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Summary
Titus entreats the judges who are leading his sons away to spare their lives for the sake of his war efforts and age. They ignore him, and he prostrates himself upon the ground, saying that he will rain tears on the earth so that it will refuse to drink the blood of his sons. Lucius enters with his sword drawn and tells his father, “You recount your sorrows to a stone” (3.1.29). To this, Titus replies that stones are softer than the tribunes of Rome. Lucius unsuccessfully attempts to free his brothers and is banished. Titus calls him a lucky man for escaping the “wilderness of tigers” (3.1.55) that Rome has become. Marcus enters with the ravished Lavinia, and all break down in tears, with Titus calling relentlessly for them to “look upon her” (3.1.67).
Aaron then breaks in on the scene with a message: if Titus cuts off one of his own hands, then Emperor Saturninus will spare his sons. Marcus and Lucius argue that one of them should sacrifice their hand instead. However, when Titus sends them off for an axe, he gets Aaron to cut off his hand. As Aaron indicates in a sly aside, his message turns out to be a trick. Soon after Titus has given his hand, a messenger returns with the severed heads of Quintus and Martius, along with “thy hand in scorn to thee sent back” (3.2.242). Marcus, whose grief now waxes into rage, urges that Titus must take action in pursuit of vengeance. Titus, meanwhile, not having “another tear to shed” (3.2.271), begins to laugh. Even so, he pledges to seek revenge and sends Lucious off to raise an army of Goths against Tamora and Saturninus.
In the second scene, Titus, Marcus, Lavinia, and Lucius’s son, Young Lucius, have a small banquet where Titus feeds his daughter while attempting to decipher the sorrow behind her mimed actions. For example, he understands that she will have no drink but her tears. When Marcus kills a fly, this causes Titus to wax sympathetic for the parents of the fly. Marcus humors him by saying that the fly is black like Aaron the Moor. Titus reacts with delight, which convinces Marcus that he is mad. Titus then takes Lavinia and Young Lucius away to read.
Analysis
Act 2 concluded with a display of excess, in terms of both the extremity of Lavinia’s physical ravishment and mutilation and the language used to describe these abuses. As act 3 opens, what may have previously been taken as theatrical excess now takes on greater significance, as Titus’s woes begin to overwhelm him. Indeed, the first half of act 3 consists of a great deal of poetic lamentation, as Titus and his kin struggle to come to terms with the efficiency and scope of the horror visited upon them. In their shared mourning, they create what Titus calls “a sympathy [i.e., harmony] of woe” (3.1.150). Titus’s lamentations are grandiose in their imagery, communicating the scope of his sorrow. At one point, he likens Lavinia to “the weeping welkin [i.e., sky]” and himself to “the earth” (3.1.231), before concluding: “Then must my earth with her continual tears / Become a deluge, overflowed and drowned” (3.1.233–34). The image of drowning in a sea of tears captures the overall gravitas of the scene.
Although the emotional tenor of the scene is one of lamentation and mourning, the larger political implications are also stark. As Titus’s pleas fail to win the tribunes’ mercy, he’s forced to reckon with the fact that his contributions to the defense of Rome haven’t guaranteed him the honor he’s merited. And not just that, but Rome is no longer the bastion of civilization he once fought for. As Titus points out to Lucius as he continues his heartrending speech long after the tribunes have departed, the men who govern the empire are harder than stone: “Therefore I tell my sorrows to the stones, / Who, though they cannot answer my distress, / Yet in some sort they are better than the tribunes” (3.1.37–39). But whereas the tribunes are heartless in their stoicism, Titus also indicates a greater threat to Rome’s reputation. With the ascension to power of Saturninus and his empress, Tamora, Rome has become, in his famous phrase, “but a wilderness of tigers” (3.1.55). Through this bestial imagery, Titus unwittingly confirms what the audience had already witnessed in act 1, where the sacraments of Roman law proved more savage than the supposedly barbarous Goths.
Amid the Andronicus family’s mounting woe, Marcus is the first to turn his mind to vengeance. More than once he cautions Titus against succumbing to his grief. Instead, he insists that the time has come to act and to begin plotting their revenge against the emperor and empress. We can understand this as a kind of “counterplotting” that responds to the plotting conceived and carried out by Aaron, who in this scene enacts yet another nefarious plot to humiliate and devastate Titus. For his part, Titus, who claims to have cried himself dry of tears, does eventually turn his mind to revenge. In this way, the opening scene of act 3 lays the foundation for the next round of vengeance. And just as Tamora’s vengeance against the Andronici has far exceeded any concept of justice, Titus’s will do the same. The all-consuming cycle already in the process of spinning out of control can only end with more death. Although the details of Titus’s revenge plot have yet to be revealed, the audience can already sense the blood-drenched tragedy that’s soon to unfold.
After all the terrible woe of the first scene in act 3, the second scene proves quite moving and even contains a bit of mordant humor. For the first time in the play, Titus takes on the role of cook, which he does to feed his wounded daughter, Lavinia. (Later, of course, he will reprise this role to feed a horrendous feast to Tamora and her court.) This marks the only time in the play when eating is portrayed as a natural and even nurturing act, as opposed to the ravenous, corrupt appetites portrayed in other parts of the play. It’s also notable that Lavinia’s body becomes yet more closely associated with a text in this scene. Just as Marcus read her body as if it were a text back in act 2, scene 4, here she is described as a “map of woe” (3.2.12) whose sign language must be interpreted. From her mute motions, Titus says that he will “wrest an alphabet” (3.2.44). The fact that this key character in the play has been reduced to a language of gesticulation is a powerful reminder that this is a play, and it is meant to be staged.
