If you’re like me, and didn’t really ever read Titus Andronicus until you started running a Shakespeare blog and became acquainted with all kinds of wonderful things you didn’t know before (ok, so maybe you’re not like me), you might be wondering a little about the history behind Shakespeare’s most gruesome and violent play.
Below is a little summary and history (though it doesn’t seem as enthusiastic about Titus as I am) for the Titus inexperienced:
William Shakespeare wrote what is most likely his first tragedy, Titus Andronicus, in the 1590s when he was just coming up as an exciting new playwright.
Famous for its displays of horrific cruelty and over-the-top violence (including ritual sacrifice, rape, bodily mutilation, murder, torture, and cannibalism), Titus Andronicus is often compared to modern-day horror films. In the play, Roman general Titus Andronicus gets caught up in a vicious cycle of revenge with his nemesis and former war prisoner, Tamora. Titus’s daughter Lavinia is savagely raped by Tamora’s sons, who cut out her tongue and chop off her hands so she can’t identify them verbally or in writing. When Lavinia is finally able to reveal the identities of her attackers, Titus gets revenge by killing the rapists and serving them (as pie) to their mother.
Shakespeare borrowed much of this plot line from Book 6 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which Philomel is raped by her brother-in-law Tereus, who also cuts off her tongue. In the story, Philomel’s sister (Procne) gets revenge by serving Tereus’s son for dinner. Shakespeare also seems to have been thinking of Seneca’s play Thyestes, where Atreus serves up Thyestes’s two sons.
If you’re wondering what the heck Shakespeare was thinking when he wrote this bloody play, you should know that Titus Andronicus is considered a “revenge tragedy,” a genre made popular in the 16th century by Thomas Kyd (Spanish Tragedy) and Christopher Marlowe (White Devil). Some critics argue that in Titus Shakespeare is attempting to outdo the bloodshed found in these previous plays, while others see it as an attempt to mock the ridiculously excessive violence of the genre.
For others, the horrific violence makes the play just plain bad. Modernist poet T.S. Eliot declared that Titus Andronicus is “one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written” (“Seneca in English Translation”). Some critics (such as Brian Vickers) even speculate that Shakespeare didn’t actually write Titus Andronicus, or that he at least had a little help from some other dramatist, like George Peele, who was known for his blood-and-guts drama.
Nevertheless, Titus was a fan favorite in Shakespeare’s time, even if some critics think of it as Shakespeare’s ugly “stepchild.”