Titus Andronicus

Titus Andronicus is Shakespeare's earliest tragedy and his most violent: a Roman revenge play in which a victorious general's family is destroyed by the Gothic queen Tamora and her lover Aaron.

Main characters

• Titus Andronicus, a Roman general
• Lavinia, his daughter
• Lucius, his son
• Tamora, Queen of the Goths, later Empress of Rome
• Aaron, a Moor, Tamora's lover
• Chiron and Demetrius, Tamora's sons
• Saturninus, Emperor of Rome

Plot summary

This summary gives away the ending.

Titus returns to Rome after defeating the Goths, bringing Queen Tamora and her sons as captives, and sacrifices her eldest son despite her pleas. He declines the imperial crown in favour of Saturninus, who then marries Tamora, putting Titus's enemy at the heart of power.

Encouraged by Aaron, Tamora's sons murder Lavinia's husband, then rape her and cut off her tongue and hands so she cannot name them. Two of Titus's sons are framed and executed, and Titus is tricked into cutting off his own hand. Feigning madness, Titus takes revenge: he kills Chiron and Demetrius and bakes them into a pie which he serves to their mother, before killing Lavinia to end her shame and stabbing Tamora. Nearly everyone dies; Lucius becomes emperor and sentences Aaron to be buried alive.

Themes

• Revenge
• Rome and 'barbarism'
• Grief and the limits of language
• Race and otherness

Famous lines

She is a woman, therefore may be wooed; She is a woman, therefore may be won.

Demetrius, Act 2 Scene 1

More in our collection of famous Shakespeare quotes.

Sources

The rape of Lavinia is modelled on the story of Philomela in Ovid's Metamorphoses, a copy of which appears on stage. The genre follows Thomas Kyd's hugely popular The Spanish Tragedy.

On stage and screen

It was the first of Shakespeare's plays to be printed, in 1594. A pen drawing of a scene from it, attributed to Henry Peacham and dated around 1595, is the only surviving illustration of a Shakespeare play made in his lifetime. Long dismissed as crude, it was revived by Peter Brook in 1955 with Laurence Olivier and has been staged more often since.

See where Titus Andronicus sits in Shakespeare's career on the timeline, or read about the playhouses it was written for.