[In the following essay, Danson contends that as in the great Elizabethan dramas that followed it, the supreme tragic action in Titus Andronicus is not revenge but the formalization of death.]

The proliferation of generic categories for Elizabethan drama is a problem as ancient as Polonius' naming of the parts: “tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited.” One firmly entrenched category is that of the tragedy of revenge, which (according to Fredson Bowers) “has been classified as a definite, small subdivision of the Elizabethan tragedy of blood”; plays belonging to that category “treat, according to a moderately rigid dramatic formula, blood-revenge for murder as the central tragic fact.”¹ But the rigidity of the formula is, in fact, questionable. Indeed a striking characteristic of the most notable of the so-called revenge tragedies is that “the central tragic fact,” the act of revenge itself, when it finally comes, seems something of an afterthought, is, at any rate, quite muddied in its motivations. Hamlet, for instance, never really does discover his means of revenge, or consciously overcome whatever scruples or fastidiousness has kept him so long from it; rather, he stumbles into it when the Claudius-Laertes plot misfires. Kyd includes in Hieronimo's revenge at least one character (the Duke of Castile) who seems extraneous to his revenger's concerns; while Titus Andronicus (most bafflingly, if revenge is what the play is about) kills his daughter Lavinia. By the time of Webster, in a play like The White Devil, the question of who is revenging himself on whom for what is almost impenetrably unclear. So badly, indeed, do these plays fulfill the expected formula that we must begin to suspect either that the greatest dramatists were very imperfect at their craft, or that the critical category describes plays that they had little intention of writing.

Something, I suggest, other than revenge ought to be sought as the “central tragic fact” of those plays for which it is really worth speaking of a “central tragic fact.” For a play like Chettle's Hoffman, “revenge” will do as well as anything else; but it makes, I think, imperfect sense to class Hoffman with Hamlet. For the greater so-called revenge tragedies something is wanted which will show their affinities with other great tragedies of the period rather than isolating them in a separate, mechanically derived category. But that is an enormous task, and what I intend to do here is something much more modest: to look for that tragic fact (by which I mean something of the deepest concern to the protagonist as well as, esthetically, to his creator) in a single early play, Titus Andronicus; and only incidentally (by way of excursions, when they are warranted, into other plays, especially The Spanish Tragedy) to push that fact towards greater generality.

And we can begin by remembering that, however despised Titus Andronicus may have become, it was throughout Shakespeare's career a very successful play. Ben Jonson, with his own career to protect in 1614, had reason to be contemptuous of old workhorses like Titus and The Spanish Tragedy: “Hee that will sweare, Ieronimo, or Andronicus are the best playes, yet, shall passe unexcepted at, heere, as a man whose Iudgement shewes it is constant, and hath stood still, these five and twentie, or thirtie, yeeres.”² But if we today share Jonson's superior smile we should do so uneasily, for we have learned not to be complacent about that audience whose taste for blood and bombast made possible, not only Hieronimo and Titus, but Hamlet and Lear as well. The popularity of the old plays well into the Jacobean period is a fact of significance for the history of drama: by Jonson's time, the parts of Titus and Hieronimo had become closely associated with the player's amazing power to force a responsive passion in his listeners.

This simple historical consideration leads immediately to something approaching a paradox. For while Titus Adronicus is a play that could elicit an audience's sympathetic response, it presents to us the image of a world in which a man's words go unheeded and his gestures unacknowledged, a world unresponsive to his cries, demands, prayers. The world of tragedy is (to borrow a phrase from Northrop Frye) “the world that desire totally rejects: the world of the nightmare”;³ and in Titus the nightmare is that widely familiar one of the unutterable scream, the unattainable release from horror through outcry or gesture. Now there is a relationship to be observed between these two facts, that (on the one hand) the play found a responsiveness in its audience and that (on the other) the material with which the play deals is the characters' inability, within the world of the play, to find an adequate hearing. It is a relationship which, because it bears upon a basic aspect of tragic theory—that things painful to behold in life can yet give us pleasure when transmuted into art—may point the way towards our “central tragic fact.” But to find that relationship we must turn to the play and trace its pattern of withered gestures and virtual silence.

The first instance I cite is one which, like much in the play, teeters on the brink of the ludicrous—for Titus (like King Lear) is a play that deals so insistently with man in extremis that the comic grotesque is always available to relieve us from the burden of its inordinate vision. At the beginning of Act IV, young Lucius enters fleeing from his aunt Lavinia; deprived of her tongue and hands, Lavinia, by her incomprehensible gestures, can only terrify the child as she tries to calm him. Now Titus and Marcus enter and interpose for Lavinia:

TIT.
Fear her not, Lucius: somewhat doth she mean.
MARC.
See, Lucius, see how much she makes of thee;
Somewhither would she have thee go with her.
Ah, boy, Cornelia never with more care
Read to her sons than she hath read to thee
Sweet poetry and Tully's Orator.(4)

Lucius is carrying his copy of Ovid; in it Lavinia directs their attention to “the tragic tale of Philomel,” and then painfully writes in the sand the names of her ravishers.

Now amidst all this pathos, the egregious touch is the reference to “Sweet poetry and Tully's Orator.” For Tully's Orator is, in all probability, Ad M. Brutum Orator, the epistle in which Cicero depicts his ideal orator. And the reference underscores how nearly Lavinia has been reduced to the barely human, the almost-monstrous: her grotesque inability to communicate sets her at the opposite pole from Cicero's orator, the man who is able to bring to bear all the distinctively human characteristics in the accomplishing of his high art. The reference might almost seem a cruel joke—but it is not meant to be one, for to the Elizabethans this matter of speaking well, of oratory, was a matter of the highest seriousness: “Oratio next to Ratio, Speech next to Reason, [is] the greatest gyft bestowed vpon mortalitie.”⁵ The idea ran deep: in the earliest English-language textbook of logic, Thomas Wilson's Rule of Reason (1551), the example given of “an undoubted true proposition” is “Homo est animal ratione praeditum, loquendi facultatem habens. A man is a liuing creature endewed with reason, having aptnesse by nature to speake.”⁶ We shall have to return to the question of oratory and rhetoric later; here it is only necessary to realize what it means to be deprived of the humanizing gift of speech, and to follow out the image that Lavinia presents and that comes to dominate the play: the image of man tongueless, limbless, sunk in a world inimical to his fundamental need to be understood, but still trying by every means to speak—to make known his pain and (by the act of making it known) his very humanity to the gods and his fellow men.

It would be tedious to record all the instances of beseeching and petitioning in Titus; there are too many of them. It is, however, worth noting that the first disappointed petitioner is the (temporarily) conquered Queen of Goths, Tamora, and that it is Titus to whom she prays for her son's life:

Stay, Roman brethren! Gracious conqueror,
Victorious Titus, rue the tears I shed,
A mother's tears in passion for her son:
And if thy sons were ever dear to thee,
O, think my son to be as dear to me.
.....Thrice-noble Titus, spare my first-born son.

(I.i.104-08, 120)

But what Tamora calls a “cruel, irreligious piety” demands the sacrifice of her son; and the only response to her entreaty is the announcement (in what may be Shakespeare's worst half-line), “Alarbus' limbs are lopp'd” (l. 143). Within the same act, Titus' sons and brother kneel and beseech him to allow Mutius burial (which, grudgingly, he does); and Titus, his sons, his brother, and Tamora plead for favor from Saturninus.

One may be tempted to say that all the succeeding instances of Titus' own inability to gain an adequate response to his entreaties arise from that first instance of his deafness to Tamora—as (to take a comparable instance) one might be tempted to say that Lear's sufferings all result from his willful deafness to Cordelia's expressive silence. But that would be too narrow a view of either play. Like Lear's, Titus' punishment so far exceeds the crime that the prevailing deafness to the human voice in its cries for mercy or justice is made to seem endemic to the play's world, beyond any one man's causing. In Act II, Lavinia's mutilation takes place against the ironically gay noise of dogs and horns (II.ii.1-6); but for Aaron the Moor, “The woods are ruthless, dreadful, deaf, and dull” (II.i.128), and there Chiron and Demetrius are to “strike her home by force, if not by words” (l. 118). As Tamora had pleaded, now Lavinia pleads:

LAV.
O Tamora, thou bearest a woman's face—
TAM.
I will not hear her speak; away with her!

(II.iii.136-37)

And even as Chiron and Demetrius (offstage) slake their lust (and incidentally Tamora's revenge) on Lavinia, it becomes Titus' turn to plead. Aaron has arranged matters so that Titus' sons seem guilty of Bassianus' murder; and, like Lavinia's plea, Titus' plea on their behalf is cut off in mid-cry:

TIT.
High emperor, upon my feeble knee
I beg this boon, with tears not lightly shed,
That this fell fault of my accursed sons,
Accursed, if the fault be prov'd in them,—
SAT.
If it be prov'd! you see it is apparent.

(II.iii.288-92)

The need to find a satisfactory response to these interrupted pleas becomes (as the incidents of frustration mount) an overwhelming concern. Lavinia, “her hands cut off, and her tongue cut out, and ravish'd,” is, as we have seen, the monument that most forcefully figures this need. But we must notice, too, the response of the other Andronici to Lavinia. Marcus, for instance, is the first to encounter his mutilated niece, and he gives us one of the clearest statements of the motif:

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.

(II.iv.33-37)

Lavinia's case, Marcus says (in one of the numerous echoes of the Ovidian tale), is worse than Philomela's:

Fair Philomel, why, she but lost her tongue,
And in a tedious sampler sew'd her mind:
But, lovely niece, that mean is cut from thee;
A craftier Tereus, cousin, hast thou met. …

(II.iv.38-41)

The means of expression lost to Lavinia, the burden of expression now falls on others: “Do not draw back, for we will mourn with thee: / O, could our mourning ease thy misery!” (II.iv.56-57).

And on Titus himself the burden of expression falls most heavily. At the opening of Act III, we find Titus pleading with the judges and senators for his sons' lives. When his words fail, he falls upon the ground to write in dust “My heart's deep languor and my soul's sad tears” (III.i.13). Although the tribunes will not heed Titus, “yet plead I must,” and

Therefore I tell my sorrows to the stones,
Who, though they cannot answer my distress,
Yet in some sort they are better than the tribunes,
For that they will not intercept my tale.

(III.i.37-40)

Now Lavinia is brought before Titus. The imperious need for relief through expression, which has already led to his writing in dust and pleading with stones, leads now to the contemplation of a further series of fantastic actions:

Shall thy good uncle, and thy brother Lucius,
And thou, and I, sit round about some fountain,
Looking all downwards to behold our cheeks
How they are stain'd, like meadows not yet dry,
With miry slime left on them by a flood?
And in the fountain shall we gaze so long
Till the fresh taste be taken from that clearness,
And made a brine-pit with our bitter tears?
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.

(III.i.122-35)

“Plot some device of further misery, / To make us wonder'd at in time to come”: Titus' final lines are worth some attention, for in them is found the motivation for the grotesque actions that are to follow, as well as an important clue towards that “central tragic fact” we are seeking. To “plot some device” can mean simply “to plan, contrive, or devise” (OED [Oxford English Dictionary], “Plot,” v¹, 3) “an arrangement, plan, scheme, project, contrivance; an ingenious or clever expedient; often one of an underhand or evil character; a plot, stratagem, trick” (OED, “Device,” 6). But both “plot” and “device” have other connotations, of a specifically artistic and dramatic nature, which indicate that Titus' lines have significance for the playwright's as well as the revenger's craft. The word “plot” is, of course, especially common in this double sense throughout the drama of the period, and requires no special comment here. “Device,” as Titus uses it, carries a related double sense which, although less common than “plot,” can yield even richer insights into the relationship between the esthetic requirements of the playwright and the existential concerns of his characters. According to the OED (whose definitions I quote at length because they form a progression, of immediate relevance to us, from a type of nonverbal expression to purely verbal expression to verbal and gestural combined), “device” can mean: “8. Something artistically devised or framed; a fancifully conceived design or figure. 9. spec. An emblematic figure or design, esp. one borne or adopted by a particular person, family, etc., as a heraldic bearing, a cognizance, etc.: usually accompanied by a motto. 10. A fanciful, ingenious, or witty writing or expression, a ‘conceit.’ 11. Something devised or fancifully invented for dramatic representation; ‘a mask played by private persons,’ or the like.” In Titus Andronicus, as well as The Spanish Tragedy, Tamburlaine—indeed in most of the tragic drama from the late eighties and the nineties—we find these various forms of expression (the related senses of “device”) in more or less uneasy mixture. Marlowe's “mighty line” is no more striking, for instance, than his use of essentially nonverbal tableaux (Tamburlaine's shifting colors, from white to red to black, is an example), which are the stage equivalent of heraldic bearings. Hieronimo's “play … in sundry languages,” with which The Spanish Tragedy culminates, is a “device” in the final sense cited from the OED. But before reaching it there have been other, less variously expressive, sorts of “devices.” Hieronimo has staged an entertainment made up of a series of heraldic bearings, which he interprets for the benefit of his stage audience (I.iv). And throughout the play Kyd more subtly introduces “devices” that figure forth the play's central concerns. What is for our purposes most interesting to observe is how many of Kyd's “devices” comprise more or less static conceits for the difficulty Hieronimo and others find in achieving justice through the use of words—as if the variety of dramatic techniques were mirroring the characters' own wrestling with the problems of expression; to cite only a few examples: an old man who has lost his son pleads for redress to a Knight Marshall who has lost his son; Pedringano goes blithely to his death while a messenger points to an empty box that is supposed to contain a written pardon; Belimperia, who knows the truth of Horatio's murder, drops a message written in blood to Hieronimo—who suspects a trick (or “device,” in the related sense) and fails to heed its contents.

Titus Andronicus similarly contains a series of devices that adumbrate the imperious need for relief through expression. The mutilated Lavinia is, as we have seen, the central such device, a conceit for the nearness of man to monster when deprived of the humanizing gift of expression, and (more narrowly) an emblematic figure for the plight of the voiceless Andronici in a now-alien Rome. The responses Titus proposes—weeping all day into a fountain, passing their days in dumb-shows—are related devices, here with the added implication of dramatic spectacle. A bare recital of the actions that do follow will sound ludicrous, unless we recognize them for the devices they are, intentionally conceited, emblematic—and each related to the same basic problem of expression needed but denied: Titus sacrifices a hand to save his sons' lives; thus mutilated he and Lavinia pray to heaven—and receive his sons' severed heads in reply. Lavinia writes the names of her ravishers in the sand, and Titus proposes transferring the words to brass. Titus sends weapons wrapped in a riddling message to Chiron and Demetrius. At Titus' bidding the Andronici shoot petitioning arrows at the gods; and because Terras astraea reliquit, Titus proposes searching for the goddess at sea or underground. Finally there is Titus' revenge itself, in all its elaboration (for here the sense of dramatic performance, “a masque played by private persons,” is strong) and apparent excessiveness (involving his own and Lavinia's deaths); but of this example, where tableau, words, and gesture combine in a culminating action, we must reserve discussion until we can explore the latter part of Titus' injunction: “Let us that have our tongues / Plot some device of further misery, / To make us wonder'd at in time to come.”

Here it is necessary to acknowledge an anomaly that will already have been apparent. Titus Andronicus is, I have said, a play about silence, and about the inability to achieve adequate expression for overwhelming emotional needs; but the thing we may notice before all else in it, before even its physical horrors, is its extreme, obtrusive rhetorical elaboration. Again the situation is similar to that in The Spanish Tragedy: surely there is something absurd about the loquacity of Titus and Hieronimo, endlessly talking and with endless elaboration about their inability to make their cries for justice heard. Indeed it is an absurdity that was not lost on the plays' near-contemporaries, as the many parodic echoes (especially of Kyd's play) attest. Hieronimo's famous speech, “O eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears; / O life, no life but lively form of death” (III.ii.1-2) is remarkable for various reasons, not least of which is its excellence as a rhetorical showpiece. In fact it is so remarkable, so insistently calling attention to its own artifice, that it inevitably provoked the backhanded compliment of parody. In Marston's Antonio and Mellida, for instance, Piero's hysterical commands, “Fly, call, run, row, ride, cry, shout, hurry, haste; / Haste, hurry, shout, cry, ride, row, run, call, fly” (at which point he lapses into Italian: III.ii.262), makes farce of the rhetorical ideal of copia (the use, to put it crudely, of the most words to say the least) which is realized in the completion of the first movement of Hieronimo's lament: “Eyes, life, world, heavens, hell, night, and day, / See, search, shew, send, some man, some mean, that may—” (III.ii.22-23).⁷

But it did not really need a Marston to prick the bubble of Hieronimo's rhetoric: a glance at the situation shows that Kyd has built in his own criticism. For just as Hieronimo is so copiously and asyndectically pleading for the means of discovering his son's murderer, “A letter falleth”; it is Bel-imperia's, and it contains most succinctly all that Hieronimo needs to know—but, as we have seen, it goes unregarded, to become another in the play's series of thwarted communications. Hieronimo is so caught up in his own elaborate rhetoric that he can no longer effectively connect with the words of others, a dilemma that culminates in his “play … in sundry languages” where (to quote Jonas Barish's excellent account),

The effect, perhaps, would have been to suggest the extremes to which language can evolve, the lengths to which verbal ingenuity can be carried and how unintelligible words can become when they lose their moorings in the reality they are meant to express. The jabbering in four languages turns the whole phenomenon of speech under a strange phosphorescent glare, revealing it as a kind of disembodied incantation, a surrealistic dance of abstractions, divorced from roots in lived existence.⁸

The confusion that Hieronimo's playlet breeds is the perfect epitome of Kyd's larger theatrical world, in which the greatest gift of man's reason, the faculty of speech, has only contributed to man's undoing.

Kyd, as Professor Barish suggests, is aware not only of “the pleasures” but also of “the perils of rhetoric”; and so, I believe, is Shakespeare. And this self-consciousness in regard to their chosen medium is most significant, for it points towards the very close but very uneasy relationship between drama and rhetoric in this period. To the Elizabethans, indeed, orator and actor were essentially the same. In one of his additions to The Overburian Characters, for instance, Webster asserts that “Whatsoever is commendable in the grave Orator, is most exquisitly perfect in [‘An Excellent Actor’].”⁹ Curiously, it seems to have been as much the use of action as of language which established this identity; the Overburian sketch justifies the comparison of actor and orator by noting that “by a full and significant action of body, he [the actor] charmes our attention.” This apparent anomaly, that action should be the quality which links orator and actor, is taken up by Francis Bacon in his “Of Boldness”:

It is a trivial grammar-school text, but yet worthy a wise man's consideration. Question was asked of Demosthenes, what was the chief part of an orator? he answered, action: what next? action: what next again? action. He said it that knew it best, and had by nature no advantage in that he commended. A strange thing, that that part of an orator which is but superficial, and rather the virtue of a player, should be placed so high, above those other notable parts of invention, elocution, and the rest; nay almost alone, as if it were all in all.¹⁰

The commonness of the relationship is worth noticing here, but so too is Bacon's contemptuous tone. For by “action” (that “virtue of a player”) Bacon means only the particular gesture of hand and body which must accompany speech; it is a merely technical skill, the suiting of the action to the word and the word to the action which Hamlet recommends to his Players; and it is a sufficiently limited notion of action to justify Bacon's contempt.

Most importantly for us, this relationship between oratory and acting, based on a rather mechanical notion of “action,” indicates a real danger for the dramatist. In some of the “devices” we have noticed in Titus and The Spanish Tragedy the danger is apparent, for such passages tend to be more or less static—speaking pictures unnaturally situated within the frame of the surrounding action. If drama was in debt to “Tully's Orator” and the other textbooks of rhetoric that were at the heart of Elizabethan education, it was also possible that drama would perish beneath the burden of the loan. Much of Elizabethan drama did in fact succumb; Gorboduc, for instance, although Philip Sidney (since he was not a playwright) could afford to luxuriate in its “stately speeches and well sounding Phrases,” is dead to us because it remained rhetoric and never found any really organic way to suit its words to its actions. Inevitably, therefore, it became the superior playwright's task to broaden the notion of “action” beyond the particular gesture until it encompassed the whole play, to find the “action”—now in a sense closer to Aristotle's (in the Poetics) than to Bacon's—that would convert the raw materials of drama (including language) into the form of drama. In Titus Andronicus we see that conversion taking place before us; here the struggle is in the open, the struggle to turn the language of words into the language of action, to convert (even by way of rhetoric) rhetoric itself into dramatic, and specifically tragic, form.

We see Shakespeare's recognition and handling of the problem in the paradoxical ineffectuality of the play's rhetoric—paradoxical, because however stirring it may be to the audience it is useless to the character in achieving, in his fictive world, the results he intends. Titus has cried out to the very heavens (having exhausted the world of men, of dust and stones) and, through elaborate imagery, sought to involve the most elemental forces of nature in his lament. His words are of no avail, yet he must speak:

If there were reason for these miseries,
Then into limits could I bind my woes:
When heaven doth weep, doth not the earth o'erflow?
If the winds rage, doth not the sea wax mad,
Threat'ning the welkin with his big-swol'n face?
And wilt thou have a reason for this coil?
I am the sea. Hark how her [Lavinia's] sighs doth 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.
          Enter a Messenger with two heads and a hand.

(III.i.219-33)

Here again is recognition that “Sorrow concealed, like an oven stopp'd, / Doth burn the heart to cinders where it is.” But though “action” may be the chief part of oratory, for Titus it is the vast gap between even the most rhetorically elaborate speech and effective action which is most painfully noticeable. The action that breaks off Titus' lament is one of the play's most horrifying devices for that gap. Titus' lamenting is compulsive: men in such extremes must speak out; but it is also, apparently, useless.

And it can be worse. For as the need to find relief through expression becomes more pressing, and as the rhetoric in response becomes more extreme and obtrusive, we find that from the heights of linguistic invention we are plunged into the nadir of madness and mad-speech. Thus Titus, having sought to ease his stomach with his bitter tongue and receiving his sons' heads and his own hand in response, is for a moment ominously still; Marcus prompts him: “Now is a time to storm”—but Titus' only reply is the laughter of the mad (III.i.264). There may, however, be another way of looking at this descent into madness: the plunge may be, like Gloucester's from the cliffs near Dover, no plunge at all; it may be a mere step, an inevitable progression from linguistic elaboration to the dissolution of language itself. What is it, after all, that disturbs us about the rhetorical showpieces? Is it not that in them language has become too prominent, breaking the expected bonds between words and world until we feel that the former has gained mastery over the latter? Mad-speech is similarly a language that has lost its connections with objective reality, words without referents in the shared world of the sane. The art of rhetoric, which can be the index of man's reason, can also, when it grows to a surfeit, become the token of madness.

So crucial is the matter of madness to most of the great Elizabethan tragedies, and so important for this discussion is the relationship between mad-speech and rhetoric, that a brief look at Shakespeare's greatest portrait of madness is justified here. And we may notice that, as Titus sought “some device of further misery / To make us wonder'd at in time to come,” so King Lear, driven to desperation by the insouciance of Goneril and Regan, utters the strangled vow:

                    No, you unnatural hags,
I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall—I will do such things,
What they are yet I know not, but they shall be
The terrors of the earth.

(II.iv.280-84)¹¹

Weeping is not the language Lear needs:

                    You think I'll weep;
No, I'll not weep:
I have full cause of weeping, but yet this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws
Or ere I'll weep.

(II.iv.284-88)

But, as he has feared from the start, only one mode is left, that last desperate means (to which Titus and Hieronimo also are brought) to fulfill the human imperative to speak: “O Fool! I shall go mad” (l. 288).

When we discover Lear on the heath (III.ii) he has become almost incapable of hearing any voice but his own and that of the thunder. Only fitfully is he aware of those around him; but those few moments of awareness are most significant, for breaking through the obsessive language of invective are the first tentative sounds of a new language that might serve to bind man to man:

          My wits begin to turn.
Come on, my boy. How dost, my boy? Art cold?
I am cold myself. Where is this straw, my fellow?
The art of our necessities is strange,
And can make vile things precious. Come, your hovel.
Poor Fool and knave, I have one part in my heart
That's sorry yet for thee.

(III.ii.67-73)

But this language and the communion it allows is premature. The process of dissolution is only beginning, and Lear's wits must turn utterly before they can turn again.

The hectic riddling of the fool and the cacophony of Poor Tom are stages on the way to the linguistic disintegration reached in Lear's great mad-speeches. A capable editor, like Professor Muir, can provide the missing clues that will reveal what he calls the “undertone of meaning” in those speeches; but while the meaning is important, so too is the mode of speech itself, a mode defined in the New Cambridge edition as “ideas following each other with little more than verbal connection”:

No, they cannot touch me for coining; I am the king himself. … Nature's above art in that respect. There's your press-money. That fellow handles his bow like a crow-keeper: draw me a clothier's yard. Look, look! a mouse. Peace, peace! this piece of toasted cheese will do't. There's my gauntlet; I'll prove it on a giant. Bring up the brown bills. O! well flown, bird; i' th' clout, i' th' clout: hewgh! Give the word.

(IV.vi.83-93)

Associations of sound more than of meaning provide the structure of Lear's discourse. The meaning of Lear's interior drama is determined by the whim of his words.

And the drama remains private: only Lear can know the infinitely complicated rules that generate his mad language. “I will preach to thee. Mark,” says Lear; and his sermon begins well enough: “When we are born, we cry that we are come / To this great stage of fools” (l. 184). But immediately the discourse is shunted off onto a detour created by a secondary association of sound or meaning: “This' a good block!” And suddenly Lear's sermon gives way to “a delicate stratagem to shoe / A troop of horse with felt,” and the wish to steal “upon these son-in-laws, / Then, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!” The sermon returns upon itself to the world of Lear's private obsessions, excluding any conceivable congregation of listeners.

Lear's mad-speech isolates the speaker, thus subverting one essential function of language. In Titus Andronicus there are also moments when a speaker's words reveal him locked in the privacy of his obsessions—and those moments are precisely those of the fullest, most magniloquent rhetorical elaboration. Such a moment we have encountered in Titus' extended comparison of himself as earth and Lavinia as “weeping welkin” (III.i.219). A more subtle and perhaps more significant example comes in III.ii; it begins with Titus' promise to the silenced Lavinia that she will still, somehow, be heard:¹²

Speechless complainer, I will learn thy thought;
In thy dumb action will I be as perfect
As begging hermits in their holy prayers
Thou shalt not sigh, nor hold thy stumps to heaven,
Nor wink, nor nod, nor kneel, nor make a sign,
But I of these will wrest an alphabet,
And by still practice learn to know thy meaning.

(III.ii.39-45)

It is a noble speech in its determination that human ingenuity can overcome the barbarity that has silenced Lavinia; and here Titus' rhetorical copiousness is ironically appropriate and moving. But almost immediately the optimism is shattered: Marcus strikes at a fly which has settled on his dish, and Titus launches into a series of fantastic speeches—speeches that seem still to have been reverberating in Shakespeare's mind when he came to write King Lear:

TIT.
Out on thee, murderer! thou kill'st my heart;
Mine eyes are cloy'd with view of tyranny:
A deed of death done on the innocent
Becomes not Titus' brother. Get thee gone;
I see thou art not for my company.
MARC.
Alas, my lord, I have but kill'd a fly.
TIT.
“But”? How if that fly had a father and mother?
How would he hang his slender gilded wings,
And buzz lamenting doings in the air!
Poor harmless fly.
That, with his pretty buzzing melody,
Came here to make us merry, and thou hast killed him.

(III.ii.54-65)

With Marcus' explanation that “it was a black ill-favour'd fly / Like to the empress' Moor,” Titus swings violently about; now killing the fly becomes “a charitable deed,” and Titus demands,

Give me thy knife, I will insult on him;
Flattering myself as if it were the Moor
Come hither purposely to poison me.
There's for thyself, and that's for Tamora.

(III.ii.71-74)

Titus' prosopopoeia on the harmless fly, with his “lamenting doings” and “pretty buzzing melody,” is an extraordinary thing—purposefully sentimental, beautifully realized as poetry. And considering Titus' mental state, one is even able to forgive the illogic by which a murdered fly laments his parents' bereavement. Fine: but what has become in all of this of Lavinia? And what of the effort to “wrest an alphabet” from her gestures? The possibility of communion is shattered as Titus wanders off in his acrid smoke of rhetoric. At the very moment that the need for human communication is most forcefully presented, we witness words destroying their natural function.

We arrive here at a nexus of concerns which can reveal that “central tragic fact” we are seeking. The playwright in the world of his craft and his characters in their created world are faced each with an analogous problem: how to break out of rhetoric, that high gift which has become a prison, and achieve the action which will suffice? For the playwright, as I have said, that action must be one broadly conceived, sufficient to transform the language of words into the language of drama, to create (to put it simply) a stageworthy tragedy. And how this can be achieved is indicated by Titus' desire to “Plot some device of further misery, / To make us wonder'd at in time to come.” The theatrical implications of the first part of Titus' line we have already glanced at; and we may notice that, as the moment of Titus' revenge approaches, such double entendre becomes more frequent: Tamora, creating a masquelike “device” of her own (she is disguised as Revenge, Chiron and Demetrius as Murder and Rape), comes to where Titus “ruminate[s] strange plots of dire revenge” (V.ii.6); Titus plans to “o'erreach them in their own devices” (V.ii.143); and when he has killed Chiron and Demetrius he announces as the next part of his plan that “I'll play the cook” (V.ii.204). Through such suggestions of a play-within-a-play, the world of reality and the world of the stage begin to merge in a way that animates Ralegh's poetic cliché, “Thus march we playing to our latest rest, / Only we die in earnest; that's no jest.” In Titus Andronicus, the earnest of death becomes inextricably bound up with the jest of playing.

But in what way can the play's “plot of dire revenge,” which includes the deaths of Lavinia and Titus himself, satisfy the demand that it be a plot “To make us wonder'd at in time to come”? Again we must attend to a special sense of Titus' language. According to J. V. Cunningham, the word “wonder” (L. admiratio), in a tradition descending from Aristotle, was closely associated with the particular emotion supposed to derive from tragedy. “The effect of astonishment or wonder is the natural correlative of unusual diction, as it is of the unusual event,” he writes; in particular, “The high style, the forceful, the grand—the style of Demosthenes and Aeschylus—will evoke that wonder which is akin to fear, and will be especially appropriate to tragedy.”¹³ But we have already seen that Titus Andronicus carries with it, just as it is exploiting the language of wonder, the recognition that even the most unusual diction and the highest style will not suffice: action, and that a very special action, must animate the otherwise imprisoning rhetoric. And the action that will not only fit but transform the words is death: for the Elizabethan dramatist, death is what can provoke “wonder” in time to come. J. V. Cunningham explains:

The tragic fact is death. Even the most natural death has in it a radical violence, for it is a transition from this life to something by definition quite otherwise; and, however much it may be expected, it is in its moment of incidence sudden, for it comes as the thief in the night, you know not the day nor the hour. Hence the characteristics of suddenness and violence which are attached to death in tragedy may be viewed as artistic heightenings of the essential character of death: the unnaturalness of the tragic event is only pointed and emphasized by the unnatural precipitancy of its accomplishment.¹⁴

In this play, when words have done their uttermost and failed, Titus breaks through the barriers of incommunicability with the gesture that, because it is the gesture most provocative of wonder, is definitive of Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy. He takes the final step from rhetoric through madness to death.

If the assertion that death is our “central tragic fact” seems something of an anticlimax, the fault may be that we know so much more than the Elizabethans—and (as Mr. Eliot said), “they are that which we know.” But why, if the simple (but also infinitely complex) fact of death is all that we arrive at, not accept the term “revenge” and leave it at that? The answer, I think, is suggested in a phrase used (in a different context) by a recent critic, who writes of “The choice of revenge as the metaphor for action.”¹⁵ Revenge itself, that is to say, is subsumed in a larger purpose; and one aspect of that purpose is immediately pertinent to this discussion: the need for a culminating action that will bring “wonder” out of rhetoric in time to come. Revenge is only one of the various routes to the ritualization of death which permits the Elizabethan dramatist to conclude his tragedy with the expressiveness of a consummatum est. The sense of something attained, at once fearful and wondrous, is the playwright's solution to the problem that haunts so much of Renaissance literature, be it sonnet or tragedy; the proboem, to use Spenser's word, of mutability. The resolution in death will assure the sort of enduring memorial Titus and his creator seek.

The demand for permanence explains a function of that saving remnant which is present at the tragedy's close, the Horatios and Edgars, who promise to remember the events and report them “aright / To the unsatisfied.” In Titus, it has to be admitted, the remaining Andronici are annoyingly wordy, a fact that may be in part forgivable under the circumstances: they have been voiceless in Rome long enough. Still, this is a long way from the more honest ending of King Lear, with its bathetically simple, “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say,” and its recognition that not all the words in the world can balance the weight of the action we have witnessed. The great tragedies of this period—whether of blood, revenge, or tragedy pure—culminate, like their important precursor Titus Andronicus, in the acting out of death, and the rest is, necessarily, silence.

Notes

1. Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy 1587-1642 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1940), p. 62.

2. Induction to Bartholomew Fair, in C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, Ben Jonson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-52), VI, 16.

3. Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957), p. 147.

4. J. C. Maxwell, ed., The Arden Edition (London: Methuen, and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1961). All other references to Titus Andronicus are to this edition.

5. Sir Philip Sidney, “An Apologie for Poetry,” in Gregory Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1904), I, 182. Sidney's commonplace must be allowed to stand here for the wealth of texts which might be cited. Among modern scholars who have studied the relationship between the rhetorical tradition and Elizabethan drama, my greatest debt is to Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1954).

6. Quoted by W. S. Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England 1500-1700 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1956), p. 18.

7. The Spanish Tragedy, ed. Philip Edwards (London: Methuen, 1959). Antonio and Mellida The First Part, ed. G. K. Hunter (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1965).

8. “The Spanish Tragedy, or The Pleasures and Perils of Rhetoric,” Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, 9 (1966), 81.

9. The Overburian Characters, to Which is added A Wife, ed. W. J. Paylor (Oxford: Blackwell, 1936), p. 76. The character of “An Excellent Actor” was added in the sixth impression, 1615; its attribution to Webster is generally accepted, and the piece is included in F. L. Lucas' edition of Webster.

10. The Works of Francis Bacon (“Popular Edition”), ed. Spedding, Ellis, and Heath (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1857), II, 116.

11. Kenneth Muir, ed., The Arden Edition (London: Methuen, 1952).

12. The authenticity of this scene has been questioned, especially on the grounds that it necessitates the re-entry of characters who have exited at the end of the immediately preceding scene. The scene may be a later addition, but I see no reason to attribute it to any hand other than Shakespeare's.

13. Woe or Wonder (Denver: Univ. of Denver Press, and Toronto: Burns & MacEachern, 1951), p. 73.

14. Ibid., p. 59.

15. Philip J. Finkelpearl, John Marston of the Middle Temple (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1969), p. 160. My italics.