Here we will mention only two kinds of wordplay, metaphors and allusions. A metaphor is a play on words in which one object or idea is expressed as if it were something else, something with which the metaphor suggests it shares common features. An allusion presents itself when one text or a character in it refers to another text, thereby prompting readers or listeners to reflect on the multiple ways in which the two texts may parallel each other.
Titus Andronicus is extraordinarily rife with allusion. An early example comes when Tamora, mourning the slaughter of her son Alarbus, is comforted by Demetrius:.
May favor Tamora the Queen of Goths [. That is, the audience could be presumed to know that like Tamora, Hecuba is the defeated queen of a defeated nation and that, like Tamora, whose son Alarbus has just been sacrificed to appease the ghosts of the dead, Hecuba lost her daughter Polyxena to precisely the same fate. Although the analogy between Hecuba and Tamora is therefore not quite exact, we can nonetheless read Titus Andronicus in light of the Hecuba allusion, and thus know that Tamora might well take her revenge on the family of Titus Andronicus.
Through allusion Shakespeare also weaves into the text of his play many threads from other classical texts. Both the characters and the action of Titus Andronicus make such insistent reference to this last text that we have chosen to print a contemporary translation of it as an appendix to this edition of the play so that readers, if they choose, may weave their reading of it into their reading of the play just as Shakespeare seems to have woven his reading of Ovid into his writing of the play.
The dialogue is written to be spoken by actors who, at the same time, are moving, gesturing, picking up objects, weeping, shaking their fists. We must learn to be alert to such signals as we stage the play in our imaginations.
Often the dialogue offers an immediately clear indication of the action that is to accompany it. Thus we learn that Titus has stabbed Mutius to death. Dialogue again cues action in a straightforward way when Quintus attempts to pull Martius from a pit into which he has fallen during a hunt. Clearly, Quintus has failed to pull Martius out; instead Martius has pulled Quintus in. Occasionally in Titus Andronicus, signals to the reader are not so clear.
We use these brackets because we recognize that editorial stage directions present only a single reading of the possibilities for action in the play, and we do not want to foreclose other interpretations that may occur to readers, whom we frankly invite to reject what is in brackets if they wish.
Caution in granting too much credence to bracketed stage directions is encouraged in this particular instance by reference to another passage in the play where a character reflects back on earlier action. I pried [ peered, spied ] me through the crevice of a wall. It seems to us that Aaron may later be representing himself as more villainous than he actually was in telling us that he laughed at tears that Titus did not shed.
Practice in reading the language of stage action repays one many times over when one reaches scenes heavily dependent on stage business. Such a scene is 4. We as editors have supplied no additional bracketed stage directions to this part of the scene, depending on readers to follow action that the dialogue makes so clear.
Throughout this text, we have chosen not to add many stage directions found in other modern editions in order to leave readers free to imagine the staging for themselves. It may be more pleasurable to attend a good performance of a play—though not everyone has thought so.
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