Daniel Cohen
English Literature
Book
Report: Titus
Andronicus by William
Shakespeare (1564-1616)
Many feel
that Titus was Shakespeare’s worst play. “If
scholars acknowledge the hand of the great master in this work at all, they usually point to his youth
as an excuse for the assumed poverty of its quality (Shakespeare would have
been 26 at the time, with Titus
Andronicus marking his first attempt at writing tragedy).”
T.S.
Eliot said, “One of the stupidest and most uninspiring plays ever written.”
Titus
is certainly the bloodiest of Shakespeare’s plays. It was very popular in its
day, but was so extreme in its violence that it was not produced again for hundreds
of years. When revived in the 1950s people fainted in the theater and had to be
hauled away in ambulances.
This
play is that it is all about revenge.
Principle Characters
Summary:
In Imperial Rome, Titus, a general returns victorious from war
with the Goths. He kills the eldest of three captured princes, as is
traditional, and earns the enmity of the victim’s mother, Queen Tamora. This is the cause for the first round of revenge.
Through several plot twists, Tamora
marries the Emperor of Rome. Tamora and her henchman,
the evil Aaron, mastermind a plot to murder the emperor’s brother and to arrest
Titus’ sons for the crime. Then, they arrange for Tamora’s
two remaining sons to rape Lavinia, Titus’ daughter
and to have her hands and tongue cut off so that she cannot describe her
assailants. Aaron convinces Titus that if he will cut off one of his hands he
can spare the lives of his two sons. Of course, they kill them anyway. Lavinia walks around for the rest of the play, wailing
incoherently with bloody stumps.
From this point on, the pendulum of revenge swings to Titus and the
balance of the play involves his plot to ensure the
deaths of all the Goths. The most grotesque aspect of this plot is the killing
of Tamora’s sons, the subsequent grinding of their
bones to dust, mixing it with their blood to prepare a paste in which to bake
their heads prior to feeding said meal to mom. Just about everyone, including Titus,
dies.
Of particular interest is the character of
the most evil Aaron, a truly malignant Moor.
Sources: