Vengeance Is Theirs

As if to counterweight the gentle, tender-hearted Shakespeare of the film Hamnet, now the brutal and bloody Titus Andronicus has arrived in New York, in an impressive Red Bull Theater production. A content advisory provided by Red Bull lists the kind of material to which the play exposes us: “violence, sexual violence, murder, mutilation, racism, grief, revenge, and harm involving a child.” A complete inventory would also include the consumption of human flesh: at the play’s climax two of its villains, a Gothic queen named Tamora and the Roman emperor Saturninus, are made to unknowingly eat Tamora’s sons in the form of a mincemeat pie. The toxic soil from which all these horrors spring, as the Red Bull production makes clear, is a disordered Roman state, redeemed neither by those who try to uphold its traditions nor by those who violate them.

Titus Andronicus is rarely seen on the stage, in part due to the traumas it can inflict on an audience. The most notable modern version, directed by Peter Brook in 1955 and starring Laurence Olivier, reportedly saw twenty faintings at a single performance. A 1996 production, in London and Johannesburg, regularly caused theatergoers to vomit; at a 2025 Royal Shakespeare Company staging, audience members in the first few rows were given blankets as shields against spattered blood. In New York the defining production of recent decades is a 1994 off-Broadway version directed by Julie Taymor, who five years later directed a film version, Titus, with Anthony Hopkins in the title role. That film set the play’s ancient story inside a contemporary frame, establishing its connection to modern atrocities; a New York Times reviewer found it impossible not to think of the Rwandan genocide and the Columbine mass shooting while watching.

Directors of Titus have sometimes tried to distance us from such nightmares by playing it as Grand Guignol, as theater of the absurd, or as black comedy. The Red Bull production might seem to share in this last approach, given that its advertisements feature an image of its splendid lead actor, Patrick Page, dressed in a modern chef’s smock and toque (the outfit he wears when he serves the above-mentioned pie, following the original stage direction: “Enter Titus, like a cook”). Yet most of it is in fact played straight. The performance I saw was disturbing enough to prompt a few departures at intermission, but the curtain call drew cheers and whoops of a kind more often heard in sports arenas than midtown theaters.

The high gore quotient of Titus has proved as problematic for interpreters as for directors. Many scholars believe that Shakespeare could not have written the play; in centuries past it was routinely yanked out of the Shakespearean canon. The critic Thomas Percy declared in 1794 that “Shakespeare’s memory has been fully vindicated from the charge of writing” Titus Andronicus. T. S. Eliot in 1927 condemned the play in scathing terms—“one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written”—and rejected the thought that the Bard of Avon could be responsible. More recent interpreters have credited Shakespeare with primary but not sole authorship; the hand of another Elizabethan playwright, George Peele, has been detected in some of the scenes. (In a note posted online by Red Bull Theater, the scholar and dramaturg Ayanna Thompson uses the term “co-authorship” to describe this collaboration, which perhaps suggests that Peele’s name should be in the program next to, or at least under, Shakespeare’s.)

Assuming that Titus is at least in part Shakespeare’s work, it surely belongs to an early phase of his career and may in fact have been his first play. If so, a claim can be made that Shakespearean tragedy began from the point at which Roman drama left off. Seneca’s Thyestes, likely composed last among his eight surviving tragedies, is one of two classical models for Titus. (The second, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, appears in book form onstage, occasioning a stunning plot twist.) Both Thyestes and Titus are dramas of savage revenge that culminate in a filial-cannibal meal, though in the former case it’s the villain, Atreus, king of Argos, who prepares it, whereas here it is Titus, the ostensible hero. It’s as though Shakespeare had set himself the challenge of inverting Seneca’s moral scheme, such that we could regard the ultimate act of cruelty as something acceptable, even just, given the nihilistic world in which it takes place. Revenge is a dish best served in a pastry shell.

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It’s Titus himself who, while trying to stay true to Rome’s laws, sends it spinning into disorder. As the play opens the empire is riven by strife between two brothers, both claimants to their dead father’s throne. Shakespeare has reimagined the imperial succession as a quasi-democratic process, decided by “election,” though the violent, unstable elder brother, Saturninus, wants the mob to install him by means of force (“Plead my successive title with your swords”). In fact the people prefer Titus, a general returning from fighting the Goths, to either royal; they deem him, like Virgil’s Aeneas, to be pius, dutiful, steadfast, observant of law.

In this case observing Roman law requires a brutal murder: to appease the ghosts of Titus’s sons killed in battle he must sacrifice a Gothic prisoner of war. He selects the eldest son of the captive Tamora and, ignoring the mother’s impassioned pleas, has him killed. “Was ever Scythia half so barbarous?” asks one of Tamora’s two surviving sons, Chiron, himself a “barbarian” Goth. The boundary line between civilized and barbarous cultures has thus been perforated at the play’s outset. The Red Bull production emphasizes the point by having Titus perform the murder himself onstage, amid gouts of blood; Shakespeare directed this first of the play’s many murders to take place offstage.

The succession question again shows Roman rules and procedures producing disaster. Titus declines the proffered throne, pleading advanced age, but using his sway with the people he swings the “election” to Saturninus. The primogeniture principle seems to have dictated his choice—for why else would he prefer the brother more given to inciting violence? In the first moments after his accession Saturninus claims Lavinia, Titus’s daughter, as his wife, a move that Titus at first approves, unaware that Lavinia is already engaged to Saturninus’s brother. When the truth is revealed and Titus revokes his approval, Saturninus turns to ice: “The emperor needs her not,/Nor her, nor thee, nor any of thy stock…. Confederates all thus to dishonor me.” “O monstrous!” Titus cries, realizing that he has handed absolute power to a petulant, unstable man. Denied Lavinia, Saturninus pledges to wed the Gothic queen, Tamora, a shock to Rome’s imperial norms. 

During the past decade Shakespeare’s portraits of dysfunctional monarchies have, inevitably, evoked our own political maladies. A 2017 Public Theater production of Julius Caesar leaned into these parallels by costuming its title character in a blond comb-over wig and an overly long red tie. Even without such overt cues, it’s hard not to see Saturninus, who tries to incite an insurrection to gain power, as a quasi-Trumpian figure. A brilliantly ego-driven performance by Matthew Amendt emphasizes the character’s narcissism and perversity. “What, hath the firmament more suns than one?” this emperor asks as he enters a room to the sound of trumpets—meaning that he himself is a second sun. In a pointed moment devised by the director of the Red Bull production, Jesse Berger, Saturninus accepts the obeisance of Titus’s sister, the tribune Marcia (Enid Graham), by placing a dish of wine on the floor as if to make her lap it up like a dog. At the last minute he picks up the dish—only joking!—having achieved her humiliation.

With Tamora and her sons installed in the palace, Rome is already spiraling out of control when Aaron the Moor, Tamora’s consort, takes the stage, soliloquizing his mischievous plans like Edmund in King Lear or Iago in Othello but outpacing both in malice. The unique purity of Aaron’s desire for evil is one reason scholars give for deattributing this play, but here too one can see Shakespeare as Seneca’s heir and successor: Thyestes features, in the figure of Atreus, a character who’s similarly incapable of remorse. After feeding his brother the flesh of his dismembered sons, Atreus laments that even this wasn’t enough; he wishes he could have forced his brother to drink their blood while they yet lived. Similarly Aaron proclaims, in his valedictory speech, “If one good deed in all my life I did,/I do repent it from my very soul.” The lines have in past productions sometimes raised a laugh, but this Aaron is so convincingly played by McKinley Belcher III, seen earlier this season in the title role of Coriolanus at Theatre for a New Audience, that they instead reveal the depths of full-on psychopathy.

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Together with the two debauched Gothic princes, Tamora and Aaron unleash a reign of horror on Titus’s family. The wages of their sins include three severed hands and a severed tongue, two severed heads, two rapes, and two murders. Improbably, one of the only figures to emerge alive from this charnel house is the pair’s illegitimate, mixed-race baby boy. Aaron cradles the infant fondly and goes to great lengths to protect him, further scrambling the play’s moral and cultural hierarchies. The worst wrongdoer, impugned in Roman eyes by both foreignness and blackness, shows a deep paternal streak and secures the life of his son, whereas in the play’s final scene the pius Titus will take the life of his violated and mutilated daughter, unable to live with her shame. “What hast done, unnatural and unkind?” cries Saturninus at this deed—the transgressor of mores suddenly turned their defender. (A similarly brutal Act I scene, in which Titus also kills one of his sons on a small pretext, has been omitted from the Red Bull production; there are reasons for thinking it was added to the play at a late stage and perhaps by Peele, not Shakespeare.)

The least compromised of all the Titus cast is Lucius, the last left standing of Titus’s many children. Banished from Rome for trying to aid his brothers, who’ve been unjustly accused and condemned to die, he goes off to the Goths to raise an army of invasion; we briefly see him rallying troops among his former foes. (That plot element anticipates the Volscian march on Rome that comes at the climax of Coriolanus, Shakespeare’s first tragedy thus paralleling his last.) Though thus far the play’s “barbarian” Goths have cut a swath of destruction through Rome, they here seem capable of bringing a restoration, by storming its gates. When Lucius takes over the state—after Titus, Lavinia, Saturninus, and Tamora are dispatched in a rapid-fire sequence of murders, amid the cannibal feast—he’s accompanied, notably, by a Gothic honor guard.

In a play where the spirit of vengeance has stalked Rome’s politics throughout, no denouement can be complete unless it includes more of the same. By proclamation of Lucius, Aaron is led away to a long, lingering death and Tamora’s body is denied burial, destined to be devoured by birds and dogs. Their crimes seem to demand such severities, but by the spiral pattern the play has established these punishments seem only to pave the way for something more savage down the road. Saturninus somehow gets a royal tomb, restoring, by way of an empty rite, one small shred of Romanitas.

In a whimsical sequence mid-play, the long-suffering Titus, pretending to be insane so as to entrap his foes, has followers fire arrows skyward bearing messages to the Roman gods. We know better than to expect he’ll receive a reply. Like Seneca, Shakespeare presents a world in which the gods are either deaf or extinct; indeed Titus quotes Seneca, in Latin, at his most desperate moment, a cry of outrage to the god who rules the sky for being able to look impassively on the horrors below. Human beings are on their own in this nihilistic landscape, hoping in vain for help from the powers above. Titus Andronicus, like Thyestes, shows us that they’re likely to make a bloody mess of things.