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By S. Clarke Hulse’s count, Titus Andronicus is a play with “14 killings, 9 of them on stage, 6 severed members, 1 rape (or 2 or 3, depending on how you count), 1 live burial, 1 case of insanity and 1 of cannibalism—an average of 5.2 atrocities per act, or one for every 97 lines.” Reviewer Mike Gene Wallace adds, “This is a great play. We’re talking fourteen dead bodies, kung-fu, sword-fu, spear-fu, dagger-fu, arrow-fu, pie-fu, animal screams on the soundtrack, heads roll, hands roll, tongues roll, nine and a half quarts of blood, and a record-breaking 94 on the vomit meter.” In a certain sense, there’s not much more to say: Titus Andronicus is a nonstop parade of abominations.
Shakespeare sets up the horrific violence of the play in the opening act, which consists of one long scene. This scene establishes the political context, in which Rome has long been at war with the Goths of Scythia. Yet the political conflict between Rome and Scythia quickly becomes personalized through a brief and violent interaction between Titus and Tamora, the captured Goth queen. With cold formality and according to Roman tradition, Titus orders the execution of Tamora’s eldest son. He betrays no emotion when faced with her pleas for mercy, showing that Rome, symbolically associated with honor and civility, may in fact be more barbarous than the Romans consider the Goths. And indeed, with this act of ritual sacrifice, Titus has set the stage for his family’s downfall.
Yet the stage isn’t yet fully set, for there is a second political conflict that arises soon after Titus executes Tamora’s son. Whereas the first political tension is an external one between the Roman Empire and Scythia, the second is internal to Rome. While Titus has been away at war, the emperor has died. Hence, another key feature of act 1 is the question of who will succeed the late emperor. The two candidates for succession are the emperor’s sons: Saturninus and Bassianus. Whereas Saturninus is the older son and hence the traditional choice, Bassianus has proven his virtue, which makes him a worthy challenger. But before a successor can be chosen, the victorious Titus makes his grand entrance. His achievements abroad have won him the hearts of everyday Romans, who prefer him over either of the late emperor’s sons. Titus diffuses the nascent tension by politely refusing the nomination and endorsing Saturninus.
Despite seeming to be settled, this political tension becomes personal when Saturninus extends an olive branch to Titus. In exchange for his endorsement, Saturninus offers to marry Titus’s daughter, Lavinia. Yet although such an arrangement might establish peaceful relations with Titus, it’s also a calculated dig at Saturninus’s brother and competitor, since Bassianus is already betrothed to Lavinia. This act also enrages Lavinia’s brothers, who are quick to aid her escape with Bassianus, which in turn gets them in trouble with their father. Titus, ever loyal to the Roman cause, ends up murdering one of his sons for his perceived crime against the empire. Though Titus performs this act of violence to express his devotion to Rome, it’s a shock to everyone, and it provides yet another ominous sign of the imminent downfall of the Andronici.
By the end of the first act, then, a knotty complex of political and personal tensions has been established, and the bloodthirsty spiral of revenge is set to begin. Tamora inaugurates this spiral in a chilling aside to Saturninus, where she vows to bring destruction down not just on Titus, but on his entire family: “I’ll find a day to massacre them all” (1.1.459). And so, in act 2, Tamora’s massacre begins. There we meet Aaron, a Moorish man of dark skin who is her secret lover as well as her chief plotter of mischief. It is Aaron who concocts the plan to murder Bassianus and frame two of Titus’s remaining sons for the crime. Likewise, it is Aaron who encourages Chiron and Demetrius to stop fighting over Lavinia and channel their violent lust together, resulting in her horrific rape and disfigurement. Already by the end of act 2, the audience can sense the terrifying logic of revenge at work. Far exceeding the formal constraints of justice, revenge functions through a constant intensification that quickly spirals out of control.
Act 3 transitions from Tamora’s revenge plot to Titus’s counterplot. Significantly, the third act opens by echoing the first. Just as Tamora pled for her son’s life in the opening scene, here Titus begs the Roman tribunes to spare the lives of his sons, Martius and Quintius, who have been sentenced to death for their alleged involvement in Bassianus’s murder. And just as Titus met Tamora’s pleas with cold silence, so too do the tribunes essentially ignore Titus. Meanwhile, Titus’s last living son, Lucius, is forced to go into exile for attempting to defend his brothers. As if this weren’t enough grief to heap on an ailing man, Marcus then shows up with Lavinia, and Titus must contend with the mutilation of her body and the desecration of her chastity. Then comes Aaron with yet another plot, convincing Titus to cut off his hand to save his sons, only to have the sons executed and their heads delivered to Titus directly. This excess of tragedy leaves Titus emotionally broken. In a string of affecting speeches, he waxes poetic about the overwhelm of grief until his brother, Marcus, argues that the time has come to act. Titus agrees, yet he can’t yet formulate a proper plan.
In act 4, however, Titus sets the mechanisms of his counterplot in motion. The instigation for his counterplot comes in the opening scene, where Lavinia finds a way to communicate that she was raped and mutilated by Tamora’s sons, Chiron and Demetrius. Armed with this knowledge, Titus embarks on a smear campaign against Saturninus that’s designed both to infuriate the emperor and convince him—and everyone else, for that matter—that Titus has lost his mind. As with the other instances of plotting in the play, Titus doesn’t plainly announce that these are his goals. Rather, Shakespeare allows the plot to play out before us, revealing its cruel mechanisms in due time. Thus, we in the audience initially believe that Titus may indeed have lost his mind. However, we are convinced otherwise in the opening scene of act 5, when Tamora and her sons appear before Titus disguised as embodiments of Revenge, Rape, and Murder. Tamora believes that she can use Titus’s madness to manipulate him into luring Lucius back to Rome for a feast. During his time in exile, Lucius has managed to organize the Goths against their former queen and move their army against Rome. Tamora’s plot aims to make the Goth army vulnerable.
Yet Titus, ever the tactician, allows Tamora to believe that she’s duped him, all the while manipulating her into leaving her sons behind as she rushes off to attend to business. Titus then captures Chiron and Demetrius, executes them, and bakes them into pies that he serves as the main dish at the feast he hosts for Tamora, Saturninus, and Lucius. The rest of the play seems already written before it plays out. The vengeful conflict between plot and counterplot conspires to leave nearly everyone dead on the stage. With Rome now headless, Lucius, who has already brokered peace with the Goths, becomes emperor. His first act as ruler is to dole out an appropriate punishment for Aaron, who has been captured and revealed as the chief architect behind the bloodbath we’ve just witnessed. Lucius’s sense of justice marks an end to the spiral of revenge and restores a modicum of civility to Rome. Yet the audience is still left wondering if the empire will truly be able to recover. The resonances of the violence we’ve just witnessed aren’t so easily resolved, as indicated in Lucius’s bitter last words, in which he vengefully condemns Tamora’s corpse to the merciless beasts of the wilderness.
