Titus Andronicus

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Titus Andronicus
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Roman Plays

• Popular literary subject in late sixteenth
  century translations of numerous Latin writers
  appear between 1560s and 1580s.
• Shakespeare wrote four Roman plays Titus
  Andronicus (1594), Julius Caesar (1599), Anthony
  and Cleopatra (1607), Coriolanus (1608) three
  later ones based on Thomas Norths Plutarchs
  Lives (1579).
• Study of Latin writers in schools foundation of
  humanist education, interest in rhetorical
  expression, morals.
• Shared identity translatio imperii, or
  translation of rule, is a concept from the
  middle ages that refers to the process which sees
  Roman Empire translating or moving westward from
  classical antiquity to Europe.
• Religious schism Rome is the centre of Catholic
  Europe.

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Sources

• No direct, single sources for Titus Andronicus.
• Story exists in two other forms a verse ballad
  from 1594 and a longer prose narrative published
  in the eighteenth century both generally thought
  to follow from Shakespeares story.
• Play draws from a number of well-known Latin
  writers, especially Ovid, Seneca, and Virgil
  richly literary, allusive narrative.
• Not a historical narrative Lavinia an
  allusion to Virgils Aeneid tells the story of
  Aeneas, a Trojan hero who traveled to Rome and
  subsequently founded the Roman race with his wife
  Lavinia, whose name also means purity in Latin.
• Also contains presence of the Goths, which
  suggests a late Roman setting play as a compact
  history of the Roman empire.

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Sources

• Draws on the closet tragedy of Seneca,
  especially Thyestes rediscovered during Italian
  renaissance reworkings of Greek tragedy by
  Euripides, Aeschylus, others Plautus and Seneca
  are classical models of comedy and tragedy
  respectively.
• Senecas style long, declamatory speeches in
  blank verse highly rhetorical focus on
  especially gory, bloody episodes.
• Plays are typically concerned with corrupting
  power, cruelty and hypocrisy in the court (Seneca
  was Neros tutor for several years) dramatizes
  acts of rape, mutilation, torture, murder,
  revenge, etc.
• Thyestes a revenge tragedy the character
  Atreus feeds Thyestes his own sons revenge
  tragedy was a very popular genre in the
  Elizabethan theatre.
• First English tragedy, Gorbuduc (Thomas Sackville
  and Thomas Norton), performed in 1562 Thomas
  Kyds The Spanish Tragedy popular through 1580s.

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Sources

• Titus draws most obviously on Procne and
  Philomela story from Ovids Metamorphosis.
• One of the bloodiest and most gruesome stories in
  Ovid involves rape, mutilation, infanticide,
  cannibalism, etc.
• Popular English translation by Arthur Golding
  (1565).
• Book appears onstage in Act 4 (4.1, esp. lines
  42ff.) deliberate anachronism.

Illustration from a Latin text contemporary with
Shakespeare, circa 1581, showing Philomela with
the head of Itys.
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The Moor in Rome

• Genealogy of the term Moor (Blackamoor)
  originally derives from ancient Mauretania.
• In Elizabethan England, use reflects English
  misperceptions about Moors geographically term
  was applied indiscriminately to peoples from
  North Africa, particularly along the Barbary
  coast, but was also occasionally applied to
  sub-Saharan Africans.
• Terms use signaled stereotypes about appearance,
  behavior and religion what are the
  characteristics of Aaron as a moor?
• Moors not determined by fixed notions of race
  reflects trans-cultural heterogeneity around the
  Mediterranean.
• But use of term on the stage would serve to
  construct race in terms of equivalencies, for
  example, between blackness and barbarism.

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Civilization versus barbarism

• Civilization from the Latin civilis meaning of
  or belonging to the city (Rome).
• Barbarian means uncivilized in contemporary
  definitions etymologically, comes from Greek
  word for foreigner thought to derive from
  sound of Persian language to Greek ears (bar
  bar) applied geographically to North Coast of
  Africa, Barbary coast also a rhetorical form,
  a barbarism.
• Barbarous and its derivatives used 7 times in
  this play (see Open Source Shakespeare).
• How is this dichotomy used by the play? OR,
  disrupted by the play?

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Lavinia Tamora

• Name means purity in Latin.
• Virgilian Lavinia, wife of Aeneus Romes
  royal mistress (Saturninus 1.1.241).
• Ovidian Philomela numerous allusions including
  Aaron, 2.2.43.
• Ovidian Lucrece (Aaron 2.1.109).
• A chaste Diane Roman goddess of chastity and
  fertility.

• Queen of the Goths.
• Assyrian Queen Semiramis (Aaron 2.1.20) famed
  for beauty and cruelty.
• Venus goddess of love root of venereal.
• A siren who will charm Romes Saturnine / And
  see his shipwreck and his commonweals (Aaron
  1.1.522-523).
• A ravenous tiger (5.3.194) sexual appetite and
  appetite for revenge.

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Latin source as theme

• Distance between texts and their interpretation a
  running motif in the play where do we find
  texts in the play?
• Ovid in Act 4 4.1, esp. lines 42ff.
• Horatian verse that Titus sends via young Lucius
  to Chiron and Demetrius and which they fail to
  interpret (4.2.18).
• Titus responds to the information at 4.1.80 with
  what is essentially a rewrite of lines from
  Senecas Hippolytus. Titus is here answering
  Demetrius from 2.1.135 (p 112), who earlier
  speaks lines from the Hippolytus, when announcing
  his intention to rape and mutilate Lavinia.
• Scrolls of Latin text which the Andronici shoot
  into the city in 4.3 for Saturninus, for him to
  interpret in 4.4.
• Titus kills Lavinia so that she does not survive
  her shame and renew her fathers sorrows
  (5.3.40) a pattern, precedent and lively
  warrant from Livys story of Virginius.
• Lavinia as text Hark, Marcus, what she says --
  / I can interpret all her martyred signs (Titus,
  3.2.35-6).

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Conventions of the revenge tragedy

• Ha! Ha! Ha!
• Madness or feigned madness is a convention of the
  revenge tragedy the main character is driven by
  grief and the desire for revenge to a kind of
  madness or seeming madness.
• In this case, as in The Spanish Tragedy, the
  other characters think Titus has gone mad and is
  ineffectual or incapable of being a threat.
  Meanwhile, he concocts a revenge plot that is
  outrageous and theatrical and gives the actor
  many moments for grand histrionic displays of
  crazed brilliance or scheming lunacy.
• Is he really mad, or just faking it?
• The feigned madness device is probably most
  recognizable as a feature of Hamlets character.

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Conventions of the revenge tragedy

• Enter Revenge with Rapine and Murder
• A theatrical convention Revenge as an actual
  character orchestrating the events in the vein of
  Kyds The Spanish Tragedy.
• Emblematic characterization (personifying of
  human vices as characters on stage) descends
  directly from medieval drama, especially the
  morality play.
• How is Shakespeare's use of the device different
  from that of earlier precedents? What does he do
  with it to make it his own?

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Conventions of the revenge tragedy

• Revenge is a dish best served cold!
• The dramatic spectacle of revenge culminates in
  the final scene in which Titus plays the cook and
  feeds Tamora her own sons baked in a pie.
• The final scene of the play, 5.3, gives us the
  spectacle of a typical revenge tragedy ending,
  with bodies strewn all over the stage there is
  a pictorial quality to the final tableau of this
  play which draws from plays such as The Spanish
  Tragedy and which anticipates later plays such as
  Hamlet.