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I am the sea. Hark how her sighs doth flow!
She is the weeping welkin, I the Earth.
Then must my sea be movèd with her sighs;
Then must my Earth with her continual tears
Become a deluge, overflowed and drowned,
Forwhy my bowels cannot hide her woes
But like a drunkard must I vomit them. (3.1.230–36)
As tragedy begins to mount for the Andronici, Titus gives himself over to grief. Ever the pragmatist, Marcus councils his brother to “let reason govern thy lament” (3.1.223). Titus, however, prefers to wax woeful and express the sheer magnitude of his grief. In this passage, the metaphors are as grand as the burden is heavy. Titus conjures an image of himself as the sea overflowing from the surge of Lavinia’s tears. But just as soon as he establishes himself as the sea, he changes the metaphor so that he is now the earth, subsumed by the “deluge” of her grief. The passage then ends with Titus likening himself to a “drunkard” who cannot stomach all the “woes” he’s been forced to drink: he must “vomit them.” The scale as well as the confusion of the images reflects just how unbearable grief can feel.
Thou map of woe, that thus dost talk in signs,
When thy poor heart beats with outrageous beating,
Thou canst not strike it thus to make it still.
Wound it with sighing, girl, kill it with groans;
Or get some little knife between thy teeth
And just against thy heart make thou a hole,
That all the tears that thy poor eyes let fall
May run into that sink and, soaking in,
Drown the lamenting fool in sea-salt tears. (3.2.12–20)
After the accumulation of tragedies that piled up in the first scene of act 3, the remaining Andronici retire to Titus’s house to recover. Sitting around the banquet table, the family listens to Titus as he continues to wallow in his grief. With these lines, he once again addresses Lavinia’s plight, referring to his daughter’s disfigured body as a “map of woe.” With her tongue cut out, Lavinia is reduced to “talk[ing] in signs”—signs that those around her find difficult to decipher. Here Titus interprets her sign language as an expression of grief made inexpressible due to her lack of speech. Since she cannot release her pain verbally, he councils her to sigh and groan the grief away, or perhaps stab a hole in her chest where the “sea-salt tears” can pool around the heart and drown that “lamenting fool.”
My heart is not compact of flint nor steel,
Nor can I utter all our bitter grief,
But floods of tears will drown my oratory
And break my utterance even in the time
When it should move you to attend me most
And force you to commiseration.
Here’s Rome’s young captain. Let him tell the tale,
While I stand by and weep to hear him speak. (5.3.89–96)
In the play’s final scene, after all the blood has been shed and the stage is strewn with corpses, Marcus stands before the people of Rome to explain the carnage. His words indicate how “all our bitter grief” has generated “floods of tears” that now “drown his oratory” and hamper his ability to speak. These lines come at the end of a passage where he has discussed the need “to knit . . . / These broken limbs again into one body” (5.3.71–73). Yet, unable to speak to the enormity of the tragic circumstances himself, he leaves it to Lucius to do this work by becoming the voice of the empire—to speak, as their ancestor Aeneas once did, “with his solemn tongue” (5.3.82). Though Marcus has indeed been through a lot of pain, it’s also possible to read his expression of overwhelming grief as a political maneuver. If he can rouse the sympathies of ordinary Romans, not only will they pardon the Andronicus family, but they will also put an Andronicus on the throne.
