Shakespeare and the Early Modern Self 141
polemical play. No one who has read Shakespeare’s Tr o i l u s with any
care can readily believe in Shakespearean negative capability.
Almost all lovers of Shakespeare’s art are united in one wish, the
wish that Shakespeare did not write Titus Andronicus. Yet the play
is his fi rst tragedy, and it has a central part in his development. As
the critic Katharine Maus says: “he returns to the Machiavellian vil-
lain in Richard III, to the urgency of revenge in Hamlet, to the
old man unwisely relinquishing power in Lear, to questions of
race and intermarriage in Othello and The Tempest, to im por tant
moments in Roman history in The Rape of Lucrece, Julius Caesar,
Coriolanus and Anthony and Cleopatra” (Greenblatt, Norton
Shakespeare, 371). All this is true, but Titus matters for our un-
derstanding of Shakespeare in a cruder and more central way.
In this play Shakespeare begins his strife with heroic values. The
image of Titus and the torments that Shakespeare visits upon him
never seem to leave his mind. The degradation, torture, and dis-
grace of this, his fi rst tragic protagonist, is a great Shakespearean
resource, and the playwright will draw upon it again and again.
What is tragedy in its essence? A question with many answers,
no doubt. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietz sche speculates that tragedy
is the drama of the rise, apotheosis, then the torture, dismember-
ment, and death of the deity. For the deity, substitute the hero— the
vividly Homeric hero— and you will begin to approach the inner
form of Shakespeare’s martial tragedies. And no Shakespearean
hero is as brutally tortured and sacrifi ced onstage as Titus.
Titus has been daring or foolish enough to embrace the Roman
code of honor as it has been passed down through Homer and
his heroes. He has fought and fought well for Rome, much as
Shakespeare will depict Coriolanus and Caesar and Antony as
having done. When the play begins, he has lost twenty- one of his
twenty- fi ve sons to the wars. As Maus observes, “Titus... in his