Themes in Titus Andronicus

Titus Andronicus begins with a sacrifice that is both heroic and terrible. Titus returns to Rome victorious, having buried twenty-one of his sons in battle. He sacrifices Tamora's eldest son, Alarbus, to satisfy the demands of his own dead sons' spirits. This sacrifice is legal, ceremonial, Roman. Tamora watches and promises revenge. The play then spends four acts demonstrating that revenge begets revenge until there is almost no one left.

What makes the violence in this play different from Shakespeare's other revenge tragedies is its escalation logic. Each act of revenge exceeds the one before it. Tamora's sons Chiron and Demetrius — acting on Aaron's instruction — do not just kill Lavinia's lover. They rape her, cut off her hands, and cut out her tongue so she cannot identify them. The excess is designed to be the worst thing the audience can imagine. Aaron explicitly brags about it.

Titus's eventual response matches the escalation. He kills Chiron and Demetrius, bleeds them into a pan with their throats cut, grinds their bones into a paste, bakes them into a pie, and serves the pie to their mother at a banquet. He kills Lavinia himself at the same banquet. He kills Tamora. Then Saturninus kills him, and Lucius kills Saturninus. In four exchanges, every principal character is dead.

The logic of this escalation was deliberate and recognisable to an Elizabethan audience familiar with Seneca, the Roman dramatist who made revenge tragedy a high-art form. Senecan tragedy specialised in spectacular suffering, rhetorical lamentation, and revenge carried out to its ultimate extreme. Shakespeare's first tragedy is working consciously in this tradition — taking its conventions and pushing them as far as they will go, partly to see what happens when you do.

What happens is that the revenge becomes indistinguishable from the original crime. Tamora's revenge on Titus (using his daughter as the instrument) mirrors Titus's sacrifice of her son. Titus's revenge on Tamora (feeding her her own children) mirrors what she did to his family by destroying their bodies and their futures. The violence produces nothing except more violence. Marcus's speech at the end of Act 5 — "O let me teach you how to knit again / This scatter'd corn into one mutual sheaf" — is an appeal to stop the cycle. He is speaking over a pile of bodies. The metaphor of scattered corn is the play's one image of something that could be rebuilt.

But before that comes Aaron's speech in Act 5 Scene 1 — unrepentant, defiant, listing his crimes with evident pride. "I am no baby, I, that with base prayers / I should repent the evils I have done." He does not fit the revenge logic. He has not been wronged; he has been opportunistic. His presence in the play suggests that some violence is not about cycles of retribution at all — it is just about power, and the pleasure some people take in exercising it.

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At the start of the play, the line between Rome and barbarism is clear — at least to Titus. Rome is civilisation, law, ceremony, duty. Tamora and her sons are the conquered Goths: outside the city, outside the law, capable of anything. Titus sacrifices Alarbus on the grounds that Roman honour requires it. The sacrifice is brutal, but it is Roman. It has rules.

By Act 2, the distinction has collapsed. Aaron — an outsider, a Moor, whose status in the play is that of someone defined entirely by Roman categories of exclusion — engineers an act of violence inside a Roman forest. The forest itself is the turning point. It is not Rome; it is not the Goth lands. It is the place outside the city walls where the play's worst things happen. Aaron in Act 2 Scene 1 describes Tamora's ascent with satisfaction: "Now climbeth Tamora Olympus' top, / Safe out of fortune's shot; and sits aloft." She is now Roman — or Roman enough to wield Roman power — which means Roman power can be turned against Romans.

Titus is the play's most Roman figure, and Shakespeare methodically strips him of every Roman category until there is nothing left. His sons are executed. His hand is cut off (on the false promise that it will save his sons — it does not; their severed heads are returned to him). His daughter is violated and mutilated in the forest. His brother Marcus is present but helpless. By Act 3, Titus is standing in the road holding his severed hand and his sons' heads and beginning to laugh. The laugh is not madness exactly; it is the recognition that nothing Roman applies anymore.

"Wilt thou draw near the nature of the gods? Draw near them then in being merciful," Tamora tells Titus in Act 1 Scene 1, asking him to spare her son. He refuses. Later, when she has power, mercy does not appear. The play uses this to question whether mercy was ever Roman or whether it was only ever offered as leverage.

Aaron is the character who makes the question most uncomfortable. He is explicitly excluded from Rome and Roman civilisation on racial grounds. He is also, by Act 5, the only character who has done something that Rome would call honourable: he saved his child. When he refuses to repent, when he lists his crimes without shame, he is performing a version of Roman stoicism — absolute refusal to be changed by the judgement of others — from completely outside the category of Roman. Shakespeare seems to be suggesting that what Rome calls barbarism can look, from the right angle, like everything Rome claims to value.

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Titus has buried twenty-one sons. He says this in Act 1 as a statement of fact, as a credential, as evidence of his loyalty to Rome. He has given Rome twenty-one sons. In return, he sacrifices Tamora's son, refuses the emperorship, supports Saturninus's claim, and brings his surviving children home. Every decision in Act 1 is framed as duty. The losses are the price of being Roman.

The play then strips everything away in exchange for nothing. The sacrifice of Alarbus does not buy peace; it starts a war. Supporting Saturninus does not preserve Rome; Saturninus is a bad emperor who allows Tamora to run his court. Titus's remaining sons are framed for murder. His daughter is destroyed. His hand is cut off in a transaction that is explicitly fraudulent — he is told the hand will ransom his sons, and then his sons' heads are returned. There is no sacrifice economy in this play. Loss does not purchase anything.

The image of Titus receiving his sons' heads and his own severed hand in Act 3 Scene 1 is one of the most grotesque tableaux in Shakespeare. He is holding what is left of two of his sons in one arm and his own hand in the other. Marcus is with him. "When will this fearful slumber have an end?" Titus asks — using the word slumber as if this might be a dream. It is not. The scene insists on its own reality through its physical specificity.

Lavinia's loss is the most sustained focus of the play's grief. She cannot speak; her hands are gone. She carries a stick in her mouth to write in sand. What she writes — the names of her attackers — is both the play's solution to its mystery and a demonstration of what language can be reduced to: a single impossible act of communication that takes enormous effort and produces the barest minimum of information. The whole system of Roman rhetoric and ceremony that Titus represents has been replaced, in his daughter, by a stick in sand.

"I am the sea; hark, how her sighs do blow! She is the weeping welkin, I the earth," Titus says in Act 3 Scene 1, trying to find words for what he is feeling by comparing himself and Lavinia to weather systems. The comparison is not metaphorical decoration — it is a man trying to find language large enough to hold what has happened, and failing, because no language is. The loss in this play exceeds the available forms for expressing it.

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Lavinia's mutilation is strategic, not random. Chiron and Demetrius cut out her tongue and cut off her hands specifically because these are the two means by which she could identify them: speech and writing. The assault is also the silencing. Shakespeare makes the connection explicit — the attackers are aware that they are committing a crime they cannot afford to have spoken aloud, and so they remove the apparatus of speaking.

The play then spends several scenes trying to solve the problem of communication without tongue or hands. In Act 3, Marcus interprets Lavinia's frantic pointing and turning of pages in Ovid's Metamorphoses (a collection of Greek and Roman myths by the Latin poet Ovid). She finds the story of Philomel, a woman in mythology who was raped and had her tongue cut out — and who then wove her story into cloth to communicate it. Lavinia cannot weave. She uses a stick held in her mouth to write in sand.

This is one of the most unusual dramatic solutions in all of Shakespeare: the plot's central mystery (who attacked Lavinia?) solved through a method of communication invented on stage, communicated to the audience through a character who cannot speak describing what another character is writing. The play has been building to this moment — every failed attempt to read Lavinia has been preparation for the one that works.

Language in Titus Andronicus is generally under pressure. Rome is a culture built on rhetoric: speeches, debate, precedent, ceremony. Titus is a great general partly because he is a great orator. In Act 3 Scene 1, when his sons are being led to execution, he throws himself on the ground and makes a speech so moving that a soldier stops to listen. But the speech does not work — his sons are executed anyway. Roman rhetoric has no purchase on Roman injustice.

Aaron's relationship with language is the play's sharpest counterpoint. He plans in soliloquy, manipulates through lies, boasts in Act 5 about the crimes he has committed — and all of it is fluent and precise. His language functions perfectly. He controls information, plants evidence, deceives everyone around him with complete effectiveness. The play's most villainous character is also its most rhetorically competent one. Shakespeare seems to be suggesting that in a world where Lavinia's tongue is cut out, the only language that works is Aaron's.

Marcus's speech at the end, asking the scattered Romans to "knit again / This scatter'd corn into one mutual sheaf," is an attempt to use rhetoric for reconstruction rather than accusation. Whether it succeeds is ambiguous. The play ends with a new order proclaimed, a new emperor chosen, Aaron condemned. Words are used to rebuild, but they are being used over the ruins of people who could not be saved by words when it mattered.

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Titus is offered the Roman emperorship in Act 1 and refuses it. He is tired, old, and has buried twenty-one sons — he does not want the crown. He supports Saturninus, the dead emperor's eldest son, on the grounds of primogeniture (the rule that the eldest child inherits). This is a Roman principle, a legal argument, a matter of precedent. It is also, immediately, a catastrophic mistake.

Saturninus is petty, unstable, and quickly dominated by Tamora, whom he impulsively marries after Titus's daughter Lavinia is seized. Titus's refusal of power is meant to be an act of Roman virtue — duty to law over personal ambition. The play makes it an act of catastrophic misjudgement. By refusing to exercise power himself, Titus hands it to someone incapable of exercising it justly.

The cost of this decision is paid not by Titus but by his family. His sons are executed. His daughter is destroyed. His hand is severed. The people who suffer for Titus's principled political choices are the people who had no voice in making those choices. Lavinia said nothing in Act 1 when her father gave her to Saturninus. She had no standing to say anything. Power in this play is exercised by and over men, but its worst costs land on people who were not in the room when the decisions were made.

Aaron's speech in Act 2 Scene 1 — watching Tamora "climbeth Olympus' top" — is a clear-eyed account of how power actually moves in this world. Not through law or ceremony but through access and proximity. Tamora is now empress. That means Aaron, as her lover, has access to the emperor through her. This is not Roman; it is not authorised; it is simply how things work. Aaron's understanding of power is more accurate than Titus's, which is why Aaron keeps winning until the very end.

The final act's resolution is thin. Lucius, Titus's surviving son, returns with a Gothic army — the enemy — to become the new emperor of Rome. He is declared legitimate because he is Titus's son and the alternatives are dead. This is not the restoration of Roman values; it is the imposition of order by the same military force that used to threaten Rome. Marcus's speech about knitting together scattered corn is well-intentioned and probably necessary, but it is made by a man whose family has been almost entirely destroyed by the choices of the previous scene. Power has costs that speeches cannot fully address.

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