he gazes at her dead body as she lies there-Cleopatra still. He says:
... she looks like sleep,
As she would catch another
Antony In her strong toil of grace.
- Act V, scene ii, lines 345-47
Nor is he vindictive. He says:
Take up her bed,
And bear her women from the monument.
She shall be buried by her Antony.
- Act V, scene ii, lines 355-57
... then to Rome
And now the world calls the one survivor and victor of all the turbulent events of the play. He says:
Our army shall
In solemn show attend this funeral,
And then to Rome.
- Act V, scene ii, lines 362-64
The civil wars that have lasted fifty years are over. The next year, 29 b.c., Octavius Caesar ordered the closing of the temple of Janus, indicating that Rome was at peace, the first time that had happened in over two hundred years. Then, in 27 b.c., he accepted the title of Augustus, by which he is best known to history.
From 27 b.c. Augustus reigned for forty-one years, establishing a new kind of government, the Roman Empire, and serving as its first and by all odds the greatest of its emperors. So firm was the government he established and so honored was it in the memory of man that though the last Roman Emperor in Italy abdicated in a.d 476, another ruler calling himself Roman Emperor continued to reign in Constantinople. The Constantinopolitan line, which used the title of Roman Emperor to the end, endured till 1453, and even after it was gone there was still a Roman Emperor in Vienna-a line that continued till 1806.
And even after that was gone there were emperors. In the German language, these were called Kaisers and in the Slavic languages tsars- both distortions of Caesar, the family name of Julius and Octavius. The last Russian tsar resigned his throne in 1917, the last German Kaiser in 1918, the last Bulgarian tsar in 1946.
It is interesting that 1946 is exactly two thousand years after 44 b.c., the year in which Julius Caesar was assassinated. For that length of time not one year passed in which somewhere in the world there wasn't someone calling himself by a form of "Caesar" as title (as all the Roman emperors did).
Part II. Roman 13. The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus
Of the four plays and one narrative history which are set in Rome, Titus Andronicus is the only one that does not deal with accepted Roman history or legend. It is utter fiction. Not one character in it, not one event, is to be found in history.
What's more, Titus Andronicus is the bloodiest and most gruesome of Shakespeare's plays, and the one in which the horror seems present entirely for the sake of horror.
Indeed, Titus Andronicus is so unpleasant a play that most critics would be delighted to be able to believe it was not written by Shakespeare. They cannot do so, however. There are contemporary references to Titus Andronicus as a Shakespearean tragedy, which also place the time of its writing at about 1593. It is an early play but by no means the earliest, and Shakespeare could surely have done better than Titus Andronicus by this time.
Apparently, what Shakespeare was doing was experimenting with Sene-can tragedy (see page I-270). These blood-and-thunder plays written about horrible crimes and horrible revenges were immensely popular in Elizabethan tunes. Thomas Kyd, for instance, had written such a drama, The Spanish Tragedy, shortly before Shakespeare had begun his dramatic career, and had scored an immense success.
Shakespeare had no objection to success and was perfectly willing to adjust himself to popular taste. In Titus Andronicus he therefore gave full vent to blood, cruelty, disaster, and revenge. Indeed, he went so far that one can almost wonder if he weren't deliberately pushing matters to the limit in order to express his disgust of the whole genre.
... the imperial diadem of Rome
The play opens in Rome, with the Romans in the process of selecting a new Emperor.
The two candidates for the throne are the two sons of the old Emperor; Saturninus, the older, and Bassianus, the younger. Both are clamoring for acceptance by the people. Saturninus stresses the fact that he is the elder:
/ am his first-born son that was the last
That ware the imperial diadem of Rome;
Then let my father's honors live in me.
- Act I, scene i, lines 5-7
The younger son, with a lesser claim, is forced to be more emotional. He begins: