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Tamora begins the play by losing her status as the queen of Goths, having been captured during Titus’s most recent campaign against Scythia. Upon arriving in Rome, Titus heaps humiliation on Tamora’s defeat by ritually executing her eldest son and paying no heed to her heartrending pleas for mercy. This act alone sparks Tamora’s desire for vengeance against both Titus and his sons, whom she views as being complicit in the barbarous murder of her son. Though she begins the play in a state of powerlessness, she ascends to great power by the end of the first act, when Saturninus, having been spurned by Lavinia, chooses her as his empress. Her newfound status emboldens her to play out her intense desire for vengeance against the Andronicus family. With the help of Aaron, her secret lover and chief plotter of revenge, Tamora sets out to “massacre them all” (1.1.459). The lust Tamora displays for vengeance will define her throughout the rest of the play, culminating in the scene where she appears before Titus disguised as the embodiment of “Revenge.”
What is most remarkable and chilling about Tamora is the extremity of her ruthlessness. Not content with an idea of justice that would claim an eye for an eye, Tamora’s lust for vengeance requires the violent destruction of the entire family. She demonstrates as much in act 2. Even though her conflict is supposedly with Titus and his sons, her first move is to ensure Lavinia’s devastation—initially by participating in the murder of her husband Bassianus, and then by encouraging her sons to rape and mutilate Lavinia herself. By helping to make Lavinia an archetypal victim, Tamora strikes straight to Titus’s heart. Through this act Tamora also arguably liberates herself from her own sense of victimhood. In doing so, she becomes symbolically associated with the fierce protectiveness of a “dam”—a mother bear or tiger protecting her cubs. Yet the way her desire for vengeance is bound up with her lascivious relationship with Aaron also marks her as a symbolic projection of misogynistic fears about female sexuality. Thus, as her ruthlessness takes hold, Tamora also becomes linked to the image of a tigress. Ultimately, the success of her revenge plot leads to overconfidence, which leads ineluctably to her death at Titus’s hands.
