The actress Anna Calder-Marshall played the raped Lavinia in the BBC television production in the mid-1980s, at a time when there was great concern about the ready availability of videos characterized by extreme violence, usually wrought upon the bodies of women. ‘Someone said to me,’ she recollected, ‘ “It’s just like a video nasty, isn’t it?” and it is very, very frightening.’ ‘But,’ she went on, ‘somehow, we’ve found – or I think we have – that the characters through their suffering get closer. Titus has committed the most appalling deeds and it isn’t until he’s maimed and his daughter’s maimed that he learns anything about love’ (BBC, 22). To understand Titus Andronicus thus is at once to perceive its proximity to King Lear and to apprehend the difference between a slasher movie and a tragedy.

  In 1953 J. C. Maxwell wrote in the introduction to his Arden edition that ‘Titus is neither a play with a complicated staging nor one which will ever be widely read’ (Ard1, xvii). This completely re-edited Arden will argue to the contrary that not only the play’s staging but also its aesthetics and politics are in fact complicated and sophisticated – and that it ought to be widely read and more frequently performed. The introduction begins with a critical and historical account, which explores the play’s intricate structure and innovative use of theatrical resources (‘Space and structure’), its historical setting and the significance of that setting for an Elizabethan audience (‘Romans and Goths’), its generic context (‘Revenge’), its expressive language (‘Passionating grief’), and two activities which are crucial to the action (‘Reading and rape’). Part two of the introduction continues the critical discussion, but in relation to the play’s theatrical life; it analyses aspects of seven productions, three from within or shortly after Shakespeare’s lifetime, one from the Restoration, one from the Victorian age, and the two great modern revivals mentioned at the outset.

  Even those who have approached Titus in a spirit of scholarly enquiry rather than critical judgement have been prejudiced by their distaste for the play. In particular, they have been anxious to find grounds for devaluing its place in Shakespeare’s career or even dismissing it from the canon of his works altogether. Several eighteenth-century editors denied that Shakespeare wrote any of it; there has been a persistent argument that he was merely touching up someone else’s play or that it was a patched-together collaborative effort; the discovery of an eighteenth-century chapbook narrating the story allowed much of the violence to be palmed off on Shakespeare’s ‘source’; and nearly all scholars suppose that it is a very early work, a piece of crude and embarrassing juvenilia.

  I believe that every one of these arguments is wrong. I believe that the play is deeply Shakespearean and furthermore that it was not based on the chapbook; rather, it was one of the dramatist’s most inventive plays, a complex and self-conscious improvisation upon classical sources, most notably the Metamorphoses of Ovid. I also suspect that it was not a piece of juvenilia but a work revised into a showpiece performed in January 1594. ‘Origins’, the third section of the introduction, argues this position in detail. Finally, in ‘Establishing the text’, I describe the four early editions of the play (the Quartos of 1594, 1600 and 1611, and the 1623 First Folio), attending particularly to various revisions to the text; I also offer an analysis of my own editorial procedures, premised on the assumption that every edition is itself an act of revision.

  It may seem curious to place the section called ‘Origins’ near the end of the introduction. I have ordered it thus because I believe that Titus is an important play and a living one, and that this is best demonstrated by taking the reader forward through its afterlife on the stage before turning back to its emergence out of the London theatre-scene of the early 1590s. Treatments of date, sources and text have to be concerned with minutiae and may appear technical and potentially boring, but I have tried to write about these matters in an accessible way because they reveal much about the artfulness of the play.

  THE DRAMATIC ACHIEVEMENT

  Space and structure

  The theatres built by the Elizabethans allowed for triple-layered performance. There was a gallery or upper stage (Juliet’s window is the most famous use of this ‘above’ or ‘aloft’ space), the main stage which projected into the auditorium and on which the actors – in Hamlet’s image – ‘hold as ’twere the mirror’ up to the lives of the theatre audience, and the ‘cellarage’ below the stage, reached by a trap-door (through which Dr Faustus descends and the weird sisters’ apparitions arise). In Titus Andronicus Shakespeare made bold and innovative use of all three levels.

  Trumpets sound, heralding the beginning of the play. But the stage remains empty: the first entrance is that of the Roman tribunes and senators ‘aloft’. The biggest theatrical hit of the early 1590s, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, had also begun with an entrance above, but there the personages on the upper stage represented a dead man and a personification of Revenge: the tragedy performed below is imagined as an acting out of revenge upon the dead man’s enemies, with him as spectator throughout. The stage-manager, ‘Revenge’, is a figure from ancient Roman tragedy, so what Kyd offers his audience is a classicized version of the medieval image of God looking down on the theatre of the world. But where Christian iconography had God and Kyd had Revenge, Shakespeare begins with human, secular authorities in the commanding position aloft.

  Below them, on the main stage, there are doors at either end of the tiring-house which serves as a backdrop (see impression of the Rose Theatre, Fig. 1). Through them come rival claimants for power: the use of opposite doors dramatizes the brothers’ opposition in terms of the stage space. When Titus Andronicus enters in his victory procession, the third level, the darkness below the stage which figures the underworld, comes into play. His first task is to give a proper burial to his sons who have died in combat, ‘They open the tomb’ and the nether world is invoked for the first time. Once buried, the dead sons would be free to cross the Styx into the underworld; once the gods were propitiated, peace could return to Rome. The city prided itself on not being barbaric: the word civilized comes from civilis, which means ‘of citizens, of the city’, and Rome was the city. The religious rituals of a civilized culture, it was believed, involved animal rather than human sacrifice. 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 fire, barbarism has entered the city.2 The first of the play’s many reversals of expected linguistic and behavioural codes takes place, and the supposedly barbaric queen of Goths speaks a Roman language of valour, patriotism, piety, mercy and nobility, whereas the Roman warriors go about their ritual killing. Theirs is, as Tamora says in a telling oxymoron, a ‘cruel, irreligious piety’. It will provoke the bloody requital of what Demetrius here calls ‘sharp revenge’. The ground is immediately laid for the play’s brutal but elegant symmetrical structure: ‘Alarbus’ limbs are lopped’ in Act 1, so Lavinia’s will be ‘lopped and hewed’ in Act 2; Tamora is made to kneel and plead for her son’s life, so Titus will later be made to kneel and plead for his sons’ lives.

  1 Reconstruction of the Rose Theatre as extended in 1592 (originally built in 1587: painting by C. Walter Hodges)

  To read the timing of entrances and exits is to see these patterns unfold: Titus’ sons enter with their swords bloody from the sacrifice of Alarbus, their dead brothers are laid to rest and then their sister comes on. Her entrance is perfectly timed to draw her into the spiral of retribution. It also serves to link the domestic political plot with the opposition between Titus and Tamora. The opposite doors come into play again when Saturninus and the Goths take off for the upper stage just as the Andronicus boys help Bassianus bear Lavinia away through the other door. Having just been at the centre of a triumphal procession, Titus suddenly finds himself alone on stage with the body of a son whom he has slain out of a mistaken sense of honour and loyalty to the new emperor who at the very same moment has gone off to marry the queen of Goths, thus further dissolving the distinction between insiders and outsiders, civilized and barbaric. There is then a re-entry through the opposite doors in which the two sides are seen in tableau against each other. Having begun with Saturninus against Bassianus, then moved to Romans against Goths, the scene ends with Saturninus and Goths versus Bassianus and Andronici, but in uneasy truce. Since that truce has been brokered by Tamora, with her ulterior scheme revealed in an aside, we know it will not last – especially since the general departure for the double wedding has left the sinister and hitherto menacingly silent figure of Aaron alone in control of the stage.

  Hunting for sport is ‘civilized’ society’s way of getting back in touch with the wild. The second act of the play moves swiftly from a cheerful aubade, complete with hunter’s peal, to a dark forest, evoked through a verbal iconography of shadowiness and banefulness – the emblem reproduced here (Fig. 2) suggests the associations of such a place. A second-act movement away from city and court anticipates the journeys not only of pastoral plays such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It and Cymbeline, but also of Lear. Where the first act is dominated by the question of who controls the upper stage, symbolic of the Capitol, of power over Rome, the second is dominated by the pit, represented by the trap-door. Aaron is in his element here, hiding the gold, springing the trap, leading in the hapless Quintus and Martius. Attention shifts from the body politic to the human body. The forest is a place where desire can be acted out: Tamora comes to make love to Aaron, Chiron and Demetrius rape Lavinia.

  The rape cannot be shown onstage, but it is evoked through the simultaneous action of the pit scene. We do not have to be card-carrying Freudians to see the connection between what we know Chiron and Demetrius are doing to Lavinia, and Quintus’ description of a ‘subtle hole’, ‘Whose mouth is covered with rude-growing briers / Upon whose leaves are drops of new-shed blood’, or Martius’ reference to ‘the swallowing womb / Of this deep pit’ where the dead Bassianus lies ‘bathed in maiden blood’.3 ‘This detested, dark, blood-drinking pit’, ‘Cocytus’ misty mouth’, ‘this fell devouring receptacle’, ‘this gaping hollow’ (OED’s earliest record of the adjective), ‘the ragged entrails of this pit’: the language becomes darkly obsessive, evocative not only of death and hell but also of the threatening female sexuality that is embodied in Tamora. There is a suggestion of Lear’s disgust at what he calls the ‘sulphurous pit’ of woman’s genitals.4 The ‘mouth’ of the pit becomes crucial when we realize that Lavinia is not only being raped but also having her tongue cut out; throughout the play, the action turns on mouths that speak, mouths that abuse and are abused, mouths that devour.

  2 ‘The woods are ruthless, dreadful …’: emblem from Henry Peacham’s Minerva Britanna (1612)

  If the onstage/offstage counterpoint of pit and rape is bold, how much bolder is the following scene in which the elaborate poetic language of Marcus is juxtaposed onstage to the physical image of Lavinia’s mutilated body. The best account of the effect is by D. J. Palmer, and it is well worth a long quotation:

  Marcus’ lament is the expression of an effort to realise a sight that taxes to the utmost the powers of understanding and utterance. The vivid conceits in which he pictures his hapless niece do not transform or depersonalise her: she is already transformed and depersonalised, as she stands before him the victim of a strange and cruel metamorphosis.… Far from being a retreat from the awful reality into some aesthetic distance, then, Marcus’ conceits dwell upon this figure that is to him both familiar and strange, fair and hideous, living body and object: this is, and is not, Lavinia.… Lavinia’s plight is literally unutterable … Marcus’ formal lament articulates unspeakable woes.… Here and throughout the play, the response to the intolerable is ritualised, in language and action, because ritual is the ultimate means by which man seeks to order and control his precarious and unstable world.

  (Palmer, 321–2)

  I return to Marcus’ speech later, in the context of Peter Brook’s and Deborah Warner’s very different treatments of the scene.

  In terms of the structure of the play, the post-rape scene is pivotal because it shifts the balance from the language-registers associated with action to those associated with reaction. It introduces two registers which have been apparent only in passing up to this point: comedy and grief. Grief is the register of Marcus’ speech, as it is of much of Titus’ language in the following scene. But the first reaction to the rape is a series of jokes. Chiron and Demetrius become a sick comedy team, offering feed line and punch line:

  CHIRON

  Go home, call for sweet water, wash thy hands.

  DEMETRIUS

  She hath no tongue to call, nor hands to wash.

  and again,

  CHIRON

  And ’twere my cause, I should go hang myself.

  DEMETRIUS

  If thou hadst hands to help thee knit the cord.

  There is a decorum of character in this – it is not unknown for rapists to think of their actions as a bit of a laugh. There is also an anticipation of Lear, where Cornwall accompanies the gouging of Gloucester’s eyes with some grimly witty word-play. But does comedy effect a simultaneous heightening and release of tension in the audience here, as it does in the Porter scene in Macbeth, which occupies a closely comparable structural position? I suspect that it is intended to, but that the cultural gap between our time and Shakespeare’s makes it difficult for us to share in the release. Among our few taboos are having a laugh at the expense of people who haven’t got any hands or women who have been raped.

  Titus’ first words to his mutilated daughter are ‘what accursed hand / Hath made thee handless in thy father’s sight?’ Features such as the relentless play on the word ‘hands’ from this point onwards have led some critics to suppose that the whole play is ‘a huge joke’, a parody in which Shakespeare watched the groundlings ‘gaping ever wider to swallow more as he tossed them bigger and bigger gobbets of sob-stuff and raw beef-steak’ (Dover Wilson, Cam1, lvi). This is a wrong-headed but understandable reading. There is a lot of comedy in the second half of the play – it was brought out brilliantly by Brian Cox in the Deborah Warner production – but that does not make it a parody. Rather, what it does is blur the conventional distinctions between tragedy and comedy, grieving and laughing. As the decorums of Roman honour disintegrate, so do the decorums of dramatic expectation.

  What do you do when twenty-one of your sons have been killed in battle, you’ve killed the twenty-second in a fit of pique, your daughter has been raped and had her hands cut off and her tongue cut out, two further sons have been wrongly accused of murdering your son-in-law and the remaining one sentenced to exile, you’ve been told that the two who are condemned will be reprieved if you chop off your hand, and you do so, only to have the hand and the heads of the two sons sent back to you in scorn? Dramatic decorum dictates that you should rant (‘Now is a time to storm,’ says Marcus). But human nature does not obey dramatic decorum. What Titus says is much more true: ‘Ha, ha, ha!’ At the end of the scene, he and Marcus carry off the heads; but, so as to be sure that Lavinia is not left out, he says ‘Bear thou my hand, sweet wench, between thy teeth’. This is a visual joke, for it shows that she has become the handmaid of Revenge (a role which will later involve her in dextrous work with a basin between her stumps). If we laugh at Titus’ line, as the audience in all three productions I have seen certainly did, we are sharing in Titus’ experience. By laughing with him, we also participate in what he calls the ‘sympathy of woe’. Where Lear has his Fool and then the company of Poor Tom, Titus and Hamlet play their own fools; in each case, the moments of laughter intensify rather than diminish the passionate fellow-feeling of tragedy.

  3 ‘I’ll play the cook’: Deborah Warner production

  Titus certainly gets the last laugh against his enemies. He spends the fourth act sending jokey messages, first to Chiron and Demetrius, then to Saturninus via arrows and Clown. He turns the tables on Tamora in the scene in which she impersonates Revenge and he then enjoys himself playing the cook (see Fig. 3 for the stylish presentation of this in the Warner production). Comedy depends on a sense of satisfaction, of one thing answering neatly to another. So there is a kind of comic satisfaction in the gagging of Chiron and Demetrius and the slitting of their throats: it answers exactly to their gagging of Lavinia and cutting of her tongue. It is no coincidence that the two longest speeches in the play are Marcus’ address to the raped Lavinia and Titus’ address to her rapists prior to his act of retribution. Furthermore, in the preceding scene, Aaron has bragged of his villainy in what Palmer (336) aptly calls ‘a parody of the need under which Titus ritualises suffering in speech and action’, so that ‘tragedy is transformed into jest’ (the trick is learnt from Marlowe’s Jew of Malta). Aaron’s ‘bitter tongue’ torments his enemies until, like other tongues in the play, it is gagged and stopped. As we come to the close and reflect on the hand that Titus has played in the second half, Palmer is again our surest commentator on the game:

  Titus’ passion is a continued struggle, not merely to endure the unendurable, but to express the inexpressible; he performs his woes out of the need to grasp what is all too real but virtually inconceivable in its enormity. The impulse to play, in other words, arises in Titus not as a retreat from the hideous world that confronts him, but as a means of registering its full significance. His more bizarre fantasies, in which his mind seems to have collapsed under the unbearable suffering, are certainly symptoms of a precarious sanity, yet far from losing his grip on reality, through these obsessive pantomimes Titus’ mind becomes fixed on its object.