Terror and pity in The most lamentable Roman tragedy of Titus

Andronicus

Suffering is a constant, in life as well as in tragedy. Much ink has been

spent on discussions of the ‘tragic paradox,’ why watching fictitious suffering
gives us pleasure, and philosophers of art are still battling over the question
whether our spectating of suffering can be an exercise in genuine sympathy,
or is, in light of the phenomenon of ‘tragic pleasure,’ in the better case a drug
to induce our own suffering with a sense of beauty, and in the worse, a sad-
istic pastime.
In the long form of its title, The most lamentable Roman Tragedy of Titus
Andronicus advertises itself as a work which invites the audience’s sorrow; it
does not say, however, how intimately is this tragedy itself concerned with
the failures and limitations of shared grief, and the impact lack of sympathy
has upon a community. The very ‘joints’ of the tragedy, situations which
start and intensify the circle of revenge, are collective and individual failures
of sympathy, which cannot offer much comfort when it surfaces after the hor-
rors thus produced. Additionally, the ambiguous and shifting tonality of the
play tries and tests the spectators’ own abilities of empathy, and so it exam-
ines the complexities of emotional communication not only among the char-
acters on the stage, but also between the stage and the audience, offering a
richly textured commentary on the often truly tragic paradoxes of sympathy.
The sacrifice of Alabrus, Tamora’s first born son, to appease the shades of
the dead Andronici marks the beginning of the vicious cycle of revenge. The
text does not make it very easy for the audience to judge the necessity of this
religious act from the perspective of Titus, but one may count on nature to
abhor the practice as such, and to be therefore kindly disposed to Tamora’s

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plea for mercy for her son. As a piece of rhetoric, the speech is marvellous,
and serves well as an introduction to the ideal dynamics of empathy, 1.107–
123:

Stay, Roman brethren! Gracious conqueror,

Victorious Titus, rue the tears I shed,
A mother’s tears in passion for her son:
And if thy sons were ever dear to thee,
O, think my son to be as dear to me!
Sufficeth not that we are brought to Rome,
To beautify thy triumphs and return,
Captive to thee and to thy Roman yoke,
But must my sons be slaughtered in the streets,
For valiant doings in their country’s cause?
O, if to fight for king and commonweal
Were piety in thine, it is in these.
Andronicus, stain not thy tomb with blood:
Wilt thou draw near the nature of the gods?
Draw near them then in being merciful:
Sweet mercy is nobility’s true badge:
Thrice noble Titus, spare my first-born son.

In the opening two lines, already, Tamora establishes her main rhetorical
aims: by calling her captors ‘Roman brethren,’ she tries to close the gap in
empathy between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ pointing towards their shared humanity,
then, by calling Titus ‘Gracious,’ appeals to the general’s self-regard, and
finally, by directing his attention to her tears, she sollicits his empathy on
an emotional level. All three motives are also developed further: balanced
paralellisms, such as … dear to thee / … dear to me, in lines 110–11, or were
piety in thine, it is in these, 118 underscore the shared, the space of common
experience which renders the supplicant as akin to the supplicated; the enu-

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meration of the sorrows already suffered (112–114) is designed to engage fur-

ther Titus’ and audience’s pity, and is crowned by a forceful amplification of
the proposed injustice: But must my sons be slaughtered in the streets, a verse
which multiplies the vicitms, stresses the public humiliation involved, and
strips down the sacrifice of any of its religious meaning to simple butchery.
In fact, the act is portrayed as irreligious in the verse 119, and an alternative
theology of mercy is proposed to counter the premise of the sacrifice itself,
mercy which, in being portrayed as the nobility’s true badge, 122, would be
expected of a Gracious conqueror, 107, of the Thrice-noble Titus, 123. In addi-
tion to its failure to persuade Titus, Tamora’s rhetoric emphatically reveals
pity to be reserved only to those we can connect to and understand them and
to those whose sorrows are amply visible, if not spectacular. Moreover, it is
more than little conscious of its being a function of one’s self-concept.
Poignantly, the same general strategy fails Lavinia when she has to resort
to supplication: O Tamora, thou bear’st a woman’s face—, 3.136, she tries to
establish a common ground for sympathy, and prevent her rape. Perhaps she
might be more successful, as Tamora’s inital refusal to hear her out might sug-
gest her being somewhat moved, but Demetrius, only too manlily, encourages
her, 3.139–41:

Listen, fair madam! Let it be your glory

To see her tears, but be your heart to them
As unrelenting flint to drops of rain.

Interestingly, these words leave open the possibility of her heart to relent
in their very trying to close it, so we may imagine the audience being in
some suspense as to the outcome. Nevertheless, Lavinia presses on in her
supplication only to be met with an irrevocable obstacle: Tamora’s memory
of pity denied :

Remember, boys, I poured forth tears in vain

To save your brother from the sacrifice,

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But fierce Andronicus would not relent.

What one can see here is how the natural reflex of sympathy can be broken
down by the very mechanism that generates it in the first place. Tamora’s
way of steeling herself to deny Lavinia the tiniest bit of pity and a decent
death is to put Lavinia to the same position as she was herself: I poured tears
in vain, and herself to the position of relentless Andronicus. It is the same
sort of mental positioning necessary for empathy, when one imagines the
pains of the victim by imagining oneself to be in their situation, but reversed.
Furthermore, it reveals empathy to be ultimately reciprocal. Perhaps this is
why we tend to reserve it for those we perceive as close, as part of ‘our’ group?
Perhaps we always unwittingly count on a repayment? Additionally, failure
to establish this reciprocity is, at least in the present tragedy, one of the very
reasons for their being an ‘us’ and ‘them’ divide between the two families, as
well as between the Andronici and the Caesar.
The final denial of compassion turns the image of ‘unrelenting flint’ on its
head. In a powerful stage-gesture, Andronicus, in a cruel turn of poetic justice
pleading for the life of his sons, is left alone by the tribunes midway in his
supplication, without him as much as noticing. When told of their departure
by his son, Lucius, he touchingly adds, 5.32–47:

Why, tis no matter, man; if they did hear,

They would not mark me, or if they did mark,
They would not pity me, yet plead I must;
Therefore I tell my sorrows to the stones;
Who, though they cannot answer my distress,
Yet in some sort they are better than the tribunes,
For that they will not intercept my tale:
When I do weep, they humbly at my feet
Receive my tears and seem to weep with me;
And, were they but attired in grave weeds,

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Rome could afford no tribunes like to these.

A stone is soft as wax, tribunes more hard than stones;
A stone is silent, and offendeth not,
And tribunes with their tongues doom men to death.

The absurdity of the stones being more human than people, even though
they only ‘seem to weep’ under Titus’ own tears, underscores the cruel condi-
tions of Shakespearean Rome, in the cruelty of which Titus initially particip-
ated, both when he killed Tamora’s Alabrus, and his own Mutius, and which
he now suffers. And despite Titus’ dessert, the image is profoundly moving,
revealing a deep vulnerability, a need for compassion in the old man’s heart
as he projects to the inanimate surroundings the pity not found elsewhere.
Contrast this moving portrait of a broken old man with the terror in the
preceding scene, where Marcus finds Lavinia raped and maimed. While most
of the audience can sympathise with Titus’ loss and sense of injustice, even
though their experience thereof would be based on lesser instances, from
which they could extrapolate, Lavinia’s suffering is so horrifying, that it de-
fies one’s ability to imagine it. Perhaps because of this difficulty, the poetry
spilling out of Marcus’s mouth sounds so eerily out-of-place, if it is not just
grotesquely farcical, 4.16–25:

Speak, gentle niece, what stern ungentle hands

Have lopp’d and hew’d and made thy body bare
Of her two branches, those sweet ornaments,
Whose circling shadows kings have sought to sleep in,
And might not gain so great a happiness
As have thy love? Why dost not speak to me?
Alas, a crimson river of warm blood,
Like to a bubbling fountain stirred with wind,
Doth rise and fall between thy rosed lips,
Coming and going with thy honey breath.

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It is true that emphasising the loss and spoiling of beauty: hands as sweet
ornaments, or the rosed lips, enhances the pathos of the scene, and yet, there
is something monstrously inappropriate about sublimating the suffering to a
pair of pastoral similes: comparing her cut-off hands to cut-down branches,
and the blood from her mutilated tongue to a bubbling fountain stirred with
wind. The terror of the fact here mixes with the perplexing decorousness
of the presentation. Is it a screen, aestheticising the terrible, so that it can
be at least spoken about, and fathomed, or is it a profoundly disturbing and
gratuitous relishing in the horror? Ultimately, every reader and spectator
has to answer this for themselves and their conscience, probing their own
experience of the scene, but the scene impels them to do so. In doing so, the
play continues to explore the limits of compassion—setting terror, in fact, as
against pity, as removing the experience of the characters so much above the
everyday suffering as to alienate the audience, and question the very power
of tragic representation to communicate anything meaningful about it.
The capability of tragedy to convey what it purports thus questioned, Mar-
cus closes of the scene with a couplet destabilising the premises of the genre
even further, 4.56–7:

Do not draw back, for we will mourn with thee

O, could our mourning ease thy misery!

Here, we are ultimately confronted with the position of a spectator towards

the tragic subject—what simply watching tragedy and feeling pity towards
the characters really amounts to? There is no direct link between symbolic
pity and help, and this is the message made explicit in the next scene of mourn-
ing, when upon Lucius’ offer to wipe Lavinia’s cheeks with his tear-besotted
napkin, Titus comments, 5.148–9:

O what a sympathy of woe is this—

As far away from help as Limbo is from bliss.

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As spectators of tragedies we may well exercise our empathy and compas-

sion, but how often does it result in our acting on the impulses thus generated,
and how many times is our act anything more than what Lucius’s wiping of
Lavinia’s cheeks amounts to?
And yet, the play closes off with additional spin on the matter. After another
mixed tone of grotesquerie and noble pathos in the scene where Titus futilely
sacrifices his hand to Aaron’s vain scheme, and the carnivalesque madness of
shooting arrows to gods, Lucius’ first act of mercy in the play, then,—letting
Aaron’s chilid live—heralds the conclusion of the tragedy, and the vicious
cycle of revenge, and the audience is well prepared to draw their last lessons.
Revenge herself appears on the stage as Tamora in disguise, and apart from
the incidental, it makes the audience ponder the phenomenon itself, shifting
their attention back to its ways and causes. What is the most lamentable
about the tragedy in hindsight resurfaces as the inability of any of the parties
to afford each other compassion, wreaking havoc in the whole community.
Despite its limitations in individual application, on the tapestry of the whole
plot, pity appears as a necessary link in the fabric of reciprocity that should
bind Rome, and any society, together.
At the final banquet, then, a further shock comes. Inexplicably, at first,
Titus asks the emperor for his opinion on the case of certain Vegetius, who
killed his daughter after she underwent Lavinia’s fate. Saturninus thinks well
of Vegetius’s act, and the reasoning which he offers is harrowing, despite
being hailed by Titus as A reason mighty, strong, effectual, 12.42; 12. 40–1:

Because the girl should not survive her shame,

And by her presence still renew his sorrows.

Again, these verses, and Titus’ act could be read as a meta-tragic comment-
ary. Faced with the (often unconscious) choice to look at the suffering of
others, and turning a blind eye, it is only too natural to choose the latter.
This spectatorial position is here dramatised in extremis, killing one’s own

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daughter because of the sorrow her shame and suffering brings being, in ef-
fect, a greater instance of resolving the tension of compassion by choosing
one’s own comfort.
After the significance of compassion and pity was undermined, and its lim-
itations explored, the other side is brought into the view: what ultimately
happens if we choose not to look, not to care. This is the truly tragic paradox,
Titus Andronicus explores: that compassion is only too often impotent, while
being necessary at the same time. That the least humanity we can muster, the
reflex of pity, must be borne even though it is often meaningless. And if one
watches carefully, the play offers the first step to overcome the limitations of
individual sympathy, as, at least, it helps to recognise them.

Wolfson College ŠTEFAN BENČÍK

sb2033@cam.ac.uk