A WILDERNESS OF TIGERS

"Titus Andronicus" is one of Shakespeare's earliest plays, which is why I wanted to read it next — I haven't read anything from his salad days — that and because I had just finished "Antony and Cleopatra" and have a special fondness for his Roman stories. It is also his bloodiest play, and that piqued my interest, too — not the gore, but the deviation from the rule.

What I had read about it, though, had not prepared me for this:

A human sacrifice involving severed limbs and burned innards.
Parents savagely killing their children.
A gang rape where the victim's hands and tongue are cut off.
And where the rapists are encouraged by their mother.
A scene where a character is asked to sever his hand to save his two sons, only to be betrayed and have his sons' heads returned to him with his own dismembered hand. (The chilling stage direction for this: Enter a Messenger with two heads and a hand.)
Throat slashings.
Stabbings.
Hangings.
Mothers being fed their dismembered children for dinner.
A corpse thrown to the birds.
A man buried chest deep and left to starve.

It is so shockingly gory that many have disputed its authorship. As one essay says, "Critics up to the middle of the 20th century saw 'Titus Andronicus' as a pointless horror show, so bad that it was probably not by Shakespeare."

But then there is the language, unmistakably Shakespearean, as in Titus' speech to his son: Why, foolish Lucius, dost thou not perceive that Rome is but a wilderness of tigers? Tigers must prey, and Rome affords no prey but me and mine.

The hacking of Lavinia's hands occasions these incomparable verses from her uncle:

O, had the monster seen those lily hands
Tremble, like aspen-leaves, upon a lute,
And make the silken strings delight to kiss them,
He would not then have touch'd them for his life!

It's Shakespeare through and through.

If these horrors happened in a modern play, we would of course be reading about a sociopath. It would be a slasher piece. But everyone in "Titus" is more or less sane. In fact, they are the cream of their society's crop. They are just really, really pissed off — and in way that we can identify with, mostly. The play's bloodbath is largely set in motion by the motherly wrath of Tamora, queen of the Goths, who begs Titus for her son's life and is coldly rebuffed. She makes a vow:

I'll find a day to massacre them all
And raze their faction and their family,
The cruel father and his traitorous sons,
To whom I sued for my dear son's life,
And make them know what 'tis to let a queen
Kneel in the streets and beg for grace in vain.

And massacre she does.

The one exception to the "normal" violence-doer is Aaron the evil Moor, whose sociopathic behavior is shocking even to the other characters. But it's not his bloodlust so much as his lack of remorse, his admission that he has enjoyed the horrors he has perpetrated. They were all doing it out of anger or grief or lust, and he was doing it, well, out of a sense of fun. And he has no regrets.

LUCIUS
Art thou not sorry for these heinous deeds?
AARON
Ay, that I had not done a thousand more.
...
Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things
As willingly as one would kill a fly,
And nothing grieves me heartily indeed
But that I cannot do ten thousand more.

I wonder what effect this character had on Shakespeare's audience, who were used to seeing blood and guts and torture, who'd walk by severed heads on London Bridge to get to the theater. They were used to gore, but were they used to it out of context, with no apparent motive? Senseless, sociopathic violence seems simultaneously primal and ultra-modern. It doesn't seem Elizabethan.

Christy and I talked a little today about the nature of violence in creative works. Why does violence play such a crucial role in so much art, and what is it, exactly, that elevates gore and pain to something poetic and meaningful? Is beautifully "versifying" extreme violence the same as beautifully filming it? Does it make it more palatable?

Shakespeare didn't write anything else the rest of his career that came close to the violence of "Andronicus," even though the play was very popular, and even though he had ample opportunity with the stories he told. Did he learn something? Did he get something out of his system?