Marcus Andronicus

Play

Titus Andronicus

Summary

Marcus Andronicus is Titus's brother and a Roman tribune — the play's closest thing to a stable moral centre amid escalating horror. It is Marcus who discovers the ravished and mutilated Lavinia in the forest and delivers the long, elaborate rhetorical lament over her ("Speak, gentle niece, what stern ungentle hands / Hath lopped and hewed and made thy body bare…") that critics have sometimes found awkward but which reflects the play's stylised, rhetorical approach to atrocity. Throughout the play Marcus attempts to counsel restraint and maintain the dignity of the Andronicus family even as catastrophe accumulates. In the final scene he helps broker peace and oversees the transition of power to Lucius.

Notable Quotations

"Speak, gentle niece, what stern ungentle hands / Hath lopped and hewed and made thy body bare / Of her two branches?" *(2.4)*

"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 touched them for his life!" *(2.4)*

Cross-references

• Titus Andronicus — the play
• Tragedies
• character_titus — his brother and the play's protagonist
• character_lucius_ta — his nephew, the ultimate survivor
• Lavinia — his niece, whose mutilation he discovers (58 lines; below the 100-line threshold for a character page)