Interpretation In David Bate's Titus Andronicus

He goes even further and identifies the Goths with the ancestors of the English people. The interpretation turns into a religious and political comment upon Shakespeare’s criticism of the Catholic Church (Bate 20). If not totally supported by criticism, Bate’s reading justifies a further look upon the hidden values expressed in the play. Smith calls Titus Andronicus “a metatheatrical defense of drama’s relevance to society in his [Shakespeare’s] time”, a reaction towards “the tyranny of tradition and an unquestioning allegiance to an orthodox humanist intellectual heritage” (288). What Titus does at the beginning of the play is a blind consensus to a rigid pattern that triggers the whole series of bloody events. The reconciliation is achieved through a re-contextualization of language. Titus has to learn the new, corporal, language of his mutilated daughter:
Speechless complainer, I will learn thy thought.
In thy dumb action will I be as perfect
As begging hermits in their holly prayers.
Thou shalt not sigh, nor hold thy stumps to heaven,
Nor wink, nor nod, nor kneel, nor make a sign,
But I of these will wrest an alphabet
And by

Shakespeare submits the entire tradition of the classical tragedy to a process of rewriting in the context of the Elizabethan society. The extreme violence performed on the stage can be read as an attempt to prove both the limits of the traditional literary conventions and the young playwright’s overwhelming creative power. Shakespeare literally writes in blood, as the play experiments with the death and rebirth of language beyond the closed referentiality of myth into a perpetual pattern. Thus, Titus Andronicus opens new paths for the theatrical representation and creates new thematic and technical patterns which will be developed by the great tragedies to