Subjecting Subjectivity: How Titus Andronicus Negates the Renaissance Construction of Self

Titus Andronicus is a drama rife with defects and impurities for many a reader; difficult to categorize, it is beholden to no singularity of genre or clear historical period.  It employs that which some critics consider an excessive amount of gratuitous violence and is often criticized for a lack of rhetorical sophistication we have come to expect from the Bard—to the point of calling into question its authorship.  Simply put, Titus Andronicus is considered “bad” Shakespeare.  Nebulously set in classical antiquity, the play chronicles the fall of a great Roman general, Titus Andronicus, and his family.  Often considered a sophomoric attempt at the wildly popular revenge plays written by his contemporaries, Titus plots the cycle of revenge that disrupts hegemonic Roman authority and calls into question the relationship of a great state power with both its subjects as well as its political enemies.  Interestingly, though held in such modern critical contempt, Titus was wildly popular with audiences until the Victorian period, where its violence was seen as unfit for general viewership.  It was not until the mid-twentieth century that the play experienced a stage revival (with a very lukewarm critical interest delayed by a few decades more).  In her commentary for the DVD of the film adaptation of Titus, Julie Taymor claims that she chose to tackle this play because it is the most pertinent of his works to the modern day; and yet, her rendering aside, the play smacks of archaic models of subject loyalty and even includes what could be an homage to the mystery plays of the Middle Ages.  Though typical considerations of Titus’s thematic impulses consider the violence to be a critique of a culture’s penchant for excess, it seems an equally plausible site for a meditation and critique of Renaissance subjectivity, an analysis of the effects and constituent parts of the new “modern” subject.  Perhaps, then, it is not the excessive spectacle or violence or its imperfect language but rather the play’s ultimate rejection of individualism that has excommunicated it from the beloved Shakespeare canon. 

Concerned that with the introduction of a “troubled” and “modern” subjectivity, contemporary ideas of self-determined identity run the risk of self-defeat, Lee Patterson considers the consequences of contemporary individualism in the introduction to his book, Chaucer and the Subject of History:

Proclaiming their autonomy from oppressive social structures, college students follow almost ritualistic patterns of behavior prescribed by their peer group […] and many Americans seem to agree that any effort to change the world is doomed before it begins […] Similarly, academic analysts insist that structures of domination do not merely control but in effect constitute the individual: to be a subject is to be subjected. (6)

Though his interest lies in understanding Chaucer’s place in history, specifically how his understanding of subjectivity mediates the supposed opposition between “the past from which [the subject] emerges and the social world within which its destiny is shaped” (12) in order to argue that the Chaucerian character is “always in the process of being constructed...it is an open site for negotiating the problematic relationship between outer and inner, historical particularity and transhistorical generality” (16), we can extrapolate his understanding of Chaucer’s historical consciousness in shaping the self to consider how Titus treats the process of subjectivity.

Where Patterson’s argument about Chaucerian subjectivity applauds him for successfully producing characters as “the transactions between the given world outside (history) and the unspecified world within (the subject)” (28-9), the characters in Titus Andronicus seem to embody a certain trepidation on the part of the author, an anxiety about his role in creating and communicating this newfangled sense of self.  Chaucer creates a specific historical setting for his pilgrims, effectively showing that he can render a particular historical moment without sacrificing the ability to transcend that moment.  Shakespeare, clearly, does no such thing; he instead creates a hazy historical setting, one that jumbles facts and collapses huge periods of history in a way that generalizes historical events rather than human characteristics.  Rather than celebrate his characters as paradigmatic of essential human subjectivity, as Chaucer’s pilgrims have been described, Shakespeare’s text seems to paint a fatalistic picture of individual human existence—so much so that Taymor’s adaptation ends with a somewhat ill-fitting scene of two children walking into the sunrise, to infuse a play that seemingly argues against individual will and action with a contemporary, optimistic stab at hope for a new, self-determined future.  Indeed, Aaron’s final speech suggests the play’s attitude toward will or self-determination; buried chest-deep and starved, he refuses to repent for his evil actions and tells us, “Ten thousand worse than ever yet I did / Would I perform if I might have my will” (5.3.186-7); and that is precisely the point—such a will has no place in this play.  With this, animalistic imagery replaces human characteristics in the final description of humanity: “As for that ravenous tiger, Tamora, / No funeral rite, nor man in mourning weed, / No mournful bell shall ring her burial, / But throw her forth to beasts and birds to prey: / Her life was beastly and devoid of pity, / And being dead, let birds on her take pity” (5.3.194-9).  The outlook for new, human subjectivity is so grim that birds supplant people in experiencing pity.  In Titus, to be a subject is to be subjected...to the human penchant for evil.  So dies the modern, self-determined subject of Titus Andronicus, with no happy ending to change the tide or pave the way for future success of individualism.