Main Characters

Titus Andronicus — general of Rome and tragic hero of the play

Tamora — queen of the Goths, mother of Chiron and Demetrius

Aaron — Tamora's Moorish lover

Lavinia — the only daughter of Titus Andronicus; in love with Bassianus

Marcus Andronicus — Roman tribune; brother of Titus Andronicus

Saturninus — the eldest son of the late emperor of Rome

Bassianus — the younger brother of Saturninus

Lucius — Titus's only surviving son

Alarbus, Chiron, and Demetrius — Goth princes; sons of Tamora

Young Lucius — Titus's grandson, and Lucius's son

Introduction

Elizabethan written accounts testify to audiences with particularly bloody tastes, and Titus Andronicus was received with great applause, remaining a favorite for over a decade. However gruesome we find Titus Andronicus today, it's worth recalling that competing with the burgeoning theater, blood sports such as public bear-baiting were popular in Elizabethan times. And it is also worth noting how a director like Julie Taymor (also responsible for The Lion King, itself inspired by Hamlet) can find relevance in this play to our own times, saturated as they are with violence. The play was a huge favorite when it opened.

Saving Shakespeare's Good Name

In 1687, some 100 years after the first performance of Titus Andronicus, Edward Ravenscroft adapted the play for a different audience and called it The Rape of Lavinia.

What's particularly interesting about Ravenscroft's comment is his need to try and rescue Shakespeare's good name. It's as though an overtly brutal pornographic early novel by Samuel Beckett surfaced and scholars felt compelled to justify something they would otherwise condemn with disdain as low popular trash. Titus Andronicus is an Elizabethan Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Yet, knowing the author, we can't but think its massive excess seems to be less an imitation of the Elizabethan revenge drama than a parody of that form.

Poet T. S. Eliot had this to say: “Titus Andronicus is one of the stupidest and most uninspiring plays ever written.”

In some ways this account gives some sense of the history of Titus Andronicus. Shakespeare's admirers once halfheartedly tried to deny his authorship of what is probably his most violent play. The debate has gone on for centuries. In 1614, Ben Jonson claimed it was as popular a play as Thomas Kyd's equally bloody The Spanish Tragedy. Samuel Johnson theorized that Shakespeare “play-doctored” someone else's work.

If scholars acknowledge the hand of the great master in this work at all, they may point to his youth as an excuse. Shakespeare would have been about twenty-six when he wrote Titus Andronicus, and it marked his first attempt at writing tragedy. Yet today Titus is as often proclaimed as Shakespeare's first critique of Renaissance England's unquestioning attitude toward all things classical. Francis Meres publicly named Shakespeare as the play's author in Palladis Tamia (1598), and the play is included in the First Folio.

Sources

The play was likely written between 1590 and 1593. While there is no clear main source for the story, critics think that they included Hecuba by Euripides, Metamorphoses by Ovid, and Thyestes and Troades by Seneca. A tutor to Emperor Nero, Seneca wrote plays that described the grisly horror of murder in elaborate detail. When Elizabethans began translating Seneca's works from Latin in 1559, writers relished them and wrote plays “in the classical style” imitating them. Shakespeare appears to have seasoned Titus Andronicus and later, Macbeth and parts of King Lear with some of Seneca's ghoulish spice.

The poetry of Titus Andronicus displays definite Shakespearean traits, and in the character of Aaron we see the seeds of Othello, Iago, and Richard III, while Tamora can be seen as an early version of Margaret in the King Henry VI plays. It is the only Shakespeare play, ironically, for which we have a contemporary illustration, by the author Henry Peacham, which shows characters in a mix of Roman and Renaissance costumes.

The Play

Titus, a Roman general, returns to Rome after a victorious campaign against the Goths. In tow as captives are Tamora and her sons, one of whom, Alarbus, is sacrificed by Titus's sons. Saturninus, the newly declared Roman emperor, is feuding with his younger brother, Bassianus. Lavinia, Titus's daughter, chooses Bassianus over Saturninus. The emperor is seduced by the captive Queen Tamora, who is plotting with her Moorish lover, Aaron, to get revenge against Titus.

Demetrius and Chiron come across Bassianus and Lavinia in the woods. They kill Bassianus then rape and mutilate Lavinia, leaving her without a tongue to speak or hands to write. Aaron now frames Titus's sons (Quintus and Martius) for Bassianus's murder, and they are condemned to death. Titus's remaining son, Lucius, tries to rescue his brothers and is banished from Rome.

Aaron tells Titus that the emperor will spare Quintus and Martius if Titus cuts off a hand and sends it to him. Titus does so. His hand is returned to him along with the heads of his two sons. Lucius, meanwhile, raises an army of Goths to sack Rome.

Titus finally is able to communicate enough with a half-crazed Lavinia to discover that Demetrius and Chiron were responsible for attacking her. Titus kills them and serves them to their mother as a pie!

When Tamora and Saturninus arrive to try to convince Titus to call off Lucius and his Goths, Titus serves them dinner, featuring pie as the main course. In the middle of the feast, Titus kills Lavinia to put her out of her misery, reveals the secret ingredient of his pie, then butchers Tamora. Saturninus in turn slays Titus. Lucius, newly arrived, kills Saturninus.

Lucius is elected emperor of Rome and orders Aaron (who refuses to ask forgiveness for his crimes) buried up to his chest and left to starve, and Tamora to be left unburied for the scavengers to feast on.

Commentary

Titus Andronicus falls between two schools of drama: it is neither history (though the characters are drawn from Roman history, the events are not) nor is the play, especially in tone, what we think of as Shakespearean tragedy. It is clearly a melodrama, best described as Elizabethan revenge tragedy, a genre defined by a hero who doggedly and bloodily pursues vengeance and perishes at his moment of success. Titus Andronicus also features one of the few genuinely evil characters in Shakespearean literature, Aaron the Moor. Aaron orchestrates all of the evil in the play, and his only regret is that he wasn't able to commit more evil. And yet even this personification of evil has one soft spot, his newborn son.

Titus is a paradoxical character. His behavior is hard for us to understand, but we can admire his concepts of honor and justice. As Rome's greatest general, Titus will allow nothing to compromise his honor or that of his family, even if he has to kill one of his sons to maintain it.

While Titus Andronicus is clearly an archetypal gore-filled Elizabethan revenge tragedy, the story of Hamlet has a superficial resemblance to Titus Andronicus. Yet clearly, the more mature playwright who wrote Hamlet, with years of theatrical experience and real-life experience (with tragedies like the death of his young son) decided to revisit a popular genre in order to turn it on its head and put the genre to rest. In Hamlet he is not content with just piling up the bodies (though there is quite a pile by the play's end). Instead, the horror of Hamlet is a spiritual one, and it takes the expectations of an audience for a genre play like Titus Andronicus and forces them to consider what all this violence and blood does to our souls.

Famous Lines

“Sweet mercy is nobility's true badge” (Act I, Scene II).

“The eagle suffers little birds to sing” (Act IV, Scene IV).