T.S. Eliot was no admirer of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, and expressed doubt as to whether it was even by Shakespeare. In “Seneca in Elizabethan Translation,” Eliot says this of the play that out-Senecas Seneca:

No doubt The Jew of Malta or Titus Andronicus would have made the living Seneca shudder with genuine aesthetic horror; but his influence helped to recommend work with which he had little in common.

Later in the essay, he savages the play yet more:

In one of the worst offenders – indeed one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written, a play in which it is incredible that Shakespeare had any hand at all, a play in which the best passages would be too highly honoured by the signature of Peele – in Titus Andronicus – there is nothing really Senecan at all. There is a wantonness, an irrelevance, about the crimes of which Seneca would never have been guilty.

Yet in Eliot’s most famous and arguably most important poem, The Waste Land, Eliot makes direct allusion to the play, thus giving it a place forever in the Western literary canon. In Part II, “A Game of Chess,” we find the following passage:

Above the antique mantel was displayed
As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene
The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king
So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
‘Jug Jug’ to dirty ears.
And other withered stumps of time
Were told upon the walls; staring forms
Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.

In his own notes to The Waste Land, Eliot refers to Book 6 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses for the story of Philomel(a). In brief, King Tereus rapes Philomela, the sister of his wife, Procne, and cuts out her tongue to prevent her from talking. In vengeance, Philomela uses her hands to weave the story into a tapestry and Procne takes revenge by feeding Tereus his son, Itys, after which the gods changed Philomela into a nightingale. Gruesome stuff.

What Eliot doesn’t tell us is that Metamorphoses 6 is both an inspiration for and an integral plot device in the story of Lavinia in Shakespeare’s play, in which he trumps Seneca by having the rapists also cut off the victim’s hands–they know their Ovid. (But they get their punishment in the end.)

What Eliot also doesn’t tell us in his notes is that he is not, or at least not only, thinking of Ovid directly, but of Ovid through the lens of Titus Andronicus. The giveaway is the word “stumps,” which Shakespeare uses multiple times for the termination of Lavinia’s handless arms.

First, Chiron (whose name actually means “hand”) mocks Lavinia:

DEMETRIUS 
So, now go tell, an if thy tongue can speak,
Who ’twas that cut thy tongue and ravished thee.
CHIRON 
Write down thy mind; bewray thy meaning so,
An if thy stumps will let thee play the scribe.
DEMETRIUS 
See how with signs and tokens she can scrowl.
CHIRON, to Lavinia 
Go home. Call for sweet water; wash thy hands.
DEMETRIUS 
She hath no tongue to call, nor hands to wash;
And so let’s leave her to her silent walks.

Later, her father, Titus, says:

In thy dumb action will I be as perfect
As begging hermits in their holy prayers.
Thou shalt not sigh, nor hold thy stumps to heaven,
Nor wink, nor nod, nor kneel, nor make a sign,
But I of these will wrest an alphabet
And by still practice learn to know thy meaning.

Again, in a stage direction, the playwright states, of using her mouth to write the names of her assaulters and their crime:

She takes the staff in her mouth, and guides it with her stumps and writes.

As Titus takes his vengeance on Chiron and Demetrius, killing them to serve to their mother in a meal, he says:

This one hand yet is left to cut your throats,
Whiles that Lavinia ’tween her stumps doth hold
The basin that receives your guilty blood.

(It is worth pointing out here than Titus has by this point also lost a hand, whose absence he had earlier described as “this wretched stump.”)

The connection is clear, and allows us to pick up on a secondary echo in Eliot’s “so rudely forced.” That word, or a compound of it, is used three times in Titus Andronicus for Lavinia’s rape. The first constitutes a sort of “window reference” (the phrase is Richard Thomas’s) through which we see Ovid through Shakespeare:

Lavinia, wert thou thus surprised, sweet girl,
Ravished and wronged as Philomela was,
Forced in the ruthless, vast, and gloomy woods?
See, see! Ay, such a place there is where we did hunt—
O, had we never, never hunted there!—
Patterned by that the poet here describes,
By nature made for murders and for rapes.

(Unlike in a normal window reference, by the way, the source of the allusion is here made explicit as a “pattern.”)

Later, we read “constrained and forced” and, finally, “enforced, stained, and deflowered.”

Besides being (in my view) interesting in itself, Eliot’s references to Titus Andronicus in The Waste Land allow us to make a not insignificant point about Eliot’s notes.

That Eliot appended notes to his own poem is a remarkable innovation. At first glance, they seem a way to ameliorate the poem’s obscurity and difficulty. And so they sometimes are. But it is equally important to remember that Eliot only tells us what he wants to; in that way, the notes themselves obscure as well as reveal. In this case, they obscure his creative use of a play he says he did not like.

One takeaway might be that inspiration and appreciation are not the same thing. But another is: If the play is as bad as Eliot claims, how could it work upon his literary mind so powerfully? Or, put differently: Will the real T.S. Eliot please stand up?