IN which sense and to what extent Shakespeare may be called the author of Titus Andronicus is still a disputed question.1 But even if we assume that Shakespeare wrote only part of it, there is no other play by which we can so well form a notion of Shakespeare's “beginning”, of the platform from which he started.
When we have read Titus or have seen it on the stage we are under the impression that we have witnessed prodigious events and prodigious speeches without having any clear notion of their necessity or their logical motivation. The frightful deeds of horror, the terrific outbursts of passion take us by surprise with their suddenness, but they fail to convince us. This happens not only because real motivation is lacking, but also because the nature and character of the persons from whom these gigantic effects derive do not yet appear to us as truly great. We apprehend in Titus only the great effects, the consequences of the nature of the characters, but not their source and essential foundation, in the personalities. This means, if transferred to the words and the style of Titus that many expressions and speeches remain for us little more than an empty gesture. The words are not yet necessarily individual to the character by whom they are uttered. Some other could as well have spoken them. And there are many passages in Titus which neither serve the characterization nor further the course of events, the action of the play. The pleasure derived from impassioned forms of expression, from bombastic and high-flown speech and lurid effects leads again and again to a deviation from the inner organic structure of the drama.
Hence it is characteristic of Titus that the desire for effective expression is greater than what is to be expressed; the dramatist's own conception of those colossal deeds and people was not plastic and realistic enough to mould the means of expression. If we are to credit Shakespeare with Titus at all, it was not his own experience and conviction but rather the desire to surpass Kyd and Marlowe by grand effects and frightful deeds which is at the root of the play.
In the nature and use of the imagery this inner disproportion becomes apparent through the predominance of the unrestrained desire for expression over any real necessity for it. The images “run wild”, they are not yet organically related to the framework of the play, just as all the other means of expression are but little disciplined in Titus. The failure in organic connection between the images and their context can be recognized by a stylistic feature. In Titus the comparison added on by means of “like” or “as” prevails. The particles “as” and “like” not only make the image stand out from the text and isolate it in a certain way; they also show that the object to be compared and the comparison are felt as being something different and separate, that image and object are not yet viewed as an identity, but that the act of comparing intervenes. It would be false to exaggerate the importance of such a fact, because in Shakespeare's late plays we also find many comparisons introduced with “like” or “as”. Nevertheless the frequency of such comparisons with “as” and “like” in Titus Andronicus is noteworthy, and this loose form of connection corresponds entirely to the real nature of these images. If we take, for example, passages such as these:
… then fresh tears
Stood on her cheeks, as doth the honey-dew
Upon a gather'd lily almost wither'd. (iii. i. iii)
… that kiss is comfortless
As frozen water to a starved snake. (iii. i. 251)
we see that these images are simply added on to the main sentence afterwards, dove-tailed into the context, appended to what has already been said as flourish and decoration. They occurred to Shakespeare as an afterthought, as “illustration”, as “example”, but they were not there from the very beginning as simultaneous poetic conception of object and image. One could leave out these images without the text's losing any of its comprehensibility and clarity. Indeed there are also longer passages in Titus which may be cut out from the text without our feeling the omission —either in thought or construction:
Now climbeth Tamora Olympus' top,
Safe out of fortune's shot; and sits aloft,
Secure of thunder's crack or lightning flash;
Advanced above pale envy's threatening reach.
As when the golden sun salutes the morn,
And, having gilt the ocean with his beams,
Gallops the zodiac in his glistering coach,
And overlooks the highest-peering hills;
So Tamora:
Upon her wit doth earthly honour wait,
And virtue stoops and trembles at her frown. (ii. i. i)
The sun-simile lines 5–8 could be left out without the loss of anything important and even without our noticing it. This simile is inorganic because it is heaped as a second image upon the image already contained in lines 1–4 and because it puts too long an interruption between line 4 and line 10.
Here we might speak of a tendency to make the images independent. Shakespeare writes a sentence suggesting an image to him. He then proceeds to enlarge upon this image and to elaborate it for its own sake—and in the meantime almost forgets the starting-point. The comparison in this case is an independent enclosure. It belongs to the order of the epic-descriptive similes such as often appear in Spenser's Faerie Queene, for example. Hence, Shakespeare may be said to employ here a type of image which does not generically belong to the drama and in consequence appears here as an extraneous addition. Although it is a characteristic of the epic style to expand upon every detail and to interrupt the action time and again by broad descriptions and elaborated digressions, the drama cannot afford such a lingering manner and such an easy, calm, delineation of the circumstances. The more Shakespeare became a dramatic artist, the fewer do such descriptive similes become. In Henry VI we still occasionally meet with such similes; if they—rarely enough—occur in later plays they have a dramatic motivation, are portentous or characterizing and can thus maintain their right to existence. But these early similes are the very opposite of “dramatic imagery”. As early as Richard III, there are no more such loosely inserted similes which could be removed from the context without difficulty.
This lack of internal and external connection between the images and the framework of the text or the train of thought is itself only one aspect of the principle of addition which characterizes the whole style of Titus. If we take any one of the longer speeches and investigate whether the image concerned has been prepared for by other stylistic means, whether it grows organically out of what has gone before or is the climax of a passage, we must answer all these questions in the negative: one line is tacked on to the other and the images are added on just as much without preparation as the thoughts. This principle of addition finds its metrical counterpart in the general absence of enjambement resulting in a pause after every line, and the necessity for every new line to start off afresh:
The birds chant melody on every bush,
The snake lies rolled in the cheerful sun,
The green leaves quiver with the cooling wind
(n. iii. 12)
Moreover, this manner of adding on, of letting the separate motifs stand side by side in isolation from each other, may also be observed in the structure of the thought of the speeches. In every speech we can neatly divide the separate thoughts and themes. In each case a subject is brought up, carried through to its end, and with no transition the new theme commences. The art of transition, of inner connection, is lacking in the structure of the whole drama just as much as in the style and in the imagery. Suddenly the characters make their most important decisions, their attitude changes from one extreme to the other in a twinkling (cf. Titus' behaviour in 1. ii.; iii. i., etc.). Shakespeare is not yet quite aware of the fact that great deeds must bud and ripen in the “womb of time”, that conflict and collision develop gradually and in a manifold, complicated dependency upon all the other happenings. Instead of preparing us for one great event, for one climax and leading us through all the stages of development up to this peak, Shakespeare overwhelms us from the first act on with “climaxes”, with a multiplicity of fearful events and high-sounding words.1
What thus holds true of the action on a larger scale can now be observed on a smaller scale in the style of the whole drama. The language adds and accumulates and would seek to replace clarity and definiteness by multiplicity. The heaping up of images is a token of the fact that the pleasure taken in building up comparisons is greater than the need for unequivocal metaphorical characterization. As an example of such piling up of imagery we quote a passage from the second act:
MART. Upon his bloody finger he doth wear
A precious ring, that lightens all the hole,
Which, like a taper in some monument,
Doth shine upon the dead man's earthy cheeks,
And shows the ragged entrails of the pit:
So pale did shine the moon on Pyramus
When he by night lay bathed in maiden blood.
O brother, help me with thy fainting hand—
(n. iii. 226)
The learned comparison with Pyramus is a second image for Bassianus' ring, which has already been compared with the taper. It is a learned addition, quite uncalled for, which could just as well have been omitted. In our discussion of Henry VI we shall have occasion to deal with the characteristic habit of the younger Shakespeare of coupling several images with one another by means of or. This can already be demonstrated by some examples from Titus.
The passage just quoted leads to another question. For what is the occasion for this image? Martius has just fallen into a deep pit, upon the corpse of Bassanius concealed therein. In this gruesome situation, almost ready to faint, as he himself admits, Martius produces these learned and circumstantial comparisons for Bassanius' ring.
The best example of such absurd contrast between occasion and image is offered by the speech of forty-seven lines which Marcus makes upon finding the cruelly mutilated Lavinia in the wood (ii. iv. 17). It is not only the idea that a human being at sight of such atrocities can burst forth into a long speech full of images and comparisons which appears so unsuitable and inorganic; but it is rather the unconcerned nature of these images, as it were, their almost wanton playfulness which reveals the incongruity. The stream of blood gushing from the mouth of the unfortunate Lavinia is compared by Marcus “to a bubbling fountain stirr'd with wind”, her cheeks “look red as Titan's face”, and of her lily hands he says in retrospect that they “tremble, like aspen-leaves upon a lute, and make the silken strings delight to kiss them”.1 The speech is, moreover, adorned with a number of studied mythological references (Tereus and Philomela, Cerberus).
In this connection the use of mythology in Titus is very instructive. In the later plays Shakespeare employs mythology in order to lend an event or a person a particular and individual colour (the parallel mythological situation often being vividly represented to us).2 In Titus, on the other hand, the use of mythological comparisons is still wholly due to the desire of displaying knowledge. When it is said of Saturnine's virtues that they “reflect on Rome as Titan's rays on earth” or of Tamora that she outshines the Roman women “like the stately Phoebe 'mongst her nymphs” (1. ii.), these are stereotyped images, at best—in the case of more abstruse mythological comparisons—learned quotations with which Shakespeare seeks to prove that he is as much a master of mythology as Greene.
It is this ambition to display his own command of the fashionable stylistic devices of the time which leads Shakespeare so often to the involved conceits we already meet in Titus. To-day the conceit may appear to us as a form in which the spontaneous image has become frozen into a mathematical figure. In the early Shakespeare we often find passages in which the simple image is expanded into an elaborate conceit. Whereas the simple image, the metaphor, can lend a greater passionateness to the speech, the effect of the conceit which is developed out of it is often quite the contrary. The rational, circumstantial manner in which the conceit splits up a whole situation is apt to rob the speech of its passionate movement, making it appear as cold and artificial. When Titus cries out:
Let my tears stanch the earth's dry appetite; (iii. i. 14)
this still seems natural. In the lines following, however, a long conceit is spun out of that line. In this way the spontaneity of this outburst of feeling is subsequently lamed by the artificial working out of the image (cf. also iii. i. 45). To be sure, these are judgements according to modern standards of taste, for the Elizabethans themselves took pleasure in the skilful invention and clever intricacy of their conceits. Shakespeare, nevertheless, with his sense of proportion in all things, turned away more and more from the unnatural character of the conceits;1 and although he still uses conceits in the tragedies he no longer employs them in that artificial manner.
It is perfectly natural that in a play strongly influenced by Marlowe in its action and its conception of man, the imagery as well often reflects that influence.2 Lines like these bear witness:
Or with our sighs we'll breathe the welkin dim,
And stain the sun with fog, as sometime clouds
When they do hug him in their melting bosoms.
(iii. i. 212)
Shakespeare could learn from Marlowe not only how to use images for comparing or illuminating concrete things or specific characteristics but also how to employ the image as a means for expressing great aspirations, wishes and passions of men. Of all the Elizabethans before Shakespeare, Marlowe is the dramatist who remains the least conventional in his imagery. By making imagery the personal form of expression of the characters speaking, Marlowe lent the images a wholly new function. The common forms of expression could not suffice for the tremendous ambitions of Tamburlaine. Only the world of imagery offered the requisite gigantic proportions. In the realm of reality Tamburlaine could still conquer the earth, but not heaven. And for this still greater desire Tamburlaine creates in his images a realm beyond reality, reaching for the stars and the elements as if they were playthings, traversing (in his imagination) the immeasurable vastness of the firmament with ease. In Marlowe's Tamburlaine the images accordingly have an important “dramatic” function. Tamburlaine's greatness as it already appears from his deeds and his bearing is enhanced and raised by them to an even more incredible height of fancy; they characterize Tamburlaine by repeating again and again on another level the colossal nature of his aspirations and his individuality. At the same time, by the repeated employment of such images, by their common theme, Marlowe creates an impression of gigantic dimensions and of passions which colour the whole play and correspond to the titanic nature of Tamburlaine.
It is necessary to recall this peculiarity of Marlowe's imagery in order to understand what Shakespeare adopted from him and what he did not adopt. When the characters of the early histories express their great desires, their threats, their emotions and their passions through imagery, we have here a function closely related to the rdle of the images in Marlowe. But we soon perceive wherein Shakespeare differs from Marlowe. Marlowe employs almost exclusively those gigantic images in which the cosmic forces and the elements rage in whirling movement. But he also uses such images when there is no question of the greatest things and the greatest passions (which alone could justify such excess). Shakespeare, on the other hand, grades and selects, and in Henry VI and Richard III we can already trace how his sense of proportion and fitness gradually prevails. The Marlowe images disappear more and more; and this not only because Shakespeare gathers his images more from the concrete observation of nature, from the objects of daily life,1 but also because he begins to follow the special observance which Hamlet enjoins upon the first player when he bids him “to suit the action to the word, the word to the action;” (iii. ii. 19).
But in Titus there is little trace of this “special observance and discretion”. We may add one further observation. In no play of Shakespeare's are there so many rhetorical questions as in Titus. The frequency of this stylistic device throws light upon the attitude of the characters to one another. For the rhetorical question is a question which expects no answer and awaits no answer, a question which is put for its own sake. The dialogue in Titus often only pretends to be dialogue; in reality the characters are not yet talking with each other, but are delivering pompous orations to the audience. The revelling in rhetorical questions to be observed in Titus is a token of the padding of the language with mere rhetorical decoration, with empty gesture and pomp. Many images, too, often appear in the form of rhetorical questions. For example:
What fool hath added water to the sea,
Or brought a faggot to bright-burning Troy? (iii. i. 68–69)
(iii. i. 222)
However, rhetorical style is not restricted to the early works of Shakespeare2; it frequently reappears even in the late tragedies, but there it has become the adequate form of expression of the character and is in harmony with the inner and outer situation.
1 A survey of the more important theories concerning the problem of authorship together with a new and challenging presentation of the case is to be found in the introduction to Professor John Dover Wilson's edition of Titus Andronicus in the “New Shakespeare”, Cambridge, 1948. Important arguments in favour of Shakespeare's authorship based on his use of classical sources are brought forward in a noteworthy article by Emil Wolff, “Shakespeare und die Antike”, Die Antike XX, 1944.
1 For accumulation of effects and motifs as a characteristic feature of Elizabethan tragedy see L. L. Schüking, Shakespeare und der Tragödienstil seiner Zeit, Bern, 1947.
1 In the Introduction to his edition of Titus Andronicus Professor John Dover Wilson interprets this and similar instances of “tawdry rant” or “bleating pathos” as having been deliberately written, Shakespeare “knowing it for what it was”. We would thus have to take many of the fustian speeches as a caricature of a style that Shakespeare despised and therefore handled in a mocking vein.
2 This is the case, for example, in the second part of Henry IV when Northumberland is reminded, by the appearance of the messenger, of that messenger of misfortune who brought Priam the news of the burning of Troy (B Henry IV, 1. i. 70).
1 Oliver Elton in his British Academy Lecture, 1936, Style in Shakespeare, discusses Shakespeare's growing “distaste for artifice in speech”. Cf. also Miss G. D. Willcock, Shakespeare as Critic of Language, Shakespeare Association, 1937.
2 A. Verity's study, The Influence of Marlowe on Shakespeare's Earlier Style, Strassburg, 1886, fails to go into the question of the influence of Marlowe's imagery.
1 Cf. the comparison of Marlowe's imagery with Shakespeare's imagery in Miss Spurgeon's book, p. 15.
2 For illuminating remarks on Shakespeare's attitude towards rhetoric and his ” rhetorical” use of imagery in Titus, see the admirable article by W. F. Schirmer, ” Shakespeare und die Rhetorik “ in Kleine Scbriften, Tübingen, 1950.