Titus Andronicus

Summary

Titus Andronicus is a Roman revenge tragedy, probably Shakespeare's first, set in an invented late-imperial Rome where the old general Titus returns from ten years of war against the Goths with his captives: Tamora, Queen of the Goths, her three sons, and her Moorish lover Aaron. Titus has lost twenty-one of his twenty-five sons in Rome's service. To appease their spirits he has Tamora's eldest son Alarbus hewn and burned as a sacrifice, though she kneels and begs for his life. The Roman people offer Titus the empire; he declines it and gives his voice to Saturninus, the late emperor's elder son, who at once claims Titus's daughter Lavinia as empress. Lavinia is already betrothed to Saturninus's brother Bassianus, who carries her off. When Titus's son Mutius blocks the pursuit, Titus kills him. Saturninus, now slighted, marries Tamora instead, and the captive queen becomes empress of Rome. During a royal hunt Aaron directs Tamora's sons Demetrius and Chiron to murder Bassianus, rape Lavinia, and cut off her hands and tongue so that she cannot name them. Aaron then frames Titus's sons Martius and Quintus for the murder with a forged letter and a bag of gold. He tells Titus that the emperor will spare them if Titus sends his own hand; Titus lets Aaron cut it off, and the hand comes back with his sons' heads. Titus's last son, Lucius, is banished and goes to raise an army among the Goths. Lavinia at last reveals her attackers by turning the pages of Ovid's Metamorphoses to the story of Philomela and writing their names in the sand with a staff held in her mouth. Titus, now behaving like a madman, shoots arrows with petitions to the gods into the emperor's court. Tamora gives birth to Aaron's black child; Aaron kills the nurse to protect it and flees, but Lucius captures him and he confesses everything in exchange for the child's life. Tamora, believing Titus mad, visits him disguised as Revenge with her sons as Rape and Murder. Titus cuts the sons' throats while Lavinia holds a basin, bakes them in a pie, and serves it to their mother at a banquet. He kills Lavinia, reveals the dish, and stabs Tamora; Saturninus kills Titus and Lucius kills Saturninus. Lucius is acclaimed emperor, orders Aaron buried breast-deep and starved, and has Tamora's body thrown to the beasts. The play is extremely violent, but its violence is staged within a sustained argument about piety, mercy and the fate of a city that worships its own honour.

Plot or Argument

• Act I: A sacrifice at the Andronici tomb

  Titus returns in triumph, buries his dead sons, and sacrifices Alarbus over Tamora's pleas. He refuses the empire, backs Saturninus, and in the quarrel over Lavinia kills his own son Mutius. Saturninus marries Tamora, who privately vows to massacre the Andronici while urging a show of reconciliation.

• Act II: Aaron's plot in the forest

  Aaron turns Chiron and Demetrius's rivalry over Lavinia into a plan. In the forest they kill Bassianus, throw his body into a pit, and drag Lavinia away; Martius and Quintus fall into the pit and are arrested. Marcus finds Lavinia mutilated and speaks the long lament over her wounds.

• Act III: The hand and the heads

  Titus pleads in vain to the tribunes for his sons, Lucius is banished, and Aaron tricks Titus into giving his hand as ransom. The heads come back with the hand. Titus laughs, swears revenge, and at a family meal grieves over Marcus's killing of a fly.

• Act IV: Ovid, arrows and a child

  Lavinia uses the Metamorphoses and a staff to name Chiron and Demetrius. Titus sends them weapons wrapped in a line of Horace, which Aaron understands. Aaron's son is born; he kills the nurse to keep the child alive. Titus has arrows shot to the gods and sends a clown with pigeons to the emperor, who hangs him. News comes that Lucius leads the Goths against Rome.

• Act V: Revenge's banquet

  Lucius captures Aaron, who confesses his crimes to save his son and repents only of any good he has done. Tamora visits Titus disguised as Revenge; he keeps her sons, kills them, and bakes them. At the banquet Titus kills Lavinia, Tamora, and is killed; Lucius kills Saturninus, is made emperor, and Marcus calls on Rome to knit its broken limbs into one body.

Characters

• Titus Andronicus, Roman general, protagonist

  Aged victor over the Goths whose rigid Roman piety leads him to sacrifice a captive and kill his own son, and whose sufferings drive him toward real or feigned madness and a horrifying revenge.

• Tamora, Queen of the Goths, later Empress

  Captive mother who begs for her son's life, then uses her marriage to Saturninus to destroy the Andronici; she visits Titus disguised as Revenge.

• Aaron, Moor, Tamora's lover

  The play's chief contriver of evil, witty and boastful in villainy, who nevertheless risks everything to protect his newborn son.

• Lavinia, Titus's daughter

  Betrothed to Bassianus; raped and mutilated by Chiron and Demetrius, she finds a way to name them through Ovid and a staff in the sand, and is killed by her father at the banquet.

• Marcus Andronicus, tribune, Titus's brother

  Moderate voice of the family who urges mercy and burial for Mutius, discovers Lavinia, and speaks the play's closing appeal for Rome's healing.

• Lucius, Titus's eldest surviving son

  Calls for Alarbus's sacrifice, is banished, returns with a Gothic army, and becomes emperor.

• Saturninus, emperor

  Elder son of the late emperor, raised to the throne by Titus's voice; vain, suspicious and ruled by Tamora.

• Bassianus, Saturninus's brother

  Lavinia's betrothed, murdered in the forest by Tamora's sons.

• Chiron and Demetrius, Tamora's sons

  Brothers who rape and mutilate Lavinia at Aaron's prompting and are killed and baked by Titus.

• Young Lucius, Lucius's son

  Titus's grandson, frightened by Lavinia's pursuit of his books; weeps for his grandfather at the end.

• Mutius, Titus's son

  Killed by his father in Act I for barring the way when Bassianus carries off Lavinia.

• Alarbus, Tamora's eldest son

  Sacrificed at the Andronici tomb, the act that begins the cycle of vengeance.

Lessons

• Piety that refuses mercy

  Titus calls the sacrifice of Alarbus religious duty to his dead, and Tamora answers that mercy is what brings men near the gods. The play lets the whole catastrophe flow from that refusal, and it asks whether devotion to family honour, however sincere, can become a cruelty that the gods themselves would not ask.

  • Tamora calls the sacrifice cruel, irreligious piety. Is her charge fair, given what she later does?
  • Why does Titus, who will beg tribunes for his own sons, refuse a mother's plea in Act I?
  • What would mercy have cost Titus at the tomb, and what did refusing it cost?

• A Roman who kills his son

  Titus kills Mutius for obstructing him and at first denies him burial among the Andronici. Marcus's line asking his brother not to be barbarous turns the play's opening categories upside down: the Roman, not the Goth, has acted like a barbarian. Students can trace how the play blurs the line between Rome and its enemies until Rome must be saved by a Gothic army.

  • Who in Act I behaves more like the 'barbarians' Rome claims to defeat?
  • Why does Titus finally allow Mutius to be buried, and does that change our view of him?
  • How does the ending, with Lucius leading Goths into Rome, answer the opening triumph?

• Grief that has no limits

  In Act III Titus says that if there were reason for his miseries he could bind his woes in limits. The play gives sorrow the language of flood, storm and vomiting, and then shows grief turning into laughter and a plan. It invites careful thought about the difference between lament, which Scripture and the classical tradition both honour, and despair that becomes a motive for vengeance.

  • Why does Titus laugh when the heads of his sons are brought to him?
  • Is Titus's madness in Acts IV and V real, feigned, or both? Use specific scenes.
  • How does Marcus's counsel, 'let reason govern thy lament', fare in the play?

• Speaking without a tongue

  Lavinia's attackers silence her, but she turns the pages of Ovid and writes with a staff in the sand. The play makes reading, books and old stories the means by which truth comes out, while also showing how classical precedents (Philomela, Lucrece, Virginius) can be used to justify killing as well as to reveal wrong.

  • Why does Shakespeare make a book of Ovid the key to discovering the crime?
  • Titus cites Virginius when he kills Lavinia. What does that precedent assume about her, and does the play endorse it?
  • What is the effect of Marcus's ornate lament over Lavinia's wounds in Act II, Scene IV?

• The villain who loves his child

  Aaron delights in evil and dies repenting only of any good he might have done, yet he defends his newborn son against the whole court and bargains his confession for the child's life. The play refuses to make even its worst character simple, and it asks students to hold together real wickedness and real natural affection, letting neither cancel the other.

  • What do Aaron's speeches over his son reveal that his other speeches conceal?
  • Why does Lucius keep his promise to spare the child?
  • Can a character be wholly evil and still love someone? What does the play suggest?

Context

Titus belongs to the vogue for Senecan revenge tragedy on the London stage of the late 1580s and early 1590s, alongside Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and Marlowe's The Jew of Malta. Its Rome is not a historical period but a composite of imperial decline, Gothic invasion and classical stories. Its main literary models are Ovid's Metamorphoses Book VI (Tereus, Procne and Philomela, explicitly named in the play), Seneca's Thyestes (a father fed his own children) and Livy's story of Virginius. Elizabethan audiences also read Rome as a mirror of their own state, and questions of succession, election and civil discord in Act I would have had contemporary weight.

Composition

Usually dated c. 1591-1592, possibly revised in 1593-1594. Philip Henslowe's diary records a performance of 'titus & ondronicus' by Sussex's Men in January 1594, and the First Quarto (1594) names the companies of the Earls of Derby, Pembroke and Sussex on its title page. Since the nineteenth century many scholars have argued that George Peele wrote Act I and some later scenes; Brian Vickers's Shakespeare, Co-Author (2002) made the case widely accepted, though not universal. The play was reprinted in quarto in 1600 and 1611 and included in the First Folio (1623), which adds the fly-killing scene (III.ii).

Reception

Titus was popular in the 1590s: a drawing attributed to Henry Peacham (c. 1595) shows Tamora pleading before Titus, the only surviving contemporary illustration of a Shakespeare play. Ben Jonson's induction to Bartholomew Fair (1614) mocks playgoers who still swear by Andronicus. Later critics often doubted Shakespeare's authorship or dismissed the play as crude; Edward Ravenscroft's adaptation was staged around 1678 and printed in 1687. Peter Brook's 1955 production with Laurence Olivier, Deborah Warner's 1987 RSC staging and Julie Taymor's film Titus (1999) led to a serious revaluation of its craft and its study of grief and violence.

Comparisons

• Hamlet

  Hamlet reworks the revenge-play machinery Titus used a decade earlier: both heroes are suspected of madness, both use theatre or disguise to trap a royal enemy, and both plays end in a banquet-hall slaughter, but Hamlet turns the delay and conscience of the avenger into the centre of the play where Titus foregrounds spectacle and lament.

• Medea and Other Plays

  Euripides' Medea and Titus both turn on parents and children as instruments of revenge: Medea kills her own sons to wound Jason, while Titus feeds Tamora her sons and kills his own daughter, and both plays leave the audience asking whether wronged parents become monsters.

• Metamorphoses

  Ovid's tale of Tereus and Philomela in Book VI is the play's master text: Lavinia's rape and severed tongue copy Philomela's, Marcus names Tereus over her body, and Lavinia literally turns to the story in a copy of the Metamorphoses to reveal her attackers. The banquet echoes Procne's revenge in the same tale.

• The Jew of Malta

  Marlowe's Barabas is the closest model for Aaron: a stage outsider who boasts of his crimes, manipulates Christians and Romans alike, and dies unrepentant. Comparing their final speeches shows how both playwrights made villainy theatrical and witty.

• The History of Rome, Books I-V

  Titus cites Virginius, who killed his daughter to save her from Appius Claudius (Livy Book III), and the play repeatedly invokes Lucrece and Junius Brutus from Livy Book I. Reading Livy alongside shows how Shakespeare turns stories of republican virtue into precedents for private vengeance.

• King Lear

  Both plays show an old man who gives away power to the wrong heir, is humiliated by those he raised up, and passes through grief into something like madness on behalf of a wronged daughter; Lear's storm speeches grow out of Titus's sea-and-sky lament in Act III.

Quotes

Medical Lens

The play offers a sustained Elizabethan study of grief and its relation to madness. Young Lucius cites the commonplace that extremity of grief makes men mad, and the action tests it: Titus's sorrow moves from flood-and-storm lament (III.i) to laughter, to the fly scene (III.ii), to the arrow-shooting and petitions to the gods (IV.iii), and Tamora believes him mad enough to deceive. Whether his madness is real, feigned, or a strategic use of a real disturbance is an interpretive question, not a diagnosis. Lavinia's mutilation also raises questions about bodily injury, speech loss and communication; the play shows her family learning to read her signs. For history of medicine, note the Galenic language of the bowels and stomach as seats of emotion in Titus's lament, and the judicial starvation sentence passed on Aaron.

• Act II, Scene IV

  Marcus finds Lavinia with her hands and tongue cut off and describes the bleeding in extended poetic imagery.

  Disability Deformity Pain
• Act III, Scene I

  Titus's hand is cut off as a supposed ransom; the heads of his sons are returned; his lament compares grief to sea and storm and to vomiting from the bowels, and ends in laughter.

  Grief WAR Wounds Pain
• Act III, Scene II

  Folio-only scene: Titus teaches Lavinia to communicate by signs and reacts with disproportionate grief, then rage, to the killing of a fly.

  Grief Madness Psychosis Disability Deformity
• Act IV, Scene I

  Young Lucius explains his fear of Lavinia with the saying that extreme grief makes men mad, citing Hecuba.

  Grief Madness Psychosis
• Act IV, Scene III

  Titus has arrows inscribed to the gods shot into the court, behaviour others read as distraction.

  Madness Psychosis
• Act V, Scene III

  Lucius sentences Aaron to be set breast-deep in earth and starved to death.

  Starvation Nutrition Death Dying

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Write the conversation between Marcus and Titus that night after the burial of Mutius, in which Marcus tries to make his brother see what he has done at the tomb.

• Essay

  Argue whether Titus is truly mad in Acts IV and V, using at least three scenes (the fly, the arrows, the meeting with Tamora as Revenge) as evidence.

• Classroom

  Stage Act II, Scene IV twice: once with Marcus's full lament and once cut to a few lines. Discuss what the long speech adds or takes away.

• Poetry

  Write a short lament in Lavinia's voice, without words she could have spoken, using only the signs and books the play gives her.

Further Reading

• Metamorphoses, Ovid

  Book VI, Tereus and Philomela, the story Lavinia uses to reveal her attackers.

• Thyestes, Seneca

  The Roman tragedy of a revenge banquet that underlies Act V.

• The Spanish Tragedy, Thomas Kyd

  The revenge tragedy that set the fashion Titus follows.

• Shakespeare, Co-Author, Brian Vickers

  Makes the case for George Peele's share in Act I and other scenes.

• Titus Andronicus (Arden Shakespeare, Third Series), Jonathan Bate (ed.)

  Edition with a substantial introduction on sources, date and stage history.

• Titus, Julie Taymor (dir.)

  1999 film with Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange.