption immediately turns to a vengeance call to her newly arrived sons, Chiron and Demetrius. Her anger is vented upon Bassianus and Lavinia for calling her a “foul adulteress” (II.iii.109) in the “barren detested vale” (II.iii.93) of the “abhorred pit” (II.iii.98). The snakes cheerfully rolling in the sun now become a “thousand fiends, a thousand hissing snakes” (II.iii.100) where “never shines the sun” (II.iii.96). The hunt becomes a descent into the “Cimmerian” (II.iii.72) land of shadows where “nothing breeds” (II.iii.96) except the harbingers of death—“the nightly owl or fatal raven” (II.iii.97). Then the pit which receives first Bassianus's “dead trunk” (II.iii.130) and afterward Martius's and Quintus's all too living bodies becomes “Cocytus' misty mouth” (II.iii.236).

Lavinia's fate is to wander through a living grave of the fields of mourning, “deflow'red” (II.iv.26), “lopp'd and hew'd” (II.iv.17), and her tongue cut out by worse than devils, for if but Tereus had “heard the heavenly harmony / Which that sweet tongue hath made, / He would have dropp'd his knife” (II.iv.48-50) and fallen asleep as the three-headed guardian of the gates of Hades did on hearing Orpheus. Those arms “Whose circling shadows kings ha[d] sought to sleep in” (II.iv.19) have been lopped off by the Cimmerian shadows of the king. Her tongue, which pleaded to Tamora to keep her from Chiron and Demetrius's “worse than killing lust” (II.iii.175) by killing her herself and tumbling her body “into some loathsome pit” (II.iii.176), has but too eloquently “stood upon her chastity” (II.iii.124) and berated Tamora's “goodly gift in horning” (II.iii.67); therefore it must be cut out by the “bastardized” Chiron and Demetrius, who are soon faced with their “brother”—Aaron's “first-born son and heir” (IV.ii.92). Her chastity, the loyalty of her nuptial vow, the “nice-preserved honesty” (II.iii.135), the “painted hope” that “braves [Tamora's] mightiness” (II.iii.126) must be destroyed by the “tiger's young ones” (II.iii.142) “wrapt in [their mother's] hide” (3 Henry VI, I.iv.137). What irony it is that Lavinia tries to put her hope in “every mother breeds not sons alike” (II.ii.146) and that, though “the raven doth not hatch a lark” (II.iii.149), it is thought by some that “ravens foster forlorn children / The whilst their own birds famish in their nests” (II.iii.153-154). Titus greets Aaron's news (that a lopped-off hand from any one of the remaining Andronici [Titus, Marcus, Lucius] will ransom both his sons, Martius and Quintus, “for their fault” [III.i.156]) with joy that “ever raven s[a]ng so like a lark” (III.i.158). Even Aaron conceives the plan of substituting the fair child of one of his countrymen in the place of his own “thick-lipp'd” (IV.iii.175) offspring in the hope that a false shadow shall be mistaken for a true substance!

And yet it is not with Lavinia's lost innocence, eloquence, and power to circle kings within the shadow of her arms that we are primarily concerned. Lavinia is only Titus's tool (just as his sons Martius and Quintus are), as her death at his hands and as her parallel situation, writing names in dust by means of staff guided by mouth and feet only, make perfectly clear. Through her is mirrored the destruction of Titus's own power to circle kings within the shadow of his mighty arms; through her is shattered the image of the innocence with which he could cry, “Rome and the righteous heavens be my judge, / How I have lov'd and honoured Saturnine!” (I.i.426-427), the innocence for which Tamora vouched; through her are refracted the rays of his eloquence which fail to reach the ears of the judges, senators, and tribunes. When Marcus finds Lavinia like a stricken deer seeking to hide herself it is an image of Titus himself, who envies the fact that his son Lucius has been banished for attempting to rescue his two brothers from their death. But Marcus is blind in thinking that the sight of Lavinia will “make [her] father blind” (II.iv.52). Titus has reprimanded Lucius for being blind in moaning about his “everlasting doom of banishment” (III.i.51), when Rome is but a “wilderness of tigers” (III.i.54). By banishing him he has befriended him (almost in Kent's terms and Coriolanus's terms), but Titus does not see how he himself has played the tiger, how he himself has been the fool that “added water to the sea” (III.i.68) and “brought a faggot to bright-burning Troy” (III.i.69). Unlike Lear, he never does see, or ever begin to see. Ironically, he now waxes poetically eloquent not on his wisdom but on his blindness. A man of grief overwhelmed by each surge of incoming waves, he is not a man “More sinn'd against than sinning” (Lear, III.ii.60) but entirely sinned against and unaware of sinning in any respect.

When he exclaims that if he had but seen the “picture” of Lavinia in this plight it would have madded him, and does not know what to do now he beholds her “lively body so” (III.i.105), he is ironically showing he lives and walks with shadows, not with substances. The suggestion that they all look into a clear fountain and gaze so long that the fountain be made a “brine-pit with [their] bitter tears” (III.i.129) is a bitter self-indictment. Titus is not looking into the clear waters of the fountain to see himself but ironically to make it impossible to see anything! The situation parallels Richard II looking into the misty glass of his tears, but Richard, however momentarily, does see himself a traitor with the rest. Titus is still in Richard's attitudinizing stages, wanting to weep the fountains salty. The greatest irony of all, however, is his suggestion that Marcus, Lucius, and himself cut away their hands and bite out their tongues “and in dumb shows / Pass the remainder of [their] hateful days” (III.i.131-132). He wants to make himself a king of snow, like Richard II, dripping into the fountain of his own grief, or a molehill king like Henry VI in a “sympathy of woe” (III.i.148). He is entirely unaware of the fact that it was himself who set the hunting of the panther and the doe going, who created the foul pit.

Aaron, coming in with the news that a lopped hand will save the heads of Martius and Quintus, points the irony still further. Titus, who already is caught in shadowy attitudinizing, cannot now see that what looks like the real substance, the real cutting off of his hand, is only a mockery of his woe. How dramatically appropriate it is that while Marcus and Lucius, still haggling about which of them shall provide the hand, go off to fetch an axe, Titus asks Aaron to lend him his hand, and he will give him his (III.i.188). In league with this thing of darkness, which he does not know or ever will know how to acknowledge as his, he deceives Marcus and Lucius, but most of all himself. He has now bereft himself of the only power he had left. With his instructions to Aaron to bid the emperor bury the hand “that warded him / From thousand dangers” (III.i.195-196) he is ironically burying the last vestige of his military power, though by cutting off the left hand he imagines he still has the right for power!

When a little later Lavinia is bidden to bear his hand between her teeth (III.i.283) the total ruined image of Titus in so far as Lavinia can reflect it is completed. His slaying of her at the end of the play becomes thus symbolic of his own suicide. Lavinia represents one part of the image which his own hand shattered.

Titus is immediately buried, too, in “bottomless” (III.i.218) woes and miseries, giving vent to “deep extremes” (III.i.216), like Lear in the storm, but again without the notion of “sinning” as well as being sinned against, or like Richard refusing to be comforted by Carlisle and Aumerle. When the hand is returned with the two heads it was supposed to have saved Titus refuses to let sorrow “usurp upon [his] wat'ry eyes / And make them blind with tributary tears” (III.i.269-270), but proceeds to be blinded by Revenge. But it is not the practical revenge policy of his son Lucius, who will go “to the Goths, and raise a pow'r” (III.i.300), but the self-annihilating revenge, because he vows to return the mischiefs again “Even in their throats that [have] committed them” (III.i.275). This must, of course, destroy himself, though he little realizes.

Face to face with his “map of woe” (III.ii.12), Lavinia, he tries to show it how to wound its heart with sighing, kill it with groans, or with a little knife between its teeth make a little hole through which to drown its heart with tears. It represents for him a repetition of the tale “How Troy was burnt and [Aeneas] made miserable” (III.ii.28), in which he identifies himself with Aeneas instead of with Sinon! He claims he can interpret all the “martyr'd signs” (III.ii.36) of the “map of woe” and will wrest an alphabet from all its marks and practise to know its meaning, but the imagery is empty of self-revelation: it is another means of revelling in his misery.

He chides Marcus for killing a fly, a “deed of death done on the innocent” (III.ii.56) unbecoming of Titus's brother, and says that the action has killed his heart, when in point of fact his own killing of Alarbus and Mutius was far more irresponsible and disastrous. When Marcus suggests the fly was “black ill-favour'd” and like “to the Empress' Moor” (III.ii.66-67) the deed is commended by Titus, for it is the very line for his own revenge. Thus the killing of the fly, Tamora, is in many ways a prefiguring of himself, and it is dramatically appropriate that in killing Tamora himself he should accuse her of literally “Eating the flesh that she herself hath bred” (V.iii.62), when in point of fact the charge is all but literally true of himself. He mistakes the shadow of Tamora for the true substance of himself.

Titus is quick to assist Lavinia in writing the names of her ravagers in the sand and pleading that heaven guide her pen to “print [her] sorrows plain” (IV.i.75) that the traitors and the truth may be known. But this only in the spirit of “discover[ing] for revenge” (IV.i.74), that the hunt may be begun and the quarry hounded to its death, though by the subtlest means lest the victims have wind of his intent. Hamlet-fashion he wants the satisfaction of annoying his enemies, Chiron and Demetrius, by sending them “weapons wrapp'd about with lines / That wound, beyond their feeling, to the quick” (IV.ii.27-28). Chiron and Demetrius are certainly incapable of appreciating their significance, but Aaron is perceptive and notes that “were our empress well afoot, / She would applaud Andronicus' conceit” (IV.ii.29-30). Again Titus is mistaking the shadow for the true substance.

His railing on justice, Terras Astraea reliquit (IV.iii.4), resembles Lear's only in its gusto, lacking any suggestion, however, that the railer even partially identifies himself with handy-dandy justice, for Titus is “wrung with wrongs more than [his back] can bear” (IV.iii.48). He thunders with Mars and Jove, lightens with Apollo and Mercury, does not so much “solicit heaven and move the gods / To send down Justice for to wreak [his] wrongs” (IV.iii.50-51) as Tamburlaine-wise to usurp the role of the gods, trying psychologically to compensate for his earlier expression of weakness—“we are but shrubs, no cedars we, / No big-bon'd men fram'd of the Cyclops' size”—in order to give greater substance to his shadow. But the immense power falls short of its target in its shooting “off one of Taurus' horns” (IV.iv.69) and landing (Pallus=Phallus? fashion) in un-Virgo's lap with the cuckolding “Empress' villain” (IV.iv.73).

And the entry of the Clown with two pigeons in his basket, whom Titus ironically misidentifies with Jupiter's “carrier” and petulantly cannot understand why he has not “come from heaven” (IV.iv.88), reduces the wronged Titus figure still further. The two pigeons, symbols of his two sons whom he has unwittingly slain, are a fitting offering to be sent to the Court by a Clown with a supplication on Titus's behalf. The Clown was going with his pigeons “to the tribunal plebs, to take up a matter of brawl betwixt [his] uncle and one of the emperal's men” (IV.iv.92-94); as ambassador of Titus he reduces Titus's wrongs to a “matter of brawl.” The shade of Mutius, who was “basely slain in brawls” (I.i.353) by his father, hangs about the embassade. The play is turning back on these incidents: things are rounding out. The “shade” of Tamora encounters with him in the name of that very Revenge he had sought hell in vain for. He had threatened to “dive into the burning lake below” (IV.iii.43) and pull “Revenge from hell” (IV.iii.38), but Revenge chooses to confound his plots.

Face to face with Tamora (Revenge) and her sons Chiron and Demetrius (Rapine and Murder) he craftily pretends that his “miserable, mad, mistaking eyes” (V.ii.66) see the Empress and the Empress's sons, knowing them all the time and allowing them to suppose him mad so that he may “o'erreach them in their own devices” (V.ii.143). What is far more important, however, is that he does not recognize that this Revenge figure talking to him of the “hollow cave or lurking-place” (V.ii.35), this “vast obscurity or misty vale” (V.ii.36) where murder and death are perpetrated, is the shadow of himself. “O, had [he] never, never hunted there!” (IV.i.56)

Lavinia, deflowered, lopped, and holding her father's lopped left hand in her teeth is one part of the shattered image of Titus; Tamora (Revenge) with Chiron and Demetrius (Rapine and Murder) at her side (Proserpine and her “two proper palfreys, black as jet” [V.ii.50]—“A pair of cursed hell-hounds and their dame” [V.ii.144] is another! What “mad, mistaking eyes”; “What [tragic] error drives [his] eyes and ears amiss” (Comedy of Errors, II.ii.185).

Demetrius and Chiron ask Titus to show them a murderer and “a villain that hath done a rape” (V.ii.94) and they will be reveng'd on him” (V.ii.95); Titus's crafty answer—“when thou find'st a man that's like thyself” (V.ii.99) he is a murderer, he is a ravisher—is powerfully ironic in its non-recognition of self. He has “lesson'd” (V.ii.110) Tamora and her sons, but has not taken the heart of the lesson to himself. With the guilty blood of Chiron and Demetrius and their ground-down bones he can make a piecrust and have Tamora eat her guilt in the fantastic wedding feast of the Centaurs: Tamora shall be physically wedded to her evil deeds. Titus is projecting his guilt on her, though he would never “see” to acknowledge it. That is why Tamora's death and Titus's are practically in the same instant of time with Lavinia's—“eating the flesh that [he] himself hath bred” (V.ii.62).

But the play significantly does not end with the triple death. That the remaining Andronici should project all the family's guilt onto Aaron—the “execrable wretch / That have been breeder of these dire events” (V.iii.177-178)—is another instance of how “worldly men” with their “mad, mistaking eyes” exonerate themselves at an obvious criminal's expense.

Titus hardly deserves to be buried in the Andronici's “household monument” (V.iii.194) for his past victory over the Goths any more than Tamora deserves any “funeral rite” or “mourning bell shall ring her burial” (V.iii.196-197). That part of him which colleagued with the shade of Tamora ought to be thrown “forth to beasts and birds to prey” (V.iii.198); that part of him which colleagued with the shade of Aaron ought to be set “breast-deep in earth” (V.iii.179) and allowed to famish; that part of him which set going the hunt for the panther and the doe ought not to find its resting place in the tomb of the Andronici, but in the panther's pit, while that part of him which wished however blindly to do the right things and unwittingly did the wrong allows him honorable burial.

Aaron, who is made almost a chorus at the end with his long speeches of “wondrous things”—“murders, rapes, and massacres, / Acts of black night, abominable deeds, / Complots of mischief, treason, villainies” (V.i.63-65), who confesses to a “thousand more” deeds than the play gives warrant of (V.i.125-144), each one of which he would have willingly done “as one would kill a fly,” and only repents that “he cannot do ten thousand more” (V.i.144)—cannot sensibly be used as the villain of the play. He is the black shadow to everyone's substantive evil. He has no moral code, nor pretends to have, except to believe in the force of morality on others, Lucius in particular! This is the thrust of his remarks to Lucius, whom he knows to be “religious” and to have “a thing within [him] called conscience” (V.i.74-75). He tries to draw himself apart and almost breaks his heart with extremely malevolent, Puckish laughter, prying through the crevice of a wall at Titus, and monstrously delighting in the foolishness of Titus. And yet the irony of it all is that he may well think he is the real substance of the tragedy, that every evil perpetrated has stemmed from him. Here is the significance of his inability to hush his child's crying which gives him away. His subconscious cries out for recognition. He needs to be acclaimed as the master villain and loses no opportunity to draw such attention to himself.

There is, however, no doubt that in Aaron's concern for the child, he is betraying something that is not so shadowy. Titus's children were made pawns to his family honor; Aaron's child, of royal blood, is tangible evidence of his father's all too human success.

Thus the tracing of Shakespeare's use of the renaissance shadow-substance topos in Titus Andronicus not only illuminates the structure of the drama but also demonstrates the unity of that structure. Furthermore, such an analysis provides a convincing argument on the side of Shakespeare's sole authorship of this play which culminates in tragedy because Titus persists throughout in taking “false shadows for true substances” (III.ii.80).

Notes

1. See Russell A. Fraser, Shakespeare's Poetics in Relation to King Lear (London, 1962), pp. 103-116.

2. Fraser, Plate XLI.

3. For general convenience, I have used the following text throughout: W. A. Neilson and C. J. Hill, ed., The Complete Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare (Cambridge, Mass., 1942). This article will appear later this year in a slightly different form as a chapter in a book, The Shattered Glass (copyright 1968 by Wayne State University Press), and is printed here with the permission of the publisher.