Themes in Titus Andronicus

In particular, scholars have argued that the play is far more thematically complex than has traditionally been thought, and features profound insights into ancient Rome, Elizabethan society, and the human condition.

Such scholars tend to argue that these previously unacknowledged insights have only become apparent during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries due to newfound relevance in the play's ultraviolent content.

Such is the horror of our own age, with the appalling barbarities of prison camps and resistance movements paralleling the torture and mutilation and feeding on human flesh of the play, that it has ceased to be improbable.

As Chiron and Demetrius drag Lavinia into the forest, Tamora vows "Ne'er let my heart know merry cheer indeed/Till all the Andronici be made away" (2.3.187–188).

After the deaths of Martius and Quintus, he asks, "Which way shall I find Revenge's cave?/For these two heads do seem to speak to me,/And threat me I shall never come to bliss/Till all these mischiefs be returned again" (3.1.269–272).

Immediately after Lucius' departure, Titus prepares a meal, but warns Marcus "Look you eat no more/Than will preserve just so much strength in us/As will revenge these bitter woes of ours" (3.2.1–3).

[8] The play is saturated with violence from its opening scene, and violence touches virtually every character; Alarbus is burned alive and has his arms chopped off; Titus stabs his own son to death; Bassianus is murdered and thrown into a pit; Lavinia is brutally raped (and has her hands cut off and her tongue cut out); Martius and Quintus are decapitated; a nurse and a midwife are stabbed to death by Aaron; an innocent clown is executed for no apparent reason; Titus kills Chiron and Demetrius and cooks them in a pie, which he then feeds to their mother.

Aaron is then buried up to his neck and left to starve to death in the open air and Tamora's body is thrown to the wild beasts outside the city.

As S. Clark Hulse points out, "it has 14 killings, 9 of them on stage, 6 severed members, 1 rape (or 2 or 3 depending on how you count), 1 live burial, 1 case of insanity, and 1 of cannibalism – an average of 5.2 atrocities per act, or one for every 97 lines.

In Thomas Preston's Cambyses (1569), for example, a character is brutally flagellated on stage, and various props and theatrical effects are used to simulate dismemberment and several instances of decapitation.

"[11] However, many twentieth century critics, working with new research into Elizabethan culture, have suggested that the society may not have been as blood-thirsty as is often assumed, and as such, Shakespeare could not have been catering to the audience's predilections for violence.

[13] Similarly, Sylvan Barnet argues, "Although the groundlings probably were delighted, the author must have felt he was creating a drama that would appeal also to the cultivated, who knew Seneca and Ovid.

"[14] The vast range of mythological and classical references have often been pointed to as evidence of an educated target audience; references include Priam, the Styx, Scythia, Hecuba, Polymnestor, Titan, Phoebe, Hymenaeus, Ajax, Laertes, Odysseus, Olympus, Prometheus, Semiramis, Vulcan, Lucrece, Aeneas, Dido, Venus, Saturn, Philomel, Dian, Acteon, Jove, Pyramus, the Cocytus, Tereus, Cerberus, Orpheus, Tarquin, Cornelia, Apollo, Pallas, Mercury, Hector, Enceladus, Typhon, Alcides, Mars, Astraea, Pluto, Cyclops, Verginia and Sinon.

In this sense, the play depicts "the Elizabethan nightmare, for even golden ages come to an end in blood, torture and barbarism, and even Rome, the greatest civilisation the world had known, can fall, dragging mankind with it into the darkness.

The lopping off of limbs, in this reading of the play, becomes a powerful metaphor for the dismembership of the state, the destruction of our moral codes and the disintegration of our very humanity.

[20] Similarly, Peter Brook, when explaining why he thought his 1955 RSC production had been so successful, argues that the play is "about the most modern of emotions – about violence, hatred, cruelty, pain.

As Eugene M. Waith argues of the highly formal nature of the opening scene, "the ceremonies of triumph, sacrifice, burial and election immediately establish the solemnity of public occasions on which an ideal political order is affirmed and individuals are valued to the extent that they support it.

The repeated interruptions of the ceremonies suggest the fragility of that order while the mention of Titus' dead sons and the deaths of Alarbus and Mutius emphasise the terrible cost of maintaining it.

His subscription to the unhistorical cruelty of making sacrifice of prisoners in the city streets is a symptom of the coarsening of Roman life and values.

In the figure of Rome's "best champion," therefore, we see Shakespeare's initial exploration in microcosmic form of the painful and tragic collapse of a great civilization.

He is also the great champion of civility when pleading with Titus to let Mutius be buried in the family tomb; Suffer thy brother Marcus to inter His noble nephew here in virtue's nest, That died in honour and Lavinia's cause.

He returns to this theme in his final speech, glorying in his embracement of barbarism; Ah, why should wrath be mute, and fury dumb?

Bate also argues that "at one level, the Goths at the end of the play are invading Rome because they wish to take revenge on their Queen Tamora for selling out and marrying Saturninus.

This is of a piece with the play's persistent dissolution of the binary opposition which associates Rome and the city with virtue, the Goths and the woods with barbarism.

According to Robert Miola, it is not; "It devours its children – figuratively by consigning them to the gaping maw of the Andronici tomb, and literally by serving them in the bloody banquet at the play's end.

But Rome was founded on murder and rape – and if the cultural achievements of humanity – society, law, language, literature – are followed back to their roots, if words are made flesh again, all our cultural achievements turn out to be based on origins which we now consider inhuman and beastly: on sacrifices, on rape and murder, on revenge, on cannibalism.

When Lucius demands that the shadows be appeased through the lopping of the limbs of "the proudest prisoner of the Goths" and the consuming of his flesh in the fire, barbarism has entered the city.

Stolid, unimaginative, and soldierly, it never dawns on him that his readiness to commit unspeakable atrocities on man, woman, and child, is utterly barbaric and totally irreconcilable with the civilised values on which his life is centred.

"[33] Darragh Greene makes the point that it is Lucius and Marcus' mastery of rhetoric, the art of manipulating language, that undermines naive ideals of civilised order: "'Have we done aught amiss?'

2.3.38-39Aaron, without directly citing his race as a reason, seems to know that he is damned, telling Tamora, "[My soul] never hopes more heaven than rests in thee" (2.3.41).