Shakespeare's Use of Comic Conventions in Titus Andronicus

DOUGLAS H. PARKER Shakespeare's Use of Comic Conventions in Titus Andronicus Over the years, critics have not been especially kind to Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, often for very good reasons. Less memorable for its tragic sophistication than for its scenes of grotesque horror and maiming, it has provoked disbelief, shock, and anger. ' Some have even gone so far as to deny its validity in the Shakespearean canon on the ground that the author of such tragedies as Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear could not possibly have stooped to write such a horrific melodrama as Titus. 2 Robert Miola states that 'it would be easy to compile a colorful anthology of disparaging pronunciamentos' about the play.> The various and widespread criticisms of the play are hard to counter; a careful reading of Titus shows that it contains many elements that iar our sensibilities: unsophisticated character development, gratuitous death of the most pernicious kind, and a moral vision which seems at odds with the western world's Judaeo-Christian roots. Indeed, so appalled have some critics been by the play's horrific happenings that they have attempted to explain the course of events by focusing on the playas comedy. But most of these comments on the play's comic elements have done as much to disparage Titus as to praise it. J.e. Maxwell reminds us that Dover Wilson saw the 'gruesome passages in Titus as burlesque in intention.' He also tells us that T.S. Eliot regarded the playas a farce and that P.H. Kocher saw it as 'more a malicious comedy than anything else.'- More recently, Richard Brucher has focused on the play's 'comic violence." All of these criticisms see Titus as somehow less of a tragedy because of its use of a particular type of comic component perhaps best summed up in the phrases 'black comedy' or 'black humour.' But black comic happenings and tragedy have never been happy bedfellows, and for critics to find Titus's actions grotesquely humorous because they cannot find them tragic does not do justice to the truly tragic elements within the play. It is my view that particular elements of comedy - not the effects that we call 'funny' or 'humorous: but rather certain formal comic conventions that Shakespeare used time and again, particularly in his romantic comedies enhance the tragedy of Titus Andronicus rather than work against it. What results is a play whose tragic effect is heightened by its close association with traditional comic conventions. Looked at this way, Titus Andronicus becomes an early but nevertheless significant tragic experiment on UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 56, NUM8ER 4, SUMMER 1987 Titus Andronicus Shakespeare's part, rather than an embarrassment that has to be swept under the carpet. That Shakespeare made use of comic elements within his tragedies in general is not an altogether new idea. Susan Snyder, in her important book The Comic Matrix ofShakespeare's Tragedies,6 has made clear how such incorporation of comic material within tragedy works. It is my view that there is a significant comic matrix that has been unacknowledged in Titus Andronicus, generally regarded as one of Shakespeare's earliest tragedies. Snyder tells us that Shakespeare's early familiarity with the world of romantic comedy would have led him naturally to employ it 'as a point of reference and departure in developing tragic form. '7 In Titus Andronicus, in my view, Shakespeare uses four major comic elements as points of reference and departure to increase the tragic effect of the play. The first is the traditional comic pattern of discord followed by resolution and reconciliation that is essential to all Shakespearean romantic comedy. In Titus Andronicus we find this pattern parodied in miniature in the opening scene of the play. The second is the use of a romantic comic rural environment - most often in romantic comedy a haven of peace and tranquillity for beleaguered lovers - to effect diabolical goals; the third is the use of a birth motif - a symbol of new life in certain of Shakespeare's romances and in romances in general - not to symbolize the beneficence of nature's powers but rather to suggest the opposite: death, destruction, and the...