The following is an excerpt of Shakespeare’s Returning Warriors – and Ours by Alan Warren Friedman, who holds the Thaman Endowed Professorship in English at The University of Texas at Austin. The book highlights a central and understudied feature of Shakespeare’s plays and what they can teach us about PTSD today when it is a widespread phenomenon in American society.. It is forthcoming from Taylor & Francis on Nov. 29, 2021.
Most Shakespearean tragedies begin with their titular protagonists returning, immediately or imminently, from highly successful martial combat. They are usually eagerly greeted or awaited by the citizenry, whose cause they have championed and whose enemies they have defeated, who hail and honor their heroes’ great battlefield prowess and achievement. But their triumphant re-entries into the civilian sphere quickly disintegrate into domestic disease and conflict that become deadly largely because the returning military leaders feel insufficiently appreciated, even betrayed, by those who, having stayed at home, can never understand or fully value what they have experienced and accomplished, no matter how much they seek to honor them.
So returnees, especially those who were troubled before they went to war, become alienated from and disdainful of those they have fought to protect. Instead of disarming for peace they remain psychologically and often literally armed and in combat mode in order to be prepared to respond forcefully to every danger they anticipate, encounter, or imagine.
What happens is what Jonathan Shay deems the loss of the capacity for social trust and faith in society’s ability to do “what’s right,” and their replacement by a reliance on weapons of force. Like Odysseus and many PTSD sufferers, most Shakespearean veterans also “have battle in [their] heart[s] forever,” wield weapons inappropriately and fatally against those closest to them before either killing themselves or, like Richard III and Macbeth, effectively committing suicide by duel, an engagement whose outcome, as they know, is fore-ordained.
Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy, Titus Andronicus, his most grisly, is replete with often gratuitous violence, cruelty, and horrors, so it is unsurprising that it has attracted most of the critical attention that addresses the subject of Shakespearean trauma.
The play inaugurates the major Shakespearean motif of returning warriors and ensuing home front trauma that recurs, in various ways, in numerous subsequent plays. Titus begins with a quarrel over the imperial throne between the brothers Saturninus and Bassianus, a quarrel that seems to be resolved by the announcement that the people of Rome have summoned Titus home “From weary wars against the barbarous Goths” (Titus 1.1.28) to assume the political and moral authority that his martial success would seem to have earned him. He is greeted as a conquering hero:
The good Andronicus,
(1.1.64-9)
Patron of virtue, Rome’s best champion,
Successful in the battles that he fights,
With honor and with fortune is returned
From where he circumscribed with his sword
And brought to yoke the enemies of Rome
What follows, however, is not a ritual cleansing that leads to harmonious reintegration and political success but, rather, a triumphalist procession parading and celebrating wartime conquest as if it were political and social virtue. Instead of purgation and orderly re-entry, the ritual of return culminates in Titus’ brutal and arbitrary execution of Alarbus, “the proudest prisoner of the Goths” (1.1.96) and the eldest surviving son of Tamora, the captured Gothic Queen, in revenge for the battlefield deaths of several of his sons.
By subverting the line between war and peacetime, notions of honor, and the rule of law, Titus’ demarcation-smashing action initiates his downward journey from triumphant returned defender of his people to rigid authoritarian to hapless supplicant. Further, Titus pronounces his summary judgment even while acknowledging that Alarbus is “the noblest that survives” (1.1.l02) because “Religiously [his surviving sons] ask a sacrifice” (124), exactly the wrong kind of transitional ritual. Tamora, rightly distinguishing between actions that are appropriate to the battlefield and to the domestic setting, fruitlessly challenges Titus’ judgment: “must my sons be slaughtered in the streets / For valiant doings in their country’s cause?” (112–13).
Deaf to her pleas, Titus turns Alarbus over to Lucius, his most vengeful son, who performs “Our Roman rites. Alarbus’ limbs are lopped, / And entrails feed the sacrificing fire, / Whose smoke, like incense, doth perfume the sky” (1.1.143–5).
Such a perversion of ritual purgation reveals Rome to be as barbaric as the Goths they defeated and sets Titus on a bloody, destructive, and fateful path that David McCandless deems “a heightened version of the Vietnam vet’s traumatic dislocation” that enables him to perform a parodic version of battlefield prowess on the home front, but at an enormous cost to Rome, his family, and himself.
In quick succession, events turn ever more sour: refusing the crown (despite having just behaved as if he were wearing one), Titus arbitrarily throws his support to the unworthy Saturninus, blocks his daughter Lavinia’s marriage to her betrothed Bassianus, gives her to Saturninus without consulting her, and kills his son Mutius for daring to oppose his high-handed actions.
Thus demonstrating his unfitness for peace and domesticity, Titus initiates the barbaric series of events – child murder, rape, mutilation, slaughter, cannibalism, madness, treason – that will destroy him, Lavinia, and virtually all the rest of his family. His end is not a suicide, but it is the culminating, though not the last, horrific death triggered by his inappropriate exercise of brutal martial power at the very moment he re-enters the domestic setting of the play’s first scene. And at the end his actions and their consequences leave the stage, and Rome, in the hands of Lucius, the butcher of Alarbus and now leader of the Goths. Lucius establishes his claim to political authority by pronouncing, like Fortinbras and Octavius Caesar in later plays, final judgments and martial funeral rites that suggest the world is in no better hands at the end of the play than it was at the beginning, although much blood has been shed, many corpses piled up, and society thoroughly brutalized.
After a great deal of mayhem, slaughter, and suffering, then, Rome has a ruler who, like his father, has shown little capacity for distinguishing the martial from the political and social, or for transitioning into a man of peace, judgment, and statesmanship.
Alan Warren Friedman, Thaman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at The University of Texas at Austin, specializes in modern British, Irish, and American literature, the novel, and Shakespearean drama.