Close reading of Shakespeare's works

Ovid in Shakespeare's Titus

Titus was Shakespeare's first play and it is evident that the fledgling author was affected by the Tereus, Procne, and Philomela story in Ovid's metamorphosis (Book Six) since he replicates the theme almost exactly.

In Book Six in Metamorphosis, Ovid tells the tale of the married Tereus lusting after Philomela, his wife's sister, raping her in a hideout on the pretext of transporting her to meet her sister, tearing out her tongue, and then keeping her secluded in that hideout on a Thrycian isle. Constrained to communicate her woe to her sister with creative means, Philomela weaves her tale into cloth ("deep purple on a white background" (830)) and sends it via her slave to her sister. Overcome with fraternal love, Procne, her sister, kills and cooks her son and hands him in broth to Tereus to eat. When Tereus asks to see Itys, the boy, Procne "unable to hide her savage joy; and eager now to be the bearer of misfortune" (950), cries "the one that you are seeking is within" When Tereus finally comprehends, he chases Procne and Philomela attempting to kill them, but the gods transform all into hapless birds.

The key theme of Shakespeare's Titus Androconus is similar in content. Titus, triumphant general, has sacrificed the son of one of his captives, Tamora a Goth, as gift for the gods, which makes Tamora determined to avenge her family. The story starts off with conflict over the hand of Lavinia. Lavinia wishes to stay with Bassianus; her father forces her to marry his selected king, Saturninus; Demetrius and Chiron the two sons of Tamora wish to rape Lavinia; and Aaron the Moor, consort of Tamora, abets them by arranging that Bassianus should be killed and the sons, consequently, (Tamora fully consenting) have liberty to complete their fiendish designs, following which they mutilate Lavinia by cutting off her hands and removing her tongue. Here, the story diverges from that of Ovid's by recounting a spiral of revenge and deception where Aaron frames the sons of Titus for the murder of Bassianus; where Martius and Quintus are consequently executed by the Emperor; where Marcus, Titus brother discovers and liberates Lavinia; where under false pretensions Aaron has Titus cut off his hand in exchange for what he believes is the liberty of his sons; and when Titus discovers their death he raises an army prepared to fight Rome.

Here the narrative, again with divergences of savagery and murder in its midst, rejoins the Tereus saga with Lavinia's creative attempt to reveal the names of her murders. Titus exacts his revenge by killing Chiron and Demetrius, and then, with the aid of Lavinia (as, too, did Philomelus help her sister) cooks them in a pie for their mother, Tamora. Titus then kills his daughter, reveals the entire plot to the Emperor, is killed himself by the Emperor, and the story again diverges from Ovid's Tereus saga by the fact that the key protagonists, rather than being saved by being transformed into an alternate sort of creature, endure all sorts of deaths at the hands of a varying panoply of people. Lucius, the remaining son of Titus, is the only one who survives.

Essentially, the only similarities between these two stories are the core of the tale: the rape of the maiden; the cutting out of her tongue (and in Lavinia's case her arms too); the creative endeavor and success of the girl in revealing her story; the consequent revenge of sister in Philomela's case and father in Titus' case of avenging the loss of maidenly honor; and, in both cases, the revenge assuming a similar form: their sons of either violator (or abettor of violation as regards Tamora) were cooked and then fed to the wrongdoer.

Even though the motif is similar, the compositional style in the recounting of the story is, undoubtedly, different in essential forms such as in structural and stylistic content.

Firstly, Ovid's structural style assumes the form of an omnipresent narrative. As transcendental and apparent objective narrator, he informs how Tereus first saw Philomelus and "caught fire as instantly as ripe grain or dry leaves" (650). Using a rhetoric tack, he then penetrates Tereus' mind and vivifies Tereus' conundrum:

What track to take here? Bribe her attendants? / Make this way to her though her faithful nurse? Seduce the girl with rare and precious gifts, / even at the cost of his whole kingdom? / or seize her and defend his theft with warfare? / (660-670).

The narrator goes on to describe how Philomelus herself made this task easier for Tereus by her gestures, and employing different techniques of, at times, creeping into one of the character's mind and, at other times, assessing the character's judgments and actions from an omniscient presence, the narrator gives us a compelling description of the key events of the story. So compelling is this description, in fact, that Anderson (1997) opined that Metamorphoses has "direct, obvious and powerful affinities with contemporary reality." (Ibid, xxx), and had this to say about the plot:

[Its imagers] offer a mythical key to most to the more extreme forms of human behavior and suffering, especially ones we think of a particularly modern: holocaust, plague, sexual harassment, rape, incest, seduction, pollution, sex-change, suicide, hetero -- and homosexual love, torture, war, child-battering, depression and intoxication form the bulk of themes. (Anderson, 1997, 18).

Unlike Shakespeare (and Shakespeare had a chorus employ an omniscient slant in some of his later writings but not in Titus), Ovid does not refrain from castigating his subject. He describes Tererius' deeds as an 'outrage', calls him a 'tyrant' and, in another place, describes him as 'barbarian'. It is clear to us where the author's sympathy lies. Tereus is condemned. Procne, however, despite the savagery and unnaturalness of her deed (killing her affectionate son and then serving him as stew for his father) is portrayed in a more empathetic manner. Here the narrator goes into her mind and deliberates on her emotions and on the cruelty and complexity of her situation:

Her anger broke / and her unwilling eyes were suddenly full of hot tears that she could not control; / but as she felt her sense of purpose falter / out of an excess of maternal love, / she turned to look upon her sister's face, / and then turned back and forth between them wildly (900-910).

Ovid goes on to describe her internal roiling and then her resolution:

"And why does this one babble pleasantries, / while that one's silent? What has got her tongue? / How can it be that this one calls me mother, / while that one cannot call me sister? Look! / Your husband is the answer to this riddle, / unworthy daughter of royal Pandion! / the only crime against a man like this / is to behave with natural affection!" (910-920).

Shakespeare's structural style is different. Rather than narrative form, he has the characters lead along the story with successive dialogue, and he refrains from stepping outside the plot and commenting. (Although there are occasions when possibly he might do so in an indirect manner such as alluding to the Goths as goats.). The structural forms of Ovid's saga and Shakespeare's saga, though similar in motif, are totally different one to the other.

Tonal differences are also apparent. Though gory enough, Ovid is more subdued in its presentation of cruelty and overt gory than Shakespeare is in his description of the similar scenes. Ovid is more detached, while in Shakespeare the extravagance of brutality seems unabated. More so, Ovid has huamn goodness intermingled with bestiality. He paints the mutual affection between father and daughter when Prometheus bides her father farewell ("he kisses her goodbye / the ripe tears falling even as he speaks, / and makes the two of them join hands together / in pledge of faith, and begs them to remember / him to his absent daughter and her son." (730)). Later on, there is that powerful verse of Procne's conflict over killing her son. The deed is barbarous; the prose in which this deed is worked through is powerful in its beauty. Ovid possesses the gift of transforming evil -- even the greatest evil -- into beauty. Shakespeare's Titus on the other hand, has none of that. Unremitting in its pageant of rivalry and pillage, Shakespeare's tone is unremittingly grim to the end. As McDonald opines, he is "straightforward, blunt, and forceful" (McDonald, xli).

Ovid also injects his tale with cultural coloring. Every third year, he tells us, the Thracian women celebrate the rites of Bacchus and he describes how "Mount Rhodope is resonant with the disturbing sound of clashing cymbals" and how the queen "wraps her head in vines and drapes a deerskin / over her left shoulder" carrying a staff that the Bacchantes call the 'thysus'. Ovid even goes on to mark the exact ululations that the queen and her escort utter "Ulula!" And "Euhoy!" It is these details -- particularly these cultural details that gives Ovid its magic and makes the tale more vivid and real than Titus seems to be. We actually feel that we are there, one of the spectators, experiencing the story along with Procne and Philomela. Titus lacks these specificities and cultural details.

Similarities, however, may be found in other elements. The imagery in both narratives is rich. Both Ovid and Shakespeare have a penchant for enlivening the passages with verbal imagery, particularly in the forms of simile and metaphor. Tamora's praise of the forest alludes to the speaker's adulterous sensuality. The scene (as it is in Metamorphosis) is alive with allusion to predators of the animal kingdom -- most often wasps, flies, snakes and adders -- no doubt correlation to the human predators who fill the tale, and descriptive images of landscape are often sexualized; there is the "unhallowed and bloodstained hole" and "the swallowing womb" for instance. Similarly in Ovid too, there is the design that Philomelus weaves: " threads of deep purple on a white background" -- does that allude to the ruination of her spotless virginity? And Tereus's being compared to "Jove's great bird of prey" that grips the hare in "his talons, and the prey and captor both now there is no escape." Later on, the severed tongue is described as falling to the "black" earth "trembling and murmuring / and twitching as it flings itself about, / just as a serpent's severed tail will do" (800). Presumably, this alludes to the desires of the tongue to retell its misfortunes. And then there is Tereus' transformation into a 'stiffly crested bird'; the threatening and once powerful warrior, Tereus, is now impotent to act.

Ovid also carries portents of events to come. Tereus and Procne are wedded with omens occurring, and their son is, likewise, born under these conditions. One of them is the "evil owl [that is] perched and brooded on the roof of their bedchamber." (620). King Pandion, too, has a 'grim foreboding troubling his mind' when he bids farewell to his daughter. Portents too frequent Titus as when, for instance, Lavinia uses an actual copy of Ovid's Philomel story to articulate the details of the rape.

Ovid's form is more direct whereas Shakespeare multiplies the structural parallels and other forms of replication in 'Titus'. Retribution, for instance, is one such theme that replicates itself in varying forms: Tamora avenges herself for the death of her offspring, by having Titus' own offspring despoiled; Titus, in turn, replicates her crime by murdering her two remaining sons. Both individuals are drawn by fate to kill their own offspring; Tamora by unconsciously eating the minced flesh of her sons in a pie, Titus by consciously killing his own daughter.

Other parallels appear in the case of the two brothers Saturnius and Bassianus who appear in the first act disputing over the throne and possession of Lavinia, whilst Chiron and Demetrius appear in the second act quarrelling over sexual possession of Lavinia. Again two brothers Quintus and Martius are decapacitated in Act Three, whilst two brothers, Marcus and Titus, console each other throughout.

Finally, Shakespeare's style differs in that the pentameter is regular; most lines are free of the metrical variations such as eleven-syllable lines that would come to characterize the later Shakespeare, and there is confluence between the semantic and poetic units, in other words the end of the line coheres with the end of the clause (McDonald, xi). An illustration here is the phrase; "Noble patricians, patrons of my right, / defend the justice of my cause without arms" (I.1.1-2). The subtleties, later visible in Hamlet or Lear, where rhythmic variety, hesitation, and creation of momentum or shifts in tempo characterization (Dowden, 1967) are non-existent here. Perhaps, another commonality existent in the style of their verse is that both are "straightforward, blunt, and forceful" (McDonald, xli).

Most famously, Shakespeare differs from Ovid with his quintessential witticisms as, for instance, in the following passage:

Demetrius: Villain, what hast thou done?

Aaron: That which thou cannot undo.

Chiron: Thou hast undone our mother.

Aaron: Villain, I have done thy mother. (IV. 2.73-76).

Shakespeare's love for imbuing text with ambiguous and multiple levels of meaning (Dowden, 1967) is also evident in a later portion. Recounting his crimes, Aaron declaims:

Aaron: They cut thy sister's tongue, and ravished her,

And cut her hands and trimmed her as thou sawst.

Lucius: O. detestable villain! Calls't thou that trimming?

Aaron: why, she was washed and cut and trimmed, and 'twas

Trim sport for them which had the doing of it. (V.1.92-96)

Observe here the play of meaning with the word 'trim', and the similarity of 'sawest' with that word.

'Goths' is often intermingled with 'goats' and allusion, no doubt to their barbarity, and in another playful passage, Shakespeare has Titus play on the image of hands:

What violent hands can she lay on her life?

Ah, wherefore dost thou urge the name of hands

O, handle not the theme, to talk of hands,

Lest we remember still that we have none. (III.2.25-30)

The hand is a symbol of agency (McDonald, xlv) with Titus' fame resting on his military skill, his 'warlike hand' being an emblem of that achievement, and the hand, too, often appearing as perpetrating acts against one another (as, for instance, one killing another by aid of his hand) or operating a significant act (as Lavinia giving her hand in a marriage). Again allegorical and bringing us back to the motif of fate with human action intermingled with destiny is the scene in Act Three where Lavinia is shorn of her stumps, and Titus of his own bleeding limbs. Running throughout, consequently, is Shakespeare's insinuations of human performance and apparent control that are shorn off by the gods.