Allusion and sacrifice in Titus Andronicus.(Critical essay)

Danielle A. St. Hilaire, Allusion and Sacrifice in Titus Andronicus

This essay defends Shakespeare's character Titus Andronicus against recent criticism by arguing that the calamitous events in Titus Andronicus are not caused by Titus behaving badly but by the construction of the play around a textual tradition that offers only sacrifice as an alternative to war. By demonstrating how Titus's actions might be read plausibly as the best possible reactions to an already bad situation, I argue that the greatest force of violence in the play is misreading and that the play's ultimate question is how a peaceful future can grow out of a bloody past.

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The cause of all calamity in Titus Andronicus can be traced back to two pairs of events, both of which occur in the play's opening scene and both of which establish the motive and opportunity for the tragedy that will unfold. The first, the burial of Titus's sons that includes as part of the ritual the sacrifice of Alarbus, provides Tamora with the impetus to seek revenge against Titus and his family; the second, the betrothal and marriage of Saturninus during which Titus kills his son Mutius, places Tamora in the position from which she might wreak that vengeance while at the same time weakening Titus's ability to fend off the attack. In commenting on these early moments in the text, critics have been almost unanimous in joining with Tamora's condemnation of Titus's "cruel, irreligious piety," (1) accusing him of "[a]cting with inflexible self-righteousness, [and] adhering strictly to custom and law," (2) of being a "tyrant ... intolerant of institutional or personal opposition," (3) and of displaying "a piety that seems not only cruel and irreligious but also a perversion of virtus." (4) I would like to argue that such criticisms, which tend to blame Titus for the tragedy on the basis of his perceived personal failings, obscure more important questions concerning why Titus acts the way he does and within what contexts, both situational and textual. Instead of focusing on the wrongness of Titus's actions (though I do not dispute that they are wrong), I want to show here that the central problem in the play is the fact that Titus's actions, though bloody, are nevertheless the best and most "correct" options available to him given the framework the play provides. In a world in which only textual precedent can authorize future action, the difficulty Titus and the rest face is how to build a future out of the past.

Before Titus speaks his first lines in the play, the social order in which he will act already is falling apart. Having just ended one war outside the walls of Rome, Titus returns to find Rome on the brink of a new war--this time within the city--as Saturninus and Bassianus fight over the rights of succession. To make matters worse, those that had been Titus's strength outside the walls of Rome, his "five-and-twenty valiant sons" (I.i.82), are nearly all dead. The loss of so many of Titus's sons is a double threat. With twenty-one of twenty-five of "Rome's readiest champions" (I.i. 154) now dead, the city is left with little to defend itself from future threats, internal or external (and we know historically that the Goths are not yet finished with Rome). More importantly, however, the death of these children threatens Rome's survival beyond the present generation. Throughout the play, offspring, particularly sons, fulfill a vital role, as parents continually pass their agency down into their children's hands. Thus Titus, finding himself unfit to serve as emperor because of his age (I.i. 190-1), chooses Saturninus as emperor, recognizing him as "our emperor's eldest son" (I.i.228), whereupon Saturninus recognizes Titus as "father of my life" (I.i.257). Similarly, Titus hands over the task of reading to his grandson Lucius when his own sight begins to fail (III. ii.85-6), and, when Titus gives over his life, it is his son Lucius who steps up to fill his place. Children are thus necessary to the survival of Rome, for only through succession, through the passing down of agency from parent to child, can the future of the society beyond the parent's generation be ensured. (5) In a city containing, as far as the reader is concerned, only three families (Titus's, the emperor's, and Tamora's), the loss of twenty-one sons is immense and suggests the vulnerability of Titus's Rome at the play's outset.

This menace to Roman society is compounded further by the call to revenge echoing out of the tomb of the Andronici. As Lucius says, and Titus affirms, Goth blood must be spilt "That so the shadows be not unappeased, / Nor we disturbed with prodigies on earth" (I.i. 103-4); though the war is finished, the dead, it would seem, demand vengeance. Jonathan Bate, in his notes on the text, comments cynically here that the ghosts of the dead Andronici are "conspicuously absent" in the play, casting doubt on the veracity of Lucius's claim. (6) Yet blood debts incurred on the field of battle are by no means an unusual literary occurrence. Achilles made the battlefield run red in Trojan blood to repay a debt for Patroklos, just as Aeneas sent so many Rutulian shades to the banks of the Styx to atone for the death of Pallas. (7) This is a world in which the dead demand revenge, and so the fact that the Andronici here should seek vengeance for the sake of their fallen brethren should not be a cause for skepticism. This need to repay a blood debt, however, does leave the "poor remains" (I.i.84) of the Andronici in considerable danger, for it threatens to renew the war so newly put to rest. If, like Achilles or the Aeneas of Aeneid 10, Titus and his sons sought "T'appease their groaning shadows that are gone" (I.i. 129) with the lives of all the Goths, they would once again have to take up arms and risk the fragile future that still remains.

Titus thus enters into a volatile situation when he walks onto the stage in act I: he stands at once on the brink of a civil war that would destroy Rome and its people from within and on the brink of a second, revenge-fueled war outside the city walls that promises to consume the "poor remains" of the Romans and non-Romans alike. As the person whom "the people of Rome ... have by common voice / In election for the Roman empery / Chosen" (I.i.20-3), Titus is given the immense task of making things right, of saving everyone on the stage from the total violence into which his world is about to descend. His actions that follow in the first act, which have been so much criticized, make sense as his response to the burden laid at his feet. First, he attends to the problem of the Goths. Rather than pursuing a wide-ranging vengeance against those who have so endangered his social order, Titus instead moves to cauterize Rome's near-fatal wound by appeasing "their groaning shadows that are gone" and eliminating the need for further violence (I.i. 129). Asking Jupiter, the "great defender of this Capitol," to "Stand gracious to the rites that [he] intend[s]" (I.i.80-1), Titus attempts to lay revenge to rest alongside his sons by incorporating into the burial ritual a second rite: the blood sacrifice of a single victim. This new ritual, a "sacrifice of expiation" (I.i.37) (8)--literally a sacrifice "from piety"--moves the call to revenge from the battlefield into a symbolic space. The effect of this move is twofold. First, it allows Alarbus's death to represent (and therefore to take the place of) a more bloody and wide-ranging retribution, expiating the debt owed by the Goths to the Roman dead while leaving Tamora's family injured but surviving and saving Titus's family from further losses in the pursuit of vengeance. Second, it entombs revenge, a chaotic and murderous force that devours its enemies and their children alike (as the play later demonstrates), within the confined space of ritual, excluding it from daily Roman life. With the sacrifice made and the accounts thus settled, the need for further revenge should be eliminated, stabilizing the social order by saving Titus's family from further fatal wars. (9)