Titus Andronicus the Contrast Between

Titus Andronicus The Contrast between Pubic and Private Personas in "Titus Andronicus": The Avenger as Social Dissembler The idea of the avenger playing or being assigned a role in drama stretches back to the Greek Oresteia, where Orestes is forced to play the role of the avenger of his father's murderer. By killing his mother and becoming the unwilling murderer of his mother Orestes must bring tragedy upon his own head.

This illustrates that becoming an avenger is a social role often distinct from the avenger's previous social role, suggesting a conflict between a public social persona and a private, familial persona motivated by revenge. Much like an actor plays a part in a play, an avenger assumes a role that may be at odds with his or her previous identity. The role of the avenger is created by a society's failure to legally avenge a murderous deed.

To assume such a socially marginal and divisive role, frequently the avenger must disguise his or her true feelings until the moment is right to strike against the evildoer. In Shakespeare's "Titus Andronicus," the title character assumes a mad identity to conceal his murderous intentions against Tamora, former Queen of the Goths, just like Tamora pretends to forgive Titus for killing her eldest son.

Both characters cast off their old identities as warrior and queen, and take on a secret role of avenger, even while they play more compliant false, social roles while they wait for the right time to realize vengeful purposes.

According to Peter Sack's essay on the early Shakespearean tragedy and revenge play of "Titus Andronicus," because of the Elizabethan populace's ambivalence to the judicial code of the day, that had rapidly shifted in a relatively short span of years from Protestant to Catholic and back again, revenge plays increased in popularity: "Part of the reason for this loss of faith in the existence or operation of justice was the entire climate of unhingement between sacred principles and secular practices.

By the mid-sixteenth century in England, parliament had taken responsibility for many judgments that had been previously left to the absolute monarch, thus introducing a sense of justice as a matter of interpretation and human vote, rather than of heaven-sent verdicts. So too, the judiciary itself had become far more bureaucratic, with a proliferation of courts and jurors, a kind of swell of mediations which delayed and made increasingly opaque the actual administration of justice" (Sacks 1984, p.578).

The terrors of an impersonal system of justice are seen early on in "Titus," where Titus sacrifices the Queen of the Goths' eldest son "That so the shadows [of the Roman Gods] be not unappeased" (I.1). Titus speaks of himself in the 3rd person at first, as if he is an impartial arbitrator of justice. When ritually slaying one of the prisoners in the name of Rome he is deaf to Tamora's point that her son committed no crime.

She says her sons, like the Romans, were similarly committed to "valiant doings in their country's cause," and that both nations' patriotic "piety" is the same (I.1). This bears no weight in her new social context, which demands blood of the vanquished, and Titus sees himself as acting as an arm of the Roman religion and state, not a man. Later on, Titus will cast off his role as a general within his soul, if not without in the eyes of observers.

He will see assuming the role of a familial avenger as a duty, just as Tamora, after the death of her son, vows to play a public role as a queen, sweetly vowing to forgive Titus aloud, but inwardly, telling herself when alone to: Dissemble all your griefs and discontents: You are but newly planted in your throne; Lest, then, the people, and patricians too, Upon a just survey, take Titus' part, And so supplant you for ingratitude, Which Rome reputes to be a heinous sin, Yield at entreats; and then let me alone: I'll find a day to massacre them all And raze their faction and their family, The cruel father and his traitorous sons, To whom I sued for my dear son's life, And make them know what 'tis to let a queen Kneel in the streets and beg for grace in vain (I.1).

Tamora, a queen, knows that she must politically assume a complacent role at first to placate the Roman populace. She will bide her time until the moment is ripe for her to take revenge on Titus and his family. The audience, as part of the structure of the play early becomes an unwitting witness to the false nature of Tamora's posture.

They understand the division between public and private personas and duties -- just as Titus killed Tamora's son as part of his duty as an avenger of Rome who had won a war, so Tamora will temporarily play a pleasant social role of a good prisoner of war and compliant wife to the emperor of Rome, until she is able to take her revenge. But Tamora's social and familial roles are now split -- on the outside she is a queen, on the inside she is still an angry mother.

The metathearticality of the Shakespearean convention of the soliloquy or monologue addressed to the self, as in the abovementioned case of Tamora, shows how outward actions create a contrast between the compliant roles the avenger must outwardly perform with his or her inward resolve.

The metatheatricality is demonstrated by the self-consciousness with which a vengeful character crafts a contrasting public and private persona, as well as how "the player articulates the entrances, exits, cues, crossings, pauses, and gestures of the drama as well as its lines: he parses the text into actions performed before sullen, boisterous or enthusiastic spectators," as Titus openly creates a vengeful persona before his family after Lavinia's rape and mutilation, while Tamora earlier on must create a more private vengeful persona before the Romans, while openly vowing revenge before her living sons and lover Aaron the Moor (Helms 1992, p.556).

Tamora's first act of openly brutal revenge that enacts her private vow is to urge her sons to rape and maim Titus' daughter Lavinia. When Titus sees his daughter, raped, with her hands cut off and her tongue cut out, he realizes that his role as a servant of Rome is meaningless: "For hands, to do Rome service, are but vain" (III.1).

The violence of the crime against Lavinia causes Titus to lose his previous identity, that of a soldier of Rome, and to take on a new identity, that of a personal, familial avenger, along with Marcus Andronicus his son, who says: My lord, kneel down with me; Lavinia, kneel; And kneel, sweet boy, the Roman Hector's hope; And swear with me, as, with the woful fere And father of that chaste dishonour'd dame, Lord Junius Brutus sware for Lucrece' rape, That we will prosecute by good advice Mortal revenge upon these traitorous Goths, And see their blood, or die with this reproach (III.1).

Both Titus and Tamora experience a loss of identity -- Titus because of his daughter's rape and the inability of the Roman state to avenge the crime, despite his military service to the state. Tamora loses her status as queen and her son.

Both wronged parents take up their role as an avenger, and are willing to sacrifice their lives, and also their current social status to see their vengeful work 'done.' Even though Tamora is given new status as a queen, that is not enough to sate her desire to see the death of her dead son avenged.

Titus goes mad with misery, but although people think that his "libelling against the senate, / and blazoning our injustice every where?" is due only to madness over the grief of his daughter, the audience knows that Titus' distraction has a cause that will result in him to taking bloody action against Rome's empress, Saturnius's wife Tamora, in a horrific bloody banquet (IV.4). Even the members of Titus' family who do not go mad, particularly Lucius, resolve to take a double.