Shakespeare and the Deus ex Machina
In this troper's college Shakespeare class, they wrote a paper comparing Titus Andronicus with The Oresteia. In the former, Titus and all his children, plus the two brothers vying for Emperor of Rome, engage in a blood feud with Tamara, Queen of the Goths, and her sons and her lover. They keep killing each other until all of them are dead at the end except one of the brothers who becomes Emperor. The latter concerns the House of Atreus, a cursed lineage that starts with King Tantalus cooking his son Pelops and serving him to the Olympians, and ends with his great, great grand-son being put on trial by the same gods and being acquitted and saved. In the paper, it is argued that Shakespeare was very deliberately trying to subvert the concept of the Deus ex Machina. In the Oresteia, one cannot say that the characters are acting immorally because 'they aren't really acting at all. They're cursed; they have no choice but to kill each other. In Titus, there's no indication that the characters aren't in control of their actions. Rather, they're at the mercy of their own selfish emotions. They also aren't saved by the gods as Orestes is at the end of his play. In act 4, scene 3 of Shakespeare's work, Titus shoots arrows at the sun begging them to intervene, but they ignore him (if they exist at all), and everyone dies except Lucius. Orestes is saved from the pursuit of the Erinyes for killing his mum, because Apollo and Athena bail him out and end the curse, but there is no such divine intervention for Titus or anyone around him. In Shakespeare's plays, there is often a duke or a prince that shows up during the denouement. This could be seen as a kind of metaphor for the gods (royalty was thought to be divinely chosen, after all). In the comedies, these noble figures often sort out all the problems to bring about the happy ending, but in the tragedies, even they are powerless to stop the deaths from occurring. They can only admonish the still-living characters (and the audience) for the follies of the dead ones. It's like Shakespeare is saying that the divine can't or won't intervene to save people from themselves, and that free will can be its own kind of curse.
