Titus Andronicus Literary Elements

Tragedy

Ancient Rome

There is no singular narrator in the play, though it closely follows the experiences and thoughts of Titus throughout.

The tone of the play is vengeful and manipulative. The mood of the play is gruesome and bleak.

There is no clear protagonist or antagonist in the play: Tamora and Titus are both, at times, emblematic of each of these roles. Lucius is a candidate for a likely protagonist, as he vows to mend Rome at the end of the play.

The major conflict in the play is the feud between Tamora and Titus, which leads to their individual plots of revenge against one another.

The climax of the play occurs when Titus reveals that he has baked Tamora's sons' remains into a pie, which she has eaten. Immediately after, the majority of characters die.

There are many examples of foreshadowing throughout the play. One noteworthy example is the description of the pit as a "swallowing womb," or cannibalistic mother. This description foreshadows Tamora's eating the pie even before audiences are aware of Titus's plan to bake Chiron and Demetrius's remains into the dish.

There are few examples of understatement used in the play, in part because characters express themselves so fervently as they strive for revenge. One might consider Demetrius's comparison of his and Chiron's pursuit to a hunt a form of understatement, as their actual plan – to rape and mutilate Lavinia – is much more grotesque.

The most prevalent allusion in the play is a literary one, as Lavinia reads from Ovid's Metamorphoses, which eventually inspires her to reveal the names of her attackers by writing their names in sand. Multiple other allusions to ancient Greek and Roman history and mythology pervade the play, given that it is set in ancient Rome and that Shakespeare's own period – the English Renaissance – framed itself as a rebirth of the cultural influence of antiquity.

Important imagery in the play includes hunting, bodies and severed limbs, the grotesque pit, and blackness as contaminant.

The central paradox of the play is that Titus and Tamora are mortal enemies but are, in actuality, more alike than anyone else in the play.

Lavinia's rape parallels that of Philomena as it is described in Ovid's Metamorphoses. This tale is what eventually leads Lavinia to discover a unique way of communicating despite her injuries.

Aaron is frequently referred to metonymically, his blackness appearing to others as the only defining feature of his character. Bassianus refers to him as Tamora's "swarth Cimmerian" in Act Two. Other characters use metonymical and epithetical slurs to refer to Aaron, denigrating him to something less than human.

The clearest example of personification in the play occurs in Act Five, when Tamora becomes the personification of Revenge itself. Titus, feigning madness, plays along with her charade and embraces her. This moment is also a nod to earlier Renaissance revenge plays (like Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy) in which Revenge appears on stage throughout the production.