Notes on Titus Andronicus

Here's some key ideas, though, that might be of use on the final.

Titus Andronicus does not have as many little nuggets of beautiful phrasing as a lot of Shakespeare, so it's harder for me to quote a few lines to give a prompt. The play does have its share of dynamic ideas, however, especially as filmed here. They come out in the extremity and complexity of both the play and its presentation on film. I may present characters and/or scenes and ask a question for each prompt. So it may be worthwhile to think of how that happened.

For the production -- the play itself involves a clash between clans -- cultures, generations, classes. That's in part carried in the movie by relation to visual and aural fashions, partly of the 20th Century. So, for instance, Titus Andronicus, for example, is an older character with a kind of Old Testament kind of morals. We find him in battle gear that reminds us of ancient Romans and Greeks. He's generally accompanied by music that sounds classical and formal -- violins, heavy sounds, choral sounds. The conflict between Bassianus and Saturnius uses a lot of Fascist imagery. Their costumes may be placed around the 1920's and 1930's. Scenes were shot in and around Mussolini's palaces and so forth. His celebrations and orgies flow with hot jazz arrangements and costumes. Tamora's kids are rockers who at one point would have had posters of Sid Vicious or Billy Idol -- probably not serious enough for the Clash, but you know the era. You see the costumes, even the 80's-early 90's graphics on the video-game consoles. And so the leather pants and so forth. There's a convenient confusion between the tattoos of Roman-era northern tribes and those of contemporary youth that's taken advantage of broadly here, but partly in the sort of exotic set of costumes for Tamora and Aaron.

All of these things -- setting, music, costume -- related meaningfully to the content of the written play and to intent in performance.

Now, the Taymor production also makes a big deal of the point of view of the boy, young Lucius. He gets that whole extra scene at the beginning where he's playing, then the last frames at the end where he walks into the rising sun with Aaron's child. That and the odd march at the beginning and the odd scene at the end where the camara pulls back from old Titus' table to show the coliseum and then what appears to be a film audience are a modern addition to the Shakespeare, and seem to provide a symbolic or at least significant bracketing to the rest of the film. Taymor's making some point or points about the viewing of the film and the viewing of violence and the effect on the younger generation, but what?

A lot of the conflicts in the play proper are built on astonishing apparent contradictions in the characters, and if you go through the play character by character and isolate what appears contradictory, why the contradictions exist, and what they tell us about human nature and principles, that will stand you in good stead. Here are a couple of the more obvious examples.

Most of us find Titus Andronicus good. He's sacrificed 21 sons to Rome at the beginning. He's modest enough to turn down being an emperor, for crying out loud. He tries to be fair: he even kills one of his own sons when he feels the son is a traitor, so he seems the ultimate patriot. But at the same time, he's willing to cut off his own hand for his sons, and even tricks his relatives to get his hand cut off before theirs. Would I hesitate so little? And yet, he has Tamora's son killed and his entrails burned in front of her. Now, if that happened at a local park on a Sunday afternoon, what would we say? Alright, this is "to appease the Roman gods," granted, but what are the Roman gods that they may be so appeased? On top of that, it's not like this son was the first who was killed. Titus lost 21 sons, but he won the war. What did the Goths lose? There's no reason here to believe that the Goths had been violent towards Rome. Rome invaded them, cut them up for something it calls glory. So what's good?

Aaron, on the other hand, can be pretty well described as evil. His last dying regret is that he may have inadvertently done something good. I won't even list the vicious things he does in the play just because they're painful and I assume you remember them well enough. On the other hand, doesn't he seem to be the only person in the whole play who demonstrates anything like defensible family values? A lot of people see Tamora's rage as righteous because she loses a son, but she herself is willing to kill her own son, and foolishly gives Aaron orders to see that it's done. Not even poor Lavinia can be described as altogether innocent. Recall her praise for her father, Titus, as he buried 21 of her brothers for the priviledge of slaughtering Goths. And what about her and Bassianus' threats towards Tamora when they found her sporting with Aaron in the woods? They surely amounted to a death threat, since Saturnius would surely have executed Tamora had he found her unfaithful. So, if the Roman and Goth societies are thus, and and if they have the prejudices towards Aaron's race that Lavinia, Bassianus, Lucius, the Andronichae, and the nurse all show at points, can we not make a case that it's not so bad of Aaron to bedevil them all?

If you can get a pretty good sense of these things for the main characters and think of them in terms of your own values and in terms of events you're familiar with, you'll be in good shape.