Titus, the Terrible

by

Nicki Leone

. . . Afraid, angry, he grabbed her,
twisted her arms behind her, and tied her up. He drew
his sword from its sheath and held her hair. She offered her throat
gladly for him to cut it and end her pain and shame . . .
But he didn’t. Instead he seized her tongue with a pair of pincers,
pulled it out of her mouth, and hacked it off with the sword.
Her mouth is full of blood from the mangled root. The tongue,
he throws onto the floor, where it lies and twitches, a wounded
pink snake at its former owner’s feet in this nightmare
she must be having.

—Ovid, The Metamorphoses Book VI, 546-556, translated freely by David R. Slavitt

I'll admit, my ongoing quest to see every Shakespeare play this year hit a sudden obstacle when it came to Titus Andronicus. It was the build-up. The words that were bandied about when anyone ever discussed this, what Harold Bloom calls Shakespeare's “most embarrassing” play. Words like “bloody” and “rape” and “decapitation,” and (the real kicker) “cannibalism.” Cannibalism? Really? Smarter, more erudite friends of mine made dour warning noises about Fellini and Satyricon. And I, who had just come down from the exhilarating experience of Richard III, quailed. I remembered Satyricon. Well, I remembered parts of it.

So for several weeks my commitment to my personal project wrestled with a very personal distaste, reluctance and trepidation. I might as well say it—I was afraid. I, who like to boast that I can read anything, discovered that I am, in fact, a coward. I wussed out. (“Wussed” is, I am sure, somewhere in the Shakespearean lexicon). I put the Julie Taymor film version starring Anthony Hopkins into my DVD player and then left it there. I avoided Titus, gave myself a dozen excellent rationalizations every time I passed over the movie in favor of something else, once actually got as far as watching the opening credits before suddenly and pathetically changing my mind and flipping to something a little more safe—like Stargate SG1 reruns. And, because I had decided to go through Shakespeare's plays in the (approximate) order they were written, my entire ambition to see/read/hear/experience every Shakespeare play this year came to a grinding, inglorious halt.

Eventually, though, I decided I was just being silly. It was ridiculous to abandon a project that had brought me so much pleasure just because I was afraid I would dislike Titus as much as I admired Richard. So finally one summer afternoon I sat down at my library table with a pot of strong coffee and some fresh homemade bread still warm from the over, and put Titus in the CD player—trusting that no matter what the play was like, I’d at least get involved in the story.
 
As is usually the case, my dread of imagined horrors was worse than the reality, which is really saying something, if you think about it. Titus Andronicus is known for being Shakespeare’s bloodiest, most violent play (someone once calculated that blood is spilled at least once every ninety-seven lines). Within the first five minutes there’s a dismemberment and a murder, and that’s not counting the three dead bodies Titus marched in with at the start. And yet, I was unmoved, even disappointed. The opening speeches felt wooden and preemptory (they are political speeches, so that may be why). The struggle between Bassianus and Saturninus--the two men vying for the Imperial throne—is muted and rather low key despite the legions of soldiers on hand and the real potential for riot. That Titus, the incoming victorious general, awards the throne to the latter despite his petulant nature seems inexplicable. The whole scene lacks the breathless intensity of Richard, proudly declaring his villainy to the audience, or even the scuttling, whispered tenseness of the conspirators in the rose garden in Henry VI. It was just men, giving speeches.

It is hard to get too involved in a story if the characters seem flat, and Titus Andronicus is not a play known for the deep internal lives of its characters. Which is why, I suppose, that when the captured queen Tamora pleads for the life of her son, who is to be sacrificed in tribute to the Roman gods, I didn’t blanche, at least not much. Tamora’s speech ought to have been a heartbreaker: “And if thy sons were ever dear to thee / O, think my son to be as dear to me!”

Probably not the best angle to take to convince the Roman general. We’ve already been told he has seen twenty-one of his twenty-five sons die in battle. Titus tells Tamora to shut up. The gods demand their sacrifice.

Titus’s rigid, unfeeling piety (Tamora calls it “cruel” and “irreligious”) is the stone that starts the avalanche of violence in this “revenge tragedy.” By the end, three more of Titus’s sons have been killed. Two have been decapitated. The Emperor’s brother has been murdered, the Queen has given birth to an illegitimate (and black) baby, her other sons have had their throats slit, Titus’s own hand has been cut off, and Titus’s daughter has been raped, her hands chopped off and her tongue cut out.  Oh yes, and the Queen has eaten the flesh of her children in a pie.

Commentators tend to take a slightly defensive tone when talking about Titus. They point out that the play was probably a collaboration (although perhaps not quite so much as originally surmised). They cite the then popular taste for revenge tragedies, exemplified by Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, or Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. They talk about the extravagance of Elizabethan culture, the violence of the era, the constant desire for spectacle. In short, they seem to consign the play to kind of aberration on Shakespeare’s part—“He was young,” they say. “He was trying to give the people what they wanted.”

I’ll concede that “spectacle” is a good term for Titus. And it is easy to see why Shakespeare, if he decided to write a “spectacle” of violence along the lines of Marlowe at his most vicious, might well fixate on the image of Ovid’s raped and mutilated Philomela (see the quote at the beginning) as the centerpiece of his story. Ovid always was one of his favorite writers. The play has even enjoyed a kind of resurgence of interest these days, thanks to a couple of brilliant re-envisionings on both stage and screen. Critics of Julie Taymor’s film version universally agree that she does full tribute to the spectacle—ours is an age, they say, for Titus. And so it is. The people who saw the play performed in Shakespeare’s time sat in theatres that were used for bear-baiting and cock-fights when they were not being used for plays. They walked down filthy, crowded streets past alleys where men and women rutted openly. The one kind of entertainment that could compete with the bears was the public executions. And the first thing anyone saw when they entered the city gates were rows of heads on spikes—the ultimate fate of traitors to Her Majesty.

Modern Shakespearian theatrical productions do not share their stages with bears, and their patrons aren’t in the habit of getting screwed in the alley behind the playhouse after the show. (If they can afford the $100 for a box ticket, then they can probably afford a hotel room.) But we do live in an age of violence and spectacle nevertheless—an age where photos of soldiers posing, grinning, over piles of naked prisoners run side by side with stories of mothers who murder their children for drug money, of public meetings where enraged people shout down the speakers, of celebrity funerals with miles of mourners following gold coffins, of television programs where people eat bugs to win money. There is something Elizabethan about the excess.

But I don’t watch reality television. I’m not into excess for its own sake. And since this ongoing exploration of Shakespeare is a purely personal quest, my only real goal with Titus was to see what the play had to say to me, a middle-aged woman of feminist bent, who doesn’t like violence, but who loves beautiful, clever language. If Shakespeare really was just trying to write a pot-boiler crowd-pleaser then Titus Andronicus had nothing for me at all.

And, as it turned out, that wasn’t the case. Titus grew on me. I realized that to get anything out of the play I had to stop looking for character development and start looking for allegory, symbol and satire. It took awhile, but by the time the parties are all out hunting in the forest in Act II (where eventually Bassianus is murdered, Lavinia abducted and ravished—on the body of her dead husband—and Titus’s sons arrested for treason), I was fully involved, at least intellectually.

It has been my habit, going through all this Shakespeare this year, to listen rather uncritically, borne along with the story until arrested by a moment where the characters seem to suddenly cease speaking to the audience, and instead, begin speaking to me, alone. It is an oddly intimate feeling, one to be marked and savored—these unexpected moments of deep identification. Richard III was like that almost from start to finish for me, making it the most exhilarating and exhausting dramatic experience of my life. 

Those moments are few and far between in Titus, however. Although not completely absent, as in this scene where Titus is pleading for the lives of his sons, who are to be executed for murder:

Lucius: My gracious lord, no tribune hears you speak.

Titus: Why, ’tis no matter man: if they did hear,
They would not mark me; or if they did mark,
They would not pity me; yet plead I must,
And bootless unto them.
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,
For they will not intercept my tale.
When I do weep, they humbly at my feet
Receive my tears and seem to weep with me; . . .

But those feelings of sudden empathy were very scarce. So I was left to find other ways to become engaged. I decided, for example, on really listening to some of the dialogue, that there was no way Shakespeare merely “collaborated” on the play. It was too clever, too full of word play and puns, too blackly comic. And no, I am not talking about what shock-critic Camille Paglia called the “hilarious” spectacle of “. . . the ravished Lavinia doggedly persists in waving her "stumps" about like a windmill.” I’m talking about the moments of deliberate absurdity:

Marcus: Alas, my lord, I have but kill’d a fly.

Titus: But how, if that fly had a father and mother?
How would he hang his slender gilded wings,
And buzz lamenting doings in the air!
Poor harmless fly,
That, with his pretty buzzing melody,
Came here to make us merry! and thou hast
kill’d him.

Marcus: Pardon me, sir; it was a black ill-favor’d fly,

And moments of deliberate, almost ridiculous pathos, such as Marcus’s inappropriately flowery speech on finding Lavinia, raped, handless, and her mouth gurgling with blood:

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.

Nothing about the phrasing, the language, feels accidentally or untried. On the contrary, every metaphor, every juxtaposition, feels quite deliberate. If Shakespeare was collaborating, he had the upper hand and the last word.
 
I marked the use of the forest as a place of wildness, desolation—the antithesis of civilization—it is the first time Shakespeare uses what will become a standard metaphor for him. I noticed the scene where Titus pretends to be mad as part of his plan to revenge himself on the Queen—a foreshadowing of plays to come, don’t you think? I noted, with real appreciation, the way that Shakespeare mirrored again that first scene where Tamora pleads unsuccessfully for the life of her son again in the forest—where it is Lavinia pleading to Tamora for mercy. Tamora appealed to Titus on the grounds that they were both parents (“And if thy sons were ever dear to thee . . .”). Lavinia appeals to Tamora as another woman; “O Tamora, thou bearest a woman’s face—.” Tamora is as unmoved as Titus ever was: “away with her,” she bids her sons, “and use her as you will; The worse to her, the better loved of me.” Revenge is sweet, but it is implacable.

And  I enjoyed  the symmetry of Tamora, the vengeful white queen of the Goths and Aaron, her villainous black Moorish servant and lover. Ah, Aaron. I really enjoyed Aaron. He is the epitome of evil. Where evil and malice were in Richard bound into a fallible human breast, Aaron is evil and malice walking. He's fascinating. He lurks in the play like a snake, the mover and motivator for every piece of villainy, and delights in it all. When he is at last caught at the end—buried breast-deep in the earth and left to starve while the birds peck at his eyes—he is still a seething creature of malice:

Ah why should wrath be mute and fury dumb?
I am no baby, I, that with base prayers
I should repent the evils I have done;
Ten thousand worse than ever yet I did
Would I perform if I might have my will.
If one good deed in all my  life I did,
I do repent it from my very soul.

It is typical of Shakespeare, is it not, to give the very best lines to the very worst characters? And typical of him to let that malice and anger ring in our ears even while the last and wholly forgettable “good guy” is making his final speech. So it was here, at the very end of the play, almost the very last line, that I finally recognized my Shakespeare—the Shakespeare who gave me Richard—and became reconciled to the terrible, the terrific, Titus.

Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.