Titus Andronicus

Most "great" famous authors really are great when you finally get around to reading them. And this is always a dismaying realization, since it defeats one's attempts to excuse the fact of not yet having read them by passing it off as a product of superior discernment.

For my young self, the trouble in this regard was always that I could never bring myself to touch Shakespeare. Of course, I read some of it in school, and saw some of it in plays I was taken to - that is to say, I absorbed the unavoidable quota in our society. But I never of my own volition made a concerted attempt upon the bard. The fact that the insidious educational Establishment wanted me to recognize Shakespeare's genius made me hate him on principle.

In short, he was ruined for me by school. It was the same perverse psychological factor that robbed Lord Byron of his ability to appreciate Horace, if we are to take Childe Harold as standing in for his creator. Says he: I abhorred/ Too much, to conquer for the poet's sake/ The drilled dull lesson, forced down word by word/ In my repugnant youth,/ Then farewell, Horace; whom I hated so,/ Not for thy faults, but mine. 

As with Harold and Horace, so with present company and Shakespeare. It wasn't his fault. He never assigned himself to me. But he was the innocent casualty nonetheless of the ruinous effect of compulsory instruction.

At that point in my life, moreover, I was not secure enough in myself to consider that this distaste for Shakespeare might be due, as Harold says, not for thy faults, but mine. I therefore sought a way to shift the blame back onto the bard.

This I found by discovering that Tolstoy too (also "great," but so far unassigned) had hated Shakespeare. And the edition of his essay on the subject I obtained and read in PDF also contained a companion essay by a British radical that systematically scoured the bard's collected works for signs of class prejudice (they were plentiful, and not hard to find), and subjected these to withering political and ethical criticism. Yes! I thought. Here at last was the ticket. This is why I hate Shakespeare. It's not because of my own intellectual laziness. It's because he's politically unacceptable!

This is a kind of intellectualized philistinism that has a perennial appeal to the young. Not yet having been on the planet long enough to have developed our own sense of taste, we nonetheless aspire to a sheen of critical discernment. The political factor gives us a rough and ready method to separate the wheat from the chaff. It's easier to have opinions on all great works of literature, without needing to actually read them, if one can summarily dismiss whole oeuvres and categories as reactionary.

In the great Whit Stillman movie Metropolitan, our young protagonist applies this method -- as so many of us have done -- to avoid the burden of having actually to read Jane Austen before forming a definite and final opinion about her. He read an essay by Lionel Trilling on Mansfield Park, he informs us, and that was more than sufficient to know where he stood.

In the old days, this practice would have been known as literary Stalinism. Our contemporary version of it seems to be the vogue for forswearing the work of people who have been accused of sexual abuse or wrongdoing. Most of us have probably been to a social gathering recently in which a Michael Jackson song came onto a preset playlist or streaming service -- and had to be immediately silenced. (I have observed this several times in the last few weeks.)

In many of these cases -- including Jackson's -- the original work did not mean a great deal to me before it was subject to this tacit ban, so I don't have a personal stake in this. But refusing categorically to listen to Jackson's or anyone's music on these grounds alone seems to me as wrongheaded as it would be to take Pound's ABC of Reading off my bookshelf because of the author's fascism and antisemitism (or -- for that matter -- to get rid of "Childe Harold" because of its creator's abusive behavior). Leaving aside the concerns about journalistic integrity that the Jackson estate raised about the recent documentary that led to the present backlash, it is a fact that artistic works survive and take on meaning outside their creators.

Auden may have been putting it too strongly in his "In Memory of W.B. Yeats," when he said that "time [...] Worships language and forgives/ Everyone by whom it lives[.]" Time may not actually forgive all authors for their deeds, and we don't need to forgive all artists at the human level.

But time certainly does sometimes forgive works for their authors. Thus, Auden was closer to hitting the nail in his poem at the graveside of Henry James. Alluding to the book by Julien Benda, he writes: "there are many whose works/Are in better taste than their lives [.... M]ake intercession/ For the treason of all clerks."

Having outgrown some of my own literary Stalinism, then, and being willing as an adult to face the truth that sometimes I haven't read something not because it is morally reprehensible, but simply because I haven't read it yet, I was finally ready this past autumn to crack open the bard.

I started in on one of the standard folios, which collects the bard's plays in roughly chronological order. I did the three parts of Henry VI. I read Richard III. Later on, I read the Sonnets. And I thought, yes, yes, okay, I get it. I cannot deny it any longer. This is good stuff, however much the portrayal of Joan of Arc and working class radicals may conflict with one's egalitarian and anti-chauvinist principles.

And even if one can't get entirely behind Shakespeare politically, nonetheless one finds him -- having read some of his work with serious attention at last -- coming to one's aid politically in unexpected ways. It was hard, in reading Richard III, not to see the similarities between the self-destructive villainy of the central cast of backstabbing characters, and the behavior of the current presidential administration, for instance. Richard ascends to the thrones on the backs of a large number of henchmen, only to purge them from his ranks when they are no longer useful. So too have Sessions, Kelly, Nielsen, Christie, Cohen, Mattis and virtually everyone else in Trump's orbit eventually been fired and subjected to smears and vituperation from the very monster they helped to create and empower.

Nor did the parallels end there. Sessions, you will recall, once notoriously invoked the Bible in defending his policy of separating immigrant children from their families at the U.S. border. And reading Richard III, we discover that Shakespeare has furnished us with a passage to describe exactly this species of inhumanity and hypocrisy, as he has for so much else: And thus I clothe my naked villainy, says Richard, With odd old ends stol'n out of holy writ[.]"

Okay, but then -- still following the roughly chronological order of this collection -- I got to Titus Andronicus. Here we have one of the bard's least popular and most controversial works. And while none of us should be judged by the worst thing we've ever written, it is unfortunately the case that many of the worst things we've written are bad in ways that seem to offer in concentrated form the faults that are present in more attenuated condition in all our other works. This is why the worst of an author's canon, when read, always casts a little bit of doubt (however unfairly) on everything else they have created as well.

In order to understand the point, let us return to Tolstoy's essay -- the one mentioned above that proved such a mental life-raft for my teenage self. In the Russian author's famous contrarian critique of Shakespeare, what exactly are his concerns?

He notes a lot of things that are fairly hard to deny: Shakespeare's characters are patently implausible. They behave in ways the are bizarrely stylized (by modern conventions). They pause to deliver bombastic speeches at the most inopportune times. They halt the action to tell us what they are going to do before they do it and why -- and it is usually for the most simplistic reasons.

Most troubling of all, however, Tolstoy regarded Shakespeare's plays as morally and emotionally tone-deaf. They mix together the most idiotic jokes with heavy-handed attempts at pathos. They insult our intelligence and demean their own characters, while failing to draw out the real drama inherent in the narratives they relate (most of which were available to Shakespeare already, not stories of his own invention). Tolstoy gives as an example the original folktale version of the King Lear story, and contrasts its simple beauty and pathos with Shakespeare's ornate overlay...

With his essay in hand, Titus, I'm afraid, appears to bear many of these faults.

So what actually happens in it?

We open with an exceedingly confusing and messy first act. Titus is just back from the wars, with four Goth prisoners in tow. At some point -- astonishingly early on -- he kills one of his own sons, Mutius. Why? Because he stood in the way of Titus's daughter Lavinia being married off against her will to the Emperor, who actually has -- just seconds before -- decided he doesn't want to marry Lavinia after all, but would rather marry one of the Goth prisoners, Tamora. (I think. Again, it's a bit hard to follow.)

Then Titus's brother Marcus comes back out on stage. He adjusts extremely quickly to the fact that his nephew is now dead at his brother's hand. Can't we at least bury him in the family crypt? he pleads. Titus, after much complaining and forswearing of any kinship to the son he has just murdered, eventually agrees to this plan. Marcus, who seems to be one of our more sympathetic characters, is satisfied by this. He says to Titus: "step out of these dreary dumps." Sure, you just killed your son. But shake it off. That's the last we hear of poor Mutius, who goes mutely into the grave.

This is all still in the first of five acts.

Then Aaron the Moor shares his plan to cuckold the emperor (make him wear "Vulcan's badge") by seducing his wife Tamora, the erstwhile Queen of the Goths. He also (for some reason) wants to induce the rape of Lavinia and the murder of her husband Bassianus, so he encourages Tamora's sons to undertake this villainy. They proceed to do so, after Lavinia and Bassianus have stumbled upon Tamora and Aaron in amorous embrace and some stage time has been devoted to further puns upon the theme of cuckoldry. Tamora says, if I were Diana, I would give you antlers for spying on me in an intimate scene, just like in the myth. And Lavinia says - you're giving your husband antlers right now,  so to speak, and you'd better watch out since we're on a hunt, someone might take him for a stag.

Tamora later gives birth to an illegitimate child by Aaron, which is brought to him (for some reason) in order that he might kill the child (why Aaron would be the logical person for this task is never explained). Aaron disobeys these instructions and saves the child, killing the nurse who brought him instead.

Tamora's sons are there. When they find out that the child was the fruit of Aaron's adulterous union with their mother, they cry: "you have undone our mother." And Aaron points out, au contraire, he has "done thy mother." Which is linguistically fascinating, since it shows how deep the roots extend of a sexual euphemism that was still in common use in my middle schools days. But otherwise it's a pretty dumb joke.

Eventually Aaron is captured by another of Titus's sons, who asks him: don't you feel bad about all the people you've killed and all the terrible things you've done? Aaron replies that no, he only feels bad about anything good he might have accidentally done. He explains at some length that he's evil, and a villain, and doesn't believe in God, etc., and this is motive enough for his behavior.

Meanwhile, Titus is shooting arrows with letters attached to them (for some reason). A "clown" is walking by -- meaning a member of those unfortunate working classes mentioned above, whom we know the bard is likely to malign, given the chance -- and Titus waylays him, asking if he came from heaven. The clown puns upon the fact that "came" can be a euphemism for ejaculation. "From heaven!" he says, "Alas, sir, I never came there. God forbid I should be so bold to press to heaven in my young days."

Then Marcus suggests to Titus that they send the clown to deliver a message to the emperor. It turns out in the next scene that the letter contains a knife, implying the desire for bloody revenge. For bringing such a missive, the clown is summarily hauled off to be executed. This seems to be played for laughs.

Why did Marcus encourage this plan of sending the clown on an evident suicide mission? I get that Titus has gone fairly insane by this point in the play, but why is Marcus on board, when he is otherwise one of the most sympathetic characters? Why are we, the audience, expected to find the precipitate execution of this totally innocent bystander a hilarious gag?

Here we have that terrible moral stupidity of Shakespeare that Tolstoy warned us about on full display.

Things don't look up from there. Titus kills Tamora's two sons in revenge for the rape of his daughter. He drains their blood and grinds their bones and uses these to make a pastry, which he then feeds to the Queen and the Emperor. And while all of this is grotesque, it offers the primeval and guilty moral satisfaction that one derives from any great tale of bloody revenge for a no less hideous injustice.

But then the play immediately undermines this very feeling. Titus proceeds to kill his own daughter, Lavinia.

The people sitting at the table while this murder is happening before their eyes -- the emperor and empress -- protest mildly, but Titus encourages them to go on eating. Then Titus kills the empress Tamora, and the emperor kills him. Then the other characters arrive on stage -- presumably stepping over Lavinia's corpse -- and deliver a bunch of lines in which she is not mentioned. Not even one time! She is dispatched as mutely as Mutius (a joke worthy of the bard, plainly, and I mean that as no self-flattery).

So Tolstoy had a point. While Titus is one of the bard's least-performed plays, it embodies traits that are present in less offensive and plentiful amounts throughout his work. The crassness. The philistine cruelty.  The sadism. The violence. The bombastic speeches. The intricate classical allusions made by one character to another while they are in the midst of a death struggle, or some other highly inappropriate occasion. The lack of coherent characters with humanly explicable motives. The gaping plot holes.

Why do we still read him then? Why is that, in Auden's terms, time has decided to forgive the works?

Because the undeniable greatness is there too, even in Titus. The greatness that lies in the comprehensiveness of Shakespeare.

Whatever else Shakespeare's works may be, they are an encyclopedia of human ideas and feeling-states. Despite the fact that Aaron in this play, for instance, is a racist caricature with no discernible human features or motivations -- actuated solely by a frank, self-confessed desire for villainy -- he nonetheless pauses in one scene to deliver a beautiful speech that -- translated to modern speech -- might be summarized as saying that "Black is beautiful." It is similar to how that antisemitic stereotype Shylock unexpectedly unburdens himself of one of the most moving and lasting testaments to the idea of human equality and brotherhood in written literature.

In both cases, it doesn't fit at all with their characters. But does it need to?

So too, when Marcus discovers Lavinia in the woods after she has been attacked and mutilated, he stands for several minutes and delivers a speech that compares her severed hands to trees with missing branches and her gurgling bloody mouth to a fountain, while making classical references to the rape of Philomela. Would anyone actually behave like that, in that situation? Of course not. But does this mean they should not do so in a Shakespeare play?

In the final banquet scene, Titus references a story of an honor killing in Chaucer. How would these ancient Romans know this medieval reference? They wouldn't. But does it matter?

For all that Shakespeare is sometimes celebrated as a dramatic story-teller, one's impression in reading him is that he treats narrative and character largely as a lattice-work: a background on which he can hang his vines and tendrils of idea, argument, puns, and rhetorical tropes. It is these that are his true interest. Shakespeare's gift -- and the thing he plainly enjoyed doing the most -- was in the presentation of a case. Most of his dialogue really consists of characters arguing at length for conflicting views, and deploying all the classical arts of rhetoric.

In doing so, he left us a body of work that amounts to something like a summa of every possible human way of seeing the world. Shakespeare's own conscience and viewpoint may not come across. He may hardly have known them himself, and for this reason there does seem to be a lack of moral center in the work that Tolstoy discerned and condemned.

The work achieves something else, however: completeness of perspective. Somewhere or other in his oeuvre, one can find the best possible statement of -- or case for -- any given idea or argument or emotion.

I am reminded of a passage in Caroline Blackwood's novel Great Granny Webster. Although only one sentence long, it might be the best Shakespeare criticism I've ever come across. The protagonist is remembering something he father once told her, in encouraging her to read the bard. "[H]e had once told me to read Shakespeare because when I grew up and was very unhappy," she says, "I would find every kind of human unhappiness perfectly expressed there."

We might add to this: and every other human experience too.