Self and Soul: A Defense of Ideals by Mark Edmundson

Author:Mark Edmundson [Edmundson, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780674088207
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2015-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

Titus is at the end of his life and feels justified in proclaiming that he has fulfilled a high ideal. Titus is not Achillean: he does not seek glory for himself. He is—or wishes to be—a descendant of Hector.

Titus demands that the eldest son of Tamora, queen of the defeated Goths, be sacrificed to the memory of his own slain sons. The sacrifice, Titus claims, has the status of religious rite. It is intended to appease the suffering shadows of the departed, his sons killed in the wars, and so it must take place. Not long afterward, Titus kills one of his remaining sons for opposing him when he declares that Lavinia, his daughter, will marry the newly proclaimed emperor, Saturninus. Titus has—honorably, nobly—ceded his right to the imperial seat to Saturninus and intends to give him absolute loyalty, whatever the cost. When Titus’ son, Mutius, tries to block the marriage, Titus draws his sword and kills him. In Roman life, it was often considered an act of nobility to put the state or one’s conception of honor before family. Maus mentions Horatius, who killed his own sister for lamenting the death of her husband, whom Horatius killed in battle; Titus Manlius Torquatus, a general who had his own son executed for too eagerly anticipating an order to close on the enemy; and Appius Claudius, who murdered his daughter when her honor was undermined (Greenblatt, Norton Shakespeare, 372). Perhaps the best-known example of such action, though, is Lucius Junius Brutus, who killed his sons for siding with Tarquin. (Lucius turns up in Book VI of The Aeneid, where Virgil calls him “infelix.”) When Titus kills his son for defying the emperor’s wish, he is following in a long line of distinguished Romans, following their version of the code of honor.

After the first scenes, the play consists in the humiliation, the debasement, and finally the destruction of Titus. By the close of the tragedy, the once valiant, noble Roman is as depraved as the human fiends who torment him. His daughter is raped. She has her tongue cut out. Her hands are sawed off. The corrupt emperor arrests Titus’ oldest remaining son. Aaron the Moor, an enemy of Titus with connections at court, informs Titus that if he will cut off his own hand and send it to the emperor, the emperor might spare his son. Titus severs the hand and sends it as a gift. The emperor laughs and kills his son anyway. By the end of the play, Titus is a mad, disfigured animal. He kills the two men who have raped and mutilated his daughter and bakes them in a pie and invites their mother to eat it. She does. Then Titus kills Lavinia to spare her further shame, or so he says. Titus dies a self-justified but ruined man, his body maimed, his spirit destroyed.

Titus’ loyalty to the emperor and to the values of republican Rome doesn’t elevate him, not in the least. It debases him. In his own terms, Titus does virtually nothing wrong.

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