Shakespeare · Tragedies

Titus Andronicus

c. 1588–93

Revenge tragedy — in the Senecan manner, with Ovid as its book

Shakespeare's earliest and bloodiest tragedy, written with George Peele in the vein of Kyd's Spanish Tragedy. A victorious Roman general sacrifices the eldest son of the captive Queen of the Goths, who then becomes empress and takes a systematic revenge: his daughter Lavinia is raped and mutilated, two of his sons are executed on a false charge, and he is tricked into cutting off his own hand. He answers by baking her two sons in a pie and serving it to her. Wildly popular in the 1590s, despised for three centuries, and rehabilitated on stage after 1955.

How to spot them

▸Late imperial Rome; fourteen deaths, a severed hand and a cannibal banquet
▸A Queen of the Goths made empress, and her lover, a Moor named Aaron
▸A mutilated daughter who cannot speak or write
▸The Peacham drawing, the only surviving contemporary sketch of a Shakespeare play in performance
▸Shakespeare's first tragedy, written in part with George Peele

Scenes, characters & lines

A general returns from the Gothic wars and sacrifices the captive queen's eldest son

The act of ritual cruelty that sets the whole revenge in motion

A woman is raped and mutilated, her hands cut off and her tongue cut out, in imitation of a story in Ovid

Lavinia, whose attackers have read their Metamorphoses

She names her attackers by holding a staff in her mouth and writing in the sand

Guided to the book of Ovid by her nephew, she finds the tale of Philomela

A father chops off his own hand to ransom two sons, and is sent back their heads

'Ha, ha, ha!' is his only response

Two brothers are baked in a pie and served to their mother at a banquet

Chiron and Demetrius, dressed as Rape and Murder

'If one good deed in all my life I did, I do repent it from my very soul'

The Moor Aaron, unrepentant to the last, sentenced to be buried breast-deep and starved

A black child is born to a white empress and must be smuggled away

Aaron defends his son: 'Coal-black is better than another hue'

Key ideas

The play is soaked in Ovid's Metamorphoses: Lavinia's fate rewrites the story of Philomela, and the cannibal banquet comes from the Thyestes myth via Seneca
Its disgrace and recovery track changing taste more than changing scholarship: what looked absurd to the Augustans looked unbearable and true after 1945

Quick-fire facts

•Stylometric work assigns Act 1 and other scenes to George Peele; it is now printed as a collaboration
•It was the most popular of Shakespeare's early plays in his own time, and the first of his plays to reach print, in a quarto of 1594
•The Longleat manuscript, or Peacham drawing, of about 1595 shows a scene from the play and is the only known contemporary illustration of Shakespeare in performance
•T. S. Eliot called it one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written; Edward Ravenscroft's 1687 adaptation dismissed the original as a heap of rubbish
•Peter Brook's 1955 Stratford production, with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh and red ribbons for blood, restored the play's reputation
•Julie Taymor's film Titus (1999) starred Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange
•The play contains fourteen killings, several of them on stage, along with a rape, a live burial and an act of cannibalism
•Tamora's sons are Chiron and Demetrius; the corrupt emperor is Saturninus and his brother is Bassianus

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Sources

Folger Shakespeare Library — Titus Andronicus
Jonathan Bate (ed.) — Titus Andronicus (The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series)