Titus Andronicus presents us with one lasting and undeniable truth, that
commercial success doesn't translate into critical accomplishment.
Said to have
been the first big hit in the career of playwright William Shakespeare, it had
already been staged by three different performance companies within two years
of its apparent debut. Yet it's rarely staged now, and when it is it's
presented more in the form of post-modern irony than as gripping drama.
The reason for that is simple: Titus is not a good play. But as a
revenge fantasy with a strangely pungent sense of cosmic injustice, it kind of,
sort of works.
The play is set in Rome, where the heroic commander Titus
Andronicus has returned after conquering the Goths. After slaying a captive
Goth prince despite the cries of the prisoner's mother, Queen Tamora,
Titus is called upon to decide who should be emperor of Rome. Declining
the imperial raiment himself, Titus favors Saturninus, eldest son of the
dead emperor. This proves an unhappy choice when Saturninus declares Titus’s
daughter Lavinia his empress, is rebuffed by an already-spoken-for Lavinia, and
angrily picks Tamora instead.
It’s not
a Shakespearean tragedy until someone gets hurt. And do they ever get hurt in
this play. You can’t say it has the highest body count of anything Shakespeare
wrote, as he wrote about the Hundred Years’ War and the Fall of Troy, but it’s
certainly the most gory in up-close content. There are beheadings, rape,
dismemberment, and a memorable instance of culinary Grand Guignol that wouldn’t
be out of place in a Saw movie.
The
sentiments expressed are as violent as the content. After raping Lavinia, Tamora’s
sons chop off her hands, rip out her tongue and then taunt her about what she
will do.
Demetrius:
So, now go tell, and if thy tongue can speak,
Who ‘twas
that cut thy tongue and ravished thee.
Chiron:
Write down thy mind, bewray thy meaning so,
And if
thy stumps will let thee play the scribe. (II.iv.1-4)
It’s not
the nonsensicalness of the situation that sticks with you, the notion someone
unable to write or speak could not find some other way to identify her
attackers. It’s the cold-bloodedness of the characters, how they delight in
their cruelty, that makes Titus seem
even more violent than it is.
Titus
himself is brutal enough, and he’s the good guy. In the opening scene, we
witness him coolly order Tamora’s son to be killed in order to placate the
spirits of his own departed offspring, then kill one of his own sons for taking
the part of his sister against Saturninus. Later, he coos with delight when his pre-teen grandson fantasizes about revenge-raping Tamora.
The
straining of the young Bard to make an impression on his audience has been
remarked upon. In the introduction to the Signet Classic edition, Sylvan Barnet
notes the play is thick with showy alliteration and classical allusions. “Julius
Caesar has only a tenth as many mythological allusions, but when he wrote
Titus, Shakespeare evidently was aiming at something quite different from the
spare style he was to use in Julius Caesar,” Barnet writes.
"Spare" is not the word
to use to describe Titus’s brother Marcus, the closest thing Titus has to a soliloquizer.
Coming upon the ravaged Lavinia, Marcus discourses for several long minutes in
blank verse about how horrible she looks: “Alas, a crimson river of warm
blood,/Like to a bubbling fountain stirred with wind,/Doth rise and fall
beneath thy rosed lips/Coming and going with thy honeyed breath.” (II.iv.22-25)
He’s not first-responder material, that’s for sure.
Unfortunately,
this sort of approach proves contagious in Titus.
Nobody just does anything, when they can talk and talk about it before and
after doing it. It’s a strange approach given the visceral quality of the
storyline, the way it was designed to apparently feed the Elizabethan desire
for a ripping revenge yarn with plenty of bloodshed to cheer the groundlings.
It is sometimes suggested that Shakespeare was setting up his audience this
way, yet ironic detachment hardly seems to have made its way into his bag of
tricks here. He’s more the earnest youngster spinning as many plates as he can, and
not getting rattled when he breaks a few.
The play’s
one outstanding character is Aaron the Moor, Tamora’s lover and the instigator
of much of Titus’s misfortune. He starts out a minor character, hovering around
the edges of the action, but comes of his own in time for Lavinia’s rape and
remains a central figure thereafter.
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| African-American actor Ira Aldridge took his adaptation of Titus Andronicus to London and an enthusiastic reception in 1850. In Aldridge's version, Aaron was the main character and the hero of the piece. Image from Wikipedia. |
One of
Shakespeare’s few black characters, openly atheistic, Aaron presents us with a
bracing counterweight from the more conventional cast members around him. He is
a man of frightfully clever tricks untrammeled by any slip of a conscience:
I have
done a thousand dreadful things
As
willingly as one would kill a fly,
And
nothing grieves me heartily indeed,
But that
I cannot do ten thousand more. (V.ii.141-44)
Aaron’s
ruthless nature gives Titus
license for bloody-mindedness; how could one not wish revenge against someone
like that? As the play goes on, Titus, like Shakespeare’s later Hamlet and Lear,
becomes gripped by a madness that may be more stratagem than mania, although he’s
definitely far gone by play’s end.
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