Titus Andronicus Revenge Quotes Page 1

This passage reveals a lot about Tamora's character and her motivation for taking revenge against Titus. Whereas Saturninus wants to seek revenge against Titus's family out in the open (because he lost Lavinia to Bassianus), Tamora encourages her new husband to play nice in public because the Roman people would probably side with Titus. At the same time, we can also see that Tamora wants to destroy the Andronicus family because Titus refused to spare her eldest son's life, even after she got on her hands and knees and begged him to. Is Tamora justified?

OK, it's pretty clear that Aaron seeks "vengeance" for something, because here he passes up an opportunity to get all steamy with his lover, Tamora, in order to plot against the Andronicus family. The question, however, is this: What is it, exactly, that Aaron seeks retribution for? Does he have any real or justifiable motives?

On the one hand, we could say that Aaron has no real motives for vengeance and that he just likes to be bad. After all, Aaron brags openly about doing a "thousand dreadful things, / As willingly as one would kill a fly" and that he curses the day "wherein [he] did not some notorious ill; / As kill a man, or else devise his death, / Ravish a maid or plot the way to do it," and so on (5.1.11). Yet when Aaron lashes out at the nurse for calling his dark-skinned child a "joyless, dismal, black and sorrowful issue" that should be "christen[ed] with a dagger's point" (4.2.6), we can see that Aaron may be responding to the way the Romans and Goths treat black men. This seems especially true when he asks "is black so base a hue?" (4.2.11).

Tamora sure could use some parenting classes, don't you think? Here she not only lies to her sons about why she's in the middle of the forest with Aaron, she also encourages them to kill Bassianus and rape Lavinia. If we haven't already lost sympathy for Tamora, here's where she becomes a completely unsympathetic figure.