ABSTRACT
Titus Andronicus is a soldier. He has successfully battled on the borders of the Roman Empire some forty years. For him, murder and disorder are not simply necessary, but celebrated on the battlefield, as these deaths protect the order of Rome, and serve to warn the barbarous and disorderly others. The death of Alarbus is a necessary ritual as punishment for all who would take arms against Rome, and as a means by which man “seeks to order and control his precarious and unstable world”. Titus led his sons to death on the battlefield; a murderous instinct displaced and projected in a manner he can rationalise and defend against. It is a pit of death, and a concretisation of the phallic and engulfing destructive women that Shakespeare personifies through Tamora’s imagery, speeches, and actions. The madness begins with a projection of internal world to the natural world in which the sea will devour him but then he becomes the sea.
