‘Romaine Tragedie’

In Titus Andronicus Shakespeare and his collaborator Peele contributed to the early modern reinvention of tragedy—a genre that had effectively ceased to exist for more than a thousand years. The play’s designation as a ‘Romaine Tragedy’ announces its self-conscious engagement with classical models—an effect rendered theatrically immediate by the identification of the audience with the citizenry of Rome; but this engagement is of a conflicted kind: the presentation of Rome as a familiar model of civilization is undercut by what the play shows about the ferociously patriarchal values epitomized in the demands of ‘piety’ (pietas). The play sets up oppositions between civilization and barbarism, Roman and Goth, city and wilderness, eloquence and violence, monumental tomb and blood-drinking pit, which it then progressively collapses. Flattering its audience with the idea of England as a new Rome, Shakespeare also reminds them of the need to make Rome new—and therefore, perhaps, to take tragedy itself in new directions.