40 SOCIAL SCIENTIST opponents and also to those they suspect as their rivals. In this world of Byzantine intrigue, not even friends are safe. Those eminent Victorians too had their problem of realizing their own "self-good". But gentlemen as they were, all Podsnaps and Veneers from toe to pate, they contrived to do it without dyeing their hands red. They abhorred violence of the non-Peterloo variety. So they developed the fine art of shuffling and reshuffling their Boodles, Goodies, Doodles, Foodies and Goodies ad infinitum. They sat around shining tables in cosy rooms and manoeuvred themselves into positions. It was all a matter of pushing, pulling and pressurizing. Maybe there was some arm-twisting, but, no,, there was no neck-wringing;. To these men of refinement Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus was something incredible and it could not be performed. It was too much of blood-and-thunder for them. But as A L Rowse says: "Such is the horror of our own age, with the appalling barbarities of prison camps and resistance movements paralleling the torture and mutilation, the feeding on human flesh of the play, that it has ceased to be improbable".6 What the play represents is not the pathetic sufferings of Titus Andronicus, "a noble Roman'9, but the tragic travails and torments of Rome under the tyranny of Saturninus whose very name reminds us of Saturn, one of the fierce Titans, one of "the whole mammoth-brood59. Titus Andronicus laments thus: Ah, Rome! well, well, I made thee miserable, What time I threw the people's suffrage, On him that thus tyrannize over thee.7 It is a heart-rending cry. It calls to mind the savage cry of Macduff: Bleed, bleed, poor country Great tyranny, lay thou thy basis sure, For goodness dare not check thee.8 Titus Andronicus is, admittedly, a Senecan tragedy, a revenge-tragedy. It is also "tragical-historical", if we are to accept the decorous division by Polonius: ^tragedy, comedy, history,pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical - historical, tragical-comical-historical-pasto-ral". It has Shakespeare's typical concern, both in the first and fifth acts, with civil order and the forces which threaten to overthrow it. Richard III which immediately preceded the firsi Roman play of Shakespeare, is the blood-curdling story of an unrelenting power-seeker, one who reached the room at the top by killing those who stood in his way. He is a political character as well as a "Machiavellian malcontent". As Palmer says, "There have been brief Augustan interludes in the history of the world when it might have seemed a libel upon our civilization to present Richard Crookback as a political character'3.9 But, "a time like our own that has out-Machiavellied Machiavelli, has turned into sober realism much in this play that to a reader of the... pre-Hitler years sounded like sheer invention." As H C Goddard so aptly observes "The world is forever