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Summary
In the Goth camp, Lucius tells the Goths that he has received news from Rome detailing how much the Romans hate their emperor, and how eagerly they await Lucius’s coming. The Goths are proud to fight alongside the man who was once their enemy, and they promise to follow his lead into battle. Meanwhile, a Goth soldier enters with the fugitive Aaron, who was found along with his baby in an abandoned monastery. Lucius’s impulse is to hang the father and child, letting the child hang first so that the father will have to watch.
The Goths bring a ladder and make Aaron climb it. From that position, he makes a bargain with Lucius to preserve the child in exchange for Aaron’s knowledge of all the horrors that have occurred. When Lucius swears by his gods that he will spare the child, Aaron reveals the child’s parents, Bassianus’s murderers, Lavinia’s rapists, and his own trickery to get Titus’s hand. Lucius is aghast, but the inveterate Moor goes on to list other crimes he has committed in his life, then he claims that he’s only sorry he won’t be able to commit any more. Lucius is so horrified that he has Aaron taken down, claiming hanging is too sweet a death for the Moor. Aaron is gagged so that he will stop speaking. Aemilius enters then with the request from Saturninus for a meeting, and Lucius agrees.
In the second scene, Tamora and her sons appear to Titus in disguise, masquerading as Revenge and her attendants Rape and Murder. She says to Titus, whom she believes to be mad, that she will punish all his enemies if he will convince Lucius to attend a banquet at Titus’s house. Her plan is to sow confusion among the Goths while their new leader, Lucius, is at the banquet. Titus, who has simply been playing at madness all along, agrees on the condition that Revenge leave Rape and Murder (Chiron and Demetrius in disguise) with him. Upon Tamora’s departure, Titus gets his kinsmen to gag and bind the two young Goths. With Lavinia holding the basin to catch their blood, Titus slits their throats. He elaborates on his plan to grind their bones to dust and to make a paste of it with their blood, which he will turn into “coffins,” a word that also meant pie crust. He will then bake Tamora’s sons in their “coffins,” and serve the dish to their mother at the banquet.
Analysis
If Aaron had aroused any sympathy among the audience when he showed paternal instincts back at the beginning of act 4, that sympathy quickly erodes in the opening scene of act 5. Now captured by the Goths, he reveals the extent of his involvement in the cruel plotting against the Andronicus family. At previous moments in the play, Aaron has openly relished his own villainy, mainly through brief asides. Here, however, Shakespeare has given him long, uninterrupted speeches in which to flaunt the horrific details of his crimes. Of course, what’s most disturbing of all—both to Lucius and to the audience—is the degree to which Aaron clearly enjoys his evil doings. He concludes his final speech with these chilling words: “I have done a thousand dreadful things[,] / . . . And nothing grieves me heartily indeed / But that I cannot do then thousand more” (5.1.144–46). With these lines, Aaron confirms that he is something of a manifestation of pure evil. Paternal instincts aside, he is an unrepentant murderer who longs only to perform more villainy. Not knowing what punishment could possibly fit the Moor’s crimes, Lucius temporarily resorts to a gag, bringing an end to his foul speech.
With Aaron now captured, the tides have begun to turn against those who have tormented the Andronicus family. His imminent execution prepares the way for the next scene, where Tamora and her sons appear before Titus in costume. What results is something like a play within a play that draws attention to the play’s theatricality and further amplifies it. Perhaps most significant, however, is the way this costume-show resembles a twisted morality play in which the three Goths each appear as abstractions of the roles they’ve occupied throughout the play. In this way, their disguises don’t conceal so much as reveal them: Tamora is the very face of Revenge, just as Chiron and Demetrius are both perfect avatars of Rape and Murder. In wearing masks that unintentionally show their true faces, the Goths make themselves vulnerable to the revenge plot that Titus has in store for them. Titus will, as he puts it, “o’erreach them in their own devices” (5.2.146).
As this line indicates, Titus knows exactly what he is doing. Whereas everyone—friends and enemies alike—has assumed that his odd behavior is a sign of madness, it turns out that Titus has had clear intentions all along. Titus has merely allowed others to believe that he’s lost his reason so that they, in turn, will let down their guard. Here he demonstrates the cunning of a seasoned military tactician, and in the end, his plan succeeds. He maintains his charade of madness throughout the scene, allowing Tamora to believe that she has tricked him. Ultimately, she and her sons are the ones who get duped, which leads directly to their demise. Yet even if Titus hasn’t lost his mind, it’s important to emphasize that, as with Tamora, his lust for revenge has profoundly unbalanced him. Returning to the line quoted above, Titus means it when he says he’ll “o’erreach [the Goths] in their own devices.” Drawing on analogous stories from classical myth, he tells his victims just before cutting their throats: “For worse than Philomel you used my daughter, / And worse than Procne I will be revenged” (5.2.198–99).
