And so conduct me where from company

I may revolve and ruminate my grief.

Exit ⌈with Exeter⌉

GLOUCESTER

Ay, grief, I fear me, both at first and last. Exit

SIIEFOLK

Thus Suffolk hath prevailed, and thus he goes

As did the youthful Paris once to Greece,

With hope to find the like event in love,

But prosper better than the Trojan did.

Margaret shall now be queen and rule the King;

But I will rule both her, the King, and realm. Exit

TITUS ANDRONICUS

BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, WITH GEORGE PEELE

SHAKESPEARE’S first, most sensation-packed tragedy appeared in print, anonymously, in 1594, and a performance record dating from January of that year appears to indicate that it was then a new play. But according to its title-page it had been acted by three companies, one of which was bankrupt by the summer of 1593; and the play’s style, too, suggests that it was written earlier. During the later part of the twentieth century, scholars increasingly came round to the view that George Peele had a hand in, especially, the first act of the play. Shakespeare seems to have added a scene after its earliest performances, for Act 3, Scene 2 was first printed in the 1623 Folio. The 1594 performance record may refer to the revised play, not the original, or to the play’s first London performance after plague had closed the theatres from June 1592.

By convention, Elizabethan tragedies treated historical subjects, and Titus Andronicus is set in Rome during the fourth century AD; but its story (like that of Shakespeare’s other early tragedy, Romeo and Juliet) is fictitious. Whether Shakespeare invented it is an open question: the same tale is told in both a ballad and a chap-book which survive only in eighteenth-century versions but which could derive from pre-Shakespearian originals. Even if Shakespeare knew these works, they could have supplied only a skeletal narrative. His play’s spirit and style owe much to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, one of his favourite works of classical literature, which he actually brings on stage in Act 4, Scene I. Ovid’s tale of the rape of Philomela was certainly in Shakespeare’s mind as he wrote, and the play’s more horrific elements owe something to the Roman dramatist Seneca.

In its time, Titus Andronicus was popular, perhaps because it combines sensational incident with high-flown rhetoric of a kind that was fashionable around 1590. It tells a story of double revenge. Tamora, Queen of the Goths, seeks revenge on her captor, Titus, for the ritual slaughter of her son Alarbus; she achieves it when her other sons, Chiron and Demetrius, rape and mutilate Titus’ daughter, Lavinia. Later, Titus himself seeks revenge on Tamora and her husband, Saturninus, after Tamora’s black lover, Aaron, has falsely led him to believe that he can save his sons’ lives by allowing his own hand to be chopped off. Though he is driven to madness, Titus, with his brother Marcus and his last surviving son, Lucius, achieves a spectacular sequence of vengeance in which he cuts Tamora’s sons’ throats, serves their flesh baked in a pie to their mother, kills Lavinia to save her from her shame, and stabs Tamora to death. Then, in rapid succession, Saturninus kills Titus and is himself killed by Lucius, who, as the new Emperor, is left with Marcus to bury the dead, to punish Aaron, and ‘To heal Rome’s harms and wipe away her woe’.

In Titus Andronicus, as in his early history plays, Shakespeare is at his most successful in the expression of grief and the portrayal of vigorously energetic evil. The play’s piling of horror upon horror can seem ludicrous, and the reader may be surprised by the apparent disjunction between terrifying events and the measured verse in which characters react; but a few remarkable modern productions have revealed that the play may still arouse pity as well as terror in its audiences.

THE PERSONS OF THE PLAY

SATURNINUS, eldest son of the late Emperor of Rome; later

Emperor

BASSIANUS, his brother

TITUS ANDRONICUS, a Roman nobleman, general against the Goths

LAVINIA, daughter of Titus

YOUNG LUCIUS, a boy, son of Lucius

MARCUS ANDRONICUS, a tribune of the people, Titus’ brother PUBLIUS, his son

A CAPTAIN

AEMILIUS

TAMORA, Queen of the Goths, later wife of Saturninus

AARON, a Moor, her lover

A NURSE

A CLOWN

Senators, tribunes, Romans, Goths, soldiers, and attendants

The Most Lamentable Roman Tragedy of Titus Andronicus

1.1 ⌈Flourish.⌉ Enter the Tribunes and Senators aloft, and then enter below Saturninus and his followers at one door and Bassianus and his followers ⌈at the other, with drummer and colours⌉

SATURNINUS

Noble patricians, patrons of my right,

Defend the justice of my cause with arms.

And countrymen, my loving followers,

Plead my successive title with your swords.

I am his first-born son that was the last

That ware the imperial diadem of Rome.

Then let my father’s honours live in me,

Nor wrong mine age with this indignity.

BASSIANUS

Romans, friends, followers, favourers of my right,

If ever Bassianus, Caesar’s son,

Were gracious in the eyes of royal Rome,

Keep then this passage to the Capitol,

And suffer not dishonour to approach

The imperial seat, to virtue consecrate,

To justice, continence, and nobility;

But let desert in pure election shine,

And, Romans, fight for freedom in your choice.

⌈Enter⌉ Marcus Andronicus ⌈aloft⌉ with the crown

MARCUS

Princes that strive by factions and by friends

Ambitiously for rule and empery,

Know that the people of Rome, for whom we stand

A special party, have by common voice

In election for the Roman empery

Chosen Andronicus, surnamed Pius

For many good and great deserts to Rome.

A nobler man, a braver warrior,

Lives not this day within the city walls.