The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works
Page 492
Ours is the fall, I fear; our foes’ the snare. Exeunt.
5.3 Enter a Soldier.
SOLDIER By all description this should be the place.
Who’s here? Speak, ho! No answer? What is this?
Timon is dead, who hath outstretch’d his span:
Some beast read this; there does not live a man.
Dead, sure; and this his grave. What’s on this tomb
5
I cannot read. The character I’ll take with wax;
Our captain hath in every figure skill,
An ag’d interpreter, though young in days.
Before proud Athens he’s set down by this,
Whose fall the mark of his ambition is. Exit.
10
5.4 Trumpets sound. Enter ALCIBIADES with his powers.
ALCIBIADES Sound to this coward and lascivious town
Our terrible approach. [Sounds a parley.]
The Senators appear upon the walls.
Till now you have gone on, and fill’d the time
With all licentious measure, making your wills
The scope of justice; till now, myself and such
5
As slept within the shadow of your power
Have wander’d with our travers’d arms, and breath’d
Our sufferance vainly. Now the time is flush,
When crouching marrow, in the bearer strong,
Cries, of itself, ‘No more’. Now breathless wrong
10
Shall sit and pant in your great chairs of ease,
And pursy insolence shall break his wind
With fear and horrid flight.
1SENATOR Noble, and young:
When thy first griefs were but a mere conceit,
Ere thou hadst power or we had cause of fear,
15
We sent to thee, to give thy rages balm,
To wipe out our ingratitude, with loves
Above their quantity.
2SENATOR So did we woo
Transformed Timon to our city’s love
By humble message and by promis’d means.
20
We were not all unkind, nor all deserve
The common stroke of war.
1SENATOR These walls of ours
Were not erected by their hands from whom
You have receiv’d your grief; nor are they such
That these great tow’rs, trophies, and schools should fall
25
For private faults in them.
2SENATOR Nor are they living
Who were the motives that you first went out;
Shame, that they wanted cunning in excess,
Hath broke their hearts. March, noble lord,
Into our city with thy banners spread;
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By decimation and a tithed death,
If thy revenges hunger for that food
Which nature loathes, take thou the destin’d tenth,
And by the hazard of the spotted die
Let die the spotted.
1SENATOR All have not offended.
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For those that were, it is not square to take
On those that are, revenge: crimes, like lands,
Are not inherited. Then, dear countryman,
Bring in thy ranks, but leave without thy rage;
Spare thy Athenian cradle and those kin
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Which in the bluster of thy wrath must fall
With those that have offended; like a shepherd,
Approach the fold and cull th’infected forth,
But kill not all together.
2SENATOR What thou wilt,
Thou rather shalt enforce it with thy smile
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Than hew to’t with thy sword.
1SENATOR Set but thy foot
Against our rampir’d gates, and they shall ope,
So thou wilt send thy gentle heart before,
To say thou’lt enter friendly.
2SENATOR Throw thy glove,
Or any token of thine honour else,
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That thou wilt use the wars as thy redress
And not as our confusion, all thy powers
Shall make their harbour in our town, till we
Have seal’d thy full desire.
ALCIBIADES Then there’s my glove.
Descend, and open your uncharged ports.
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Those enemies of Timon’s and mine own
Whom you yourselves shall set out for reproof
Fall, and no more; and, to atone your fears
With my more noble meaning, not a man
Shall pass his quarter or offend the stream
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Of regular justice in your city’s bounds
But shall be remedied to your public laws
At heaviest answer.
BOTH ’Tis most nobly spoken.
ALCIBIADES Descend, and keep your words.
Enter a Soldier.
SOLDIER My noble general, Timon is dead,
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Entomb’d upon the very hem o’th’ sea;
And on his grave-stone this insculpture which
With wax I brought away, whose soft impression
Interprets for my poor ignorance.
ALCIBIADES [reading the Epitaph]
Here lies a wretched corse, of wretched soul bereft:
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Seek not my name. A plague consume you, wicked caitiffs left!
Here lie I, Timon, who, alive, all living men did hate.
Pass by and curse thy fill, but pass and stay not here thy gait.
These well express in thee thy latter spirits.
Though thou abhorr’dst in us our human griefs,
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Scorn’dst our brains’ flow and those our droplets which
From niggard nature fall, yet rich conceit
Taught thee to make vast Neptune weep for aye
On thy low grave, of faults forgiven. Dead
Is noble Timon, of whose memory
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Hereafter more. Bring me into your city,
And I will use the olive with my sword,
Make war breed peace, make peace stint war, make each
Prescribe to other, as each other’s leech.
Let our drums strike. Exeunt
85
Titus Andronicus
The only recorded copy of a 1594 Quarto edition of The Most Lamentable Roman Tragedy of Titus Andronicus was found in Sweden in 1904. It survives from the earliest known printed edition of any of Shakespeare’s plays and is now a treasured item in the collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Before its discovery the play was known from the Quartos of 1600 and 1611 and from the First Folio of 1623, where it is the second of the tragedies and gains a whole scene, 3.2, not present in the Quartos. This scene, which appears to be authentic, may well have been added at some date later than 1594. The 1594 title-page records performance by the Earl of Derby, Earl of Pembroke and Earl of Sussex’s Men, whether consecutively or in combination (the play makes heavy casting demands). Five performances at the Rose playhouse between 23 January and 12 June 1594 are recorded in Philip Henslowe’s accounts, three by Sussex’s Men, two by the Lord Chamberlain’s (i.e. Derby’s) Men. Proposed dates of composition range from 1589 to 1593–4: the Arden 3 editor puts forward arguments for the later date. Long regarded as a play of dubious authorship, Titus is now generally accepted as Shakespeare’s, despite continuing claims that act 1, which shows signs of revision to incorporate the killings of Alarbus and Mutius, was originally the work of George Peele. A drawing of characters from the play by Henry Peacham (see p. 6) appears to combine moments from different scenes, if indeed it relates directly to performance at all. Once dated 1595, this well-known drawing may in fact have been made as late as 1615 (the date on it admitting of more than one interpretation).
Despite the presence of many motifs familiar from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (a book used i
n its action), Seneca’s tragedies and the plays of Marlowe, the plot of Titus appears to be original. A ballad and prose history once identified as its sources are better accounted for as derivative spin-offs, occasioned by the sustained success of the play (whose continued popularity Ben Jonson mocked as late as 1614).
A long period of infrequent revival and generally low esteem followed the attempt of Edward Ravenscroft to rewrite Titus for audiences in the Restoration. Modern theatrical interest began in the 1920s and received much stimulus from the worldwide success of Peter Brook’s production starring Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, which was first presented at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1955. Recent productions have used a less thoroughly rearranged text than that of Brook, who cut it heavily and reordered its action to inhibit intrusive laughter.
It is easy to caricature Titus as violent melodrama, but it exercises great power in the theatre and shows Shakespeare already engaged with tragic characters and situations to which he would return as late as Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus (alluded to at 4.4.62–7), which again dramatize the opposition of the values of an ostensibly civilized and honourable Rome to those of threatening barbarians. Titus adumbrates both the crafty madness of Hamlet and the passionate madness of Lear; the villainous Moor, Aaron, combines qualities which were to separate into Othello and Iago; but it is supremely Lavinia, mutilated and mute, who first realizes the pathos of female victims of violence which is so distinctive a feature of Shakespeare’s tragic writing.
The 1995 Arden text is based on the unique copy of the 1594 First Quarto, with a few corrections from the 1600 Second Quarto and the addition of 3.2 from the 1623 First Folio. Passages unique to the Second Quarto and the First Folio are designated by superscript Q2 or F at the beginning and end of them.
LIST OF ROLES
ROMANS
SATURNINUS
eldest son of the recently deceased Emperor of Rome,
later Emperor
BASSIANUS
younger brother of Saturninus
TITUS Andronicus
a Roman nobleman, general against the Goths
MARCUS Andronicus
a tribune of the people, brother of Titus
the surviving sons of Titus Andronicus (in descending order of age)
LAVINIA
only daughter of Titus Andronicus, betrothed to Bassianus
Young Lucius, a BOY
son of Lucius
PUBLIUS
son of Marcus Andronicus
kinsmen of the Andronici
EMILLIUS
a Roman
CAPTAIN
MESSENGER
NURSE
CLOWN
Other ROMANS
including senators, tribunes, soldiers and attendants
GOTHS
TAMORA
Queen of the Goths and later Empress of Rome by
marriage to Saturninus
AARON
a Moor in the service of Tamora, her lover
Other GOTHS
forming an army
Titus Andronicus
1.1 Flourish. Enter the Tribunes including MARCUS Andronicus and Senators aloft. And then enter below SATURNINUS and his followers at one door, and BASSIANUS and his followers at the other, with drums and colours.
SATURNINUS Noble patricians, patrons of my right,
Defend the justice of my cause with arms.
And countrymen, my loving followers,
Plead my successive title with your swords.
I am his first-born son that was the last
5
That wore the imperial diadem of Rome:
Then let my father’s honours live in me,
Nor wrong mine age with this indignity.
BASSIANUS
Romans, friends, followers, favourers of my right,
If ever Bassianus, Caesar’s son,
10
Were gracious in the eyes of royal Rome,
Keep then this passage to the Capitol,
And suffer not dishonour to approach
The imperial seat, to virtue consecrate,
To justice, continence and nobility;
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But let desert in pure election shine,
And, Romans, fight for freedom in your choice.
MARCUS [aloft, with the crown]
Princes, that strive by factions and by friends
Ambitiously for rule and empery,
Know that the people of Rome, for whom we stand
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A special party, have by common voice
In election for the Roman empery
Chosen Andronicus, surnamed Pius
For many good and great deserts to Rome.
A nobler man, a braver warrior,
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Lives not this day within the city walls.
He by the senate is accited home
From weary wars against the barbarous Goths,
That with his sons, a terror to our foes,
Hath yoked a nation strong, trained up in arms.
30
Ten years are spent since first he undertook
This cause of Rome and chastised with arms
Our enemies’ pride; five times he hath returned
Bleeding to Rome, bearing his valiant sons
In coffins from the field Q2and at this day
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To the monument of the Andronici
Done sacrifice of expiation,
And slain the noblest prisoner of the GothsQ2.
And now at last, laden with honour’s spoils,
Returns the good Andronicus to Rome,
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Renowned Titus, flourishing in arms.
Let us entreat, by honour of his name
Whom worthily you would have now succeed,
And in the Capitol and senate’s right,
Whom you pretend to honour and adore,
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That you withdraw you and abate your strength,