Titus andronicus by william shakespeare Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Titus andronicus by william shakespeare - Essay Example In the first passage chosen for this paper, Titus Andronicus tells Saturninus that he in fact killed his two sons, and then proceeded to mix their flesh with pie, which their mother then unwittingly ate: â€Å"Why, there they are both, baked in that pie;/ Whereof their mother daintily hath fed,/ Eating the flesh that she herself hath bred. Tis true, tis true; witness my knifes sharp point. (Shakespeare). In this passage two things are worth noting. One is that Titus seemed to be proud of the fact that he had killed two people, and both of them the sons of the person he is addressing. If this were an act of revenge, or an act where a noble man kills men who were evil and had done some terrible wrong to others, then this boasting would have remained within the confines of sane narration. What makes this killing so monstrous is that Titus was not content with killing the two sons, but we read between the lines that he had prepared their flesh and mixed them with pie, precisely so he co uld feed the flesh of her dead sons to their mother. There is no sense to this, and no justification, other than to show that Titus lacked remorse. It was unnecessary to do things this way. The purpose of the monstrous in this case seems to be just to demonstrate how inhuman the whole cascade of events was. The killing and the subsequent baking and feeding of the pie to the mother was gratuitous, totally uncalled for by the turn of events. This aspect of the killing is what makes the act so monstrous and totally inhuman (Shakespeare). Elsewhere we see just how Titus killed the two sons. He did so with the help of Lavinia, who held the basin that caught the blood from the slit throats of the two brothers. We understand that Lavinia suffered much from the two, but the measure of her revenge seemed to go beyond the bounds of what is human too. She could have just had them killed, but she chose to see the killing, and she chose to do so