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I ought perhaps to begin by confessing that this paper proved a challenge in various respects. To start with, I had to take into account the fact that Titus Andronicus, with its host of characters and many scenes of carnage, is a relatively little known play compared to Macbeth. Titus Andronicus happens to be Shakespeare's first tragedy, the least often performed, a sort of delirious blueprint for future plays so to speak. And yet this initial impression of madness may need some reconsideration, given the spirit of that day.
This brings me to a second difficulty: the fact that I am not a historian. However, I did some further reading on the history of that time, without being entirely aware of where it would lead me, and discovered how well the historical context lent itself to the kind of enterprise I had in mind. Everything I learned seemed in fact to corroborate my hypothesis that both tragedies contain a hidden meaning and that this governs the very structure of their plots. But I must admit that historians and scholars versed in the history of literature would certainly consider my sources very incomplete.
In the third place it will be necessary to repeat ideas which have been outlined in detail in my book Creativity and Perversion (1984).
I shall endeavor to show how the structure of Macbeth, and of Titus Andronicus is comparable to the ritual of a secret ceremony, whose aim is to topple reality in order to establish the reign of chaos, to reinstate the undifferentiated universe that existed before God's Creation, in other words, to revert to anomie. This is a doubly secret ceremony, being occult by nature and because, without a second