In the Library
Titus Andronicus
William Shakespeare, 1594
- Form
- Form Play
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 1.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 14
- Length
- Length 21k words
£1.99
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Why, there they are, both baked in that pie, / Whereof their mother daintily hath fed, / Eating the flesh that she herself hath bred.
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- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
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- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
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If you like this, try
Medea
Euripides
Medea does the same thing, building steadily toward an act of horror, but the engine is a mother's grief and betrayal rather than a father's revenge.
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Macbeth
William Shakespeare
Macbeth does the same thing, tracking a body count that spirals past reason, but Shakespeare traded severed limbs for a conscience that will not stop talking.
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Metamorphoses
Ovid
Lavinia turns the pages of Ovid to Philomela's story to name the men who maimed her, and the Metamorphoses is where Titus found its most terrible pattern.
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About the book
Lavinia is brought onstage with her hands cut off and her tongue cut out, and the unbearable part is not the wound but what she does next: she turns the pages of Ovid with her stumps until she finds the tale of Philomela, then takes a staff in her mouth and writes her rapists' names in the sand. This was Shakespeare's first tragedy and one of the most popular plays of his lifetime, and the four centuries since have spent themselves apologising for it, as though a young poet had lost control of the blood. He had not. Every atrocity here is answered by another, exactly, until a father who cut off his own hand to ransom sons already dead stands in his ruined house, laughing, and explains that he has not another tear to shed. Nothing else in Shakespeare reaches this far into cruelty, and nothing else found so early what grief does to a man when it has nowhere left to go.