Titus Andronicus
Lecture Notes

Historical
- legendary relation of Britain & Rome
- London as new city / Rome as ideal

Elizabethan study of classics
- Humanism
- Latin mythology (Ovid, Metamorphoses)
- Shakespeare's education

Violence in Elizabethan society
- public torture & executions
- bull & bear baitings
- proximity of theatres & "bear gardens"

Popular revenge play genre
- Greek tragedy / destiny / curse of family
- Senecan tragedy
- Thomas Kyd / "ur-Hamlet" / The Spanish Tragedy
- assault on family / justified retaliation / feigned madness
TA as cartoon for later tragedies of character in extremis (Lear, Othello)

Principle of retaliation
- lex talionis
- Biblical "eye for an eye" = principle of balance as well as revenge (license)
- in civilized societies, state takes over role of retribution
-- but what if chief of state is the criminal (e.g. Hamlet)?

Aesthetics of revenge
- individual actors & families subservient to revenge action
- revenge plot
- plot as (1) criminal design & (2) dramatic script
- avenger as artist

Titus Andronicus

stage sketch c. 1590

1.1 staging of ritual opposition
- paters & fraters fighting over Mother of Cities
- defense becomes violence
- patrilineal primogeniture: "successive title" / "father's honours"

1.1.92-103 ("O sacred receptacle ...")
- symbolic tomb / womb
- Roman v. pagan beliefs
- first act of revenge, which Titus terms "sacrifice"
- issue of rhetoric & power: Rome v. Goth, authority v. barbarism
- definitions of violence (click here)

English Shakespeare Company production logo (2000)

1.1.128-29 ("Away with him ...")
1.1.142-47 ("See, lord and father ...")
- metaphors of sacrifice

1.1.130-31 ("O cruel, irreligious piety! ...")
- Rome vs. barbarism

1.1.150-56 ("In peace and honor ...')
= model of Latin elegy

1.1.185-89 candidatus & body politic
- imagery of woman & dismemberment

1.1.272-292 ("Thanks, sweet Lavinia ...")
- violent eruption shatters apparent political solution of succession
- intra-familial violence: brothers, father-son
- Roman authority & power built on ritualized violence (war, "rape")
- barbarian Gothic violence looks to be other but in fact is native
- Titus kills his son for interfering

1.1.349-354 ("Traitors, away ...")
- issue of sympathy for Titus
- tragic form of play
- Titus suffers from his own rash actions, which proceed from violent patriarchal virtue:
-- one ethic opposes another

1.1.399-406 ("So, Bassianus ...")
- definition of "rape"
- brothers fighting over woman

1.1.462 ("Titus, I am incorporate in Rome")
- corporeal metaphor
- shifting image of (feminine) Rome
early version of Shakespearean split between idealized daughter & demonized mother
- Rome as "wilderness of tigers": city as jungle / order as wildness

2.1.1ff ("Now climbeth Tamora ...")
Aaron's soliloquy
- clumsy, conventional, clichéd speech
- Shakespeare as journeyman poet
- shadowy stock character
- black villain (see 3.1.202-05)
Elizabethan ignorance of Africa ("the Moor")

2.1.26ff ("Enter Chiron and Demetrius [S.D.]")
Goth brothers quarrel in parody of opening Roman dispute
- barbarism underlying prior "honorable" quarrel

2.3.42-45 ("This is the day ...')
story of Tereus and Philomela
- "the voice of the shuttle" [link]

2.3.10-29 ("My lovely Aaron ...")
2 opposite versions of place

2.3.92-115 ("Have I not reason ...")
Elizabethan stage as "empty stage" (narrative construction)
- locus amoenus v. locus horribilis

2.3.198ff ("What? Art thou fallen? ...")
"What subtle hole is this ...?"
- poetry describing horror

Marcus & Lavinia, Mary Worth Company production (1989)

2.4 ("Enter ... with Lavinia ..." [S.D.])
problem of staging Lavinia [Study Question #4]
- realistic or symbolic? dramatic or poetic?
- collision of object & description

2.4.16-32 ("Speak, gentle niece ...")
Ovidian metaphors & bloody body

3.1.92-135 ("For now I stand ...")
Titus as tragic hero
- center of violence & loss
- Lavinia = mute victim (object) / Titus = heroic, speaking victim (subject)

3.1.252-287 ("When will this fearful slumber have an end?" to Exeunt)
- dream / madness / revenge ...

4.2.172-180 ("Now to the Goths ...')
Aaron as father
- example of 2-dimensional character briefly assuming 3rd dimension

Tereus discovers he has eaten his son (Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 6)

5.1.121-44 ("What, canst thou say ...")
Aaron returns to conventional villain
- prior instance of Marlowe's Barabas in The Jew of Malta

5.2.166-205 ("Enter Titus ... [S.D.]")
imagery of bloody banquet
- classical instances of Philomela (Ovid) & Thyestes (Seneca)

Page last updated: April 12, 2005
Send comments to: Professor David Willbern