Introduction

In Titus Andronicus , Titus seeks leniency for Quintus’s and Martius’s sentencing after they have been found in the pit with Bassianus’s corpse. Titus leans his face on the ground and supplicates: O earth, I will befriend thee more with rain That shall distill from these two ancient ruins Than youthful April shall with all his showers. In summer’s drought I’ll drop upon thee still; In winter with warm tears I’ll melt the snow And keep eternal springtime on thy face, So thou refuse to drink my poor sons’ blood. (3.1.16–22) 1 In exchange for his sons’ bail, Titus promises to outdo the rains of April, using his tears to make the rains last all year and bringing repeated lamentation from his eyes that echo the cleansing rains of springtime. The moment is noteworthy, not only because of the impossibility of such a deluge of tears, but also because Titus believes that this miracle can replace the act of violence that would end the boys’ lives. In a way, he does achieve an echo, but more hollow and less salvific than he hopes. The tribunes, as Lucius points out, “hear you not, no man is by, / And you recount your sorrows to a stone” (3.1.28–29). Hoping to get some sort of feedback from the Senators that would verify that his story was heard, Titus only finds the stones of the pavement. The stones themselves “Receive my tears and seem to weep with me,” seeming to give him more feedback and compassion in the face of violence than the pitiless humans (3.1.42). Titus hopes to interrupt a cycle of violence before it continues. He recognizes the capacity for violent acts to redound, but he hopes he can replace sorrowful tears with thankful ones. Of course, Titus is unable to subvert the hypergeneration of further acts of violence. By the end of the play, Titus asserts that his face is carved out with his tears: “Witness these trenches made by grief and care” (5.2.23). Titus is transformed by the violence that he both perpetrates and receives, in body and mind. Katherine A. Rowe states that the play’s “explosive violence” is a result of the fact that “history depends explicitly on a politics of forgetting.” 2 In order to have a functioning Roman state, the past must be forgotten, allowing the previous acts of violence to stop echoing into the future. The fact that violence often multiplies and repeats itself subverts the ability of the Andronici to let go – and that dogged repetition and memorialization are only stopped when all the principal actors are dead.