SOURCE: Palmer, D. J. “The Unspeakable in Pursuit of the Uneatable: Language and Action in Titus Andronicus.” Critical Quarterly 14, no. 4 (winter 1972): 320-39.

In the following essay, Palmer takes issue with the conventional view of Titus Andronicus as structurally formless or poorly constructed, arguing instead that the drama is a “highly-ordered and elaborately-designed work.”

These wrongs unspeakable, past patience, Or more than any living man can bear. 

(V. iii. 126-7)

The extremities of horror and suffering in Titus Andronicus seem to stretch the capacities of art to give them adequate embodiment and expression. Perhaps it was this sense of testing the limits of his poetic and dramatic resources that attracted Shakespeare to the subject at the beginning of his career, for his early work in general is characterised by its tendency to display rhetorical and technical virtuosity, as well as by a desire to emulate and outdo his models...