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Summary
Away from the hunting party, Aaron buries a bag of gold under a tree. Tamora finds him and urges him to make love to her. However, Aaron is ruled by vengeance and asks her to deliver a letter to Saturninus instead. The couple is spotted in their physical intimacy by Bassianus and Lavinia, who proceed to insult Tamora and her dark-skinned lover. Lavinia is surprisingly coarse in her use of derogatory language. Chiron and Demetrius enter and stab Bassianus to death in defense of their mother’s honor. When Tamora wants to stab Lavinia too, her sons stop her, wishing to keep her alive until they have satisfied their lust for her. Tamora assents, ignoring Lavinia’s heartrending request that Tamora kill her immediately instead.
Aaron leads Titus’s sons Quintus and Martius to where he claims a panther is asleep. They both fall into the pit where Chiron and Demetrius left Bassianus’s body. Aaron then leads Saturninus to the pit, where Tamora hands him the letter Aaron had previously written, and which incriminates Quintus and Martius as Bassianus’s murderers. The bag of gold that Aaron buried is conveniently uncovered and taken as proof that Titus’s sons were going to pay a huntsman to do the deed. Titus tries to free his sons, but to no avail; they are taken away by Saturninus to await execution.
Chiron and Demetrius enter with a ravished Lavinia, whose hands and tongue they have cut off to prevent her from revealing the identity of those who raped and mutilated her. They insult her before they leave her alone in the wilderness. The wretched girl is discovered by Marcus. He is profoundly moved by the sight of Lavinia’s suffering. Discovering that both her hands and tongues have been hewn from her body, he delivers a long speech likening her to Philomel, a tragic figure who appears in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Like Lavinia, she was raped and then silenced by having her tongue removed. Lavinia tries to flee in shame from her uncle, but he stops her and decides to bring her to her father, even though he is sure that such a sight will blind Titus.
Analysis
In the latter half of act 2, the vengeance Tamora had vowed to exact on the Andronici becomes a violent reality. By the end of the fourth scene, two of Titus’s remaining sons are implicated in the murder of Bassianus, and Lavinia, now deprived of her new husband, is left raped and physically mutilated. All this comes about through the malicious plotting of Aaron the Moor. It’s worth noting that the concept of a plot plays a significant role throughout act 2. Aaron first introduced this theatrical trope back in act 2, scene 1, when he told Chiron and Demetrius that they “but plot [their] deaths” by fighting over Lavinia. Now he discusses his own bit of plotting. Though he doesn’t explain the details in advance, he draws our attention to a bag of gold he’ll use to, as he puts it, “beget / A very excellent piece of villainy” (2.3.6–7). Aaron’s cagey reference to his plot prepares the audience to expect violence to unfold shortly. And so it does. By the end of scene 3, we realize that the gold Aaron’s planting will turn out to be the reward mentioned in a forged letter meant to incriminate Titus’s sons in Bassianus’s death.
Although Aaron had already revealed his villainy in the first scene of act 2, it is here that we begin to suspect that this character is a force of irredeemable evil. He puts the matter plainly as he rebuffs Tamora’s desire to make love and redirects her to deliver his fabricated letter: “Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand, / Blood and revenge are hammering in my head” (2.3.38–39). For modern audiences, Aaron’s pure evil coexists uneasily with his racial identity as a dark-skinned man. Like Othello, Aaron is a Moor—that is, an inhabitant of a region of the Roman Empire that is today part of northern Africa. He references his own hair as being “woolly” (2.3.34), and when Bassianus and Lavinia arrive to torment Tamora, they draw explicit attention to her lover’s dark skin. It’s important to note that early modern ideas of race can’t easily be conflated with the racial discourse of our times. Even so, dark skin was often understood as a signifier of ugliness and sin during Shakespeare’s time. Bassianus echoes these contemporary racializing stereotypes when he describes Aaron as a “swarthy Cimmerian” whose “body’s hue” is “spotted, detested, and abominable” (2.3.72–74).
The final scene of act 2 begins with the horrifying stage directions: “Enter . . . Lavinia, her hands cut off, and her tongue cut out, and ravished.” If we imagine the techniques of the Elizabethan theater might have used to depict this poor girl as having been “ravished” (e.g., with fake blood and stumps), it is easy to see why some critics characterize Titus Andronicus as a play of uncontrolled excess. Yet the excess is only partly about the play’s physical violence. As act 2’s final scene demonstrates, the excess also takes place on the level of language. Chiron and Demetrius speak gleefully in coarse couplets that not only explain to the audience what they have done to Lavinia, but which also add literal insult to injury. Then there is Marcus’s extended speech, which deploys poetic language for the purpose of further revealing the extent of Lavinia’s mutilation. The language here is meant to stir the audience’s emotions, goading us into complicity by inviting us to cheer on the rage-fueled spiral of vengeance already playing out.
