SOURCE: Palmer, D. J. “The Unspeakable in Pursuit of the Uneatable: Language and Action in Titus Andronicus.” Critical Quarterly 14, no. 4 (winter 1972): 320-39.

These wrongs unspeakable, past patience,
Or more than any living man can bear.

(V. iii. 126-7)

The extremities of horror and suffering in Titus Andronicus seem to stretch the capacities of art to give them adequate embodiment and expression. Perhaps it was this sense of testing the limits of his poetic and dramatic resources that attracted Shakespeare to the subject at the beginning of his career, for his early work in general is characterised by its tendency to display rhetorical and technical virtuosity, as well as by a desire to emulate and outdo his models. The early Shakespeare is more prone to excessive ingenuity than to a lack of skill or inventiveness. But the question at issue in Titus Andronicus has for a long time been whether the nature of the material over-extended Shakespeare's abilities. Edward Ravenscroft, its Restoration renovator, condemned the play as ‘the most incorrect and indigest piece in all his Works; It seems rather a heap of Rubbish, then a Structure’: if he had been acquainted with the terminology of modern criticism, Ravenscroft might have accused the play of the fallacy of imitative form in representing the collapse of classical Roman decorum into Gothic barbarism. Yet, even given that Elizabethan taste is not Ravenscroft's or our own, the charge of formlessness is a paradoxical one to make, since the play is very obviously full of formal devices and rhetorical patterning. Most modern critics of the play, in fact, have been offended by its elaborate stylisation, which they find quite out of keeping with the sensational physical horrors: Dover Wilson, for instance, was led by his sense of such incongruity to believe that the play was intended as a burlesque and not as a tragedy at all.

The charge that the form and style are at odds with the situations they are supposed to express finds a point of focus in the episode where Lavinia, ‘her hands cut off, and her tongue cut out, and ravish'd’, is encountered by her uncle Marcus. Marcus addresses her gruesome figure in a speech of formal lamentation, dwelling on the details of her mutilation and shame with such elaborate and fanciful conceits, mixing sweetness with the grotesque, that many have thought the effect of lines like these to be an insensitive mockery of the physical and emotional reality of the situation:

Alas, a crimson river of warm blood,
Like to a bubbling fountain stirr'd with wind,
Doth rise and fall between thy rosed lips,
Coming and going with thy honey breath …
.....And not withstanding all this loss of blood—
As from a conduit with three issuing spouts—
Yet do thy cheeks look red as Titan's face
Blushing to be encount'red with a cloud.

(II. iv. 22-32)

The effect is certainly bizarre, and intrinsic to it is the mute presence on stage of Lavinia herself. Indeed for that reason I find it difficult to accept the defence of this kind of rhetoric in the play made by E. M. Waith¹, who argues that it derives from the style of Ovidian metamorphosis (the ‘conduit’ image is certainly taken from Ovid's description of the death of Pyramus in Metamorphoses, Book Four). Waith finds that the effect of such curious conceits is to transform states of violent emotion, at their point of extremity, into ‘interested but somewhat detached contemplation’, but he acknowledges that the device belongs essentially to narrative and descriptive poetry, and ‘cannot be fully realized by the techniques of drama’. Detached contemplation, however, is hardly appropriate to the formal lament that Marcus is uttering, and it seems more in keeping with the techniques of drama to take these lines as an expression of Marcus' own feelings, moved by the sight of such affliction, rather than as directly descriptive of Lavinia. Just as the religious poetry of the early seventeenth century, influenced as Louis Martz has shown² by the formal practice of meditation concentrating the total awareness of the senses, feelings and understanding on the realisation of a devotional subject, was to produce in the baroque sensibility of Richard Crashaw such conceits as ‘purple Rivers’ of blood flowing from the crucified Christ, and to present the tears of Mary Magdalene as ‘sister springs … Ever bubling things’, and even more grotesquely as

Two walking baths; two weeping motions;
Portable, & compendious oceans,

(‘The Weeper’)

so Marcus' lament is the expression of an effort to realise a sight that taxes to the utmost the powers of understanding and utterance. The vivid conceits in which he pictures his hapless niece do not transform or depersonalise her: she is already transformed and depersonalised, as she stands before him the victim of a strange and cruel metamorphosis. The opening words of his speech are ‘Who is this?’ and his first response is to doubt the reality of what he sees:

If I do dream, would all my wealth would wake me!
If I do wake, some planet strike me down,
That I may slumber an eternal sleep!

(13-15)

Far from being a retreat from the awful reality into some aesthetic distance, then, Marcus' conceits dwell upon this figure that is to him both familiar and strange, fair and hideous, living body and object: this is, and is not, Lavinia.

Lavinia's silence is as moving, and as appalling, as the sight of her bleeding wounds, and following his envisagement of her, Marcus gives dramatic embodiment to another function of rhetoric in this episode as in the play as a whole:

Shall I speak for thee? Shall I say 'tis so?
O, that I knew thy heart, and knew the beast,
That I might rail at him to ease my mind!
Sorrow concealed, like an oven stopp'd,
Doth burn the heart to cinders where it is.

(33-37)

Lavinia's plight is literally unutterable: Ovid's Philomela, as Marcus says, at least had her hands to tell her story in a woven sampler, but in thus surpassing Ovid Shakespeare also makes fully dramatic the testing of his own expressive resources. By realising Lavinia's tragedy, Marcus' formal lament articulates unspeakable woes.

The formality and stylisation of this speech, therefore, instead of being incongruously related to the horror of the situation, arise reality. Here and throughout the play, the response to the intolerable is ritualised, in language and action, because ritual is the ultimate means by which man seeks to order and control his precarious and unstable world. Behind the style and structure of Titus Andronicus, as Ben Jonson later implied when he coupled the play with The Spanish Tragedy in a disparaging reflection on earlier Elizabethan drama³, there lies the example of Kyd, whose tragic hero Hieronymo resorts to the ritualised patterns of rhetorical lament to express his extremity of suffering:

O eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears;
O life, no life, but lively form of death;
O world, no world, but mass of public wrongs,
Confus'd and fill'd with murder and misdeeds. …

(The Spanish Tragedy, III. ii. 1-4)

Hieronymo finally extracts his revenge through the enactment of a play, and, his purpose accomplished, bites off his tongue. So Shakespeare, overgoing Kyd as well as Ovid, develops the compulsions of his tragic figures in conscious relationship to the scope and function of his own art as poet and dramatist.

II

The story of Titus Andronicus is not historical, and the actual source that Shakespeare used is unknown, although most scholars believe that it probably did not differ in essentials from a prose version that has survived in an eighteenth-century chapbook. What is clear is that in re-shaping the narrative material for his play Shakespeare related the events to analogues in Roman literature and mythology, most notably to Ovid's tale of Tereus and Philomela (Metamorphoses, Book Six), and possibly to the Senecan banquet of Thyestes; there are also allusions to Virgil's Aeneid, to Coriolanus, to Appius and Virginia, and of course to the classical deities. All these help to evoke the Roman world of the play, and it may be said of these literary allusions, as T. J. B. Spencer remarked of the eclectic nature of the political institutions in the play, that ‘the author seems anxious, not to get it all right, but to get it all in’.⁴

In addition to establishing a Roman setting, however, the classical references are also designed to suggest a pattern in the events of the plot as though the tragedy is a re-enactment of a primordial Roman experience. There is one complex of references in particular which sets the play as a whole in relation to a mythological scheme of significance: in altering the name of the Emporer from the vaguely late-Roman resonance of Theodosius, as he is called in the prose version of the story, to the Saturninus of the play, Shakespeare created a series of associations that enhance the meaning of the dramatic action. The reign of Saturn, first of the gods, was the Golden Age, when men lived in perfect harmony and happiness; his overthrow by Jupiter his son began that process of decline and fall, through the ages of silver, brass and iron, which Ovid describes in Book One of Metamorphoses, until at last, in the words of Golding's translation:

Men live by ravine and by stelth: the wandring guest doth stand
In daunger of his host: the host in daunger of his guest:
And fathers of their sonne in lawes: yea seldome time doth rest,
Betweene borne brothers such accord and love as ought to bee.
The goodman seekes the goodwifes death, and his againe seeks shee.
The stepdames fell their husbandes sonnes with poyson do assayle.
To see their fathers live so long the children doe bewayle.
All godlynesse lies under foote. And Ladie Astrey, last
Of heavenly vertues, from this earth in slaughter drowned past.

(162-170)

The aptness of this vision of anarchy to the condition of Saturninus' Rome in the play is reinforced by Titus when he quotes Ovid directly: “Terras Astraea reliquit” (IV. iii. 4). What historical basis there is in Shakespeare's source, which sets the story against the background of Rome's struggle against the Goths, clearly denotes the decadence of empire, and this seems to have prompted Shakespeare's ironic recollection of another famous piece of Roman literature, Virgil's Fourth Eclogue, with its Sybilline prophecy of another Golden Age: ‘iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna’:⁵

Now is come the last age of the song of Cumae; the great line of the centuries begins anew. Now the Virgin returns, the reign of Saturn returns; now a new generation descends from heaven on high.

The fulfilment of this prophecy depended on the birth of a son, and throughout the Middle Ages Virgil's lines were read as a foretelling of Christ's coming. In this context, the last age of Rome under Saturninus in Shakespeare's play is something akin to a blasphemous parody, in which the ‘Virgo’ becomes neither Astraea nor Mary, but the violated chastity of Lavinia, whose terrible revelation, ‘Stuprum-Chiron-Demetrius’, is written in the sand that Titus compares to the Sibyl's leaves (IV. i. 106), while the son that is born into this world of woe is no redeemer, but Aaron's bastard.

It is Aaron who gives another twist to the Saturnine significances in this play by referring his villainy to the planetary influence of the god:

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

(II. iii. 30-39)

The astrological aspect of Saturn has little to do with his benign presidency over the Golden Age, as is shown in Erwin Panofsky's summary of medieval and renaissance conceptions of the attributes associated with the planet:

In the capacity of planetarian ruler, Saturn was held to be a peculiarly sinister character; we still use the word ‘saturnine’ to indicate ‘a sluggish, gloomy temperament’, to quote the Oxford Dictionary. Those subject to his power could be mighty and wealthy, but not kindly and generous; they could be wise, but not happy. For men born under Saturn must perforce be melancholy. Even those highly conditional advantages were granted only to a very small minority of Saturn's ‘children’. Generally Saturn, coldest, driest, and slowest of planets, was associated with old age, abject poverty and death. In fact Death, like Saturn, was represented with a scythe or sickle from very early times. Saturn was held responsible for floods, famines and all other kinds of disasters. Those born under him were classed with the most miserable and undesirable of mortals …⁶

Clearly, in the old age of Rome represented by the play, Saturn's baleful and malignant influence is predominant, and it is appropriate that the tragic hero himself should be an old man.

The scythe or sickle which the figure of Saturn bears in iconographical representations (several of which are reproduced in Panofsky's book) has a complicated but fascinating origin. It became identified with the idea of Death as a harvester, but before that it reflected the conflation of the Roman Saturn with the Greek god Chronos, himself etymologically related to (or confused with) Kronos, or Time: hence what has come down to us as the more familiar figure of Father Time. But Saturn's sickle (or scythe) has another, more horrific, significance, and one that relates him even more closely to Shakespeare's play: this implement symbolises his castration of his father Uranus, according to renaissance mythographers (though some are willing to allow that it might also refer to his Golden-Age associations with the fertility of the earth, deified in the figure of his wife, Rhea). The same mythographers also specify another equally blood-curdling attribute: holding his sickle in one hand, with the other hand Saturn thrusts a child into his mouth (some of Panofsky's illustrations show this feature, and there is also Goya's well-known picture of the subject). This macabre detail owes its origin to the myth in which Saturn devours all his male children, except Jupiter, Pluto and Neptune. He was also sometimes depicted holding a snake with its tail in its mouth, which seems to suggest similar propensities. These iconographical attributes correspond closely to the two related crimes in Titus Andronicus: mutilation and cannibalism. Moreover, while the lopping of Lavinia's ‘branches’ (as Marcus calls them) and its subsequent avenging in the banquet served to Tamora are the twin atrocities on which the dramatic action turns, other events and the language used to describe them parallel these Saturnine activities. In the opening scene, for instance, we learn that of his twenty-five sons Titus has lost all but four in defending the cause of Rome: ‘pius’ Titus thus sacrifices his children to the state that devours them, and the burial of the latest victims is celebrated by the sacrificial slaughter of Alarbus, son of Rome's enemy Tamora. Alarbus is to be first dismembered, then buried, and the line ‘Let's hew his limbs till they be clean consum'd’ (I. i. 129) conflates the idea of mutilation with that of devouring in the act of ritual murder. Similarly, at the end of the play Tamora's surviving sons are first to be completely disintegrated:

Hark, villains! I will grind your bones to dust,
And with your blood and it I'll make a paste …

(V. ii. 187-8)

and then fed to their ‘unhallow'd dam’, who will, ‘like to the earth, swallow her own increase’. ‘Suum cuique is our Roman justice’ (I. i. 280) is a text that receives an ironic gloss as the play unfolds. Tamora, ‘Eating the flesh that she herself hath bred’, is, like Rome itself, under this Saturnine rule, appropriately assimilated to the figure of Rhea the earth-goddess. A peculiarly horrid notion of renaissance neo-Platonism was that Saturn's twin deeds of dismemberment and cannibalism were an allegory of the primal mystery of the Many and the One: as the first represented disintegration and dispersal, the second, the eating of his own offspring, denoted the return of multiplicity into unity. Perhaps it is also appropriate therefore that the Saturnalia of Shakespeare's play should be concluded by Marcus' address to the citizens of Rome:

O, let me teach you how to knit again
This scattered corn into one mutual sheaf,
These broken limbs again into one body;
Lest Rome herself be bane unto herself.

(V. iii. 70-73)

These, I think, are the central shaping significances of the reign of Saturn in the play, though minor reverberations may be picked up in other aspects of its design. The name Titus itself, for instance, may in this context recall the Titans who warred against the Olympians, since Aaron associates himself with Tamora as ‘mounting aloft’ to ‘Olympus' top’ (II. i. 1-14): the Olympians overthrew Saturn, just as Saturninus' rule is subverted by these Gothic intruders. On the other hand, Titan in one version of the myth was Saturn's elder brother, who abdicated in his favour just as Titus yields the emperorship to Saturninus at the beginning of the play. Perhaps too these mythological parallels explain why the clown in this saturnine Rome has never heard of ‘Jubiter’ (IV. iii. 85—as the First Quarto text spells it). One imagines that Shakespeare enjoyed the elaboration of such ingenious correspondences, just as Marcus suspects that ‘the gods delight in tragedies’ (IV. i. 61).

III

The progression of the play's first two Acts represents the metamorphosis of Roman civilisation into Gothic barbarism through a transition from solemn ceremony to wild and brutal sport. So clearly structured is the sequence of action in this opening phase of the play, leading to the violation of Lavinia, that its significance can be followed almost entirely in terms of the strongly-defined patterns of stage-spectacle and movement. We attend as much to Shakespeare's choreography as to the dialogue, while the shifting tableaux of groups of figures, their physical movements and gestures, create a series of expressive parallels and contrasts in rhythm, emotional pitch and tone. The tragic issues are here presented in the language of theatrical form.

There are three different kinds of ceremony to be performed in the long public scene that constitutes the whole of Act One: the election of the new Emperor, the triumphal entry of Titus' victory procession and the burial of his sons. The action begins with a brief tableau in which the two brothers Saturninus and Bassanius enter with drums and trumpets from opposite sides, confronting each other with their followers as rivals for their father's crown, as Marcus, the people's representative, appears above them holding the crown: the pyramidal grouping expresses both the rule of law, the formal majesty of the state, and the tensions that threaten to tear it apart. At the news of Titus' approach, this pageant disperses to make way for another. The triumphal entry of Titus is obviously a splendid and elaborate spectacle, carefully ordered by the stage-direction:

Sound drums and trumpets, and then enter Martius and Mutius, two of Titus' sons; and then two Men bearing a coffin covered with black; then Lucius and Quintus, two other sons; then Titus Andronicus; and then Tamora, the Queen of Goths, with her three sons, Alarbus, Demetrius and Chiron, with Aaron the Moor, and Others, as many as can be. Then set down the coffin and Titus speaks.

(I. i. 69)

At this point however the victory march turns into a funeral procession: the triumph of Titus culminates in the burial of his sons, and the conjunction of these two ceremonies creates an ambiguity, reflected in Titus' speech, as though his glory is the sacrifice of his sons. Such an incongruous mingling of triumph and mourning has the effect of questioning the values underlying this Roman piety and sacrifice, as the tomb of the Andronici is opened to gape like the jaws of some god appeased by devouring its offspring: the stage-image is powerful in suggestion. Moreover, this effect is intensified by our knowledge that Titus is re-enacting a rite he has performed five times before: repetition of an act itself establishes a ritualistic pattern.

The ensuing sacrifice of Alarbus to appease the sons of Titus who have themselves been sacrificed confirms our sense of inhuman cruelty in this ritual sequence. Tamora comes forward to plead for her son in a spontaneous movement that breaks the ceremonial ordering of the scene, yet also creates a new tableau in the pleading that ironically parallels Titus' prayer for his sons to the gods: a contemporary drawing (in the Longleat Manuscript) represents her as kneeling in an attitude of supplication, which, although there is no such stage-direction in the text, appropriately reinforces the formal quality of this dramatic moment. The mounting tension of the scene erupts into open violence as Alarbus is unceremoniously dragged off to be dismembered for interment; Tamora's cry, ‘O cruel irreligious piety!’ underlines the strong contradiction between formal ritual and such a brutal show of physical force. The dramatic situation has now been transformed, or rather it has developed according to an inner logic and momentum which now accelerates.

The contradictions of Titus' behaviour become increasingly apparent as he refuses to wear the ceremonial ‘palliament’ of the ‘candidatus’, but instead nominates Saturninus in his place, and as he offers Lavinia to Saturninus (much as he has sacrificed his sons to the state), provoking the open rebellion of Bassanius and the ensuing family brawl in which Titus kills his son Mutius. This slaughter takes place on-stage, but since Titus acts to uphold the same piety for which his other sons have died, the deed is akin to their sacrifices. This is the climactic point of the scene, and as if to reinforce our sense of a complete reversal of the opening situation, at this moment Saturninus enters ‘aloft’ as the new Emperor, with his former enemy but now his bride-to-be Tamora, her two sons and the still-silent Aaron: in the separation between lower and upper stage we see the divisions that are to dismember Rome itself. It only remains for Titus to yield to the supplications of his brother and three surviving sons that Mutius should receive burial in the family tomb (a concession that barely redeems Titus' humanity), and for Tamora to demonstrate her manipulation of Saturninus by persuading him to dissemble a truce with Titus, before the scene concludes with Titus' invitation to the hunt on the following day.

Aaron, a mute spectator of events in the opening Act, begins the following scene with a soliloquy. As so often in Shakespeare, the scene of crowded public activity is succeeded by a more intimate interlude that comments on the previous action from a new point of view. The transposition of style and tone is equally marked, as Aaron's Marlovian rhetoric of aspiration gives way to low comedy with the entry of Tamora's two clownish sons, Chiron and Demetrius. Instead of brooding upon vengeance for Alarbus, as we might have expected, they are engaged in a quarrel over Lavinia, adopting the comically inappropriate postures of rival lovers. This exhibition of a brotherly brawl itself parodies the action of the previous scene, and Aaron is once again the amused bystander until he intervenes to prevent them from killing each other. Like the old Vice of the morality plays, Aaron acts with avuncular humour and superior intelligence to chide them and effect their reconciliation by means of a scheme that promises further mischief. In the remainder of the scene he devises the plot that will satisfy the desires of each in the forest where the hunt is to take place.

The shift of location from court to forest, thus prepared for, suggest emblematically a reversion from civilised values to what we now call ‘the law of the jungle’. Yet from what we have seen of Roman ceremonials, and of the breakdown of order that has already taken place, court and forest, like Roman and barbarian, have been assimilated to each other. As the ‘solemn hunting’ proposed by Titus is another form of ritualised bloodletting, so the dreadful fates that await Lavinia, her husband and two of her brothers are not only the consequences of events in Act One, but re-enactments of the cruel rites performed before. The gloomy pit which will consume its victims parallels the open tomb of the first scene: a point easily made in stage-performance, as it was in Peter Brook's production in 1955. It is the focal image of desecration, of the vile plot hatched by Aaron and acted out under his direction; moreover, ‘this unhallow'd and blood-stained hole’, as Martius calls it, ‘the swallowing womb of this deep pit’, as it is described by Quintus, are images that not only make it a fit place to avenge Alarbus' sacrificial death, but that relate both tomb and pit at the beginning of the play to the final banquet at which Tamora will ‘Like to the earth, swallow her own increase’.

So the logic and the ritual of revenge involve a hideous pattern of re-enactment in the play. This pattern calls for the substitution of different figures in cyclic repetition, and the idea of displacement is one of the unifying elements in the play. So, for instance, the opening tableau raised the issue of which son was to take his father's place as Emperor; then followed the ceremonial interment of Titus's dead sons as sacrifices for their father's triumph and their city's survival. Alarbus in turn answered for their deaths, and his mother pleaded on his behalf. Saturninus was elected Emperor in place of Titus; Lavinia was bestowed on Saturninus instead of Bassanius, and when Bassanius asserted his prior claim, Saturninus wedded Tamora instead, while Aaron displaces Saturninus in Tamora's bed. Another ironic development of this pattern of substitution is Aaron's device of a hunt-within-the-hunt, in which Lavinia becomes ‘this dainty doe’, and her two brothers answer with their lives for the murder of Bassanius committed by Chiron and Demetrius. Aaron's mocking humour and his sense of parody are related to the diabolism of his urge to desecrate and disfigure. By descending gradations, the first two Acts bring us from the high ceremony of ‘pius’ Titus, through the sport of hunting, to Aaron's jesting plot, performed in deadly earnest.

IV

Ritual and game, the solemn and the farcical, are also grotesquely mingled in Titus' enactment of his suffering, as though it is only in these forms of play that he can realise extremities of horror and cruelty that defy normal comprehension. The horrific of its very nature is that from which the mind shrinks, that which repels the senses, feelings and understanding, but for Titus there is no such evasion. Titus' passion is a continued struggle, not merely to endure the unendurable, but to express the inexpressible; he performs his woes out of the need to grasp what is all too real but virtually inconceivable in its enormity. The impulse to play, in other words, arises in Titus not as a retreat from the hideous reality that confronts him, but as a means of registering its full significance. His more bizarre fantasies, in which his mind seems to have collapsed under the unbearable suffering, are certainly symptoms of a precarious sanity, yet far from losing his grip on reality, through these obsessive pantomimes Titus' mind becomes fixed on its object.

His passion begins in III. i., another extended sequence of action that demonstrates Shakespeare's skill in scenic structure, controlling the tension and building up the momentum by gradations to a climactic point. Here, however, the dramatic focus is upon the single figure of Titus. The scene opens with a formal procession passing across the stage, as Titus' two sons Martius and Quintus are led to execution in a literal miscarriage of justice. The prostrate Titus pleads for mercy unheeded while the procession passes, as Tamora had pleaded to him in vain for her son, and as Lavinia had pleaded fruitlessly to the ruthless Tamora in the previous scene: the repetition enforces a sense of inexorable logic in the pattern of events. When his son Lucius enters and exhorts him to rise and cease his futile prayers, Titus continues instead by dramatising a studied contrast between the hard-hearted tribunes and the stones on which he lies and weeps: this compulsion to create an emblematic pageant out of suffering is to be developed throughout the scene.

The anticipated moment, when Titus must confront his mutilated daughter, now arrives as Marcus enters with Lavinia, raising the pitch of feeling still further:

My grief was at the height before thou cam'st,
And now like Nilus it disdaineth bounds.

(III. i. 70-1)

The style of Titus' lamentation, however, is not mere formless rant: on the contrary, its imagery and ordering express the struggle to maintain an equilibrium in bringing the eyes to focus on such appalling and as yet totally inexplicable atrocity. Titus' ‘consuming sorrow’ is related to the imagery of devouring that is basic to the play:

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

(93-97)

But as the waxing tide of calamity around him, and of his passions within, threatens to overwhelm him, there is a rock of identity that rises from this ‘wilderness of sea’: the very urge to clarification through a dramatised sense of self is enacted in these lines. And in the sequence of the following lines there is both a gathering momentum of mounting woes and a stabilising effect deriving from the balanced litany of enumeration:

This way to death my wretched sons are gone;
Here stands my other son, a banish'd man,
And here my brother, weeping at my woes.
But that which gives my soul the greatest spurn
Is dear Lavinia, dearer than my soul.
Had I but seen thy picture in this plight,
It would have madded me; what shall I do
Now I behold thy lively body so?
Thou hast no hands to wipe away thy tears,
Nor tongue to tell me who hath martyr'd thee;
Thy husband he is dead, and for his death
Thy brothers are condemn'd, and dead by this.
Look, Marcus! Ah, son Lucius, look on her!

(98-110)

The dramatic power of these lines also arises from the way in which the patriarchal figure of Titus embraces all their afflictions, includes them within his own agony, and celebrates their union in suffering like a high priest of Sorrow. There is as yet no protest, no execration, no demand for justice; only ‘a sympathy of woes’ (148), in which pity, so totally repressed in the opening scenes, now reasserts itself as the supremely humanising quality. Pity is enacted as the compelling need to identify with its object, to take its part and become one with what it beholds:

Or shall we cut away our hands like thine?
Or shall we bite our tongues, and in dumb shows
Pass the remainder of our hateful days?
What shall we do? Let us that have our tongues
Plot some device of further misery
To make us wonder'd at in time to come.

(130-5)

As an expression of pity, Titus' identification with Lavinia's suffering and his assimilation of his family's plight into his own ritualised performance gives another meaning to the motif of substitution in the play, and one that inverts the pattern of pitiless expiation in the earlier scenes. Pity moves Titus to a sustained act of imagination which alone can realise and express the magnitude of the suffering in which he participates.

Titus does not have long to wait before his compulsion to identify with Lavinia and to stand in place of his sorrowing kin is satisfied, by Aaron's entry with the offer of a reprieve for the condemned sons in exchange for a severed hand from one of the Andronici. Since this is Aaron's sadistic jest, it is fitting that it should reduce Titus, Marcus and Lucius to a ludicrous rivalry in their frantic efforts to volunteer the required article, but any laughter surely stops abruptly when Titus, outwitting his brother and son, is actually dismembered on-stage. Aaron alone continues to see the funny side of this spectacle, confiding to the audience that it is only the heads of his two sons that Titus will be given in return. Anticipating the outcome of this grisly practical joke, we now hear Titus break out into the most passionate of his laments, despite Marcus' attempts to restrain him:

If there were reason for these miseries,
Then into limits could I bind my woes …
.....I am the sea; hark how her sighs do blow.
She is the weeping welkin, I the earth;
Then must my sea be moved with her sighs;
Then must my earth with her continual tears
Become a deluge, overflow'd and drown'd;
For why my bowels cannot hide her woes,
But like a drunkard must I vomit them.
Then give me leave; for losers will have leave
To ease their stomachs with their bitter tongues.

(220-234)

Recollecting the flood-metaphors of his earlier speech, these lines also draw upon the play's central imagery of swallowing as a nauseous and abhorrent act. Titus's bowels, the seat of compassion, affirm the humanity denied by the tomb and pit of the opening scenes, and by the stomach that will devour the hideous banquet at the end of the play. Yet while the images of these lines express a sense of boundless uncontrollable anguish, linked in their physical immediacy to the horrific spectacle we have just witnessed, there is a modulation through the imagery from the idea of limitless and therefore ungovernable woe to that of relief and purgation through utterance itself. Moreover, the patterned working-out of Titus' conceits is so controlled in its ordered development that he does indeed bind his feelings ‘into limits’. Once more, a tension is set up in the style of the dramatic verse between violent anarchic energies and a ritualistic impulse towards the formal devices of their enactment, and it is the turbulent energies themselves that are felt to seek such a formalised means of expression.

The Messenger who now enters, bearing the heads of Titus' sons and the severed hand, echoes by a characteristically Shakespearian touch the scene's major concern with ‘a sympathy of woes’, as he reports Aaron's cruel deception and proffers his own compassion for Titus:

Thy grief their sports, thy resolution mock'd,
That woe is me to think upon thy woes,
More than remembrance of my father's death.

(239-241)

Such a humanising of the conventionally impersonal messenger is particularly effective at this juncture, when, as Marcus says,

These miseries are more than may be borne.
To weep with them that weep doth ease some deal,
But sorrow flouted at is double death.

(244-246)

This is the turning-point of the whole scene: as Marcus and Lucius bear the burden of inveighing against Aaron's malicious trick, Titus, now wrought to breaking-point, finds his only possible response in the terrible mirthless laugh that parodies the mockery of Aaron himself. He vows to seek ‘Revenge's cave’ (another metamorphosis of the devouring mouth), and makes a prophecy that will eventually be fulfilled to the very letter:

                                                  I shall never come to bliss
Till all these mischiefs be return'd again
Even in their throats that have committed them.

(273-275)

The grisly pageant in which Titus now leaves the stage, carrying the head of one son while Marcus carries that of the other, and Lavinia brings up the rear with her Father's severed hand between her teeth, may be regarded as horror toppling over into farce through sheer excess. But this kind of laughter, as Titus has just shown, may also be a very effective release of hysterical tension: the emotional pitch, wrought steadily higher by the progression of the scene, is suddenly snapped by Titus' laugh, and his vows of revenge are calculating and deliberate, not distraught or frantic. So as he leaves the stage in this grotesque procession, the urge to laughter which the spectacle provokes in us secures and intensifies for the moment our complicity with his mood. It is a culminating effect which, in terms of the scene's internal dynamics, resolves the mounting pressure on our responses, and allows the scene to end in an abrupt shift of emotional perspective before the concluding sobriety of Lucius' soliloquy.

V

The following scene, III. ii., is possibly a later addition, since it does not appear in any of the three Quartos printed before the 1623 Folio. It does not further the narrative action of the play, but it does develop in a self-contained episode one of the principal dramatic ideas of the play: that Titus' woes find expression in forms of ritual and game. As a banquet-scene, it also pre-figures the feast at the end of the play. But primarily the focus is on Titus' incipient madness. As Lavinia can only ‘talk in signs’, which Titus will interpret:

Speechless complainer, I will learn thy thought;
In thy dumb action will I be as perfect
As begging hermits in their holy prayers,

(III. ii. 39-41)

so Titus himself adopts the sign-language of his charade, in which the fly killed by Marcus first represents a slaughtered innocent and then becomes a surrogate for Aaron, to be chopped to pieces in a mimic enactment of revenge. Like the later scene (IV. iii.) in which Titus directs his kinsmen in shooting arrows at the heavenly gods, petitioning them for justice, the performance of the tableau is in its grotesque fantasy a confirmation of Titus' insanity. Yet neither episode is merely an occasion for farcical absurdity: both are directly related to the play's concern with formal devices of speech and action, and with the compulsion to find an analogue to the reality that defies expression. Titus' madness corresponds to Lavinia's muteness: both are reduced to making signs, finding substitutes, for speech in Lavinia's case, and for action in that of Titus. The arrows that bear written messages to the gods signify the deafness of worldly justice as much as Lavinia's writing in the sand signifies the dumbness of affliction: the written word is, ‘literally’, a sign or series of signs standing for the thing itself.

Language is assimilated to ritual and game throughout the play, not only through the formal style of speeches of lamentation and prayer, through the witty wordplay of Aaron and the obsessive puns of Titus, but through the use of literary allusions and analogues. The power of utterance, like the impulse to perform tableaux that solemnise or parody reality, involves both the idea of repetition or re-enactment and that of substitution. ‘Shall I speak for thee?’ asks Marcus (II. iv. 33), moved to his lament by the spectacle of his mutilated niece, and his words reiterate her tragic plight by speaking on her behalf. So do the words of Ovid, in the scene where Lavinia opens the book of Metamorphoses at the tale of Tereus and Philomela (IV. i): her story is a reiteration of the poet's fiction, a substitution of one set of characters for another enacting the same pattern of events. Shakespeare's use of the Ovidian fable here, like that of the tapestry depicting the Fall of Troy in The Rape of Lucrece, is akin to the device of the play-within-the-play, in which art holds the mirror up to nature. But in Titus Andronicus, with its reiterative imagery of the devouring mouth, the revenge action itself is also a ritualised sequence of repetition through substitution.

The capacity of words to speak for woes brings relief through clarification: as Marcus says,

Sorrow concealed, like an oven stopp'd,
Doth burn the heart to cinders where it is.

(II. iv. 36-37)

Consequently the action of the play as a whole seems to turn upon the dual nature of the mouth that utters and devours: Lavinia's deprivation of speech is finally avenged by a banquet of uneatable flesh. Yet while extremities of horror and suffering seek comfort in utterance, of their very nature they are too dreadful to be named. Pleading in vain to Tamora before the outrage is committed upon her, Lavinia cannot bring herself to speak of rape except as ‘one thing more, / That womanhood denies my tongue to tell’ (II. iii. 173-174); and when at last she reveals that crime by writing in the sand, the word she uses is Latin, ‘Stuprum’ (IV. i. 79). In a sense, since this is a Roman play, that word does not conceal the horrid deed in the decent obscurity of a dead language, but rather, like Caesar's ‘Et tu Brute’, it gives a sudden actuality to the dramatic moment. When Chiron and Demetrius fall prey to Titus, they are seized with a thrice-repeated command:

And stop their mouths if they begin to cry …
.....Stop close their mouths, let them not speak a word …
.....Sir, stop their mouths, let them not speak to me;
But let them hear what fearful words I utter.

(V. ii. 162-169)

The cutting of their throats on-stage is not therefore simply a gratuitous piece of butchery before they are dispatched to the kitchen: by a precise and macabre irony, the knife is again used to silence the voice.

Aaron murders the nurse who brings his bastard son, to preserve the secret to which that ‘long-tongu'd babbling gossip’ (IV. ii. 151) is privy, yet it is the child's cry which finally betrays him to Lucius and his army. Lucius taunts the Moor:

Say, wall-ey'd slave, whither wouldst thou convey
This growing image of thy fiend-like face?
Why dost not speak? What, deaf? Not a word?

(V. i. 44-46)

But what begins as a confession wrung from Aaron to save the infant's life soon becomes the villain's willing boast:

'Twill vex thy soul to hear what I shall speak;
For I must talk of murders, rapes, and massacres,
Acts of black night, abominable deeds,
Complots of mischief, treason, villainies,
Ruthful to hear, yet piteously perform'd.

(62-66)

Aaron's desire to reiterate his limitless villainy is a parody of the need under which Titus ritualises suffering in speech and action. Tragedy is transformed into jest, as Aaron recounts how he

Beheld his tears, and laugh'd so heartily
That both mine eyes were rainy like to his;
And when I told the Empress of this sport,
She swooned almost at my pleasing tale.

(116-119)

Aaron is carried away by a compulsive urge to tell his secrets that is not without parallel in criminal history:

Even now I curse the day—and yet, I think,
Few come within the compass of my curse—
Wherein I did not some notorious ill:
As kill a man, or else devise his death;
Ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it;
Accuse some innocent, and forswear myself;
Set deadly enmity between two friends;
Make poor men's cattle break their necks;
Set fire on barns and hay-stacks in the night,
And bid the owners quench them with their tears.
Oft have I digg'd up dead men from their graves,
And set them upright at their dear friends' door …

(125-136)

The grotesque mixture of the familiar and the fantastic in Aaron's story, whatever it owes to Marlowe's lugubrious Jew and his farcical speech of self-revelation, is given in this context both a convincing psychological motive and a significance in relation to the play's concern with the reiteration of action in speech. For this is Aaron's downfall, turned into his moment of glory by the power of speech, in which, deprived of other means, he still discovers a way to wound his enemies: ‘to torment you with my bitter tongue’ (150). Not surprisingly, the scene ends at this point with Lucius' command: ‘Sirs, stop his mouth, and let him speak no more’ (151). When he is brought captive back to Rome, Aaron does speak again, though only to invoke speech itself:

Some devil whisper curses in my ear,
And prompt me that my tongue may utter forth
The venomous malice of my swelling heart!

(V. iii. 11-13)

The playful relish and alacrity with which Aaron utters his ‘pleasing tales’ contrast with the duress that his victims feel to enact their woes. Titus and Lavinia must in their extremity find signs and analogues that speak for them, in dramatised tableaux or in the poetic fictions of ‘Sad stories chanced in the times of old’ (III. ii. 83). Of these, Virgil's Aeneid has a particular significance. The play's first reference to the Roman epic is Tamora's comparison of the forest where she meets her paramour Aaron to the ‘counsel-keeping cave’ (II. iii. 24) in which Virgil's hero betrayed both his mission to found Rome and the infatuated Queen Dido: a baleful analogy that links the image of the cave (like the tomb and the pit) to the deed that must not be uttered. Later, however, when Marcus inadvertently speaks of Lavinia's hands, Titus exclaims,

Ah, wherefore dost thou urge the name of hands?
To bid Aeneas tell the tale twice o'er
How Troy was burnt and he made miserable?

(III. ii. 26-28)

The allusion is to the opening of Book Two of the Aeneid, when at Dido's request Aeneas begins to relate the fall of Troy: ‘Infandum, regina, iubes renovare dolorem’ (‘Unspeakable, O queen, is the grief you bid me renew’). At the end of the play, after unspeakable woes have been reiterated in word and action, and the pattern of repetition which is the logic of revenge has gone its full circle, Marcus bids Lucius recount the tragic events to the people of Rome (it is we, the audience, who are to be addressed):

Speak, Rome's dear friend, as erst our ancestor,
When with his solemn tongue he did discourse
To love-sick Dido's sad attending ear
The story of that baleful burning night,
When subtle Greeks surpris'd King Priam's Troy.
Tell us what Sinon hath bewitch'd our ears,
Or who hath brought the fatal engine in
That gives our Troy, our Rome, the civil wound.
My heart is not compact of flint nor steel;
Nor can I utter all our bitter grief,
But floods of tears will drown my oratory
And break my utt'rance, even in the time
When it should move ye to attend me most,
And force you to commiseration.
Here's Rome's young Captain, let him tell the tale;
While I stand by and weep to hear him speak.

(V. iii. 80-95)

So Lucius speaks for Marcus, and for Titus and the others who have now themselves receded into the frame of a sad story, ‘chanced in the time of old’. As the Andronici take their last farewell of the dead in ritual obsequy, Lucius reminds his young son of Titus:

Many a story hath he told to thee,
And bid thee bear his pretty tales in mind
And talk of them when he was dead and gone.

(164-166)

The tragedy that has been performed before us hardly makes a pretty tale, but it has shown us that through the reiterative processes of fiction and drama we confront, name and expiate the worst that is in us, and that in speaking for us tragedy enables us to become whole again.

VI

My claim for Titus Andronicus is not only that it is a highly-ordered and elaborately-designed work, but that it is also one in which Shakespeare takes some extremely bold yet calculated risks with the resources of his art. Its faults are those of an excessively conscious theatrical and poetic ingenuity rather than those of crude sensationalism. It moves to admiration, in the Elizabethan sense of wonder and amazement, more often than to compassion or sympathy; even the laughter it provokes (although it is to the dread of modern theatre-directors) can be trusted as determined and controlled by Shakespeare's skilful management of tone and emotional pitch, disconcerting though it often is. The play is rich in dramatic and stylistic invention, and so full of analogues to its own art that it might be described as Shakespeare's thesis in tragedy, anticipating many of the formal techniques and devices used in the later tragedies. But it is for all that and above all an exciting piece for performance, and one which should stand in little need of apology in an age when our contemporary drama also seems to be exploring the basis of its own existence.

Notes

1. E. M. Waith, ‘The Metamorphosis of Violence in Titus Andronicus’, Shakespeare Survey 10 (1957).

2. Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven, 1954; 2nd edn. 1962).

3. Introduction to Bartholomew Fair (1614).

4. T. J. B. Spencer, ‘Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Romans’, Shakespeare Survey 10 (1957).

5. The point is made by A. C. Hamilton, ‘Titus Andronicus: The Form of Shakespearian Tragedy,’ Shakespeare Quarterly XI (1960).

6. E. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (New York, 1939; 1962 edn.), pp. 76-77.