Search review text. Literally years after people began suggesting that I do this, I finally got around to reading the damn play. So in the words of Bette Davis: fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night.
I'm an awesome general, all my super-handsome sons are awesome, I have a hot daughter who's engaged to a great guy, and even though the emperor just married my enemy Queen Tamora I'm sure that can never backfire on me! Yessireee, everything's coming up Titus! So, um I was walking in the woods, and first I found your daughter's husband's dead body. And then Cannot change the channel, people. Here are their heads, later sucker! In case anyone in the audience hasn't caught on, I'm the bad guy because I'm black.
Othello isn't for a few more years, folks. Enjoy this. Hey guys! How was raping and mutilating Titus' daughter? Good thing Mom let us do that instead of just killing her like Lavinia asked. Seriously though, why isn't that a bigger deal? Also we made her ugly, which is way worse. Tamora just had a baby! The bad news is, he's brown. But I didn't do it alone, I had a great assistant!
Come in here, Lavinia! You've sure had a rough couple of days, but it's all going to be okay soon! Also, since you were raped and dishonored, I have to kill you.
Hey Tamora, why didn't your sons come to dinner? Going somewhere, Aaron? Okay, here's the deal: don't kill my mixed race bastard baby and I'll tell you how I planned the whole thing. Now I'm just going to throw your girlfriend's body to the dogs and bury you chest deep in the ground to starve to death slowly!
Bill Kerwin. Author 1 book Like A Comedy of Errors , Titus Andronicus is part of a grammar-school-educated Shakespeare's crash-course substitute for a university education. In Errors , he imitated Plautine comedy's plot structure and stock characters, and--in an experiment to see just how much fun the form could hold--doubled the number of comic misunderstandings by doubling the number of identical twins.
In Titus , he imitates the violent plots and magisterial rhetoric of Senecan tragedy, and--again as an experiment--doubles the horrors.
In the process, Shakespeare produces for the first time some highly rhetorical, mythology-laden blank verse which flows with a new musical subtlety, and also succeeds in creating over-the-top language and grisly tableaux as outrageous and overwrought as a blood-spattered baroque ceiling--in other words, exactly the sort of excess that would appeal to an Elizabethan audience.
Is the play intentionally funny? Except for an occasional line here and there, I doubt it. At any rate, if it is supposed to be, it fails. Shakespeare lacked the anarchic temperament necessary to exult in evil for its own sake as Marlowe so effectively did in the "Jew of Malta". On the contrary, his early villains are the most convincing when they reveal their vulnerability--La Pucelle's terror at her auto da fe , the deformed Gloster's fear of courtly dalliance--not when they revel in their nihilism.
Without at least a little love for chaos, there can be no real black comedy, and, if such a love can be deemed an artistic virtue, it is a virtue not found in Shakespeare's character. Eventually, he would depict the cold manipulative rage of Iago, but it would take ten years of life and craft to give him the tools to do so. Although I like this play, I don't believe it is successful.
The plot is too mechanical and the horrors too insincere. Since not all translations are fully cataloged, some items may only turn up in one of these searches. Explore the curated image group for Titus Andronicus in the Folger digital image collection. Titus Andronicus. The title page of Titus Andronicus printed in the First Quarto.
STC The title page of Titus Andronicus printed in the First Folio. STC Fo. Unappeased, she urges her sons Chiron and Demetrius to rape Titus's daughter Lavinia, after which they cut off her hands and tongue so she cannot give their crime away. Finally, even Titus's last surviving son Lucius is banished from Rome; he subsequently seeks alliance with the enemy Goths in order to attack Rome.
Each new misfortune hits the aged, tired Titus with heavier impact. Eventually, he begins to act oddly and everyone assumes that he is crazy. Tamora tries to capitalize on his seeming madness by pretending to be the figure of Revenge, come to offer him justice if Titus will only convince Lucius to cease attacking Rome. Titus, having feigned his madness all along, tricks her, captures her sons, kills them, and makes pie out of them. He feeds this pie to their mother in the final scene, after which he kills both Tamora and Lavinia, his own daughter.
Lucius has the unrepentant Aaron buried alive, and Tamora's corpse thrown to the beasts.
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