Titus Andronicus: Stuff to Chew On

When we decided to name the episodes where we cover major themes, the main sources, and key background information for Shakespeare’s plays, we definitely weren’t thinking of the implications it would have for this play in particular. 

But now we are here, and discussing stuff to chew on for Titus Andronicus!

Content warning: Titus Andronicus contains depictions and descriptions of acts of mutilation, graphic discussions of sexual assault and rape, overt racism, non-consensual cannibalism, and torture. Please listen with care.

Elyse Sharp (ES): Hi Kourtney.

Kourtney Smith (KS): Hi Elyse.

ES: Sorry. I got really excited that I got that in first.

KS: Well, it's been a long day for me.

ES: (overlapping) Been a lot of “Hi Elyses,” lately.

KS: A lot of hi Elyse's, not enough hi Kourtney's at the top, and I'm happy to bow down this time. How are you doing?

ES: I'm doing okay. How are you?

KS: I'm doing fine. I'm really excited to talk about today's episode. We are getting into our stuff to chew on for Titus, which thank you listeners for hanging in there on a rough synopsis.

ES: Yeah

KS: Again, trigger warning for everyone. There's content that may be uncomfortable or not appropriate for all listeners. There's a laundry list of difficult material in this play. There's sexual assault, mutilation, violence, killing, racism, cannibalism. So we'll continue to remind everyone in these Titus episodes, but thank you for sticking with us.

ES: But with that said, now let's get into our stuff to chew on for Titus Andronicus. Things that typically people talk about when they start talking about this play. Let's.

KS: Titus Andronicus was considered a wildly popular one of Shakespeare's plays in his time and as one of his bloodiest tragedies, developed its negative reputation around the 18th century because the play was thought to be in bad taste. In fact, several 18th century editors denied Shakespeare wrote any of it and questioned its authorship because they called it crude and juvenile. And this distaste for the brutal play makes sense given I would consider this play closer to a horror movie like Saw than anything that we have covered so far like Hamlet, Midsummer, Twelfth Night. As a revenge play, it's very brutal. It's very bloody. And knowing what I know about the 18th century and the 19th century, I understand why people wanted to distance Shakespeare from this play.

ES: Right. But speaking back in Shakespeare's time, we actually have some exact dates for Titus Andronicus that scholars believe are most likely the first performances. There's a small, very small margin of error because the theater companies were moving about and changing during this time, during the time that Titus was written. But it's widely believed that Titus Andronicus was performed sometime between late 1593 and early 1594 as original dates. Fun fact, 1592 through 1594 were particularly difficult years for the London theater. The Privy Council ordered the theaters closed after a public disturbance in June 1592 that was related to the theaters. According to receipts kept by Philip Henslow at the Rose Theater, the Lord Strange's Men resumed performing at the Rose in December 1592, but that winter season was cut short and closed again by the Privy Council at the end of January 1593 due to an outbreak of plague. The theaters reopened again after almost a year for another short season. And Henslow's records indicate that the Lord Chamberlain's Men performed at the Rose between December 27th, 1593 and February 6th, 1594. Four weeks into that season, Henslow records a premiere, or he notes it as new, of Titus Andronicus on Thursday, January 24th, 1594, with receipts, or ticket sales, equaling £3.08, and those sales are some of the best of the entire season. The play was repeated for two more performances on January 29th and February 6th, but unfortunately theaters closed again due to plague on February 7th. The order to close was issued on the 3rd of February, and by the 6th, that date of final performance, a printer named John Danter had lodged an entry for a play called A Noble Roman History of Titus Andronicus with the Stationer's Register. And we're going to get into the quartos later, but it is possible, especially due to this rushed printing, that this first quarto was sold by the players to Danter, so if people couldn't see the play, they could at least read it. Titus was revived again in early June 1594 for a short season outside the city, while theaters in the city were still closed to plague, and both the Admiral's Men and the Lord Chamberlain's Men were performing during that season, so it's unclear which one continued to perform it. That said, when the theaters reopened, the Lord Chamberlain's Men split off from the Rose and Henslow's Company to The Theatre, north of the river, capital T Theatre, and it's believed they took the rights to Titus with them. Unfortunately, the Lord Chamberlain's Men didn't keep records as well as Henslow did, so we don't know exact performance history after that, or before that. But Lord Chamberlain's Men were new at the time, so it's very much believed that that late 1593, early 1594, are the original performances of Titus Andronicus.

KS: I'm obsessed with Philip Henslow and his record keeping, because there's so much we would not know if it weren't for this man and his diary. Thank you.

ES: Yeah, we owe a lot to him, yeah.

KS: Yes, we do.

ES: Comparatively, the other plays that were playing in late 1593 and early 1594 at the Rose were not breaking the, like, pound mark. This man, like, over three pounds, they were raking in in shillings. So this play was wildly popular, so I think also, potentially, it's also theorized that potentially the players were looking to just have another source of income on this play, because it was so popular and demand was so high.

KS: That makes sense. Another thing to note about Titus is that it is a revenge play and the first Roman play of Shakespeare's.

ES: It being late 1593 to 1594 also makes it one of the earliest of Shakespeare's plays.

KS: I kind of mentioned this before, but there is an authorship question that's ridiculous, but it does exist, so I want to bring it up. So this was a play written by Shakespeare and performed by the Lord Chamberlain's Men. You said that, Elyse. And so an Edward Ravenscroft, who was an English dramatist from the late 1600s, early 1700s, wrote that it was not originally Shakespeare's play, but there is no evidence for that claim. And authorship questions came into fashion. We see that with many of the plays and just, you know, the Francis Bacon question, the Marlow question, and there's even a book called Did Shakespeare Write Titus Andronicus? by George Peele. And again, this play, because it was so dark and crude and quote unquote juvenile, is said to not be his. It couldn't possibly be his, but there's absolutely no evidence to back that up. [Note: We misspoke here. Authorship of Titus Andronicus has previously been attributed to George Peele. Recent work in attribution studies shows Peele likely collaborated with Shakespeare on the play—see our episode with Darren Freebury-Jones for more. J.M. Robertson is the author of Did Shakespeare Write Titus Andronicus?.]

ES: There is a lost play that was not by Shakespeare, that's believed to not be by Shakespeare, but often confused with Titus Andronicus called Titus and Vespasian. Sometimes they would just be abbreviated as Titus in recordkeeping. Henslow's recordkeeping is great because it actually says it's Titus Andronicus, but it's possible that that's where this question came from, was seeing that Titus attributed to other authors.

KS: And as far as sources are concerned with Titus, this play is not historical and it is extant in three versions. So there's Shakespeare's play, there's a ballad that was entered in the stationer's register in 1594, and a prose narrative account, which survives only in a mid 18th century chapbook. And based on the publishing trends at the time, it's very likely that the ballad was written after Titus Andronicus, the play itself. And this chapbook is also probably a narrative using Shakespeare's original source. And there are three scholars who have argued that the play came first, and the ballad is based on the play, and the chapbook was a re-expansion of the story based on the ballad. And in fact, Titus can be seen as one of Shakespeare's source-less plays, like Midsummer and Hamlet, that are influenced by things, but there's not a one-to-one or like a half of it very much comes from another source kind of situation. So Titus is one of those where we're not going to be bringing in Hollingshed's Chronicles or anything like that.

ES: As I mentioned earlier, the first printing is that John Danter printing in 1594. That's the first quarto. We also get a second quarto in 1600, a third quarto in 1611, and then the first folio in 1623. Play texts in early modern England were not high priority in Elizabethan printing houses. They were quick and cheap. However, John Danter, an early modern printer that I mentioned earlier, and his compositors produced a Titus with far fewer blunders than most. And like I said before, possibly because the theater was directly involved in the production of this text. A first quarto turned up in Sweden, and that is now among the most prized possessions of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Scholars agree that folio was set from quarto three, but that either the annotator of quarto three or the printer of the folio had a copy of a prompt book.

KS: Available evidence suggests that Titus was written for Henlow's Rose Theater, and the excavation of the foundations of that theater in 1989 revealed that the shape of its stage was different from those of the Fortune and the Globe, which we know about from documents relating to their construction. And actions in staging of Titus suggest that Shakespeare had given thought to the problems and potentiality of the Rose Theater. Titus is also the only play for which we have a contemporaneous illustration, which means that it consists of a single folio sheet and a carefully executed ink drawing, which is referred to as the Peachum drawing, because in the left-hand margin near the top of the sheet is written Henricus Peachum. And this drawing illustrates a scene from the play in which Tamara is pleading for her sons who are going to execution. A lot of people like to think that Shakespeare's plays were performed at the Globe Theater, but obviously the Globe Theater wasn't around until the latter half of Shakespeare's career, so half of his plays weren't even performed at the Burndown Globe.

ES: This play has also been adapted. Dutch dramatist Jan Vos wrote an adaptation in 1637 through 1638, so less than 50 years after Titus Andronicus, titled Aran en Titus, so Aaron and Titus, that was reprinted in 1642, 1644, 1648, and 1649, subsequently going through roughly 28 editions by 1726. Titus was also adapted for production on the English stage after theaters reopened in 1660 and was called The Rape of Lavinia. Unlike Tempest or Lear, which changed to a happy ending, the characterization and structure of the Restoration adaptations remained true to Shakespeare's original. The main change is getting Aaron into the action earlier by giving him a Demetrius speech encouraging Tamara to get revenge for the death of Alarbus.

KS: And some context about the conflict going on in the play, Titus is set in Rome and most of the characters are Roman citizens, and it's a Rome versus Barbarian story. The Barbarians are the Goths, respectively. The Goths are a Germanic people who historically played a major role in the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the emergence of medieval Europe. In the late 4th century AD, some Goths entered the Roman Empire, and these would come to be known as Visigoths, and eventually the Visigoths would sack Rome. Now, Titus doesn't include any historical or legendary or mythic conflict between the Romans and the Goths-slash-Visigoths. I read this as more of a, we need to have an other, so we're going to pick an other, the Goths, to be in conflict with our Roman tragic hero.

ES: Yeah, I read it very much as taking some pieces of Roman history that through studying classics Shakespeare would have known and piecing them together to create a revenge story set in Rome.

KS: Exactly.

ES: Another additional background that we have featured really heavily in this is the story of Philomela from Ovid's Metamorphoses. This story is also referenced in A Midsummer Night's Dream, but not as much. In Titus, Lavinia is constantly compared to Philomela because both of them endure sexual assault and mutilation. So here is a quick overview of Philomela according to Wikipedia. Philomela was the younger of two daughters of Pandion, the first king of Athens, and a nyad, I think pronounced, Zeuxippe. Her sister, Procne, was the wife of King Tereus of Thrace, and then they had a few other siblings. The myth has a few variations, but the general idea is that Philomela, after being raped and mutilated by her sister's husband, Tereus, obtains her revenge and is transformed into a nightingale. Ovid's version, specifically, places these events in the fifth year of Procne's marriage to Tereus. At this point she asks her husband to “let me at Athens my dear sister see, or let her come to Thrace and visit me.” Tereus agrees to travel to Athens and escort Procne's sister, Philomela, to Thrace. King Pandion of Athens, the father of Philomela and Procne, is apprehensive about letting one of his one remaining daughter leave his home and protection, and asks Tarius to protect her as if he were her father. Tereus agrees. However, as soon as he sees Philomela, he lusts for her. Once arriving in Thrace, Terues forces Philomela to a cabin or lodge in the woods and rapes her. After the assault, Tereus threatens her and advises her to keep silent, and Philomela is defiant, and this angers Tereus, and in his rage, he cuts out her tongue and abandons her in the cabin. According to an 18th century translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, the defiant speech of Philomela reads like this:

Still my revenge shall take its proper time,
And suit the baseness of your hellish crime.
My self, abandon'd, and devoid of shame,
Thro' the wide world your actions will proclaim;
Or tho' I'm prison'd in this lonely den,
Obscur'd, and bury'd from the sight of men,
My mournful voice the pitying rocks shall move,
And my complainings echo thro' the grove.
Hear me, o Heav'n! and, if a God be there,
Let him regard me, and accept my pray'r.

So, while Philomela is unable to speak because of her injuries, she weaves a tapestry or a robe that tells her story and sends it to Procne. Procne becomes incensed by her husband's actions and kills their son Itys, or Itylos, in revenge. Procne boils Itys and serves him as a meal for Tereus, and then after Tereus eats Itys, the sisters present Tereus with the severed head of his son, revealing their conspiracy. Tereus grabs an axe and chases the sisters, intending to kill them. They flee and desperately pray to the gods to be turned into birds to escape Tereus's rage and vengeance. The gods transform Procne into a swallow and Philomela into a nightingale. They also transform Tereus into a bird, as well, that looks ridiculous, a hoopoe. It has like a mohawk.

KS: So Google it. Thank you for reading the myth and sharing her speech. People go down to the footnotes and go, oh, this is based on this myth, but, you know.

ES: Yeah, I think we can go back to like, sourceless Shakespeare and go, well, again, he's not directly adapting an earlier version of a Titus story. We have sons baked into pies as revenge for rape and mutilation of a daughter.

KS: Right. It's the incident that pushes Titus over the edge, so therefore it is very influential. It really, really made a mark on this, on Shakespeare writing this play.

ES:And maybe Titus's actions are actually a reference to the fact that these two, Demetrius and Chiron, do to her what was done to Philomela and, you know, add to it.

KS: Exactly. Yeah. So that is background on Titus. Now let's talk about some of those themes and motifs from your English class, your college class. The first one is revenge. Titus is, as I said before, from a genre of drama called revenge tragedy. And another very different example is Shakespeare's Hamlet, also a revenge tragedy. So revenge is central to the play. The play unfolds as a series of acts of revenge that plunge the characters into a spiral of eye for eye and tooth for tooth violence. But as this play demonstrates, revenge does not annul or cancel out a crime or a violent act. Rather, it continues the cycle of violence. Titus kills Tamora's oldest son as revenge for the loss of some of his children. But this causes her to seek revenge on him. But neither does her revenge solve the matter. Instead, it prompts Titus to seek further vengeance on her. The tragedy concludes not because revenge finally settles any disputes, but because by the end of the play, no one is alive to seek further vengeance. So Shakespeare takes a common convention of tragic plots, revenge, and explores it to its fullest throughout the play.

ES: The next major theme is related to revenge. It's violence. In addition to revenge, Shakespeare pushes another common aspect of tragic drama to its limits in Titus Andronicus, and that is violence. Not only do characters die in Titus Andronicus, but children are murdered in front of their parents, like Tamora's oldest son, Lavinia is raped and disfigured horribly, Titus has his hand cut off, and in the final act of the play, Titus feeds Tamora's own children to her. In the play, Shakespeare stretches the boundaries of what can be represented on stage and what audiences and readers are willing to endure.

KS: Another theme of Titus is justice. We are prompted to ask whether any act of violence can be just, as characters carry out their acts of horrid violence in the name of justice. Titus and his sons explicitly pray for the personified goddess of justice to come help them in Act 4, and they see their subsequent actions as bringing such justice about. Titus and Tamora believe in the justice of revenge, but as the play devolves into an endless cycle of bloodshed, this seems like anything but justice. Titus's sons are put on trial, but the trial certainly does not arrive at a just conclusion. Saturninus believes he is carrying out justice in opposing Lucius and his army of goths. Titus even maintains in the final scene of the play that killing his own daughter, Lavinia, is justified because it returns her honor to her. Titus Andronicus thus asks us to consider whether justice can be attained through violence and whether justice is ever really served in the play.

ES: Another theme present in Titus is children, or children and lineage. Thinking about, on one hand, the importance of beginning children to be heirs, and on the other hand, being able to trace one's descent from a family line. Especially, sons and male lineage are extremely important in the cultural world of ancient Rome that Shakespeare constructs in Titus Andronicus. In the first scene of the play, lineage determines who will be the next emperor of Rome, Saturninus. And by contrast, Aaron's child by Tamora does not have a suitable lineage for the Roman throne and threatens to expose Aaron as Tamora's lover. But, if children are extremely precious and valuable in the world of Titus Andronicus, they are also oddly disposable. Titus is quick to kill his own son, Mutius, when Mutius tries to prevent Saturninus from marrying Lavinia, whom Titus is also quick to give away in marriage. And Titus also kills Lavinia in the final scene of the play as a way to protect the Andronicus family's honor. At times, Titus appears to value his children more as reflections of his own virtue and honor than as persons in their own right. In the balancing act of revenge, children are used like bartering chips to settle disputes between rivals.

KS: The next thing we want to talk about is mourning. If one consequence of the numerous deaths and violent acts of this play is revenge, the other is mourning. As characters experience ever-increasing pains over the course of the play, they are plunged deeper and deeper into grief, especially Titus. I think this is not factual, guys, but I think like half of the play he is grieving or mourning. A lot of his text is talking about grief and mourning. The repeated scenes of grieving beg the question of whether such lamentation is actually worth anything or if it's simply useless. For example, in Act 3, Scene 1, Marcus advises Titus to let reason govern by lament, but Titus insists on an outpouring of grief. And later in the same scene, Titus begins to laugh, basically saying he doesn't have another tear to shed. So in a sense, Titus is pushed beyond the limits of grief and can then only turn to cold-hearted revenge.

ES: Speaking of grief, our final theme to chew on today is grief. The play also brings up that question of how much grief is fitting or appropriate for someone to display. While Titus is plunged into extreme outbursts of grief, Marcus and young Lucius, Lucius' son, practice restrained mourning for the death of Titus and pay their respects to the dead within reason, taking care to have Lavinia and Titus buried in the Andronicus family tomb. As a way of responding to suffering, mourning may not change anything, but within reasonable limits it may help people cope and move on, as Marcus, Lucius, and young Lucius hope to do at the play's close. And as a response to tragedy, it at least seems preferable to revenge. And interesting to think back on our discussions with Twelfth Night about the appropriate mourning and grief debates that were happening in England during the late years of Elizabeth's reign.

KS: And that episode is our Twelfth Night: Comedic Tropes episode, so check that out. All right, well, Elyse, I think that is all the time we have to chew on Titus Andronicus. Oh, oh no.

ES: Yeah I’ve been thinking about

KS: I saw Elyse's face.

ES: I've been thinking about our title, Stuff to Chew On, in reflection of this play. Little bit gruesome.

KS: It's not a meat pie, everyone. It's chewing on ideas, not—

ES: Knowledge.

KS: Chew on knowledge, not people.

ES: With that said, thank you for listening.

Quote of the Episode:

ES: From Henry V, Act 5, Scene 2, said by Queen Isabel: “She hath good leave.”

Shakespeare Anyone? is created and produced by Kourtney Smith and Elyse Sharp.

Music is "Neverending Minute" by Sounds Like Sander.

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Works referenced:

“Philomela.” Wikipedia, 23 May 2023, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philomela.

Shakespeare, William, and Jonathan Bate. Titus Andronicus: Revised Edition. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2018