The N-Town Play II Book

Like A Comedy of Errors, Titus Andronicus is part of a grammar-school-educated Shakespeare's crash-course substitute for a university education. In Errors, he imitated Plautine comedy's plot structure and stock characters, and--in an experiment to see just how much fun the form could hold--doubled the number of comic misunderstandings by doubling the number of identical twins. In Titus, he imitates the violent plots and magisterial rhetoric of Senecan tragedy, and--again as an experiment--doubles the horrors. In the process, Shakespeare produces for the first time some highly rhetorical, mythology-laden blank verse which flows with a new musical subtlety, and also succeeds in creating over-the-top language and grisly tableaux as outrageous and overwrought as a blood-spattered baroque ceiling--in other words, exactly the sort of excess that would appeal to an Elizabethan audience.

Is the play intentionally funny? Except for an occasional line here and there, I doubt it. At any rate, if it is supposed to be, it fails. Shakespeare lacked the anarchic temperament necessary to exult in evil for its own sake (as Marlowe so effectively did in the "Jew of Malta"). On the contrary, his early villains are the most convincing when they reveal their vulnerability--La Pucelle's terror at her auto da fe, the deformed Gloster's fear of courtly dalliance--not when they revel in their nihilism. Without at least a little love for chaos, there can be no real black comedy, and, if such a love can be deemed an artistic virtue, it is a virtue not found in Shakespeare's character. (Eventually, he would depict the cold manipulative rage of Iago, but it would take ten years of life and craft to give him the tools to do so.)

Although I like this play, I don't believe it is successful. The plot is too mechanical and the horrors too insincere. The Moor's passionate defense of his newborn son--a villain displaying his vulnerability--is the only part of this elaborate bloodbath that touches the human heart.