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Titus Andronicus, a Roman general, returns from his most recent war campaign with only four of twenty-five sons left. He has captured Tamora, queen of the Goths, along with her three sons and Aaron the Moor. In obedience to Roman rituals, Titus sacrifices her eldest son as retribution for his own dead sons, an act that earns him Tamora’s unending hatred and her promise of revenge.
Meanwhile, Titus’s triumphant return to Rome occurs at a moment of political instability, as the late emperor’s sons, Saturninus and Bassianus, compete for the throne. Titus’s brother Marcus, a tribune, offers Titus the throne, but Titus refuses on account of his age. He endorses Saturninus instead. Saturninus shows his gratitude by offering to marry Titus’s daughter, Lavinia. However, Lavinia is already betrothed to Bassianus, who steals her away with the help of Titus’s sons. One of those sons, Mutius, dies by Titus’s hand when he bars his father from pursuing Lavinia.
In Lavinia’s stead, Saturninus makes Tamora his empress, which emboldens her to fashion a plot to massacre Titus and his family. Although she and the emperor make a show of establishing peace with the Andronici, she secretly schemes with her lover, Aaron, to have two of Titus’s sons framed for the murder of Bassianus. When Titus’s third son, Lucius, attempts to intervene on their behalf, he’s sent into exile. Meanwhile, Tamora and Aaron urge Chiron and Demetrius to rape Lavinia, after which they sever her hands and cut out her tongue so she can’t incriminate them. With two sons sentenced to death, the third sent from Rome, and his daughter horrifically mutilated, Titus succumbs to grief. Then, becoming a victim to another scheme, he cuts off his own hand to save his condemned sons, but they are executed anyway. Each new misfortune hits the aged and tired Titus with heavier impact. Eventually, he begins to act oddly, and everyone assumes that he has lost his mind.
Tamora tries to capitalize on his seeming madness by pretending to be the figure of Revenge. She goes to his house with her sons, who are disguised as Rape and Murder, to offer him an avenue for retribution against Tamora and her consort. But Titus is not actually mad, and he uses the opportunity to manipulate Tamora into leaving her sons behind. Once she’s gone, he kills them and bakes them into pies. In the play’s gruesome final scene, he feeds these pies to his mother and to Saturninus. Then a rash of killings ensues. Titus begins by killing Lavinia to put an end to her shame. Then, after revealing the grotesque main ingredient of his gory pies, Titus kills Tamora. Saturninus then kills Titus. Finally, Lucius, who has returned to Rome at the head of the vengeful Goth army, ends the violence by killing Saturninus.
The only people left alive at the play’s end are Marcus, Lucius, Young Lucius, and Aaron. Marcus explains to the citizens of Rome how all this carnage came to pass, then, with the people’s agreement, he proclaims Lucius the new emperor. Lucius, who had captured Aaron in act 4, has the unrepentant villain buried alive, and he orders Tamora’s corpse thrown to the beasts.
