SOURCE: "Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus: An Experiment in Expression," in Cahiers Élisabéthains, No. 31, April, 1987, pp. 1-9.

In the following essay, Carducci focuses on the language of Titus Andronicus, and maintains that the play demonstrates "the failure of the Roman masculine ideal. "

My grief lies all within,
 And these external [manners] of laments
 Are merely shadows to the unseen grief
 That swells with silence in the tortur'd soul.

(Richard II, IV. 1.295-8)

Although Titus Andronicus (c. 1594) was popular until at least 1620, today it is one of the least frequently produced of Shakespeare's plays.¹ Like its predecessor, the Senecan revenge tragedy, this melodrama offers an unhappy ending, accumulated horrors, and long, didactic speeches in a florid and rhetorical style. Though it follows the Senecan tradition of bombast and brutality, Titus is especially savage. Indeed, as T. S. Eliot notes, "No doubt . . . Titus Andronicus would have made the living Seneca shudder...