ABSTRACT
Titus’s killing of his son Mutius in the opening scene of Titus Andronicus has often been seen as essential to the play’s characterization of Titus as an unbendingly righteous Roman.1 Yet the incident seems odd in both its immediate and its wider contexts. Titus kills his son abruptly, with a single line of dialogue in which to formulate and express his intent and without so much as a single word of subsequent regret. Indeed, he soon seems entirely to forget the killing for over forty lines (I. i. 299-341).2 His fatal sword-thrust occasions a mere two lines of reproach apiece from his eldest son, Lucius, and his brother, Marcus, an astonishingly subdued reaction in a play focused on the deep suffering that all three are caused, and the revenge Titus in particular
1 ‘The apparently late addition of the Mutius material, for instance, contributes strongly to the structural patterning which critics have praised as characteristically Shakespearian’: G. Taylor, ‘The Canon and Chronology of Shakespeare’s Plays’, in S. Wells and G. Taylor with J. Jowett and W. Montgomery, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford, 1987), 115. For the ‘apparently late addition’, see below. 2 Within twenty lines of killing Mutius, and with his body still on stage, Titus winces at Saturninus’s reproach (not for the killing, which Saturninus somehow has not seen, but for the abduction of Lavinia, effected by Bassianus with the help of Titus’s brother and sons): ‘O monstrous! What reproachful words are these? . . . These words are razors to my wounded heart’ (I. i. 308, 314), then sulks that he has not been allowed to wait upon Tamora at her wedding ceremony and has been ‘dishonoured thus’ (I. i. 338-40)—all of this with no thought of the Mutius he has just killed. Citations are from Titus Andronicus, ed. E. Waith (Oxford, 1984).
