Titus Andronicus
Play
Summary
Titus Andronicus is Rome's greatest general, returning triumphant from war against the Goths with Tamora and her sons as his prisoners — and immediately triggering a spiral of atrocity by sacrificing Tamora's eldest son over the protests of all. His strict, old-Roman sense of honour proves catastrophic: he kills his own son Mutius for defying him, allows the wrong men to be executed for a murder he knows they did not commit, and is progressively unmanned by accumulating horrors — his daughter Lavinia raped and mutilated, his sons executed, his own hand severed. The play drives Titus to the edge of madness and then offers him one of Shakespeare's most extreme revenge denouements: he kills Tamora's sons, bakes them in a pie, serves them to their mother at a banquet, and kills both Tamora and Lavinia before being killed himself.
Notable Quotations
"Rome is but a wilderness of tigers. / Tigers must prey, and Rome affords no prey / But me and mine." *(3.1)*
"For now I stand as one upon a rock / Environed with a wilderness of sea, / Who marks the waxing tide grow wave by wave." *(3.1)*
"I am the sea; hark how her sighs do blow! / She is the weeping welkin, I the earth." *(3.1)*
"I have not another tear to shed." *(3.1)*
Cross-references
- Titus Andronicus — the play
- Tragedies
- character_tamora — the Queen of the Goths whose revenge destroys him
- character_aaron — Tamora's lover and arch-villain
- character_marcus — his brother, the moral witness
- character_lucius_ta — his son, the ultimate survivor
- character_saturninus — the weak emperor who sides with Tamora