payment page
Numerous early critics disliked Titus Andronicus so greatly that they attempted to demonstrate that Shakespeare couldn’t have been the author. Scrutinizing everything from vocabulary to meter, they aimed to show that the great Bard, who had written such gripping tragedies as Hamlet and King Lear, could never have penned such a lowly revenge tragedy. Yet all the historical evidence makes it clear that Shakespeare did indeed write this play. Which means that instead of asking, Did Shakespeare really write it?, the real question might be, In what ways is this play Shakespearean? Framed in this way, it immediately becomes clear that Titus Andronicus already exhibits many of the character types, themes, plot devices, and rhetorical motifs that will define Shakespeare’s later tragedies. To take just one example, the title character is a figure who resembles Lear both in his age and his early miscalculations. Similarly, it’s worth noting how Shakespeare employs the meta-theatrical motif of plotting as a key element in the play, using the unfolding of the play itself to draw attention to its own theatricality. Many other resonances show that Titus Andronicus should absolutely be studied alongside the Bard’s other plays—if for no other reason that it helps show how Shakespeare became Shakespeare.
There is indeed a very heavy emphasis in Titus Andronicus on the reading and writing of texts. Again and again, characters show up with letters, books, scrolls, messages, and maps that must be read and made sense of. And in most cases, these various texts are intended to deceive, often with fatal consequences. For example, the forged letter Tamora presents to Saturninus convinces the emperor that Titus’s sons killed his brother, which leads to their execution. Meanwhile, Lavinia, who loses both hands and her tongue in the second act, spends the rest of the play reduced to a gesticulating figure whose physical pantomime becomes a language unto itself. As such, her body becomes a text to be read. Ultimately, she communicates the nature of the crimes committed against her by fishing out her nephew’s copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and turning to the story of Philomela. Then, taking a staff between her teeth and guiding it with her forearms, she manages to inscribe the names of her rapists in the sand. In the play as a whole, then, reading and writing serve as methods both for encoding deceit and revealing truth.
At first glance, Titus Andronicus operates in a gray zone between history and tragedy. It nods at the history play, and the Roman history play in particular, in that it takes place in late Imperial Rome. However, Titus Andronicus isn’t a history because it’s entirely fictional. As such, it’s better classified as a tragedy, since the entire play is organized around the tragic downfall of Titus and his family. This designation also makes sense insofar as the play contains many of the key themes and devices that Shakespeare will develop more fully in later tragedies such as King Lear and Othello. That said, it’s unusual for a classic tragedy to be so thoroughly organized around the bloodthirsty pursuit of vengeance. In this regard, the best possible genre classification is probably the so-called “revenge tragedy.” This was indeed a popular genre in Shakespeare’s time. 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.
