Titus plans to bake some pies

This is horrifying, but awesome…from Titus Andronicus’s speech to Chiron and Demetrius, before he slices their throats and bakes them into pies to feed to their mother!

O villains, Chiron and Demetrius!

Here stands the spring whom you have stain’d with mud,

This goodly summer with your winter mix’d.

You kill’d her husband, and for that vild fault

Two of her brothers were condemn’d to death,

My hand cut off and made a merry jest;

Both her sweet hands, her tongue, and that more dear

Than hands or tongue, her spotless chastity,

Inhuman traitors, you constrain’d and forc’d.

What would you say if I should let you speak?

Villains, for shame you could not beg for grace.

Hark, wretches, how I mean to martyr you.

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.

You know your mother means to feast with me,

And calls herself Revenge, and thinks me mad.

Hark, villains, I will grind your bones to dust,

And with your blood and it I’ll make a paste,

And of the paste a coffin I will rear,

And make two pasties of your shameful heads,

And bid that strumpet, your unhallowed dam,

Like to the earth swallow her own increase.

This is the feast that I have bid her to,

And this the banquet she shall surfeit on,

For worse than Philomel you us’d my daughter,

And worse than Progne I will be reveng’d.

And now prepare your throats. Lavinia, come,

Receive the blood, and when that they are dead,

Let me go grind their bones to powder small,

And with this hateful liquor temper it,

And in that paste let their vile heads be bak’d.

Come, come, be every one officious

To make this banquet, which I wish may prove

More stern and bloody than the Centaurs’ feast.

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