Titus Andronicus: Psychoanalysis of Projection and Revenge in Elizabethan Times - and Our Own.

Titus Andronicus is one of Shakespeare’s bloodiest and least frequently produced plays.  Whether penned by a player from Stratford or a nobleman, it is generally agreed to be an early and simplistic play.  I had not been wild about seeing it, but we have a local company that has been producing the plays for a long time, they are only one of four companies in the U.S. to have produced the entire canon of 38 plays, and they have recently moved into a new building – their old theater was terrible.  The new one is a smaller scale version of the Globe and it is lovely.  We have been wanting to see a performance in the space for some time and this nicely fit into our need to have a date.  As a kicker, this play has been produced recently at the Stratford Festival in Canada – where they often choose plays with an eye towards helping the U.S. think about just what the heck it is currently doing.

If it is true, as Allan Bloom claims, that Shakespeare invented the human – at least on the stage, but perhaps more generally – this plays counts very few humans in its cast.  This makes sense from the perspective that it is a play from a playwright who is not just learning his craft, but is about to set about upending it.  But first he has to produce something recognizable.  And the odd thing was that this play was easier to watch for me, a person who is far from a Shakespearean specialist, than many of the later, greater plays (Hamlet as perhaps the greatest) have been.  The language was more immediate.  The plot is straightforward, and the characters are cartoons – with the exception of Aaron – the moor.  Aaron is a black slave who creates chaos and disruption – and whose motives are unclear – unlike everyone else on the stage.

I think that the pleasure we had – if you can call watching people get brutally murdered one after the other for three hours pleasure – was greatly enhanced by the staging.  The director chose to set the play in some nebulous time in the silent movie era – and had witty silent film synopses projected ahead of each scene, as well as using projection to let the players and the audience know what had occurred off stage.  We were also invited to participate as Roman Citizens watching the play and rooting for various characters – and helping others at various points – our votes were being courted or we were hiding planted evidence that would lead to miscarriages of justice.  And the characters were played as cartoons – they weren’t enhanced or complicated – in fact they were played as types rather than as persons.  It felt almost campy - but not in an arch way - instead it felt like camp was how this play was intended to be played.

Titus Andronicus returns from a war with the Goths.  He has been successful, but at great cost.  He brings back Tamora, queen of the Goths, her three sons and her moor/slave Aaron as a set of war trophies, but he also brings back the ashes of 21 of his 25 sons, each of whom has died in battle, as well as his four remaining sons who also fought.  Titus' first act of celebration on his return is to execute Tamora’s eldest son in front of her and the Romans as a means of celebrating his victory.  He does this despite Tamora’s entreaties, and we see that she is bent on revenge.

While Titus was away, the emperor of Rome has died, and Titus brother has convince the Senate to allow Titus to run against the two sons of the emperor in a three way election for emperor, but Titus – demonstrating his fatal flaw of fealty to authority – instead endorses and for all practical purposes enthrones the dead emperor’s eldest son, Saturninus, a vain and shallow fool, as the next emperor.  Saturninus was played with somewhat effeminate airs in the production that we saw and they called attention to the essential silliness of the character.  Titus’s choice is a bit of a surprise as the younger son, Bassianus, is betrothed to Titus’ daughter Lavinia, and it would have been a better family based choice to have nominated the younger son, and this underscores that, for Titus, there was no real choice.  The eldest son will lead.  And, more centrally, Titus will do what is called for by culture, tradition, and those who are in power.

No sooner does Saturninus get elevated to the throne than he plucks Lavinia from his brother and insists that he will marry her despite her love for Bassianus because he loves her and he is, after all, emperor.  Bassianus, who is the beloved of the people, and who is annoyingly and simperingly good natured and well intentioned, is, despite his conflict avoidant style, mortified by having his bride stolen from him – as are Lavinia’s brothers – Titus’s remaining children.  Titus sides with the emperor, continuing to be the dutiful and rule bound man that he is – and is so furious with Bassianus and his children that he fights with them to convince them to support the emperor, and, in the process, kills his youngest remaining son (I did say the play  was bloody, didn’t I?  Just wait...).  After Saturninus has set Titus’ family against itself he recants and decides instead to marry Tamora, who is elevated from war trophy/slave to empress by this move – and Titus is now ruled by and must, according to his own code, show fealty to the woman he has defeated, and to the woman who has sworn vengeance against him.

As in King Lear, all of this set up to the motion of the play takes place in the opening scene and before we have really settled into our seats.  And, as in King Lear, the rest of the action is an untangling of these events and the seemingly preordained way that this must needs happen.  This play, though, really does that ruthlessly.  In due time, Tamora’s remaining two sons murder Bassianus and frame Titus’s younger two remaining sons.  After they have done this deed, they rape Lavinia who implores Tamora not to let them do it, but Tamora, intent on revenge, eggs the boys on.  After raping her, they rip out her tongue and cut off her hands so that she can neither speak nor write about what they have done to her.  Meanwhile Titus is told that he can save his boys who have been sentenced to death by cutting off his hand and sending it to the emperor – which he does, but this turns out simply to be a ruse cooked up by Aaron to increase Titus’ pain.  The emperor sends the boys heads and Titus’ hand back to Titus in bags and Banishes Titus’ remaining son from Rome.    

Not surprisingly, next time we see Titus, he appears to be mad.  He is, however, still, underneath it all, the crafty general and he has discovered that it was Tamora’s sons who raped his daughter and killed her husband, and he knows that the emperor killed his children, so he has hatched his own plan for revenge, sending his one remaining son – somewhat crazily, in my mind – to lead the Goths back to Rome to fight the emperor (why would the Goths welcome as their leader one of the people who just defeated them in order to go on a quest to kill their queen?).  In any case, when Tamora comes calling dressed as revenge and brings her sons dressed as rape and murder, Titus, playing the mad man, appears to be taken in, and allows the sons to stay with him – where they plan to cause more mischief, but he turns the tables on them and kills them, bakes them in a pie, and invites the emperor and his wife – their mother, for dinner.

Meanwhile, Tamora has given birth to a child but that child has black skin.  The child is Aaron’s – and Aaron is, completely uncharacteristically, totally taken by it.  He falls in love – as father’s do – and becomes an idiot, cooing and loving on it.  Tamora’s plan had been to kill the thing, but Aaron will have none of that and, instead, he substitutes a white baby from some local Goths and kills everyone who knows anything about the actual child.  He then heads back to Goth, all in love with his child.  Unfortunately, he runs into Titus' son, who apprehends him.  Before he is put to death, he entices the son with information that he knows – so the son gives him a temporary reprieve to hear the information, and Aaron confesses to being behind the killing of Bassanius, the framing of Titus’s other two sons, the cuckolding of the emperor with Tamora, and seems to be quite proud of all this.

The final scene is a doozy.  Dinner at Titus’ place – the emperor and empress eating crow pie.  When they discover what it is, Titus kills his daughter in order to undo the shame that he feels at her having been defiled by the empress’ sons before killing the empress, then he is killed by the emperor, the emperor is killed by Titus’ son, and the son, crowned emperor by his uncle, sentences Aaron to be buried up to his neck and left to starve to death – an ancient Greek means of killing the most evil of people.  Order is restored.  The end.

Wow.  I think that is the most time that I have spent in any post spitting out the plot of a movie, play or book.  I think that is because I really wasn’t interrupted by much that was of psychoanalytic interest, and I think that, in turn, is because this is a very plot driven rather than character driven play.  The people here just aren’t that interesting.

I think it is mildly interesting that there are two prominent female characters.  Lavinia is mostly a prop though, and her suffering – as anguishing as it is – is not understood or appreciated by her father.  Despite their appearing to be of one mind about the revenge (not hard to appear to be in agreement when you can’t speak any lines), the harm that has been done to Lavinia is experienced by Titus as having happened to him – not to her.  His daughter – his pride – his property – was despoiled.  Her chastity was violently broken – as if her unwillingness were not at issue.  I think this can help us appreciate how deeply and for how long women have been blamed for rape and have borne the disgrace of it.  Lavinia's death, of the many deaths on the stage, was the only one that truly surprised me.  I suppose that is good – and a sign that we as a culture have moved along a bit – but it is also concerning, because I should have known that she would be blamed – including by her father – for this action.  If you want to know why more women don’t come forward about such things, we need look no further than this play.

Tamora is also interesting because of her duplicity, but that is relatively straightforward.  She is called forth to be the vain and foolish newbie emperor’s bride and she, no fool herself, knows how to use him.  But it feels a little like putting a formula one race car driver on a tricycle.  Yes, the driver will win the race, but the competition from six year olds is hardly a challenge. 

So Aaron becomes the character of interest, but largely out of curiosity.  He is, at least in this production, largely outside or above the idiots around him.  He is, by far, the strongest and most lithe of the players.  He is also the smartest, coming up with the plot to frame Titus' remaining sons.  He is most off balance in his interactions with Tamora, where he is more smitten with her than she with him, which seems out of character.  Or perhaps she is more focused on revenge, which Aaron has some investment in – but he is, after all, a slave of the Goths, not a native of the country that was defeated by Titus.  We hear no pronouncement of his attachment to Tamora’s son who is executed – at least in this production his body language suggests that he doesn’t have a dog in that race.  Does he carry out the revenge plot just to stay in the good graces of Tamora?  Is he merely trying to butter up his paramour?

At the end, he is, as the reluctant wife pointed out, unrepentant.  He cares not a whit that he has been directly responsible for the deaths of three men, about whom he cared little, and that he has cut the hand off a fourth.  Though he thought that the rape of Lavinia was a childish act on the part of Tamora’s boys, he did not prevent it.  We might think that he is cunning – or perhaps psychopathic – meaning unmoved by the experiences of others.  But he is so totally taken with his own child – we realize that a human heart beats under that black exterior.  And the issue of his skin color – despite those (including myself) who consider race to be a US invention – is vivid in this play.  He is black – and this blackness becomes a stain on his child – it marks his child, just as it has marked him.  And it is equated, in the language of the play, with evil.  But I think it is also equated with his being an outsider – an other – the excluded one.  The one who has no legitimate seat at the table.

Part of Aaron’s glee at having a child is general, but part of it is specific.  His child is the child of a high born woman – the queen of the Goths and the empress of Rome.  His child is royalty.  How could that have happened to a man who is a commoner – indeed, a slave?  On the one hand, all of his machinations as an outsider have bought him the ultimate insider ticket.  His progeny is in the inner circle and carries not just free but royal blood.  He, who has been the target of racist erasure of who he is – he who has lurked outside the wheels of power, has been able to exercise puppet master expertise in manipulating situations and he does not feel guilty – he feels proud.  If murder and mayhem be the cost of inclusion, give me the bill, and I will pay in full.

So why do the Canadians want us to pay attention to this play?  Do they see us, at this time when impeachment is in the air, as having the fatal flaw of fealty?  Do they want to remind us that just because someone has the title of emperor or president, that doesn’t mean they deserve the title?  That was my initial thought – that they identified us with Titus and wanted to remind us to watch out for the king.  But I think that, perhaps, they may also have wanted to warn us that there might be an Aaron in our midst.  Aaron, the second son of Adam.  Aaron, the one who was passed over – and who responded with murder.  The one who was blinded by his having been excluded from the family, and so destroyed it.  Are they pointing a finger at our president who pursued the office not to do good or out of any kind of ideological verve, but rather out of a wish to finally be included – to be considered up to snuff.  Were they exposing the snake in the grass?

My hunch is that this is what they had in mind – or should have had in mind.  That said, I am worried about the use of race as a means of marking outsiderness.  I think that we have done this since, well, I guess at least since the time of Shakespeare.  But I think that this is a vehicle for a deeper truth.  Yes there is enmity between races, and between Goths and Romans, but this play is about the enmity of an individual being excluded from a family – even though he was able to demonstrate that he was not only up to snuff but above the members – and attractive to the queen.  I think that whites (whatever they are) have long projected their disowned aggression against oppressed others – frequently people of color – and then justified their continued aggression as a need to contain the projected aggression. 

If this play is a flat footed first attempt at tragedy – it was, I don’t doubt – popular with those who lusted for blood and revenge (as referred to in Shakespeare in Love).  Perhaps more importantly, it portrayed quite clearly the prejudice and aggression of a culture against those most disempowered within it – the women and the slaves.  It is shocking but not surprising to find this so clearly spelled out in a play from so long ago.  

  

I have posted about other Shakespearean Plays including: Hamlet, King Lear, The Taming of the Shrew, and a fanciful and lovely film about an imaginary Shakespeare in Love.   I have also posted about the controversy about who Shakespeare might really be based on the books Will of the World and Shakespeare by Another Name.  

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