Titus Andronicus, or, what do we do with the evil that men do?

I am enjoying a reread of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, a play I have not visited since grad school. It would seem, though, that it be very difficult in our modern era not only grapple with the violence but to also include this work with the great texts produced by Mr. W.S. Does Titus compare to Hamlet? to Romeo & Juliet? to Julius Caesar? It may compare to Macbeth but even that play seems restrained in its use of gore and abuse of the human person. Certainly the play, being W.S.' first tragedy, was mimicking the gore-saturated spectacles popular in late 16th century England & hadn't yet the full stamp of masterful language and insight to character of the great works of the later years.

I've always had difficulty reading the work for its cumbersome use of too much violence and seen it as a 16th century slasher film; ye olde Freddie Kruger or something. But even in this play I am seeing the first musings of the Bard that would come to resolution in his later works. In many ways it is a precursor of The Tempest especially.

This minus the tongue and the hands!

Shakespeare lived in a violent era where only 30 years prior to Billy's birthday Thomas More was convicted of treason, beheaded, quartered and had his parts publicly exposed on the entrances into to London. Hangings were a picnic spectacle. Civil war was an ever looming fear. Banditry, disease, poverty, filth and horrendous surgical practices were commonplace. A world lit only by fire (as William Manchester points out) was a world surrounded by terrors and not far removed from the terrors of prior generations as far back as Rome or Greece. C.S.Lewis points out that such men of Shakespeare's era had more in common with Greeks and Romans (1600 years in the past) than they did with people 300 years later in the 1900s.

We live in a particularly antiseptic and pampered era yet even recently have been the Grendelian characters such as Belle Gunness, or Mary Mallon, Lizzie Borden or Howard Unruh; Karl Panzram, Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson, the Zodiac Killer, Son of Sam, or Jim Jones.

Not your model citizen by any standard.

Additionally one can look to horror stories of mafia kills, or foreign dictators sending their rivals through wood chippers, or starving their own people, or locking them inside the walls of their city and denying them flu medicine.

The point being that no era is virginally free of humans imposing cruelty and violence on their fellow humans. Perhaps Shakespeare, seeing the depravity to which people in his own era could fall, was creating a reflection on what the response to such depravity ought to be. Do we seek revenge for the ills done us? Is it an eye for an eye? Should we, like Al Pacino's character, Michael, gun down all those who have so harmed our family and our persons? Do we, as Sam Gamgee suggests to Galadriel, "make the bad men pay"? Doesn't life then become a monotony of violence; "tomorrow & tomorrow & tomorrow" creeping in a petty pace from day to day? How do we seek revenge and "taint not thy mind"? How to keep from being "fortune's fool"?

Try not to get upset when your brother can't get through the toll booth.

That question seems to plague many of Shakespeare's later plays and only begins to find resolution, I think, in "The Tempest".

If we are ever to escape the primordial cycle of violence & power it is almost as if we have to eschew violence & power and seek, instead, to love other people, listen to them, seek their good - submitting to the possibility of our own defeat and ruin with the idea that there is something greater, some "undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns"; to accept that we

have but slumber'd here

While these visions did appear.

And this weak and idle theme,

No more yielding but a dream...";

And only thus finally find that "the rest is silence."