SOURCE: "Titus Andronicus: The Form of Shakespearian Tragedy," in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. XIV, No. 3, Summer, 1963, pp. 201-13.

In the following essay, Hamilton examines Ovidian influences on Titus Andronicus, and calls the play the archetype of Shakespeare's later tragedies.

In this essay I shall challenge the usual reading of the play as expressed in Dover Wilson's judgment that it is "some broken-down cart, laden with bleeding corpses", and in T. S. Eliot's remark that it is "one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written."¹ One word may sum up the reasons for rejecting this play: excess. Its plot tells

of murthers, rapes, and massacres,
 Acts of black night, abominable deeds,
 Complots of mischief, treason, villainies,
 Ruthful to hear, yet piteously perform'd.

(V.i.63-66)²

The S. D. "Enter . . . Lavinia, her hands cut off, and her tongue cut out, and ravish'd" displays this excessive violence through its deliberate...