Gina Eliot Explains Titus Andronicus

Although I can’t claim to be the Shakespeare scholar that Lady Britomart is, I do derive quite a bit of enjoyment (or sick pleasure, if that’s how you take it) from the rather bloody and hilariously crazy plot of Titus Andronicus.  I am capable of taking the Bard quite seriously, but this play just takes the head-infused cake.  For those unfamiliar with the plot, I offer my detailed synopsis below.

So, there’s this guy named Titus Andronicus – he’s a general in the Roman army during Roman Times, and he’s really good at killing Goths, with whom they’re all at war.  But that’s not where the play begins.  The Roman Emperor has lately keeled over, and his two sons, Saturninus and Bassianus, decide that they’re going to take advantage of the power vacuum and fight over who gets to rule the world.  Bassianus is the good guy, Saturninus bad – which is pretty obvious from the beginning.  Saturninus is the oldest, so he has that going for him, but Bassianus is a really good guy, and we know how they fare in Shakespearean tragedies.  Anyway, Titus shows up in some glory, and he’s dragging along his prisoners, Tamora, the Queen of the Goths, and her sons Alarbus, Chiron, and Demetrius.  Titus decides that it’s only fair that he kills Alarbus, because his son was killed in the war.  Trade-off, right?  Tamora gets on her knees and really begs for Alarbus’s life, and does a pretty good job of it, to the point where Titus almost gives in…but instead, he decides that the right thing to do would be to uphold the tradition of killing the loser’s oldest son off-stage and bring his guts back onstage to throw on the fire in front of his mother.  Well, Titus can’t seem to figure out why Tamora is so pissed about this, and she gives a pretty nice little speech about how she’ll GET HIM.

Jessica Lange is a pretty hot lady – and she’s MEAN.

Because Titus is a stickler for tradition, he convinces the silly Roman people that even though Bassianus is a really good guy, Saturninus is the eldest, and therefore should be emperor.  Hooray! Anyway, Titus has this cute daughter, Lavinia, and she’s secretly engaged to Bassianus.  Two of her brothers know this, but Titus isn’t aware. Saturninus has his eye on Lavinia, and Titus agrees that she should marry him.  This is when Bassianus and Lavinia freak out and decide to run away together, assisted by her two brothers, but Titus sees this as treason.  So, Titus kills one of his own sons because they’re being unpatriotic.  Saturninus intervenes and then sees Tamora’s hotness.  He decides, with a little bit of Tamora’s convincing, that he’d rather marry her than Lavinia, since Lavinia is now obviously a whore.  So that works out well – Lavinia and Bassianus get to get married, and Tamora gets to be the Empress of Rome.  Hooray!

Hey, did I mention that Tamora has a Moor lover, Aaron?  He’s predictably REALLY EVIL.  He’s basically around to kill people and do some general plotting with Tamora.  Chiron and Demetrius, Tamora’s (alive) sons, saw that hottie Lavinia during the previous scene and decide that they’d like to rape her.  Aaron is all for this, and he plots (with Tamora, who’s all for anything causing pain to Titus) with the boys about how to bring this about.  There’s a lot of business about a pit for tigers or cats or something, but eventually Bassianus and Lavinia show up while Tamora is hanging out near the pit, and Lavinia starts TAUNTING Tamora.  Yeah, that’s not a good move.  Anyway, Tamora is pissed, but she already hated these people, so it’s no biggie, and Chiron and Demetrius show up and they’re going to kill Bassianus for “killing” the two dudes already dead in the tiger pit.  Lavinia then pleads to Tamora (oh yeah, Lavinia, she’s the flippin’ Empress, remember?  No taunting.) for Bassianus’s life, but of course Tamora isn’t having any of that, and the boys dispatch Bassianus and run off with Lavinia, but not before Tamora reminds them to make sure Lavinia can’t go blabbing her tongue about who did the deed.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers – creepiest Chiron evar.

Aaron is still scheming against Titus, and he wheedles his way into getting two of Titus’s sons accused for Bassianus’s murder.  Titus is pretty upset, but Aaron says that Tamora will spare the boys’ lives if Titus gives up one of his hands.  That’s right, his hand.  Titus’s brother is all about taking the fall and giving up his hand, but Titus pulls a fast one and cuts off his hand before his brother.  Aaron takes that back to the Empress, but she’s already killed the boys!  Oh no!  They bring back the two boys’ heads as proof.  Titus is pretty upset, and then it GETS WORSE.  Lavinia comes running in with bloody stumps instead of hands, and her tongue has been cut out!!!  EEEK.  She uses a stick to kind of spell out in sand Chiron and Demetrius as the perps. Needless to say, Titus goes pretty insane.  He gets his only surviving son to go talk to the Goths about amassing an army to take over Saturninus and Tamora (that was probably an interesting conversation: “Hey, Goths, so remember how we just finished killing you and capturing your Queen?  About that…).

–Meanwhile, in the midst of all of this killing, Tamora finds time to have a mixed-race child, which is obviously Aaron’s.  Chiron and Demetrius are all for killing the kid, but Aaron saves his son and runs off. —

There’s a weird scene where Tamora, Chiron, and Demetrius try to appear to Titus as gods, which is pretty stupid.  Titus mostly doesn’t buy it, but he is starting to go kind of nuts, so it’s unclear what he’s doing in that scene.  He does manage to trick Chiron and Demetrius, capturing them.  So, they’re tied up, and Titus taunts them a bit and brings Lavinia in, carrying a big bowl (with whose hands, I don’t know), and Titus proceeds to slit their throats and collect their blood in the bowl.  Yum.

Titus pretends that he has decided to let bygones be bygones and invites everyone over for a big dinner party. Tamora and Saturninus are really enjoying their meal, and then Titus is like, “hey, let’s all say hi to Lavinia! Oh yeah! She can’t say hi back because your sons raped and mutilated her.”  Titus deems that she’s pretty much worthless (they’re already had their food served by her, so Saturninus agrees) and stabs her in the stomach.  She dies, and then Saturninus takes this moment to decide that Titus might be a little bit crazypants, and decides that a good fight might be in order.  Titus is like, “hey Tamora, that awesome cake you just had was composed of your sons’ meat!! Whahahahaha!!!”  Tamora is pretty upset.  Titus then kills Tamora, and Saturninus then kills Titus.

Remember Titus’s son Lucius that was sent up to the Goths to bring back an army?  Shakespeare seems to think that the dinner party is a good time bring him back up into the scene, and he sees his dead father and wails a bit.  Lucius kills Saturninus to avenge his father’s death.   He orders that Tamora’s body should be chopped up and fed to the birds, since she was just an animal anyway.  Lucius (or his “people”) also found Aaron and the baby, and he decides that the baby should be spared, since he’s kind of a baby, but Aaron needs to get some comeuppance.  Aaron isn’t really apologetic at all, so they decide to bury him in the sand and keep his head outside so that he’ll eventually die and be eaten by birds or other wild animals (maybe those tigers).

That’s pretty much it.

LADY BRITOMART DE GOLFECASTLE EXPLAINS HER NEW LITERARY THEORY

During the Nineteenth-Century, literary criticism was devoted to what they called Zeitgeist, or “The Spirit of the Age.”  This means that they believed every time period had some great, essential thought ideas, and every work of literature could be studied as an example of the ideas of the time at which it was written.  This theory has fallen out of favor, but it has sparked my interest and inspired me to uncover a new interpretive lens.

First, I will detail my thought process.  If the Zeigeist theory seeks to find the common thread in each successive age, should we not also seek the thread that connects the disparate ages?  This would give us a theory that can account for the whole of literature.  This would be a sort of “unified literary theory,” much like the long sought-for unified field theory of physics.

So, what connects all of the ages together?  Why, it is the oldest profession known to man: prostitution.  Ever since cavemen began exchanging dead mountain lions for cavewoman tail, prostitution has been a fact of human existence.  It stands to reason that it must also be a fact of human literature.

Pictured: A prostitute.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet?  Hamlet’s mother trades sex with the new king, her dead husband’s brother, for her continued status as queen of Denmark and all the crown jewels she wants.  What does that make her?  A prostitute.

 

 

 

Pictured: Sexy, sexy embroidery.

Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter?  Hester Prynne trades sex with local pastor Arthur Dimmesdale for lucrative embroidery skills.  (It’s a little known fact that Arthur Dimmesdale taught her how to sew during their torrid love affair.  He was a multi-talented pastor.)  What does that make Hester?  A prostitute.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pictured: Prostitution.

Twain’s Tom Sawyer?  Tom convincing the other kids to paint the fence for him is just another metaphor for prostitution.  The act of painting the fence, which the children think is pleasurable, is a metaphor for sex.  After convincing the other kids that painting fences is great, the other boys actually pay Tom to let them paint his fence…and they painted it all night long.  Well, all day long, but you know what I mean.  What does that make Tom?  That’s right.  A prostitute.

 

 

 

See?  It’s all about prostitution.  This new theory, which I call Prostitution Theory, will revolutionize literary studies.  The next few years should put all those pesky literary questions to rest, freeing English students to focus on more important things like Star Trek or Dancing with the Stars.

All I can say is: You’re welcome.

Pictured: Isn’t Spock great? Hold on a minute…are they doing what I think— Spock, no! This is going too far. You can’t be a…you know what. Stop it this instant! STOP IT!!!! WHAT HAVE I DONE?

(Lady B runs away crying, a broken literary critic.)

LADY BRITOMART DE GOLFCASTLE EXPLAINS THE WIFE OF BATH’S TALE BY GEOFFREY CHAUCER

So, there was this young knight dude, and he was wandering around one day when he saw this super-hot damsel, and he said to himself, “I gots to get me some o’ that.”

So he raped her, ‘cause that’s how he rolled.

Then this damsel, who was not happy about bein’ raped, complained to King Arthur about it.  King Arthur was all like, “Dude, you can’t just rape people.  That’s not cool.  Now I’m gonna have to put you to death or somethin’.”

Then the queen was all like, “You know what, honey, I’ve got this.”

She turned to the young knight dude, and she said, “Here’s what’s gonna happen.  I’ll let you live, but there’s a catch.  You’ve got to go on this quest for me.  I’ll give you a year to figure out what all women want most.  When the year is up, you have to come back here and tell me the answer.   If all the ladies here agree with you, you’ll get off with a warning not to rape people in the future.  I figure that if you can learn something about the ladies while you’re out on this quest, you’ll respect women enough to only engage in sex with mutual consent.  However, if the ladies don’t unanimously agree with your answer, then you’re gonna die.  Simple as that.  Take it, or leave it.”

The young knight chose to take his chances with this quest thing.  After all, that’s what knights are supposed to do, and there was absolutely no knight better at doin’ what he’s supposed to do than this one.  (Except for the whole rape thing – that was not what he was supposed to do, but he understood that now.)  So, the young knight dude got up on his horse and rode away.

Now, the young knight dude went along asking every woman he met what women wanted most.  Some of them said they wanted jewelry, some said they wanted clothes, and some said they wanted hot boyfriends, and a lot of other things he didn’t care about.

This was no help!  They weren’t coming up with just one answer.  It was almost as if these women had their own minds and weren’t part of a homogenous collective.  The ladies at King Arthur’s court were never gonna agree to any of these answers, especially since most of them appeared to be designed specifically to propagate misogynistic stereotypes, while the women of King Arthur’s court were forward-thinking individuals who valued the sisterhood of feminist principals.

When the time came for the young knight dude to return to the court and face the music, he was in deep despair over his failure to properly de-individualize women (despite the queen’s feminist intentions) by finding out what every, single woman wanted most.

As he made his way back to court, the young knight dude happened to see a bunch of naked women dancing around a fire.  He decided he’d better go for a closer look.  You know, just in case they could tell him what he needed to know.

And also to rape them.

But as he got closer, the naked women vanished, and, instead of hot naked chicks, he found an ugly, old lady.  He figured she was worth a shot, so he explained his situation, and asked her what women wanted most.

The ugly old lady was all like, “Yeah, I know what women want most ‘cause I’m all old and stuff, so I know what’s up.  I’ll tell you the answer, but you have to take me with you to the castle and promise to do me a favor later.”

The young knight said to himself, “How bad could it be,” so he promised to do her a favor.

The ugly old, lady told him the answer, and they rode off together.

The queen asked the young knight dude if he had figured out what women want most, and the knight said, “What women want most is to boss around their significant others.”

The queen and the ladies of the court got together and took a vote, and they decided that the young knight was right: they did all want to boss around their significant others.

The queen said to the knight, “Okay, we like the answer you gave.  We were kind of hoping you wouldn’t come up with something good, so we could have you killed…but we have to admit that you’ve got a point.  That means you get to live.”

Then the ugly, old lady came out of nowhere and was like, “Hey, I told him that answer, and he has to do me a favor!”

The young knight, though a rapist, was honest, so he introduced the ugly, old lady to the queen.

The queen asked, “So what kind of favor do you want from this knight?”

“I want him to marry me,” said the ugly, old lady.

Everybody was like, “WTF, old lady,” and the knight was like, “Marriage is not the same thing as a favor.”

The knight offered money and land and stuff, instead, but the ugly, old lady refused to take anything but his roamin’ hands and rushin’ fingers in marriage.  The knight had two options:  He could break his promise and no one would ever trust him again (as much as you can trust a rapist), or he could marry the old lady (I mean, who else is gonna marry a rapist?).

The knight decided that his honor (as a rapist) was more important than his happiness, so he decided to go through with it.

The rest of the court realized that, while it’s hard to root for a rapist, it was also kind of sad that this hot, young dude had to marry (and, presumably, sleep with) this ugly, old lady.  Unsurprisingly, nobody was particularly happy on the wedding day.  Except for the ugly, old lady, of course.

After the ceremony, the knight went off somewhere to pout, but at nighttime, he had to go to his room and face his new wife – a woman who looked old enough to be his great-great-grandmother.  She asked him why he looked so sad, and why he was being so shy.  “Are all of Arthur’s knights this hesitant to jump into the sack?”

“No,” he said.  “I’m sad because you’re old, and I’m young.  You’re ugly, and I’m smokin’ hot.  You’re a commoner, and I’m a knight.  I am totally better than you, but I’m totally stuck with you.”

The old lady said, “Hey, dude, you’re the rapist here, not me.  Well, I guess I kind of am, but that’s not the point.  I’m old, so I have a lot of experience.  Yes, I mean that in a sexy way, but also, I’m wise and stuff.  How else do you think I saved your life?  You weren’t complaining about my age then.  Also, I’m ugly, but none of your friends will ever hit on me, which is a plus.  You won’t have to worry about me sleeping around, ‘cause nobody wants to sleep with me.  Finally, being a knight hasn’t really made you a great guy, since you go around raping people.  But I was nice enough to save your life, so I’m obviously the better person here.”

“You know what, you’re right,” the knight said.  “I’m really sorry I’ve been acting like such a dick.”

The old lady said, “Now that you’re seeing reason, I have a proposition.  I can be really young and hot if you want me to be, but you have to make a choice.  Either, I can be hot and sleep with all your friends (and they’ll want to when I’m hot), or I can stay ugly and I won’t have the opportunity to cheat on you.  Which is it?”

The knight, who by now knew what lesson he was supposed to have learned, said, “You know what, honey, you’re the boss.  You decide.”

The old lady said, “So, let me get this straight.  You are making me the boss in this family?”

“Right,” he said.

“Right answer,” the old lady said, and she changed into a total hottie.  “Because you learned your lesson, and you’re letting me have my way, instead of having your way, like you did with that damsel (burn!), you get a wife who’s hot and not gonna sleep around.”

When the knight heard this, he shouted “Win!”  And they all lived happily ever after.  ‘Cause there is no one more deserving of a happy ending than a rapist and his crazy stalker.

Work Consulted

Chaucer, Geoffrey.  “The Wife of Bath’s Tale.”  The Riverside Chaucer.  3^rd ed.  Ed. Larry Benson, et al.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin: 1986.  116-122.  Print.