The other day, I got scolded, again, but fairly, for remarking that we humans are like Hottentots dancing around the rim of a live volcano.  It keeps coming back to me.  All history tells me that we humans can go back to the primal slime from which the apes came, and we can behave like savages.  King Lear looked at our condition when we go out of our minds and become like flies to wanton boys.  (You may recall that Titus, the hero in Titus Andronicus, goes wild when a fly is swatted.)  The madness that Carlyle saw in the hearts of men is, therefore, properly a matter for high art on the stage or screen.

My most recent reference to the Hottentots came in discussing the reference of the Dutch historian Pieter Geyl to the moral cowardice of those who refused to intervene in the savagery of the September massacres during the French revolution.  While discussing how moral cowardice is on show in the U S in the refusal of the senators and others to control Trump, my eye fell on a remark about Napoleon that Geyl attributed to Madame de Staël:

He is the complete egoist, for whom human sympathy does not exist, for whom men are despised tools, pieces on a chess board.

That sounds just right.  I know what she meant – and I recognise the type of person.  But when I looked for such a character in Shakespeare, the really bad guys – like Aaron, Richard III or Iago -did not seem to fit the bill. And, then, with some encouragement from our editor, I came to Saturninus, the feckless emperor of Rome in Titus Andronicus.

You may recall that the play opens with Saturnine making a spoiled-child plea for the purple.  The hero, Titus, returns from the wars against the Goths.  He orders a human sacrifice.  The victim is a son of the queen of the Goths, Tamora.  Then Titus refuses the purple and offers it to Saturnine who sets out to prove the villain.  After the failure, of Saturnine to secure the daughter of Titus, Lavinia, as a bride, Titus in a fit kills his own son, and Saturnine marries Tamora.  We meet the black monster of evil called Aaron, who will play around with Tamora – and we are set for a revenge play to beat all other revenge plays.  Sons of Tamora rape and mutilate the daughter, and meet their end being served up to their mother in a pie.  Then Titus snuffs out Lavinia, and there is more carnage in the end than with Hamlet or King Lear. 

Whatever else this play is about, therefore, it is not civilisation.  And if the hero in one of this writer’s tragedies has to have a fatal flaw, Titus is as flawed as you could get.

Saturnine is a man – well, someone – for whom human sympathy just does not exist.  He is like a cardboard cut-out who moans about the injustice that the world foists on him.  And he is a world class whiner.

Why, lords, what wrongs are these! Was ever seen

An emperor in Rome thus overborne,

Troubled, confronted thus, and for the extent

Of equal justice used in such contempt? (4.4.1-4)

The spoiled child rises to the highest office – and feels persecuted.  Trump would not have surprised this playwright.

The play is loaded with references to honor and to Rome.  The forest sees the savagery – the barbarous.  But what the play tells us is that the city of Rome is more savage and barbarous than any forest.  The whole play blows to smithereens the notion that ancient Rome was civilised.  Shakespeare was here doing to that myth what he would do to the myth of medieval chivalry in Falstaff and the mockery of ‘honor’.  (The turn of the Greeks comes in Troilus and Cressida in which the poster-boy hero Achilles is seen as a jerk.)

This point has not been sufficiently noticed. May I make three observations?

First, ancient Rome was built on slavery and a protection racket called empire.  Oxbridge may have been content to indulge in the myth when England ruled the waves and an empire, but not after it quit India at the behest of a half-naked fakir – and then got used to losing in cricket to the erstwhile colonies.

Secondly, ancient Rome, at least under the emperors, lacked the first requirement of a civilised nation.  You won’t find it discussed by Kenneth Clark in his great series on Civilization –but he was an art critic.  As our greatest jurist, Sir Owen Dixon, reminded us, ‘the rule of law’ was foreign to Roman Law.  (Elsewhere his Honour commented that ‘the supremacy of the law’ is an idea that we owe to the Middle Ages.)  The king is under the law because the law makes the king; all people are equal in the eyes of the law; and we cannot lose any rights except under the law.  We are to be ruled by laws, not people.  There you have the sine qua non of civilization – which you do not get in the David of Michelangelo.

There is not a whiff of it in Titus Andronicus. The contrary is the case.  Rome is a ‘wilderness of tigers’ and arbitrary caprice runs unchecked.  There is one horrifying example.  A ‘clown’ – a battler from the bush according to my Everyman edition – brings to the court a letter that Saturnine does not like.  The response?  ‘Go, take him away, and hang him presently.’  (4.4.44) All of Gibbon might be an essay on caprice.

There is a related issue.  Sir Ronald Syme in The Roman Revolution said that the constitution of the Roman republic was a ‘sham’.  Not a small claim from a distinguished historian (and a Kiwi).  The failure to have a mode of succession – on one occasion the Praetorian Guard put the purple up for auction – was an essential part of the decline and fall of the Roman empire.  This play begins with an example of the damage to the fabric of Roman society.

Gibbon said:

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.

So much for civilization.  Gibbon said that the wonder was not that the empire fell, but that it had held on for as long as it did.  And he hoped that the world would never see its like again.  As might we all – because of the dreadful picture painted in this play.

Thirdly, ancient Rome was characterized by cruelty that we could not tolerate today. At the period of this play, the Romans had not been exposed to the Ten Commandments, much less the Sermon on the Mount, and their religion looks as dodgy as their constitution.   

Put to one side throwing Christians to the lions.  Open Tacitus or Gibbon at just about at any page and get ready to be revolted.

Here are comments on Tacitus from a book of mine about historians:

Eventually, Sejanus over-reaches and is murdered.  What Professor John Burrow describes as ‘the appalling ruthlessness of Roman political atrocity’ is pitifully depicted in the treatment of the son and daughter of Sejanus in one of the cruellest passages of Western history.

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.  This is a soft translation – another has it that the daughter was violated by the executioner ‘with the rope on her neck.’  It is on any view an appalling moment in Western letters.

All these issues are canvassed in Titus Andronicus.  It is not therefore surprising that Tony Tanner concluded his Preface by saying that it touches on issues of great moment –

What does our Roman heritage – and we in the West are all inheritors of Rome – really comprise and stand for?  And – is it possible ever to delimit and demarcate the ‘barbarous’?

They are truly issues of great moment – and the Hottentots are my answer.

Someone said we go to great writers for the truth.  Titus Andronicus is for me a great play that exemplifies this insight.  It is not a work of history, but a work of art to be performed in the theatre.  I am reminded of the advice given to me by a tutor, Dr David Smith, at Cambridge, that I should read Carlyle’s The French Revolution not as history, but as a work of art, like an opera or epic poem. 

And because we are dealing with our greatest writer, we should not be pigeon holed.  There are whiffs of Greek tragedy and commedia dell’arte that look odd in Elizabethan theatre, but this play blazes with explosive insight and drama.

There is a lot of snootiness about Titus Andronicus.  Auden dismissed it out of hand.  Learned people in search of a genre refer to Seneca.  (When did you last see his work on the stage?)  This play brings to my mind Brecht, Ionesco, and Picasso.  Or Waiting for Godot.  Or De Chirico and Jeffrey Smart.

We don’t put Michelangelo or Mozart in a box – and it is worse than folly to try that on with Shakespeare.  It is therefore a relief to read Jonathan Bate -the play is ‘not a self-indulgent spectacle of barbarism, but a profound meditation on how human beings cope, or fail to cope, with extreme suffering’.  That sounds to me like a meditation on the place of human sympathy.

This play is very hard to put on.   But its exposition by Julie Taymor in the film Titus is the best performance of a play by Shakespeare, on stage or screen, that I have ever been privileged to see – by the length of the straight at Flemington.  If I have said anything useful here, it probably comes from my time with that movie.

Saturnine and Trump lack sympathy and mock our humanity.  These spoiled children are soulless – empty vessels.  They are takers not givers.  They have no time or space for friends or God.  (Manning Clark may have said that the hand of the potter faltered.) 

Shakespeare by his art painted the picture, and Julie Taymor by her art allowed us hope.  The rest, someone said, belongs to the madness that is art.