The Library Annex

Peace, tender sapling; thou art made of tears,
And tears will quickly melt thy life away. –

So savage! Very few Shakespeare plays drop my jaw so ruthlessly. Whatever unspoken rule I imagined for 16th century English playwrights disappeared or ran for the hills. Nothing implied, everything exposed. If England ever adopted a rating system for plays back in the renaissance period, this may have birthed it.

The audience struggles to find a moral anchor in this play. They might find their hero in Titus but then remember his role in the melting pot of horror. They might find themselves despising Tamora but then remember how she entered the fray. This play lacks cleanliness; not only with its gore but in its lack of a definitive principle or character. Audiences can only accept the messy realism of the uncleanliness and wonder how they might respond if thrust into the role of these characters.

Amidst topical themes of patriotism, politics, and even racism, Shakespeare explores justice and the size of the fire resulting from those fighting each other with it. Early in the play, each offending episode sprouts from pain caused by someone else. Each character festers in their unjust experience. Shakespeare not only explores those causes and effects but each character’s reaction to them; even how their self-victimization propels them to ungodly deeds.

I expect that many find their hero in Titus. As the grand Roman general, sacrificing his own livelihood in service to the Roman Empire, to an ideal, his soul and meaning in life, perhaps irresponsibly, lives and dies with the glory of that ideal. If that ideal, or the expression of that ideal, transforms into something viscous and threatening, one can understand how that mind begins to drift and focus on revenge. He not only suffers similar losses as other characters, but the loss of his soul. To believe in something so deeply, to mortgage his very being on it, can only create a violent vacuum in its horrible absence. However, this does not preclude his innocence, or even a pure unjust victimization, but audiences may sympathize more with him. But it is not a comfortable sympathy – blemished with a hope that a hero might have done things differently.

As Lucius address the Roman public during the conclusion, assuredly facing the audience directly and calling them Roman only in name, each person must decide how they feel about his sentencing of each character. Even at the end, after the bloody climactic tumult, when the audience relishes their chance to impulsively cheer for a character without considering their reasons for doing so, they return to their discomfort and the gray mire backdropped behind Lucius judgements.



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