William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in April 1564, and his birth is traditionally celebrated on April 23. The facts of his life, known from surviving documents, are sparse. He was one of eight children born to John Shakespeare, a merchant of some standing in his community. William probably went to the King’s New School in Stratford, but he had no university education. In November 1582, at the age of eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior, who was pregnant with their first child, Susanna. She was born on May 26, 1583. Twins, a boy, Hamnet ( who would die at age eleven), and a girl, Judith, were born in 1585. By 1592 Shakespeare had gone to London working as an actor and already known as a playwright. A rival dramatist, Robert Greene, referred to him as “an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers.” Shakespeare became a principal shareholder and playwright of the successful acting troupe, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (later under James I, called the King’s Men). In 1599 the Lord Chamberlain’s Men built and occupied the Globe Theater in Southwark near the Thames River. Here many of Shakespeare’s plays were performed by the most famous actors of his time, including Richard Burbage, Will Kempe, and Robert Armin. In addition to his 37 plays, Shakespeare had a hand in others, including
Sir Thomas More and
The Two Noble Kinsmen, and he wrote poems, including
Venus and Adonis and
The Rape of Lucrece. His 154 sonnets were published, probably without his authorization, in 1609. In 1611 or 1612 he gave up his lodgings in London and devoted more and more time to retirement in Stratford, though he continued writing such plays as
The Tempest and
Henry VII until about 1613. He died on April 23 1616, and was buried in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford. No collected edition of his plays was published during his life-time, but in 1623 two members of his acting company, John Heminges and Henry Condell, put together the great collection now called the First Folio.
Titus AndronicusI
ntroductionAlthough Titus Andronicus has been singled out by some critics as unworthy of Shakespeare’s genius—T. S. Eliot called it “one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written”—recent performance history has shown that Titus can succeed brilliantly before audiences. In his memorable production at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1959, Peter Brook chose to stage the entrance of the ravished and mutilated Lavinia (Vivien Leigh) with scarlet ribbons trailing from her wrists and mouth, in a visual stylizing that gave to the violence an emotional seriousness even while it avoided gory realism. The long ribbons translated the text into visual symbols. Titus (Laurence Olivier) was a battered veteran from the start of the play, war-wearied, Lear-like in his suffering and agonies of disillusionment. Deborah Warner’s more realistic production, at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon in 1987 with Sonia Ritter as Lavinia, stressed the horror of rape and its painful relevance to a late-twentieth-century world deeply concerned with human rights and especially with the victimization of women. Interpretations of Tamora in this and other productions have variously seen her as exotic, sexually magnetic, cunning, playful, and deeply sadistic. Most recently, an innovative film version by Julie Taymor, with Anthony Hopkins as Titus, has intrigued a larger audience with this relatively little-known play about wanton violence. Hopkins shows how grim black humor can ironize the effects of gross cruelty and turn our laughter into an attempt to comprehend humanity’s apparently fathomless penchant for inhumanity. Recent criticism, too, has taken Titus seriously as a study in violence that is painfully relevant to our modern experience.
Titus Andronicus is unmistakably an early play. First published in quarto in 1594 “as it was played by the Right Honorable the Earl of Derby, Earl of Pembroke, and Earl of Sussex Their Servants,” it could have been written as early as 1590–1591 or even before. The allusion in theater owner and manager Philip Henslowe’s Diary for January 24, 1594, to a new production by Sussex’s men of “Titus & Ondronicus” could refer to a new play or to one newly revised or newly acquired by the company. Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus was thus widely separated in time from the great tragedies; Romeo and Juliet is the only other tragedy (excluding the English history plays) of the decade preceding 1599. Moreover, the play may not be en- tirely Shakespeare’s. The first three scenes (Act 1 together with scenes 1 and 2 of Act 2) and the first scene of Act 4 have been plausibly attributed to George Peele. The two dramatists seem to have worked on their separate stints independently, with some resulting discrepancies. Shakespeare was apparently responsible for the play’s overall design. Even so, Titus Andronicus was thus widely separated in time and in collaborative authorship from the great tragedies that Shakespeare would produce, most of them a decade or more later. How are we to respond to and appraise an apprenticeship in tragedy that is so isolated in terms of artistic career from the mature tragedies that we reckon among his greatest achievements?
Titus Andronicus is studded with bookish references to classical authors—another likely indication of an early date. No other tragedy, and perhaps no other Shakespearean play, reveals such direct evidence of youthful learning. Some of its many untranslated Latin phrases are schoolchildren’s favorites, such as the “Integer vitae” of Horace that is immediately recognized by Chiron. “I read it in the grammar long ago,” he says (4.2.23). Classical allusions compare the chief characters of the play with Aeneas and Dido, Queen of Carthage; Hector, King Priam, and Queen Hecuba of Troy; Ajax and Odysseus among the Greeks; Hercules, Prometheus, Orpheus, Coriolanus, Semiramis the siren Queen of Assyria, Pyramus, Cornelia the mother of the Gracchi, and Actaeon; and others. Yet these learned references are far from being a mere display of youthful learning; through a controlled and self-conscious artistry, they enable us to explore a tragic world whose moral dimensions are defined in terms of classical literary models. Especially significant are the references to victims of rape and vengeance: Virginia the Roman, killed by her father Virginius to save her from rape; the chaste Lucrece, ravished by Tarquin; Philomel, raped and deprived of her tongue by Tereus, whose name she then reveals by weaving the information into a tapestry; and Procne, her sister and the wife of Tereus, who avenges Philomel by serving Tereus’s son Itys to him in a meal.
Titus Andronicus does not record actual historical events. Shakespeare, assisted by Peele, seems to have put it together from a medley of sources, none of which provided a complete narrative model. An eighteenth-century chapbook called The History of Titus Andronicus, once thought to give a reliable version of an original to which the dramatists had access, has now been shown to be an expansion of the story based on a ballad of 1594 which in turn was modeled on the extant play, so that this play stands first in the line of succession. The dramatists drew from varied materials. Ovid’s Metamorphoses gave them a number of legends, especially that of Tereus, Philomel, and Procne. Seneca’s Thyestes offered in dramatic form a similar tale of vengeance, in which two sons are slain and served to their parent in a grisly banquet. One or even two plays about Titus may have existed prior to the text we have. Even if Shakespeare used such prose and dramatic sources in writing his major portion of the play, however, some scholars believe that one or even two plays about Titus may have existed prior to Shakespeare’s and that we can deduce their contributions to his work by examining two later continental plays derived from them: Tragaedia van Tito Andronico (German, 1620) and Aran en Titus (Dutch, 1641). Possibly one of these earlier plays was the “Titus & Vespacia” entered in Henslowe’s Diary for April 11, 1592, as acted by Lord Strange’s men. Even if the dramatists used such prose and dramatic sources, however, they also knew well the Ovidian and Senecan originals that had inspired them. Elizabethan revenge tragedy, containing some Senecan influences (though those Senecan elements should not be over-stressed), was a strongly formative influence, especially Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1587). The phenomenal recent stage successes of Marlowe had left their mark: Titus’s killing of his son Mutius recalls Tamburlaine Part II, and Aaron’s Vice-like boasting of wanton villainy recalls The Jew of Malta. The dramatists’ reading of Virgil is evident not only in repeated references to the tragic love story of Dido and Aeneas but also in his choice of the name Lavinia (The Aeneid, Book 7 ff.)
As this sizable list of influences suggests, Titus Andronicus remains close to its models, however original it may be in its narrative outline. Although the play anticipates several motifs in Shakespeare’s later tragedies—the ingratitude of Rome toward its honored general as in Coriolanus, Roman political factionalism as in Julius Caesar, infirm old age confronted by human bestiality as in King Lear—Titus Andronicus is the kind of revenge play one might expect of a gifted young playwright and collaborator in the early 1590s. The successful models for tragic writing in those years were Kyd and Marlowe; Greene, Peele, and others paid these two the flattery of imitation. So, to an extent, did Shakespeare. We can best understand Titus Andronicus if we view it as a revenge play in the sensational vein of Shakespeare’s immediate predecessors, with substantial assistance by Peele and with generous additions of Ovidian pathos. We should not look to Titus Andronicus for that poetic density and complexity of vision we find in later Shakespearean tragedy; as a revenge play, Titus Andronicus focuses on violence and horror, and its mood is one of revulsion. The style, too, requires some adjustment in our expectations. Owing much to Kyd, Marlowe, and Ovid, it is replete with rhetorical figures and classical allusions in the manner of Shakespeare’s Ovidian poems from the early 1590s, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. Even if its “early” features are manifest, the style works to good dramatic effect in highly wrought scenes, as when Titus pleads for jus- tice to the unresponsive senators (3.1.1–47) or lays a trap for Tamora and her sons under the guise of his supposed madness (5.2). The seeming incongruity of violent action and elaborately refined metaphor, as in Titus’s florid lament for Lavinia’s mutilation (3.1.65 ff.), is not, as Eugene Waith has shown (Shakespeare Survey, 1957, 39–49), without its purpose, for it evokes pathos on behalf of gruesome suffering in a deliberately Ovidian manner, abstracting and generalizing human torment. As in Ovid, the interest is not in moralizing lessons but in the “transforming power of intense states of emotion.”
Violence is an enduring feature of Titus Andronicus, and its function must be understood if the play is not to be dismissed as merely hyperbolical in its bloodshed. We are constantly aware of ritual human sacrifice, murder, and maiming, as in Titus’s sentencing of Tamora’s son Alarbus and his slaying of his own son Mutius, the massacre by Tamora’s sons of Bassianus and their ravishing of Lavinia, the subsequent execution of two of Titus’s sons wrongfully accused of Bassianus’s murder, the cutting off of Titus’s hand, the feeding to Tamora of her sons’ bodies ground into a fine paste, and still more. Savage mutilation is characteristic of many of these atrocities, especially in the lopping off of hands and tongue. The play’s climax is, in the manner...
