As we all have probably recognized by now, fate and genre work closely with one another in determining the course of events in Shakespeare’s plays. Put simply, conventions of genre determine fate. Titus Andronicus uses one of my personal favorite themes—revenge—to uphold this notion and doom many of its characters from the play’s opening act. Shakespeare’s grizzly tragedy opens with the return of Titus from war with the disgustingly barbarous Goths/Goats to civilized Rome where, filicide, adultery, and successional debate reign supreme. He brings with him "five and twenty valiant sons," many of whom died at the hands of the Goths/Goats. Titus has already lost much, then, and thus the seeds for the revenge plot are in place.
It is important to recognize, however, that the revenge cycle began to turn before the events of the play, as Titus’ sons (the ones that he does not murder himself, at least) died in battles that the play does not enact. This brings an element of preordination into the play from the outset, even though the audience does not become aware of it until well into the first act. Everything that transpires in Titus is the result of the Goth Goats answering for their crime of killing the sons that the audience never meets. Lucius confirms this in stating, "Give us the proudest prisoner of the Goths,/ That we may hew his limbs and on a pile/ Ad manes fratrum sacrifice his flesh" (I.1.99-101), demanding that a Goth be sacrificed literally "to the spirits of our brothers." The conflict in Titus, therefore, is one of two families (Romeo and Juliet, anybody?). They are spun into this process of taking revenge upon one another for ongoing transgressions, with the acts escalating to the rape and "trimming" of Lavinia and culminating into Titus feeding the Goth Queen/Roman Empress, (I know, sounds weird, right?) Tamora, her sons for committing this rape. Titus, Lavinia, Tamora, and Saturninus, the incumbent Roman emperor, all proceed to die and we are left with Lucius and Marcus Andronicus to "heal Rome’s harms and wipe away her woe" (V.3.148).
I don’t particularly enjoy using summary to get my points across, but the plot in Titus is too riveting to simply be overlooked, and it exemplifies the "revenge cycle" so well that I couldn’t just pass it up. The main question, though, is what does the play say about England’s fate? By the end of the play, Rome is a battered, raped, and scarred body politic, and while Lucius promises to "heal Rome’s harms," his first act in moving towards this is taking revenge upon Aaron the Moor, the Andronicus’ most dangerous opponent. Lucius has a chance to end the revenge cycle, but instead chooses to keep it in motion, giving it the potential to wreak destruction upon his family and Rome once again. With this choice, why should we leave this play thinking everything will remain stable in Rome? Though Lucius threatens to hang Aaron’s son earlier in the play, he says nothing about this in the end, so his fate could very well be to follow in his father’s footsteps as an ingeniously evil destructive force. Rome, in the end, is an weak and unstable body politic. England’s Elizabeth, though perhaps not weak, is aging and heirless, making her very much unstable. Will succession bring about another War of the Roses, essentially a real-life revenge cycle? Will England suffer the same fate as Rome, which eventually fell to outsiders due to lack of internal stability? Though we know four hundred years later that the answer is "no," it is important to recognize this question loomed over all of Shakespeare’s plays, and it should not be ignored.
I really like the notion that Titus's return to Rome with the bodies of his dead sons contributes to a sense of preordained death, as well as a kind of primordial offense that engenders all the subsequent revenge. In a way, this suggests that the play's ending is just a pause in a self-renewing cycle of revenge, not a decisive end to it. Rome's "harms" (the "h," by the way, is silent in Elizabethan pronunciation), we know, are healed only to be "trimmed" or otherwise brutalized another day.
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