The Cruel, Religious Piety of Revenge and Violence in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus
By Ben Parsons
Abstract
This essay is a minor research project I undertook on my Master of Arts in English at the University of New England, Armidale. In it, I explore the "turn to religion" in Shakespearean criticism, and Shakespeare's apparent preoccupation with religiously-sanctioned violence in his early play, Titus Andronicus. I also explore the origins of human violence, inherent both in human nature as a species that successfully evolved through a brutal process of natural selection, and inherent also in various, often primitive, religio-cultural human practices and sanctions that are, strangely I think, still followed today. I posit that Titus Andronicus offers humanity a useful lesson in that any violence, whether religiously sanctioned or not, is a pretty bad idea.
Introduction
Virtually all of the violence and calamity that transpires in Shakespeare’s play Titus Andronicus can be traced back to one seminal event in the opening scene: Titus’s slaughter of Queen Tamora the Goth’s eldest son, apparently done to appease the souls of Titus’s own sons, themselves recently slain by the Goths in war. In response to Titus’s plan, Queen Tamora famously protests, “O cruel, irreligious piety!” (Shakespeare and Bate 1.1.148, my emphasis). The “cruel” violence to which Tamora refers and which pervades nearly every scene is, in fact, ‘natural’, and to be expected as innate in an animal that has become the dominant species on the planet through the savage Darwinian process of evolution by natural selection, often at the expense of entire other species. Religion, it is often claimed, has been an overwhelmingly positive, ‘civilising’ influence on the naturally cruel mankind, however this is demonstrably untrue: the “irreligious piety” of human sacrifice and revenge to which Tamora refers is, in fact, very “religious”, and enshrined in various forms of paganism, theistic texts including the Christian Bible, and the religiously-derived Roman law under which Titus lives: therefore, religion is anything but a civilising influence on humanity. Tamora’s seemingly innocuous oxymoron “cruel, irreligious piety” interjection hides a key theme in the play: that religion itself is a paradox, and is used by various characters, most notably Titus, to both facilitate and excuse their savagery, and appear civilised when they are manifestly anything but. The play Titus Andronicus contains a valuable lesson for humanity: that barbarity is barbarity whether religiously-sanctioned or not, and that if barbarity is responded to with more barbarity, the inevitable result is a Titus-esque style, insoluble, vicious cycle of revenge-begets-revenge-begets-revenge, where there are simply no winners, only losers.
The Deep Roots of Human Violence
There is a plethora of philosophical, religious and scientific sources at hand that describe the Homo sapiens species as being innately predisposed to violence and barbarity. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes describes his view of humanity as “every man against every man” and proclaims the need for an authoritarian state or monarch in order to control humans, who he deems incapable of self-management (Giorgi 10). In many religions such as Christianity, man is often originally “condemned” in sin (9). Science also proposes a range of theories that are pessimistic about human nature: evolutionists Darwin, Herbert and Spencer portray human violence as simply an inevitable product of brutal evolution by natural selection (10); the renowned psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud cites violence as a natural and instinctive response to repressed eroticism; and biologist Konrad Lorenz believes that humans simply just follow evolutionary rules that served them well for evolutionary survival (11). More modern theories along this vein abound: one of those is the Deep-Roots Theory of War, a proponent of which is Steven Pinker, who posits that “the human brain has conserved mammalian circuits for rage and dominance” and that most adult humans to this day experience heritable, homicidal fantasies (Pinker 310), few of which in today’s civilised world, fortunately, are acted upon. During ‘pre-civilised’ times however, violence, war, murder and genocide were the order of the day: almost one in seven humans died violently at the hand of another human (Pinker 309), and barbaric customs such as human sacrifice, witch-hunting, chattel slavery, blood sports, torture, mutilation, and executions by such means as burning, breaking, crucifixion, disembowelment and impalement were commonplace (309). While accepting that violence is part of the human condition, this theory does not, however, propose a pessimistic view that human violence is inevitable like hunger or libido: Pinker believes there are elements to the human mind such as cognition, empathy and reason, which enable humans to embrace their “better angels”, and socially decide the parameters of what is acceptable, civilised behaviour, and what is not (310).
Religious Roots of Human Violence
The earliest attempt at embracing our “better angels” and deciding acceptable parameters of human behaviour was the development of superstitious and religious belief systems which often included laws, moral codes, and codes of honour, and while these are often presumed to have had a civilising influence on humanity, this is demonstrably false. One form of savagery, human sacrifice, is particularly apparent in the history of nearly every religion: for example, in the 6th Century BCE in Roman Crimea, the pagan Taurians routinely sacrificed any foreigners they encountered to their pagan goddess Iphigeneia (Rives 67-8), while the Gauls and Punics regularly practiced human sacrifice, considering it a “divine” and “pious” act (69). Paganism, however, does not hold the mantle alone when it comes to human sacrifice: major organised and so-called ‘civilised’ religions not only sanction human sacrifice, but are founded upon it. Christianity often self-designates as the “light to lighten the gentiles” (Moschovakis 462), but this claim is dubious at best. The central event of Christianity, the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ, is in itself a human sacrifice: according to The Bible, Christ was delivered to God by his followers to appease Him for the supposed “transgressions” or “sins” of all of humanity, and through the vicarious suffering of Jesus, “make us right with Him” (Bible, Romans 4:25). Put simply, without the human sacrifice of Jesus to God, humanity could not be saved and had no “justification” (Romans 4:25), and Christianity would not exist. Moreover, Christian communities possess a long history of human sacrifice in the form of “witch hunts” of “nonconforming groups” (Klaits 393), and while the Islamic Koran does not implicitly condone honour killings per se, they “internationally… are on the rise {in Islamic communities]… [and] elements of Islamic Law (Sharia) – including harsh punishment, strict moral codes and patriarchal control or women and girls – could be seen to encourage honour-based violence” (Al-Gharaibeh 2). All things considered, religion cannot claim to be a net curtailer of violence: at best, it sanctions it; at worst it condones it.
Shakespeare & the 'Turn to Religion'
The plays of William Shakespeare, including Titus Andronicus, are littered with references and allusions to religion, and many critics have posited that Shakespeare himself maintained something of a scepticism or distrust of religion (Clegg 599). According to Shell (cited in Clegg 599-600), a recent trend in Shakepsearean criticism, the “turn to religion,” seeks to “take seriously the religious thoughts, beliefs, or crises that both energised and disturbed Shakespeare when he wrote.” The new “turn” takes seriously the cultural context in which Shakespeare wrote, early post-Reformation England, and views the playwright as
"a religious skeptic who was critical of his own religiously conflicted society and also both intellectually and emotionally attached to some of the features of the “old religion” as he sought ways to translate some of them into psychologically and ethically powerful theatre" (Jackson & Marotti, cited in Clegg 600)
In Titus Andronicus specifically, critics such as Kuchar (cited in Clegg 601) posit that the repeated use of ritual human sacrifice in the play, which Tamora labels “irreligious piety” represents an ironic “failure of Roman culture to recognise in itself the barbarity that it deplores in the Goths.” Human sacrifice in Rome is used as a trope by Shakespeare to criticise his cultural context of religious, post-Reformation England, where torture and executions of Catholics or ‘others’ not deemed religiously suitable was sanctioned by the religio-political state (Kuchar, cited in Clegg 601). The state cannot simply commit genocide with impunity from the masses: for impunity to occur, it requires sanction, and it finds that sanction within the religion of the masses.
"a religious skeptic who was critical of his own religiously conflicted society and also both intellectually and emotionally attached to some of the features of the “old religion” as he sought ways to translate some of them into psychologically and ethically powerful theatre" (Jackson & Marotti, cited in Clegg 600)
In Titus Andronicus specifically, critics such as Kuchar (cited in Clegg 601) posit that the repeated use of ritual human sacrifice in the play, which Tamora labels “irreligious piety” represents an ironic “failure of Roman culture to recognise in itself the barbarity that it deplores in the Goths.” Human sacrifice in Rome is used as a trope by Shakespeare to criticise his cultural context of religious, post-Reformation England, where torture and executions of Catholics or ‘others’ not deemed religiously suitable was sanctioned by the religio-political state (Kuchar, cited in Clegg 601). The state cannot simply commit genocide with impunity from the masses: for impunity to occur, it requires sanction, and it finds that sanction within the religion of the masses.
Religiously-sanctioned Violence in Titus Andronicus
In Titus, Shakespeare continues to frame his criticism of the post-Reformation English context into a Roman setting through the use of anachronism. According to Moschovakis (461) the deliberate use of post-Reformation Christian terms such as “heaven” (Shakespeare and Bate 2.2.41), “ever-burning hell” (3.1.243) and “incarnate devil” (5.1.40) serves as an artistic device to “enjoin the reevaluation in present terms of subjects otherwise regarded as past” (Moschovakis 461). Put simply, it allows Shakespeare to take past events and issues, and give them a sense of urgency, a sense that they must be immediately dealt with. Colliding post-Reformation Christianity with the context of the Roman Empire versus the pagan and supposedly barbarous Goths, Shakespeare presents us with a multi-spectral, paradoxical world where, almost immediately, the lines between ‘pagan’ and ‘Christian’, ‘civilised’ and ‘uncivilised’, and ‘religious’ and ‘irreligious’ become blurred, and characters are at once both pious and impious, religious and irreligious, or even cruel and kind.
As in post-Reformation England, in Titus Andronicus man appears as innately barbaric, and much of the violence that occurs in the play manifests as an evolutionary response by an individual to a perceived external threat, and religion is often used to both sanction and excuse it. Before ordering the slaughter of Alarbus, Titus apostrophises his dead sons: “why suffer’st thou thy sons, unburied yet, / To hover on the dreadful shore of Styx?” (Shakespeare and Bate, 1.1.86). Significantly, however, the ghosts of his sons are “conspicuously absent” (St Hilaire 312). Shakespeare’s other plays are littered with appearances of ghosts and the undead: in Hamlet, the ghost of the titular character continually appears and reappears throughout the play, eventually playing a major part (Shakespeare Hamlet Acts 1-3); in Macbeth, the ghost of Banquo, plays a major role (Shakespeare The Tragedy of Macbeth, Act 3); and in addition to the named character Ariel, The Tempest contains at least five other named ghosts who play important plot roles (Shakespeare The Tempest, Acts 1-5). It seems that if ghosts actually exist in Shakespeare plays, they are visible, appear on the stage, and are often named and given a speaking role. Titus did not hear the “groaning shadows” (Shakespeare and Bate 1.1.145) of his son’s ghosts, because they simply did not exist. On the contrary, Titus instinctively viewed the loss of so many of his progeny as an existential threat to the continuation of his bloodline and to his status as the dominant alpha-male of the dominant alpha-tribe in Rome, and his Darwinian response of ordering Alarbus’s slaughter was calculated to secure his bloodline’s future by providing a deterrent to any further attacks from the perceived threat, Queen Tamora and her progeny. As opposed to the “barbarous goth” other (1.1.33), the Romans then are the ‘not barbarous’ and civilised: in civilised Rome therefore, Titus knew he could not perform this uncivilised act on a prisoner of war lightly without revolt from the masses. He required a civilised solution: he invoked the supposedly civilising influence of religion by inventing the suffering ghosts of his sons to justify the killing of Alarbus, “that so the shadows be not unappeas’d” (Shakespeare and Bate 1.1.90, my emphasis), and using biblical language like ‘appease’ to appeal to the masses’ religiosity. Titus had successfully sanctioned the human sacrifice of his enemy using religion.
When Tamora ascends the social order, marries Saturnine and becomes the alpha-female empress of Rome, she too sees her position and survival as precarious, and in turn takes Darwinian, proactive steps to secure both her position and her progeny. Knowing full well that she was the emperor’s second choice of bride, she immediately sets out to remove the threat of the first: Lavinia. In an allusion to the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament, Lavinia is lured by Queen Tamora to an Eden-esque “lonely part of the forest” (2.3.1) where “the birds chant melancholy on every bush /, the snake rolled in the cheerful sun; / [and] the green leaves quiver with the cooling wind” (2.3.742-745). Like Titus, Tamora knows that in civilised Rome, she cannot simply murder “gracious Lavinia, Rome’s rich ornament” (Shakespeare and Bate 1.1.52) … [who] stood upon her chastity, / Upon her nuptial vow, her loyalty” (2.3.861). In order to civilise the killing of the chaste and loyal ornament of Rome’s masses, she requires religious sanction, and she achieves this by having her remaining progeny and heirs to the Roman throne, Demetrius and Chiron, “make pillage of her chastity” (2.3.778), raping her, removing her virginity and therefore chastity. The summary killing of any unmarried non-virgin or adulterous woman, is sanctioned in the already alluded-to Old Testament, which put simply states: if a woman is not a virgin or is an adulterer, she shall be brought to her father’s house, and she shall be put to death for being a whore and dishonouring him (Bible, 22:20-21, my emphasis). Lavinia herself seems to agree with the Deuteronomic principle, and prefers death before such dishonour: “O, keep me from their worse than killing lust, / And tumble me into some loathsome pit, / Where never man’s eye may behold my body” (2.3.869). Tamora’s actions certainly seem to also fit the Deuteronomy paradigm: she does not kill Lavinia directly, however she knows that by removing her chastity and familial honour through rape, she will have attacked and threatened Titus’s honour, and he will perform the now religiously-sanctioned, Darwinian, honour-restoring sacrifice on her behalf, which he eventually does at the end of the play.
In response to Tamora’s counterattacks, Titus decides to set the cycle of revenge-begets-revenge full circle and “plot some device of further misery” (3.1.1264). Lamenting that “Terras Astrea reliquit”, or “The Goddess of Justice has left the Earth” (4.3.1885), he again decides that only religion can provide redress, so he “solicit[s] heaven, and move[s] the gods / to send down Justice for to wreak our wrongs” (3.1.1931-3). Titus’s plan is to attach letters addressed to the Roman gods onto arrows, then fire the arrows into the sky, appearing to others present to “write to Heaven for his redress” (4.4.2022). Titus, however, intentionally aimed the arrows so that they would land in the palace containing his enemies. The arrows he fired into the palace were undoubtedly some of the most powerful and deadly long-range military hardware available at the time, and could be considered the Roman equivalent of a modern-day high-powered assault rifle, or possibly even a rocket-propelled grenade. That the deadly arrows landed in the palace, almost killing Titus’s enemies, could not possibly have been an accident considering the size of Rome. Titus was not shooting the arrows to solicit the gods for his redress: in actual fact, this was merely another attempt by Titus to exact bloody revenge upon his enemies by killing them, and using religion to both sanction and excuse it.
Throughout the play, various characters are continually described not in terms of their deeds or misdeeds, but often contrapuntally in terms of their apparent religiosity and piety, or even lack thereof. Despite appearing by deed as a warmongering serial murderer, Titus is often compared to something of a god by his peers and family. Lavinia addresses him as “lord and father” who demands she “kneel” at his feet and “bless” her with his “victorious hand” (1.1.179-90). Moreover, Saturninus regards him as something of a creator figure, adulating him with the prayer-like phrase:
Thanks, noble Titus, father of my life.
How proud I am of thee and of thy gifts
Rome shall record; and when I do forget
The least of these unspeakable deserts,
Romans, forget your fealty to me
(1.1.280, my emphases)
Consider now the similarity to the Lord’s prayer:
Our Father in heaven,
Hallowed be thy name,
Your Kingdom come,
Your will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
(Bible, Matthew 6:9–13)
The prayer-like adulation of Titus despite his many misdeeds stands in stark contrast to how Aaron the Moor is described, despite his admitted “murders, rapes, and massacres, / acts of black night, abominable deeds, / Complots of mischief, treason, villainies” (Shakespeare and Bate, 4.1.2200). Other than a few superficial racially-derived descriptions such as “coal-black Moor” (3.2.1525), at the end of the play it seems the only real charge against him was that he was an “irreligious Moor” (5.3.2661). Ironically, according to Aaron, only the “religious” have a conscience (5.1.2210), however this has been shown to be unequivocally false: the religious are demonstrably equally as barbaric as the irreligious, yet at least the irreligious Aaron is honest about his crimes. The implication is clear: in the world of Titus Andronicus, one’s character and deeds in life are irrelevant: what seems to matter most is not how religious one actually is, but rather how religious one either appears, or can at least present oneself to appear. If Aaron had, at the conclusion of the play, survived and turned to religion, there would predictably have been no charges against him for his crimes as he would have achieved religious sanction for them, and the only sum remaining of his character would be the racial epithets.
At the play’s culmination, Titus has the removal of his enemies all but assured; yet, he inexplicably commits further religiously-sanctioned violence. Having removed the threat of Aaron, Chiron and Demetrius, and now having lured Tamora to her imminent death, Titus and his only remaining progeny could have gone and lived the proverbial ‘happily-ever-after’. For Titus, however, the removal of Lavinia’s “spotless chastity” (5.2.2493) actually represents the next greatest threat to his honour and continuance as alpha-male. With his familial honour in tatters due to Lavinia’s rape, he feels he must take pre-emptive, deterrent action to restore it. In a further anachronism which compounds the collision of post-Reformation England with Rome, Titus alludes to Chaucer’s Physician’s tale, and there he finds sanction to commit an honour killing of Lavinia, removing her “shame” and “presence” which was the further cause of his “sorrow” (5.3.2578-88), and supposedly replacing it with his lost honour. Titus claims that his murder of Lavinia was a selfless and ‘humane’ act, as if to put an animal out of its misery, but his speech and the repeated use of the first personal pronoun betray the self-preserving narcissism of his motives: "Killed her, for whom tears have made me blind, / I am as woeful as Virginius was” (5.3.2581-53, my emphasis). Lavinia was, put simply, slaughtered vicariously in order to redeem Titus’s lost honour and place his status as alpha-male of Rome beyond challenge.
While it is clear that Titus invokes religion in sanctioning his violence, it is worth exploration of the legality under either secular Roman or religious law of his actions. When Titus encounters Murder and Rapine outside his house, he commands “Good Murder, stab him; he’s a murderer” (5.2.2409, my emphasis). This command confirms that almost all of Titus’s actions in the play seem to be inspired by the religiously-derived law of Lex Talionis, literally “law of retaliation” or “an eye for an eye”, an iteration of under which he lives, recorded in the Twelve Tables of Early Roman Law (VanDrunen 945). Lex Talionis, however, goes back much farther than Roman Law. The concept has its roots in early Mesopotamian civilisation in The Code of Hamurrabi, a part of which states “If a man has caused a man of rank to lose an eye, one of his own eyes must be struck out. If he has shattered the limb of a man of rank, let his own limb be broken. If he has knocked out the tooth of a man of rank, his tooth must be knocked out” (Brooks 1). The law was carried over into various iterations in Abrahamic religious texts: the Old Testament states: “if there is a serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise (Bible, Leviticus 24: 17-22, Deuteronomy 19:21). Roman Law states unequivocal support to the Old Testament view: “If a person has maimed another's limb, let there be retaliation in kind” (Adams), yet adds a caveat in that violent retribution may be avoided however if “fair compensation” is reached. In the New Testament, Jesus himself appears to contradict Lex Talionis: “you have heard it was said, ‘eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth’, but I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also” (Bible, Luke 6:29). Titus disregards both the Lex Talionis caveat, and the corrective New Testament, and instead adheres to older, obsolete law. According to VanDrunen, Lex Talionis was never meant to be taken as literally as Titus has taken it: it is meant to represent a “virtuous sense of equity” and equal compensation before the law, and that such physical retribution was never meant to be practiced. Titus is not only acting unethically: he is acting illegally, too.
Another key theme in the play is that of vicarious suffering, whereby characters such as Lavinia are harmed or killed in place of another person. Again, this is sanctioned in the central event of Christianity, where Jesus Christ was vicariously crucified in order to appease God for the sins of humanity. Firstly, Titus claimed to have been suffering on behalf of the entire nation, carrying the sorrows of “ungrateful Rome” (4.3.1900) and Saturninus, sensing the relentless counterattack of Titus, claims to have been wrongly “overborne, / Troubled, confronted” (4.4.2010-12) for others’ actions. This, however, pales in comparison to the punishment order against Aaron. Instead of punishing the admitted offender himself for his crimes, it is instead decided to target the “base fruit of his burning lust” (5.1.2176), Aaron’s innocent and illegitimate infant child. Cruelly, yet fitting the vicarious redemption and suffering paradigm exemplified by the crucifixion of Jesus, Lucius’s commands to “first hang the child, that he [Aaron] may see it sprawl, - / A slight vex to the father’s soul withal” (5.1.2184-5). In the world of Titus Andronicus, revenge is not simply something that bounces back and forth between involved and culpable parties: on the contrary, the violence is able to be meted out to anyone present, including innocent parties, and once again, this type of vicarious suffering is not only sanctioned by religion, but condoned and exemplified by it.
As in post-Reformation England, in Titus Andronicus man appears as innately barbaric, and much of the violence that occurs in the play manifests as an evolutionary response by an individual to a perceived external threat, and religion is often used to both sanction and excuse it. Before ordering the slaughter of Alarbus, Titus apostrophises his dead sons: “why suffer’st thou thy sons, unburied yet, / To hover on the dreadful shore of Styx?” (Shakespeare and Bate, 1.1.86). Significantly, however, the ghosts of his sons are “conspicuously absent” (St Hilaire 312). Shakespeare’s other plays are littered with appearances of ghosts and the undead: in Hamlet, the ghost of the titular character continually appears and reappears throughout the play, eventually playing a major part (Shakespeare Hamlet Acts 1-3); in Macbeth, the ghost of Banquo, plays a major role (Shakespeare The Tragedy of Macbeth, Act 3); and in addition to the named character Ariel, The Tempest contains at least five other named ghosts who play important plot roles (Shakespeare The Tempest, Acts 1-5). It seems that if ghosts actually exist in Shakespeare plays, they are visible, appear on the stage, and are often named and given a speaking role. Titus did not hear the “groaning shadows” (Shakespeare and Bate 1.1.145) of his son’s ghosts, because they simply did not exist. On the contrary, Titus instinctively viewed the loss of so many of his progeny as an existential threat to the continuation of his bloodline and to his status as the dominant alpha-male of the dominant alpha-tribe in Rome, and his Darwinian response of ordering Alarbus’s slaughter was calculated to secure his bloodline’s future by providing a deterrent to any further attacks from the perceived threat, Queen Tamora and her progeny. As opposed to the “barbarous goth” other (1.1.33), the Romans then are the ‘not barbarous’ and civilised: in civilised Rome therefore, Titus knew he could not perform this uncivilised act on a prisoner of war lightly without revolt from the masses. He required a civilised solution: he invoked the supposedly civilising influence of religion by inventing the suffering ghosts of his sons to justify the killing of Alarbus, “that so the shadows be not unappeas’d” (Shakespeare and Bate 1.1.90, my emphasis), and using biblical language like ‘appease’ to appeal to the masses’ religiosity. Titus had successfully sanctioned the human sacrifice of his enemy using religion.
When Tamora ascends the social order, marries Saturnine and becomes the alpha-female empress of Rome, she too sees her position and survival as precarious, and in turn takes Darwinian, proactive steps to secure both her position and her progeny. Knowing full well that she was the emperor’s second choice of bride, she immediately sets out to remove the threat of the first: Lavinia. In an allusion to the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament, Lavinia is lured by Queen Tamora to an Eden-esque “lonely part of the forest” (2.3.1) where “the birds chant melancholy on every bush /, the snake rolled in the cheerful sun; / [and] the green leaves quiver with the cooling wind” (2.3.742-745). Like Titus, Tamora knows that in civilised Rome, she cannot simply murder “gracious Lavinia, Rome’s rich ornament” (Shakespeare and Bate 1.1.52) … [who] stood upon her chastity, / Upon her nuptial vow, her loyalty” (2.3.861). In order to civilise the killing of the chaste and loyal ornament of Rome’s masses, she requires religious sanction, and she achieves this by having her remaining progeny and heirs to the Roman throne, Demetrius and Chiron, “make pillage of her chastity” (2.3.778), raping her, removing her virginity and therefore chastity. The summary killing of any unmarried non-virgin or adulterous woman, is sanctioned in the already alluded-to Old Testament, which put simply states: if a woman is not a virgin or is an adulterer, she shall be brought to her father’s house, and she shall be put to death for being a whore and dishonouring him (Bible, 22:20-21, my emphasis). Lavinia herself seems to agree with the Deuteronomic principle, and prefers death before such dishonour: “O, keep me from their worse than killing lust, / And tumble me into some loathsome pit, / Where never man’s eye may behold my body” (2.3.869). Tamora’s actions certainly seem to also fit the Deuteronomy paradigm: she does not kill Lavinia directly, however she knows that by removing her chastity and familial honour through rape, she will have attacked and threatened Titus’s honour, and he will perform the now religiously-sanctioned, Darwinian, honour-restoring sacrifice on her behalf, which he eventually does at the end of the play.
In response to Tamora’s counterattacks, Titus decides to set the cycle of revenge-begets-revenge full circle and “plot some device of further misery” (3.1.1264). Lamenting that “Terras Astrea reliquit”, or “The Goddess of Justice has left the Earth” (4.3.1885), he again decides that only religion can provide redress, so he “solicit[s] heaven, and move[s] the gods / to send down Justice for to wreak our wrongs” (3.1.1931-3). Titus’s plan is to attach letters addressed to the Roman gods onto arrows, then fire the arrows into the sky, appearing to others present to “write to Heaven for his redress” (4.4.2022). Titus, however, intentionally aimed the arrows so that they would land in the palace containing his enemies. The arrows he fired into the palace were undoubtedly some of the most powerful and deadly long-range military hardware available at the time, and could be considered the Roman equivalent of a modern-day high-powered assault rifle, or possibly even a rocket-propelled grenade. That the deadly arrows landed in the palace, almost killing Titus’s enemies, could not possibly have been an accident considering the size of Rome. Titus was not shooting the arrows to solicit the gods for his redress: in actual fact, this was merely another attempt by Titus to exact bloody revenge upon his enemies by killing them, and using religion to both sanction and excuse it.
Throughout the play, various characters are continually described not in terms of their deeds or misdeeds, but often contrapuntally in terms of their apparent religiosity and piety, or even lack thereof. Despite appearing by deed as a warmongering serial murderer, Titus is often compared to something of a god by his peers and family. Lavinia addresses him as “lord and father” who demands she “kneel” at his feet and “bless” her with his “victorious hand” (1.1.179-90). Moreover, Saturninus regards him as something of a creator figure, adulating him with the prayer-like phrase:
Thanks, noble Titus, father of my life.
How proud I am of thee and of thy gifts
Rome shall record; and when I do forget
The least of these unspeakable deserts,
Romans, forget your fealty to me
(1.1.280, my emphases)
Consider now the similarity to the Lord’s prayer:
Our Father in heaven,
Hallowed be thy name,
Your Kingdom come,
Your will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
(Bible, Matthew 6:9–13)
The prayer-like adulation of Titus despite his many misdeeds stands in stark contrast to how Aaron the Moor is described, despite his admitted “murders, rapes, and massacres, / acts of black night, abominable deeds, / Complots of mischief, treason, villainies” (Shakespeare and Bate, 4.1.2200). Other than a few superficial racially-derived descriptions such as “coal-black Moor” (3.2.1525), at the end of the play it seems the only real charge against him was that he was an “irreligious Moor” (5.3.2661). Ironically, according to Aaron, only the “religious” have a conscience (5.1.2210), however this has been shown to be unequivocally false: the religious are demonstrably equally as barbaric as the irreligious, yet at least the irreligious Aaron is honest about his crimes. The implication is clear: in the world of Titus Andronicus, one’s character and deeds in life are irrelevant: what seems to matter most is not how religious one actually is, but rather how religious one either appears, or can at least present oneself to appear. If Aaron had, at the conclusion of the play, survived and turned to religion, there would predictably have been no charges against him for his crimes as he would have achieved religious sanction for them, and the only sum remaining of his character would be the racial epithets.
At the play’s culmination, Titus has the removal of his enemies all but assured; yet, he inexplicably commits further religiously-sanctioned violence. Having removed the threat of Aaron, Chiron and Demetrius, and now having lured Tamora to her imminent death, Titus and his only remaining progeny could have gone and lived the proverbial ‘happily-ever-after’. For Titus, however, the removal of Lavinia’s “spotless chastity” (5.2.2493) actually represents the next greatest threat to his honour and continuance as alpha-male. With his familial honour in tatters due to Lavinia’s rape, he feels he must take pre-emptive, deterrent action to restore it. In a further anachronism which compounds the collision of post-Reformation England with Rome, Titus alludes to Chaucer’s Physician’s tale, and there he finds sanction to commit an honour killing of Lavinia, removing her “shame” and “presence” which was the further cause of his “sorrow” (5.3.2578-88), and supposedly replacing it with his lost honour. Titus claims that his murder of Lavinia was a selfless and ‘humane’ act, as if to put an animal out of its misery, but his speech and the repeated use of the first personal pronoun betray the self-preserving narcissism of his motives: "Killed her, for whom tears have made me blind, / I am as woeful as Virginius was” (5.3.2581-53, my emphasis). Lavinia was, put simply, slaughtered vicariously in order to redeem Titus’s lost honour and place his status as alpha-male of Rome beyond challenge.
While it is clear that Titus invokes religion in sanctioning his violence, it is worth exploration of the legality under either secular Roman or religious law of his actions. When Titus encounters Murder and Rapine outside his house, he commands “Good Murder, stab him; he’s a murderer” (5.2.2409, my emphasis). This command confirms that almost all of Titus’s actions in the play seem to be inspired by the religiously-derived law of Lex Talionis, literally “law of retaliation” or “an eye for an eye”, an iteration of under which he lives, recorded in the Twelve Tables of Early Roman Law (VanDrunen 945). Lex Talionis, however, goes back much farther than Roman Law. The concept has its roots in early Mesopotamian civilisation in The Code of Hamurrabi, a part of which states “If a man has caused a man of rank to lose an eye, one of his own eyes must be struck out. If he has shattered the limb of a man of rank, let his own limb be broken. If he has knocked out the tooth of a man of rank, his tooth must be knocked out” (Brooks 1). The law was carried over into various iterations in Abrahamic religious texts: the Old Testament states: “if there is a serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise (Bible, Leviticus 24: 17-22, Deuteronomy 19:21). Roman Law states unequivocal support to the Old Testament view: “If a person has maimed another's limb, let there be retaliation in kind” (Adams), yet adds a caveat in that violent retribution may be avoided however if “fair compensation” is reached. In the New Testament, Jesus himself appears to contradict Lex Talionis: “you have heard it was said, ‘eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth’, but I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also” (Bible, Luke 6:29). Titus disregards both the Lex Talionis caveat, and the corrective New Testament, and instead adheres to older, obsolete law. According to VanDrunen, Lex Talionis was never meant to be taken as literally as Titus has taken it: it is meant to represent a “virtuous sense of equity” and equal compensation before the law, and that such physical retribution was never meant to be practiced. Titus is not only acting unethically: he is acting illegally, too.
Another key theme in the play is that of vicarious suffering, whereby characters such as Lavinia are harmed or killed in place of another person. Again, this is sanctioned in the central event of Christianity, where Jesus Christ was vicariously crucified in order to appease God for the sins of humanity. Firstly, Titus claimed to have been suffering on behalf of the entire nation, carrying the sorrows of “ungrateful Rome” (4.3.1900) and Saturninus, sensing the relentless counterattack of Titus, claims to have been wrongly “overborne, / Troubled, confronted” (4.4.2010-12) for others’ actions. This, however, pales in comparison to the punishment order against Aaron. Instead of punishing the admitted offender himself for his crimes, it is instead decided to target the “base fruit of his burning lust” (5.1.2176), Aaron’s innocent and illegitimate infant child. Cruelly, yet fitting the vicarious redemption and suffering paradigm exemplified by the crucifixion of Jesus, Lucius’s commands to “first hang the child, that he [Aaron] may see it sprawl, - / A slight vex to the father’s soul withal” (5.1.2184-5). In the world of Titus Andronicus, revenge is not simply something that bounces back and forth between involved and culpable parties: on the contrary, the violence is able to be meted out to anyone present, including innocent parties, and once again, this type of vicarious suffering is not only sanctioned by religion, but condoned and exemplified by it.
Conclusion
Titus Andronicus, in spite of its age, has never been more relevant. Recently, on the back of a campaign focused very much on a Titus-esque fear of the ‘other’, England voted to secede from the European Union (EU). One of the most frequently-cited reasons for England’s decision was its perceived loss of sovereignty under EU rule, and that the overbearing EU regulations had eroded England’s national identity and democratic freedom (Friedman 1), and what preceded the violence in Titus seems to carry a warning to such nationalist critique: in the opening lines, the soon to be slain Bassianus commands “But let desert in pure election shine, / And, Romans, fight for freedom in your choice” (Shakespeare and Bate 1.1.19-20, my emphases). Another contributor to the perceived loss of English national identity was an irrational opposition to immigration, fueled by xenophobic fears that the large influx of mainly Arab Muslims from war-torn parts of the Middle East and Africa were somehow certainly, yet vaguely “ruining Great Britain” (Beauchamp 1). As the English fear the “rapist… scum” (1) immigrant Muslim other, the Roman’s fear their other: the supposedly “Barbarous Goths” (Shakespeare and Bate 1.1.33). Ironically, however, at the play’s conclusion with Titus closing the revenge cycle he started by feeding Tamora her dead sons, this is proven to be the reverse of reality, and the Romans are the true Barbarians.
In conclusion, Titus Andronicus should be considered a didactic text, as it contains some valuable lessons for humanity. In addition to the rise in populism resulting in the Brexit vote and the rise of demagogues like Donald Trump, the world is currently navigating a very dangerous path. Parts of the Middle East lay ruined from sectarian civil wars. World super powers engage in sabre-rattling over territory in the South China Sea. These events have taken place in the backdrop of a general East-to-West power shift resulting from a weakened United States economy resulting in more influence, confidence and challenges from resurgent, nuclear-armed Eastern powers like China and Russia. Moreover, a growth in secularism and irreligiosity in the West, offset by a contrasting rise in religious fundamentalism in the East, has resulted in a proverbial ‘clash of cultures’, and these challenges have the potential, if unchecked, to spiral into a Titus-esque revenge-begets revenge cycle where there are simply no winners. In Titus Andronicus, we are shown that man is innately barbaric, and that barbarity is barbarity whether sanctioned by religion or not. We are further warned that responding to religiously-sanctioned barbarity with more religiously-sanctioned barbarity only serves to create a dangerous, vicious cycle, such as the attack-begetting-pre-emptive invasion, invasion-begetting-counterattack, counterattack-begetting-counterattack cycle that was witnessed during the ‘War on Terror’ and the invasion of Iraq, which has created so many of the world’s problems today. Perhaps some of these world leaders should take the time to read Titus Andronicus and learn a few of these lessons, because the world can hardly afford to exist as a Shakespearean tragedy.
In conclusion, Titus Andronicus should be considered a didactic text, as it contains some valuable lessons for humanity. In addition to the rise in populism resulting in the Brexit vote and the rise of demagogues like Donald Trump, the world is currently navigating a very dangerous path. Parts of the Middle East lay ruined from sectarian civil wars. World super powers engage in sabre-rattling over territory in the South China Sea. These events have taken place in the backdrop of a general East-to-West power shift resulting from a weakened United States economy resulting in more influence, confidence and challenges from resurgent, nuclear-armed Eastern powers like China and Russia. Moreover, a growth in secularism and irreligiosity in the West, offset by a contrasting rise in religious fundamentalism in the East, has resulted in a proverbial ‘clash of cultures’, and these challenges have the potential, if unchecked, to spiral into a Titus-esque revenge-begets revenge cycle where there are simply no winners. In Titus Andronicus, we are shown that man is innately barbaric, and that barbarity is barbarity whether sanctioned by religion or not. We are further warned that responding to religiously-sanctioned barbarity with more religiously-sanctioned barbarity only serves to create a dangerous, vicious cycle, such as the attack-begetting-pre-emptive invasion, invasion-begetting-counterattack, counterattack-begetting-counterattack cycle that was witnessed during the ‘War on Terror’ and the invasion of Iraq, which has created so many of the world’s problems today. Perhaps some of these world leaders should take the time to read Titus Andronicus and learn a few of these lessons, because the world can hardly afford to exist as a Shakespearean tragedy.
Works Cited
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Al-Gharaibeh, Fakir. "Debating the Role of Custom, Religion and Law in 'Honour' Crimes: Implications for Social Work." Ethics and Social Welfare 10.2 (2015). Print.
Beauchamp, Zack. "Brexit Isn't About Economics. It's About Xenophobia. ." www.vox.com 2016. Web.
Bible, The. 1611. Print.
Brooks, Robert. "Lex Talionis." The New World Encylopedia2016. Print.
Clegg, Cyndia Susan. "Shakespeare Criticism and the "Turn to Religion"." The Huntington Library Quarterly 74.4 (2011): 599. Print.
Friedman, George. "3 Reasons Brits Voted for Brexit." Forbes 2016. Web.
Giorgi, Piero. The Origins of Violence by Cultural Evolution. Brisbane: Minerva E & S, 1999. Print.
Klaits, Joseph. Servants of Satan: The Age of the Witch Hunts. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1987. Print.
Moschovakis, Nicholas. ""Irreligious Piety" and Christian History: Persecution as Pagan Anachronism in Titus Andronicus." Shakespeare Quarterly 53.4 (2002): 460-86. Print.
Pinker, Steven. "Taming the Devil within Us." Nature 478.20 (2011): 309-11. Print.
Rives, J. "Human Sacrifice among Pagans and Christians." The Journal of Roman Studies 85.4 (1995): 65-85. Print.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. London, England: Harold Jenkins Publishing, 1982. Print.
---. The Tempest. London, England: Haprer Collins, 2012. Print.
---. The Tragedy of Macbeth. London, England: Dover Thrift Editions, 1985. Print.
Shakespeare, William, and Jonathan Bate. The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus. 1995. Web.
St Hilaire, Danielle. "Allusion and Sacrifice in Titus Andronicus." Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 49.2 (2009): 311-31. Print.
VanDrunen, David. "Natural Law, the Lex Talionis, and the Power of the Sword." Liberty University Law Review 2.3 (2008). Print.
