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Titus Andronicus represents Shakespeare’s first recorded attempt at writing a tragedy. This fact, along with the perceived impoverishment of the play’s language, has led many critics in the centuries following Shakespeare’s death not just to denounce the play, but to deny that Shakespeare wrote it at all. The seventeenth-century English dramatist Edward Ravenscroft offers a typical example of this view in the introduction to his 1687 adaptation of the play: “I have been told by some anciently conversant with the stage, that it was not originally his [Shakespeare’s], but brought by a private author to be acted, and he only gave some Master-touches to one or two of the principal parts of characters; this I am apt to believe, because ‘tis the most incorrect and indigested piece in all his works; it seems rather a heap of Rubbish than a structure.” Yet despite the attempts of Ravenscroft and others to uncouple Shakespeare’s name from the play, there is little doubt of its authorship. Francis Meres names Shakespeare as the play’s author in his landmark book Palladis Tamia (1598), which provides the first-ever critical account of the Bard’s work. And if that weren’t evidence enough, Titus Andronicus is included in First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays.
Perhaps one of the reasons Titus Andronicus has sparked such contention rests on its resistance to easy categorization. Portraying events supposedly derived from the history of the late Roman Empire, but which are entirely fictitious, the play flirts with the genre of the history play without satisfying that genre’s minimum requirement of being based on historical figures. Likewise, the play bears some elements of a tragedy, but the revenge plots that drive it render its conclusion less cathartic than in any of Shakespeare’s later tragedies. That said, the so-called “revenge tragedy” was itself a well-known and much-produced genre. Plays such as Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy were landmark revenge tragedies that lit up the Elizabethan stage. On many counts, Titus Andronicus follows the conventions established by these and other revenge tragedies. However, in its deliberate excesses, the play may well be less an imitation of the Elizabethan revenge drama than a deliberate parody of that form.
In recent decades, many critics have taken a more positive view of Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy. The scholar Marjorie Garber, for instance, finds in this play not a hackneyed display of an amateur dramatist, but rather the foundations of many characters, themes, and plot devices that will define his later, greater tragedies. Also characteristic is the way Shakespeare seems to have pieced together the key elements of the play from a variety of sources, adapting them as he saw fit to create a unique and original work. Perhaps the most obvious source material for Titus Andronicus is Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a copy of which text appears in the play’s third act, when Lavinia opens it to the story of Philomela. Philomela is a figure from mythology who was raped by her sister’s husband, King Tereus. To ensure that she could reveal his crime to her sister, Procne, Tereus cut out Philomela’s tongue. But Philomela still finds a way to communicate with Procne, and the two women conspire to kill Tereus’s son, bake him into a pie, and serve it to his father. It is this story that informs Lavinia’s tragic arc and Titus’s revenge against Tamora. References to many other figures from history and myth help fill out the details.
Regardless of what later critics have thought about the play, it’s evident that the public of Shakespeare’s own time relished it. Scholarship on the Elizabethan era testifies that contemporary theatergoers had especially bloody tastes, and that Titus Andronicus was received with great applause, remaining a favorite for over a decade. Though certainly not one of Shakespeare’s most accomplished plays, it nevertheless displays uniquely Shakespearean traits that needed only to mature before forming the foundation of his many masterpieces.
