My progress:
Shakespeare Reading Project
Henry VI, parts 1, 2, 3 and Richard III
Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Taming of the Shrew

Titus Andronicus

This is body horror at its most horrible. This is the play featuring the following stage direction:

Enter a Messenger, with two heads and a hand.

Like …

There are so many decapitated heads. Hands are lopped off left and right. A tongue is cut out – during a rape. There’s definitely violence in his plays, and there are also decapitated heads floating around from time to time … but Titus Andronicus is gruesome to a degree where it becomes absurd. Not that it’s funny but … maybe it is a little bit?

Titus Andronicus takes place in ancient Rome but the plot, as it were, lines up with the Revenge plays, common in Elizabethan theatre. There’s an onstage murder in the first scene, if I recall. The bodies pile up. Some are thrown into this pit in the forest, a seething terrible spot, which some scholars connect to the “hellmouth” of the medieval mystery plays, still in recent memory for the Elizabethans, and probably still existing here and there as part of a tradition. The play doesn’t feel real in any sense of the word. It feels Dante-an. The pit exists in a surreal symbolic space. Mark Van Doren calls the play “Shakespeare’s one unfeeling tragedy”, but the pit pushes it into the supernatural. This isn’t just a hole in the woods. It’s something else. The witches in Macbeth would hang out there.

I’ve never seen a production of Titus Andronicus. I have no idea how a production would handle the pit! Bodies are thrown into it. Sometimes living people are trapped down there and you hear their voices coming out from the pit. I imagine it’s a challenge to stage. Has anyone seen this done live? I’d love to hear how they portray the pit. I’m reading it, and thinking, “Huh … how would you actually pull this off”.

Throughout, there are references to hands, heads, ears, tongues … all of which we see amputated at different spots in the play. The whole thing is about a power struggle, so body imagery = body politic. The body politic at the play’s opening is in pieces, its body parts amputated all over the place.

There are so many sons in this play, and even a grandson, and everyone wants to avenge some wrong done to them or to a family member. Someone steals the throne and also steals someone’s wife. A Goth Queen “steals” her place beside the Emperor and she’s got an army behind her. She also has a lover – Aaron the Moor – and during the play they have a child, who is mixed race, and described in dehumanized language. It’s all pretty racist. That being said, Aaron is the best character in the whole thing. He’s a villain but you see his reasons. He’s clever.

There’s one slight moment of humor when a clown appears, but other than that …

To Titus’ credit, he does not shame his daughter for being raped by two men (who also cut out her tongue and lopped off both her hands, while everyone else is standing around chatting onstage). Poor Lavinia, staggering back onstage without hands or tongue. Speechlessness is a recurring motif in Shakespeare: Iago, Perdita, Hero, Cordelia, Hamlet’s “the rest is silence” and etc. Plays are about words. Shakespeare is about speech. So pay close attention when he silences someone.

My favorite part of this play is Lavinia eventually using Ovid’s Metamorphosis to communicate who raped and mutilated her. There’s also a moment where she “writes” in the sand with a stick. But the use of an actual book – a book Shakespeare himself knew so well (Stephen Booth goes into this influence extensively, and how heavily Shakespeare borrowed from Ovid). So it’s a cool moment, Lavinia using this book to impart her terrible message. You can look at this as a meta-moment too, as in Shakespeare acknowledging his own influence. We are used to having the literature of the ancient Greeks and Romans available to us, but it was new in Shakespeare’s time. A lot of new translations were coming out at the time, and the rise in literacy (comparatively) meant these things spread, were taught in schools, and would be widely known. Shakespeare wasn’t a college-educated guy (that we know of, anyway) but grammar school was heavy in Latin and Greek. And writers of Shakespeare’s generation were using this stuff as launch pads for their own work. We’ll see it in Comedy of Errors, a frank imitation of two of Plautus’ plays put together, but Shakespeare added another set of identical twins to Plautus’ one set, for … no reason except to add to the confusion. Either way, everyone would have recognized this material.

I just think it’s cool for Shakespeare to include Metamorphosis in his play, and have a mutilated woman use it to communicate … because that’s essentially what he was doing as a writer (at least early on). He used Ovid/Plautus/etc. as scaffolding: early on you can still see the scaffold. Later, even if he was inspired by something else, he re-invented it to such a degree it became his.

Quotes on the play

 
“English kings and heroes might be seen as ‘parallel’ to those of the ancients…Politicians and theorists, and the Queen and her counselors, looked to classical Rome as the pattern for the English nation and its nascent imperial powers.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“… the use of what our time has come to call ‘black humor’ or moments of ‘absurdist’ and ‘existential’ comedy may seem out of place in the lexicon of a Shakespeare best known to many readers for his emotional verisimilitude and his psychological acuity. But in the shape, characters, and domestic situations of Titus, Shakespeare’s earlier tragedy, can be seen not only harbingers of future tragic plots of the family, from Hamlet to King Lear, but also an extraordinarily powerful story in its own right — one that may serve, in our consideration, as the root of radical form of all Shakespearean tragedy.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“As we will see, both at the end of Titus Andronicus and in the end of most other Shakespearean tragedies, the audience is left with mixed emotions: the tragic heroes, with their excesses, their eloquence, their errors, and their magnificent suffering, are replaced by figures of lesser emotional scope, though often of far greater practical and political acumen. An invitation to social and cultural healing often closes the play, but even when what is lost is madness or rage, an audience may remember most the grandiosity of those tragic figures who have suffered and died.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“The stage is set for the playing out of these various fantasies of vengeance, and, as if in a nightmare, the stage itself becomes ‘that other scene’ that literalizes what lies below the surface.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

On the weird gross pit in the forest:

“The salient point here is not that Shakespeare was capable of so graphic and nightmarish an image of female sexuality, nor that Freud was not the first to invent Freudianism but rather that this play — and the stage — opens up to become a living metaphor, a dream landscape all too aptly representing the key events that have just taken place.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Reading and then writing are the keys to a recovered humanity, as well as the first steps toward further revenge. It is not an accident, I think, that young Lucius and his books are the priximate agent here. The recovery of the ancient classics made possible the humanist educational reforms of the Tudor period, and in this dramatic (or melodramatic) instance the classics are seen as explicitly enabling a kind of rebirth for Lavinia, reduced to the state of an “infant” by her attackers. Literature here comes to the rescue, replacing speech with writing, and telling the truth across the ages.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Titus declines to be Emperor, in words that prefigure Lear’s abdication from his throne.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Titus Andronicus is in a way the radical — the root of Shakespeare’s tragedy, the dreamscape or nightmare world laid out for all to see, not disguised by a retreat into metaphor. The more we learn about the events of 20th- and 21st century warfare, the less easy it becomes to consign such appalling physical terrors and mutilations to the realm of either a barbaric past or a poetic imagination.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“… from its almost Brechtian mode of staging physicality to its unrelenting pileup of horrors, Titus is the most modern play of Shakespeare that we have.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Poetic thinking is contextualized by poetic influences, even in Shakespeare, most gifted of poets, who parodies Marlowe’s Jew of Malta in Titus Andronicus, where Aaron the Moor attempts to overgo in villainy the sublime Barabas, the Marlovian Jew.”
— Harold Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language

“The uniqueness of Titus Andronicus among Shakespeare’s plays as being the only one that is inhuman … may be attributable to the inexperience of its author… The author of Titus Andronicus is as yet an undeveloped poet.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“There is still the possibility, though, that he was parodying his contemporaries and himself.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“This tragedy, it is true, is framed according to a false idea of the tragic, which by an accumulation of cruelties and enormities degenerates into the horrible, and yet leaves no deep impression behind.”
— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, Lectures on Dramatic Literature

“Are the critics afraid that Shakespeare’s fame would be injured, were it established that in his early youth he ushered into the world a feeble and immature work? Was Rome the less the conqueror of the world because Remus could leap over its first walls? Let anyone place himself in Shakespeare’s situation at the commencement of his career. He found only a few indifferent models, and yet these met with the most favorable reception, because men are never difficult to please in the novelty of an art before their taste has become fastidious from choice and abundance. Must not this situation have had its influence on him before he learned to make higher demands on himself, and by digging deeper in his own mind discovered the richest veins of a noble metal?”
— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, Lectures on Dramatic Literature

“Genius is in a certain sense infallible, and has nothing to learn.”
— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, Lectures on Dramatic Literature

“In Shakespeare’s acknowledged works, we find hardly any traces of his apprenticeship and yet an apprenticeship he certainly had.”
— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, Lectures on Dramatic Literature

“In its kind [Titus Andronicus] is full grown, and its features decided and overcharged. It is not like a first imperfect essay, but shows a confirmed habit, a systematic preference of violent effect to everything else.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

“All lovers of Shakespeare would be glad to relieve the poet of responsibility for that concentrated brew of blood and horror: Titus Andronicus.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

See what I mean? He’s devastated by the play’s existence.

“As late as Richard III he was under the influence of the trend that Tamburlaine the Great had started.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“[Shakespeare] seems to be an example of the truth that the poet who is ultimately to prove most original may — as in the case of Keats — begin by a following of current or classic models so close as to seem almost slavish. It would be in keeping with such a tendency for a juvenile Shakespeare to strive in his first theatrical enthusiasm to exceed popular examples of the Senecan tragedy of blood just as in The Comedy of Errors he exceeded Plautus in comedy.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“It’s a heap of rubbish.”
— Edward Ravenscroft, 1687

“Shakespeare was a beginner at the beginning of English tragedy, and he had to make what he could of it.”
— Shakespearean scholar Peter Alexander

“Titus Andronicus, in poetry and characterization, is superior to any play written before it.”
— Irving Ribner

“Certainly we should remember that Elizabethan stoicism is not quite the stoicism of Seneca.”
— Frank Kermode, Riverside Shakespeare

“No one’s view of imperial Rome is much affected by Titus. It offers, on the face of it, a very confused representation, with features drawn from different periods. There are anachronisms: human sacrifice and panther-hunting were not practiced in Rome, and holy water was not used in marriage. Yet we should remember that it does contain that political interest which distinguishes the later Roman tragedies.”
— Frank Kermode, Riverside Shakespeare

“Titus Andronicus is intended to be a faithful picture of Roman civilization.”
— T.J.B. Spenser, Shakespeare’s Plutarch

“There have been attempts to show that the whole play is intended as burlesque. These do not succeed; but there are moments when the farcical possibilities inherent in Grand Guignol seem to be deliberately invoked, as when Titus appears as a chef, or when Aaron defies his captors and expresses his soldierly love for the bastard child. It is perfectly easy to underestimate the flexibility of the early Elizabethan theatre, still associated in many ways with all manner of shows and entertainments, still close to the mood of those miracle plays in which Herod is not only a terror but a joke.”
— Frank Kermode, Riverside Shakespeare

“The play itself, though certainly the least of tragedies, illustrates the fantastic range of possibilities that were to be explored later. More immediately, it points the way from Kyd and Marlow to Hamlet.”
— Frank Kermode, Riverside Shakespeare

Quotes from the play

And help to set a head on headless Rome.
— MARCUS, Act I, sc i, 186

I’ll find a day to massacre them all,
And rase their faction and their family.
— QUEEN TAMORA, Act I, sc i, 450-451

As when the golden sun salutes the morn
And, having gilt the ocean with his beams,
Gallops the zodiac in his glistering coach
And overlooks the highest-peering hills,
So Tamora.
Upon her wit doth earthly honor wait,
And virtue stoops and trembles at her frown.
— AARON, Act II, sc i, 5-11

The Emperor’s court is like the house of Fame,
The palace full of tongues, of eyes, and ears;
The woods are ruthless, dreadful, deaf, and dull.
There speak and strike, brave boys, and take your
turns.
There serve your lust, shadowed from heaven’s eye,
And revel in Lavinia’s treasury.
— AARON, Act II, sc i, 126-131

O, how this villainy
Doth fat me with the very thoughts of it!
Let fools do good and fair men call for grace;
Aaron will have his soul black like his face.
— AARON, Act III, sc i, 202-205

Do, then, dear heart, for heaven shall hear our
prayers,
Or with our sighs we’ll breathe the welkin dim
And stain the sun with fog, as sometime clouds
When they do hug him in their melting bosoms.
— TITUS, Act III, sc i, 210-213

O brother, speak with possibility.
And so not break into these deep extremes.
— MARCUS, Act III, sc i, 214-215

If the winds rage, doth not the sea wax mad,
Threat’ning the welkin with his big-swoll’n face?
And wilt thou have a reason for this coil?
I am the sea. Hark how her sighs doth flow!
She is the weeping welkin, I the Earth.
— TITUS, Act III, sc i., 222-226

To weep with them that weep doth ease some deal.
But sorrow flow that is double death.
— MARCUS, Act III, sc i, 244-245

MARCUS:
Now is a time to storm, why art thou still?
TITUS:
Ha, ha, ha!
MARCUS:
Why dost thou laugh? It fits not with this hour.
— Act III, sc i, 263-265

And, Lavinia, thou shalt be employ’d,
Bear thou my hand, sweet wench, between thy teeth.
— TITUS, Act III, sc i, 281-282

Ew!!!

Fie, fie, how franticly I square my talk,
As if we should forget we had no hands,
If Marcus did not name the word of hands.
— TITUS, Act III, sc ii, 31-33

TITUS:
What dost thou strike at, Marcus, with thy knife?
MARCUS:
At that that I have killed, my lord, a fly.
TITUS:
Out on thee, murderer! Thou kill’st my heart.
Mine eyes are cloyed with view of tyranny;
A deed of death done on the innocent
Becomes not Titus’ brother. Get thee gone.
I see thou art not for my company.
MARCUS:
Alas, my lord, I have but killed a fly.
TITUS:
“But”? How if that fly had a father and mother?
How would he hang his slender gilded wings
And buzz lamenting doings in the air!
Poor harmless fly,
That, with his pretty buzzing melody,
Came here to make us merry! And thou hast killed
him.
— Act III, sc ii, 52-62

Alas, poor man, grief has so wrought on him,
He takes false shadows for true substances.
— MARCUS, Act III, sc ii, 79-80

The eagle suffers little birds to sing,
And is not careful what they mean thereby,
Knowing that with the shadow of his wings
He can at pleasure stint their melody.
— TAMORA, Act IV, sc iv, 78-81

But I have done a thousand dreadful things,
As willingly as one would kill a fly,
And nothing grieves me heartily indeed,
But that I cannot do ten thousand more.
— AARON, Act V, sc i, 141-144