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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Act IV, Scene I

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

• Act IV, Scene III

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

• Act V, Scene III

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