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Titus Andronicus is a seasoned military general who is widely respected by ordinary Romans for his achievements in the long war against Scythia. So deep is their respect for him that, upon his most recent return from victory, they want him to take the throne. But Titus has been aged by his experience, and he has also lost most of his sons in battle. Too exhausted to perform this honored duty, and identifying more as a soldier than a politician, Titus politely refuses the nomination and endorses the most obvious second choice: the previous emperor’s eldest son, Saturninus. Yet despite his nimble political maneuvering upon returning to Rome, Titus makes two fatal moves, both of which demonstrate his too-rigid loyalty to the empire. The first fatal move is his ritual execution of Tamora’s son. Though sanctified by Roman law, the merciless barbarity of this ritual killing provokes Tamora’s lust for vengeance. The second fatal move comes when Titus’s sons support Lavinia’s refusal of Saturninus’s marriage proposal. Titus interprets their action not as a defense of their sister’s honor, but rather as an affront to the empire, which leads him to murder one of them. This debacle shocks and aggravates Saturninus, setting him against Titus.
Ironically, then, Titus’s acts of loyalty to Rome ultimately spell his undoing at the hands of the empire. By choosing Tamora as his queen, Saturninus emboldens her to act out her horrific revenge plot, which is stewarded by her secret lover, Aaron. Their plot heaps unimaginable grief upon Titus, overwhelming him with sorrow and reducing him to the brink of madness. Yet just as the Roman state has both literally and figuratively dismembered his family, Titus formulates a counterplot with an equal and opposite goal—that is, the literal and figurative dismemberment of the Roman state. In this way, killing is met with more killing, which leads to a predictable spiral in which all the main players end up dead. But even though the logic of revenge that drives Titus in the play’s final acts may be predictable, the specific machinations of his counterplot aren’t. Indeed, one of the grim pleasures of the play is the way Titus reveals his apparent devolution into madness as a strategy of psychological warfare. Essentially, he convinces his enemies he’s lost his mind so that they let down their guard and make themselves vulnerable. In this way, Titus remains a consummate military tactician to the bitter end.
