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The Unstoppable Cycle of Vengeance
As a revenge tragedy, it will come as no surprise that the key theme of Titus Andronicus relates to vengeance and the way it can quickly spiral out of control. The chief driver of revenge in the play is familial grief. When Titus orders the ritual execution of Tamora’s eldest son in retribution for the sons he lost in battle, he does so while ignoring her desperate plea for mercy. The cold formality of the slaying leaves Tamora grief-stricken, humiliated, and instantly wanting revenge. And so, the cycle of violence begins. She and Aaron orchestrate the brutal rape and mutilation of Titus’s daughter, Lavinia. They also kill Bassianus, framing two of Titus’s remaining sons for murder. This act leads to their execution by beheading, but not before they also devise a ruse to get Titus to chop off his own hand. Meanwhile, Titus’s one remaining son is forced into exile. The rapid accumulation of tragedy initially overwhelms Titus. But through the council of his brother Marcus, Titus emerges from his woe to formulate his own revenge counterplot—one that leads ineluctably to the deaths of all the major characters in the play’s gruesome final scene.
Revenge gets its unstoppable drive from a combination of personal and political undercurrents. As suggested in the outline above, the personal undercurrent is characterized by emotional rawness. There is a strong quality of unreason in the desire for revenge, which always exceeds justice. Consider Tamora. After losing a beloved child, she doesn’t seek a just punishment for Titus, which might have been the symmetrical killing of one of his sons. Rather, she pledges “to massacre them all” (1.1.459). Another reason the personal undercurrent of revenge is unstoppable is that it’s often bound up with sexual desire—what Lavinia calls “more-than-killing lust” (2.3.175). The heady mix of sexuality and violence is most obvious in the dynamic between Aaron and Tamora and the way they encourage Chiron and Demetrius to commit acts of sexual violence. Yet there is also a political undercurrent in which revenge is driven from the “outside,” as it were, compelling emotional intensity to ensure the arrival of a new political horizon. Marcus, for instance, repeatedly councils Titus to turn from grief to revenge, in part out of a desire to see the emperor’s seat occupied by an Andronicus. Together with the personal, the political element of revenge makes the cycle of violence truly unstoppable.
The Unbearable Burden of Grief
Grief plays a key thematic role in Titus Andronicus, acting, as it does, as the flip side of revenge. Titus is the play’s undisputed master of the language of grief: he spends much of act 3 developing a tragic poetry of woe that no one else can top. Though family tragedies—and body parts—pile up around him over the course of the third act’s opening scene, the chief object of his mourning is Lavinia. It is her ruined chastity and mutilated beauty that represents the culmination of his woe. To express the scope of his pain, he conjures large-scale metaphors of an overflowing sea of tears and a deluged earth. He also empathizes deeply with Lavinia who, in lieu of speech, he reads as a “map of woe.” Reduced as she is to gesticulations, he 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 and drown that “lamenting fool”—the heart (3.2.20).
Crucially, the unbearable burden of grief relates closely to the play’s thematic emphasis on revenge, in that grief is a key emotional component that drives the desire for vengeance. In Titus’s case, we see this dynamic play out through Marcus’s repeated attempts to steer him away from expressing his grief verbally and instead take action. He councils Titus to “let reason govern thy lament” (3.1.223) and recognize that “now is a time to storm” (3.1.268). Eventually, as Titus’s tears dry up, he follows Marcus’s recommendation and begins his search for “Revenge’s cave” (3.1.275). At this point, Marcus has successfully transformed Titus’s grief into fuel for vengeance. Although Tamora spends less time in the play voicing the burden of her grief, it is equally clear that her lust for vengeance has its origin in woe. The pain she experiences when her eldest son is ritually slain is plainly evident in her desperate pleas for mercy. The unbearable grief caused by this experience becomes the chief driver of her pledge to massacre the entire Andronicus family
The Breakdown of the Body Politic
Titus Andronicus is an unceasing pageant of violence in which the act of dismemberment and the accumulation of body parts symbolizes a larger breakdown of the body politic. The phrase “body politic” has a long history in political theory, stretching back to the Greek philosopher Plato, and to later Athenian orators who first used the phrase, “the body of the state.” This notion of the state as a metaphorical body was revived during the European Renaissance, when the concept became a central component of political theory. The basic idea is that any bounded political entity—whether a state, kingdom, or empire—can be figuratively conceived as a body. The parts of this body are constituted by various individuals and institutions, the most important being the “head” (e.g., a monarch) and the “arms” (e.g., a military). The metaphor the body politic remains part of our political language today, as we continue to refer to presidents and prime ministers as “heads of state.” It is precisely this language that becomes key in the play’s opening scene, where Marcus compels Titus to “help . . . set a head on headless Rome” (1.1.186).
Titus refuses the position for himself, stating: “A better head her glorious body fits / Than his that shakes for age and feebleness” (1.1.187–88). Even so, he successfully performs the duty asked of him by endorsing Saturninus’s candidacy. Yet through a rapid series of events, Titus’s choice of “head” leads to a situation in which his enemy, Tamora, ascends to power by becoming Saturninus’s bride. In a sham expression of peace, Tamora implicitly flaunts her newfound power by declaring to Titus, “I am incorporate in Rome” (1.1.472). The word incorporate is crucial here, since it literally means, “united in one body with.” However, as with so much of the language in this play, its meaning will be reversed in the acts to come, such that the metaphor of a single united body will devolve into a grotesque carnival of dismemberment. Just as her son Alarbus had his “limbs . . . lopped” (1.1.143), so too will Lavinia lose her hands and her tongue, Titus will lose his hand, and two of his sons will lose their heads. As the eminent scholar Marjorie Garber concludes in her book Shakespeare After All: “The ill-assorted body parts [in the play] . . . are a speaking picture of the breakdown of the body politic.”
