What happens in Titus Andronicus

Titus Andronicus returns to Rome a war hero, having beaten the Goths, and the Senate hands him the right to name the next emperor. He picks Saturninus, the late emperor’s elder son, out of duty. As thanks, Saturninus claims Titus’s daughter Lavinia as his bride — but she is already promised to his brother Bassianus, who seizes her and runs. In the chaos Titus kills his own son Mutius for blocking him, and Saturninus, furious, marries instead the captive Gothic queen Tamora. She smiles and bides her time. Titus had her eldest son sacrificed on his return, and she means to repay it in kind.

Tamora’s lover, the Moor Aaron, is the engine of the revenge. He sees her younger sons Chiron and Demetrius quarreling over Lavinia and turns their lust into a plan. During a royal hunt in the forest, the brothers murder Bassianus and drag Lavinia away. They rape her, then cut out her tongue and cut off her hands so she can neither tell nor write what they did. Aaron, meanwhile, frames two of Titus’s sons for Bassianus’s murder using planted gold and a forged letter. Lavinia’s uncle Marcus finds her in the woods, ruined and silent, and brings her home.

The cruelty deepens. Titus pleads for his condemned sons, then hears that Aaron will spare them if Titus sends his own hand. He lets Aaron strike it off — and a messenger returns with the hand and the two sons’ severed heads anyway. Bent under grief, Titus sits the broken family down to a thin meal and tells them to eat only enough to live for revenge. The pieces finally fit together when Lavinia drags down a copy of Ovid’s tale of Philomela, then holds a staff in her mouth and writes the names of her attackers in the sand: Chiron and Demetrius.

Now Aaron faces his own trouble. Tamora bears him a dark-skinned child that gives away their affair, and when Chiron and Demetrius move to kill the baby, Aaron fights them off, kills the nurse who knows the secret, and flees to protect his son. Titus, slipping in and out of madness, shoots arrows wrapped with appeals to the gods and sends a clown to the emperor with a hidden knife. His son Lucius, banished, gathers a Gothic army and marches on Rome. The Goths capture Aaron carrying the baby, and he confesses every horror without a flicker of regret, boasting he’d gladly do worse.

Tamora thinks Titus is too far gone to be dangerous. She comes to his house disguised as the spirit Revenge, with her sons dressed as Rape and Murder, offering to help him punish his enemies. Titus knows her at once and plays along. He persuades her to leave the two sons behind, then seizes them, slits their throats, and has their flesh baked into pies. He invites the emperor and Tamora to a banquet to seal a false peace.

At the feast Titus serves the pie, then tells Tamora what she has just eaten. In a few quick strokes the room dissolves into slaughter: Titus kills Tamora, Saturninus kills Titus, and Lucius kills Saturninus. The shaken Romans proclaim Lucius their new emperor. Aaron, unrepentant to the last, is sentenced to be buried up to the neck and left to starve, still wishing he had done more evil in his life. Rome, soaked in the blood of two families, is left to put itself back together.