Week 02, Titus Andronicus

Notes on William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus

Act 1, Scene 1

The play seems to be set in the fourth century CE, and it depicts a Roman world turned upside down—one in which a Goth leader only recently brought to Rome in chains is elevated to nearly supreme power, and a valiant Roman is crushed by his rigid belief in an ancient code of honor that virtually no-one around him takes seriously. In the eventful first scene, Titus Andronicus, a soldier of forty years’ standing, returns to Rome with his trophy Goths Tamora and her sons, only to be confronted with the bickering of Saturninus and Bassianus over the imperial succession. While Saturninus proclaims his right as the first-born son of the late emperor, Bassianus advances his cause in the name of virtue: “suffer not dishonor to approach / The imperial seat” (13-14), he pleads to the Tribunes, Senators, and his own followers. Titus has just returned from ten years of fighting in Rome’s cause, and all ears await his sentence as to who should take the throne. The general’s speech to the assembled Romans is magnificent in its honest reckoning of the losses he has willingly borne for his country, and moving in its attention to the children he has lost: “Titus, unkind and careless of thine own, / Why suffer’st thou thy sons, unburied yet, / To hover on the dreadful shore of Styx?” (86-88) He is a Roman of the old school and a believer in strict pietas to family and state.

At his remaining sons’ request, therefore, he will sacrifice conquered Tamora’s eldest son. Titus’ sons explain clearly why they want to commit this act. They say to their father, “Give us the proudest prisoner of the Goths, / That we may hew his limbs and on a pile / Ad manes fratrum sacrifice his flesh . . . / That so the shadows be not unappeas’d, / Nor we disturb’d with prodigies on earth” (96-101). Titus agrees to this demand without hesitation, but Tamora is quick to see the affair as hypocrisy: “must my sons be slaughtered in the streets / For valiant doings in their country’s cause?” (112-13) Her sons have only done what Titus’ would do in defense of their homeland. Tamora’s plea, “Thrice-noble Titus, spare my first-born son!” (119) is revealing in that its numerical quality suggests a world in which everything can be quantified or accounted for: surely, this strange honor code in which Titus believes is expansive enough to allow for generosity towards the eldest son of a valiant, defeated queen! Titus isn’t simply noble; he is thrice noble, and ought to be magnanimous in victory. But Titus disagrees: the honor code is strict, and a demand by blood for blood cannot be refused without shame. It would, in fact, constitute an outrage against the memory of Titus’ dead sons. So Tamora’s individual heartache, her natural appeal as a mother, must be subordinated to the Roman ritual in such cases: piety must be upheld, and the general tells her to “patient” herself while this act of Roman religiosity is accomplished. Tamora’s denunciation seems appropriate: “O cruel, irreligious piety!” (130) The aftermath of the deed is announced with the words, “Alarbus’ limbs are lopp’d, / And entrails fee the sacrificing fire, / Whose smoke like incense doth perfume the sky” (143-45). The alliteration of the first line is deliciously absurd, and lets us in on the comic undertone of this otherwise tragic play: Titus Andronicus has an over-the-top quality, a tendency to revel in its scenes of violence and criminality, that mark it as a fine example of Elizabethan revenge tragedy. “Shakespeare was young when he wrote Titus,” as an old professor of mine used to suggest as a way of accounting for the play’s exuberance and outright silliness (there are approximately 217 references to body parts in Titus Andronicus—surely no accident on Shakespeare’s part), but we might as well admit that it’s a masterpiece of its kind. The Elizabethans loved this kind of limb-hacking, blood-spattered spectacle, as the popularity of other plays such as Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy attests.

Well, with Alarbus’ limbs duly lopp’d, Titus must return to the public responsibility that awaits him. Offered the throne in his own right, he magnanimously turns it down with the utterance, “Give me a staff of honor for mine age, / But not a scepter to control the world” (198-99). As kingmaker he chooses the eldest son of the departed Caesar as the new emperor, and Saturninus promises to wed Lavinia out of gratitude for this service (240). But Bassianus, with the aid of Titus’ sons, escapes with his beloved Lavinia. Titus kills his son Mutius when the latter bars his way in pursuit of the absconders (291), but Saturninus flies into a rage all the same, and chooses Tamora to be his empress in place of Lavinia. The perverse nature of this choice is implied in Tamora’s promise to the young man: “If Saturnine advance the Queen of Goths, / She will a handmaid be to his desires, / A loving nurse, a mother to his youth” (330-32). Titus has given control of great Rome to a man who seeks a mother in the “barbarian” woman who wants nothing more than to destroy it as a means of revenging her losses in battle and the slaughter of her child. As empress, Tamora (at 428 and following) deviously smoothes things over for Titus, who has been left to lament the betrayal by his sons of the reputation he held dear. As she explains to the inexperienced young emperor, she does this the better to crush Titus and his entire line when Saturninus is secure on the throne: “let me alone, / I’ll find a day to massacre them all, / And rase their faction and their family, / The cruel father and his traitorous sons” (449-52). And so the act ends with Saturninus’ offer of a double wedding, and Titus’ promise of fine hunting.

Act 2, Scenes 1-2

Aaron is exultant at Tamora’s advancement because it means great rewards for him, not only in terms of wealth but also personal pride: he will “be bright, and shine in pearl and gold” (19), but more than that, he will “wanton with this queen” who promises to be the ruin of the hated Romans and their emperor. Chiron and Demetrius scheme with Aaron’s aid to ravish Lavinia: says Aaron the strategist, “The woods are ruthless, dreadful, deaf, and dull” (128), and therefore they can absorb in silence the savage crime these young men desire to commit against Lavinia. They will all conspire with Tamora to refine the plot. Scene 2 tells us of the hunting scene’s beginning.

Act 2, Scene 3

Tamora and Aaron converse in the woods, and then Bassianus and Lavinia discover Tamora and insult her. Aaron brings back Chiron and Demetrius, who kill Bassianus and rape and mutilate Lavinia, with Tamora’s explicit and sadistic approval; she mocks Lavinia’s appeals to feminine compassion, reminding all present of Titus’ utter lack of compassion for her own heartrending pleas in support of her son. She goes off to enjoy herself with Aaron while the deed is done. Saturnine is easily duped by Aaron’s forged letter and planted bag of gold into thinking that Titus’ sons Martius and Quintus are Bassianus’ murderers. They are dragged from the pit into which they have fallen and brought to prison. Tamora pretends to Titus that she will yet again assist him.

Act 2, Scene 4

Titus’ brother Marcus finds Lavinia and wonders what has happened. Waxing poetical, he likens the scene to the story of Tereus and Philomel: “But sure some Tereus hath deflow’red thee, / And lest thou shouldst detect [him], cut thy tongue” (26-27). Worse yet, he says, the ravishers have improved upon the dastardly practice of the original: “A craftier Tereus, cousin, hast thou met, / And he hath cut those pretty fingers off / That could have better sew’d than Philomel” (41-43). Off they’ll go to afflict poor Titus with the sight of his ruined daughter, as if he hadn’t suffered enough already: as usual, the reference to suffering is harshly physical: “Come let us go, and make thy father blind, / For such a sight will blind a father’s eye” (52-53).

Act 3, Scene 1

Everyone ignores Titus’ self-sacrifice of four decades, and the tribunes he implores are nowhere to be found, so he tells his sorrow to the stones instead. His entire world view has crashed, and Rome seems “a wilderness of tigers” (54) intent on devouring only Titus and his kin. Lucius has been banished for trying to assist his brothers. At this point, we pity Titus already, but now he is shown Lavinia to top off his grief. Of course, pity has its limits when a man insists on serving up puns such as, “Speak, Lavinia, what accursed hand / Hath made thee handless in thy father’s sight?” (66-67) Titus’s sacrifice of Tamora’s sons in the name of piety now appears worthless since piety is dead in Rome. To be “wonder’d at in time to come” (135) now seems appropriate to Titus, and his thoughts turn to what they can do to bring this about.

Aaron enters at line 150 and offers to lend the Andronici a hand—or rather take one, and Titus (who had already thought it appropriate to “chop off” the hands that had vainly defended Rome) falls for the ruse: in spite of all that’s happened, he still thinks that when a man has given his word, honor will bind him to it. Aaron’s pitch is, “if thou love thy sons, / Let Marcus, Lucius, or thyself, old Titus, / Or any one of you, chop off your hand / And send it to the King” (151-54). As for Aaron, he is as always the ultimate stage villain: “Let fools do good, and fair men call for grace, / Aaron will have his soul black like his face” (204-05). Aaron’s cynical, selfish perspective is that codes exist only to get others to do what you want them to do. But the Moor also pledges allegiance to pure wickedness, and as we can see from his exultant comments when he is in great danger later on, he is almost religious in his devotion to evil. Titus’ rigidity in adhering to old Roman honor and morality has opened a window for Aaron’s excesses, and the man indulges his sadistic brand of individualism when Roman morality breaks down.

A messenger soon undeceives Titus, and the absurd spectacle of “thy two sons’ heads, / Thy warlike hand, thy mangled daughter here” (254-56), brings no more tears from the old man but instead determination to plan the destruction of Tamora and the Emperor. Lucius will go to the Goths to raise an army. Titus, Marcus and Lavinia continue the grotesque “body parts” motif by carting their dismembered kinsmen’s particulars off the stage: “Come, brother, take a head, / And in this hand the other I will bear; / And, Lavinia, thou shalt be employ’d; / Bear thou my hand, sweet wench, between thy teeth” (279-82).

Act 3, Scene 2

Just when we thought the hand theme couldn’t be more over-the-top, along comes the second scene, with Titus and family seated at a banquet. When Marcus clumsily blurts out, “Fie, brother, fie, teach her not thus to lay / Such violent hands upon her tender life” (21-22), Titus responds with the immortal lines, “O, handle not the theme, to talk of hands, / Lest we remember still that we have none” (29-30). Titus continues to think on revenge, connecting even Marcus’ killing of a fly to this imperative: “I think we are not brought so low, / But that between us we can kill a fly / That comes in likeness of a coal-black Moor” (76-79). Marcus thinks Titus is out of his mind, but that doesn’t seem to be the case; I suppose it’s just that by now his overflowing grief has transformed itself into a macabre sense of humor. Titus and Lavinia soon go off to read “Sad stories chanced in the times of old” (83). He doesn’t know yet just how informative those stories will turn out to be, but it’s easy for us to guess that Ovid is about to provide some enlightenment about Lavinia’s predicament.

Act 4, Scene 1

An excited Lavinia explains via Ovid’s tale about Procne, Philomel, and the wicked Thracian King Tereus, and she writes Stuprum (as in the Latin phrase for rape, per vim stuprum, “violation by main force”) – Chiron – Demetrius. Titus says he will be another Lucius Junius Brutus, this time expelling not Tarquins but Goths, and he writes a note to be carried along with presents by the boy Lucius to Tamora’s sons at the palace. Shakespeare has cleverly combined Ovid’s story from The Metamorphoses with the violent foundational myth of the Roman Republic: the rape and suicide of Lucretia. Below is the momentous tale from Titus Livius’ The History of Rome, in which Lucretia, to ensure that “no unchaste woman shall henceforth live and plead Lucretia’s example,” lets death attest to her adherence to the female married chastity necessary to preserve dynastic Roman bloodlines. The matron’s death allows her determined husband Collatinus, Lucius Junius Brutus, and others to use her outraged corpse as a prop for the expulsion of the Tarquin (Etruscan) King Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, father of Lucretia’s rapist, Sextus Tarquinius. Lucretia, then, more insightful about the severe implications of the rigid Roman honor code than her own husband and his male compatriots, provides the blood that spurs Roman valor into throwing off 244 years of Tarquin rule.

From Livy’s History of Rome, Book 1: The Earliest Legends

1.57: [ ....] The royal princes sometimes spent their leisure hours in feasting and entertainments, and at a wine party given by Sextus Tarquinius at which Collatinus, the son of Egerius, was present, the conversation happened to turn upon their wives, and each began to speak of his own in terms of extraordinarily high praise. As the dispute became warm, Collatinus said that there was no need of words, it could in a few hours be ascertained how far his Lucretia was superior to all the rest. “Why do we not,” he exclaimed, “if we have any youthful vigour about us, mount our horses and pay our wives a visit and find out their characters on the spot? What we see of the behaviour of each on the unexpected arrival of her husband, let that be the surest test.” They were heated with wine, and all shouted: “Good! Come on!” Setting spur to their horses they galloped off to Rome, where they arrived as darkness was beginning to close in. Thence they proceeded to Collatia, where they found Lucretia very differently employed from the king’s daughters-in-law, whom they had seen passing their time in feasting and luxury with their acquaintances. She was sitting at her wool work in the hall, late at night, with her maids busy round her. The palm in this competition of wifely virtue was awarded to Lucretia. She welcomed the arrival of her husband and the Tarquins, whilst her victorious spouse courteously invited the royal princes to remain as his guests. Sextus Tarquin, inflamed by the beauty and exemplary purity of Lucretia, formed the vile project of effecting her dishonour. After their youthful frolic they returned for the time to camp.

1.58: A few days afterwards Sextus Tarquin went, unknown to Collatinus, with one companion to Collatia. He was hospitably received by the household, who suspected nothing, and after supper was conducted to the bedroom set apart for guests. When all around seemed safe and everybody fast asleep, he went in the frenzy of his passion with a naked sword to the sleeping Lucretia, and placing his left hand on her breast, said, “Silence, Lucretia! I am Sextus Tarquin, and I have a sword in my hand; if you utter a word, you shall die.” When the woman, terrified out of her sleep, saw that no help was near, and instant death threatening her, Tarquin began to confess his passion, pleaded, used threats as well as entreaties, and employed every argument likely to influence a female heart. When he saw that she was inflexible and not moved even by the fear of death, he threatened to disgrace her, declaring that he would lay the naked corpse of the slave by her dead body, so that it might be said that she had been slain in foul adultery. By this awful threat, his lust triumphed over her inflexible chastity, and Tarquin went off exulting in having successfully attacked her honour. Lucretia, overwhelmed with grief at such a frightful outrage, sent a messenger to her father at Rome and to her husband at Ardea, asking them to come to her, each accompanied by one faithful friend; it was necessary to act, and to act promptly; a horrible thing had happened. Spurius Lucretius came with Publius Valerius, the son of Volesus; Collatinus with Lucius Junius Brutus, with whom he happened to be returning to Rome when he was met by his wife’s messenger. They found Lucretia sitting in her room prostrate with grief. As they entered, she burst into tears, and to her husband’s inquiry whether all was well, replied, “No! what can be well with a woman when her honour is lost? The marks of a stranger, Collatinus, are in your bed. But it is only the body that has been violated, the soul is pure; death shall bear witness to that. But pledge me your solemn word that the adulterer shall not go unpunished. It is Sextus Tarquin, who, coming as an enemy instead of a guest, forced from me last night by brutal violence a pleasure fatal to me, and, if you are men, fatal to him.” They all successively pledged their word, and tried to console the distracted woman by turning the guilt from the victim of the outrage to the perpetrator, and urging that it is the mind that sins, not the body, and where there has been no consent there is no guilt. “It is for you,” she said, “to see that he gets his deserts; although I acquit myself of the sin, I do not free myself from the penalty; no unchaste woman shall henceforth live and plead Lucretia’s example.” She had a knife concealed in her dress which she plunged into her heart, and fell dying on the floor. Her father and husband raised the death-cry.

1.59: Whilst they were absorbed in grief, Brutus drew the knife from Lucretia’s wound, and holding it, dripping with blood, in front of him, said, “By this blood-most pure before the outrage wrought by the king’s son-I swear, and you, O gods, I call to witness that I will drive hence Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, together with his cursed wife and his whole brood, with fire and sword and every means in my power, and I will not suffer them or any one else to reign in Rome.” Then he handed the knife to Collatinus and then to Lucretius and Valerius, who were all astounded at the marvel of the thing, wondering whence Brutus had acquired this new character. They swore as they were directed; all their grief changed to wrath, and they followed the lead of Brutus, who summoned them to abolish the monarchy forthwith. They carried the body of Lucretia from her home down to the Forum, where, owing to the unheard-of atrocity of the crime, they at once collected a crowd. Each had his own complaint to make of the wickedness and violence of the royal house. Whilst all were moved by the father’s deep distress, Brutus bade them stop their tears and idle laments, and urged them to act as men and Romans and take up arms against their insolent foes....

1.60: When the news of these proceedings reached the camp, the king, alarmed at the turn affairs were taking, hurried to Rome to quell the outbreak. Brutus, who was on the same road, had become aware of his approach, and to avoid meeting him took another route, so that he reached Ardea and Tarquin Rome almost at the same time, though by different ways. Tarquin found the gates shut, and a decree of banishment passed against him; the Liberator of the City received a joyous welcome in the camp, and the king’s sons were expelled from it. Two of them followed their father into exile amongst the Etruscans in Caere. Sextus Tarquin proceeded to Gabii, which he looked upon as his kingdom, but was killed in revenge for the old feuds he had kindled by his rapine and murders. Lucius Tarquinius Superbus reigned twenty-five years. The whole duration of the regal government from the foundation of the City to its liberation was two hundred and forty-four years. Two consuls were then elected in the assembly of centuries by the prefect of the City, in accordance with the regulations of Servius Tullius. They were Lucius Junius Brutus and Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus. (End of Book 1)

From The History of Rome, Vol. I, Titus Livius. Editor Ernest Rhys. Translator Rev. Canon Roberts. Everyman’s Library. London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1912.

Act 4, Scene 2

Titus’ note to Chiron and Demetrius reads “Integer vitae, scelerisque purus, / Non eget Mauri jaculis, nec arcu” (20-21). But the boys aren’t good enough readers of Horace’s Odes to realize that Titus knows they conspired with the Moor. Aaron is clearly out for himself—he doesn’t even tell Tamora about this new information. The Empress delivers a child by Aaron, who protects his newborn son fiercely when Chiron and Demetrius think to kill the infant, bearing him away to the Goths with the intention of raising the child as a warrior. Aaron kills the Nurse, horrifying even the wicked sons of Tamora. A countryman’s fair-skinned baby will be substituted and presented as Saturninus’ legitimate heir. What is the child to Aaron? He makes the point succinctly: “My mistress is my mistress, this myself, / The vigor and the picture of my youth: / This before all the world do I prefer” (107-09). Rome and its politics can go hang; Aaron’s main concern is to take the portion of immortality that a child of one’s own promises.

Act 4, Scene 3

Titus’ arrows bear messages soliciting the gods for justice nowhere to be found on earth. The whole scene seems to show him both unhinged and yet canny: he tells Publius and Sempronius, “’Tis you must dig with mattock and with spade, / And pierce the inmost centre of the earth; / Then when you come to Pluto’s region, / I pray you deliver him this petition” (11-14). His stratagem, though, is to shoot arrows towards Saturninus’ palace, and thereby to unsettle the young Emperor. Titus also pays a rustic or “clown” to present Saturninus with a short speech and some pigeons. But then, perhaps we shouldn’t dismiss the notion that there’s something insane about Titus’ behavior all through the play: if insanity is “doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results,” Titus is at times close to a madman: he keeps supposing that if somebody makes a promise, it must be kept; and if somebody is legally entitled to an office, he’ll do his duty rather than taking advantage of the situation. Such persistence in doing the honorable thing would make sense in a normal setting, but in decadent Rome it can only destroy him.

Act 4, Scene 4

Saturninus is enraged before the Senate over Titus’ “blazoning our unjustice every where” (18) and then has the clown hanged after reading the letter Titus wrote. Tamora thinks she has at last driven Titus off the deep end, and the Emperor is frightened upon hearing that Lucius is headed for Rome with an army of Goths, but he misunderstands Titus’ motive, which is revenge of a sort not reducible to politics. Titus doesn’t want to rule Rome—what good would that do his battered spirit and maimed body now? Tamora promises to sooth Titus’ anger, and thereby get him to separate Lucius from his invading force.

Act 5, Scene 1

The Goths swear loyalty to Lucius. Aaron, captured with his child, is brought in—he did not know about this new development. Lucius threatens the child, so Aaron promises to tattle everything about his plots with Tamora and her sons—but Lucius must swear by the Roman gods first. All this plotting is news to Lucius because he left to raise an army of Goths before Lavinia revealed exactly what had happened to her and who did it. When asked if he’s sorry, Aaron outdoes himself with a flourish of supervillain rhetoric from 124-44. It would be hard to top the following claim for sheer malice: “Oft have I digg’d up dead men from their graves, / And set them upright at their dear friends’ door, / Even when their sorrows always was forgot, / And on their skins, as on the bark of trees, / Have with my knife carved in Roman letters, / ‘Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead’” (135-40). He seems dedicated not so much to the kind of violence that furthers his self-interest or ambition but rather to a code of “evil for evil’s sake,” perhaps in part out of hatred for the Romans he so evidently despises: friendship is the target of Aaron’s alleged stratagem here, and readers of classical history and culture will know that loyalty in the cause of amicitia was among the primary Roman virtues. More than that, Aaron asserts a fierce liberty in the face of Roman culture, which seems to depend so much on “the ties that bind” people: ties of memory, friendship, and honor.

Act 5, Scene 2

Tamora and sons show up at Titus’ place dressed as Revenge, Murder, and Rapine. He doesn’t believe them, but they consider him mad in spite of the clues he lets slip. “Revenge” wants Titus to send for Lucius, and promises that when they are all at a banquet at Titus’ home, she will bring Tamora, Chiron, Demetrius, the Emperor and any other foes so that he may take revenge upon them. Titus insists that Rapine and Murder stay with him, and promptly kills them, fully informing them that they are literally on the banquet menu. Like the Thracian King Tereus in the legend, Tamora will “swallow her own increase” (192).

Act 5, Scene 3

Dinner is set and served. Titus asks if Virginius (a decemvir from 451-449 BCE) was right to kill his daughter for chastity’s sake. (Appius had used legal trickery in an attempt to force himself on her, claiming that she was actually his slave; Virginius, disguised as a slave, killed her just after Appius’ co-conspirator Marcus Claudius judged in favor of Appius.) He then kills Lavinia, explaining to all present that Chiron and Demetrius had ravished her. Asked where they are, he informs Tamora and Saturninus with an unforgettably gleeful rhyme: “Why, there they are, both baked in this pie; / Whereof their mother daintily hath fed, / Eating the flesh that she herself hath bred” (60-62). Titus immediately stabs Tamora, and Saturninus kills him, whereupon Saturninus is killed by Lucius. Aemilius asks for a full account of all the misdeeds, and receives it from Lucius, who is chosen emperor. Aaron’s child is carried in. Aaron, who has also just been brought in, is sentenced to starve, but he maintains his standing as the play’s most remorseless evildoer: “If one good deed in all my life I did, / I do repent it from my very soul” (189-90). The savage irony of this punishment is that, as mentioned earlier, Aaron had set himself up as a free spirit, unbound and untouched by Roman customs or values. The Emperor will be properly buried, but Tamora will become food for the birds.

All in all, the play is a delightfully outrageous, bloody instance of Elizabethan revenge tragedy in the tradition of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, in which the protagonist Hieronymo seeks violent justice for the vengeful murder of his son. Melodramatic as it may seem, Kyd’s early revenge tragedy is serious and philosophical. It considers life’s great questions, above all what constitutes justice in a wicked world, and is perhaps worthy of comparison with similar efforts by Aeschylus or Sophocles. Shakespeare’s play is sometimes dismissed as frivolous, but it has a serious dimension that repays study. Titus is no mere villain, and neither is Tamora. Only Aaron seems to be an outright dastard, with Tamora’s foolish sons coming in a distant second—they lack the cunning and brains Aaron exhibits. Shakespeare’s genius leads him to employ the Romans versus Goths theme in a manner that confounds any simple opposition between Roman and Goth. Titus turns out to be more of a Goth than we might have thought: excessive, bloody, and barbarous in his revenge. Tamora is more than a cardboard or stage barbarian, and shows herself a skilled manipulator of Roman politics. Aaron’s race adds yet another perspective on the Goth/Roman opposition: it’s true that the “villain plot” he drives sets itself up against the twin revenge plots of Titus and Tamora and in part displays the man’s dedication to wickedness, but Aaron shows considerable loyalty to his child as the image of himself, and exults in his blackness. Moreover, while Shakespeare may not be subjecting the revenge code to the kind of scrutiny it receives in Hamlet (where it’s understood that revenge is against God’s law), he seems quite interested in the complexities of Roman honor, and the allusions he makes to the Lucretia story from Livy’s History of Rome and the Philomela tale from Ovid’s Metamorphoses allow him to explore the significance of those key Roman myths. What is the play suggesting about moral codes? Perhaps that people must live by them and within them, but also that they must not be imprisoned by them altogether. Rigidity, failure to reflect on one’s values, allows cynicism and outrage to flourish: extremes beget counter-extremes. “Titus is an honorable man,” to be sure, but the play as a whole keeps iterating that claim until it generates a Mark Antony effect: by the fourth and fifth acts, what’s needed isn’t more old-fashioned honor but a good plan for revenge against the barbarous Goths and Moors who have taken advantage of Titus’ stiff morality.

Finally, Julie Taymor’s 2000 production Titus sets the play in a strangely neo-fascist Italy, with its futuristic architecture and art. Taymor’s choice makes sense because the 1920’s-40’s dictator and Hitler ally Benito Mussolini appropriated the ancient Roman symbols of power and tried to turn Italy into an empire. (For one thing, he invaded Ethiopia.) And even in ancient times, the image of Rome in its imperial phase was due at least partly to the well-oiled propaganda machine of Augustus Caesar and the wisest of those who followed him as rulers. Augustus promoted the idea that Rome’s anachronistic republican values were still operative, even though by his day, such values were probably more of a fashion statement than anything else. By Titus’ era, his Rome no longer exists, in spite of his stubborn (if stylized) adherence to it. Titus’ stylization, its earnestness aside, is itself decadent and not much more than an anachronistic fashion. Of course, fashion statements can have political implications and reflect political facts on the ground, whether sincere or not. Shakespeare would probably praise Taymor’s concentration on the role of fabrication and stylistic borrowing and recycling in politics and history, with the definition of “reality” as consisting significantly (though not necessarily entirely) in people’s perceptions of themselves rather than being reducible to some external standard.