Cry Me a River: Tears and the Dissolution of Boundaries in Titus Andronicus

Abstract

Morbid curiosity, the concept of bloody and violent spectacle, first led me to Titus Andronicus. I just HAD to read the play that Edward Ravenscroft called “a heap of Rubbish,”¹ that T. S. Eliot criticized as “one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written,”² and that Harold Bloom referred to as “a howler . . . a poetic atrocity . . . an exploitive parody . . . an explosion of rancid irony.”³ On my first reading I realized that, yes, Titus lacks many things that make Shakespeare “Shakespeare”—whatever that means. However, multiple readings revealed an interesting pattern: these characters mention crying, a lot. In fact, the word tear, the singular, and the plural tears, appears a whopping forty-two times; Titus himself says it twenty-three times. Romeo and Juliet contains the second-highest number, recording a paltry twenty-one occurrences.