Titus Andronicus & Timon of Athens by William Shakespeare Page A

promises that if Titus sends for Lucius to come to his house for a banquet, she will bring all Titus’ enemies there for him to be revenged upon. Titus sends Marcus to fetch Lucius, and while Tamora and her sons are leaving on the pretense of doing what Revenge has promised (though they are of course going back to Saturninus), Titus demands that Rape and Murder be allowed to stay with him. They confer in an aside that it will be best in order to placate him and keep him occupied, but with Tamora gone, Titus’ kinsmen come out and seize upon Chiron and Demetrius, gagging and binding them. Titus reenters, carrying a knife, alongside Lavinia, who is supporting a basin on her stumps. Titus, in a long, blood-curdling speech, reveals that he is not mad, that he knows what they have done, and that he will exact a revenge “worse than Progne.” He tells them he is going to cut their throats, catch their blood in Lavinia’s basin, mix it with their bones which he will grind “to powder small,” and make “two pasties” to feed to Tamora at the banquet (as in Act 4 Scene 1, this is an escalation of an Ovidian myth). As good as his word, he slits their throats and orders the bodies brought in so that he may “play the cook.”
ACT 5 SCENE 3
    Marcus, Lucius, and the Goths arrive at Titus’ home with Aaron and the child prisoner. Lucius asks Marcus to keep Aaron alive so that they may later extract testimony of Tamora’s crimes, and Aaron is led away. Saturninus and Tamora arrive and they and all the rest sit down to dinner. Titus enters
“like a cook”
and asks Saturninus if he thinks Virginius—an infamous centurion—was right to kill his daughter for being raped. Saturninus replies that he was, because the girl “should not survive her shame.” At this Titus kills Lavinia. Saturninus, horrified, demands to know the reason for this “Unnatural and unkind” act. Titus tells him of Chiron and Demetrius’ crime, and Saturninus orders them to be sent for. Titus, however, reveals that they are already present, “bakèd in that pie.” He then stabs and kills Tamora; Saturninus leaps up and kills Titus; and Lucius in turn kills him. Uproar ensues, but Marcus and Lucius justify the grim events by telling the people everything that Tamora, Chiron, Demetrius, and Aaron have done. They also reveal the parentage of the child, and offer to kill themselves if Rome is not satisfied. Emillius calls for Lucius to be emperor, saying the people “do cry it shall be so.” Lucius accepts, and he, Marcus, and Young Lucius honor Titus’ body. Aaron is brought out and Lucius orders for him to be buried “breast-deep” and starved to death, though Aaron remains unrepentant. Lucius orders that Saturninus’ body be interred with his ancestors, and Tamora’s be cast out “to beasts and birds of prey.”

TITUS ANDRONICUS

IN PERFORMANCE:
THE RSC AND BEYOND
    The best way to understand a Shakespeare play is to see it or ideally to participate in it. By examining a range of productions, we may gain a sense of the extraordinary variety of approaches and interpretations that are possible—a variety that gives Shakespeare his unique capacity to be reinvented and made “our contemporary” four centuries after his death.
    We begin with a brief overview of the play’s theatrical and cinematic life, offering historical perspectives on how it has been performed. We then analyze in more detail a series of productions staged over the last half-century by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The sense of dialogue between productions that can only occur when a company is dedicated to the revival and investigation of the Shakespeare canon over a long period, together with the uniquely comprehensive archival resource of promptbooks, program notes, reviews, and interviews held on behalf of the RSC at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, allows an “RSC stage history” to become a crucible in which the chemistry of the play can be