Titus Andronicus & Timon of Athens (2 page)

Structurally, the violence in
Titus
is always artistically purposeful, never showily gratuitous. There is a harsh but elegant symmetry to the action. Alarbus’ limbs are lopped, and so then are Lavinia’s: since Tamora Queen of the Goths loses her son, Titus General of the Romans must lose his daughter. Ever since the time of ancient Greek tragedy, Western culture has been haunted by the figure of the revenger. He or she stands on a whole series of borderlines: between civilization and barbarity, between an individual’s accountability to their own conscience and the community’s need for the rule of law, between the conflicting demands of justice and mercy. Do we have a right—a duty even—to exact revenge against those who have destroyed our loved ones? Or should we leave vengeance to the law or the gods? And if we do take action into our own hands, are we not reducing ourselves to the same moral level as the original perpetrator of murderous deeds? In the Elizabethan public theater, Thomas Kyd began to explore these questions in
The Spanish Tragedy;
Shakespeare developed them further in
Titus Andronicus
and then refined them to their highest level in
Hamlet
.

Revenge drama can deal as powerfully with emotional trauma as with ethical dilemma. Hieronimo in
The Spanish Tragedy
is driven mad by the death of his son. In the end his grief becomes so intense that it is literally inexpressible, causing him to bite out his own tongue. Shakespeare nods toward Hieronimo when Titus says “Or shall we bite our tongues, and in dumb shows / Pass the remainder of our hateful days?”

Is it possible to relieve emotional anguish through language? The attempt to do so is the traditional cathartic function of poetic tragedy. In
Titus
, Marcus—the play’s chief “spectator” figure—confronts the appalling mutilation of his niece, Lavinia, and finds himself searching for a language of mourning that will “ease [her] misery.” Her father, Titus, later tries to share her pain by holding her closely to him and comparing her to the weeping wind; himself to first the sea and then the earth. But even this elemental language is insufficient. Lavinia’s woes are literally
unspeakable
. Throughout
Titus
, Shakespeare pushes at the boundaries between true expression and false, sanity and madness, speech and silence.

In particular, he is fascinated by the ways in which the human body itself can be made to speak. The actor on the Elizabethan stage communicated with his audience in two ways: through words and gestures. Shakespeare began his career as an actor, learning the elaborate rhetorical speeches and highly formalized physical gestures that characterized the relatively crude dramatic repertory of the time. The top box-office star of this period, the early 1590s, was Edward Alleyn. The first Hieronimo, Alleyn was renowned for his grand style. Shakespeare, though, quickly saw the dangers of going “over the top” onstage. Working closely with his leading actor, Richard Burbage, he sought to develop a much subtler style, in which poetic language became a medium less for showy display and more for a flexible, inquiring exploration of the inner life.
Titus
has its share of windy rhetorical grandiloquence—that was necessary in order to bring in the crowds. But its unique brilliance occurs in those passages where Shakespeare deliberately deprives himself of the dramatist’s usual resources of word and gesture. Kyd’s Hieronimo only bites himself into silence in the final scene before his death, whereas Shakespeare’s Lavinia has her tongue cut out before the halfway mark in the action. For the remainder of the time, she can speak only in dumb show. Nor can she express herself with gestures, for her hands have been cut off. She has become a visual icon of man’s inhumanity to woman. So it is that her father, Titus, has to “wrest an alphabet” from the “martyred signs” of her mutilated body.

Titus’ own body has been battered by years of war, and yet he survives. Shakespeare reminds us that real human beings are not supermen or last action heroes, but vulnerable creatures. Titus is scarred, muddy, physically made to stoop low, yet he remains high and indomitable in spirit, despite all the wrongs he has to endure in a cruel world devoid of divine justice:

Aaron, meanwhile, is the first great Shakespearean villain, the forerunner of Richard the Third, Iago in
Othello
, and Edmund in
King Lear
. But he is also the first great black role in English drama. Motivated throughout by his status as an outsider, at first he seems to be the devil incarnate. But toward the end, there is an astonishing turn-around. “Is black so base a hue?” he asks the Nurse who has handed him his first-born son with an insult. Black pride and paternal affection undo the ancient racist equation of darkness with evil.

Titus Andronicus
plays like the work of a very clever, very naughty schoolboy. In the classroom of the Stratford-upon-Avon grammar school, young Will would have learned that the purpose of studying the classics was to be inspired by their heroic actions and moral virtues. This was the message of books such as Plutarch’s
Lives of the Most Noble Grecians and Romans
, out of which he would later create his
Julius Caesar
and
Antony and Cleopatra
. But what he also found in classical literature were glorious tales of blood and gore, not to mention every sex crime imaginable. The brilliance of
Titus
is that it is suffused with the language of the Elizabethan classroom—words like “tutor,” “instruct,” “lesson”—yet uses classical literature as “pattern and precedent” not for virtue but for high crime and misdemeanor. The story of the rape of Philomel by Tereus and her sister Progne’s juicy act of revenge, as told in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
, is explicitly invoked first by Demetrius and Chiron as the pattern for what they do to Lavinia and then by Titus as the precedent for what he will do to them. And it is by way of reference to the actual book of Ovid that the silenced Lavinia contrives to reveal what has happened.

Again, the lesson of classical literature was that tragedy should be kept apart from comedy, high art from low. Shakespeare was perfectly capable of following this precept when he wanted:
Julius Caesar
probably has fewer laughs than any other play in the canon. But in
Titus
, he wantonly flouts the classical rules. He recognizes that there is actually a very narrow borderline between tragedy and farce. Four hundred years before the enfants terribles of modern Hollywood, he saw that audiences love the shock of the roller-coaster ride from violence to humor. Jokes are always at someone’s expense and it is one of the obligations of the serious artist to push at the barrier of good taste so that we can discover when the expense is so great that we feel sick.

If the play has a fault, it is that the formality of both language and action in the opening scenes creates a sense of stiffness that suggests classicism at its most tedious. This is probably not Shakespeare’s fault: modern scholarship has persuasively demonstrated by means of close stylistic analysis that
Titus Andronicus
was begun by another dramatist, George Peele, who had a high-level classical education and a taste for large-scale symmetrical stage encounters spoken in high-flown rhetoric. It is almost certainly Peele who deserves credit for the play’s ingenious syncretism, its sweep across the diversity of Roman history. We do not know whether the play was written as a purposeful collaboration or whether Shakespeare came in to do a rewrite or to complete an unfinished work. Nor do we know at precisely what point the writing became his alone—though there is no doubt that he is the author of all the most dramatic scenes, from the rape through the hand-chopping to the fly-killing banquet (which was his later addition, not included in the earliest printed text) to the feast at the climax.

Perhaps the most profoundly Shakespearean moment—a dramatic move far beyond the capacity of Peele—comes when Titus is confronted with the dismembered ruins of his family and his brother Marcus tells him that it is time to “storm,” to rend his hair and explode into a great tirade of words, to rant in the style of a ham actor. But he does not cry or curse. He laughs. In times of extremity, you have to throw away the rulebook. In real life, tragedy and comedy don’t live in different boxes. William Wordsworth once wrote of thoughts that lie too deep for tears. Only William Shakespeare could have dramatized the astonishing but profoundly human idea that the place you get to when you go beyond tears is not silence but laughter.

In thirty-seven of Shakespeare’s thirty-eight plays, there are representations of family and sexual relationships—parents and children, siblings, lovers, married couples; usually in multiple combinations. The bonds of family and desire are the very DNA of his dramatic world.
Timon of Athens
is the unique exception that proves the rule. Nobody in the play has a blood relationship to anyone else. The central character has no family and no lover.

The play seems to have been written around the time when Shakespeare was creating his most demanding female roles—Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra—and yet it almost entirely banishes women. Two whores have walk-on parts in one scene, delivering forty words between them. Some Amazons dance in a masque, though they may be intended as cross-dressed men, like the masquers in
Love’s Labour’s Lost
and
Henry VIII
. There are no children either: the boy actors in Shakespeare’s company can seldom have been so underemployed.

Cupid, the mischievous god of love, presides invisibly over all Shakespeare’s comedies and several of his tragedies:
Timon
is the one play in which he actually puts in an appearance, speaking the prologue to the masque. But ironically, he has no part in the action. No character in the play is struck by the dart of love. Cupidity, however—the desire for money—is the heart of the matter.

“In
Timon of Athens
,” wrote Karl Marx of his favorite play, “Shakespeare attributes two qualities to money. It is the visible deity, the transformation of all human and natural qualities into their opposites, the universal confusion and inversion of things; it brings incompatibles into fraternity. And it is the universal whore, the universal pander between men and nations.”
¹
In simpler language: we worship money, it distorts our view of what is important in life and it turns all relationships into commercial exchanges. As Lucius’ servant puts it, “Ay, and I think one business does command us all, / For mine is money.” No other Shakespearean play gives so much attention to servants: by focusing on the master–servant relationship, as opposed to parent–child or man–woman, Shakespeare and his coauthor Thomas Middleton (a master in both the comedy and the tragedy of commercial exchange) bring home the Marxist point. Money as the universal whore: that is the symbolic significance of having prostitutes as the only female roles. It is also why the play begins with a selection of unnamed characters selling their wares: jewels, silks for fine clothing, poems, and a painting.

The presence of a Poet is especially interesting, in that it gives a glimpse of Shakespeare’s conception of his own art. He knew from his experience of dedicating his early poems to the Earl of Southampton what was involved in the pursuit of patronage, and as a leading member of the King’s Men he was a firsthand witness of the rush for favors in the febrile atmosphere of the Jacobean court. The Painter at the beginning of
Timon
assumes that the Poet is assiduously preparing “some work, some dedication / To the great lord,” but the Poet’s reply suggests that Shakespeare conceived of his own art in terms of
sprezzatura
, the air of seeming artlessness. It takes effort to strike fire from a flint, whereas poetry may slip out “idly” and “as a gum, which oozes / From whence ’tis nourished.”

The opening scenes of the play offer a superb presentation of how culture, both in classical times and Shakespeare’s, operates through an elaborate system of ceremonies and rituals in which hospitality and respect are key elements. The granting of favors and the lavishing of gifts are equally essential to the system.

Gift-giving was not a spontaneous act of generosity (is it ever?): it was, as one historian of the early modern period puts it, “an integral part of the package of obligations and indebtedness which accompanied any transaction of services.”

In order to maintain the position in which he commands respect, Timon has to spend vast amounts of money throwing parties. As only the wise steward Flavius perceives, the continuance of the show has exhausted his master’s financial resources. On a smaller scale, Shakespeare himself had probably witnessed a similar process in his youth when his father reached a position of eminence in the community, but then overstretched himself, borrowed money and ran into trouble because he could not pay his debts. It is a familiar enough story, though in
Timon of Athens
the scale of the wealth is inflated to an extreme and the spiral into poverty is accompanied by a philosophical commentary.

Generally speaking, Shakespeare is skeptical of the claims of philosophy. He is more interested in how people behave in extreme situations than in what they profess to believe. He only used the word “philosopher” ten times in his complete works. Four of these usages are in wry contexts in the comedies, while the other six are confined to two tragedies, written in close proximity to each other early in the reign of King James I. They are two tragedies which follow a similar pattern of a man going from high to low estate, out from city or court to forest or stormy place where there’s scarcely a bush. In this “outside” space, the protagonist is filled with fury at his fellow humans. One of those two plays is
King Lear
, the other is
Timon of Athens
. The resemblances have often been observed.