Titus Andronicus

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:51 pm by Peter Leithart

Titus Andronicus 2017-09-06T23:51:40+06:00 Peter Leithart

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Notes on Titus Andronicus , drawn from various sources, mainly Robert Miola, ?Titus Andronicus: Rome and the Family,?Ein Titus Andronicus: Critical Essays .

1) Titus Andronicus is sometimes seen as an anomaly among Shakespeare?s Roman plays in that it is set in Rome but shows little interest in Rome itself. But this is hardly a fair assessment of the play. The city of Rome itself plays a significant role in the atmosphere and setting. Within the opening lines, the Capitol, walls, Senate, Pantheon are all mentioned. As Robert S. Miola says, ?Central to Shakespeare?s imaginative conception is the city, defined by contrast with other landscapes and depicted once again as the reincarnation of Priam?s Troy. As in Lucrece, the city welcomes invaders, admitting within its walls a Trojan horse that will violate its penetralia. As before, Romans live and die in a restricted ethical universe, one dominated by a military conception of honor and by a desire for fame. And once again civil turmoil and rebellion overturn established order. Evident here is Shakespeare?s growing interest in the processes of Roman government, in the secular problems of power and order, and in the political and moral issues raised by the clash between private interest and public duty. In Titus Andronicus , the clash reverberates through all of Rome, destroying the life of the individual, the unity of the family, and the order in the city. Roman heroic traditions act here as a source of strength and nobility; yet they also force Romans to lead lives that are increasingly at odds with human instincts and needs.?E

2) The interest in Rome as Rome is evident in the opening scene of the play. Rome has just been delivered from a threat from the Goths through the heroics of Titus; there is an imperial election underway; there are demonstrations of Roman virtues, rituals, and religious devotions. Above all, the characters are embodiments of Roman virtues. Titus praises his daughter Lavinia, wishing that she would ?outlive thy father?s days,/And fame?s eternal date, for virtue?s praise?E(1.1.170-171). She thus serves as the embodiment of Roman feminine virtue, and particularly the virtue of chastity (cf. 2.1.108-109). Her later rape and mutilation is thus a symbolic dismemberment of virtue.

Above all, Titus represents all that Rome stands for. Miola again: ?Titus is not an individual with a famous biography, as is Lucrece, Caesar, or Antony, but a composite of various characteristics vaguely conceived of as Roman. Shakespeare ?seems anxious,?ET. J. B. Spencer remarks, ?not to get it all right, but to get it all in.?ETitus first appears manifestly larger than life: The noble Roman soldier who vanquishes the enemy outside the walls returns home to restore peace in the city . . . .Titus embodies Romanitas, here defined as a military code of honor that encompasses the virtues of pride, courage, constancy, integrity, discipline, service, and self-sacrifice. Shakespeare carefully illustrates the operation of this code in the opening funeral march: Titus does not weep tears of sorrow for his dead sons, but tears of joy for his return to Rome. So completely does he try to identify personal and civil welfare that the panoply of public triumph, theoretically at least, subsumes all private grief.?EAmong the virtues that Titus embodies are virtues associated with family loyalty, and the devotion of family to the service of the city. Titus has lost more than twenty sons for the sake of Rome, and his family serves as protector of the city. He is the ?father?Eof Rome (1.1.423).

3) Yet, even in the opening scene, it is evident that all is not well in Rome, and it is clear that family and civic devotion lead into inhumane extremes and that they are ultimately in conflict. To put an Augustinian spin on it, the play shows that Romans do not abandon their lust for battle when they retire from the battlefield; they simply carry on the battle internally, against other Romans. For Titus, the battle is even against his own family: ?The emblem of Roman order quickly degenerates into a vision of chaos and brutality as the Andronici create the civil division that Titus was summoned to prevent.?EWhen Bassianus seizes Lavinia ?Ean act of personal love that violates familial and civic rules ?ETitus kills his son who is helping Lavinia and Bassianus escape. Further, Titus is clearly locked into a devotion to the rule of law that eliminates wisdom. Though Bassianus is clearly the better choice for emperor, Titus puts a different head on headless Rome ?ESaturninus ?Esimply because he is the elder son. There is a double error here: Titus refuses to take the imperial crown himself, and he bestows it on the wrong candidate. Soon, Rome, though no longer headless, begins to be dismembered: ?Roman honor, with its subordination of private feeling to public responsibility, transforms the city into barbaric chaos . . . . Titus the ?pius?Eimpiously slays a son for the unthinkable crime of standing in the way. Because the Roman family appears as the basic unit of the city, Titus?s attack on Mutius is an attack on Rome itself. However necessary to the defense of the city such honor is, Shakespeare clearly shows us its disastrous consequences within city walls.?ETitus even refuses to give Mutius burial in the Andronici tomb, drawing from his brother a charge of ?impiety?Eand ?barbarous.?E

The most obvious instance of the cruelty and inhumanity of Roman virtue is the sacrifice of Tamora?s son, Alarbus. Lucius wants to ?hew his limbs and on a pile/Ad manes fratrum sacrifice his flesh?E(1.1.96-98). As Miola comments, this jarringly juxtaposes the formal/ceremonial with the barbaric: ?The placing of the blunt an vivid English, ?he his limbs and on a pile,?Enext to the formal Latinate phrase ?Ad manes fratrum,?Eexposes a fundamental tension in the proceedings: It suggests that Roman ritual is barbaric savagery and blood lust. The noble sentiments and hallowed abstractions of the funeral ceremony sound less grand and glorious as they lead to the death and dismemberment of a living human being.?EIt is the ?barbaric?Equeen, Tamora, who speaks for pity, mercy, and humanity, crying out for the Romans as ?brethren?E ?Tamora challenges Roman pietas to encompass those brothers outside the immediate family, to recognize the human identity that transcends national disputes.?ERome becomes a ?wilderness of tigers?Enot so much by abandoning its Roman virtues, but by pressing those Roman virtues to an extreme.

4) The degeneration to barbarity and bestiality is symbolized by a shift from the city to the forest, the ?ruthless, dreadful, deaf, and dull?Ewood (2.1.128), the wild that Aaron describes as ?fitted by kind for rape and villainy?E(2.1.114-116). Tamora describes the forest as a place of darkness, barrenness, toads and snakes, and the image of the pit, where Bassianus?Ebody will be thrown and Titus?Etwo sons will be framed with the murder, takes the center in the play?s imagery (2.3.93-104). Working with her sons, Demetrius and Chiron, Tamora arranges for Bassianus?Edeath and Lavinia?s rape, in a scene that ?grotesquely parodies the familial values depicted in the opening brutal recital. Unlike the Andronici, Tamora and her family dedicate themselves to the satisfaction of base appetites, to assisting each other in murder and in rape.?ELavinia?s pleas for mercy go as unheeded as Tamora?s had for her son, as do Titus?s later pleas for his two accused sons (3.1). The forest, a potentially pastoral and peaceable setting, is turned into a jungle, a place of predation and shocking violence. But the violence is not confined to the wood: ?The reappearance of Lavinia, ravished, her tongue cut out and hands lopped off, demonstrates the deterioration of Rome under Saturninus and Tamora. The city, like the forest, becomes a place where the good are victimized and rendered incapable of human speech and action.?EInitially, the walls serve as boundaries between the barbaric forest and battlefield and the civilized

interior; yet, ?they come in the course of the play to enclose the city-turned-wilderness.?ELucius leads Goths in a siege of the city that will purify it and restore its earlier dignity.

5) Miola points to how Shakespeare?s play is indebted to Ovid?s treatment of the myth of the four ages: ?Rome in this play is an iron city ?Ea military establishment protected by walls and filled with sword-carrying soldiers such as the Andronici . . . . The civil strife in this play measures the distance between these Romans and the inhabitants of the golden age who shared all things and lived together in peace. Here, brother challenges brother for wealth and power, the citizens arrange themselves into armed factions, the rulers oppose the ruled.?EHistorically, the civil strife is particularly reminiscent of ?the civil wars that occurred as the Augustan empire was sin its birth pangs, the civil wars popularly understood as manifestations of the world?s fall into decadence.?EUnder Saturninus, ?modesty, truth, and faith?Eevaporate, and the ?ruling family employs deceits, stratagems, snares, and violence.?EFurther, ?Queen Tamora satisfies her lust for power by betraying her country and wedding the Roman Emperor, thereby founding the royal family not on love but on self-interest and hatred for the Andronici. She satisfies her lust for sensual pleasure by taking a lover who, in turn, uses her to attain wealth and political power. Here two sets of brothers take arms against each other for personal gain; one brother looks on helplessly, incapable of action, while is brother is cheated and tortured, his niece mutilated, his nephews killed or banished. During the course of the action we hear of a mother who will sell her child for gold; we see another order her bastard infant killed and encourage her full-grown sons to acts of violence. Here a Roman father murders his son and then his daughter, sacrificing them both on the altar of his own personal honor. And here a rebellious Roman son, having previously drawn his sword against his father, leads a foreign army against the city and against the pater patria , the Emperor himself. Victa iacet pietas , indeed.?EThat this takes place under ?Saturninus?Eis no accident; for Saturn is the god who devours his children. The cannibalism ends only when Lucius ?stops the hideous feeding, the ghastly acts of impietas that destroy the city?Eand explicitly refuses ?to devour another?s child ?EAaron?s bastard son.?E

6) Ahh, but what kind of restoration is it, asks Gail Kern Paster in the same volume of essays. She suggests that “Instead of a new order for Rome, there is only a solemn restoration of the old under Lucius, whose merciless disposition of Aaron and Tamora echoes his father’s early actions in the play. Rome is again victorious in its mourning weeds, having survived a war within . . . . even though the play presents the Roman ethos of self-denying loyalty to family and city in an extreme form, that ethos remains the only possible alternative in the world of the play to the chaos of lawless appetite.” The city will always be under threat, but the city is capable of restoration as long as it grants immortality through honorable burial to those who die for its sake and leaves unhallowed those who war against it . . . . For Titus and Lavinia, Lucius provides honorific entombment, the play’s metaphor for the achievements of civilized order, but condemns Aaron to starve to death and Tamora to be left to the cyclic ravages of the predatory order, her flesh devoured,” as, of course, she has devoured flesh. This suggests that the order of Rome is only a counter-violence against the violence of chaos, which, Milbank argues, is the sort of order that antiquity and modern secularism always resorts to. The only alternative is an order of gratia .

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