Dirty deeds, done dirt cheap.1
As a youngster, ‘trick or treating’ was very different.
You’d hear stories every year, sotto voce, about ‘little monsters’ who’d called at the wrong house, got something they hadn’t bargained for (like a carrot, for heaven’s sake), and exacted horrifying revenge by throwing eggs at windows, pushing them through letterboxes, and so on.
Me? In bed with an appropriately scary book.
In fact, I was far more likely to stay up after midnight at Hallowe’en than Christmas Eve. Because, obviously, once you hit 01 November, all the prowling banshees, zombies, and other creatures of the night have lost their power. And that’s when you can stand down and sleep.
Right?
The implied threat of the trick remains part of the fun, I suppose. But to see a particularly nasty little trick, let’s spend some time with Titus Andronicus. (We’ll call him/the play TA.)
Some of you might be unfamiliar with the text. It’s far too often overlooked, even dismissed. T. S. Eliot, who I feel should know better, called it:
one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written.2
Unlike his poems about cats …
In introducing my Arden Third copy, Professor Jonathan Bate suggests TA is ‘the pivotal play in Shakespeare’s early career’. Even that, I think, is faint praise.
Look, Titus Andronicus is Quentin Tarantino in tights. Think Reservoir Dogs with ruffs.
Bloody, graphic, and gripping. Fast-paced, snappy, and unexpectedly moving in places. It contains the seeds of many of the later tragedies, and deserves reappraisal. It’s absolutely the play I would take a class of students to — the ones who think Shakespeare is ‘boring’.
Having (hopefully) sold it to you, I don’t want to tell you too much about how this week’s trick comes to pass.
Aaron – a Moor, ‘The Moor’, until Othello enters stage left years later – belongs to the faction opposing Titus. He arrives with a message: Titus’s captured sons can be spared if their father will surrender a hand. Titus readily agrees, not least because he’s down to a handful of sons out of an original 29 (twenty-nine!), and enlists Aaron to sever it.
Good Aaron, wilt thou help to chop it off?3
The thing is, there is nothing ‘good’ about Aaron here.
This is one of those occasions when ‘dramatic irony’ is so much fun. We know what Titus doesn’t: there is no such bargain. Aaron is making mischief on his own behalf, as Titus will discover when his hand is returned to him, accompanied by a couple of severed heads …
Our tragic hero’s sacrifice, vulnerability – and trust – have been turned into the very things that hurt him most.
And there’s a particularly nasty detail. Aaron doesn’t return with the various body parts himself; an anonymous messenger is despatched. But this doesn’t mean he’s indifferent to the consequences. Quite the opposite.
When we get to Act V, Aaron tells a miraculously surviving son that the trick:
almost broke my heart with extreme laughter
… as he witnessed the big reveal through a crevice in the wall.
Imagine your suffering being so entertaining to your enemy that he watches it in secret, then recounts it as a funny story.
But it’s worth telling you, even at the risk of spoilers, that Aaron is ‘a piece of work’. His pleasure in cruelty for cruelty’s sake sets him apart among Shakespeare’s villains, I think.
Near the end of the play, he declares:
If one good deed in all my life I did,
I do repent it from my very soul.
I’m struggling to think of other characters who go out all guns blazing like that. Even tragic heroes can have a moment of anagnorisis – a realisation or discovery – that complicates our judgement of them. Aaron, by contrast, seems determined to leave us in no doubt.
Yesterday evening, we only got one knock at the door (thanks to the bliss of living in a rural area). But … we were met with a single horde of horror: at least two dozen people, mostly children, but several parents in the spirit, too.
Any trick, nowadays, is probably on the parents. They’re the ones who have to deal with small children who are going to be turbo-charged on sugar and all kinds of additives for the next few days. Mwahahahahaha!
But, in my peculiar way, and with a Hallowe’en theme having been announced for Shakespeare Sunday, it got me thinking about things like language change.
A ‘trick’ isn’t what it once was.
A ‘prank’ doesn’t quite fit what Aaron did.
What should we call it?
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