‘Eyeless in Gaza’ is the term applied by Milton to Samson in a work that could well be banned from many campuses today for its unholy exultation of bloody violence, including suicidal terrorism, and its loathing of women.  Taking out eyes may have been the worst form of mutilation.  It is the shrieking low point of the violence in King Lear.  The victim, and the audience, are left with the lament of Samson: ‘Light, the prime work of God, is to me extinct.’

With this exception – God had not been discovered in the time of the action in King Lear.  Or of Titus Andronicus.  The former is set in Albion in some preternaturally dark age.  The latter is set in Rome, when the Goths had arrived on the scene, but God, had not – and the Sermon on the Mount had not been heard either.  (This may have involved the author in some date juggling, but he never minded that.  The date of the action in each play is deliberately obscure.) 

The play Titus comes to us early in the oeuvre of Shakespeare.  He would return to its themes later – in a different and more practised manner.  But we don’t decline to enjoy the symphonies of Mozart before he really made his mark in number 27 – just as it would be both silly and unhelpful not to enjoy the early comedies and English history plays of Shakespeare.

The violence in Titus verges on the lustful.  It is the ultimate revenge play – seething, soaking, bloody revenge.  (The word occurs 25 times in the play.)  Consequently, it went down well with audiences when it first came out.  England tolerated and inflicted the most gruesome kinds of mutilation until the Declaration of Rights in 1689 (and, in times of state emergency, ignored the common law prohibition of torture).  But then the national mood changed, and Titus was on the nose. 

That was so until Gallipoli, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, My Lai, Srebrenica, and Mariupol.  All evil beyond our comprehension, and beyond the imagination of even Shakespeare.

And now Gaza – for which we should look again at this early play of the greatest playwright of them all. 

Dr Johnson thought that Titus was spurious. He loathed it.  ‘The barbarity of the spectacles and the general massacre which are here exhibited can scarcely be conceived tolerable to any audience, yet we were told by Jonson that they were not only borne but praised.’ 

Perhaps the audiences in Shakespeare’s time were more worn or worldly – public mutilation then was still a free spectacle – like hanging, drawing, and quartering. 

Whatever may have been the case in those times, the barbarities of the spectacles in the play are mild compared to what we have in and around Gaza now.  And real people are there being raped and slaughtered.  In the war against the Ukraine, we have seen rape deployed as a weapon of war by a nation that has a history for such war crimes, but which still claims to be civilised.

And before you conclude that Rome was incapable of that degree of cruelty, consider what Professor John Burrow describes as ‘the appalling ruthlessness of Roman political atrocity.’

The general rage against Sejanus was now subsiding, appeased by the executions already carried out.  Yet retribution was now decreed against his remaining children.  They were taken to prison.  The boy understood what lay ahead of him.  But the girl uncomprehendingly repeated: ‘What have I done?  Where are you taking me?  I will not do it again!’  She could be punished with a beating, she said, like other children.  Contemporary writers report that because capital punishment of a virgin was unprecedented, she was violated by the executioner, with the noose beside her.  Then both were strangled, and their young bodies were thrown on to the Gemonian Steps. 

The Gemonian Steps were next to the prison.  They were called ‘the Stair of Sighs’.  After execution, dead prisoners were thrown on to these steps, and then dragged to the Tiber.  The steps may have been close to the present Via di San Pietro in Carcere.  An alternative was to fling people alive from the Tarpeian rock.  (  The threat of which caused Coriolanus to leave town.)

The play Titus Andronicus poses two questions.  Can revenge ever be righteous?  Can we reasonably describe ancient Athens or Rome as civilised?

Titus is an aged and trusted soldier in a very war-like state.  After a successful campaign against the Goths (in which he has lost sons), he allows the human sacrifice of a son of Tamora, the queen of the Goths.  Then he declines the purple and allows it to go to a very weak and nasty piece of work.  Who then marries Tamora, after Lavinia, the daughter of Titus, declines the offer.  This enables Tamora to exact revenge.  She does so when her sons violate Lavinia and mutilate her to prevent her accusing the brothers.  Further outrages are perpetuated on Titus by a Moor who impregnates Tamora, and who is the personification of evil – the ‘motiveless malignity’ that one critic used for the later edition of such a character (Iago – a character that makes his whole play frankly intolerable for me).  Titus feigns madness and gets his revenge by literally serving up to Tamora her dead sons on a platter.  After deadly mayhem, the world can start afresh.

You will struggle to find a more graphic plot in any play or opera.  But it is wonderfully put together by Julie Taymor in her film TITUS.  It is for me by far the best film of any of the plays of Shakespeare.

Violence begets violence.  The Greeks looked at this in the Oresteia.  The first object of what would become the common law was to end the vendetta.  The great jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes said that ‘the Roman law started from the blood feud, and all the authorities agree that the German law [the origin of our common law] began in that way.’

Before that, God had had His say.  ‘Vengeance is mine.  I will repay.’  Then a Jewish hasid stood on the side of a mountain and said: ‘Turn the other cheek.’

Well – we know all that, but we also know the impulse of revenge is so often irresistible.  Righteous?  No.  Inevitable?  Just about.  It was and is utterly inevitable now in Gaza, and all the moonshine in the world will not soften that revenge.

What about the Oxbridge dream of the civilisation of ancient Athens and Rome?  They buggered their boys; treated their women like doormats; and they lived off slavery and empire.  But most of all, they had no conception of the dignity seen by Kant as inherent in each of us just because we are human.

And as it happens, Titus opens, and closes, with a process for choosing an emperor.  The Romans never secured the process of succession.  It was as orderly as a Mallee footy club chook raffle.  On that failure of governance alone, Rome was decidedly uncivilised – as Gibbon saw and documented so clearly.  He was right to be revolted.

Such was the unhappy condition of the Roman emperors, that, whatever might be their conduct, their fate was commonly the same.  A life of pleasure or virtue, of severity or mildness, of indolence or glory, alike led to an untimely grave; and almost every reign is closed by the same disgusting repetition of treason and murder.

How you apply such notions to affairs in Gaza now is a matter for you.  Australia has a diaspora from each side, and naturally their views are opposed. 

We have canvassed some moral and political views.  Now for the tin tacks.  We go to the theatre to watch ourselves in the mirror of the stage.  And in Titus we see these issues writ large – almost as large as in commedia dell’arte.  It comes at us at first as grotesque – our reaction to King Lear.  Then we pass through the theatre of the absurd.  I fondly recall the groaning apprehension of the cinema audience in South Yarra when Anthony Hopkins lit up the screen answering the stage direction ‘Enter Titus as a cook.’  Then there is a kind of peace as we reconcile ourselves to the truth that all this is beyond words. 

Dr Johnson was right – the barbarity on the stage is ‘barely tolerable’.  But what does that say about our place in the world?  Does it say that we turn away from suffering inflicted on others by evil people – and that in so doing we condone such evil, and stand diminished in ourselves?  Are we then complicit in a general decline in our community? 

This inquiry into what Conrad saw as the ‘horror’ in Heart of Darkness comes not from charts and graphs, but from the charge of drama on the stage.  We see that a people without pity leads to a wilderness of tigers that can never find peace.  And that bears directly on the horrors confronting us in the world right now.

We are left to ask with the brother of Titus:

O, why should nature build so foul a den

Unless the gods delight in tragedies?

That was the question in King Lear, and what we askafter any act of mass murder.

In that play, the lament was that the gods treat us like wanton boys treat flies.  The passage in Titus that stays with me is:

MARCUS
 Alas, my lord, I have but killed a fly.
TITUS 
But? How if that fly had a father and mother?
 How would he hang his slender gilded wings
 And buzz lamenting doings in the air!
 Poor harmless fly,
 That, with his pretty buzzing melody,
Came here to make us merry! And thou hast killed him.