It is fitting that I’m writing about Titus Andronicus during the week of Halloween. It is the bloodiest, most horrific of any of the Shakespeare plays I’ve read in my life (and that includes Macbeth and Hamlet, both of which are Halloween-worthy with their gore, ghosts, and witches). But I thoroughly enjoyed it, especially with the companion of Julie Taymor’s Titus (1999), which stars Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange.

Aside: You’ll also notice, if you are looking at my reading plan for the year, I’m now about 3 weeks behind schedule. I’ll need to catch up over holiday breaks, but this project is also forcing me to confront my choice about how I spend my free time. In the balance, I’m finding the time spent reading Shakespeare feels far more rewarding (and enjoyable!) than the time I spent in the last week playing Grand Theft Auto 5. That isn’t a critique of the game–though I’ve not been a fan of the franchise (personal taste); rather, I’m finding that spending time with Shakespeare really is a pleasure. And for those of you who might leap to critique GTA5 for all the things you may have read and hear about it, I assure you that Titus Andronicus is far more violent.

THE PLOT: BODY COUNT
Unless you are reading along or have seen Taymor’s movie, I expect you haven’t read this play. It isn’t produced often, and I had heard very little about it before it came up on my list. So I’ll provide a short synopsis. It is worth noting, first, if you’ve haven’t seen the play that Taymor’s movie makes a number of changes to the sequence of the scenes and, importantly, dramatizes a long-standing love between Lavinia and Bassianus (all with non-verbal cues) that is not as present in the actual text.

The play begins after the death of the Roman Emperor. The Emperor’s two sons, Saturninus (the older) and Bassiunus, are vying for the throne. When general Titus Andronicus returns from the Goth wars, some of the Roman public urge him to seize the empire. Titus, wearied by war and the death of 25 sons (only four remain alive) refuses the throne and backs Saturninus. At the same time, despite the pleadings of the Goth queen, Tamora, he publicly executes her son, Alarbus (26), to appease the gods. The killing is the trigger for most of the tragedy that will follow.

Titus offers his daughter, Lavinia, to Saturninus to become the Empress. But within a page of the text, Saturninus throws her over and decides to wed Tamora. Luckily for Lavinia (or, unluckily, as it will soon turn out), Bassianus is in love with her and the two flee. Mutius (27), one of Titus’ four remaining sons, defends her departure. For that, Titus kills him.

Meanwhile, Tamora is already plotting to make Saturninus a cuckold by way of the Moor, Aaron. And she goads her sons to rape Lavinia and kill Bassianus. She’s so brilliantly constructed the plot that Titus’ own sons, Quintus and Martius, are accused of the murder and are ordered to be executed.

Now the blood really flows.

Lavinia stumbles across the stage after her rape. Her hands are cut off and her tongue is cut out — a ploy by Tamora’s sons, Demetrius and Chiron, to keep her from communicating the perpetrators.

The distraught Titus, now flailing in emotional agony, is tricked by Aaron to cut off his own hand as a tribute to the Emperor as a way to save his sons’ lives. But the severed hand is quickly returned to Titus — along with the heads of Quintus and Martius.

It appears as if Titus has gone mad for a time, and he pleads with the gods for justice. But, in the end, he undertakes one last, great war: he has his son Lucius align with the Goths for an invasion of Rome.

On the eve of battle, Titus successfully plots the deaths of the rapists, Demetrius and Chiron, and of Tamora and Saturninus. Indeed, he feeds Demetrius and Chiron (baked in a pie) to their mother before he kills her. He also kills his daughter, and he is murdered himself in the final triangle of death with the Emperor and Empress.

Oh, and along the way Aaron announces that the Empress, Tamora, bore him a son — one that he has saved from the execution she ordered.

In summary, I will forever remember Titus Andronicus as the play of severed heads, hands, and tongues; of rape and cannibalism; and of threatened infanticide. Not light fare.

Marjorie Garber offers the reminder that in the 1500s, public execution was still a major form of entertainment. So maybe the play was just another night out for the average Elizabethan.

ROMAN STOICISM AND GOTHIC BLOOD
Titus Andronicus offers me an opportunity to write about Roman stoicism for a bit, or the lack of it. Several years ago, reading Marcus Aurelius was, for me, a strange return to the glories of Western cultural studies. Long a student of Zen, I was struck by the resemblance between Aurelius’ world view and that of Dogen. Somehow, these people living in murderous times found a path to calm, a path to a kind of fatalism that did not turn into nihilism. Aurelius bridged my reading of Eastern philosophy and my knowledge of classical literature. He showed me Zen roots within the Roman tradition.

Titus is not a Roman stoic in the form of Marcus Aurelius. At first, I thought he might be. He starts that way, certainly, with a triumphant yet humble return to Rome and the calculated decision to execute Tamora’s son — in the face of her pleading — as a necessary sacrifice (by Roman terms).

But his stoicism turns to something chilling when he kills his own son, Mutius, when Mutius helps Lavinia escape with Bassianus. How is this necessary?

Titus unwinds when he discovers Lavinia raped and mutilated and two of his remaining sons accused of murdering Bassianus. Briefly, it seems as though he will become a raving Lear.

Then Titus returns to a kind of stoic center (or is it?) and uses feigned madness to trap and kill Demetrius, Chiron, Tamora, and Saturninus. Their deaths position Lucius to rule. Was that Titus’ plan all along? There is something both horrifying and enjoyable in watching Titus’ vengeful self-mastery as his plot comes together.

But Lavinia’s death remains an oddity that belies the stoic reading.

TITUS
…Was it well done of rash Virginius
To slay his daughter with his own right hand,
Because she was enforced, stained, and deflowered?
SATURNINUS
It was, Andronicus.
TITUS
Your reason, might lord?
SATURNINUS
Because the girl should not survive her shame,
And by her presence still renew his sorrows.
TITUS
A reason mighty, strong, and effectual;
A pattern, precedent, and lively warrant
For me, most wretched, to perform the like.
Die, die, Lavinia, and thy shame with thee,
And with thy shame thy father’s sorrow die!
[He kills her.] (V.3, 36-47).

Is this his full embodiment of his role as madman, part of a stoic’s plot to set order? Or is Lavinia’s death — and his own 16 lines later — a colossal failure of this self-mastery, of his stoicism in the face of grief?

Garber sees Lucius’ ascension as a restoration of order. But this is how I end up reading Titus Andronicus: not as a tragedy in the spirit of Shakespeare’s later tragedies but as a play of blood and horror that flows from the loss of Roman stoicism, a loss of order and self-control.

Harold Bloom goes so far as to say Shakespeare was exorcising Marlowe with the play. Certainly, the play is more like Marlowe, more vicious, than anything else of Shakespeare’s I’ve read. As with much Marlowe, the hero is at the center of the sea of blood. For me, Titus becomes a mirror of Tamora and Aaron. The glory of the Roman general falls away as he becomes an emotional, vengeful wreck, a sociopathic man-child who kills his own children.

Lucius may replace him and Saturninus as the figurehead of Rome. But I don’t see that Lucius has set a new course. Shakespeare chose to end the play not with harmony, not with “Lucius, all hail, Rome’s gracious governor!” (V.3 146) but with more vitriol — now from Lucius himself:

As for that ravenous tiger, Tamora,
No funeral rite, nor man in mourning weeds,
No mournful bell shall ring her burial;
But throw her forth to beasts and birds to prey.
Her life was beastly and devoid of pity,
And being dead, let birds on her take pity! (V.3, 195-200).

Tamora is beastly? Devoid of pity? Are the Andronici different? Isn’t Lucius describing his father?