The Clown is one of the play’s few characters who speaks with genuine innocence and bumbling good humor. He is a simple man, a carrier of pigeons, who stumbles into the machinery of Titus’s revenge plot through no fault of his own. Titus sends him to the emperor with a petition (disguised in a knife) and a pair of pigeons, giving him explicit instructions on how to behave: kneel, kiss the emperor’s foot, hand over the birds, and wait for his reward. The Clown’s confusion is endearing—he misunderstands nearly everything Titus tells him, not knowing who Jupiter is, insisting that he’s never been to heaven, and remaining cheerful and obedient despite his bewilderment.
What makes the Clown’s brief scenes so darkly comic is the collision between his harmless literalism and the lethal world he’s entered. When Titus asks him if he can “deliver an oration to the emperor with a grace,” the Clown replies that he’s never been able to “say grace” in his life—he takes the word “grace” to mean a prayer before meals, a confusion that is both funny and pointed. He represents the ordinary person caught in the machinery of state violence, someone who asks only for his “charges”—his payment—and whose only crime is being the messenger. When Saturninus reads Titus’s petition and orders him hanged, the Clown goes to his death with a joke on his lips: “Hanged! by’r lady, then I have brought up a neck to a fair end.” He is, in effect, killed for nothing, a victim not of his own actions but of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The Clown’s execution marks a turning point in Titus Andronicus. His death shows that Saturninus’s rage is indiscriminate and that the cycle of violence extends beyond the great families to touch anyone who comes into contact with it. The Clown’s brief life in the play illustrates how tragedy, in Shakespeare’s hands, can encompass not just the noble and the scheming, but also the innocent and the bewildered—those who simply do what they’re told and pay the ultimate price.
