“In the source myth Shakespeare found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Tereus rapes his sister-in-law Philomela and cuts out her tongue; but she weaves a tapestry that tells her story, and her sister takes revenge. Lavinia has no hands; there is, seemingly, no way she can tell her story. The mutilation also figures externally the shame that attends a raped woman in the play’s patriarchal society: Lavinia is now ruined forever. Critics up to the middle of the 20th century saw Titus Andronicus as a pointless horror show, so bad that it was probably not by Shakespeare. [Nunca confiar nos críticos.] But Lavinia’s fate has been a key factor in the recent rehabilitation of the play, in the theater as well as in criticism. Violence against women, the denial of women’s language—these are issues to which we are now, with good reason, particularly alert; and when Lavinia enters, raped, mutilated, and speechless, it is as though in the middle of a high-flown, consciously literary tragedy someone has pulled a fire alarm.”
“The attack takes place in the woods, established as a place of terror outside the bounds of society. Yet looking back, we can see that the act does not come out of nowhere. The rape sequence begins with the two Gothic brothers quarreling over Lavinia, a quarrel Aaron the Moor settles by pointing out that they both can have her. The play likewise began with a competition between two brothers, Saturninus and Bassianus, for the possession of Rome. Bassianus in particular makes Rome sound like a woman whose honor is at stake: ‘And suffer not dishonor to approach / The imperial seat, to virtue consecrate’ (1.1.13–14). Aaron in turn makes Lavinia sound like a captured city, telling Chiron and Demetrius to ‘revel in Lavinia’s treasury’ (2.1.139).”
“The primary meaning of rape in our time is sexual assault, but it can also mean seizure; and in that sense Lavinia is raped twice, once in Rome and once in the woods. Saturninus and Bassianus debate the word, Saturninus declaring ‘Thou and thy faction shall repent this rape’ and Bassianus retorting ‘Rape call you it, my lord, to seize my own, / My true betrothèd love and now my wife?’ (1.1.412–14). Throughout the sequence the emphasis is on Bassianus’ rights, and throughout the sequence Lavinia herself is silent. This is not the enforced silence of the second rape, and we could read many different meanings into it. But we have to do the reading, and the parallel has a disturbing effect. Raped and silenced in the woods, she has already been raped and silent in Rome. The atrocity may be not so much an outlaw act as a revelation of the male pride and possessiveness that have already erupted in Rome itself.”
“At the request of his eldest son, Lucius, he sacrifices the Gothic queen Tamora’s eldest son, Alarbus, to give the souls of his own sons passage across the Styx. Tamora pleads for her son’s life; rejecting her plea, Titus gives no sign that he has even listened to it. He is then given the responsibility of picking the next emperor. Without pausing to think, he chooses Saturninus, simply because he is the late emperor’s elder son. He accepts Saturninus’ offer to marry Lavinia as an honor done to him, with no thought of Lavinia’s feelings or Bassianus’ rights. When the rest of the family carries her off he tries to pursue, and kills his own son Mutius for blocking his way, thinking only of the challenge of the moment: ‘What, villain boy, / Barr’st me my way in Rome?’ (1.1.295–96). Titus is a creature of armor and leather, with thought processes to match. § When Saturninus turns against him and marries Tamora, Titus suddenly feels disoriented, a stranger in the city he thought was his. But it is the return of Lavinia from the woods that breaks him open, presenting him with a sight for which nothing has prepared him, for which no automatic reaction will serve.”
“‘What shall we do?’ (3.1.135). Once a man of action and quick decisions, he can think only of multiplying Lavinia’s afflictions in static spectacles. His language expands, giving it a cosmic reach it never had before—but it is filled with images of flood and drowning, images of helplessness.”
“The man of action is back; he knows now what he has to do. But there is still nearly half the play to come, and in the tradition of Elizabethan revenge plays (exemplified by Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1585) and, with variations, by Hamlet) the final deed is held off while the hero, seemingly mad, questions the world that makes revenge necessary. Titus has his relations dig in the earth, fish in the sea, and fire arrows with messages to the gods, all to seek for Justice and to demonstrate that she is nowhere to be found. The answer is revenge. Language was made helpless in the silencing of Lavinia and in Titus’ floundering attempts to find the right thing to say to her.”
“Titus’ revenge, like the act it avenges, has its roots in the myth of Philomela, whose sister Procne feeds Tereus his own son at a banquet. Within the play itself the act is grimly appropriate: Titus will ‘make two pasties of [their] shameful heads’ (5.2.193), recalling the severed heads of Quintus and Martius. He will ‘bid that strumpet, [their] unhallowed dam, / Like to the earth swallow her own increase’ (194–95). Central to the atrocity in the woods is the pit in which Chiron and Demetrius dropped the body of Bassianus, and into which Aaron lured Lavinia’s brothers. The pit, like the tomb of the Andronici, is a dark hole that swallows life; now Tamora will be made to imitate it. Quintus also describes the mouth of the pit as stained with blood (2.3.200–202), making it an image of the assault on Lavinia that is taking place as he speaks. The Gothic brothers are entering her body as her own brothers fall into the pit. In revenge Titus compels Chiron and Demetrius to enter Tamora’s body, making her the final image of the hole in the earth that swallows men.”
“When in the final scene Titus kills Lavinia, he does so after confirming with the Emperor that the story of Virginius gives him a precedent for his act. Roman honor is satisfied. (…) It is easy to assume that Titus is releasing Lavinia from a life that has become intolerable, and that death is what she wants. Some productions stage the scene as a ritual in which Lavinia not only consents but gives the signal for her death. Yet in Titus’ act we feel the weight of the patriarchal society he has always served, in which Lavinia earlier seemed to be a pawn. He is preoccupied not with her grief but with her shame; the grief that matters is his own. The last we hear of Lavinia is Lucius’ command to bury his father and sister in the family tomb. She is released from an intolerable life, but she is also absorbed into the patriarchal world that was implicated in her suffering.”
“In Act 2, when Lavinia appeals to Tamora, as one woman to another, to prevent Chiron and Demetrius from raping her, Tamora ignores this appeal to fellow feeling as Titus ignored hers. Tamora has a son to avenge, as Titus will have a daughter. Tamora meets cruelty with cruelty, and Titus will do the same. Disguised as Revenge, Tamora comes to visit Titus, playing on what she thinks is his madness. When Titus welcomes her with a one-armed embrace, the moment has a double significance: Titus is embracing Revenge but he is also embracing Tamora—and the act conveys, more than Titus realizes, how much he and his victim have in common.” Segunda interpretação: um meio-abraço, um abraço traiçoeiro.
“In the last scene Lucius is proclaimed Rome’s emperor, charged with restoring Rome and healing its wounds. Yet he has entered at the head of an army of Goths. Restoration is also enemy invasion: again the border has collapsed.”
“The character who mounts the most telling challenge to any sense of otherness is Aaron the Moor. He appears at first to be the play’s ultimate Other: a Moor in the service of the Goths (and how did that happen?), he is doubly foreign in Rome. His blackness sets him apart visually, and his cruel wit gives him detachment of another kind. Telling Lucius of the attack on Lavinia, he describes it as a trip to the barber: ‘Why, she was washed, and cut, and trimmed [raspada, limpa]; and ‘twas / Trim sport for them which had the doing of it’ (5.1.96–98).”
“The extravagance of the play’s action takes it to the edge of grotesque comedy. For Aaron, peering through the wall that signifies his detachment, it is a comedy.”
“The play itself moves into Aaron’s territory in 3.2, a scene that appears for the first time in the Folio and may have been added by Shakespeare as an afterthought. Marcus casually kills a fly. After Titus rebukes him, invoking the grief of the fly’s parents, Marcus appeases his brother by saying ‘It was a black, ill-favored fly, / Like to the Empress’ Moor. Therefore I killed him’ (67–68). Titus then grabs a knife and stabs away at the tiny body. Two of the play’s key ideas, grief and revenge, spin into absurdity, and the sense of humor at work is not unlike Aaron’s own.”
“They are foreign, other, not human. But earlier in the play Titus himself, when the outrages against his family are only just beginning, declares ‘Rome is but a wilderness of tigers’ (3.1.55). The atrocity committed against Lavinia happened outside society, in the wilderness; but the more we reflect on it, the more we find the distinction between Rome and the wilderness dissolving.”
Seclusão Anagógica 