I don't really know what to say about Titus Andronicus. It's a tragedy which isn't even remotely tragic. In fact, it's quite funny, but I can't always tell if it is intentionally so. The villain, Aaron, strikes me as being Iago without everything which makes Iago a great character. The "hero", Titus, is such a reprehensible human being from Page 1 that I have absolutely no reason to care when he is finally killed. None of the other major characters are sympathetic in the slightest, either, which means that their deaths are ultimately entirely unemotional.
It is nothing like the other two tragedies of the same time, Julius Caesar and Romeo & Juliet, both of which are much more similar to Shakespeare's later great plays. Titus is more of Shakespeare's thinking "I'm going to write a tragedy as if by Tarantino." What he forgot was that Pulp Fiction was actually on a certain level a COMEDY. I suppose one could read Titus as a sort of black comedy, and in fact it works on that plane much better than it does as a strict tragedy. In many ways, Titus is like Pulp Fiction, but without the heart. And if you are going to reply, "but Pulp Fiction didn't have heart!", then I say to you that it DID; not much, but it was there, and it made it into a great movie rather than a meaningless one.
And that's the thing. I'm sure Titus means something. I just still am not quite sure what it is. Someone today told me that she thought it was about the ultimate meaninglessness of violence. That's certainly plausible, but the only problem I have is that Titus veers into what I'd call "slasher film" territory too often. To explain what I mean, I'm going to quote a passage from Orson Scott Card's wonderful book Characters and Viewpoint:
"The hideous murders in [slasher films] were originally devised to jack up the audience's emotions, higher and higher with each death. Rather sooner than they expected, however, many of the audience stopped being horrified and began to laugh. This is not really a sign of the audience's moral decay or inability to empathize; it's simply that an audience reaches a point where fictional pain is too difficult to bear. When pain or grief become unbearable in real life, human beings often develop fictions to cope with it--we call it insanity. When pain or grief become unbearable in fiction, readers simply disengage from the story and either abandon the tale or laugh at it."
Therein lies the problem, for me. Taking all of the events of Titus Andronicus at face value would make it a simply horrifying play, beyond the likes of even a play like Macbeth. So we don't take it at face value. I found a lot of the play, therefore, to be very funny. But that undermines, for me, any serious message which the play may have been trying to make about violence, or revenge.
Now, I will say that I did enjoy reading the play, and upon reflection I really don't agree with those critics who say that it is simply a bad play, given that there's a lot to think about in it. However, compared to the other works of Shakespeare I've read, I'm sorry to say that Titus Andronicus falls flat. I know that this may simply be that I didn't understand it well; I welcome any comments which might help me shed some light on it.
Next up, I'm going to try to go by the chronological order given by Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, and I'm going to read the Henry VI plays, which are considered Shakespeare's earliest.
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