This is an edited version of an essay originally
written for ‘ENGL394 – Popular Theatre: Polemic, Mirror, Satire’ at Macquarie University
T’will vex thy soul to hear what I shall speak;
For I must talk of murders, rapes and massacres,
Acts of black night, abominable deeds…
For I must talk of murders, rapes and massacres,
Acts of black night, abominable deeds…
Aaron, V.1.62-64
Titus
Andronicus has been maligned
and derided for its excessive depiction of, and reliance upon, violence and
brutality since its writing and performance in 1594. Despite Shakespeare’s age
at the time of writing Titus Andronicus,[i]
the play displays a markedly youthful brashness and sensationalistic attitude
which highlights his knowledge of classical authors and sources, as well as a
desire to create a work which appealed to a wide audience[ii].
Throughout the play Shakespeare harnesses the conventions of a revenge tragedy
to his now-trademark sophistication of language, humour and rhythm, and
challenges the established perception and tolerance of violence and abuse, as
well as its implications and consequences. In doing so, Shakespeare shows how Titus Andronicus is “as much about how
the audience experiences violence as entertainment as it is about the tragedy
of the endless cycle of violence itself,”[iii]
and thus demonstrates how popular theatre avoids adhering to the status quo of
the period and, in this case, for all time.
In the closing decades of the sixteenth
century, “English drama ... was created to fill... a new cultural niche. [The]
theatres generated a voracious demand for fresh wit, and [were] characterised
by innovation, competition and complex forms of collaboration.”[iv]
At the time Titus Andronicus was
written, theatre companies “closely monitored their rivals… imitating each
other’s successes”[v] and Shakespeare’s
play can be construed as both an homage and parody of Christopher Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris and Tamburlaine, and Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. It is an emboldened
and daringly original work, in which Shakespeare challenges the boundaries of
sensationalism, entertainment, taboo and social critique.
Peter Ackroyd proposes that Titus Andronicus was “a play that
[attempted] to beat Kyd and Marlowe at their own game… [borrowing] structure
and detail from Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy.”[vi] “Where
Kyd gave [him] the model for the passion and revenge of Titus, Marlowe gave him
ideas for his villains.”[vii],
[viii]
In responding to the influences and successes of the period, Shakespeare
created a play that examines contemporaneous issues such as monarchical
succession, justice, revenge, and the role, function and nature of violence. It
is through an examination of the interrelations between Romans and Goths, the
civilised and barbaric, that Shakespeare is able to deconstruct the boundaries
that define the foundations of Elizabethan and contemporary society,
challenging the idea of the taboo, and showing that the “real enemy lies
within”[ix] –
that everyone is, and can be, capable of intolerable cruelties: “ultimately
Titus killing his daughter [is] Bosnia. Or whatever the latest outrage is.”[x]
Titus
Andronicus is a revenge
tragedy that draws upon classical allusions, mythologies and histories, as well
as the conventions of the Senecan model of Tragedy – the most recognised model
available to the Elizabethans – and repeatedly challenges the status quo and
presents a radicalised image of mankind’s reaction to the horrors it encounters.
The play can be read as an exploration on the abuse, denigration,
victimisation, demonization and brutalisation of women. The most harrowing
example of this misogynistic perspective is the rape of Lavinia, an act which for
all the play’s brutality and exsanguination is not actually presented on stage.
Rather, “[it conforms] with an age-old code, [and is] categorised as ‘obscene,’
literally something which must take place, from the Latin ‘ob scena,’ ‘off stage.’”[xi]
Julie Taymor, in her 1999 film Titus,[xii]
turns this deed, via a flashback intercut with Lavinia writing on the ground, into
an act of “raw animal aggression, deploying imagery from the play that figures
Lavinia as a doe and Chiron and Demetrius as tigers,”[xiii]
blurring the distinction between symbolism and reality.
Throughout his career, Shakespeare drew heavily
upon classical sources, from Ovid and Homer to Greek and Roman mythologies and
histories. Throughout Titus Andronicus,
he “breaks them down [and] forces them into gruesome and unexpected new
settings,”[xiv]
creating a “complex and self-conscious improvisation upon classical sources”[xv]
which still resonates with and challenges audiences today. A key example of
this is in II.4, when Marcus discovers the mutilated Lavinia and “addresses her
in bizarrely stylised rhetoric:”[xvi]
Why dost not
speak to me?
Alas, a crimson river of warm blood,
Like to a bubbling fountain stirr'd with wind,
Doth rise and fall between thy rosed lips,
Coming and going with thy honey breath.
But, sure, some Tereus hath deflowered thee,
And, lest thou shouldst detect him, cut thy tongue. [xvii]
Alas, a crimson river of warm blood,
Like to a bubbling fountain stirr'd with wind,
Doth rise and fall between thy rosed lips,
Coming and going with thy honey breath.
But, sure, some Tereus hath deflowered thee,
And, lest thou shouldst detect him, cut thy tongue. [xvii]
Marcus’ language hereby challenges
the status quo and presents a radicalised image of mankind’s reaction to the
horrors encountered forthwith, following in the Senecan model’s structure and
function which was “based more on declamation than on action: the expression of
emotion in elaborate rhetorical form … its very lifeblood.”[xviii]
Marcus’ speech, whilst heavily Ovidian in inspiration, consciously
aestheticises Lavinia’s torture and is deliberately confrontational, demanding
that the audience becomes him and shares his grief, forcing them to confront
and negotiate the “terrible gulf between florid words and theatrical reality.”[xix]
As there is no opportunity to look away throughout this scene, the horror is
magnified; the implications and resonances are more deeply felt because the
sight is present in front of us. Throughout this and the following scene in
which Lavinia is presented to Titus, as throughout the entire play, Shakespeare
constantly blurs the boundaries between taboo and decorum – what can and can’t
be shown on stage. In doing so, it can be argued that he presents a more
affecting, harrowing and realistic portrait of grief and trauma than anything
before or since. Throughout much of the later half of the play, Lavinia’s
mutilated and ravished body – as well as the actuality of the act of rape
itself – is flaunted and concealed, illustrated and censored, “[existing] as an
absence or gap that is both product and source of textual anxiety,
contradiction and censorship,”[xx] unapologetically
challenging the audience’s toleration and acceptance of such a deed.
Shakespeare further addresses the impact and
consequences of the horror by introducing darkly humorous puns and wordplay,
whereby Aaron, Chiron and Demetrius – even Titus himself – make too-frequent
references to hands, hewing and trimming, often likening Lavinia to a tree:[xxi]
what stern
ungentle hands
Have lopp'd and hew'd and made thy body bare
Of her two branches, those sweet ornaments,
Whose circling shadows kings have sought to sleep in [xxii]
Have lopp'd and hew'd and made thy body bare
Of her two branches, those sweet ornaments,
Whose circling shadows kings have sought to sleep in [xxii]
The use of humour at these points is
deliberately confrontational and is employed as a form of catharthis, a way of
making sense of the tragedy; in doing so, Shakespeare challenges further the
notion and limits of decorum and the established code of behaviour in a
perversely ironic way.
Throughout the play, as throughout his oeuvre,
Shakespeare often uses humour to diffuse the full garish impact of the
brutality, and in doing so, manages to amplify that which he seeks to assuage.
Following Lavinia’s rape, Titus – her own father – puns relentlessly on the
usefulness and significance of hands, which is only compounded by the fact he
has but one: “O handle not the theme to talk of hands, / Lest he remember still
that we have none” [III.2.29-20]. Similarly, when Titus and the remaining
members of the Andronici are presented with the heads of two of his sons, the
inclusion of Lavinia in his reaction appears to explicitly draw attention to
that which she lacks: ““Bear thou my hand, sweet wench, between thy teeth,” he
commands, making her the handmaid of his revenge, a metaphor gruesomely
literalized [in V.1] when with her stumps she holds a basin to catch the blood
while he slits the throats of her attackers.”[xxiii]
Through the use of humour, even in such blatant ways, Shakespeare manages to
confront the assumptions and established conventions of both the Senecan model
of tragedy and Elizabethan (and, indeed, contemporary) theatre, urging the
audience to rethink their position and reactions to such events and
conventions.
Throughout Titus Andronicus,
the audience’s perception and interpretation of the play’s events is channeled
through the focalisation of a key protagonist who drives the action, eliciting
an important emotional and often sympathetic connection with the audience. This
focalization changes twice during the course of the play – from Tamora to Aaron
to Titus – and has led to their being labelled as “serial protagonists.”[xxiv]
Tamora first challenges the status quo when her desperate attempts to save her
eldest son are ignored, and he is sacrificed to appease the Roman gods. Setting
in motion the play’s unbreakable revenge cycle (“O cruel, irreligious piety!”
[I.1.133]), this moment marks the moment when she, as a character, becomes more
clearly psychologically defined than a mere former-captive: “we understand her
motivations [and] watch in horror as the lust for vengeance transforms her into
[a] Goddess of Vengeance.”[xxv]
Turning her back on her husband and Emperor, she seduces both the audience and
her former fellow-captive Aaron the Moor, instigating a shift in the play’s
tension and power dynamic, and introduces the next in the series of
protagonists.
Aaron the Moor is a Marlovian villain-hero, modeled on Marlowe’s
Barabas (from The Jew of Malta) in
much the same way that Richard III is. The resulting character is an engagingly
original[xxvi]
“Marlovian monster, more outrageous than anyone in Marlowe,”[xxvii]
and “the first great black role in English drama.”[xxviii]
At first, Aaron appears to be “the devil incarnate,”[xxix]
but as his function in the play increases, the audience perceives a shift
towards his dominance and the allure of his enigmatic and compelling
paradoxical nature asserts his position as the second protagonist in the
revenge cycle.[xxx]
Aaron’s disarming delight in black humour, coupled with his destructive “nihilistic,
atheistic [and] calculating”[xxxi]
attitude, makes him the perfect foil to Titus’ initial unwavering sense of
morality and justice. It is Aaron who instructs Chiron and Demetrius to the
murder of Bassianus and the rape of Lavinia; Aaron who killed Titus’ two sons
in the pit in the forest; Aaron who, through his son “the babe, as loathsome as
a toad” [IV.2.69],[xxxii]
leads to Tamora’s demise as well as that of the Nurse and midwife. As Aaron’s
life is threatened at the play’s end, he bargains with the Goths to ensure the
safety of his son, his only regret is that though
[he has] done a thousand
dreadful things
As willingly as one would kill a fly,
And nothing grieves me heartily indeed
But that I cannot do ten thousand more. [xxxiii]
As willingly as one would kill a fly,
And nothing grieves me heartily indeed
But that I cannot do ten thousand more. [xxxiii]
“He is thoroughly delighted in the machinations of evil, even gleeful,
and, when it comes to his son, exhibits the very compassion, love, and vain
hope that [Marlowe] warns against,”[xxxiv]
through his character of Barabas. By ensuring that Aaron ultimately dies as a
human and not a stony-hearted villain as in Marlowe’s tragedies, Shakespeare challenges
the audience’s perception of the function and status-quo of the villain-hero.
The last eight scenes of Titus
Andronicus – from the knowledge of Lavinia’s attackers in IV.1 through to
the conclusion – see the rise of Titus as the ultimate revenger, the final
protagonist. Earlier in the play, Titus briefly fulfils the position of
protagonist (in III.1) when he is presented with the heads of his sons and his
hand, the hand that was meant to save them. Disregarding the decorum as dictated
by the Senecan model (“Now is a time to storm” [III.1.264]), Titus laughs (“Ha,
ha, ha!”) because he has “not another tear to shed” [III.1.267], and plays his
own fool, the moment of laughter “intensifying rather than [diminishing] the
passionate fellow-feeling of tragedy.”[xxxv]
Shakespeare pushes the boundaries of convention “between true expression and
false, sanity and madness, speech and silence [because] he is intrigued by
tears [and] laughter, [the] intensely physiological expressions of inner states.”[xxxvi]
Titus’ greatest act of revenge, however, comes when “Tamora and her two Sons
disguised” [V.2.s.d] appear before him, masquerading as the gods of Revenge,
Rape and Murder, respectively. At first, Titus appears to be mad but, like
Hamlet, he has in fact been “preparing for a public act.”[xxxvii]
In a clever and subtle display of intellect, ‘mad’ Titus sees through his
visitors’ disguises for what they are: “the device has been reversed – the
vehicle for Tamora’s revenge against Titus [becomes] the vehicle for Titus’
revenge against Tamora for the rape of Lavinia”[xxxviii]
and the death of his sons and family. Shakespeare reasserts the favoured notion
that “all the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players” [As You Like It, II.7.138-139], a device
that Titus eagerly adopts when he plays the cook in a deed which “closely
resembles an Aaron act in its cruelty and creativity.”[xxxix]
In the play’s ultimate and climactic scenes, Shakespeare-as-Titus stretches the
boundaries of taste, decorum and the revenge model to their fullest and most
garish conclusions, further blurring the line “between illusion and substance”
beyond distinction, until “the nightmare takes over the plot and madness
becomes clarity, preparing us for the worst when the most unimaginable will actually
occur.”[xl]
Titus
Andronicus is a play that
constantly pushes the boundaries of excess and taste, convention and
expectation; a play that challenges the status quo of the popular theatre
through its violence, humour, wit and characters. Yet it is “[precisely] because of all its extremities, [that] Titus is the Shakespeare play for our extreme time … a compendium of two
thousand years of warfare and violence.”[xli] Through
its use of Senecan rhetoric and disarmingly black humour to cope with the
horrors and violence, to its unwavering on-stage depiction of dismemberment;
from the serial protagonists embodied in Tamora, Aaron and Titus, to its carnage-laden
conclusion, Titus Andronicus remains
the finest theatrical example of a work that challenges the fundamental
constitution of contemporary society’s beliefs as well as the structure and
function(s) of its popular theatre.
Bibliography
Ackroyd, Peter. Shakespeare: The Biography. London: Vintage Books, 2005.
Bloom,
Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the
Human. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1998.
Blumenthal,
Eileen, Julie Taymor, and Antonio Monda. Julie
Taymor, Playing with Fire: Theatre, Opera, Film. Third ed. New York:
Abrams, 2007.
Booker,
Christopher. "Why Sex and Violence? The Active Ego. The Twentieth-Century
Obsession: From De Sade to the Terminator." In The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories. New York: Continuum
Books, 2004.
Dickson,
Andrew. The Rough Guide to Shakespeare.
Second ed. London: Rough Guides Ltd, 2009.
Gossett,
Suzanne. "Dramatic Achievements." In The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1500-1600, edited by
Arthur F. Kinney. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Kahn,
Coppélia. "The Daughter's Seduction in Titus Andronicus, or, Writing Is
the Best Revenge." In Roman
Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women. London: Routledge, 1997.
Logan,
Robert A. ""Unfelt Imaginations": Influence and Characterization
in 'the Massacre at Paris,' 'Titus Andronicus,' and 'Richard III'." In Shakespeare's Marlowe: The Influence of
Christopher Marlowe on Shakespeare's Artistry. England: Ashgate Publishing
Limited, 2007.
McCandless,
David. "A Tale of Two Tituses: Julie Taymor's Vision on Stage and
Screen." Shakespeare Quarterly
Vol. 53 no. No. 4 - Winter (2002).
Schechner,
Richard, and Julie Taymor. "Julie Taymor: From Jacques Lecoq to 'the Lion
King': An Interview." TDR Vol.
43, no. No. 3 - Puppets, Masks, and Performing Objects. (Autumn) (1999).
Shakespeare,
William. Titus Andronicus. Edited by
Jonathan Bate, The Arden Shakespeare. London: Routledge, 1995, 2006.
Taymor,
Julie. "Titus." Italy / USA / UK Clear Blue Sky Productions / Fox
Searchlight Pictures, 1999.
Taymor,
Julie, and William Shakespeare. Titus:
The Illustrated Screenplay. New York: Newmarket Press, 2000.
Wrathall,
John. "Titus (1999) [Review]." British Film Institute, http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/review/563.
References
[i] Shakespeare appears to
have been about thirty years old in 1594.
[ii] Coppélia
Kahn, "The Daughter's Seduction in Titus Andronicus, or, Writing Is the
Best Revenge," in Roman Shakespeare:
Warriors, Wounds, and Women (London: Routledge, 1997), 46.
[iii] Julie Taymor on Titus, in
Eileen
Blumenthal, Julie Taymor, and Antonio Monda, Julie Taymor, Playing with Fire: Theatre, Opera, Film, Third ed.
(New York: Abrams, 2007), 194.
[iv] Suzanne
Gossett, "Dramatic Achievements," in The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1500-1600, ed.
Arthur F. Kinney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 153.
[v] Ibid.,
154.
[vi] Peter
Ackroyd, Shakespeare: The Biography
(London: Vintage Books, 2005), 157.
[vii] Jonathan Bate in Introduction,
in William
Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed.
Jonathan Bate, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1995, 2006), 87.
[viii] Critic Harold Bloom disagrees: “To call Titus Andronicus a mere send-up of Marlowe and Kyd hardly seems
sufficient; it is a blowup, an explosion of rancid irony carried well past the
limits of parody. Nothing else by Shakespeare is so sublimely lunatic; it
prophesies not King Lear and Coriolanus, but Artaud.” (Bloom, p83)
[ix] Kahn,
"The Daughter's Seduction in Titus Andronicus, or, Writing Is the Best
Revenge," 47.
[x] Richard
Schechner and Julie Taymor, "Julie Taymor: From Jacques Lecoq to 'the Lion
King': An Interview," TDR Vol.
43, no. No. 3 - Puppets, Masks, and Performing Objects. (Autumn) (1999): 47.
[xi] Christopher
Booker, "Why Sex and Violence? The Active Ego. The Twentieth-Century
Obsession: From De Sade to the Terminator," in The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories (New York: Continuum
Books, 2004), 455-56.
[xii] Julie
Taymor, "Titus," (Italy / USA
/ UK Clear Blue Sky Productions / Fox Searchlight Pictures, 1999).
[xiii] David
McCandless, "A Tale of Two Tituses: Julie Taymor's Vision on Stage and
Screen," Shakespeare Quarterly
Vol. 53 no. No. 4 - Winter (2002): 503.
[xiv] Andrew Dickson, The Rough Guide to Shakespeare, Second ed. (London: Rough Guides
Ltd, 2009), 372.
[xv] Bate in Introduction, Shakespeare,
Titus Andronicus, 3.
[xvi] Dickson, The
Rough Guide to Shakespeare, 372.
[xvii] Shakespeare,
Titus Andronicus, II.4.21-27.
[xviii] Bate in Introduction, Ibid.,
29.
[xix] Dickson, The
Rough Guide to Shakespeare, 373.
[xx] Kahn,
"The Daughter's Seduction in Titus Andronicus, or, Writing Is the Best
Revenge," 58.
[xxi] See also II.3.1-10 and V.1.93.
[xxii] Shakespeare,
Titus Andronicus, Marcus, II.4.16-19.
[xxiii] Kahn,
"The Daughter's Seduction in Titus Andronicus, or, Writing Is the Best
Revenge," 60.
[xxiv] John
Wrathall, "Titus (1999) [Review]," British Film Institute,
http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/review/563.
[xxv] Taymor in Director’s Notes,
Julie
Taymor and William Shakespeare, Titus:
The Illustrated Screenplay (New York: Newmarket Press, 2000), 175.
[xxvi] Robert A. Logan, ""Unfelt
Imaginations": Influence and Characterization in 'the Massacre at Paris,'
'Titus Andronicus,' and 'Richard Iii'," in Shakespeare's Marlowe: The Influence of Christopher Marlowe on
Shakespeare's Artistry (England: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2007), 37.
[xxvii] Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (London: Penguin Books Ltd,
1998), 82.
[xxviii] Jonathan Bate in Introduction,
Taymor and Shakespeare, Titus: The Illustrated Screenplay, 13.
[xxix] Ibid.
[xxx] While Aaron isn’t
explicitly revenging against anything, Julie Taymor argues that Shakespeare,
through the character of Aaron, has “painted a picture of racism that is
unparalleled in his other plays” [Taymor: 2000, 178] and that Aaron could be
revenging against the inscribed racism evident within contemporary society
[McCandless: 2002, 494].
[xxxi] Taymor
and Shakespeare, Titus: The Illustrated
Screenplay, 178.
[xxxii] See also IV.2.75-78 –
“What hast thou done? / Thou hast undone our mother. / Villain I have done thy
mother.”
[xxxiii] Shakespeare,
Titus Andronicus, V.1.141-44.
[xxxiv] Logan,
""Unfelt Imaginations": Influence and Characterization in 'the
Massacre at Paris,' 'Titus Andronicus,' and 'Richard Iii'," 37.
[xxxv] Jonathan Bate in Introduction,
Shakespeare,
Titus Andronicus, 12.
[xxxvi] Jonathan Bate in Introduction, Taymor and Shakespeare, Titus: The Illustrated Screenplay, 9-10.
[xxxvii] Bate in Introduction, Shakespeare,
Titus Andronicus, 26.
[xxxviii] Ibid.,
22.
[xxxix] Taymor in Director’s Notes,
Taymor and Shakespeare, Titus: The Illustrated Screenplay, 178.
[xl] Ibid., 185.
[xli] Bate in Introduction, Ibid.,
10-11.
