Line #7 YMMV/TitusAndronicus


1	* AlternateCharacterInterpretation:
2	** It's possible partially to exonerate Tamora, on the grounds that her child (Alarbus) has been brutally killed and her pleas for mercy have been ignored. Her having Bassianus killed is tit for tat, and most of the other atrocities are committed by Aaron.
3	** For that matter, Aaron himself can be seen as a bitter, lost and unhinged WoobieDestroyerOfWorlds if you squint a bit.
4	** Titus Andronicus kills two of his own children - Mutius and Lavinia, and arguably as a general of an invading conquering army, he bears ultimate responsibility for his other sons killed in battle in his long war with the Goths, and as such is the true VillainProtagonist of the play, someone who values his own pride and honour over the lives of his children, and ultimately, over his state, since he commits open treason as part of his revenge (i.e getting his son Lucius to raise an army among the same Goths he subjugated and bringing them to Rome).
5	** Was Saturninus just that much of an idiot that he he didn't realize the chaos that would unfold from first trying to wed his brother's fiancée and then choosing a captured foreign queen instead? Was he being petty by trying to humiliate his brother and Titus after just barely taking the throne? Or was he just savvy enough to realize that needing Titus's backing to claim the throne made him look weak and so he needed some way to publicly humiliate Titus in order to improve his own standing?
6	* AlternateShowInterpretation: There was an adaptation of ''Theatre/TitusAndronicus'' that, in the end, revealed the setting to be an asylum and that all the characters were inmates.
7	* AngstAversion: There are very few even remotely sympathetic characters in the play (unless you invoke AlternateCharacterInterpretation) and the few people who are have a bad tendency of getting tortured and exploited. It's also easily the goriest of Shakespeare's plays, featuring copious amounts of dismemberment, cannibalism and general bloodshed, all for a major DownerEnding.
8	* CatharsisFactor: Despite the gruesomeness of Titus butchering Demetrius and Chiron and baking them in a pie for Tamora to eat, it is ''very'' cathartic to see them finally punished for the horrible things they did to Lavinia. Bonus points for her being invited to witness it and to hold the basin to catch their blood.
9	* CrossesTheLineTwice: If one subscribes to the argument that the play is an over-the-top parody of a revenge drama, the endless violence of the story becomes [[BlackComedy hilariously disturbing]].
10	* MemeticMutation: Shakespeare invented the [[YourMom Yo Momma]] joke.[[note]]The infamous exchange where Aaron boasts of having slept with Chiron and Demetrius's mother.[[/note]]
11	* MoralEventHorizon: Demetrius, Chiron, Tamora and Aaron all cross with Lavinia's rape and mutilation. The latter two didn't actively participate, but Aaron was the mastermind behind it, and Tamora fully encouraged it. And what's worse, Demetrius and Chiron ''taunt her about it afterwards,'' mockingly daring her to try and tell anyone who abused her so thoroughly.
12	* NightmareFuel: There is a lot:
13	** Though [[GoryDiscretionShot off stage]], Chiron and Demetrius, egged on by Tamora, gang-rape Lavinia ''on top of the corpse of her murdered boyfriend''.
14	* OlderThanTheyThink: A character getting revenge on a hated enemy by tricking them into eating their own children. While that idea may be most closely associated with ''Titus Andronicus'', it's also a major plot point in the saga of the House of Atreus in [[Myth/ClassicalMythology Greek Mythology]], in which Atreus gets revenge on [[CainAndAbel his brother Thyestes]] by killing his sons and serving them up as the main course in a banquet. Considering how much Shakespeare loved the Classics, the ending of ''Titus'' is almost certainly a deliberate ShoutOut to this. And of course there are the direct references to the story of Philomela from Ovid's Metamorphosis, which this play has a twist on by having the girl lose both her tongue and hands, but finding another way to point out her attackers.
15	* OvershadowedByControversy: While this play doesn't have the stigma of being bigoted like ''Theatre/TheMerchantOfVenice'' or ''Theatre/TheTamingOfTheShrew'', it's still rather contentious for its extreme ultraviolence and grimdark tone.
16	* PopularityPolynomial: In Shakespeare's lifetime, ''Titus Andronicus'' was one of his most popular works, indeed a 1614 comment by Ben Jonson in his introduction to the printed edition of ''Bartholomew's Fair'' places it in the same breadth as ''Theatre/TheSpanishTragedy'' by Thomas Kyd (i.e. the BreakthroughHit of Elizabethan Tragedy) in terms of popularity and critical esteem. Yet its reputation declined in the centuries that followed. Then it revived again after UsefulNotes/WorldWarII, where a landmark production by Peter Brook and Creator/LaurenceOlivier became unexpectedly popular and successful commercially, and Polish critic Jan Kott praised it as one of Shakespeare's most undervalued plays, and since then its critical reputation is slowly rising (albeit it's still dismissed and derided by the likes of Harold Bloom and other Shakespeare scholars).
17	* RootingForTheEmpire: Titus Andronicus was the general of an invading army into the Gothic Kingdom, and Tamora is a subjugated woman brought in triumph to Rome, and whose plea for mercy for her son Alarbus is denied for the sake of revenge for Titus' sons (whose deaths are Titus' responsibility since he started the war). Likewise, for all the evil Demetrius and Chiron do, they are not willing to murder their family members and end up agreeing to spare and hide their half-brother ChocolateBaby at the cost of potentially compromising their lifestyle, whereas Titus kills two of his own children. And in the end, Titus is two-faced and hypocritical enough to bring the Goths to invade Rome for his own revenge.
18	* SignatureScene: Titus revealing that he cooked Tamora's sons into the pie she's been eating.
19	* TooBleakStoppedCaring: Between the extreme violence (including multiple murder, dismemberment, rape, and cannibalism) and pretty much the whole plot being EvilVersusEvil in a CycleOfRevenge, it’s fair to see why ''Titus'' has never made it among Shakespeare’s most popular plays.
20	* ValuesDissonance: Some scholars have contextualized the violence of the play by noting that the play happened in a very violent era, one where dueling, cockfighting and bear-baiting were all considered perfectly normal forms of entertainment (several London bear-baiting pits were just a short walk from the theaters where Shakespeare's plays were performed, in fact). Any level of staged violence--no matter how gruesome--probably seemed pretty tame to people who frequently entertained themselves with ''real'' violence, and likewise, ''Titus Andronicus'' is milder than the Senecan tragedies that inspired it and which was all the rage in its time and place.
21	* ValuesResonance:
22	** Julie Taymor choose to adapt the play to film because she regards it as the [[WorldHalfEmpty closest to our current times.]] Formally and stylistically, the play's sex and violence, its mix of tones, and the juxtaposition of the absurd, grotesque, darkly comic, and tragic, makes the play look closer to an avant-garde 20th Century production, and in the wake of Brecht, Beckett, Artaud, Titus Andronicus looks way ahead of its time.
23	** Lavinia eventually succeeds in publicly naming her assailants by using her knowledge of Roman classics and poetry, making references to it to allude to what happened to her, and then marking out the names in the sand despite being disabled, after being shown how to write by her Uncle Marcus to use a stick by moving it with her mouth and body. As such, one can argue that the play celebrates female literacy, high culture, and disability rights, and Titus Andronicus' honor killing of his mutilated daughter is openly condemned in the play.
24	** Titus chooses Saturninus as emperor solely on the basis of primogeniture, and the latter's corrupt and weak-willed reign facilitated the horrible chain of events that occurred over the course of the play; these would likely have been averted had either Bassianus, or the popular Titus, been emperor instead. In this light, the work may be seen as a precautionary tale advocating for rulers to be democratically elected rather than installed on the basis of aristocratic descent.

Context YMMV / TitusAndronicus