Titus Andronicus: The State of Play 9781350027398, 9781350027428, 9781350027411

Table of contents :
Cover
HalfTitle
Dedication
Title
Copyright
Content
List of illustrations
List of contributors
Series preface
Introduction Farah Karim-Cooper
Part One Genre, style and sources
1 Senecan belatedness and Titus Andronicus Curtis Perry
2 Titus Andronicus:Elizabethan classicism and the styles of new tragedy Goran Stanivukovic
3 Soliloquies in Titus Andronicus: An empirical approach James Hirsh
Part Two Critical approaches: Race, culture
4 ‘I have done thy mother’: Racial and sexual geographies in Titus Andronicus John Kunat
5 Remixing the family:Blackness and domesticity in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus David Sterling Brown
6 ‘If I might have my will’:Aaron’s affect and race in Titus Andronicus Carol Mejia LaPerle
Part Three Critical approaches: Bodies, emotions
7 Metaphorically speaking:Titus Andronicus and the limits of utterance Jennifer Edwards
8 Granular reading: Texture, language and surface marks in Titus Andronicus Whitney Sperrazza
Part Four Performance and adaptation
9 ‘Did you see that?!’:Titus Andronicus and theatrical transgression Ralph Alan Cohen
10 In/di/gestion:Seneca→Shakespeare→South Park Lizz Angello
11 ‘My tears will choke me, if I ope my mouth’:Framing, feasting and speaking sexual violence in Titus Andronicus, 2006–2017 Emma Whipday
Index

Citation preview

Titus Andronicus

The Arden Shakespeare State of Play Series General Editors: Lena Cowen Orlin and Ann Thompson Macbeth: The State of Play, edited by Ann Thompson Othello: The State of Play, edited by Lena Cowen Orlin The Sonnets: The State of Play, edited by Hannah Crawforth, Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Clare Whitehead The Revenger’s Tragedy: The State of Play, edited by Gretchen E. Minton

Titus Andronicus The State of Play Edited by Farah Karim-Cooper

THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE and the Arden Shakespeare logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Paperback edition first published 2020 Copyright © Farah Karim-Cooper and contributors, 2019 Farah Karim-Cooper and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work. Cover image © Shutterstock All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-­party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-2739-8 PB: 978-1-3501-7878-6 ePDF: 978-1-3500-2741-1 eBook: 978-1-3500-2740-4

Series: Arden Shakespeare The State of Play Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

List of illustrations  viii List of contributors  ix Series preface  xiii

Introduction  1 Farah Karim-Cooper Part One  Genre, style and sources 1 Senecan belatedness and Titus Andronicus  15 Curtis Perry 2 Titus Andronicus: Elizabethan classicism and the styles of new tragedy  37 Goran Stanivukovic 3 Soliloquies in Titus Andronicus: An empirical approach  63 James Hirsh Part Two  Critical approaches: Race, culture and politics 4 ‘I have done thy mother’: Racial and sexual geographies in Titus Andronicus  89 John Kunat

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CONTENTS

5 Remixing the family: Blackness and domesticity in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus  111 David Sterling Brown 6 ‘If I might have my will’: Aaron’s affect and race in Titus Andronicus  135 Carol Mejia LaPerle Part Three  Critical approaches: Bodies, emotions and metaphor 7 Metaphorically speaking: Titus Andronicus and the limits of utterance  159 Jennifer Edwards 8 Granular reading: Texture, language and surface marks in Titus Andronicus  179 Whitney Sperrazza Part Four  Performance and adaptation 9 ‘Did you see that?!’: Titus Andronicus and theatrical transgression  203 Ralph Alan Cohen 10 In/di/gestion: Seneca→Shakespeare→South Park  223 Lizz Angello

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11 ‘My tears will choke me, if I ope my mouth’: Framing, feasting and speaking sexual violence in Titus Andronicus, 2006–2017  249 Emma Whipday Index  271

ILLUSTRATIONS

6.1 James Baldwin in London’s Albert Memorial. Photo by Allan Warren 9.1 Lavinia (Victoria Reinsel) exits with Titus’ hand ‘between her teeth’, American Shakespeare Center, 2009. Photo by Tommy Thompson

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CONTRIBUTORS

Lizz Angello responds to the call of ‘things doing stuff’ in medieval poetry and early modern drama and is particularly interested in transcribing conversations between textual objects across the pleats in time and space. She teaches literature at the University of South Florida, St Petersburg, and is currently revising her dissertation, Paradise Always Already Lost: Myth, Memory, and Matter in English Literature, for publication (forthcoming). David Sterling Brown is Assistant Professor of English at Binghamton University, State University of New York. His scholarship has either appeared in or is forthcoming in Radical Teacher, Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies (2018), Hamlet: The State of Play (Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare) and White People in Shakespeare. His chapter in this volume draws from his current book project, which examines black domestic life in Shakespearean drama. Ralph Alan Cohen is co-­founder and Director of Mission at the American Shakespeare Center and Professor of Shakespeare and Performance and founder of the graduate programme in those studies at Mary Baldwin University. He was project director for the building of the Blackfriars Playhouse – a recreation of Shakespeare’s indoor theatre – in Staunton, Virginia. In 2001, he established the Blackfriars conference. He has directed thirty-­five productions of plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. He is the author of ShakesFear and How to Cure It: The Complete Handbook for Teaching Shakespeare. In 2008, he was the co-­recipient of the Commonwealth Governor’s Arts Award. In 2009, he was the Theo Crosby Fellow at Shakespeare’s Globe in London and received the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Award in 2014.

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Jennifer Edwards is the Research Coordinator at Shakespeare’s Globe, London. She recently completed an Arts and Humanities Research Council-­funded PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London, which explored conceptions and dramatizations of the ecstatic experience in the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Her current research considers the role of distraction in Shakespeare’s theatre. James Hirsh is a Professor Emeritus of English at Georgia State University. He is the author of The Structure of Shakespearean Scenes (1981), and Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies (2003), which won the 2004 South Atlantic Modern Language Association Book Award. He has published articles in Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Newsletter, Shakespeare, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Modern Language Quarterly, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America and elsewhere. Farah Karim-Cooper is Head of Higher Education and Research at Shakespeare’s Globe and Visiting Research Fellow of King’s College London. She is Chair of the Globe Architecture Research Group and currently a trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America. In addition to publishing numerous articles and essays, she has also published Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama (2006, 2012) and The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment (Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016). She is co-­editor, with Christie Carson, of Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment (2008); co-­editor, with Tiffany Stern, of Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance (Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2013); and co-­editor, with Andrew Gurr, of Moving Shakespeare Indoors: Performance and Repertoire in the Jacobean Playhouse (2014). John Kunat is a Professor of English at Sonoma State University. He teaches courses on Shakespeare, Renaissance art and literature, ancient culture and world mythology. His primary areas of research are the intersections among discourses of

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race, queer sexuality and political theory. He has recently published articles in Shakespeare Quarterly and Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 on sexuality, ethnicity and republicanism in the Renaissance. Carol Mejia LaPerle is Professor and Honours Advisor for the Department of English at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. Her research interests include early modern drama, poetry and culture, the history of race, gender theory, material culture, and affective performances of and in Shakespeare. She regularly teaches a survey of early English literature, the methods and materials of academic research, and topic seminars with titles such as ‘Race in the Renaissance’, ‘Gendered Rhetoric in Early Modern Culture’ and ‘Shakespeare in Performance’. She has published articles on William Shakespeare, Philip Massinger, Ben Jonson, Thomas Heywood, John Webster and Elizabeth Cary. She is currently completing a book on affect and race in Shakespeare. Curtis Perry is Professor of English, with courtesy appointments in Classics, Medieval Studies, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. He is the author of Literature and Favoritism in Early Modern England (2006), as well as of numerous other articles and books on early modern literature and politics and on early modern drama and classical reception. Whitney Sperrazza is a postdoctoral researcher at the Hall Center for the Humanities, University of Kansas. Her research focuses on sixteenth- and seventeenth-­century English poetry and women’s writing, and she has published work on Margaret Cavendish’s printed letters, along with a co-­authored essay on the poetry of Aemilia Lanyer and Lucy Hutchinson. She is currently working on a book project that explores the intersections among women’s writing, poetic form and Renaissance anatomy. Goran Stanivukovic is Professor of English Renaissance Literature and Chair of the Department of English at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Canada. His most recent

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publications include Knights in Arms: Prose Romance, Masculinity, and Eastern Mediterranean Trade in Early Modern England, 1565–1655 (2016), and edited volumes, Queer Shakespeare: Desire and Sexuality (Bloomsbury, 2017) and Timely Voices: Romance Writing in English Literature (2017). His monograph, co-­authored with J. Cameron, Tragedies of the English Renaissance, was published in March 2018. Emma Whipday is Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at the University of Newcastle. She holds a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, working on brother–sister relationships on the early modern stage. Her monograph Shakespeare’s Domestic Tragedies is forthcoming; she has also published on domestic murder, Arden of Faversham, the Royal Shakespeare Company Roaring Girls season, and practice as research.

SERIES PREFACE

The Arden Shakespeare State of Play Series editors: Lena Cowen Orlin and Ann Thompson This series represents a collaboration between King’s College London and Georgetown University. King’s is the home of the London Shakespeare Centre and Georgetown is the home of the Shakespeare Association of America (SAA). Each volume in the series is an expedition to discover the ‘state of play’ with respect to specific works by Shakespeare. Our method is to convene a seminar at the annual convention of the SAA and see what it is that preoccupies scholars now. SAA seminars are enrolled through an open registration process that brings together academics from all stages of their careers. Participants prepare short papers that are circulated in advance and then discussed when the seminar convenes on conference weekend. From the papers submitted, the seminar leader selects a group for inclusion in a collection that aims to include fresh work by emerging voices and established scholars both. The general editors are grateful for the further collaboration of Bloomsbury Publishing, and especially our commissioning editors Margaret Bartley and Mark Dudgeon.

Introduction Farah Karim-Cooper

While the authorship of Titus Andronicus has always been and still is a matter of debate and ongoing enquiry, the play’s status as a popular tragedy has only increased in the last few decades. The tragedy may be the reworking of an ‘Ur-Titus’ by George Peele, as Jonathan Bate suggests, or a completion of a play for which Peele most likely wrote only the first act.1 That the play is not an ‘active collaboration’ but rather a reworking of an earlier or an incomplete play suggests that Shakespeare was the primary author, with Peele responsible for only 635 lines. Some of the chapters in this volume refer to the ‘co-­authorship’ of the play as a way of acknowledging that Titus is not a single-­authored play; whether or not it is believed to be the result of a collaboration or simply a revision of an earlier or incomplete play may differ from contributor to contributor in this volume. Bate’s first edition of Titus (1995) may have ushered in the twenty-­first-century fascination with the play in critical as well as performance terms. The traditional critical assessment that it is Shakespeare’s most immature work in its overly sensational emphasis on violence and bloodshed, seems implausible. The dismissal of Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy in fact dates back to

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Shakespeare’s own lifetime. Philip C. Kolin reminds us that Ben Jonson had judged in his Induction to Bartholomew Fair, ‘that Titus was typical of old-­fashioned plays, filled with bombast and roaring, and mocked Elizabethan masses who with their “virtuous and staid ignorance” held Titus up as an artistic standard’.2 Some have seen this as hostile, others, such as Goran Stanivukovic in this volume, see it as ‘ironic’ instead. Either way, despite its popularity in its own time, it was not critically hailed. Recent debates and approaches have not only reconsidered questions around authorship but have also drawn closer attention to the play’s classicism; they have reconsidered the genre or classification of the play as Roman; they have reconsidered the nature and effects of violent spectacle, the intimacies of family relations and kinship, the historical import of political alliance, and the representation of race and miscegenation. This collection has gathered together essays that explore some of these issues through a range of methodologies that reflect the critical climate at the end of the second decade of the twenty-­first century. In addition to its critical resurgence, Titus continues to prove very popular in performance. Although performed throughout the twentieth century, the play has seen an extraordinary revival in recent years, staged in a range of performance styles and choices that have tended to highlight in one way or another the play’s preoccupation with the spectacle of violence. Indeed, the effects of such spectacle have been registered recently by audience and critics alike, as evidenced in the physiological responses of the play’s spectators. The headline to the Daily Telegraph review dated 30 April 2014 noted that the ‘Globe audience faints at “grotesquely violent” Titus Andronicus’.3 In October 2017, Ian Hughes noted in the Stratford Observer that ‘Shakespeare still shocks’, reporting on the findings of a Royal Shakespeare Company-­led audience research project that monitored the emotional responses of both the theatre and the cinema audience (who watched it streamed). The results showed that watching Titus forced

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heart levels to rise ‘to the equivalent of a five-­minute cardio workout – and men showed a slightly greater emotional reaction than women’.4 In the present volume, Emma Whipday’s chapter examines the extent to which recent productions of Titus stage the sexual violence central to the play’s depiction of trauma. This volume of essays draws attention to the play’s increasing and urgent relevance in the twenty-­first century. In addition to addressing questions of genre, style and sources, the chapters here reflect recent critical approaches and theories of race, culture, historical phenomenology, sense perception, performance, reception and adaptation. Part One considers in a new light the play’s classicism, its aesthetic and style, and how dramatic devices, such as soliloquy, need to be redefined in order to illuminate character and stylistic diversity. Curtis Perry’s contribution argues that Titus uses Senecan drama specifically for the way it models ‘citationality’ and belatedness in relation to Roman writers like Ovid and Virgil. In practice, Perry helps us to reconsider the relationship between Titus and two Senecan plays prominent within what Perry calls the ‘dense intertextual scaffolding’ of Titus: Thyestes, in which the antihero Atreus attempts to dream up a crime of unique, unrivalled horror but winds up imitating (an Ovidian) Procne; and Troades, which takes up the Virgilian subject matter of the end of Troy, but which emphasizes the regressive pull of the past instead of the futurity of epic. These plays, Perry argues, provide Shakespeare and Peele with useful models for thinking about Romanitas and tragic agency as ‘citational and belated’. Goran Stanivukovic’s chapter suggests that the play’s language makes Titus a new kind of tragedy as he explores the authenticity, innovation, stylistic vibrancy and linguistic richness of Titus as features of the humanist revival and reframing of the classics in late Elizabethan aesthetics more generally. He argues that, rather than imitating the rhetorical patterns of Senecan tragedy, Shakespeare and George Peele react against formulaic rhetoric, thereby overturning grammar-­ school rhetorical training. Focusing on the rhetoric of the play,

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Stanivukovic’s chapter illuminates what it meant to sound like a Roman in a play whose revival of Rome on the stage depended on rethinking Rome and ‘Romanness’ in Elizabethan humanism. Critics often refer to Titus as an early Roman tragedy; but he suggests that thinking of it as a late Elizabethan classical drama brings it closer to its origins in the new aesthetics of the 1590s. In the final chapter of Part One, James Hirsh shows how in Titus Shakespeare brilliantly exploited the complex and precise conventions that governed soliloquies in early modern drama. Plentiful evidence demonstrates that soliloquies at the time represented self-­addressed speeches by characters rather than audience-­addressed speech. Hirsh argues that if a soliloquy had knowingly been addressed by a character to thousands of playgoers, it would have represented the most public form of speech possible in the period. The character’s purpose in speaking would have been to inform, entertain, persuade, surprise, provoke, dismay, or otherwise influence a large gathering of strangers. Soliloquies, Hirsh maintains, represented the most private kind of speech possible and depicted how the character interacts with himself. The very first soliloquy in Titus contains two unambiguous markers of self-­address, according to Hirsh: ‘Titus, when wert thou wont to walk alone . . .?’ (1.1.339), and the rest of the play contains many other pieces of evidence of various sorts that soliloquies represented self-­addressed speech as a matter of convention. At no point in the play does any character unambiguously acknowledge the presence of playgoers. What Hirsh does is to explore the implications of the operations of the convention of self-­addressed speech in the play, thereby illuminating one of Shakespeare’s most profound techniques of characterization. In recent years, the study of race in Shakespeare has advanced significantly, demonstrated by established as well as emerging scholars. The special issue of Shakespeare Quarterly dedicated to discussions of race in early modern scholarship, edited by Peter Erickson and Kim F. Hall, establishes the increasing centrality of the subject to the discipline of

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Shakespeare studies and suggests that there is still a long way to go. A collection of essays on Titus Andronicus, therefore, cannot ignore the play’s complex and compelling representation of racial otherness. Part Two of this collection examines race, as well as culture and politics, to consider the broader issues related to identity that might be at stake in the play and to draw attention to emerging arguments and methodologies in this field. The first chapter in this section, by John Kunat, considers polarity as a defining characteristic of ancient thought, and demonstrates how critical analyses of race and ethnicity in Titus Andronicus have generally focused on the distinction between the Romans and the various ‘others’ in the play. He argues that such readings have overlooked the more nuanced consideration of difference Shakespeare offers his audience. Titus was written in the 1590s when the English were occupied with the outbreak of the Nine Years’ War in Ireland and the possibility of a Scottish succession. The ‘others’ pressing most closely on the English were thus white like themselves, according to Kunat. Yet, they were also considered to some degree barbaric. Titus navigates this disjunction through a staging of Rome during the period when it experienced the mixing of peoples that would eventually constitute Europe as a distinct ‘ethnological entity’. Kunat’s chapter, therefore, traces this process through an examination of how Shakespeare appropriates two literary forms – Roman comedy and Ovidian myth-­making – which were themselves concerned with differentiation and identity. Also considering racial intermixing and domesticity, David Sterling Brown discusses Tamora and Aaron’s black baby as a marginal figure whose presence reframes the drama’s initially exclusive emphasis on ‘endogamous family relations’. Brown suggests that Act  1 presents three family structures that are consanguineal and, notably, white (or ‘fair’): Bassianus and Saturninus’ bond has a fraternal structure; Titus, who is a father, brother, grandfather and uncle, heads a large, paternally structured family, the Andronici; and Tamora, prior to the

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sacrifice of her eldest child and the birth of her lovechild, is mother to three Goth sons. However, Shakespeare pointedly restructures the established Goth family – Tamora and her sons Chiron and Demetrius – when Aaron defines the black child as the Goth boys’ ‘brother’ in 4.2. Aaron’s emergence in Act  2, Brown observes, begins to disrupt conventional ideas about family as he assumes a surrogate parental role with Chiron and Demetrius. Specifically, Aaron’s relation to Tamora, her Goth sons and, later, his own biologically related child offers a different kind of family structure that accommodates elective kinship and racial mixing – the Gothic with the African. Act 3, Scene 2 anticipates the remixed conception of the family, as the ‘entomological allegory’ where a black ‘ill-­ favoured fly’ is instilled with various meanings by Titus, and his brother, Marcus, turns our attention to the play’s second direct acknowledgement of the potential for a family to be black or, at least, contain physical blackness.5 Much of the play’s criticism highlights Act 3 as the turning point for Titus, who abandons his allegiance to Rome in favour of defending his family against Aaron and the Goths. Yet, in focusing on character assessments of Titus, Brown suggests, critics have not acknowledged Act 3 as a significant turning point for how the play depicts kinship, for the black fly’s imagined anthropomorphic family is itself an alternative, albeit emblematic, way of conceptualizing the bond between parent and child. Thus, while scrutinizing the developmental inclusivity of family relations in Titus, Brown makes a compelling case for a shift in familial configurations in Act 3, conventionally the play’s centre and climax, and then literally thereafter, all with focused attention on blackness. As a result, the very notion of family presented in Act 1 gets ‘remixed’, as what Brown calls ‘the consanguineal, fair-­skinned families’ – the Goths and the Romans – are set up to tolerate rather than exclude blackness by the end of the tragedy. In the final chapter of this section, Carol Mejia-LaPerle argues that Titus Andronicus cultivates a white imaginary of the black man as a looming danger. She suggests that even evil

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deeds ‘unperformed’ are alarming since the source of their malevolence is always already desiring and intending to enact offences that are potentially ‘ten thousand worse’. It is from the construction of the black man’s perceived, and in this case hyperbolic, violence that Shakespeare racializes Aaron’s will. She argues that through Aaron’s embodiment of the nightmare of a black man with access to power – and whose violence not only mimics Roman violence, but bests it – Titus Andronicus criminalizes the racialized subject’s social agency and considers Aaron an enduring and latent threat to the Roman culture in which he participates, iterating ‘blackness as legible only to be disciplined and feared’. His final fate – his head sticking out of the earth – is at once the greatest fear and the greatest fantasy the play offers – that Aaron is a physical threat constrained, what LaPerle refers to as ‘a mouth cursing at the world made silent and starved, but his embodiment of violent volition is deeply embedded in Roman soil’. Fundamentally, for LaPerle the demonization of a wilfulness in opposition to a dominant will that does not declare itself as white patriarchy, and the punishment of black bodies for which this Roman play is a primal pedagogical performance, is no less deeply rooted in Shakespeare. The next section of the book contains two chapters that take as their subject the performing, legible body of Lavinia. Considering Elaine Scarry’s discussion of the relationship between pain and language as her starting point, Jennifer Edwards explores the limits of ‘expressive capacity’ in Titus. Resituating Lavinia’s lack of voice amongst both her literary analogues and her textual contemporaries, Edwards considers what Lavinia paradoxically expresses through silence. Situating itself among early modern voices claiming linguistic efficacy and the powers of expression, Edwards’ chapter, like Titus itself, gradually ‘erodes the faith in the ability of language to properly express both emotions and self’; language, we learn, functions less as access to but rather as obstruction from expression. Taking Lavinia and Lucrece from Shakespeare’s narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece as sustained test-­cases of

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characters not found but lost in language – placing them alongside and in dialogue with one another – Edwards considers what is at stake in the attempt to speak for Lavinia, highlighting the communicative potential of linguistic failure in order ultimately to demonstrate the paradoxical articulacy of Shakespeare’s famously ‘dis-/in-­inarticulate subject’. Also employing a feminist approach, Whitney Sperrazza examines the moment when Lavinia ‘scrawls’ Chiron and Demetrius’ names in the sand in Act  4, in which she creates visible marks that finally make her rape legible to her male kin. More subtly, however, Shakespeare uses the ‘sandy plot’ on which Lavinia writes to call attention to the gap between the legible marks Titus and Marcus read, and the illegible trauma of her experience. Sperrazza demonstrates that if we place too much emphasis on the words Lavinia writes, we align ourselves with her family’s surface-­level reading of Lavinia’s violation. We understand her plight solely within the parameters of legible expression reading and writing represent. Instead, this chapter argues that Lavinia’s character presents a model for reading based on texture, tactility and feeling. Like Edwards, Sperrazza accounts for alternative communicative modes for Lavinia, but she argues that touch becomes key to Lavinia’s alternative rhetorical mode. Sperrazza uses the ‘sandy plot’ as a framework for her analysis to demonstrate that Act  4, Scene 1 invites us to compare Lavinia’s permanently inscribed, mutilated body to the ‘ephemeral, granular inscription’ she produces. In this moment, Sperrazza suggests, Lavinia offers a ‘granular reading mode’ that exposes the problematic reading modes at work around her on stage. Drawing on recent critical debates on modes of reading, she argues that Shakespeare uses Lavinia’s character – and the performing body of the actor – to critique particular kinds of reading and, instead, connect reading more directly with the highly embodied experience of early modern playgoing. The final section of this collection examines performance and adaptation to consider the ways in which modern productions and adaptations take into account the performance

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of violence and tragic consequence. Ralph Alan Cohen begins with the notion that Titus is one of the plays of Shakespeare that explores the nature of the theatrical experience and challenges its limits. He argues that all Shakespeare’s plays are about plays; some are about theatre not because they do or do not mention it, but because they test the limits of the theatrical project and in particular challenge the power of an audience to function as part of the performance. What Cohen argues is that Titus is the play that transgresses theatrical limits by what it makes visible, repeatedly forcing an audience to see things on stage – amputations, self-­mutilation, miscegenation, torture, ‘human pies’, and arrows flying out at a crowded theatre – that discomfort them, not only because of the indecorous matter of those things but also because their presentation violates the normal efficiencies of staging. The play thus adds an audience’s unconscious awareness of the physical work of putting on a play to their conscious response to the violation of norms in its narrative, and in doing so it doubly risks itself and – in terms of the audience’s sensations – doubly succeeds. Cohen’s chapter attempts to track these moral and theatrical violations and invents a ‘Dual Transgression Meter’ to do so. This ‘meter’ suggests the degree to which Shakespeare at the beginning of his career was already delighted in pushing theatrical boundaries. Exploring Shakespeare’s Senecan source to examine the tragedy’s appropriation by the animated television programme South Park, Lizz Angello suggests that the cartoon villain, Eric Cartman, succeeds as a revenger where his literary forebears had failed. In a narrative environment that strives for originality and dominance, Seneca’s Atreus fulfils his family curse and the wishes of an ancestral ghost rather than his own violent desires; similarly, Shakespeare’s Titus voluntarily sublimates his personal drive for vengeance to the needs of Rome and his family. Cartman, by contrast, follows no script, pursues no agenda, and acts on no impulse other than his own. Because Titus invests so heavily in the interrogation and demolition of boundaries, it follows that the play’s descendants would also

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play with the concept of demarcation. South Park presents us with perhaps the most unbounded example because of its unique cultural and historical moment, which fuels Cartman’s independence and success as the embodiment of American values stretched to their outermost limits. In the final chapter of this collection, Emma Whipday considers landmark productions by Peter Brook (1955) and Deborah Warner (1987), and Julie Taymor’s groundbreaking film adaptation Titus (1999), to show how the perception of Titus as unperformable has been challenged by a spate of innovative and discomforting productions. Whipday notes trends in recent productions of the play: Lucy Bailey’s Shakespeare’s Globe production in 2006; Yukio Ninagawa’s Noh-­influenced staging in 2006; Bailey’s revival in 2014; the cross-­gender Taffety Punk Theatre Company (2013); Smooth Faced Gentlemen (2015) productions; and Dundee Rep’s re-­ imagining in a contemporary Roman restaurant (2015). Whipday explores how Taymor’s film has reconfigured recent theatrical approaches to the generic instability, meta-­ theatricality and sensational and sexualized violence of this notoriously ‘difficult’ play and examines the ways in which cross-­gender casting, meta-­theatrical framing devices and ‘contemporary’ settings engage with and problematize Shakespeare’s exploration of sexual violence as at once speakable and unsayable, visible and unperformed. She then demonstrates the extent to which these productions participate in wider cultural conversations about sexual, familial and political violence in popular and ‘high’ culture, from Game of Thrones to Jamie Lloyd’s 2016 Faustus, interrogating the place of Titus Andronicus in today’s theatrical, televisual and cinematic landscape. All the chapters in this volume showcase the current state of play in Shakespeare criticism: from critical race theory to a feminist phenomenological enquiry to performance criticism. This collection of essays on Titus Andronicus means to consider the play in its generic context, examining style and sources, but more importantly the politics of race and the

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traumatized female body at the centre of the play. This volume also highlights the play’s celebrated revival on stage and, through adaptation, speaks to its evolving status as one of Shakespeare’s most important tragedies.

Notes 1 See Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate, revised edition, Arden Shakespeare (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), Introduction, pp. 130–6. 2 Philip C. Kolin, ‘Introduction’, Titus Andronicus: Critical Essays, ed. Philip C. Kolin (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1995), p. 19. 3 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/william-­shakespeare/ 10798599/Globe-­audience-faints-­at-grotesquely-­violent-TitusAndronicus.html accessed 4 December 2017. 4 https://stratfordobserver.co.uk/news/shakespeare-­still-shocks-­ research-reveals-2976/ accessed 4 December 2017. 5 Significantly, Act 3, Scene 2 of Titus is only printed in the Folio text. According to Jonathan Bate, it ‘has all the marks of an addition to the action’; this has led some to question the authorship of the scene, but, Bate continues, ‘its consistency of style with the rest . . . leaves little doubt that it is by Shakespeare’ (Introduction, p. 116).

PART ONE

Genre, style and sources

1 Senecan belatedness and Titus Andronicus Curtis Perry

It was not all that long ago that Titus Andronicus was thought to be (in Edward Ravenscroft’s memorable formulation) an ‘indigested piece’ of Shakespearean juvenilia.1 Ironically, since Ravenscroft responds in part to the play’s obtrusive literary borrowing, this turn of phrase seems to have been derived from Ovid’s description of primeval chaos as an unrefined and indigested mass (‘rudis indigestaque moles’) near the beginning of the Metamorphoses: the play is seen as being chaotic in an Ovidian sense, unshaped by the mature hand of the bard.2 The irony of Ravenscroft using an Ovidian metaphor to criticize Titus for its undigested-­seeming use of classical texts underscores the fact that Roman literature, in addition to providing early modern writers with a set of culturally authoritative models to imitate, also provided them with models for thinking about imitation and invention. Roman writers like Virgil, Ovid and Seneca provided matter, but they were also understood as theorists of imitation and cultural transmission. In Elizabethan England, therefore, the association of such writers’ texts with questions about

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imitation and translatio imperii could become complex and recursive. Nowadays, thanks to scholars like Jonathan Bate and Heather James (and many others too, of course), we tend to think that Titus Andronicus is designed as ‘a complex and self-­ conscious improvisation upon classical sources’.3 But we should remember, too, that the postmodern-­seeming sophistication we have come to discover in Titus’ allusive texture owes something to the Augustan and post-Augustan Roman literature that Shakespeare and/or Peele drew upon.4 It is not only the case that brilliant, modern-­minded Elizabethans put Roman sources in relation to one another in interesting ways; Roman sources are themselves already involved in a sophisticated intertextual conversation with one another about imitation, citation and Romanitas. This proposition, in turn, invites a re-­examination of the question of Senecan tragedy’s importance for Titus Andronicus. For while Seneca has typically been subordinated to Ovid in discussions of the play’s sources – for good reason, since Metamorphoses is the book that characters within the play use to make sense of its pattern of rape and cannibal banquet – Senecan tragedy thematizes literary belatedness in a distinctive manner that informs Titus Andronicus’ obsessively allusive construction. In relation to a play that is both about cannibalism and obsessed with citation and allusion, Ravenscroft’s ‘indigested’ also (perhaps unwittingly) evokes another classical topos, one associating the smooth operation of literary influence with the healthy consumption and digestion of food. The locus classicus for this metaphor, a commonplace in early modern discussions of literary imitation, is Seneca’s Epistle 84, where the ability to create something new out of one’s reading is compared to the way humans digest food: Quod in corpore nostro videmus sine ulla opera nostra facere naturam: alimenta, quae accepimus, quamdiu in sua qualitate perdurant et solida innatant stomacho, onera sunt; at cum ex eo, quod erant, mutata sunt, tum demum in vires

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et in sanguinem transeunt. Idem in his, quibus aluntur ingenia, praestemus, ut quaecumque hausimus, non patiamur integra esse, ne aliena sint. Concoquamus illa; alioqui in memoriam ibunt, non in ingenium. This is what we see nature doing in our own bodies without any labour on our part; the food we have eaten, as long as it retains its original quality and floats in our stomachs as an undiluted mass, is a burden; but it passes into tissue and blood only when it has been changed from its original form. So it is with the food which nourishes our higher nature, – we should see to it that whatever we have absorbed should not be allowed to remain unchanged, or it will be no part of us. We must digest it; otherwise it will merely enter the memory and not the reasoning power.5 To see the play as ‘indigested’ in this sense is to understand its obsessive allusiveness as a sign of its authors’ failure to transform or subsume received material into a new, organic corpus. Titus Andronicus is, among other things, a play about indigestion (in a Senecan sense) as a metaphor for the problematics of cultural transmission.6 I want to argue here that Shakespeare and/or Peele draw upon Seneca not only for motifs, plot devices and quotations but also for a set of ideas about belatedness and allusion that pervade the play and contribute centrally to its sophisticated, pessimistic and, above all, citational evocation of Rome.7 To make this case is to build upon a suggestion that Alessandro Schiesaro put forward some time ago now, namely that ‘the strong meta-theatrical component of Titus is . . . inspired by Seneca rather than Ovid’.8 My argument is not that we should be thinking of Seneca instead of Ovid, but rather that the self-­consciousness about belatedness that shapes Titus Andronicus’ use of Roman cultural authority owes something to the palimpsestic texture of the Senecan dramatic text and to the way Seneca’s tragedies

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themselves thematize belatedness in relation to Virgil and Ovid.9 *  *  * Atreus – the outsized revenger of Seneca’s Thyestes – models his crime, as does Titus, on the precedent of Ovid’s Procne. Early in Thyestes we are told that Atreus’ crime will be like Procne’s, but ‘performed with larger numbers’ (‘fiat . . . maiore numero’).10 Later, as Atreus casts about for a suitably over-­the-top crime, he too finds precedent in Procne’s cannibal banquet:    vidit infandas domus Odrysia mensas – fateor, immane est scelus, sed occupatum: maius hoc aliquid dolor inveniat. animum Daulis inspira parens sororque; causa est similis: assiste et manum impelle nostram. liberos avidus pater gaudensque laceret et suos artus edat. bene est, abunde est: hic placet poenae modus tantisper. The Odrysian house [i.e., the Tracian house, the house of Procne and Tereus] saw an unspeakable feast – that crime is monstrous, admittedly, but already taken. My bitterness must find something greater than this. Breathe your spirit into me, you Daulian mother and sister [Procne and Philomela]: our cause is comparable. Stand by me, drive my hand. Let the father rend his children avidly, gleefully, and eat his own flesh. This is good, this is ample. This measure of revenge pleases me – for the present. (272–80) This is a complicated, recursive moment, as R. J. Tarrant notes: ‘in his overt awareness of the Procne-Tereus story, and

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particularly in his desire to surpass it, [Atreus] resembles Seneca himself in his relationship to Ovid’.11 Atreus’ train of thought here moves, jarringly, from rejecting Procne’s crime as already taken to finding the inspiration in it for his own revenge. Like Titus, Atreus seeks to be ‘worse than Progne’ (5.2.195), and Seneca too is writing in an explicitly belated relation to Ovid.12 Thyestes offers a classical model in which a character’s pursuit of revenge is doubled by a sense of authorial belatedness vis-à-­vis Ovid. Seneca, writing as a philosopher in the Epistles, is optimistic about our capacity to digest our reading and transform it into something organic and original. But Thyestes – with its poetics of indigestion – explores something more like an oedipal anxiety of influence.13 ‘A poet’, as Harold Bloom once put it, ‘is not so much a man speaking to men as a man rebelling against being spoken to by a dead man.’14 This formulation doubles as a neat account of what happens in Thyestes.15 The dead man in Seneca’s play is Tantalus, Atreus’ ancestor, whose shade is sent ‘like some dread exhalation from a fissure in the earth’ (‘ut dirus vapor / tellure rupta’ (87–8)) to revisit the family curse upon Atreus and Thyestes. In this sense, the crime that Atreus later commits – murdering Thyestes’ children and feeding them to him – is already a re-­enactment even without Procne. Tantalus, whose attempt to feed his son Pelops to the gods inaugurated the family’s unfortunate propensity for cannibal banquets, is forced by a Fury to re-­enter the world of the living as both the carrier and the embodiment of his family’s insatiable bloodthirstiness. At first, he resists the Fury’s injunction, but then he is made to give in: Tantali Umbra: [. . .] Quid ora terres verbere et tortos ferox minaris angues? quid famem infixam intimis agitas medullis? flagrat incensum siti cor et perustis flamma visceribus micat. sequor. Furia: Hunc, hunc furorem divide in totam domum

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Tantalus: . . . Why do you menace my face with your whip and threaten me fiercely with entwined snakes? Why do you rouse the hunger set in my bones marrow? My heart is fired and ablaze with thirst, and lames dart through my burnt flesh. I follow! Fury: Distribute this very frenzy throughout the house! (96–101) Tantalus thus delivers a frenzy that is both his and not his (because it comes from the Fury as well as from his own characteristic hunger); and Atreus’ passionate violence is likewise both his own and not his own (because it is at once heartfelt and caused by the infusion of Tantalus into the world of the play). The poet, in this case, is Atreus himself, the evil genius who presides as the play’s main creative engine in Acts 2 to 5. In referring to Atreus as a poet, I am again echoing Schiesaro, who describes Atreus as ‘a gifted poet’ because so much of the play’s tension is metadramatic, wrapped up in Atreus’ struggle to create a suitable revenge plot and in his ability to impose the play of his own devising upon other characters.16 Atreus, the poet, can be said to rebel against being spoken to by Tantalus, the dead man, not because of any moral hesitation to commit the crime caused by Tantalus’ return, but rather because the pursuit of radical autonomy is so central to the project that Atreus is embarked upon. Atreus’ is a drama of self-­assertion; when the enormity of his crime makes the sun go black at the beginning of Act 5, his triumph has everything to do with his desire to monopolize agency in the world of the play: ‘I discharge the gods’ (‘dimitto superos’ (888)). This moment, as Gordon Braden describes it, is characteristic of Senecan drama in that Atreus strives ‘to take a fantasy of individual autonomy beyond almost any kind of limit’.17 Atreus’ eerie triumph is for Braden characteristic of Senecan drama’s interest in ‘heroic evil’ as ‘the ultimate autarceia, enforcing and exploiting a radical split between the self’s needs and the claims of its context’.18

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This triumphant brand of autonomy is at odds with the idea that the whole action is caused from without by Tantalus. Seneca is centrally interested in this tension between autonomy and self-­assertion, on the one hand, and pre-­scriptedness or belatedness, on the other. This is also epitomized by the fact that Atreus murders his nephews in a manner that perfectly mimics the ritual of animal sacrifice: ‘every part of the ritual is kept, to ensure that such an outrage is performed by the rules’ (‘servatur omnis ordo, ne tantum nefas / non rite fiat’ (689– 90)). The murders re-­enact or parody social norms associated with piety even as they seek to violate all boundaries and to assert Atreus’ unfettered, autonomous will.19 Atreus as a character is primarily defined by the drive to escape contingency and to assert referential priority, be it over his family history, over nature, over the gods, over cultural models, or over Ovid. But he is also surrounded, in the play, by intimations of belatedness: in relation to Ovid’s Procne, to Tantalus, who embodies the family curse and is himself a figure for endless repetition, and to the pre-­existing culture whose sacrificial rituals he simultaneously enacts and subverts. This dialectic lies at the core of Seneca’s peculiar dramaturgy. Early modern plays are more complexly plotted than Roman tragedy, but there is something comparable going on in the way Titus Andronicus stages its revenge plot as a contest over referential priority waged in relation to authoritative Roman pretexts. A striking example is the way Tamora seems to invent ex nihilo the Senecan pit which becomes the centrepiece of the play’s Ovidian woods in Act  2. Tamora seems to conjure up this pit as a Senecan correlative to the violence that will be carried out in and around it: These two have ’ticed me hither to this place: A barren detested vale you see it is; The trees, though summer, yet forlorn and lean, O’ercome with moss and baleful mistletoe; Here never shines the sun, here nothing breeds Unless the nightly owl or fatal raven.

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And when they showed me this abhorred pit, They told me here at dead time of the night A thousand fiends, a thousand hissing snakes, Ten thousand swelling toads, as many urchins, Would make such fearful and confused cries As any mortal body hearing it Should straight fall mad, or else die suddenly. No sooner had they told this hellish tale, But straight they told me they would bind me here Unto the body of a dismal yew And leave me to this miserable death. (2.2.92–108) Tamora’s vivid improvisation is indebted to Senecan loca horrida, and especially to the barren vale (‘valle’) in which Atreus murders his nephews: arcana in imo regio secessu iacet, alta vetustum valle compescens nemus, penetrale regni, nulla qua laetos solet praebere ramos arbor aut ferro coli, sed taxus et cupressus et nigra ilice obscura nutat silva, quam supra eminens despectat alte quercus et vincit nemus. [. . .] hinc nocte caeca gemere ferales deos fama est, catenis lucus excussis sonat ululantque manes. quidquid audire est metus illic videtur. errat antiquis vetus emissa bustis turba et insultant loco maiora notis monstra. quin tota solet micare silva flamma, et excelsae trabes ardent sine igne. saepe latratu nemus trino remugit, saepe simulacris domus attonita magnis. nec dies sedat metum: nox propria luco est, et superstitio inferum in luce media regnat.

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At the farthest and lowest remove [within Atreus’ citadel] there lies a secret area that confines an age-­old woodland in a deep vale – the inner sanctum of the realm. There are no trees here such as stretch out healthy branches and are tended with the knife, but yews and cypresses and a darkly stirring thicket of black ilex, above which a towering oak looks down from its height and masters the grove . . . Here in blind darkness rumour has it that death gods groan; the grove resounds to the rattling of chains, and ghosts howl. Anything fearful to hear can be seen there. A hoary crowd walks abroad, released from their ancient tombs, and things more monstrous than any known caper about the place. In addition, flames repeatedly flicker throughout the wood, and lofty tree trunks burn without fire. Often the grove booms with threefold barking, often the house is awed by huge apparitions. Daytime does not allay the fear: the grove has a night all its own, and an eerie sense of the underworld reigns in broad daylight.20 (650–79) Shakespeare (who wrote this scene) has Tamora draw on Seneca here in part because of the way the womb/tomb/pit at the heart of the play becomes associated with the battle over referential priority as part and parcel of the play’s recurring violence.21 There is a similarly uncanny quality to the way the framing stories of Lucrece and Philomela are invoked by Aaron (at 1.1.607 and 2.2.43 respectively) before the rape of Lavinia and then used subsequently by others to make sense of what has happened (e.g., 2.3.26–43, 3.1.299, 4.1.42–58, 4.1.89–94). These moments contribute to one’s sense that the physical horrors staged in the play are always imagined simultaneously in terms of a meta-­theatrical battle over control of the deployment and meaning of allusion. Publius’ improvised early reaction to Titus’ madness – ‘Pluto sends you word / If you will have Revenge from hell, you shall’ (4.3.38–9) – seems to anticipate, and so perhaps to conjure, the action of 5.2,

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where Tamora comes to Titus dressed as ‘Revenge, sent from below’ (5.2.3). Part of what makes Titus Andronicus read like a poststructuralist pastiche is the way its characters seem so frequently to cite classical pretexts that then, uncannily, are concretized and re-­enacted as real within the space of the play. The puckishness with which Titus stage-­manages the denouement of his revenge plot owes something to Atreus’ own darkly comic joking during his cannibal banquet (‘I shall show you shortly the faces you long for’, Atreus tells Thyestes as the latter eats, ‘and give the father his fill of his own dear throng’ (‘ora quae exoptas dabo / totumque turba iam sua implebo patrem’) (978–9)). Part of what makes Titus’ playfulness so upsetting is its sadism, the pleasure he seems to take in the fulfilment of his plans. His pleasure is associated with closure, with the successful re-­enactment of the Ovidian model. But Titus’ tone of comic grotesquerie also signals, via the embrace of radical dramatic indecorum, an improvisational freedom from prior narrative prescription. We might feel, at this point, that Titus has emerged victorious from his Senecan struggle (with Tamora and with Ovid) for referential priority, and that he has fashioned his own story out of – and as a parody of – the intertexts of Rome. And yet whatever grotesque triumph is implied by Titus’ ability to wrest control over the insistent Ovidian pre-­text is ironized by the way the most horrifying moments of the revenge plot’s denouement are written, like a romantic comedy, in rhyme. From the moment when Titus murders his daughter Lavinia (Saturninus: ‘What hast thou done, unnatural and unkind?’ Titus: ‘Killed her for whom my tears have made me blind’ (5.3.47–8)), Titus’ plot unspools with the inhuman rhythms of farce; we get the revelation of cannibalism and then three other deaths (Titus kills Tamora, Saturninus kills Titus) in about twenty lines of rhyming verse culminating in Lucius’ murder of Saturninus: ‘Can the son’s eye behold his father bleed? / There’s meed for meed, death for a deadly deed’ (5.3.64–5). The decision to compose this portion of the play in rhyme is obviously meant to heighten the scene’s indecorum.

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But rhyme also binds characters into a larger language game, indicating that the utterances of characters are determined by the machine of the story as much as by the hearts and minds of individual speaking agents. There is something intentionally paradoxical, oxymoronic even, about putting an act of what Braden might call ‘heroic evil’ into rhyme within a Shakespearean tragedy. Titus’ triumph is thus made to be a bit like Atreus’ ritually pre-­scripted human sacrifice in Act 4 of Thyestes. In each case, a violent crime designed as an extreme act of self-­assertion is presented to us in such a way as to undercut and so ironize the very self-­assertion implicit in the act itself. Robert Miola, whose study of Seneca’s influence upon Shakespeare remains our most thorough and even-­handed discussion of the subject, focuses on the differences between ‘Atreus’ weird ritual and Titus’ mad cookery’, noting that Seneca’s cannibal banquet is dilated and drawn out while Shakespeare’s handling of similar material is hyper-­compacted.22 And yet the two plays may be getting at something similar nevertheless. Atreus protracts the cannibal banquet and his brother’s discovery of its true nature for as long as possible in order to sustain a sense of complete triumph that he knows, at some level, can only be fleeting. He is, after all, only copying Procne. Titus, whose sense of belatedness vis-à-­vis Procne is itself (I am suggesting) belated, is not even allowed to exult. Instead, Shakespeare’s banquet scene – a re-­enactment of a re-­enactment, cannibalizing a literary act of cannibalism – is staged in such a way as to emphasize the absurdity of its hero’s attempt at heroic evil. *  *  * Seneca’s fascination with literary belatedness is connected – in his tragedies – with a pessimistic, counter-Virgilian idea of Roman culture as both a site of contested reappropriation and the trigger for regressive violence. R. J. Tarrant, Thyestes’ most distinguished modern editor, notes that Seneca’s vivid account of Atreus’ palace (641ff) draws upon a Virgilian passage

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(Aeneid, 7.170–91) which was in turn thought in antiquity to have been modelled upon the palace of Augustus on the Palatine Hill.23 But Atreus is a nightmare figuration of Roman absolutism, and the secret grove at the heart of Atreus’ Virgilian/Augustan palace is also where his violent re-­ enactment occurs.24 The play’s intertwined motifs of belated citation, cannibalism and repetition can be read as a rebuke to an epic model of cultural transmission, associated with Virgil, in which progress is associated with the subsuming and transcending of the past. The Senecan style of belatedness I have been discussing in Titus works in this way too, as a counter-Virgilian model of cultural transmission that helps disrupt the optimistic Virgilian idea of Rome with which the play opens. The early association of Titus Andronicus (‘surnamed Pius’ (1.1.23)) with Aeneas evokes a Virgilian ethos, which in turn frames the play’s action in relation to a teleologically progressive, imperial vision of Rome.25 This coincides with the exemplary timelessness initially associated with the ‘monument of the Andronici’ (1.1.36), where virtuous Romans (and Roman virtues) remain ‘in store’ (1.1.97) forever. To lie within the walls of this monument, as Marcus suggests, is to ‘sleep in fame’ (1.1.176). As he lays his sons to rest, Titus describes their secure repose in language that is reminiscent (as Jonathan Bate has suggested) of a stoic-­sounding choral ode from Seneca’s Agamemnon, in which a group of displaced Trojan women welcome ‘death’s freedom’ as ‘a tranquil harbour of eternal calm’ free from the perils of the unstable world they have experienced.26 With the sacrifice of Alarbus ‘ad manes fratrum’ (1.1.101), the play veers into the territory of Seneca’s Troades, a play that obsessively undermines Virgilian optimism about progress and empire. When the monument of the Andronici becomes the site of human sacrifice, Seneca’s play (staged around burial mounds, thematizing human sacrifice, and everywhere concerned with the regressive pull of past violence) becomes a key thematic and atmospheric intertext.27 Troades, like

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Thyestes, is about repetition and regression, and the allusive juxtaposition of Virgilian and Senecan versions of the Troy legend, in the intertextual imagination of Titus’ first act, is suggestive: Seneca’s tragedy rewrites the Virgilian framing of the matter of Troy by emphasizing the impossibility of breaking free of the violence of an entangling past. The sacrifice of Alarbus revises the play’s Virgilian triumphalism via its re-­enactment of the sacrificial violence that lies at the centre of Seneca’s Troades. As Miola puts it, ‘the parallel here lies not merely in recurrences of commonplaces, but in the portrayal of the dead as an eerie and demanding presence among the living’.28 Troades also lies behind Tamora’s pleading for the life of her son, which has a resonant counterpart in the exchange, at the centre of Seneca’s play, in which Andromache implores Ulysses to spare the life of Astyanax, who has been marked for sacrifice by the Greeks: miserere matris et preces placidus pias patiensque recipe, quoque te celsum altius superi levarunt, mitius lapsos preme: misero datur quodcumque, Fortunae datur. sic te revisat coniugis sanctae torus, annosque, dum te recipit, extendat suos Laerta; sic te iuvenis excipiat tuus, et vota vincens vestra felici indole aetate avum transcendat, ingenio patrem. miserere matris: unicum afflictae mihi solamen hic est. Pity a mother; receive kindly and patiently my prayers of motherly love. The higher the gods have exalted your lofty station, the more gently you should tread on the fallen; gifts to the wretched are gifts to Fortune. So may your chaste wife’s bed behold you once again, and Laertes lengthen his years until he receives you home; so may that young man of yours welcome you, and exceeding your hopes in his natural gifts may he surpass his grandfather’s

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years and his father’s intellect. Pity a mother: my sole comfort in distress is this boy. (694–704) Later, when the execution of Astyanax by the Greeks is described, Andromache asks ‘what nomad Scythian perpetrated this?’ (‘quis sedis incertae Scytha / commisit?’ (1104–5)). Tamora’s speech is not a direct adaptation of Andromache’s, but in the context of a play that is concerned with Virgilian Romanitas, the matter of Troy and human sacrifice as a trigger for recurring violence, the parallel seems important nevertheless: Stay, Roman brethren, gracious conqueror Victorious Titus, rue the tears I shed, A mother’s tears in passion for her son! And if thy sons were ever dear to thee, O, think my son to be as dear to me. Sufficeth not that we are brought to Rome To beautify thy triumphs, and return Captive to thee and to thy Roman yoke? But must my sons be slaughtered in the streets For valiant doings in their country’s cause? O, if to fight for king and commonweal Were piety in thine, it is in these. Andronicus, stain not thy tomb with blood. Wilt thou draw near the nature of the gods? Draw near them then in being merciful. Sweet mercy is nobility’s true badge: Thrice noble Titus, spare my first-­born son. (1.1.107–22) When Titus (like Ulysses) refuses mercy, Chiron, like Andromache before him, exclaims ‘Was never Scythia half so barbarous!’ (1.1.134).29 There is some deliberate irony to the fact that Titus, who insistently styles himself according to the model of the Trojan

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Aeneas, should play the role of implacable murderer that is associated, in Seneca, with Troy’s Greek oppressors, and that Tamora should be associated in Act  1 with both Hecuba (1.1.138–44) and Andromache. I take this intertextual role-­ reversal to be deliberate because it anticipates the deconstructive movement of the play’s larger story, in which the Gothic becomes ‘incorporate in Rome’ (1.1.467) and in which the Roman turns out to be indistinguishable from the outlandish. Nevertheless, when Titus tells Tamora to be patient as her son is killed, he justifies the sacrificial murder of Alarbus by treating it as something proscribed by custom and tradition, a practice justifiable as part of ‘our Roman rites’ (1.1.146). Since human sacrifice, according to Livy anyway, was supposed to be ‘wholly alien to the Roman spirit’, this too is deconstructive in the context of the play.30 Part of what is at stake in framing the practice of human sacrifice in this manner are questions about the transmission of Roman culture for which Senecan tragedy provides an astringent alternative to Virgilian optimism. If a Virgilian, imperial perspective imagines the transmission of Roman culture as the progress of pious virtue, Seneca’s Troades focuses instead upon the way acts of violence recur. As one recent commentator puts it, ‘Troades begins at Troy’s end and relives its death; painful repetition is a dominant motif.’31 Troades, in marked contrast to Virgil’s handling of the same legendary material, emphasizes the total destruction of Troy, the repetition of senseless violence, and the inescapability of the past. This is evident at the level of plot – the victorious Greeks cannot move forward here until both Polyxena and Astyanax have been sacrificed32 – and each of the play’s episodes explores a related idea. In the play’s first narrative episode, where the ghost of Achilles demands the sacrifice of Polyxena, Seneca’s Agamemnon resists on the theory that enough blood has been shed already. But he is forced to accede to a sacrifice that is given in the play as a recurrence of both his own earlier sacrifice of Iphigeneia and of the wrath of Achilles over Briseis in the Homeric story of the Trojan War. It turns out to be impossible to avoid re-­enacting the past. In the play’s

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vivid central episode, Andromache is warned by the ghost of Hector that the Greeks will murder their son Astyanax, so she hides him in Hector’s tomb. But when Ulysses susses out her hiding place and threatens to level the tomb, she is made to see that she has no choice but to protect the past by surrendering the future.33 In the play’s finale, a messenger recounts how Greeks and Trojans alike are helpless spectators as the sacrificial violence is carried out. When Polyxena is killed on Achilles’ funeral mound, we learn that ‘the tomb swallowed and savagely drank down all the blood’ (‘obduxit statim / saevusque totum sanguinem tumulus bibit’ (1164–5)). This theme of repetition is doubled at the level of literary allusion in Seneca’s play, and often in relation to Virgil, whom Seneca is here especially concerned to rewrite.34 The play’s wrenching middle section, in which Andromache tries and fails to save the life of her son, is explicitly anti-Virgilian, since Hector’s dream-­vision warning to Andromache (443–60) inescapably evokes Aeneas’ dream vision of Hector in Book 2 of the Aeneid, the spectral warning which sets the foundational narrative of Rome into motion.35 Seneca’s ironic recasting of this episode does not allow for escape. Later in the same episode, Seneca’s description of Astyanax being dragged to his death by Ulysses (1088–91) intentionally parodies Aeneas’ description of pulling his son Julius out of Troy from Book 2 of the Aeneid.36 In Seneca’s play, the promise of escape (and thus of Rome) is replaced by backward-­looking, sacrificial violence. When ‘Pius’ Titus Andronicus has Alarbus sacrificed to honour his monumentalized dead, Titus Andronicus in effect takes up this tension between a Virgilian idea of cultural transmission and its Senecan rebuttal. The disturbing Senecan image of the burial mound of Achilles savagely swallowing and drinking down Astyanax’s sacrificial blood is revisited, in Act 2 of Titus, when Martius falls into the ‘detested, dark, blood-­drinking pit’ that is so central to the violence in the middle of the play (2.2.224). And again, later, first when Titus pleads with the earth to ‘refuse to drink’ his sons’ blood (3.1.22) and then when he tells Chiron

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and Demetrius of his plans to make Tamora ‘like to the earth swallow her own increase’ (5.2.190–1). This recurrence indexes the fact that the anti-Virgilian, regressive Senecan model of violence wins out in the play, structuring its pattern of violence and revenge. In Act 2, the regressive nature of this Senecan vision is staged as farce by Quintus’ inability to keep himself out of the ‘fell devouring receptacle’ (2.2. 235) into which his brother has previously fallen. His tumble into the pit is a bit of comic grotesquerie, but it also emblematizes the play’s interest in uncanny repetition, the inability to avoid the pull of the past which comes, more than any Virgilian piety, to be the trademark of its bloody, Senecan vision of Rome.

Notes 1 Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus, or, The Rape of Lavinia (London, 1687), sig. A2. 2 Quoted from the Loeb Classical Library edition of Ovid: Metamorphoses, Books I–VIII (1916; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 1.7. On Ravenscroft’s Ovidian language, see John W. Velz, ‘Topoi in Edward Ravenscroft’s Indictment of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus’, Modern Philology, 83(1) (1985): 45–50. 3 I quote from Bate’s edition of Titus Andronicus (revised edition, London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 3. I use this text in what follows, and subsequent citations will be parenthetical. See also James, Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 4 Since the publication of Brian Vickers’ Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), most scholars have seen Shakespeare and Peele as having collaborated on Titus Andronicus. Jonathan Bate, however, in the revised edition of his influential Arden third edition of the play, suggests that co-­authorship might just as well have taken other forms, if Shakespeare revised or finished something Peele had written earlier (130–7). The formulation here is meant to be as open-­ended as possible concerning the range of

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authorial relationships: the focus of my essay is to recover some of what Senecan drama offered to early modern dramatists, not to weigh in on differences between Peele and Shakespeare. 5 Seneca: Epistles 66–92, trans. Richard M. Gummere (1920; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 84.5–7. On this epistle, see also Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 72–6; Greene discusses the persistence into the Renaissance of this digestive metaphor for imitation at, e.g., 98–9. 6 On imitation and/as cannibalism in Seneca, Ovid and Titus, see also the smart, useful discussion in Helen Slaney, The Senecan Aesthetic: A Performance History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 54–61. See also the sharp, concise discussion of Senecan intertextuality (and of Seneca’s ‘appetite to compete with Ovid’ (213)) in Emma Buckley’s overview of ‘Senecan Tragedy’ for A Companion to the Neronian Age, ed. Buckley and Martin T. Dinter (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 204–24. 7 For a thorough résumé of Senecan borrowings in Titus, see Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Influence of Seneca (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 11–32. See also Michael Pincombe, ‘Classical and Contemporary Sources of the “Gloomy Woods” of Titus Andronicus: Ovid, Seneca, Spenser’, in John Batchelor, Tom Cain and Claire Lamont (eds), Shakespearean Continuities: Essays in Honour of E. A. J. Honingmann (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), 40–55; Niall Rudd, ‘Titus Andronicus: The Classical Presence’, Shakespeare Survey, 55 (2002): 199–208; and Pramit Chaudhuri, ‘Classical Quotation in Titus Andronicus’, ELH, 81 (2014): 787–810. 8 Schiesaro, The Passions in Play: Thyestes and the Dynamics of Senecan Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 70 n.1. 9 The idea of Senecan drama as palimpsestic is borrowed from A. J. Boyle’s Tragic Seneca: An Essay in the Theatrical Tradition (London: Routledge, 1997). See also C. A. J. Littlewood, Self-Representation and Illusion in Senecan Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) and Christopher V. Trinacty, Senecan Tragedy and the Reception of Augustan Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

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10 My text for Seneca’s plays is the Loeb Classical Library edition of Seneca’s Tragedies, ed. and trans. John G. Fitch, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002–2004). I here quote from lines 56–7. Subsequent citations will be given parenthetically by line number. 11 Tarrant (ed.), Seneca’s Thyestes (1985; Atlanta: Scholar Press, 1998), 130. 12 On Seneca’s reworking of Ovid here, see also Littlewood, Self-Representation, 128, and Schiesaro, Passions in Play, 179–80. 13 The relationship between Seneca’s philosophical and dramatic writings has been the subject of considerable controversy. I find useful Erik Gunderson’s argument that the plays ‘can be read as places where key themes are subjected to thought experiments’ (The Sublime Seneca: Ethics, Literature, Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 105). 14 Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 19. 15 On Senecan authorship and Bloom’s anxiety of influence, compare Boyle, Tragic Seneca, 112, and Littlewood, SelfRepresentation, 105. 16 Schiesaro, Passions in Play, 1. 17 Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger’s Privilege (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 57. 18 Braden, Renaissance Tragedy, 47. 19 Compare John Kerrigan’s reading of Atreus’ slaughter as a parodic oath-­sacrifice in Shakespeare’s Binding Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 48–51. 20 This hidden vale also shares several features with the grove (‘lucus’) in Seneca’s Oedipus (530ff) where Tiresias summons Laius and other underworld shades from a chasm or pit. Tamora’s invention about ‘hissing snakes’ may owe something to the emergence there of ‘the whole snaky brood’ (‘omne vipereum genus’ (587)) of shades sown from serpent teeth by Cadmus. On Seneca’s baleful landscapes, see Alessandro Schiesaro, ‘A Dream Shattered? Pastoral Anxieties in Senecan Drama’, in Marco Fantuzzi and Theodore Papanghelis (eds), Brill’s Companion to Greek and Latin Pastoral (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 427–49.

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21 On the pit’s Senecan provenance, see especially Pincombe, ‘Classical and Contemporary Sources’. Compare Schiesaro, Passions in Play, 88–9. Andrew J. Power argues that the tradition of Senecan tragedy is powerfully associated with infernal spaces under the stage in English drama generally; see his ‘What the Hell is Under the Stage? Trapdoor Use in the English Senecan Tradition’, English, 60 (2011): 276–96. 22 Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy, 29. 23 Tarrant (ed.), Thyestes, 183. 24 Compare Schiesaro on the anti-Virgilian manner in which Thyestes resists closure (Passions in Play, 188–90). 25 James, in Shakespeare’s Troy, shows how Titus’ Ovidian strains contaminate the play’s Virgilian frame (42–84). In this regard, Senecan allusion works in alongside the Ovidian contamination that James describes. 26 ‘miseros libera mors vocet, / portus aeterna placidus quiete’ (591–2). See Bate (ed.), Titus Andronicus, 30–1. 27 See Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy, 18–22: Miola notes that Troades ‘informs the symbolic design of Titus Andronicus’, with its emphasis on the tomb as ‘a locus for action’ and as a ‘resonant symbol of devouring death’ (20). More recently, see also Kerrigan, Shakespeare’s Binding Language, 58. 28 Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy, 20. 29 See also Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy, 19, and Rudd, ‘Classical Presence’, 200. 30 ‘minime Romano sacro’ (Livy: History of Rome, Books 21–22, trans. B. O. Foster (1929; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 22.57.6). Human sacrifice, crucially, would have been understood as something that both is and is not Roman. This is taken up as a paradox in Plutarch’s Roman Questions 83, and Virgil’s Aeneas is shown ready to sacrifice captives of war in the Aeneid (10.510–20, 11.59–99). On the latter, see, e.g., S. Faron, ‘Aeneas’ Human Sacrifice’, Acta Classica, 28 (1985): 21–33. 31 Littlewood, Self-Representation, 90. 32 On this surprising double demand, see Schiesaro, Passions in Play, 193.

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33 On this episode, compare Mairéad McAuley, Reproducing Rome: Motherhood in Virgil, Ovid, Seneca, and Statius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 280–94. 34 See Boyle (ed.), Seneca’s Troades (Leeds: Francis Cairns, 1994), 24–30. 35 See Elaine Fantham (ed.), Seneca’s Troades (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 279–83, and Boyle (ed.), Troades, 180–1. 36 Boyle (ed.), Troades, 226.

2 Titus Andronicus Elizabethan classicism and the styles of new tragedy Goran Stanivukovic

More than any other play in the Shakespearean canon, Titus Andronicus has provoked diametrically opposed responses from critics. In particular, the play’s language and style have been at the crux of criticism ranging from enthusiasm to castigation. Successful in its own time, the play was remembered well over twenty years after its first performance. Ben Jonson’s ironic but not hostile comment on Titus in the Induction to Bartholomew Fair (1614) testifies to the enduring popularity of Shakespeare’s first tragedy: ‘He that will swear Jeronimo or Andronicus are the best plays yet, shall pass unexcepted at, here, as a man whose judgement shows it is constant, and hath stood still, these five and twenty, or thirty years.’1 While Jonson registers the period’s enthusiasm in the 1590s for a new tragedy inspired by Seneca, more modern critics have called Titus a ‘repugnant [and] . . . an extremely mature piece of work’,2

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regarding it a drama made of ‘elaborate rhetoric’ that produces ‘unpleasing . . . baroque . . . bloodiness’.3 Famously, if notoriously, they have also pronounced Titus to be ‘one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written’, a play full of ‘the crimes of which Seneca would never have been guilty’.4 Yet critics have also boldly claimed that Titus is ‘probably [Shakespeare’s] most learned play’.5 The learnedness of the play has encouraged poststructuralist critics to examine how extreme emotions, sexual violence and historical narrative are crafted through the styles and formal devices deriving from neoclassical Elizabethan learning of rhetoric and Latin literature, especially Ovid and Cicero.6 Consequently, a persistent critical view that Titus is a heavily rhetorical play, ‘stocked to the brim with loud and long declamations’,7 and the emphasis on the bombastic has connected the play to Robert Greene’s vitriolic attack on the rhetoric heard on the auricular stage in the early 1590s, Greene’s Groat’s-worth of Wit (1592). Greene takes issue with ‘an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers . . . [who] supposes that he is well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-­scene in the country’.8 Critics have suggested that this reference is an allusion to Shakespeare, because of the inferred pun on his name, and they have argued that this allusion implies that Shakespeare effectively aped the style of his contemporaries. Others have suggested that this reference ‘means simply that actors are unfairly given the credit that ought to go to the author of the words they speak’,9 that actors gain success on the ingratitude they show towards playwrights,10 and that Greene may even ‘be alluding, however obliquely, to Shakespeare’s use of Peele’s partial script’11 in the play’s first act. Any or none of these critical speculations may be completely true. Yet what appears to be the case is that Greene draws attention to rhetoric in shaping ideas dramatically while also highlighting the competitiveness of the theatre marketplace in early 1590s London. Titus, most recently dated at ‘late 1589’,12 is one of the earliest plays in the Shakespearean canon,

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and with it Shakespeare found himself in the thick of this competition. The study of style is affected by debates about the authorship of Titus Andronicus, though not, as I argue, in ways that restrict this analysis. From a belief that the play ‘is deeply Shakespearean’,13 to an argument about George Peele’s authorship of 1.1, 2.1 and 4.1,14 to an elaborate claim of Shakespeare’s ‘light revision’15 of the play’s opening scene, to the proposition that Thomas Middleton is the author of the ‘Fly Scene’ (3.2),16 and to a competitive argument about 4.1, ‘belong[ing] to Shakespeare’s share of the play’,17 all these theories have considered style, language and rhetoric as the starting points of analysis to differing degrees. This critical work on co-­authorship has brought into a sharper focus the claim that ‘Shakespeare’s language’ can more accurately be rethought as ‘the language used in Shakespearean text’.18 In suggesting this rephrasing, David Crystal has in mind numerous ‘variables’ which played their part in shaping the linguistic and stylistic features of Shakespeare’s texts, from internal properties of early modern English more generally to issues concerning the transformation that a play text underwent from authorial manuscript to acted or printed version. The co-­authorship argument adds to Crystal’s proposal for this rephrasing. Rather than stifling such discussions, co-­authorship debates reinvigorate criticism about style and language, encouraging us to treat co-­authorship as a creative activity that lies behind the complexity of the play’s style. Co-­authorship expands rather than limits, thickens rather than dilutes, the stylistic and linguistic fabric of a play. In a play known for its rhetorical abundance and diversity, and for the emulation of Ovid’s ‘clear-­edged style’ and ‘self-­aware rhetoric’19 in the representation of violence and suffering, two hands contributed different rhetorical features and strategies. Co-­authorship diversifies the effect produced by rhetoric. It increases the reach of thought in the play and enhances the play’s stylistic vitality. While Titus Andronicus could be said to represent ‘a type of play which was being written before 1590’,20 the

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rhetorical vivacity of its style links it more closely with the new tragedy, which became a dominant dramatic genre that developed together with the growth of London theatres in the 1590s. Shakespeare’s co-­authorship with Peele should not only be seen as reflecting the need of ‘producing material of the required standard in as short time as possible’21 to satisfy the hunger for new plays, but also as a contributing factor to creating a kind of tragedy in the new style of Elizabethan classicism. Co-­authorship expands the possibilities of stylistic analysis because it reveals a tendency to diversify the use of language. Early modern, and modern, resonant accounts show that both the power and discomfort elicited by Titus emerge from its rhetorical form primarily, not from the character and the play’s sensational plot. This is in keeping with many plays of the 1590s, such as those by Christopher Marlowe, which were remembered most for their ‘mighty’ lines. Such accounts thus acknowledge the play’s poetic energy and intellectual force, which Russ McDonald has described as the ‘verbal fireworks’ with which Titus brims.22 They also tell us that ‘the young, plastic, Shakespeare’,23 as Gladys Willcock calls the Shakespeare of the early 1590s, experimented not only with the genre of tragedy but also with the creative possibilities that elocutio, or style, afforded to dramatists. Such experimentation coincided with the debates about style that were being argued over and formalized in the rhetorical theory. In 1593, Henry Peacham’s The Garden of Eloquence was published. This was a treatise on tropes and figures framed around a discussion about the relationship between eloquence, stylistic ornamentation and ‘deep understanding’, or cognition, in the vein of Cicero’s notion rendered from Orator: ‘as wit is mans worship, or wisedome mans honor, so eloquence is the light and brightnesse of wisedome’.24 The Ciceronian style of persuasion through ornamentation, in which ornament and understanding are conjoined, lies at the heart of late Elizabethan aestheticism, which determined all genres of writing in the 1590s. The Ciceronian effect on the new aestheticism became

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the main lens through which historical, social and amorous discourses were filtered. When, in 4.1, the author invokes Tully, ‘Tully’s Orator’ (14), as recommended reading for a boy, Cicero’s influential treatise on deliberation and ornamentation features as an intertext, which gives meaning and theoretical basis to the rhetorical variety and abundance throughout Titus. This is a play in which the aesthetic tension between nature and artifice frames the narrative about heroic virtue and politics in Rome. When it comes to Roman authors, Titus is most often associated with Ovid; however, this reference to Cicero’s text, one which deeply redefined vernacular ideas about poetic writing in late Elizabethan England arguably makes Titus a Ciceronian play. It also makes it a cutting-­edge new tragedy in which ornament is itself the wisdom, thought and meaning that the play also in turn produces. Himself a product of the grammar-­school system of education in which Cicero featured prominently, Shakespeare would have been amenable to the Ciceronian idea that ornament is not merely stylistic embellishment but a vehicle of thought and a conduit to meaning. Shakespeare writes within and reacts against the Ciceronian moment in English literature. How does it work? Alone on the stage, Lucius addresses the audience, having just parted with Titus: Farewell, Andronicus, my noble father, The woefull’st man that ever lived in Rome. Farewell, proud Rome, till Lucius come again; He loves his pledges dearer than his life. Farewell, Lavinia, my noble sister, O would thou wert as thou tofore hast been! But now nor Lucius nor Lavinia lives But in oblivion and hateful griefs. If Lucius live, he will requite your wrongs . . . (3.1.289–97)25 This passage illustrates how the organization of dramatic verse can enhance the aural–oral effect of the rhetorical figures of

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repetition, figures Shakespeare frequently employs in his early drama. In this instance, symploce, a figure of repetition which George Puttenham describes as ‘a manner of repetition, when one and the self word doth begin and end many verses in suit and so wraps up the former figures in one’,26 extends its purpose beyond the original definition. ‘Wrapping around’ implies framing, containing, shaping into a form. However, Shakespeare pushes the effect of his dramatic verse beyond the poetic theory described by Puttenham. In Shakespeare’s hands, symploce is not merely a taxonomical device27 of repetition that takes on or wraps up other, simpler iterative forms, whose effects are the emphasis of an idea (parting, in this case), but it is also a figure of sound, one that enhances the effect of iteration. Marrying prosody with rhetoric, Shakespeare enriches the repetition of wrapping up lines by the iteration of ‘l’ in the end, medial and initial positions of words in each line. At the phonological level, the speech plays with the letter and sound ‘l’, and that play extends on to the semantics of the speech. The affective charge ensuing from parting is expressed in repetitive aural patterns produced by the relatively regular rhythm at which stressed and unstressed syllables create patterns. Thus, the repeated ‘l’ in ‘Farewell’ and ‘noble’ creates a sonic unit of these two words and emphasizes the nobility the speaker is parting with. Giving the central meaning to line 290, ‘woefull’ chimes with the word ‘lived’; ‘farewell’ and ‘till’ can be heard as an aural unit, but ‘till’ also emphasizes a shift in thought after the caesura, so that ‘Farewell’ in the initial position in the line is relativized by the suggestion of another thought, Lucius’ return to Rome from exile. But, then, in ‘Farewell’ the stress is on the second syllable (‘well’) which is followed by an unstressed ‘noble’; in ‘woefull’, the stress is on the first syllable (‘woe’), which is followed by a stress on the first syllable in ‘lived’. Thus, in the first two lines the pattern created by the interchange of stressed and unstressed syllables in the words are connected acoustically by the consonant ‘l’ and contains the patterns ‘unstressed followed by stressed’ and ‘stressed followed by unstressed’

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(that is, / X   X /). In the next two lines, the pattern continues: the stressed ‘well’ in ‘Farewell’ is followed by the unstressed ‘till’, which is followed by the stressed syllable ‘Lu’ in ‘Lucius’ (/ X   X /); and stressed ‘well’ in ‘Farewell Lavinia’ followed by the unstressed ‘ble’ in ‘noble’ (/ X   X /). Therefore, the first three lines are not only wrapped up, to echo Peacham’s term for describing the effect of symploce, but also signposted or marked by the repeated letter ‘l’, which varies the quality of repetition by making it a complex pattern consisting of a rhetorical figure and syllabic patterning. In marking the pattern produced by syllabic repletion using the letter ‘l’, Shakespeare makes visible as well as audible what the accentual patterns of English verse of his time required. This aural and print feature of the text speaks to readers of Shakespeare as well as audience members. By enhancing the rhythm of repetition with an additional acoustic element, Shakespeare capitalizes on his period’s acute awareness of orality. If at that moment, as Jonathan Hope has neatly summarized, ‘[w]ords were acoustic, not visual’,28 then the acoustic effect of the repetition of the words with the letter ‘l’ adds sonic quality to the blank verse, which provided audiences with the kind of aural pleasure they expected from language, especially in the visual–oral environment of the theatre. This acoustic feature of Shakespeare’s language in Titus is at once particular to his style and constituent of a cultural moment at which a word’s sound mattered as much as its meaning. Gladys Willcock has suggested that ‘From the beginning, or very nearly the beginning (if we knew when that was), Shakespeare’s “blank” lines have more promise than his rhymed ones. They have a buoyancy, a lift, which rhyme seems to peg down.’29 While Willcock does ‘not find his rhymes phonetically very rich’30 in the narrative poems, the example from Titus shows that Shakespeare has enriched his early dramatic poetry with wit, liveliness and variety. Writing for actors who would speak these words made Shakespeare mindful of the importance of the art of delivery; we can

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perhaps then regard these experiments in the early dramatic poetry as a counterpoint and an alternative to the rhyme in poetry. Puttenham instructs the poet to ‘hold in and to wrap up verses by reduplication, so as nothing can fall out’,31 and he refers to an iteration of a word. Puttenham sees virtue in symploce because the figure maintains rhetorical coherence within lines. But Shakespeare shows an awareness of the danger of monotony resulting from wrapping up lines of unrhymed blank verse with symploce only. He creates a pattern and then disrupts it; without disruption, the pattern would be monotonous, and without the pattern, the disruption would lose force and meaning. Shakespeare creates a pattern within a wrapped-­up structure, within individual lines, something that enriches the speech both acoustically and dramatically. He is both a rhetorical and anti-­rhetorical playwright: rhetorical, because he is aware of the descriptive rhetorical tradition of his time; and anti-­rhetorical, because he grasps the potential for exceeding, expanding and ultimately leaving behind such a tradition, which he uses as a springboard for creative innovation. Shakespeare’s strategy of patterning, of creating an order of repetition within a rhetorical order of iteration, is part of a larger aesthetic practice that occurred in England in the 1590s, something the architectural historian Nicholas Pevsner has described as one of the effects of humanism, ‘which spread the idea of symmetry’ as ‘really a process of ordering’. Such ordering moves beyond architecture, for one can also ‘draw a parallel also with the tidying up of metre in poetry of the sixteenth century and especially the development of so highly contrived a form as the sonnet’.32 We can entertain Pevsner’s idea that the Elizabethan cultivation of patterns and repetitions produced ‘the elementary relation of strict symmetry’33 in the sonnets by also applying that idea to Titus, a play composed at the time when sonnet writing reached its peak. Pevsner’s argument that such strict symmetry derived from a rediscovery of Roman architecture within humanism also helps us locate Titus at the centre of a dynamic and expansive Elizabethan

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experimentation with repetition, symmetry and balance. One effect of this repetition is harmony. Using repetition, Shakespeare brings to life in drama what Peacham refers to in theory as ‘the brightness of wisdom’,34 by which he means, an orator shows a deep understanding of how an artifice most effectively expresses ‘politicke considerations of wisedome’,35 or how figures shape thinking. Yet Titus offers us an opportunity to observe Shakespeare at work building his own stylistic structures on the foundation of the Elizabethan revival of Ciceronian stylistics. The play also shows how the expansive elocutionary model Shakespeare employs differs from the classical master’s doctrine with which he works. In Book III of De oratore, Crossus instructs Cotta how to amplify the effect of a persuasive speech using iteration, which actualizes and enlivens a speech dramatically: ‘there is sometimes force and in other cases charm in iteration of words, in slightly changing and altering a word, and in sometimes repeating the same word several times at the beginning of clauses and sometimes repeating the same word at their end’, a manner of speaking persuasively which Cicero calls a ‘harmonious interchange of words’.36 The Ciceronian rhetorical pattern can be seen in ‘Here lurks no treason, here no envy swells,/ Here grow no damnèd drugs, here are no storms’ (1.1.156–7). The classically educated Peele displays a textbook facility with the Ciceronian advice on iteration. In Shakespeare’s hand, however, the pattern is disrupted, the norm is broken; iteration is turned into a meaning-­producing tool; and it becomes linguistic material for the creation of aesthetic beauty, the kind of patterning practised and liked by the Elizabethans. In his elaborately argued claim for Peele’s co-­authorship of Titus, Brian Vickers puts emphasis on rhetorical figures as the distinguishing markers between the two dramatists. Vickers distinguishes Peele’s style from Shakespeare’s by separating the rhetorical figures and devices each dramatist appears to be more prone to, suggesting that Shakespeare employs hyperbole and oxymoron more often, while Peele prefers metaphor and simile. Shakespeare’s style appears to be more invested in using

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linguistic augmentation, while Peele’s is more distinguished by its ‘basically unadventurous’ diction and ‘generalized vocabulary’,37 such as that drawn from the lexicon of military and heroic endeavours. In his search for language to express violence, military heroism and its vicissitudes; to question the piety which tears apart the Renaissance world; and to put virtue and beauty under scrutiny, Shakespeare reduces the aesthetic and historical distance between late Elizabethan England and classical Rome. There have been critics, like J. C. Maxwell, who have doubted that in his earliest tragedy Shakespeare’s main concern was suiting the play to its dramatic purpose: Titus ‘is, I think, the one play of Shakespeare which could have left an intelligent contemporary in some doubt whether the author’s truest bent was for the stage, and this in spite of its superiority in sheer competence over most contemporary drama’.38 Such an attitude has a solid pedigree: Samuel Johnson thought that ‘the barbarity of the spectacles, and the general massacre which are here exhibited, can scarcely be conceived tolerable to any audience’,39 while Samuel Taylor Coleridge argued that the play’s scenes of ‘blood and horror’ were meant only for ‘vulgar audience’.40 As with Johnson’s and Coleridge’s caustic remarks, J. C. Maxwell’s observation confirms the fact that Shakespeare’s earliest plays come across as more literary than later drama, and rhetoric gives them that literariness that is, as Maxwell concludes, ‘often successful’.41 Other critics around Maxwell’s time expressed a similar view. Thus, E. M. W. Tillyard observed that the distinct quality of Titus as one of his earliest plays is its ‘academic, ambitious and masterfully planned’ form.42 As indicated in Greene’s Groats-­worth of Wit, Shakespeare displays his rhetorical fluency and ability better than the best of his contemporaries; in fact, he tailors rhetoric to dramatic purpose by tempering the Senecan eloquence that gave drama acoustic power but no flexibility of deliberation and persuasion, and by revealing how individual thought moves, how it gives plot its dynamic direction. When in Titus we hear an explicit reference to ‘Tully’s Orator’ (4.1.14), a direct reference to

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Cicero on deliberative and figurative persuasion: De oratore, a treatise that shaped grammar school education in rhetoric, Shakespeare acknowledges a new rhetorical standard for dramatic poetry. ‘One of the chief pleasures of reading Titus Andronicus’, writes Russ McDonald, ‘is that it affords the experience of watching the young Shakespeare at work’.43 As this discussion demonstrates, Titus is a new tragedy of Elizabethan classicism. It is part of the aesthetic and rhetorical trend of revivifying classicism in contemporary aesthetics, and it self-­consciously experiments with the individual properties of those aesthetics. The Ciceronianism that furnishes ornamental patterns of repetition is not the end in itself because it frames the use of enjambment by way of repetition, which reveals Shakespeare’s facility with complex figurative patterning composed not merely of phrases and clauses, but of narrative devices as well. For example, Titus pleads to the tribunes and senators on behalf of his sons: Hear me, grave fathers; noble tribunes, stay! For pity of mine age, whose youth was spent In dangerous wars whilst you securely slept; For all my blood in Rome’s great quarrel shed, For all the frosty nights that I have watched, And for these bitter tears which now you see Filling the aged wrinkles in my cheeks, Be pitiful to my condemned sons, Whose souls is not corrupted as ’tis thought. (3.1.1–9) The rhetorical architecture of this speech reveals Shakespeare’s facility with using an intricate pattern of repetition of the figure itself, and of the syntactical repetition within the figure. The speech opens with the figure known as paradigiesis (1–3), or ‘a narrative digression used to introduce one’s argument’.44 It is followed by a digression shaped in the form of conduplicatio, or a ‘repetition of a word or words in succeeding

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clauses’45 (4–6; ‘For all my blood / For all the frosty’). This is a figure that Titus, in his grandiloquent manner as someone eager to speak about his past and of his pain, is fond of using.46 This is then followed by ‘a return from digression’.47 While paradigiesis and digression enable the narrative content and structure of this part of the speech in a kind of ornament in which one form of digression (paradigiesis) is followed by a digression and a ‘return’ from it that connects lines 6–9 with paradigiesis, conduplicatio draws aural attention to digression as itself an ornament that incrusts the introductory and conclusive segments of the speech. This entire speech (1–26) is an instance of early Shakespeare’s grand style, his emotionally charged and highly metaphorical language, built on the foundation of the schematic bedrock of complex repetition at the beginning of the speech. Those, Cicero says, who write ‘without any rhetorical ornament, have left behind them bare records of dates, personalities, places and events’.48 Shakespeare demonstrates that which will mark his version of history as an emotionally, psychologically and socially charged poetry. Shakespeare’s history is history as language. Elizabethan audiences hearing Titus’ personal account of Rome’s imperial history delivered on the stage of the Rose theatre, where the play was performed, could hear Shakespeare’s classical mind handling different yet related rhetorical registers of artifice within the same strategy of linguistic augmentation, characteristic of Roman eloquence – classical Roman eloquence, on an early modern stage. Titus is a Roman play in its theme, but it is a neoclassical Elizabethan play in its rhetorical design. Peele’s rhetorical habit in 1.1 complements Shakespeare’s propensity for grandiloquent style. He uses repetition not merely to gain acoustic pitch but also for conceptual unity. Different forms of repetition adjusted to the dramatic character and situation suggest that he regards repetition as a rhetorical strategy that enhances an idea that the plot and dramatic narrative develop. Demetrius, one of the Goths, declares the following of Lavinia:

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She is a woman, therefore may be wooed; She is a woman, therefore may be won; She is Lavinia, therefore must be loved. (1.1.582–4) In this isocolon, a figure of repetition consisting of phrases that are roughly of equal length and similar in structure, ‘loved’ is ironic, because Demetrius will be one of the rapists of Lavinia. This isocolon amplifies the irony, because neither wooing nor winning will be his intent. A Goth with a Roman name, Demetrius demonstrates a good mastery of classical eloquence, manipulating the effect of that eloquence by appropriating the language of a romantic lover for a decidedly unromantic purpose. The balance of thought achieved by the isocolon contrasts the rape to come. In turn, rape throws off balance the emotion conveyed by the isocolon, revealing at once that behind the ‘additional elegance’,49 with which, according to Quintilian, isocolon enriches any passage, lies a sinister and deceptive purpose. A passage like this shows that, rather than being chained by rhetoric, the writer liberates rhetoric from some of its more prescriptive rules. Isocolon may be, as Quintilian maintains, ‘[t]he best form of this figure [of repetition]’,50 but in Titus, Peele treats isocolon anti-­ rhetorically, employed it for effects that both exceeded those described in the manuals, and, more often, went against taxonomic definitions. This kind of repetition is a rhetorical marker that distinguishes Peele’s style of writing in 1.1 from Shakespeare’s in the rest of the play. Regarded solely as a form of dramatic language, repetition is a difficult subject to analyse from any theoretical and critical position; that is, unless we treat repetition as a figure that dilates meaning.51 For example, the Goths are particularly prone to using grandiloquent rhetoric that creates a pitch. The use of hyperbole in Titus illustrates that, but within a larger theoretical context concerning the use of ornamental language. This is Tamora, assessing the place where the rape of Lavinia is about to occur:

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A barren detested vale you see it is; The trees, though summer, yet forlorn and lean, O’ercome with moss and baleful mistletoe; Here never shines the sun, here nothing breeds Unless the nightly owl or fatal raven. . . . A thousand fiends, a thousand hissing snakes, Ten thousand swelling toads, as many urchins, Would make such fearful and confused cries As any mortal body hearing it Should straight fall mad, or else die suddenly. (2.2.93–7, 100–4) This looks more like an English than an Arcadian Greek pastoral (esp. 93–7). However, this attempt to localize the naturalness in rhetorical description reads like an anti-locus amoenus, and shows Shakespeare challenging the rhetorical debate about the artificiality and naturalness of expression when using rhetorical tropes and figures. Tamora’s exaggeration, which takes the form of a simple hyperbole of number (‘A thousand . . .’, ‘Ten thousand . . .’) is used for the purpose of a ‘gradual intensification’52 of thought. A description of a concrete place combined with the hyperbolic effect of awe reminds us of the period’s discussion about how eloquence improves nature. Henry Peacham, in The Garden of Eloquence (1577), says that: wisedome appeareth in her beautie, sheweth her maiestie, and exerciseth her power, working in the minde of the hearer, partly by a pleasant proportion, & as it were by a sweet & musicall harmonie, and partly by the secret and mightie power of perswasion after a most wonderfull manner. This then is the virtue which the Orator in his praise before me[n]tioned calleth eloquence . . . the goodnesse of the sap tasted in the sweetnesse of the frute, euen so the precious nature, and wonderfull power of wisedome, is by the commendable Art and vse of eloquence, produced and brought into open light.53

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Modern audience consider hyperbole faulty style. But the gradation and repetition which form Tamora’s hyperbole would have been considered, as Peacham suggests, ‘pleasant proportion[s]’ producing acoustic harmony. Such exaggerated verbal harmonies are not faulty; they bring out the essence and the flavour of an idea. Tropes that amplify content, as hyperbole does when it draws attention to the unpleasantness and danger lurking in the pastoral, create another layer of meaning in this rhetorically remarkable speech. William Webbe demeaned pastoral as ‘rude kind of verse’. But pastoral connects with rhetoric at a deeper level of poetic invention. Webbe maintains that pastoral was ‘borrowed from the Barbarians’, who for Webbe are not only the ancient Greeks, the alleged inventors of quantitative metre rhyme, the pastoral and the poetry of husbandry, but also the barbarians from the Continent, ‘the Hunnes and Gothians and other barbarous Nations’,54 whom he (alongside Roger Ascham) imagines as mediators between the classical pastoral form and the English version of the form. In Webbe’s theoretical mythography of pastoral poetry, Goths are imagined as cultural mediators in the shaping of a new form of writing in English poetry. In Shakespeare, Goths articulate the rhetorical fluency of that poetry, but they do so only for an anti-­civilizational end, symbolized by the stabbing of Bassianus and the rape of Lavinia. The dramatic situation itself amplifies the poetically created horror of the fallen world of this pastoral place: the audience is hearing a mother prodding and encouraging her sons to perform the heinous deed (‘when ye have the honey ye desire, / Let not this wasp outlive, us both to sting’ (2.3.131–2)). The violence that dominates this scene, indeed the entire play, finds its stylistic equivalent in hyperbole, the effect of which is ‘to . . . force violently’55 a thought. Shakespeare recognizes the power of hyperbole to give force to an idea and the context that produces it. Sometimes rhetorical figures in Titus mix with native colloquialism, which contrasts with the classicism of the play.

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Aaron, fond of ‘racy epithets’,56 describes the two Goth rapists, Chiron and Demetrius, in the following terms: That codding spirit had they from their mother, As sure a card as ever won the set. That bloody mind I think they learned of me, As true a dog as ever fought at head. (5.1.99–102) Each of the two lines of isocolon (‘That codding’, ‘That bloody’), a figure composed of phrases of ‘approximately equal length and corresponding structure’,57 is followed by an Elizabethan proverb (‘As sure a card’, ‘As true a dog’), creating a unit in which two sets of formal parallelisms mix to create a stylistic ornament, both classical and colloquial. Repetition itself is not a new stylistic device, and Shakespeare frequently employs proverbial expressions. But in combination with one another, these two forms connect the play to the public theatre. As an acoustic as well as a figurative unit, they make a Roman play sound more English for an English audience; they give new purpose and meaning to classical rhetoric. By mixing classical rhetorical form with vernacular colloquialism, Shakespeare writes in line with Ciceronian judgement that ‘a style which is symmetrical, decorated, ornate and attractive, cannot continue to give pleasure for long, however brilliantly coloured the poem or speech may be’.58 Shakespeare makes great use of symmetry and pattern, but he also knows when to break free from them. The language and rhetoric of a new tragedy like Titus Andronicus can strike us as the opposite to the effect of neoclassicism on 1590s drama. ‘Neoclassicism in art and criticism is associated with restraint and appropriateness’,59 argues Raphael Lyne in his reassessment of early modern tragedy. Yet in Titus, Shakespeare’s creative reimagining of classical Rome for the stage shows abundance, augmentation and iteration as features of his neoclassicism. His is an anti-­ neoclassical rendering of the reverence for the classical world.

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This blending of rhetorical, verbal and acoustic repetition enhances one of the play’s most resonant and moving speeches. In the third act, Titus says: If there were reason for these miseries, Then into limits could I bind my woes. When heaven doth weep, doth not the earth o’erflow? If the winds rage, doth not the sea wax mad, Threatening the welkin with his big-­swollen face? And wilt thou have a reason for this coil? I am the sea. Hark how her sighs doth blow. She is the weeping welkin, I the earth. Then must my sea be moved with her sighs, Then must my earth with her continual tears Become a deluge overflowed and drowned, For why my bowels cannot hide her woes, But like a drunkard must I vomit them. (3.1.220–32) The rhetorical anchor of this speech is the hyperbole ‘I am the sea!’, conceptually one of the most memorable in early Shakespeare. Its conceptual opposite, ‘I the earth’, suppresses half of the elements that make up the universe of a character prone to exaggerations. Titus has already prepared to hear an inflated expression of his anguish, his ‘deep extremes’ (3.1.216), as Marcus calls them, just before he launches into the lament quoted, when he asks rhetorically: ‘Is not my sorrows deep, having no bottom? / Then be my passions bottomless with them’ (3.1.217–18). The polyptoton, repeating a word ‘from the same root but with [a] different ending[]’,60 Marcus’ call for reason to govern Titus’ lament in 3.1.219, captures the depth and complexity of the affect in which isolation is both social and emotional. Titus’ loneliness has found an expression in a figure which pushes the idea of loneliness to a depth that is unlimited. Two emotional hyperboles are circled within a deliberation structured as two parallel rhetorical questions: ‘If there were

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reason / If the winds rage / And wilt thou have’. They are followed by a syntactic repetition, and the acoustic iteration of the consonant ‘w’ and the sound produced by the phonemic effect of the labio-­vellar consonant throughout the speech: ‘my woes’, ‘When . . . weep . . . o’erflow / winds rade . . . sea wax / welkin . . . big-­swoll’n / sighs doth blow / weeping welkin’. Shakespeare then gives us a break from the acoustic harmony produced by a single sound pattern, modulated discreetly by the levelling of w and wh, which went on in his time, would still had ‘some speakers using w for wh’,61 when he introduces conduplicatio, a ‘repetition of a word or words in succeeding clauses for amplification and emphasis . . . [and] to express emotion’. The exaggerated idea of a deluge of water continues in the conduplicatio, in the thought of unstoppable tears likened to a sea with the sound produced by the consonant w in ‘overflowed and drowned’ echoing the previous harmonies, and creating new ones (why . . . bowels . . . woes), as the speech draws to its end. This part of the scene is embellished by other isolated uses of figurative rhetoric to achieve repetition, as in the polyptoton in ‘That woe is me to think upon thy woes’ (3.1.240). The rhetorical duet involving Marcus and Titus is stylistically choreographed as figurative language of a similar amplitude. At this point, the play does the opposite of what Maxwell has argued when he says that Titus lacks ‘the power to convey real impression of dramatic interchange’.62 This rhetorical pair, or duet, as I have called it, shows that, in fact, dramatic interchange is produced through the shared kind of rhetorical repetitions and thus a joined acoustic quality of dramatic verse. This duet illustrates that Shakespeare uses repetition to create a stylistic system, an authorial stylistic signature that is not a rhetorical ornament standing in isolation from the linguistic and stylistic separateness from the surrounding environment of Shakespeare’s blank verse. Marcus’ hyperbole ‘let hot Etna cool in Sicily’ (3.1.242), apart from picking up on Titus’ hyperbole incorporating the notions of the sea and the land, also anticipates the syntactic structure of Anthony’s hyperbole, ‘Let Rome in

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Tiber melt’ (1.1.33).63 Shakespeare ends Marcus’ short speech with a diacope (‘To weep with them that weep doth ease some deal’ (3.1.245)), a figure based on the ‘[r]epetition of a word with one or few words in between’,64 and he concludes a rhetorical unit consisting of his and Titus’ speeches. These rhetorical figures of repetition, concentrated within the two speeches that I have analysed, represent, and sound like, one ‘stylised dramatic artefact’.65 They display Shakespeare’s early ability to use his actor’s skill to deliver rhetorically long and complex orations, in writing rhetorically dense speeches that can be brought alive on stage, and reveal his flexibility and finesse in bringing together rhetorical patterns that give both acoustic energy and stylistic variety to dramatic language. The blank verse that is the result of such rhetorical patterning and acoustic arrangement of individual words does not take over by its repetitive, if magnificently opulent, bombast characteristic of Marlowe’s blank verse. Rather, Shakespeare builds his blank verse around rhetorical regularity. That is, a variety of rhetorical figures of repetition and of thought (hyperbole) are strung together in a patterned interval, producing the effect of harmony. This artistic sensitivity to patterns of verbal and syntactic repetition, and phonemic qualities of individual words, show that earliest Shakespeare searched for such strategies that would give force to ideas in tragedy in performance, and that he found those strategies in employing auricular figures that appeal to the sense of hearing. Shakespeare plays with these figures and pushes the limits of their use. His facility with the figures of repetition suggests that his early style is a carefully patterned aesthetic creation. In an important essay about the relationship between iterative style and authorship, R. F. Hill argues that a relatively low grouping of the rhetorical figures of repetition, like antimetabole, epanodis, symploce and epanalepsis, ‘shows the eccentricity of Titus’.66 To these figures I can add commoratio, conduplicatio, polyptoton and diacope, which Shakespeare also uses sparingly in Titus. Do these rare uses make Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy even more eccentric? Certainly. However, when it comes to

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assessing the figurative style, infrequency is less important than variety. ‘Never naïve’, as Hill himself claims, ‘in his use of language’,67 Shakespeare displays the absence of such naivety not by ridiculing the pedantries of language and rhetorical rules, as he does in his comedies, but by varying the figures of repetition; in this way, he avoids monotony and achieves modulation and amplitude of language. Rhetoric, for Shakespeare, is not a model to be followed slavishly. Rather, it is a way of manipulating language to suit one’s purposes, dramatic or otherwise. Recent analyses of Shakespearean style and versification68 have focused on the different ways of achieving a consensus or a conclusion of what has often been presented as more acute problems to be grappled with, if not resolved: authorship and dating. But micro-­analysis of his earliest style reveals a great deal more about Shakespeare’s propensity for inventing new dramatic uses for familiar rhetorical devices and their effects. Micro-­analysis, which reveals such variety and examines patterns of repetition, enables us to see Titus as a play of an extraordinary stylistic abundance, one that withstands the claim that ‘Hamlet is richer than Titus Andronicus because the sound of its verse is more various and complex’.69 Such claims are of degree and not of kind. The sound of repetitive rhetoric in Titus shows that this play is both various and complex in its own way. The music of its verse and the effect of its style, perfected so early in his career, indicate more than just ‘Shakespeare apprenticeship’.70 More importantly, Shakespeare’s iterative style is individual in each play, depending on a combination of devices taking precedence over other techniques. This is something that a wide-­ranging comparative study of all, not just early, plays would reveal. The literariness of Titus is what makes it a complex play. Literariness is also a formal feature that provides arguments against the critique of its compulsively rhetorical nature. In Titus, rhetoric is an acoustic property of text intended for stage performance, showing that it is a pliable medium for modelling the sound of drama.

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The rich rhetorical tradition that lay behind the style of Titus is one strand of influence that shaped this early tragedy. Another influence, in addition to the classical rhetoric and the rhetoric of contemporaries and competitors, was the stage itself. Shakespeare is not mocked in Greene’s Groats-worth of Wit (1592) for the excessive artificiality of his imitative rhetoric, but for being more of a player than a playwright. In her biography of Shakespeare, Lois Potter expands on a convincing interpretation of this part of the satirical pamphlet, and argues that ‘[t]he image of a crow decked out with other birds’ feathers means simply that actors are unfairly given the credit that ought to go to the author of the words they speak’; she suggests that ‘[t]his is certainly a view that Greene would have shared’.71 While Shakespeare is mocked for being a Johaness Factotum, or ‘Jack of all trades’, it is the playwright’s experience as an actor that adds richness to his rhetoric. Titus shows that the combination of dramatic skill and poetic sensibility allows Shakespeare to explore rhetoric in a flexible way. Yet this pairing, which is disparaged because it somehow dilutes the blank verse, actually enriches it in ways that either the author of the pamphlet could not see or, given the jealous venom in his attack, could see only too well.72

Notes 1 Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, ed. E. A. Horsman (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979), 11. 2 Marco Mincoff, Shakespeare the First Steps (Sofia: Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, 1976), 114. 3 Nicholas Brooke’s Shakespeare’s Early Tragedies (London: Methuen, 1968), 15. 4 T. S. Eliot, ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’, in Elizabethan Dramatists (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 11–57, 31. 5 Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language (London: Allen Tate, 2000), 10.

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6 Gillian Murray Kendall, ‘ “Lend me thy hand”: Metaphor and Mayhem in Titus Andronicus’, Shakespeare’s Quarterly, 40(3) (1989): 299–316; Jack E. Reese, ‘The Formalization of Horror in Titus Andronicus’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 21(1) (1970): 77–84. J. K. Barret, ‘Chained Allusions, Patterned Futures, and the Dangers of Interpretation in Titus Andronicus’, English Literary Renaissance, 44(3) (2014): 452–85. 7 Simon Palfrey, Doing Shakespeare (London: Thomson Learning, 2005), 73. 8 Quoted from Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives (Oxford: Clarendon Press and New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 50. 9 Lois Potter, The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography (Malden, MA, and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 99. 10 Brian Vickers, ‘ “Upstart Crow”? The Myth of Shakespeare’s Plagiarism’, The Review of English Studies, NS, 68.284 (2017): 246, 244–67. 11 Rory Loughnane, ‘Re-Editing Non-Shakespeare for the Modern Reader: The Murder of Mutius in Titus Andronicus’, The Review of English Studies, 68.284 (2017): 294, 268–95. 12 I refer to Gary Taylor’s and Rory Loughnane’s dating of the play proposed in ‘The Canon and Chronology of Shakespeare’s Works’, in The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion, ed. Gary Taylor and Gabriel Egan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 417–602, 491. 13 Jonathan Bate, ‘Introduction’, Titus Andronicus, revised edition (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 3. 14 Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 148–243. 15 Loughnane, ‘Re-Editing’, 268. 16 The New Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, Modern Critical Edition, ed. Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus and Gabriel Egan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), Titus Andronicus, ed. Gary Taylor, Terri Bourus, Rory Loughnane, Anna Pruitt and Francis X. Connor, 187.

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17 William W. Weber, ‘Shakespeare After All?: The Authorship of Titus Andronicus 4.1. Reconsidered’, Shakespeare Survey, 67 (2014): 71, 69–84. 18 David Crystal, ‘Think on my Words’: Exploring Shakespeare’s Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 41. 19 Colin Burrow, Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 107. 20 Alan Hughes (ed.), Titus Andronicus, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 5. 21 Jonathan Hope, The Authorship of Shakespeare’s Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 3. 22 Russ McDonald, Shakespeare and the Arts of Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 40. 23 Gladys D. Willcock, ‘The Language of Shakespeare’s Plays’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 40 (1954): 114, 103–17. 24 Henry Peacham’s The Garden of Eloquence (London, 1593), A.B.iijr and A.B.ijv. 25 Throughout this essay, I quote from Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate, revised edition (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). 26 George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2007), 283–4. 27 I borrow this term from David Jones, ‘Critical Solace’, New Literary History, 47(4) (2016): 483, 481–504. 28 Jonathan Hope, Shakespeare and Language: Reason, Eloquence and Artifice in the Renaissance (London: A&C Black, 2010), 39. 29 Willcock, ‘The Language’, 114. 30 Ibid., 114. 31 Puttenham, The Arte, 284. 32 N. B. L. Pevsner, ‘The Planning of the Elizabethan Country House’, An Inaugural Lecture Delivered at Birkbeck College on the 23rd of May 1960. Lincoln and London: J. W. Ruddock and Sons for Birkbeck College, 1960, 1–24, 24. 33 Ibid., 5. 34 Peacham, The Garden, sig. A.B.iijr.

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35 Ibid., sig. A.B.iijr. 36 Cicero, De oratore, Book III, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1942), III.53.205. 37 Vickers, Shakespeare, 174. 38 J. C. Maxwell (ed.), ‘Introduction’, in Titus Andronicus, The New Arden (London and New York: Methuen, 1953), xxxvii. 39 Quoted in Bate (1995), ‘Introduction’, 33. 40 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge’s Shakespearean Criticism, ed. T. M. Raynor (Cambrdige, MA: Harvard University Press, 1930), II, 31. 41 Maxwell, ‘Introduction’, xxxvii. 42 E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s History Plays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 137–8. 43 Russ McDonald (ed.), ‘Introduction’, in Titus Andronicus, The Pelican Shakespeare (New York and London: Penguin, 2000), xxix. 44 Richard Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Figures (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1991), 194. 45 Lanham, A Handlist, 190. 46 We hear him again later in 3.1: ‘if they did hear, / They would not mark me; / if they did mark, / They would not pity me’ (3.1.33–5). 47 Sister Miriam Joseph, Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 155. 48 Cicero, De oratore, vol. 1 of two vols, trans. E. W. Sutton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and London: William Heinemann, 1988), II.xii.52. 49 Quintilian, The Institutio Oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler, vol. 3 of four vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and London: William Heinemann, 1986), IX.iii.80. 50 Quintilian, Institutio, IX.iii.80. 51 In his book Moving Words: Forms of English Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), Derek Attridge makes a similar point about repetition in non-­dramatic poetry (esp. 16–18). 52 Heinrich Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary Study, ed. David E. Orton and R. Dean

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Anderson (Leiden, Boston, Köln: Brill, 1998), 410. This is recommended by Quintilian, Institutio, VIII.6.68. 53 Peacham, The Garden, sig. A.B.iijr. 54 William Webbe, ‘A Discourse of English Poetrie’, in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), vol. 1 of two vols, 226–302, 226, 266, 240. 55 William Scott, The Model of Poesy, ed. Gavin Alexander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 67. 56 S. S. Hussey, The Literary Language of Shakespeare (London and New York: Longman, 1984), 45. 57 Lanham, A Handlist, 93. 58 Cicero, De Oratore, III.xxv.100. 59 Raphael Lyne, ‘Neoclassicism’, in Tragedy in Transition, ed. Sarah Annes Brown and Catherine Silverstone (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 123, 123–40. 60 Lanham, A Handlist, 117. 61 Helge Kökeritz, Shakespeare’s Pronunciation (Yale: Yale University Press, 1953), 328. 62 Maxwell, ‘Introduction’, xxxvii. 63 Quoted from Antony and Cleopatra, ed. John Wilders (London: Bloomsbury, 1995). 64 Lanham, A Handlist, 49. 65 Murrary Roston, Macmillan History of Literature, vol. Sixteenth-Century English Literature (London: Macmillan, 1982), 177. 66 R. F. Hill, ‘The Composition of Titus Andronicus’, Shakespeare Survey, 10 (1957): 66, 60–70. 67 Ibid., 66. 68 Marina Tarlinskaja, Shakespeare and the Versification of English Drama, 1561–1642 (Farnham, Surrey, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014). 69 McDonald, Shakespeare, 89. 70 Robert Y. Turner, Shakespeare’s Apprenticeship (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1974).

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71 Potter, The Life, 99. The point that Greene was attacking the actor, Shakespeare, was made previously by Frederick S. Boas, Christopher Marlowe: A Biographical and Critical Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940), 193. 72 I am grateful to Jackie Cameron for his reading of this chapter and for the comments he made on it.

3 Soliloquies in Titus Andronicus An empirical approach James Hirsh

Soliloquies are among the most pervasive and distinctive features of late Renaissance drama in general and of Shakespeare’s plays in particular. Many scholars have taken the easy, shortcut method of defining ‘soliloquy’ on the basis of its etymology as a speech uttered when a character is alone.1 This is a patently wrongheaded procedure. There is no chance that Shakespeare tailored his artistic practices so that they would conform to the etymology of a word (a word that, moreover, did not become a theatrical term in English until after his death). Arriving at an accurate description of theatrical practices requires the hard work of actually surveying, cataloguing and analysing those practices. When one conducts an empirical survey of Shakespeare’s plays, one discovers numerous passages that do not qualify as dialogue in the sense of speeches directed at the hearing of other characters but that are spoken in the

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presence of other characters. For example, unbeknownst to Juliet, Romeo is on stage during the balcony episode and overhears speeches that she does not direct at the hearing of any other character. The logical, clear-­cut and dramatically significant distinction is between ‘dialogue’ in the sense of speeches directed by a character at the hearing of one or more other characters and ‘soliloquies’ in the sense of passages not directed by the character at the hearing of any other character. Late Renaissance plays are also pervaded by ‘asides’ in the sense of passages that the speaking character guards from the hearing of at least one other character. Some asides are directed at the hearing of one or more other characters; they are ‘shared asides’. Some asides, such as Romeo’s speeches guarded from the hearing of Juliet in the balcony episode, also qualify as soliloquies in the sense of speeches not directed at the hearing of any other character. Such speeches are ‘soliloquies guarded in asides’ since they fulfil the criterion of each kind of speech. The nineteen soliloquies in Titus Andronicus occupy a total of 110 lines (4.4 per cent of the approximately 2,500 lines in the play). Eighteen occur onstage, one offstage. They are fairly evenly distributed throughout the play. Five soliloquies occur in the portions of the play that have been attributed to George Peele.2 Similarities between the three soliloquies by Aaron in those portions and Aaron’s soliloquies elsewhere in the play are evidence that the collaborators must have closely coordinated their efforts. Soliloquies are not evenly distributed among characters. Only six of the thirty or so speaking characters soliloquize, and there is a conspicuous imbalance within the group: Aaron: ten soliloquies (over half the total), comprising seventy-­three lines (two-­thirds of the total); Lucius: one soliloquy of thirteen lines; Tamora: two soliloquies, nine lines in total; Titus: two soliloquies, six lines in total; Marcus: one soliloquy of five lines; Young Lucius: three soliloquies, four lines in total.

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Over half (ten) of the soliloquies are three lines or shorter and so are invisible to those who include in their definitions of ‘soliloquy’ the extraneous criterion that the passage must be long to qualify. Of the eleven soliloquies guarded in asides, six are spoken by Aaron, three by young Lucius, and one each by Tamora and Titus. Plentiful, unambiguous, conspicuous, varied and one-­sided evidence demonstrates that soliloquies in Shakespeare’s plays represented the spoken words of characters as a matter of convention, rather than their unspoken thoughts.3 The most conspicuous kind of evidence is that, whenever an eavesdropper is present, the eavesdropper overhears a soliloquy by a character unaware of the eavesdropper’s presence. This kind of situation occurs with remarkable frequency in Shakespeare’s plays.4 The same kind of situation sometimes occurs offstage. In 5.1 of Titus, a Goth soldier reports to Lucius that he overheard Aaron’s offstage soliloquy and provides a verbatim account (20–39). Plentiful, unambiguous, conspicuous, varied and one-­sided evidence demonstrates that soliloquies in Shakespeare’s plays represented self-­addressed speeches as a matter of convention.5 In medieval and early Renaissance drama, soliloquies by characters engaged in the fictional action often explicitly acknowledge the presence of playgoers. The convention governing soliloquies radically and decisively changed in the late 1580s and early 1590s. In The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1586), Thomas Kyd established in no uncertain terms that soliloquies in the play represented self-­addressed speeches by characters. In short order, other dramatists enthusiastically adopted the convention.6 It became one of the most common, conspicuous and consistently adhered-­to conventions in theatrical history.7 With regard to every soliloquy by every character, playgoers were in a situation analogous to that of Romeo in the balcony episode and that of the Goth soldier in his account of an offstage situation: playgoers eavesdropped on the self-­addressed speeches of characters. Titus is dense with evidence that soliloquies represented self-­addressed speech. Three sorts of evidence of self-­address

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often occur independently and often together: (1) self-­address by name, title, epithet or alias; (2) self-­address by a second-­ person pronoun; (3) a command that is clearly directed at the speaker himself rather than at playgoers. In the following catalogue each verbal marker of self-­address is emboldened. The first soliloquy in the play contains two such markers. Titus, when wert thou wont to walk alone . . . (1.1.344) It would have been nonsensical, moreover, for a character to declare that he is ‘alone’ in a speech knowingly addressed to thousands of people. In his one soliloquy, Marcus addresses himself by name and commands himself to comfort Titus: Marcus, attend him in his ecstasy . . . (4.1.125) In a soliloquy guarded in an aside from Demetrius and Chiron, Aaron surreptitiously mocks them for failing to understand a veiled threat from Titus. After conjecturing that Tamora ‘would applaud Andronicus’ conceit’ (4.2.30), Aaron gives himself a command: But let her rest in her unrest awhile. (4.2.31) His decision to delay informing Tamora that Titus has delivered a clever veiled threat reflects the fact that, although he eagerly assists her in revenging herself on the Andronici, he regards her merely as a means by which he can ‘mount aloft’ (1.1.512), not as an object of genuine affection. Aaron regards all Europeans, including Tamora, as contemptible. In his soliloquies, Aaron expresses his secretly adversarial attitude toward Tamora. The soliloquy during which he decides to leave the Empress to ‘rest in her unrest awhile’ echoes his soliloquy in 2.2 during which he decided to leave the gold to ‘repose’ in order to cause ‘unrest’ to those who ‘have their alms out of the empress’ chest’ (8–9).

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Some scholars have convinced themselves that a soliloquy in which a character reviews his situation and plans must represent audience address because the character already knows his situation and plans and so would have no reason to review them. But real human beings often review their situations and plans, sometimes obsessively. Furthermore, these scholars have not tested their theory against the evidence. If they had, they would have come across numerous soliloquies in late Renaissance drama with the following characteristics: (1) the speaker reviews his situation and/or plans; (2) the speaker does not acknowledge the presence of playgoers; and (3) the speech contains conspicuous, unambiguous evidence of self-­address. In his first soliloquy in Titus Andronicus, Aaron reviews his situation and plans at length (25 lines). At no point does he acknowledge the presence of playgoers. Instead, the speech contains nine markers of self-­address (the word ‘Away’ is used as a command): Then, Aaron, arm thy heart and fit thy thoughts To mount aloft with thy imperial mistress, And mount her pitch whom thou in triumph long Hast prisoner held, fettered in amorous chains . . . Away with slavish weeds, and servile thoughts! (1.1.511–14, 517) Other conspicuous markers of self-­address in late Renaissance drama include apostrophes in the sense of passages addressed to imaginary listeners. It would be incongruous to address an imaginary audience in a speech directed at actual listeners, as indicated by the fact that apostrophes in speeches directed by characters to the hearing of their fellow characters are rare in Shakespeare’s plays. On the other hand, apostrophes occur pervasively in soliloquies. The obvious explanation for this huge difference is that soliloquies were speeches not directed by the character at any actual listener other than herself. If soliloquies had represented audience addresses, apostrophes would have been as incongruous in those speeches as in speeches directed at other characters.

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Soliloquies in Titus Andronicus contain numerous apostrophes. In 2.2, as Aaron buries gold that had been allocated for followers of Tamora, he addresses the metal, And so repose, sweet gold, for their unrest . . . (8) After a speech by Titus, Aaron contemptuously addresses his antagonist but speaks only for his own hearing. But I’ll deceive you in another sort, And that you’ll say ere half an hour pass. (3.1.191–2) Shakespeare did not bother to supply an antecedent for the pronoun ‘you’ because he expected regular playgoers to know that soliloquies represented self-­address as a matter of convention and to realize that the word ‘you’ in this case was an apostrophe addressed to Titus, the preceding speaker, and did not represent an address to themselves by the character. When young Lucius delivers weapons to the sons of Tamora, he surreptitiously mocks them in apostrophes in soliloquies guarded from their hearing (here indicated by italics): Boy I greet your honours from Andronicus – And pray the Roman gods confound you both. Demetrius Gramercy, lovely Lucius. What’s the news? Boy That you are both deciphered, that’s the news, For villains marked with rape. (4.2.5–9) In a soliloquy guarded in an aside, Tamora apostrophizes the man who ordered the execution of one of her sons:

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But, Titus, I have touched thee to the quick; Thy life-­blood out. (4.4.36–7) Some soliloquies contain multiple apostrophes, as in the following excerpts from a soliloquy by Lucius: Farewell, Andronicus, my noble father, The woefull’st man that ever lived in Rome. Farewell, proud Rome, till Lucius come again; . . . Farewell, Lavinia, my noble sister, O would thou wert as thou tofore hast been! . . . If Lucius live, he will requite your wrongs . . . (3.1.289–91, 293–4, 297) Some apostrophes are lengthy, such as the following in a soliloquy that Aaron addresses to his uncomprehending infant son: Come on, you thick-­lipped slave, I’ll bear you hence, For it is you that puts us to our shifts. I’ll make you feed on berries and on roots, . . . And cabin in a cave, and bring you up To be a warrior and command a camp. (4.2.177–9, 181–2) Aaron’s entire offstage soliloquy quoted onstage by a Goth soldier is another long apostrophe to his son (‘Peace’ is a command meaning ‘be quiet, calm down’): Peace, tawny slave, half me, and half thy dame! Did not thy hue bewray whose brat thou art, Had nature lent thee but thy mother’s look, Villain, thou mightst have been an emperor . . . Peace, villain, peace! . . . For I must bear thee to a trusty Goth Who, when he knows thou art the empress’ babe, Will hold thee dearly for thy mother’s sake. (5.1.27–30, 33–6)

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All told, soliloquies in Titus Andronicus contain fifty-­seven unambiguous markers of self-­address. At no point in the play does any character acknowledge the presence of playgoers. The evidence is similarly one-­sided in Shakespeare’s other plays. This evidence decisively refutes the currently popular dogma that soliloquies in Shakespeare’s plays were typically meant to represent speeches that characters knowingly addressed to playgoers.8 That fallacy radically alters the implied hypothetical psychology of the character. If a soliloquy had represented a speech knowingly directed by the character at thousands of playgoers, it would have represented the most public form of speech possible in the period. The character’s motive in speaking would have been to inform, entertain, persuade, surprise, provoke, dismay, or otherwise produce an effect on a large group of strangers. A self-­addressed speech, on the other hand, is the most private kind of speech possible. The character’s implied hypothetical motives for speaking are entirely self-directed. A self-­addressed speech depicts how the character interacts with himself. In some soliloquies, the character attempts to talk himself into a belief or course of action. That is a fundamentally different psychological, rhetorical and dramatic situation from one in which a character attempts to convince thousands of strangers to share a belief. The notion that some soliloquies were meant to represent audience address and others self-­address is untenable. That would have required in each case an unambiguous indication of which type of dramatic speech was being represented in order to distinguish the two profoundly different types from one another. Unambiguous evidence of self-­address is vast; unambiguous evidence of audience address is conspicuous by its absence. The convention of self-­addressed speech was employed so frequently, so conspicuously and so one-­sidedly in the plays of Shakespeare and other major dramatists that it could have been overridden only by an unambiguous and conspicuous signal. In the absence of such a signal, regular playgoers would have assumed that the familiar convention was in operation. The benefit of any doubt would have gone to the convention.

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That is what a convention entails. Significantly, this particular convention was rarely, if ever, overridden by major dramatists of the period. Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists evidently regarded the convention as too valuable as a unique form of characterization and too productive of interesting dramatic situations to be weakened even a little by exceptions. Dramatists and playgoers evidently were fascinated by what a character might say to herself if she thought that no one else could hear her words. They evidently took voyeuristic pleasure in eavesdropping on the most private moment of a character. They were evidently not interested in what a character might say to themselves if the character knew that she were merely a character in a play. Each soliloquy in Titus Andronicus depicts a character engaged in some form of self-­directed behaviour. The title character has both the first and the last soliloquies in the play. In 1.1, Titus is provoked into self-­address by the Emperor’s demeaning behaviour towards him: I am not bid to wait upon this bride. Titus, when wert thou wont to walk alone, Dishonoured thus and challenged [i.e., accused] of wrongs? (343–5) Titus uses a self-­addressed speech to try to come to terms with the discrepancy between his private sense of his merit and the way he has been treated. Many characters in Shakespeare’s plays engage in self-­address for similar reasons. In response to threats to their egos, characters often defend their private selves, their private self-­image, in speeches directed only at their own hearing. Titus’ motive for giving voice to this perception in a self-­addressed speech ironically resembles Aaron’s motive for engaging in the same behaviour later in the play. Aaron is repeatedly provoked into self-­addressed speech in reaction to the unjust, racist humiliation to which he is subjected, which is at odds with his sense of his intellectual superiority. For Aaron, humiliation has been a daily occurrence over a long period, but it is a new experience for Titus.

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In the presence of Tamora and her sons in 5.2, Titus guards a soliloquy from their hearing. He gloats that he will turn the tables on them: I knew them all, though they supposed me mad, And will o’erreach them in their own devices – (142–3) The speech entails self-­fashioning, or rather self-refashioning. Before the start of the play, Titus prided himself on being a leading warrior in battles for the glory of Rome and on being a trusted imperial counsellor. By the time of his soliloquy in 5.2, he has embraced a new identity, that of a secret plotter and avenger. Titus’ self-­addressed speech guarded in an aside in 5.2 resembles Aaron’s series of self-­addressed speeches guarded in asides throughout the play. In those speeches, Aaron expressed pride and glee at outwitting and harming others. It is a tragic and ironic reversal that in a soliloquy late in the play, the paterfamilias Titus refashions himself into a virtuoso of revenge, while in two soliloquies in the same part of the play the sadistic revenger Aaron refashions himself into a father figure. That over half of the self-­addressed speeches in the play are spoken by Aaron is not surprising, since Aaron is very much an outsider (neither Roman nor Goth) and a secretive plotter. Treated unjustly as inherently inferior by most Roman and Goth characters, Aaron frequently uses his self-­addressed speeches to reassure himself that he is in fact superior to his persecutors. These speeches would not have made psychological sense as public-­spirited efforts to keep playgoers informed. Aaron is intensely antisocial, not public-­spirited. In his first soliloquy (1.1.500–24), which at 25 lines is the longest in the play, Aaron gloats about his sway over Tamora, who holds sway over the Emperor, who holds sway over the vestige of the Roman Empire. Aaron expresses as much contempt for Tamora as for other Europeans. In her case, his contempt is based primarily on his ability to enslave her sexually. The soliloquy is partially indebted to vaunting,

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narcissistic soliloquies by over-­reachers in Marlowe’s plays and anticipates Edmund’s gloating in his long first soliloquy early in King Lear about his ability to manipulate his credulous father and brother. Aaron reassures himself that he is superior to those who regard him as inferior simply because he is black, and Edmund reassures himself that he is superior to those who regard him as inferior simply because of his birth out of wedlock. Aaron’s soliloquies reveal that, although he gloats about mounting aloft, his overriding goal is not practical self-­ interest but rather the Roman Emperor’s ‘shipwrack and his commonweal’s’ (523) as retribution against Europeans for a lifetime of humiliation. Aaron’s repeated expressions of contempt for other characters in his soliloquies have a paradoxical implication. A serenely self-­confident person does not need to reassure himself repeatedly of his superiority to others. In a soliloquy already quoted, Aaron gives himself the command, Away with slavish weeds and servile thoughts! (1.1.517) Aaron would not have to urge himself to send away servile thoughts if he never had such thoughts. In the face of ongoing daily reminders that Europeans regard him as inferior, he regularly reassures himself of his superiority in self-­addressed speeches. Aaron exhibits a different kind of self-­defensiveness in his soliloquy at the outset of 2.2: He that had wit would think that I had none, To bury so much gold under a tree And never after to inherit it. Let him that thinks of me so abjectly Know that this gold must coin a stratagem . . . And so repose, sweet gold, for their unrest That have their alms out of the empress’ chest. (1–5, 8–9)

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Aaron’s self-­justification is based not on conventional morality or even on practical self-­interest but on the utility of his action to cause harm to others (‘their unrest’, 8). The soliloquy is not an acknowledgement of the presence of playgoers by the character. The final two lines constitute an address to an imaginary audience (‘repose, sweet gold’) that would have been incongruous in an address to an actual audience other than himself. The preceding lines conjure up an imaginary witness, a hypothetical fault-­finder. Conjuring up of an imaginary witness is analogous to conjuring up an imaginary addressee, an activity in which soliloquizers often engage. If Shakespeare had wanted this speech to be understood by playgoers as an audience-­addressed speech in violation of the pervasively reinforced convention that soliloquies by characters engaged in the action represented self-­addressed speeches, he could have done so only by an unambiguous signal, which he easily could have created. All he needed to have done was to have had Aaron say ‘Those of you auditors that have wit . . .’ and ‘Let those among you auditors that think . . .’. In the absence of such an unambiguous signal, regular playgoers would have assumed that the familiar convention of self-­addressed speech was in operation. It is psychologically significant that Aaron takes the trouble to refute a hypothetical fault-­finder in a speech not addressed to any listener other than himself. It ironically dramatizes that he needs to justify his actions to himself. He feels it necessary to refute an internal fault-­finder: that part of his own psyche that values practical self-­interest. Entailing active concealment, the six soliloquies guarded in asides by Aaron highlight his status as a loner, isolated from others even in their presence. In the course of these asides, he expresses contempt for Demetrius, Chiron, Saturninus, Quintus, Martius and Titus. When he eavesdrops on the quarrel between Demetrius and Chiron over Lavinia in 1.1, he facetiously adopts for his own amusement the tone of a conventional peace-­loving citizen: Clubs, clubs! These lovers will not keep the peace. (536)

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In a soliloquy guarded in an aside in 4.2, Aaron surreptitiously mocks the brothers for their dimwitted failure to perceive a veiled threat from Titus:         The old man hath found their guilt, And sends them weapons wrapped about with lines That wound beyond their feeling to the quick. (26–8) At times, Aaron mocks the brothers openly, but open derision can be a form of male bonding. Aaron would be horrified at the notion that he had such a bond with Tamora’s boys. By mocking them in self-­addressed speeches, he can demonstrate to himself that his mockery is genuine, not the amicable, facetious mockery of male bonding. Another way in which Aaron convinces himself of his superiority to the Romans and Goths who regard him as inferior is by gloating in soliloquies guarded in asides about his ability to manipulate and to inflict suffering on those supposedly superior beings. In 1.1, he surreptitiously adds a phrase (in italics below) to an assertion by Demetrius, who lusts after Lavinia, Bassianus’ betrothed: Demetrius Though Bassianus be the emperor’s brother, Better than he have worn Vulcan’s badge. Aaron Ay, and as good as Saturninus may. (588–90) Aaron gloats that he has made the Emperor a cuckold and enjoys covertly speaking about his sexual enslavement of Tamora in the presence of her sons. In 2.2, Aaron expresses pride in the cleverness of his malicious plot to frame Quintus and Martius for the murder of Bassianus and takes pleasure in speaking about the plot in their very presence (206–8). In an apostrophe in a soliloquy guarded in an aside in 3.1, Aaron

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gloats about tricking Titus into sacrificing his hand in a futile attempt to save the lives of his sons: . . . I’ll deceive you in another sort. (191) After chopping off Titus’ hand, Aaron again gives voice to delight in his own cleverness and cruelty: I go, Andronicus, and for thy hand Look by and by to have thy sons with thee. Their heads I mean. O, how this villainy Doth fat me with the very thoughts of it. (3.1.201–4) A virtuoso sadist seeks not merely to cause pain to his victim but, if possible, to turn the suffering of the victim into a joke.9 Here, Aaron’s joke is to add to his overt assertion a surreptitious codicil, as if it were only a minor clarification, that only the severed heads of Titus’ sons will be returned. Aaron makes jokes in his self-­addressed speeches for his own amusement. If those speeches had been knowingly addressed to playgoers by Aaron, Aaron’s motive would have been the public-­spirited one of seeking to entertain thousands of strangers. This would not have made psychological sense because, as explained above, Aaron is intensely antisocial, and most playgoers would have been of European ethnicity, like the Roman and Goth characters whom Aaron detests for having persecuted and demeaned him. After eight soliloquies in which Aaron gives voice to contempt or malice, his ninth, which comprises the final nine lines of 4.2, is a radical departure. In the course of this soliloquy, partially quoted above, Aaron exhibits concern, tenderness and ambition for his infant son. Most of the soliloquy consists of an extended apostrophe: Come on, you thick-­lipped slave, I’ll bear you hence, For it is you that puts us to our shifts.

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I’ll make you feed on berries and on roots, . . .            . . . and bring you up To be a warrior and command a camp. (177–9, 181–2) Aaron transforms words that Romans and Goths have applied to himself as demeaning insults (‘thick-­lipped slave’) into terms of endearment. In a self-­addressed speech, the speaker is free to create a private language. The passage sets up ironic similarities between himself and Titus. Aaron earlier mocked Titus for sacrificing his hand in an attempt to save his sons but now takes as his highest priority the nurturing of his offspring. Aaron’s ambition for his son, ‘To be a warrior and command a camp’, is similar to the ambition that the warrior-­fathers of the Andronici clan (Titus and the elder Lucius) have for their sons. Aaron’s final soliloquy, spoken offstage and reported verbatim by a Goth soldier (5.1.27–36), is the second longest soliloquy in the play (over nine lines). Like his first and longest soliloquy, his last is emphatically self-­addressed. The first contained nine unambiguous markers of self-­address; his final soliloquy contains sixteen. His last soliloquy is a further manifestation of the radically new self that he began to fashion in his next-­to-last soliloquy: that of a loving father. It is dramatically important that Aaron expresses fatherly feelings in two long soliloquies in two different contexts: the fatherly self he fashioned at the end of 4.2 was not a fleeting aberration but an enduring new identity. Aaron’s last two soliloquies dramatize that fatherhood has genuinely, profoundly and permanently transformed him. He is no longer an absolute loner whose overriding motive is vengefulness. It is ironic that a self-­addressed speech in which he expresses tenderness towards another human being reveals his identity as an outlaw to an eavesdropper and leads directly to his own death and that of the infant whose nurture is the subject of his final two self-­addressed speeches.

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Titus may have the very first soliloquy in the play (a speech of three lines), but before the first scene is over, Aaron has a much longer soliloquy (twenty-­five lines), and a similar imbalance is maintained throughout the play. Aaron’s ten self-­ addressed speeches occupy seventy-­three lines; Titus’ two self-­addressed speeches occupy a total of only six lines. Titus may be the title character of the play, but playgoers eavesdrop far more extensively on Aaron’s most private utterances, when he thinks he has only himself for an audience, than they do on self-­addressed speeches of Titus. Shakespeare later constructed a similar intentional incongruity in Othello. In that play, Iago speaks conspicuously more lines in soliloquies than the title character. As a result, in each play an unscrupulous, manipulative, secretive character becomes a rival of the title character for prominence. In a soliloquy in 2.2, Tamora makes a solemn vow to herself that affirms her recently chosen identity as the deadly enemy of the Andronici: Ne’er let my heart know merry cheer indeed Till all the Andronici be made away. (188–9) Instead of merely thinking her vow, Tamora commits herself more strongly to her goal both by articulating the vow in speech and by hearing herself make the vow. In the last two lines of the soliloquy, Tamora alludes to two imminent sex acts, her own with Aaron and the offstage rape of Lavinia by Chiron and Demetrius: Now will I hence to seek my lovely Moor, And let my spleenful sons this trull deflower. (190–1) The juxtaposition is not coincidental. Consciously or unconsciously, Tamora attempts to convince herself of her superiority to Lavinia. She incongruously labels Lavinia a

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‘trull’ even though Lavinia is a chaste victim of sexual assault, while Tamora herself eagerly engages in an illicit sexual relationship. Tamora projects her own violation of conventional sexual morality onto her victim. In order to maintain self-­ respect, Tamora actively deceives herself about the situation. Depicting characters engaged in self-­deception was one of the most common and most important functions of self-­addressed speeches in Shakespeare’s works.10 After openly urging Saturninus to be tolerant and merciful towards Titus in 4.4, Tamora says to herself in a soliloquy guarded in an aside: But, Titus, I have touched thee to the quick; Thy life-­blood out, if Aaron now be wise, Then is all safe, the anchor in the port. (36–8) The target of Tamora’s enmity and the addressee of her apostrophe is Titus, who is not on stage at the time. The most prominent character on stage from whom Tamora guards the speech is Saturninus. In addition to giving explicit voice to her hatred of Titus, the speech implicitly dramatizes her contempt for the Emperor. She takes pleasure in surreptitiously speaking the name of her lover in the presence of her clueless, cuckolded husband. In his one and only soliloquy, Lucius makes a solemn vow in an apostrophe to Titus, Rome and Lavinia: If Lucius live, he will requite your wrongs And make proud Saturnine and his empress Beg at the gates like Tarquin and his queen. (3.1.297–9) The speech sets up an ironic parallel with the moment in which Tamora reinforced a solemn vow to obtain revenge against the Andronici by externalizing the vow in speech and by hearing herself express the vow. Shakespeare often dramatized the

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tragic irony that, consumed by mutual hatred, enemies often come to resemble and to echo one another. Marcus is an orator rather than a warrior like his elder brother and nephew. Unlike most other soliloquies in the play, in which speakers give voice to hatred, contempt and vengefulness, Marcus’ one soliloquy contains a self-­directed injunction to provide comfort to a pitiable victim and relegates vengeance to the gods: Marcus, attend him in his ecstasy That hath more scars of sorrows in his heart Than foemen’s marks upon his battered shield, But yet so just that he will not revenge. Revenge the heavens for old Andronicus! (4.1.125–9) Ironically, the soliloquies that most closely resemble this one, in which a character expresses tender concern for a loved one, are the two in which Aaron later apostrophizes his infant son. One of Marcus’ assertions is glaringly at odds with what Marcus knows about his brother. In 1.1, Titus ordered the execution of Alarbus in revenge for the killing of Titus’ sons by Goths in battle. When Marcus tells himself that Titus is ‘so just that he will not revenge’, he is engaging in wishful thinking, a form of self-­deception. In 4.2, young Lucius delivers weapons as gifts from Titus to Chiron and Demetrius in an overtly respectful fashion. It is painful and difficult for young Lucius to force himself to show overt respect for the brothers. He manages to do so by expressing his actual hatred and contempt for them in three soliloquies guarded in asides. To revile them in spoken words in their very presence is satisfying even though he himself is the only intended auditor of his expressions of ill will and contempt. It is particularly satisfying for him to do so in apostrophes addressed to them but guarded from their hearing, as he does in two passages quoted earlier: ‘[I] pray the Roman gods confound you both’; ‘you are both deciphered . . . / For

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villains marked with rape.’ Lucius adds to an innocuous farewell his third insulting soliloquy guarded in an aside: And so I leave you both like bloody villains. (17) Regular late Renaissance playgoers would have recognized that these soliloquies guarded in asides exhibited courage by young Lucius. Soliloquies represented speeches by characters, not interior monologues utterly incapable of being heard by other characters. To guard such a speech from other characters required skill and unrelenting attentiveness and entailed a risk. If the speaker relaxed her guard even for a moment, the other characters onstage would begin to hear the speech.11 It showed pluck on the part of a child to revile murderers in spoken words in their very presence. Post-Renaissance playgoers and readers who assume that asides were meant to represent unspoken words would not recognize a key feature of young Lucius’ characterization. In his self-­addressed speeches, young Lucius fashions himself as an implacable enemy of Chiron and Demetrius. Although playgoers share the boy’s opinion of the odious sons of Tamora, it is nevertheless tragic that implacable enmity should be one of the most important components of a child’s sense of his own identity. It is also disturbing that these soliloquies guarded in asides in which the sympathetic young Lucius sardonically mocks the brothers echo earlier soliloquies guarded in asides in which the sadistic Aaron sardonically mocked the same characters. The ironic connection is reinforced when, within ten lines of young Lucius’ last expression of contempt for Demetrius and Chiron, Aaron also expresses contempt for the brothers (in Aaron’s case, for their failure to perceive Titus’ veiled threat, 4.2.26–8). Further reinforcing the connection is the fact that both Lucius and Aaron express their contempt surreptitiously in the form of soliloquies guarded in asides from the brothers. Titus Andronicus is in many respects a daring theatrical experiment, and one of its most important and valuable

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experimental elements is its imaginative and varied employment of the convention of self-­addressed speech. Shakespeare continued to experiment with the convention throughout his career and used it to create countless novel, intriguing and artistically significant situations.

Notes 1 For example, in The Harper Handbook to Literature, 2nd edn (New York: Longman, 1997), Northrop Frye defined ‘soliloquy’ as ‘talking alone’ (437). 2 Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). References to Titus Andronicus are taken from Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate, revised edition, Arden Shakespeare (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). 3 For a catalogue of the extensive evidence, see my book Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), Chapter 5. 4 For a catalogue, see Hirsh, History, 125–46. 5 For huge catalogues of unambiguous evidence that soliloquies represented self-­addressed speeches by convention, see Hirsh, History, Chapter 6; ‘Late Renaissance Self-Fashioning: Scholarly Orthodoxy versus Evidence’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 27 (2014): 132–60; and ‘The Origin of the Late Renaissance Dramatic Convention of Self-Addressed Speech’, Shakespeare Survey, 68 (2015): 131–45. Evidence of unambiguous audience address by characters engaged in the action is conspicuous by its absence. Despite this evidentiary situation, most current scholars cling to the belief that Shakespeare regularly designed soliloquies to represent speeches knowingly addressed by characters to playgoers. The most extensive recent attempt to defend that notion occurs in Shakespearean Insides: A Study of the Complete Soliloquies and Solo Asides by Marcus Nordlund (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017). The book it is not an empirical study. Nordlund simply ignores the vast, unambiguous, conspicuous

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and varied evidence that Shakespeare designed soliloquies to represent self-­addressed speeches as a matter of convention. See my review of the book: Renaissance Quarterly, 71 (2018): 419–21. Among studies that promote the popular belief, I have not encountered any that attempts to explain or that even acknowledges the vast body of evidence conspicuously at odds with the belief. 6 Numerous scholars have recognized that The Spanish Tragedy profoundly influenced subsequent drama. Thomas McAlindon went so far as to declare that the play was ‘quite the most important single play in the history of English drama’, in English Renaissance Tragedy (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986), 55. None of these scholars explored the most pervasive influence of the play: Kyd’s establishment of the sophisticated convention of self-­addressed speech, a convention conspicuously employed in nearly every play from 1590 to 1642. See Hirsh, ‘Origin’. 7 For an account of the complex and rigorously adhered-­to set of conventions governing soliloquies, asides and eavesdropping, see my essay, ‘Guarded, Unguarded, and Unguardable Speech in Late Renaissance Drama’, in Who Hears in Shakespeare? Auditory Worlds on Stage and Screen, ed. Laury Magnus and Walter W. Cannon (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012), 17–40. After a hiatus in theatrical activity in England from 1642 to 1660, the intricate set of conventions that had governed soliloquies, asides and eavesdropping since the late 1580s were not revived. In succeeding centuries, countless scholars have projected demonstrably false notions about soliloquies onto late Renaissance drama. For a catalogue and refutation of those fallacies, see Hirsh, History, Chapters 9 and 10. 8 See Hirsh, History, Chapter 6, and ‘Late Renaissance SelfFashioning’. 9 The play depicts and elicits various kinds of disturbing laughter. See my article ‘Laughter at Titus Andronicus’, Essays in Theatre, 7 (1988): 59–74; reprinted in Shakespearean Criticism, 134 (2010): 150–8. 10 Numerous scholars have convinced themselves that Shakespeare never employed soliloquies to depict a character engaged in

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self-­deception. For catalogues of the vast evidence refuting that peculiar theory, see Hirsh, History, 284–5, 329–32, 359, 446; and Hirsh, ‘Dialogic Self-Address in Shakespeare’s Plays’, Shakespeare, 8 (2012): 312–27, especially 321–5. 11 A complex and subtle episode that depends on the implicit operation of this important nuance of the convention occurs in 1.3 of Macbeth. After Macbeth learns that Duncan has conferred on him the title Thane of Cawdor, as prophesied by the weyard women, he gives voice to his horror at his contemplated murder of Duncan in a series of self-­addressed speeches that, initially, he carefully guards from the hearing of the other thanes. Macbeth has an exceptionally powerful imagination, and here he experiences a ‘horrid image’ (135) that unfixes his hair and makes his heart knock at his ribs. He is becoming so intensely preoccupied by his ‘horrible imaginings’ (138) that he is losing consciousness of the presence of others. Banquo comments to the other thanes: Look, how our partner’s rapt. (143) Familiar with the convention that a soliloquy begun as an aside would eventually be overheard by other characters present if the speaker failed actively and continuously to guard the speech, regular late Renaissance playgoers would have been in suspense during this episode. Will Macbeth become completely oblivious to the presence of others, cease to guard his soliloquies adequately, and thereby inadvertently allow them to overhear his secret consideration of regicide? Post-Renaissance scholars who assume that soliloquies represented either interior monologues or privileged communications by the character to playgoers are blind to the suspense that was a key element of the experience designed by Shakespeare for playgoers of his own time. The danger that Macbeth will inadvertently reveal his guilty secret in the episode is averted only because Banquo does not want the other thanes to know that he and Macbeth have consorted with weyard women. Banquo takes action to end Macbeth’s rapture and thereby to prevent him from spilling the beans: Worthy Macbeth, we stay upon your leisure. (149)

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Macbeth, ed. Kenneth Muir (London: Arden, 1984). This episode and countless others demonstrate that Shakespeare and late Renaissance playgoers loved the intricacies of the convention of self-­addressed speech whose existence is adamantly denied by most current Shakespeare scholars. For other examples, see Hirsh, History, Chapter 5, and ‘Guarded’.

PART TWO

Critical approaches: Race, culture and politics

4 ‘I have done thy mother’ Racial and sexual geographies in Titus Andronicus John Kunat

Critical analyses of race and ethnicity in Titus Andronicus have generally focused on the distinction between the Romans and the various others in the play. Although such an approach has yielded many fine readings, it overlooks the more nuanced consideration of difference Shakespeare offered his audience. Titus was written in the early 1590s when the English were occupied with the outbreak of the Nine Years’ War in Ireland and the possibility of a Scottish succession. The ‘others’ pressing most closely on the kingdom were fair-­skinned and Christian like the English themselves, who nonetheless considered these neighbouring peoples to be to some degree barbaric. Titus navigates this disjunction between nationality and skin colour through a staging of Rome during the period

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when it experienced the mixing of peoples that would eventually constitute Europe as a distinct ethnological entity. This chapter traces this constitutive process by examining how Shakespeare appropriates two literary forms – classical comedy and Ovidian myth – to comment upon identity formation in Titus’ Rome.1 Recent Titus scholarship tends to focus on either gender or race, or sometimes nationhood, but often without fully investigating the mutual articulation of these categories, especially in regard to power relations, such as exist between master and slave or between Romans and Goths, two peoples who are ‘white’ but enact their social selves in very different ways.2 In what follows, I complicate such identity-­based paradigms by analysing how selves are forged through the psychology of revenge that defines the subject in opposition to multiple others. The African slave trade unquestionably altered the representation of blackness in the early modern period, but the Elizabethans maintained a conflicted and ambivalent relationship to this form of human trafficking. Although the English were later to become adamant defenders of the slave trade when it became a means of supplying labour in their own colonies, during the queen’s reign, before such colonies had been established, they were, as Michael Guasco observes, ‘routinely critical of slavery as it existed throughout the world’.3 This anti-­slavery discourse may have been generated more by a hatred of Spain – the major slaving power in Europe – than a genuine concern for Africans.4 Nevertheless, it circulated alongside the discourses of blackness that represented dark-­skinned peoples as barbaric, creating a complex lexical field for designating the relationship between race and social behaviour.5 This discursive contradiction is often embodied in the depiction of Africans on the Elizabethan stage. Othello is an adventurer, who had himself been ‘sold into slavery’, and whose ‘travailous history’ elicits first sympathy and then desire in Desdemona (1.3.139 and 140).6 However, this ‘Noble Moor’ is not able to restrain his inborn barbarism, leading him cruelly to murder his innocent wife

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in a fit of jealous rage. Aaron follows a contrary path, masterminding a bloody scheme of death and dismemberment, only to be humanized through the love he expresses for his son. Often, Othello is viewed as a representative African who only appears noble until his true inner blackness becomes manifest, but this is clearly not the case with Aaron, who displays almost every stereotypically evil trait historically associated with blackness, only to reveal finally a capacity for tenderness and self-­sacrifice. Since Shakespeare’s African characters generally appear in sexually charged – or potentially charged – relationships with white lovers, the nature of interracial desire is crucial for understanding the function and purpose of alterity in the Elizabethan era. It is also worth considering that Shakespeare may have been acquainted with Africans residing in London during the 1590s. Elizabeth’s infamous 1601 proclamation expelling ‘Negroes and blackamoors’ from the realm suggests that Africans had become a sufficiently significant population to warrant action by the government. Imtiaz Habib ingeniously hypothesizes that the ‘riots against aliens and immigrants to the metropolis in the 1580s and 1590s . . . may have been at least partially inspired by and directed against blacks’.7 To calm tensions in the city, the government may have then moved to expel Africans, a reading that gains strength from the parallel with Titus, in which order can only be restored in Rome by purging Aaron and the unruly Goths. However, other documentary evidence suggests that the situation was more complicated than simply a matter of expelling an alien nuisance.8 In 1596, Thomas Baskerville brought ten ‘Blackmoors’ into the realm,9 and on the pretext that these immigrants were taking jobs from the English, Elizabeth authorized Edward Banes to transport them out of the kingdom.10 The same year Casper van Senden, a merchant of Lübeck, was licensed to transport eighty-­nine ‘Blackamoores’ to Spain and Portugal, as recompense for the eighty-­nine prisoners he had ransomed from these same countries at his own expense.11 This was a bigger operation than had previously been proposed, and what

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is obscured by the language of the warrant is that van Senden was going to sell the Africans he acquired into slavery, in compensation for the money he had already spent on ransoms, while also likely gleaning a nice profit for himself. Unfortunately, for van Senden, the government did not grant him the power to compel masters to relinquish their African servants, forcing him to rely upon their consent, which proved not to be forthcoming. To salvage this money-­making scheme, van Senden enlisted the aid of the notoriously corrupt war profiteer Thomas Sherley, who wrote to Cecil asking for a commission with more teeth, explaining that his client ‘together with a Pursivant did travell at his great Charges into dyvers partes of your highness Realme for the said Blackamoores, But the masters of them, perceiving by the said warrant that your orator could not take the Blacamoores without the Master’s good will, would not suffer your Orator to have any one of them.’12 But Cecil, who himself had an African servant named Fortunatas, was reluctant to grant such compulsory power.13 Instead, a proclamation was issued, ordering officials to cooperate with van Senden and help him persuade reluctant masters to forfeit their servants. If any ‘willingly and obstinately refuse’, their names are to be taken down and certified to the queen, who will take ‘such further course therein as it shall seem best in her princely wisdom’.14 Since van Senden was imprisoned for debt about this time, his elaborate enterprise failed to bring him the expected profits, apparently because he had not reckoned upon the unwillingness of Englishmen to part with the Africans who belonged to their households or were employed in their businesses. Of course, the government could have deported the Africans directly with a show of force, but Elizabeth generally preferred to use private intermediaries, so she could disclaim responsibility, especially when the action was undignified, such as selling innocent men and women into slavery. The scheme failed because her subjects seem not to have endorsed the idea that ‘like Christians [they should] rather to be served by their owne contrymen then with those kynde of people’.15 Apparently, Africans had acquired a certain

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amount of social capital, making them more desirable as servants and workers than the unemployed and underemployed natives. This added social value might help explain why African characters became such a draw upon the stage, appearing more often and in more significant roles than their numerical presence in London would otherwise warrant. The social capital associated with African servants, many of whom appear to have worked in aristocratic households, finds a correlative in the cultural capital Shakespeare sought to display professionally. Like other playwrights in the fledgling commercial theatre, Shakespeare invoked ancient literary models to appeal to the more sophisticated members of his audience and to establish his intellectual credentials as an author. The Comedy of Errors, written in close proximity to Titus, is a reworking of Plautus’ Menaechmi, in which Shakespeare demonstrates the ability to adapt Roman theatrical genres to the English stage. Moreover, he does not merely take the Roman texts as models, but also imitates Roman methods of composition by incorporating Amphitruo, a second comedy by Plautus, into the plot of Menaechmi, a process known today as contaminatio, or the ‘contamination’ of one play by another. Shakespeare continued to employ Roman comedy as a model when he composed Titus, although the borrowings are not as obvious as with The Comedy of Errors and have therefore not attracted significant critical commentary.16 Nevertheless, Titus is a senex whose foolish devotion to outmoded tradition and custom plunges both himself and his children into a series of misadventures, while Demetrius and Chiron are versions of the love-­struck juventas. Tamora can also be viewed as a lena, or procuress, who, through a process of dramatic inversion, presides over the sexual initiation of her sons rather than a daughter. At the grisly feast, Titus also outfits himself as a cook, another stock figure in Roman comedy. However, for the purposes of my argument, the most significant borrowing is Aaron as the servus callidus. The clever slave’s primary role in the plays of Plautus and Terrence is masterminding a scheme that enables his young master to obtain the puella, or maiden.

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Upon discovering Demetrius and Chiron quarrelling over which of them most deserves Lavinia, Aaron plays the part of the servus to perfection by devising a plan whereby the Goths ‘both should speed’ (1.1.601).17 When Aaron tricks Titus into chopping off his hand, he is again acting like the servus, who routinely makes the senex an unwitting accomplice in his schemes, undermining the older generation’s position and authority. Similarly, when Aaron is captured attempting to substitute Muliteus’ baby for his own, he again conforms to the role of the servus, who typically falls victim to his own conniving. The servus callidus has traditionally been regarded as a figure of ‘sheer fun’, driven to scheme for the sake of scheming. However, more recently, Roman comedies have been read as fantasy structures, in which the fear of slave resistance and vengeance is assuaged by the restoration of order with which the play concludes.18 In other words, the slaves in these plays use their cunning not simply to pleasure the sons but also to strike back at the fathers, whose patria potestas they directly contravene with their elaborate plotting. Like his Roman predecessor, Aaron has been viewed as a villain whose schemes have no purpose other than the joy he derives from manipulating and destroying the lives of others. Bernard Spivack compares Aaron to the morality play Vice, a congenitally evil figure, who lacks a concrete reason for his malignancy, leading to the ‘liquidation’ of ‘conventional motives’; G. B. Harrison, who notes that Aaron is based upon the ‘witty slave’ of classical comedy, nonetheless also describes Aaron’s acts as ‘motiveless’; and Jacques Berthould echoes this sentiment by calling his deeds ‘baffling’. Emily Bartels agrees that Aaron lacks a motive but attributes his villainy to a need to enact blackness, straightforwardly reading his character as an embodiment of the negative traits associated with Moors in Elizabethan England. Such views have much to commend them, but are also one-­sided and overlook the performative appeal of Aaron’s sheer audacity and sparkling wit. Paxton Hehmeyer acknowledges this appeal but still falls prey to the belief that

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Aaron ‘never explains his motive’, adding that ‘[v]engeance does not come from any wrong or grievance done to him’.19 Given the nature of revenge tragedy, in which each party can point to prior injury, it would be odd if Aaron alone acted without a sense of grievance and feeling of justification. Since slavery in Roman comedy is not predicated on skin colour or complexion, the servus is not physically distinguishable from his masters, a point driven home by the numerous instances in which he impersonates his owner or another member of the ruling class – a form of mimicry instanced by Shakespeare in The Taming of the Shrew when Tranio passes for Lucentio. In contrast, Aaron’s physical differences from both Romans and Goths are foregrounded throughout Titus, indicating he could never pass for a master or assume office as Tamora does when she becomes empress. The difference in ‘hue’ is what dooms him to an inferior position and what motivates his seemingly indiscriminate revenge. Aaron regards slavery not as a natural condition but as a matter of fortune, and like other Renaissance villains, he refuses to accept his subordination, choosing instead to rebel against a world in which his merits are not recognized. He desires to take vengeance on a social system predicated on unwarranted distinctions, demonstrating his mental capacity through the brilliance of his scheming. Failing to distinguish friend from foe, Roman from Goth, Aaron victimizes all those who misread his black skin as a sign of insufficiency. Aaron’s revenge, then, is directed against the social order as a whole, and he victimizes those who have benefitted from this order and those who have denigrated him for his blackness. Even Tamora commands him to dispose of their newborn baby, not realizing he has far more regard for his son than he does for her. The vengeance of the slave against the world of the masters is highlighted by having Tamora initially occupy a position structurally equivalent to Aaron’s, as a captive reduced to servitude by right of conquest. Accustomed to issue commands as a queen, she must now submit to her new Roman

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masters and is forced to kneel in the street, begging for her son’s life. Reduced to non-­personhood as an enslaved prisoner, she speaks eloquently but is nonetheless rendered mute by the deaf ears upon which her pleas fall. Shakespeare draws attention to Tamora’s slave status by having Saturninus ‘set [the] prisoners free’ (1.1.278) after Titus has conveyed them to him as a goodwill gesture. The dangers of manumission, especially when motivated by sexual desire, are aptly illustrated by Tamora’s transformation from a bondswoman to an empress, who then turns an African and a fellow slave into the emperor’s counterfeit, investing the servile rather than the imperial body with libidinal energy. By dominating Saturninus erotically, Tamora becomes the real power in the state, but lacks sovereignty over herself because Aaron is the lord of her desire. Despite this sexual mastery, Aaron is aware he can never be emperor or even exercise power openly. He does taunt Chiron and Demetrius that their newly born brother is a ‘thick-­ lipped slave’ (4.2.177) and condescendingly warns Lucius, ‘Touch not the boy, he is of royal blood’ (5.1.49). Yet, he knows the child is tainted by his paternity. Had not his ‘hue’ betrayed ‘whose brat thou art’, the boy ‘mightst have been an emperor’ (5.1.28 and 30), a simulacrum whose imperial dignity would have belied the racially constructed nature of Romanitas. But the child’s identity is inscribed upon his body. Though this racial heritage is a sign too easily read by others, it also marks the boy as worthy in Aaron’s eyes, leading him to concoct the plan of substituting another baby with African blood for his own. Had avoiding detection been the only concern, Aaron could have put any white infant in his son’s place, but he instead conspires to substitute Muliteus’ child, whose ‘fair’ skin disguises its African heritage. The boy’s whiteness belies the Renaissance notion that racial identity is conferred by the male’s active seed, as the children’s differing ‘hues’ reveal the mother and father’s contribution to skin colour and racial composition is a matter of chance. Also, ‘Muliteus’ is a Latinized version of ‘Muly’,20 indicating Aaron’s ‘countryman’ (4.2.154) has to some degree been accepted in Roman society,

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as demonstrated not only by his name but also by his marriage to a fair-­complexioned woman. The differing hues of the two bi-­racial children reveal the complex series of oppositions informing discourses of race and ethnicity in the play. Muliteus and Aaron are both African males who impregnate a woman whose ‘fair’ complexion has been foregrounded by the text. In Act 1, Saturninus alerts the audience to Tamora’s skin colour, noting she is ‘[a] goodly lady, trust me, of the hue / That I would choose, were I to choose anew’ (1.1.265–6). Saturninus strongly implies the extreme whiteness of her skin stimulates him sexually, an implication substantiated by the other instances in which he calls attention to her complexion. Shortly after praising Tamora’s ‘hue’, he twice calls her ‘fair queen’ (1.1.267 and 338), as he anticipates the nuptials to come.21 Yet, despite Tamora’s fairness and the Goths’ ultra-­whiteness,22 her son is not like Muliteus’ son but dark-­skinned and ‘thick-­lipped’ (4.2.177), a difference noted by Aaron himself when he tells Chiron and Demetrius that his countryman’s son resembles the white wife not the African father: ‘[the] child is like her, fair as you are’ (4.2.156). By comparing the child to the Goths, Aaron disrupts the conventional reading of ‘fair’ as a term with moral implications. Chiron and Demetrius are not only completely amoral, having raped and mutilated Lavinia for sport, but are also shown to be sadistic when they assault her on Bassianus’ body, mockingly using his corpse as a ‘pillow’ (2.2.130). Aaron’s use of ‘fair’ is thereby rendered deeply ironic, revealing the two brothers are ‘white-­limed walls’ (4.2.100), possessing fair exteriors disguising corrupted interiors. His pointed comments about the brothers demonstrate that, in this instance, ‘fair’ is simply a skin colour, not a marker indicating character or inner worth. Kim F. Hall has argued that early modern racial discourse reifies the ‘notion that white is the “natural” colour of humans’.23 Aaron disrupts the reification process by comparing Muliteus’ white baby to Chiron and Demetrius, whose ‘black’ deeds will be punished with a cruelty unparalleled in the Shakespeare canon. Racial identity is akin to ‘alehouse painted

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signs’ (4.2.100), marking interiority but in a constructed fashion whose signifying capacity may be altered with a fresh coat of paint. Early modern blackness is generally posited as the antithesis of the normative fair complexion, embodying those qualities that must be discursively expelled from the European subject’s conception of itself. However, as we have already seen, in Titus Andronicus, the Goths embody ‘whiteness’ in an extreme form that opposes blackness but also partakes of its supposed barbarism. We are not given any explicit information about the ethnicity of Muliteus’ wife, but the parallel established between the two interracial couples and Aaron’s comparing Demetrius and Chiron’s complexion to hers suggests she might be a Goth. Aaron, however, grants her no identity apart from her fairness, not even a name other than ‘wife’ (4.2.155). Gender and race hierarchies collide in this denomination, for as a white subject, she should be given priority over her African husband, yet as a woman, she, like many other wives in Shakespeare, acquires her identity and name through marriage. She has admirably performed her marital duty by getting pregnant and delivering a white baby, whose skin colour enables it to do what Aaron and Tamora’s cannot: counterfeit Roman nobility by being ‘received for the Emperor’s heir’ (4.2.160). Aaron’s baby is both imperial and royal, having descended on the mother’s side from the Empress of Rome and the Queen of the Goths. But the child is disbarred from being accepted as noble by its bodily markers, despite the play’s having established the contingency of racial and ethnic identity through the various transpositions of Romans, Goths and Africans. Though the Goths are Rome’s foremost enemy, against whom Titus has lost ‘one-­and-twenty valiant sons’, men at arms, ‘[k]nighted in the field’ rather than at court (1.1.198, 199), they are nevertheless the people who liberate Rome, led by Lucius, whose bloodlust, in sacrificing Alarbus, had initiated the spiral of revenge that turns the city into a ‘wilderness of tigers’ (3.1.54). Lucius’ command to burn Alarbus and ‘hew

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his limbs till they be clean consumed’ leads Chiron to exclaim that ‘was never Scythia half so barbarous’ (1.1.132, 133). As Robert Miola observes, this scene is taken from Seneca’s Troades, in which Andromache pleads with Ulysses to spare Astyanax, noting that even the Colchians or Scythians had never committed a crime so barbarous.24 When Chiron voices an almost identical sentiment, his brother replies, ‘oppose not Scythia to ambitious Rome’ (1.1.135). Rome’s self-­conception as a just and legalistic society is so deeply entrenched that pointing out Scythia’s relative humanity will have no effect, as Titus and his sons view their own killing in a different light from that of other peoples. Offering what amounts to a Nuremberg defence of Alarbus’ actions, Tamora elicits no response from Titus other than that she must ‘[p]atient herself’ because her ‘son is marked, and die he must’ (1.1.124, 128). She argues Alarbus should not be punished for defending his country as any loyal soldier would. The legal point she proposes is whether his being ‘marked’ is justified. Titus’ response does not address this point but simply states that since he is so marked, he must in fact die. This is state-­sponsored violence for the purposes of control: Alarbus must be executed to compensate the Romans psychologically for the terrible and traumatic losses they have sustained on the battlefield. The talionic nature of this justice cannot be questioned because the Romans are not comparable to other races or peoples. Sufficient unto itself, Rome does not enter into mutually constitutive relationships with others but instead is that by which these others are defined. Tamora and Chiron plead for a more multicultural perspective, in which races and their customary practices can be compared with one another. If Scythians are the most barbarous race, what does it say that they are more magnanimous in victory than the Romans? But Titus refuses to even entertain this question because, for him, culture, law and right are all synonymous with Rome. Realizing such a position is impervious to reason, Demetrius tells his mother not to argue but devote herself to revenge and become the barbarian she is already presumed to be.

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Demetrius proffers Hecuba as model for Tamora to follow. Shakespeare’s most likely source for this reference is Book XIII of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which Hecuba takes revenge for her son’s murder by blinding Polymestor, to whom she had entrusted the child. By referring to Polymestor as a ‘Thracian tyrant’ (1.1.141), Demetrius foregrounds Rome’s barbarity and unwittingly anticipates his own imitation of another Thracian king, Tereus, who rapes and mutilates Philomel, much as he and his brother will do to Lavinia. Ovid describes Tereus as burning with his own viciousness and that of his people (flagrat vitio gentisque suoque (6.460)),25 racializing the crime and implicitly warning readers about the dangers of miscegenation and mixed marriages. Thracian barbarity has a long history, stretching back at least as far as the Iliad, in which the Thracians are allied with Troy as part of the multiethnic host that confronts the Greeks. Yet, the Thracians are not Asian or African, like most of the other Trojan allies, but European and more like the Greeks than the other peoples who fight on the side of Priam and Hector. In fact, the eponymous Thrace is a sister of Europa, and the Thracians themselves play a double game in the war, supplying the Greeks with wine, even though they are ostensibly fighting on the other side. Demetrius’ comparison thus explicitly complicates the ethnic boundaries in the play, especially since he urges Tamora to imitate the Trojans, whom the Romans believed to be their ancestors. These Asian barbarians are typified by Paris, who, unable to control his lust, violates the most sacred bonds of guest-­friendship by raping Helen, after having been invited into the sacred precincts of the household by her husband. Yet, to take revenge on Rome, Tamora is urged to imitate the city’s Trojan ancestor, the ur-­mother, Hecuba, who tears out Polymestor’s eyes with her bare hands, using her fingers like claws to gouge the sockets after the eyes have been ripped from them. Ovid emphasizes Hecuba’s animal-­like frenzy to prepare the reader for her metamorphosis into a dog, howling in barbaric fury at the inhuman depredations committed against her children.

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Ovid follows the Hecuba episode with the story of how Aurora prayed to Zeus for the restoration of her son, the Ethiopian prince Memnon. Taking pity on the mother, Zeus transforms Memnon’s ashes into black birds, who divide into two camps and fight with one another, a ritual they are destined to repeat for eternity. Metaphorically, the furious birds are akin to the peoples from different continents, battling one another in cycles of repetitive warfare.26 The birds hate those who belong to the other side, forgetting or unaware they arise from the same human material, the burning corpse of Memnon. The blackness of the birds also introduces racial or bodily markers into the endless, pointless cycles of violence perpetuated by humans. But Ovid’s point seems to be that such markers are meaningless. The Asians are barbarians who perpetuated a rape but the Greeks are even more barbaric in their revenge – both sides are ‘blackened’ by their deeds, just like the birds who peck and claw each other so relentlessly over Memnon’s ashes. In Ovid’s version of Troy’s fall, ethnicity has no moral implications since Greeks can be even more cruel and vicious than the supposed barbarians against whom they war. Yet, Ovid persists in making blackness a signifier of barbarism, even when the point is to demonstrate the arbitrary nature of categories such as barbarian and civilized.27 Although Memnon is perhaps the most noble of Troy’s allies, his corpse nonetheless gives rise to birds whose black colour connotes their fierceness and single-­minded drive to destroy each other. Commenting upon this episode in his edition of Metamorphoses, George Sandys posits that Memnon may have been wrongly designated an Ethiopian since ‘others write hee raigned in Susa a Citty of Persia: who in that he came from the East, was said to bee the sonne of the morning’.28 Memnon, according to Sandys, was ‘[p]erhaps supposed an AEthiopian in regard of his complexion’. To cement this case of mistaken identity, he further notes that Arian reports that ‘Alexander incountered with blacke men in those countries [to the East]’ (448). However, Sandys is not willing to acknowledge the existence

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of different black peoples but instead regards blackness as a singular racial category. If Memnon was indeed king of Ethiopia, he must have marched from the East and conquered this land, which seems likely, Sandys argues, because the fable of the birds alludes ‘to the custome of those Easterne Countries where the nearest servants and favorites of Princes, having compassed the funeral Pile with howlings and lamentations, threw themselves into the fire, that they might bee ready in another world to give their attendance’. Ovid’s tale, Sandys argues, documents a practice common among Eastern peoples, some of whom are black but not African. All these groups must have a common descent because blackness is produced neither by climate nor geography, which is proven by the ‘well knowne’ fact that ‘black men dwel on the one side the river Niger and tawnie on the other’. The irrelevance of geography and climate is also demonstrated by another observation about blacks, ‘who though they change their clime, never change their complexions, if unmixed with others’ (448). ‘Negroes’, all of one race, regardless of whether they are Asian or African, cannot be altered except through miscegenation. Shakespeare explores interracial sexuality by coupling Desdemona with Othello and Anthony with Cleopatra, but Aaron and Tamora are different because both are outsiders, whose identity is defined in juxtaposition to Rome. Unlike Sandys’ ‘Negroes’, who embody universal blackness, the Goths represent a shade of whiteness, differentiated from its Roman counterpart by their supposed barbarism. Despite her claim to be ‘incorporate’ in the empire, Tamora is never really assimilated into Rome but instead retains the symbolic ‘hue’ of her native land. When Lucius leads the Goth army into the city, the suggestion seems to be that these others will have to be accommodated if Rome is to survive. As the anomalous figure disrupting this accommodation process, Aaron must be excised for Rome to renew itself, leading Lucius to have him buried alive and left to starve. This barbarous act repeats the earlier sacrifice of Alarbus, with the difference that Lucius had to plead then for what he now commands. Despite Lucius’

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attempt to eradicate difference, Aaron’s baby with Tamora suggests the future may depend upon multiracialism and the creation of new subject positions that do not fit with either the old patterns or a newly reconfigured whiteness. The lust Tamora exhibits for Aaron conforms to that seen in other plays of the period, such as Lust’s Dominion and even Othello, in which the black male body ignites desire in a white female. Unlike Eugenia or Desdemona, however, Tamora does not embody European subjectivity, representing instead a corporeal form akin to but also different from that which had been privileged and naturalized in Rome. White like the Romans and barbarous like her African paramour, Tamora doubly inscribes difference in the child she produces with Aaron. Yet, the possibility that Muliteus’ child could pass for Roman, despite incorporating two racially coded forms of alterity, also marks the moment when whiteness ceases to be barbaric. The new ideology of barbarism demands that whiteness be fully assimilated with civility, a mediatory process whereby what is really a political form becomes a racial subject position. Nevertheless, the origins of Tamora and Aaron’s baby can never be fully erased, for as the father notes, the child is ‘tawny’ rather than fair. ‘Tawny’ is generally used to distinguish relatively light-­skinned Moors from ‘blackamoors’, an ethnographic division Sandys had located geographically along the Niger. But in Titus Andronicus, the word is clearly not being used to identify one group of Moors in contradistinction to another. Rather, tawny indicates the child is the product of racial mixing, as Aaron makes clear when he calls the infant a ‘tawny slave, half me and half thy dame!’ (5.1.27). Aaron and Tamora’s ‘tawny Moor’ is in effect a new social formation, a composite child who problematizes the categories that works such as Sandys’ were intended to both establish and maintain. This ‘tawny Moor’ could just as easily be described as a ‘tawny Goth’, a possibility Aaron mockingly drives home when he solicits Chiron and Demetrius to greet their ‘brother’. Aaron, though, refuses to accede to the matrilineal discourse defining the child as a Goth and instead appropriates the baby as his

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‘son’, cementing its propertied relation to his person by proudly calling it a ‘slave’, a status the newborn could only have inherited from him. When Demetrius threatens to kill the baby, claiming he will ‘broach the tadpole on [his] rapier’s point’, the father responds that anyone who attempts such an action ‘dies upon my scimitar’s sharp point’ (4.2.87, 93). The juxtaposition of European and Asian weapons – the rapier and scimitar – anticipates the racial trajectory by which whiteness will become consolidated in the aftermath of the play. Romans will mix with Goths and other barbarians to produce the geographical and political entity of Europe, which will be defined in opposition to various darker-­skinned peoples, who will eventually be denominated as ‘non-Western’. Aaron’s plan to substitute one infant for another would have insinuated this darker hue within the new proto-European population as a latent possibility, integrated into the imperial body, which, according to Renaissance theories of skin colour, such as that articulated by Sandys, it would have eventually claimed as its own. Of all Aaron’s plans, the baby-­switching is the only one he does not bring to fruition. It is also the only one of his plans not predicated upon revenge. Since Muliteus is Aaron’s countryman, he does not appear as a threatening other, denying the servus callidus the recognition he deserves. Revenge drives Aaron, ‘hammering in [his] head’ (2.2.39), and when he finally acts out of a motive other than vengeance – the love of his child – he ceases to be the master of his own destiny and falls prey to an ordinary Goth on patrol. Aaron, whose rhetorical skill is unmatched, is captured babbling to his son like the weak-­minded, doting fools, the ‘giddy men of Rome’ (4.4.86), whom he has over-­reached throughout the play. Aaron has one last card to play with Lucius, turning the future emperor’s own fatuous religious beliefs against him, leaving revenge to his son, or maybe the hope that the boy will inhabit a world where a tawny slave can rise on his merits and ‘be a warrior and command a camp’ (4.2.182). Like Aaron’s son, Muliteus’ child is bi-­racial, but its fair complexion erases the diversity of its

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tawny origins, foregrounding whiteness as the duplicitous hue. Aaron had previously defended blackness as a superior colour [or hue] because ‘it scorns to bear another hue’ (4.2.102), but whiteness is revealed to have the power to erase blackness. This erasure is what grants value to his countryman’s son, a point Aaron drives home by telling the Goths to ‘give the mother gold’ in exchange for her child; Muliteus does not have to be bribed because he will gain sufficient compensation by having his child received for the ‘emperor’s heir’ (4.2.157, 160). Although this child is not mentioned again in the play, the possibility remains that Demetrius and Chiron completed their mission and substituted it for their brother, as they had been instructed to do by Aaron. This possibility is rendered more likely by Saturninus and Tamora’s appearing together in harmonious fashion at Titus’ feast. Though this substitution is what Aaron would call ‘a very excellent piece of villainy’ (2.2.7), he never mentions it in the laundry list of evil deeds he confesses to Lucius, suggesting he desires the imposture to remain undiscovered. If Saturninus had survived and taken the child as his own, the ‘imperial seat’ would then have been Africanized. However, Shakespeare silently passes over the possibility of this presumptive racialization for both the Roman world and his own. Instead, he leaves us with Aaron and Tamora’s tawny child: a replacement for the sons and daughters who have been lost and a signifier of the new, anomalous empire forged by Lucius and the Goths.

Notes 1 For the influence of classical comedy on Shakespeare: Wolfgang Riehle, Shakespeare, Plautus and the Humanist Tradition (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), 13–21; Robert S. Miola, ‘Roman Comedy’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy, ed. Alexander Leggatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 18–23. On Shakespeare’s use of Ovid in Titus, see Charles and Michelle Martindale, Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity: An Introductory Essay

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(New York: Routledge, 1990), 47–55; Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 100–17; Sarah Carter, Ovidian Myth and Sexual Deviance in Early Modern English Literature (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 14–52. 2 See, for example, Dorothea Kehler’s justly famous reading of Tamora as a lusty widow, which, despite its persuasiveness on many counts, fails to consider the racial and ethnic components of desire in the play (‘ “That Ravenous Tiger Tamora”: Titus Andronicus’s Lusty Widow, Wife, and M/other’, in Titus Andronicus: Critical Essays, ed. Philip C. Kolin (New York: Garland Publishing, 1995), 326–8). 3 Michael Guasco, Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 49. 4 For an overview of the black legend in England, see William S. Maltby, The Black Legend in England: The Development of Anti-Spanish Sentiment, 1558–1660 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1971). See also Barbara Fuchs, ‘The Spanish Race’, in Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in Renaissance Empires, ed. Margaret R. Greer, Walter D. Mignolo and Maureen Quilligan (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2008), 88–99, esp. 94–8. 5 Nabil Matar usefully reminds us that the various terms for dark-­skinned peoples should not be conflated with one another because of the different power relations England maintained with Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa and the Levant (Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 7–8). I have chosen the term ‘African’ to indicate the subject position being constructed by the play. 6 William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann, Arden third edition, revised with a new introduction by Ayanna Thompson (1997; London: Bloomsbury, 2016). 7 Imtiaz Habib, Shakespeare and Race: Postcolonial Praxis in the Early Modern Period (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000), 92. 8 For details of van Senden’s attempts to export Africans to Spain and Portugal, see Miranda Kaufmann, ‘Caspar Van Senden, Sir

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Thomas Sherley and the “Blackamoor” Project’, Historical Research, 81, 212 (May 2008): 366–71. The article may be accessed online: http://www.mirandakaufmann.com/ caspanvansenden.html (accessed 27 May 2018). 9 Baskerville was left in command of this voyage after Sir Francis Drake and Sir John Hawkins died en route. Drake had a long history of operating in tandem with Africans against their Spanish oppressors and, according to a Spanish report, on this voyage he acquired a hundred African men and women, most of whom it seems willingly went with him to escape their Spanish overlords. Since Baskerville returned with only ten Africans, the others might have died, or more likely were resold into slavery at another colonial port. For a reconstruction of these events, see Emily Bartels, Speaking of the Moor: From Alcazar to Othello (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 83–7. 10 PC 2/21, f304. A facsimile and transcript of this document, as well as the warrant and proclamation issued on van Senden’s behalf, are available online at the National Archives site: http:// www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/blackhistory/early_ times/elizabeth.html (accessed 27 May 2018). 11 PC 2/21, f. 306. 12 Salisbury MSS, vol. 14, 143: Hatfield, Petitions 151. Quoted in Kaufman. 13 Van Senden also brought fifty Spanish and Portuguese prisoners being held in Plymouth back to their homeland as part of his exchange operation. Kaufman suggests these prisoners may have been black since a company of Moriscos is known to have sailed with the Armada. This seems doubtful since almost a decade had passed before he brought them to Lisbon in January 1598. The Africans residing in England had more likely come into the country as a by-­product of the privateering war. Some of them may have been captured but others may have been serving aboard English privateers, given the connections established by pirates and other traders with North Africa. See Guasco, 93–115. 14 Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. Paul L. Hughes, vol. 3 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 221–2. 15 PC 2/21, f. 306.

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16 Colin Burrow argues persuasively that the influence of Roman comedy upon Shakespeare is not limited to the plots he borrowed for plays such as The Comedy of Errors. Instead, Shakespeare adopted scenes and situations from Plautus and Terence, as can be seen in the first act of Othello when Brabantio plays the senex, Iago the servus callidus, and Othello the miles gloriosus (Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 134 and 159–61). 17 William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate, Arden third edition (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). All subsequent quotations are from this edition of the play. 18 Kathleen McCarthy, Slaves, Masters, and the Art of Authority in Plautine Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 19 Bernard Spivack, The Allegory of Evil: The History of a Metaphor in Relation to His Major Villains (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), 379–86; G. B. Harrison, Shakespeare’s Tragedies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 45; Bartels, 65–99; Jacques Berthould, ‘Introduction’, in Titus Andronicus (London: Penguin Books, 2001), 41; Paxton Hehmeyer, ‘ “Twill Vex Thy Soul to Hear What I Shall Speak”: Aaron and the Aesthetics of Discomfort’, in Titus out of Joint: Reading the Fragmented Titus Andronicus, ed. Liberty Stanavage and Paxton Hehmeyer (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 165–77, 172. See also, G. Harold Metz, Shakespeare’s Earliest Tragedy: Studies in Titus Andronicus (Madison and Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), 53–4. 20 In his otherwise fine edition of the play, Bate very unconvincingly argues that ‘Muliteus’, found in all the early printed texts, should in fact be ‘Muly lives’. He cites George Steevens’ claim that ‘Muliteus [is] no Moorish name’. However, the Latinized form of the name appears deliberate and raises the possibility that Muliteus has been assimilated into Roman society. Moreover, Steevens’ claim, cited by Bate, that a ‘blundering’ transcriber or printer misread ‘Muly lives’ as ‘Muliteus’ strains credulity (269). The emendation is therefore quite weak on textual grounds and also reflects a Eurocentric bias that it is better not to reproduce, especially when the preponderance of evidence points in a different direction. I will

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therefore proceed with ‘Muliteus’ as the more likely reading of this line. 21 In an extremely cogent and well-­argued essay, Jean Feerick argues that Saturninus is stimulated by Tamora’s nobility rather than her fairness. Tamora’s royal blood undoubtedly enables her to become empress, but Saturninus is clearly excited sexually by her appearance. He also appears to want a mother, so his motives are complex. But his attraction to her ‘hue’ is undeniable. Feerick claims ‘hue’ can mean ‘form’, but in Titus the word clearly refers to skin colour, as is evident when Aaron queries whether ‘black be so base a hue’. Saturninus also twice refers to Tamora’s fairness after commenting on her hue, so the word is clearly intended to associate her sexual desirability with whiteness. Jean Feerick, ‘Botanical Shakespeare: The Racial Logic of Plants in Titus Andronicus’, South Central Review, 26(1/2) (Winter and Spring 2009): 82–102, 88–9. 22 I adapt this term from Francesca T. Royster, who, in her groundbreaking article on race in Titus, refers to the Goths as ‘ultrawhite’ ‘White-Limed Walls: Whiteness and Gothic Extremism in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 51(4) (Winter 2000): 432–55, 432, 444, 449 and 454. 23 Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 51. 24 Robert Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Influence of Seneca (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 19–20. 25 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, rev. G. P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library 42 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916), 320. 26 The repetitive battles of the birds also likely refer to the civil strife that characterized Rome during much of Ovid’s life. Lee Fratantuono, Madness Transformed: A Reading of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2011), 381. As Shakespeare was to demonstrate in Julius Caesar, these struggles also had relevance to the factionalism of the 1590s. 27 On Ovid’s discourses of blackness, see Ian Smith, Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 53–6.

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28 George Sandys, Ovid’s Metamorphoses Englished, Mythologized and Represented in Figures (Oxford, 1632; reprinted in facsimile New York: Garland, 1976). Sandys includes commentaries after his translation of each book. The comments referenced in the text are taken from his commentary on Memnon in Book Thirteen.

5 Remixing the family Blackness and domesticity in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus David Sterling Brown

Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (c. 1590) positions Aaron, a black Moor, as a marginalized outsider whose calculating actions facilitate his, and his child’s, uneasy integration into Rome’s public and private domestic spheres. The sole black figure on stage for nearly four acts, and one of two characters who is present but silent in Act 1, Aaron becomes the drama’s most physically and rhetorically visible figure.1 Coming very close to having the play’s last word, this noticeable black character in Titus serves in a role that is not entirely about him.2 According to Imtiaz Habib, the sixteenth-­century black person’s ‘cultural visibility is therefore by direct implication [his] cultural in-visibility’.3 As a figment of Shakespeare’s imagination, Aaron, too, is invisible. He is a cultural tool that

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complicates easy assumptions about blackness because, as Kim F. Hall stresses, ‘In any form, the use of a black figure as a focus of an artist’s skill in England was increasingly linked to the use of black people as household slaves and as colonial labor.’4 Perhaps more than any of the ‘white’ characters in Titus, Aaron’s presence is instrumental for transmitting early modern ideals about family and domesticity, and consequently blackness, which Shakespeare entangles in the character’s hybrid black body.5 Since, on the early modern stage, Aaron’s role was played by a white actor who ‘blacked up’, the Moorish character’s messages about domesticity, and even patriarchal authority, were acted out by a male member of the dominant culture whose presence, beneath the black façade, simultaneously reinforced positive and negative ideas.6 Although scholars often define Aaron simply as a villain, in the domestic context such readings, which make Aaron the scapegoat for the white characters’ crimes, are reductive.7 Moreover, such readings ignore the fundamental ways Aaron’s actions, diabolical or not, are complex, and sometimes contradictory, correctives that illuminate the errors of Roman and Goth behaviour.8 The contradictory correctives arise because Aaron is part of ‘the Shakespearean black male presence that struggles against its own colonial inscription’.9 Aaron is what he is; and he is what he is not.10 In presenting a bi-­racial family in the canon for the first time, Shakespeare focuses on two marginal parental figures who are racial opposites: Aaron and Tamora, the fair-­skinned Gothic Queen who is no less ‘barbarous’ than her dark-­skinned lover (2.2.118).11 Although the play is named for Titus’ endogamous family, the Andronici, the drama quickly displaces Roman centrality once the Gothic Queen ascends the throne, accompanied by her two Goth sons, Chiron and Demetrius. For much of the play, the margin displaces the expected centre, redefining both the state and the family through cultural integration. More specifically, Tamora and Aaron’s biologically related progeny, a nameless black infant who comes into existence in 4.2, definitively reframes the drama’s initially

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exclusive emphasis on endogamous family relations. The familial shifting that occurs in 4.2 pointedly restructures the established Goth family – Tamora and her sons – especially when Aaron defines the black child as the Goth boys’ ‘brother’ (4.2.90). Titus, which gradually favours a different, socially complex family model, initially emphasizes consanguineous family relations: Bassianus and Saturninus’ bond has a fraternal structure; Titus heads a large, paternally centred family, the Andronici; and Tamora, prior to the sacrifice of her eldest child and the birth of her lovechild, is mother to three Goth sons. Before long, these three families are consolidated into two when the royal Roman brothers take their brides in Act 1, still sustaining the play’s emphasis on the fair-­skinned family: Bassianus marries Lavinia, aligning himself with the Andronici as an in-­law, and Saturninus crosses cultural lines when he marries Tamora. By the end of Act 1, all major characters are officially associated with a family except Aaron, whom we only know up to that point as Tamora’s lover. But something changes once we arrive at Act 2 because Aaron gains access to a kind of power – parental authority – which forever alters the Rome of the play through bloodshed, the mixing of blood through sex, and the remixing of the family. In Act  2, Aaron begins to disrupt more normative notions about family and domesticity when he assumes what resembles a surrogate parental role with Chiron and Demetrius. Aaron’s quasi-­parental behaviour is suggestive and anticipates the continued growth of the Goth family. His relation to Tamora, her Goth sons, and eventually, his own biologically related child offers a different kind of family structure that supports elective kinship and racial mixing – the Gothic with the African. The consanguineal, fair-­skinned families – the Goths and the Romans – are set up to tolerate rather than exclude blackness by the play’s end. Thus, while scrutinizing the developmental inclusivity of family relations in Titus, I will argue that Shakespeare uses Aaron, and the disparaging animalistic metaphors in Acts 2 and 3 that allude to Aaron and his blackness, to critique, among

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other things, the dominant culture’s domestic behaviour. The absent-­present Aaron in Act 1 is a socio-­cultural assessor who witnesses actions that would be considered improper by English conduct-­book standards: brothers quarrelling with each other, a father com­mitting filicide, children disrespecting their parent, men fighting over a betrothed woman, and, perhaps most egregiously, a man letting a woman ‘rule’ him (1.1.447).12 Aaron’s exposure to Rome’s public and private domestic disorder equips him with the ability to teach the white early modern audience;13 however, as Aaron provides solutions for domestic conflicts, he cannot help but create new problems because the baseness of his blackness, and revenge tragedy conventions, disallows his appearing heroic. This paradox is a consequence of the play’s ambiguous attitude toward blackness; and it is also a result of the racism and prejudice indirectly perpetuated through Shakespeare’s art.14 It may be true, as Emily C. Bartels contends, that in the Elizabethan period ‘a discourse of blackness was taking shape and getting used as a vehicle of discrimination at the time that English playwrights were featuring the Moor and that the English queen was declaring the “blacks” in her realm “to manie” ’.15 Still, I believe the dramatic work performed by the black body did more than simply (re)create racial paranoia or reinforce black stereotypes, despite the fact that ‘the notion of black as evil began to influence English society’s attitudes towards objects and peoples that [were] visibly darker than them’.16 Gretchen Gerzina reminds us that ‘the theatre-­going public was quite accepting of racial mixing when sentiment, honour and questions of class were involved’.17 Miscegenation, and therefore the black characters’ presence, only needed utilitarian value for the white audience.18 This means that figures like Aaron were good for more than just being bad – hypersexual murderers, adulterers, and rapists, for example;19 simplistic critical readings of Aaron ignore how early modern England actually saw collaborative coexistence between black and white people, even within ‘domestic life[, which] is thus not limited to the domestic space’.20 As Ariane M. Balizet asserts,

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‘Domesticity encompassed the domus as well as licit and illicit sex, parenthood, household order, the relationship between the home and state, and the connections between family honor and national identity.’21 Even without a formal household space of his own, then, Aaron is undoubtedly part of Titus’ domestic fabric as Tamora’s illicit partner, as a biologically related and surrogate parent, and as a parodic patriarch. Through Aaron, particularly because of his association with the play’s ‘conflict and violence’, Shakespeare engages early modern domestic ideology.22 Rather than shock the audience by frontloading the consequences of Aaron and Tamora’s sex, Shakespeare grad­ ually leads us away from a domestic or relationship model that is strictly Roman by first depicting cultural mixing. In need of an empress after Bassianus reclaims Lavinia, Saturninus soon takes the Gothic Tamora as his bride and makes her ‘incorporate in Rome, / A Roman now adopted happily’ (1.1.467–8). Although Tamora is a Goth, she now belongs to and in Rome because of a legally sanctioned marriage to the Emperor. Her incorporation, which scholars such as Francesca T. Royster have examined, facilitates her swift upward move­ment from freed foreign prisoner to matriarch of a royal family that connects her through marriage to the Andronici given Lavinia’s union with Bassianus.23 Briefly, the play permits the existence of one big, white extended family that embraces cultural but not racial difference. Aaron remains on the outside of that broad family structure in Act 1, though his role as Tamora’s lover, which becomes clearer in subsequent acts, amplifies the kind of mixing that Saturninus himself authorizes by crossing cultural lines. Aaron’s relationship with Tamora eventually enhances the play’s attention to the various kinds of familial or domestic models that Titus Andronicus suggests are possible: namely, miscegenation and surrogacy.24 Until the end, Titus maintains a preoccupation with mixing that reveals the significance of sexual and cultural blending, along with the accompanying anxieties produced by blackness.25 The only time ‘mix’ appears in the play is when Titus prepares

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to slit Chiron’s and Demetrius’ throats because they ravished Lavinia. He laments, ‘Here stands the spring whom you have stained with mud, / This goodly summer with your winter mixed’ (5.2.170–1). While Titus considers Lavinia’s mutilation, he first attends to the sexual violation of her body. By associating Lavinia with summer and the pure element water, Titus considers how the Goth boys tainted her wholesomeness and femininity. In so doing, he defines Roman-­ness by distancing it from Goth-­ness, denoting their cultural difference;26 ‘mud’ and ‘winter’ darken the Goths and imply that they are emblematically black(ened) because, like Aaron, they are morally dead. The anticipation of Aaron’s parental instincts and biological fatherhood begins with his surrogate-­like parental behaviour toward Chiron and Demetrius. The play’s attention to surrogacy is evident even in the Roman characters’ actions. In Act 4, for instance, Titus stands in for the banished Lucius to nurture and ‘teach’ his grandson, Young Lucius (4.1.119). In Act 2, the play recognizes the potential for the existence of an alternative, bi-­racial family through the Goth–Moor faction. As Barbara L. Estrin observes, the play links Aaron to the idea of fostering when, in the forest scene, ‘Lavinia defends an order transcending the generational cycle – a kinship based on caring rather than consanguinity’.27 Lavinia’s suggestion that ‘ravens foster forlorn children / The whilst their own birds famish in their nests’ domesticates the black figure through personification (2.2.153– 4). Her words are initially supported by Aaron, the person whom the Roman characters associate with the raven. Even more influential than the Goth brothers’ legitimate stepfather, Saturninus, Aaron provides depraved support for Tamora’s neglected Goth sons. However, Aaron ultimately deviates from Lavinia’s description when he receives and defends his ‘own bird’, the biologically related baby that Tamora abandons in 4.2. Through Aaron’s parental role and his position as Tamora’s lover, Shakespeare enables Aaron to foster forlorn children while he threatens and parodies normative notions of Roman paternalism. The Romans identify the black family as natural but non-­human.

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The infamous forest scene is also notable because it marks the first time in the play when we can conceive of domesticity in relation to blackness. In dehumanized terms, Shakespeare enables blackness to define at least part of the family through Lavinia’s raven allegory that suggests familial remixing occurs within nature and that that model should also apply to humanity. The raven’s fostering forlorn children signals Aaron’s parental nature and his later paternal sensitivity. Lavinia’s curious use of ‘children’ in a dialogue about birds mixes the image of human and non-­human offspring; and the connection between animal and human reflects Aaron’s own character progression as he oscillates between being a barbaric, devilish villain and being what is arguably the play’s most protective parent, a role he works on developing with Tamora’s sons.28 Shakespeare plants the seeds of parentage in Aaron’s bond with Chiron and Demetrius.29 The author allows Aaron’s important role as a protective father to draw attention to his often ignored position as a leader who determines strategy for the Goth faction as it assimilates into Rome. Children – Tamora’s Goth sons and the black baby – stimulate Aaron’s domestic voice. The Goth boys display a dependence on Aaron that exists from the play’s beginning and manifests itself strongly as the drama develops. For instance, in their final scene with Aaron, Demetrius begs, ‘Advise thee, Aaron, what is to be done, / And we will all subscribe to thy advice. / Save thou the child, so we may all be safe’ (4.2.131–3). Here, Chiron and Demetrius look to Aaron for protection. In so doing, their behaviour reinforces why and how parental figures are essential. Chiron and Demetrius’ last moment with Aaron echoes their first encounter with him, one in which Aaron offers advice intended to protect the Goths. When the brothers drew their swords at court as they argued about Lavinia, Aaron intervened: I would not for a million of gold The cause were known to them it most concerns,

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Nor would your noble mother for much more Be so dishonoured in the court of Rome. For shame, put up. (1.1.548–52) The blood bond between Tamora and her sons connects them to her lover, Aaron. As a kind of foster parent, he neutralizes the brotherly quarrel by applying Tamora’s parental authority in her absence. Only after doing that does Aaron assume his role as a parental figure and offer explicit instruction to Tamora’s sons. He requires obedience from Chiron and Demetrius; his pathway to it runs through their mother. By correcting the brothers’ behaviour, Aaron promotes a message about brotherly accord that contrasts with the Roman brothers’ earlier conduct (Bassianus and Saturninus’ fight over the crown and Lavinia, and Titus and Marcus’ battle over Mutius’ murder and burial), all while he plots Bassianus’ and Lavinia’s destruction. The children’s dependence on and deference to a non-­ biologically related adult such as Aaron leads to the acquisition of parental authority for him. This domestic power permits him to instruct the Goths throughout the remainder of the scene. Regardless of the quality of his counsel, Aaron assumes responsibility for guiding Chiron and Demetrius. Although their relationship dissolves upon the arrival of Aaron and Tamora’s lovechild, it should be recognized because it prefigures the remixing of the family and the kinds of qualities that humanize and appear to redeem Aaron in Act 4 – namely, his parental skills and attentiveness that are indirectly alluded to through the animalistic metaphors in 2.2 and the play’s climax. In 3.2, the entomological allegory where a black fly is instilled with various meanings by Titus and his brother, Marcus, turns our attention to the play’s second direct acknowledgement of the potential for a family to be black or, at least, contain physical blackness. Much of the play’s criticism highlights Act 3 as the turning point for Titus, who abandons his blind allegiance to Rome in favour of defending his family

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against its enemies. As I will show, Act 3 is a significant turning point for how the play depicts domestic relations, as the black fly’s imagined anthropomorphic family is itself an alternative, albeit symbolic, way of conceptualizing domesticity, specifically the bond between parent and child. When Marcus stabs the black fly with his knife, his action evokes a passionate response from Titus who does not condone his brother’s behaviour and says,         Thou kill’st my heart. Mine eyes are cloyed with view of tyranny; A deed of death done on the innocent Becomes not Titus’ brother. (3.2.54–7) Before hearing Marcus’ rationale for stabbing the fly, Titus empathizes with the insect and its hypothetical family, which he views as innocent victims of his brother’s cruelty.30 The fly first represents for Titus the play’s white victims (his injured daughter and murdered sons), but it quickly comes to signify the black villain. As a material household object, the dish that provides the backdrop for the fly’s death, and the knife, connects the play’s ideas about blackness and domesticity that further indicate the black(ened) miscegenetic family is out of place. At first associating the fly with his own familial injuries, Titus chastises Marcus for being a ‘murderer’ (3.2.54); and then he proceeds to question, ‘How if that fly had a father and mother?’ (3.2.61). Here, he establishes a simple visual: the fly as the offspring of male and female figures. In so doing, Titus constructs what might be considered a complete nuclear family – an image of mother, father and child. There are various ways to interpret the entomological allegory, which appears in the 1623 Folio but not the Quarto. For example, the father could symbolize Titus and the fly could represent Lavinia, Martius or Quintus, Titus’ ill-­fated children. However, Marcus’ racialized justification for killing the fly, and Titus’ eventual acceptance of that rationalization,

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implicates Aaron, Tamora and their baby, foreshadowing the existence of the play’s sole interracial blood family (the mention of Muly, his wife and child in 4.2 presents the image of an offstage interracial family, one whose child was presumably not the product of infidelity). To defuse Titus’ anger and excuse his own violent behaviour, Marcus asserts, ‘It was a black, ill-­ favoured fly, / Like to the empress’ Moor. Therefore I killed him’ (3.2.67–8). By substitution, Aaron metaphorically enters Titus’ domestic space, but not as a welcome guest and certainly not as a human being. Titus approves of Marcus’ racialized connection, saying, Then pardon me for reprehending thee, For thou hast done a charitable deed. Give me thy knife; I will insult on him, Flattering myself as if it were the Moor Come hither purposely to poison me.              [Takes knife and strikes.] There’s for thyself, and that’s for Tamora. (3.2.70–5) When Marcus justifies killing what he casually reframes as a black fly that resembles Aaron, he uses narrative control to transform Titus’ sentimental fly reading into a contemptuous one that suggests the insect deserved death. The fly’s blackness becomes linked to Aaron’s physicality and Tamora’s emblematic blackness – her so-­called barbarousness. Yet, the fly’s hue, coupled with its being ‘innocent’, also relates the insect to Aaron and Tamora’s child who appears in the dramatic landscape two scenes later, thus retrospectively obscuring the fly’s meaning. Through the allegory, Shakespeare alludes to the three major figures of the interracial blood family, the villainous parents and the guiltless child, as Titus’ and Marcus’ violent actions prefigure the dissolution of the black(ened) family. While considering blackness and domesticity in Titus, it is worth noting that the easy transferability of racism, and prejudice, particularly within the domestic space, makes it

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function like a hereditary disease that confuses perceptions of blackness.31 The heightened racial tension in this scene, epitomized by Titus’ excessive violence towards the already dead fly, reinforces just how necessary Aaron’s absent presence is for assessing the value of blackness. The racial shifting exposes how people can view the same situation (or the same object, the fly in this case) and maintain totally different interpretations of what something is or how it should be appraised. As Frederick Douglass explains, prejudice ‘paints a hateful picture according to its own diseased imagination’. He continues, ‘As those who believe in the visibility of ghosts can easily see them, so it is always easy to see repulsive qualities in those we despise and hate.’32 Titus’ final reaction to the innocent fly is replicated in Lucius’ later response to the baby, which he refers to as ‘this growing image of [Aaron’s] fiend-­ like face’ (5.1.45); the diseased mind, which cannot easily process humanized blackness, infects reality. Operating concurrently in 3.2 as personified insect and dehumanized person, the black figure is a contradiction. The emphasis on controlling the domestically intrusive free-­floating blackness that interrupts the white family at mealtime re-­establishes the brotherly bond, all while Marcus transfers blame onto his entomological victim. In a scene where critics have viewed Titus as ‘mad’, colour permits the conversion of fellow human to insect to be eradicated.33 In other words, racism is madness, for ‘it is in the minds of whites that blacks become large, threatening, powerful, uncontrollable, ubiquitous, and super­ natural’.34 In Titus’ mind, and Shakespeare’s, the tiny black fly undergoes an extraordinary metamorphosis. The fly scene, as well as Aaron’s diabolical nurturing of Chiron and Demetrius, sets the stage for the black infant’s arrival, which denotes the climax in Aaron’s transition from quasi-­foster parent to biologically related parent.35 The black figures’ metaphorical progression – from raven-­as-foster-­ parent to black-­fly-family to human father and interracial baby – is itself a domestication process. Moreover, the mixed-­ race child solidifies the play’s emphasis on an alternative family

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configuration structured by biological and endogamous relations and by surrogacy and miscegenation. Having been cast as a marginalized villain – notably the sole character in Act 1 who is not linked to a blood family – Aaron becomes the primary parental figure in 4.2 because of his black son, the only child in the play who has a living mother and father. As he opposes the fair-­skinned characters’ insistence that he execute his son, Aaron asks, ‘Will you kill your brother?’ (4.2.90). This familial term indicates a ‘desire for sameness, [which] is the disempowered black [figure’s] desire for equality and mutual respect’.36 Despite Tamora’s order that he kill the child, Aaron, unlike Saturninus, refuses to let a woman rule him, thus taking a definitive and likely recognizable stance as an authoritative patriarch. In Aaron, a parody of the Roman paterfamilias, a white male audience member might have seen himself.37 Aaron’s forceful rhetoric in 4.2 highlights the remixed familial blood relationship that links the Gothic with the African, and the black with the royal, specifically through a fraternal and miscegenetic family structure.38 Twice, Aaron declares the child as Chiron and Demetrius’ brother and ‘by the surer side’, the maternal side (4.2.128). Despite the Goths’ ironic rejection of the baby, Aaron insists that his child must live, even if that means being fostered by his countryman, Muly, who conveniently has a fair-­skinned, bi-­racial newborn Aaron hopes to swap with his own. I consider the Goth’s rejection of their new family member ironic because at least twice in the play the Goths and Aaron are recognized as a unit. In the meta-­dramatic moment when Tamora, Chiron and Demetrius arrive at Titus’ home disguised as Revenge, Rape and Murder, the Roman patriarch notices Aaron’s absence. For Titus, the group is incomplete: ‘Well are you fitted, had you but a Moor’, he declares (5.2.85). And Aaron affirms his influential position in this Goth–Moor faction when he brags to Lucius, ‘Indeed, I was their tutor to instruct them. / That codding spirit had they from their mother’ (5.1.98–9).39 He adds, ‘That bloody mind I think they learned of me’ (5.1.101). Once again displaying his awareness of parental roles and domestic

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responsibility, Aaron indicates that the Goth brothers have Tamora’s nature but were nurtured by him, their surrogate father figure. The parental division of labour that Aaron highlights here is consolidated in 4.2 when he considers raising his son alone. The 4.2 mention of Muly is particularly compelling because Aaron, as he acknowledges a ‘silenced invisible community in the play’, proposes further familial remixing in order to save his son.40 Aaron realizes the baby’s existence problematizes Tamora’s position as Saturninus’ wife and Rome’s empress. However, he does not see filicide as an option, unlike Titus and Tamora, both of whom are concerned with preserving familial purity (though Tamora is also interested in political survival). Tamora’s unruliness, namely, her tolerance of racial and sexual impurity, is to blame for the integration of the Gothic and African, as well as the proposed adoption of the mixed-­race child into Rome; it is implied in Act 5 that the marginal black baby may officially become, like his mother in Act  1, ‘incorporate in Rome, / A Roman now adopted’ through transference (1.1 467–8). Yet, before the black father is forced to relinquish his child and his claims to parental power, he articulates an androcentric domestic fantasy that – much like Titus’ conclusion, but for different reasons – depicts a world without women/mothers.41 Before he exits with his son, Aaron pronounces: Come on, you thick-­lipped slave, I’ll bear you hence, For it is you that puts us to our shifts. I’ll make you feed on berries and on roots, And feed on curds and whey, and suck the goat, And cabin in a cave, and bring you up To be a warrior and command a camp. (4.2.177–82) His domestic sensibilities are embedded in the phrase ‘bear you hence’, which signals his desire to remove the baby from the hostile environment; the phrase also encapsulates Aaron’s

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embodiment of both paternal and maternal roles.42 In bearing his baby, Aaron transfers Tamora’s bearing of the child onto himself; his protective actions literally give the black infant life. In a different way, and from this point forward, Aaron owns carrying blackness, for example, the child, ‘his firstborn son and heir’ (4.2.94). Relying on himself and nature, Aaron explores the possibility of single parenthood, which would make him no different than the play’s other parents – Lucius, Marcus, Tamora and Titus. I want to suggest that, for an early modern audience, Aaron’s single parenthood and parental love are exemplary but also threatening, not only because he continues to be malicious, but because his imagined all-­black household, or ‘cave’, does not involve whiteness (for self-­ preservation purposes, his vision quickly gets away from the miscegenetic family he acknowledges through the term ‘brother’;43 furthermore, even Tamora’s connection is erased as Aaron imagines a goat nursing the child).44 Unlike the play’s white parents who neglect, abandon or desire to kill their children, Aaron eventually offers a counter to what a modern audience might interpret as the drama’s child abuse narrative. If anything about his parenting is aggressive, it will be the way that he nurtures and nourishes his son by ‘mak[ing]’ him ‘feed’. The dismantling of the Goth–Moor faction carries on from 4.2 because Rome’s restoration necessitates the erasure of the depraved alternative family. However, the idea of remixed families, in general, is not altogether abandoned due to the suggested assimilation of the black baby into Rome. After initially threatening to ‘hang’ the infant, Lucius swears to Aaron (5.1.47): ‘Thy child shall live and I will see it nourished’ (5.1.60). This moment reinforces the play’s tension between blackness and domesticity; and it suggests that coexistence, and perhaps even codependency, between black and white is a necessary and natural part of human existence.45 The emphasis on the baby’s nourishment and survival contrasts with Aaron’s death by starvation. In Lucius’ stead earlier in the play, Titus nurtured Young Lucius; and now, in Aaron’s impending absence, Lucius insists that he will step into the role Titus

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assumed earlier for his grandson. Yet, Shakespeare provides no definitive answers as to how, where or with whom the parentally deprived black child will live, but it will be raised up somehow.46 In Titus, it is not only marriage and sex that perpetuate the growth of families across social boundaries defined by blood, culture and class; rather, attention to blackness reveals that fostering, adoption and surrogacy also allow for the development of the family structure in Shakespeare’s first tragedy. The seeming disappearance of the black baby, a character type that never appears again in Shakespeare’s canon, insinuates that its future is uncertain, perhaps leaving the play’s conclusion complicated. Lucius’ promise allows us to fill in the Shakespearian silence and postulate that he will honour his word but, still, the uncertainty should make us uncomfortable. Given Lucius’ previous violent threats toward the black baby, there is no guarantee that he will not be, like Aaron, a marginal subject whose black body will be used, and maybe even rejected, by white bodies given the imbalanced power dynamics embedded in the play’s racialized hierarchy. After all, it is Lucius who defines Aaron’s progeny as the ‘fruit of bastardy’ (5.1.48); it is Lucius who rejects Aaron’s claim that the child ‘is of royal blood’ (5.1.49) by asserting that the infant is ‘too like the sire for ever being good’ (5.1.50); and it is Lucius who becomes Rome’s emperor in the end. If ‘good’ blood is Roman, as Titus suggests when he berates Chiron and Demetrius for ravishing Lavinia, the metaphorical ‘goodly summer’ (5.2.171), then the baby’s bad non-Roman blood – especially his Moorish blood – predetermines both his future and domestic place, for Lucius has already ruled that the baseness of the child’s black nature cannot be nurtured out of him.47 Titus Andronicus’ keen attention to blackness, presented first through Aaron’s lone presence at the onset, foregrounds the background figure to whom the audience should pay attention, not because he is evil but because he is an educative force that disseminates important domestic messages, albeit sometimes paradoxically. The drama offers no straightforward

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way for the Romans to control free-­floating blackness, and this is necessarily so because Aaron serves as a reflection of early modern cultural anxieties about racial others. In the end, Lucius sentences Aaron to be buried ‘breast-­deep in earth and famish[ed]’ (5.3.178); the partial burial of his body plants him into the landscape and gestures towards his remaining connection to Rome through his son, who has Gothic, Moorish and Roman roots. As such, the beginning of Aaron’s final speech subtly reminds us of his absent child. He boldly protests, ‘Ah, why should wrath be mute and fury dumb? / I am no baby, I’ (5.3.183–4). In contrast to Aaron, the baby does not yet have a voice, which may explain the child’s silence/absence. We last hear of the infant when Marcus exclaims, ‘Behold the child. / Of this was Tamora delivered, / The issue of an irreligious Moor’ (5.3.118–20). The baby, finally not referred to in derogatory terms by a member of the dominant culture, is displayed as a representation of Tamora’s infidelity and Aaron’s loose black sexuality. Like the fly, the infant is blameless and, as Titus proclaims in the fly scene, ‘A deed of death done on the innocent / Becomes not’ the Andronici (3.2.56–7). Without dialogue or stage directions that directly address the black child’s fate, we can only assume that Lucius will keep his promise. Regardless, free-­floating blackness drastically transforms the play’s opening emphasis on endogamous family relations and suggests that ‘the abject black, in this case Aaron, while viewed as a violent perpetrator in modernity, may be the precursor of a new world’.48 Free-­floating blackness makes elective kinship and racial mixing central to the drama’s domestic narrative. In closing, I want to put the spotlight on the physical distance created between Aaron and his child because it, too, calls attention to ideas about blackness and domesticity. The separation of Aaron and the infant, which is required given Aaron’s crimes, prevents the black family from appearing as a stable, cohesive unit. Perhaps this is to be expected, since in Shakespeare’s canon black people are always presented as members of absent, broken or disbanded families; this is not

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the case for the Andronici, whose surviving members are reunited. When the play ends, or when the white actor would have removed his artificial bodily hue, blackness disappears and the audience is left to take ‘false shadows for true substances’ (3.2.81). Titus’ conclusion reminds us: that Aaron and the baby are merely domestic symbols; that they are powerful extensions of the white imagination; that they, like other black dramatic figures, are being put to work, socio-­ politically and culturally speaking; and that they are false shadows of real early modern people whose blackness was accepted, tolerated, challenged and seemingly erased from the developing world they inhabited.49 When we choose to – as some historians and literary critics have not done, perhaps unwittingly so – we remember the lives that are early modern black history.50

Notes I am grateful to many for helping me reach this place with Titus. I thank John Michael Archer, David Bevington, Kim F. Hall, Jean E. Howard, Farah Karim-Cooper, Arthur L. Little, Jr., Milla Cozart Riggio, Ian Smith and Ayanna Thompson, as well as my students, (in)formal mentors, fellow SAA seminarians the Duke University SITPA initiative, the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the editors of the forthcoming Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies anthology, and the generous anonymous Studies in English Literature reader whose incredibly thorough and encouraging feedback, which I received in 2014, inspired me to stay on this path with Aaron. 1 Mathieu Chapman claims, ‘Aaron’s entrance is different than the other prisoners in that he does not get the opportunity to speak.’ However, among the named Roman prisoners is Tamora’s eldest son, Alarbus, who also does not speak in Act 1. As such, Alarbus’ fairness contrasts with Aaron’s darkness; Aaron is the initially silent prisoner who survives until the end. See AntiBlack Racism in Early Modern English Drama: The Other ‘Other’ (London: Routledge, 2017), 158.

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2 Virginia Mason Vaughan posits that ‘the black characters that populated early modern theatres tell us little about actual black Africans’. See Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500– 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 5–6. 3 Imtiaz Habib, Shakespeare and Race: Postcolonial Praxis in the Early Modern Period (New York: University Press of America, 2000), 95. 4 Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 212. 5 In this chapter, I refer to the Goth and Roman characters as white; the play itself ‘racialize[s] and complicate[s] whiteness’. See Francesca T. Royster, ‘White-Limed Walls: Whiteness and Gothic Extremism in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 51(4) (Winter 2000): 434. 6 Gretchen Gerzina argues, ‘The theatrical draw then, as later, was in the visual contrast and spectacle, but also probably in the assumption that more behavioural and verbal freedom could occur under the guise of “black” skin.’ See Black England: Life before Emancipation (London: John Murray, 1995), 4. Farah Karim-Cooper analyses the mimetic function of ‘material cosmetics’. See Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 137. 7 Chapman, 173. 8 Vaughan also cites the ‘representation of blackness [as] vastly more complex’ in Titus. See Performing, 43. 9 Habib, Shakespeare, 12. 10 Gustav Ungerer’s assessment of Aaron helps shed light on the tension that Shakespeare illustrates, as ‘Aaron, the black outsider, does not correspond to the black African slaves the Londoners had come to know in increasing numbers.’ See ‘The Presence of Africans in Elizabethan England and the Performance of Titus Andronicus at Burley-­on-the-Hill, 1595/96’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 21 (2008): 40. 11 All references to William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus are cited parenthetically and come from Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate (1995; London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2002). As Ian Smith asserts, the barbarian ‘is characterized as

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threatening and destructive to good social institutions’. However, Aaron’s domestic function covertly repurposes the ‘barbarian’. See Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 75. 12 As Wendy Wall mentions, ‘According to marital guides and sermons, the wife’s authority in the home was qualified by her husband’s superior rule.’ See Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 168. For more on early modern domestic conduct, see John Dod and Robert Cleaver’s A Godlie Forme of Householde Gouernment (London: Felix Kingston, 1598). 13 Meg F. Pearson positions Aaron as a pedagogue, ‘a criminal so skilled that he teaches others his craft’. I define Aaron’s pedagogical agenda in different terms. See ‘ “That bloody mind I think they learned of me”: Aaron as Tutor in Titus Andronicus’, Shakespeare, 6(1) (2010): 35. 14 Aaron emerges during a critical Elizabethan moment: ‘In the 1580s and early 1590s a crucial shift took place from the simple display of blackened devils and Moorish kings to the white actor’s impersonation of black characters who were meant to be imagined as human beings from the exotic and dangerous regions of sub-Saharan Africa.’ See Vaughan, 35. 15 See Speaking of the Moor: From Alcazar to Othello (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 101. 16 Chapman, 39. 17 Gerzina, 7. 18 Chapman explains, ‘Representations of blackness [. . .] reveal the ways in which the Early Modern subject viewed blackness as that which can never be defined, but always already exists as the manifestation of the psychic needs of civil society.’ See AntiBlack, 25. 19 Onyeka Nubia proposes that ‘Shakespeare’s writings suggest that he had contact with Africans, and his Sonnets 127, 131 and 137 imply that blackness does not always have to be negative.’ See Blackamoores: Africans in Tudor England, Their Presence, Status and Origins (London: Narrative Eye and The Circle with a Dot, 2013), 70.

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20 Ariane M. Balizet, Blood and Home in Early Modern Drama: Domestic Identity on the Renaissance Stage (New York: Routledge, 2014), 18. 21 Ibid., 3. 22 Ibid., 17. Furthermore, Wall observes that ‘the household was the primary institution for teaching subjects where they fit into early modern society’. See Staging Domesticity, 191. 23 Royster, 435. 24 Helen Berry and Elizabeth Foyster describe household life as more complex than Lawrence Stone characterizes it in Family, Sex and Marriage. See the ‘Introduction’ in The Family in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 7. Wall acknowledges that there were ‘diverse “kinship” arrangements’ in the period. See Staging Domesticity, 8. Elizabeth Kristin Gager also considers the ‘range of [early modern] domestic configurations’; see Blood Ties and Fictive Ties: Adoption and Family Life in Early Modern France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 11. 25 Interracial unions occurred across both sexes, and such pairings ‘mark a historically unnoticed but significant assimilatory aspect of the history of black lives in Elizabethan London’. See Imtiaz Habib, Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–1677: Imprints of the Invisible (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 96. 26 Royster, 449. 27 Barbara L. Estrin, The Raven and the Lark: Lost Children in Literature (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1985), 22. 28 Onyeka claims, ‘Plays [such as Titus] can indicate popular perceptions and ideas about Africans present in Tudor society.’ See Blackamoores, xxvi. 29 It is important to note that ‘sixteenth-­century texts make clear that neither household nor family were reducible to the father-­ mother-children triad’. See Wall, 159. Tamora’s marriage to Saturninus, and Aaron’s role as her lover, complicates ideas about parentage and family in Titus. 30 After the fly comes to represent Aaron, we can see the play’s invisible black woman, Aaron’s mother, by looking back to Titus’ earlier line about the fly’s ‘father and mother’. On black women’s (in)visibility, see Kim F. Hall, ‘ “Object into Object?”:

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Some Thoughts on the Presence of Black Women in Early Modern Culture’, in Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance England, ed. Peter Erickson and Clark Hulse (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 347. 31 Elsewhere, I offer an in-­depth examination of racism and the performativity of blackness in Titus by presenting the play as a ‘symptomatic case of anti-­black violence’. See ‘ “Is Black so Base a Hue?”: Black Life Matters in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus’, in Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies, ed. Miles Grier, Nick Jones and Cassander Smith (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 32 ‘The Color Line’, The North American Review, 132(295) (1881): 567. 33 Bartels writes about the ‘color-­coded discrimination’ and link to madness. See Speaking, 90. 34 Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 72. 35 In the period, ‘children were demonstrable proof of a man’s sexual success and fertility’. The birth of the black baby, in addition to his father’s care, humanizes Aaron and validates his ‘sexual identity’. See Helen Berry and Elizabeth Foyster, ‘Childless Men in Early Modern England’, in The Family in Early Modern England, ed. Helen Berry and Elizabeth Foyster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 170, 182. 36 Habib, Shakespeare, 230. 37 Onyeka’s archival research shows that ‘in 1579 we find an African such as Reson [“a Blackmore”] living on the west side of the parish [“of St. Saviour”] and recorded as the head of a household. We do not know what sex this person is . . .’. See Blackamoores, 56. 38 Titus’ implicit concern with the black body’s proximity to fair-­skinned (female) royalty is not wholly surprising given that Africans were ‘personally [useful] to Elizabeth and members of her Privy Council’. See Nubia, 27. 39 Discussing Roger Ascham, Edward VI’s and Elizabeth I’s tutor, Pearson indicates that ‘this figure serve[d] in loco parentis’. See ‘ “That Bloody Mind” ’, 35.

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40 Habib, Shakespeare, 113. 41 Dympna Callaghan studies the implications of women’s absence in Shakespeare. See Shakespeare without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Early Modern Stage (New York: Routledge, 2000). 42 Even King James I depicted himself as an ‘androgynous mother-­ father’ in order to appear as the ultimate parent to his people. See Rachel Trubowitz, Nation and Nurture in SeventeenthCentury English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 98. 43 I thank Arthur L. Little, Jr., for pushing my thinking about the erasure of whiteness in this textual moment. 44 On nursing, Wall notes, ‘If nursing was not simply a powerful trope, as it was at times, then early modern people believed that one sucked one’s identity.’ In that sense, nothing will transfer from Tamora to the child. See Staging Domesticity, 138. 45 My previously cited essay, ‘ “Is Black so Base a Hue?” Black Life Matters in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus’ expands on this point through an analysis of Aaron’s figurative ‘swan’ language in 4.2 (lines 103–5). 46 Peter Laslett discusses parental deprivation in detail. See Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations: Essays in Historical Sociology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 160. 47 In 5.1, Lucius returns to Rome with an ‘army of Goths’ according to the stage directions, and he refers to them as ‘[his] faithful friends’ (5.1.1). The acceptance of these Goths into Rome reinforces how the play sanctions intercultural relations; however, as the black baby’s disappearance implies, an undeniably positive bond – devoid of prejudice – between black and white remains to be seen. 48 Chapman, 179. 49 Richard C. Maguire argues that ‘the space created by a lack of detailed records [on blacks] has been filled in by assumptions, which have become “real” ’. See ‘Presenting the History of Africans in Provincial Britain: Norfolk as a Case Study’, History, 99(338) (2014): 838. 50 Habib, Black, 7. Habib names several critics and historians whose scholarly work renders early modern black people

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‘untraceable’. Thus, I propose that the erasure, or convenient forgetting, of real deceased early modern black people, particularly when compared to the constant recalling of white people’s lives, indicates just how inherently powerful whiteness is, for even dead white people benefit from the privilege of their bodily hue, which makes them visible and therefore memorable.

6 ‘If I might have my will’ Aaron’s affect and race in Titus Andronicus1 Carol Mejia LaPerle

If any white man in the world says ‘Give me liberty, or give me death,’ the entire white world applauds. But if a black man says exactly the same thing, word for word, he is judged a criminal and treated like one and everything possible is done to make an example of this bad nigger so there won’t be any more like him. JAMES BALDWIN 2

In the epigraph above, James Baldwin highlights not just the hypocrisy that has failed to acknowledge the exclusions inherent in the legacy of liberal doctrines but, more urgently, he underscores the prosecution of black activists who evoke tenets

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FIGURE 6.1  James Baldwin on London’s Albert Memorial.

of humanism in their politics. In doing so, Baldwin quarrels with the normativity of whiteness within liberal humanism itself – a normativity that marginalizes the participation of black communities.3 Allan Warren’s much circulated image of Baldwin alongside a dominant icon of humanities, William Shakespeare, makes visible the vexed relationship of black writers with canonical literature and the privileged advantages of whiteness literally set in stone. Standing before but looking away, Baldwin troubles the neutrality of Western bastions of culture and knowledge. In his essay ‘Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare’, he tracks the racist edge of bardolatry: I felt it so bitterly anomalous that a black man should be forced to deal with the English language at all – should

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be forced to assault the English language in order to be able to speak – I condemned him [Shakespeare] as one of the authors and architects of my oppression.4 It is as ‘author and architect’ of the black man’s oppression that Baldwin first associates Shakespeare with the racial insularity of liberalism and with the invention of a language precluding the expression of black agency. Baldwin reminds us of the uncertain territory of social emancipation (give me liberty, or give me death) occupied by racialized subjects, and particularly the ways in which canonized language – the fictions, narratives and literatures valued as classical texts – perpetually represent the social agency of black people as an affliction to a universalized dogma that does not declare its ideological investments in Eurocentric white hegemony. Titus Andronicus places in relief this tension between a black character’s volition and the will of a dominant commonweal. Through Aaron’s embodiment of the nightmare of a black man with access to power – and whose violence not only mimics Roman violence, but bests it – Titus Andronicus criminalizes the racialized subject’s social agency and teaches the audience how to ‘give him death’. While facing an angry mob of Romans and Goths calling for his painful, public punishment, Aaron’s final lines evoke repentance and prayer – the expected rhetorical turn of the execution scene – to ridicule the moral imperative of a religious trope (italics mine):         . . . that with base prayers I should repent the evils I have done. Ten thousand worse than ever yet I did Would I perform if I might have my will. If one good deed in all my life I did I do repent it from my very soul. (5.3.184–9)5 Aaron’s insistence and sustenance of a will – explored throughout the play as a choice as much as a disposition – is

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fundamentally counter to the social expectation of an affective human response to pain and suffering. In this final scene, as Aaron refuses to perform appropriately repentant and conciliatory gestures, Titus Andronicus sums up the play’s investments in cultivating a white imaginary of the black man as an imminent threat. Even evil deeds unperformed are dangerous since the source of their malevolence is always already willing to enact offences that are potentially ‘ten thousand worse’. It is from the construction of the black man’s perceived – and, in Shakespeare’s case, hyperbolic – villainy that Shakespeare connects physical difference to violent volition. The play racializes Aaron’s will as a perpetual threat to the Roman culture in which he participates, iterating blackness as legible only to be disciplined and feared. Repeatedly in the play, blackness is the catalyst and the proof of a dangerous will. ‘Hue’ – some vague yet noticeable form of physical difference – inspires the very first aside, and thus signals a fissure between exterior show and interior desire. Even while considering the extreme whiteness of Tamora as foil to the blackness of Aaron, as Francesca Royster has ably foregrounded in her investigation of the ‘multihued palette of barbarism’, the concept of hue I develop is one of affect rather than appearance.6 I contend that dark or fair, hue is made iterable when it triggers a fracture between social duty and private desire. When Saturninus states ‘A goodly lady, trust me, of the hue / That I would choose were I to choose anew’ (1.1.265–6), he announces an intense reaction to Tamora, one so powerful as to cast aside his public proclamation of marrying Lavinia and honouring Titus, to whom he owes his induction as Rome’s Emperor. To register privately ‘the hue / That I would choose’ is to acknowledge a forbidden response, a sexual attraction in direct opposition to social and familial duty. What the inaugural aside tells the audience is that for Saturninus, and for Tamora whose hue distempers him to distraction, the rituals and sacrifices of Roman public life can be subordinated to the compulsion of an internal, in this case illicit, reaction. Although a small aside and only one of many

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graver transgressions in the play, this foundational shift from public heeding of social will to private acknowledgement of selfish desire is a response to hue. Aaron extrapolates from this interpretation of hue when he claims that blackness is an enduring individual essence that rejects external circumstance: Coal-­black is better than another hue In that it scorns to bear another hue; For all the water in the ocean Can never turn the swan’s black legs to white, Although she lave them hourly in the flood. (4.2.101–5) Beyond a somatic marker, Aaron forces consideration of hue as a state in relation to social influence. His declaration of self-­ authority turns the disparagement ‘to blanche an Ethiope white’ into an argument for an enduring constancy immune to social circumstance. No force – no water in the ocean or hourly flood – can penetrate the fundamental uniqueness and potential defiance that hue signifies. In the affective alignment of hue as that which is counter to external pressures or demands, Aaron’s noticeable external appearance as a Moor – his performance of the most noticeable of hues – is a physical difference that precedes and all but guarantees a private agenda in conflict with the public, social will that underwrites Roman authority. That Aaron’s first words confirm this suspicion shows not just a misalignment of motives, but a will that refuses to submit to that authority. No longer a silent witness as he was in the opening scene, Aaron embarks on an elaborate, eloquent soliloquy. He celebrates Tamora’s turn of fortune ‘above pale envy’s threatening reach’ (1.1.503) and makes clear the advantages this affords him: Then, Aaron, arm thy heart and fit thy thoughts To mount aloft with thy imperial mistress, And mount her pitch whom thou in triumph long Hath prisoner held, fettered in amorous chains

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And faster bound to Aaron’s charming eyes Than is Prometheus tied to Caucasus. (1.1.511–16) In an erotic evocation of the trope of imprisonment, Aaron conveys the power he has over the newly minted empress of Rome. Tamora is fettered, bound, tied to Aaron. He anticipates that her overwrought passions lead to social and personal benefits for him; he must ‘mount aloft’ in the wake of her unexpected victory. The reference to ‘Prometheus tied to Caucasus’ troubles the victorious speech because it echoes the original condition of their arrival at Rome: that of prisoners punished for insubordination of, or resistance to, a more powerful force. Zeus is to Prometheus what the Roman military is to the defeated Goths. But the allusion is meant to brush over the analogy and, in an unlikely twist, instead casts Aaron as the one who powerfully chains Tamora to the rock. He is both Zeus and Caucasus; both punisher and the punishment. This paradox of power and submission that characterizes Aaron’s relationship with Tamora is captured in the declaration of triumph that follows: Away with slavish weeds and servile thoughts! I will be bright, and shine in pearl and gold To wait upon this new-­made empress. To wait, said I? – to wanton with this queen, . . . (1.1.517–20) Expecting wealth and power, Aaron nonetheless reverts, in the very next line, into the language of service, ‘waiting upon the new-­made empress’. Although he corrects this with flourish – ‘to wanton’ instead of ‘to wait’ – the slip captures an oscillation between power and submission informing the racialized character’s participation in the play’s politics. A black body unwilling ‘to wait’ in the service of what is deemed the dominant social will can only be imagined as a dangerous source of social trauma and sexual sin.

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Critics have successfully considered Aaron’s disruption of Roman society through his exploitation of the violence and suffering modelled after Ovidian narratives. Jonathan Bate contextualizes Aaron’s perversion of humanist learning by criticizing, in Shakespeare and Ovid, the English schoolroom as source for moral pedagogy.7 Aaron as the ‘Chief architect and plotter of these woes’ (5.3.121) is expanded by Meg F. Pearson in her discussion of him as tutor: Aaron the Moor functions as a pedagogue, tutoring Tamora’s sons and even Tamora herself. He guides them through his nefarious plans and uses his abilities with language, particularly written language, to help the Goths achieve their ends. The execution of his plans relies upon the literal word, and his capacity to read, interpret and rewrite the actions of others that helps him to maintain his dominance.8 Beyond the classroom, J. K. Barret captures the problem of classical allusion as primary reference for future frames of knowledge and action. She states: The center of critique proves ever more shocking as death pervades a stage littered with body parts: initiating a career-­ long interest in the relationship between the ancients and the moderns, Shakespeare suggests that the real tragedy is the entrapment of a future predetermined by allusion, particularly when it is chained to a dangerously limiting interpretive tradition.9 In a play which is itself preoccupied with literature as a model for revenge, violence is inevitable. William W. Weber considers how ‘allusion propels action – but this action is invariably violent; allusion creates meaning and death, both communication and devastation’.10 But as much as all characters participate in narratives of violence, failing to escape the blueprint of antiquity’s carnage and cruelty, the black character’s contribution

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is represented as not just participatory but decidedly hyperbolic, not just a form of mimicry or allusion but a fundamental embodiment. Aaron enacts violent volition as desire, as choice, as inclination. Unlike the revengers depicted as products of the mimetic pedagogy a humanist education affords, Aaron’s will is a perpetual threat that exceeds any previous iterations of bloodshed. Beyond mimetic violence shaped by previous allusions, Aaron creates mayhem with unrestrained originality, frequency and variety. This villainization is aligned with Aaron’s racial difference in ways and for purposes under-­explored. As Aaron orchestrates the plot that spirals the Andronici into turmoil and death, his violent volition is explicitly correlated to his physical characteristics. In the early stages of plotting, while Tamora’s lust leads her to risk a forest foray, Aaron stalls their encounter to prioritize revenge. In doing so, he explicitly connects ‘fatal execution’ to the reading of his body: What signifies my deadly-­standing eye, My silence and my cloudy melancholy, My fleece of woolly hair that now uncurls Even as an adder when she doth unroll To do some fatal execution? No, madam, these are no venereal signs; Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand, Blood and revenge are hammering in my head. (2.2.32–9) Beyond providing a meta-­conscious itemization of the physical characteristics he performs as a looming black menace, he explicitly instructs on the way in which to interpret his performance. He teaches Tamora how to read his physical form – ‘no, madam, these are no venereal signs’ – for he is instead a symbol and mechanism for ‘fatal execution’. His ‘woolly hair’ is compared to a venomous snake, metamorphosing at the moment it seeks to deliver death. As he directs Tamora away from lustful thoughts, he becomes legible as a series of

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body parts meant for fatal destruction: eyes, hair, heart, hand, blood, head. Aaron’s intensity underscores the mistake Bassianus, Lavinia and the Romans make in their dismissal of him as a ‘barbarous Moor’ (2.2.78) in lascivious heat. Bassianus expresses the underlying accusations of adultery in seeing Aaron’s proximity to Tamora: Believe me, queen, your swart Cimmerian Doth make your honour of his body’s hue, Spotted, detested and abominable. (2.2.72–4) Bassianus sexualizes Aaron’s ‘spotted, detested and abominable’ body. But in dismissing Aaron as a sexual threat, Bassianus and Lavinia fail to grasp the social consequences of Aaron’s potent will. To read his ‘venereal’ signs is to indicate a personal depravity that compromises Tamora’s honour. But the rest of the scene proves the incompleteness of this assessment. The play literalizes Aaron’s own statement of the ‘death in his hand’ for he concocts the conditions for everyone’s pain and destruction. Through the gruesome events that follow, the play teaches its audience to read the black body as not mere sexual corruption, but as the ultimate catalyst to social annihilation. When Lucius calls Aaron ‘the incarnate devil’ (5.1.40), he conveys an influential reading of the black character as an archetypal vice figure of morality plays.11 Ania Loomba captures the symbolism of colour grounded in institutional practices: ‘Aaron leads us to literary, religious, and theatrical traditions that had equated black skin with godlessness and sin.’12 Considering early modern anxieties about the Moor as a religious, cultural and sexual threat, Imtiaz Habib reads Aaron as ‘a symbolic confirmatory examination of the civic treachery and sexual riot that popular travel literature has already paradigmatically suspected him to possess’.13 As these critics show, the theatrical technology of blackface in Aaron’s characterization is inextricable from the reality of English society’s preoccupation with race. Engagement with foreign cultures is an important subtext for

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Shakespeare’s representation of Aaron as a Moor – a social identity Emily Bartels observes as ‘becoming increasingly visible within English society in person and in print, particularly in descriptions of Africa in travel narratives and on the stage.’14 Expanding on this, Margaux Deroux claims that ‘The presence of Africans allowed for the articulation of xenophobic anxieties, certainly, but also function to reveal associations and conceptions of blackness.’15 These readings employ historically founded teleological approaches to the epistemology of racial impersonations and foreign identities at the time of the play’s performance. As valuable as these analyses are in understanding Aaron, I ask a different question, and so require a different methodology. In Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s development of affect theory, she invites a shift away from the recent fixation on epistemology (which suggests that performativity/performance can show us whether or not there are essential truths and how we could, or why we can’t, know them) by asking new questions about phenomenology and affect (what motivates performativity and performance, for example, and what individual and collective effects are mobilized in their execution?).16 Rather than querying what we can or cannot know about Aaron’s race, I pursue what his performance mediates and cultivates, what his blackness produces in terms of affect. To investigate the affective experience, rather than the teleological cause, design or meaning of Aaron’s blackness is to read what the black body is made to perform in the network of human interactions represented in the play. Aaron mobilizes a will imagined as counter to an affective economy that privileges the emotional experiences of characters in relation to each other and in opposition to the black man’s agency. I bring together these critical assessments of Aaron – the Ovidian pedagogue and the racialized Moor – in dialogue with the affective networks that underwrite what it means to be human in the play. It is worth noting that everyone sheds tears

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in Titus Andronicus. Weeping is mentioned in every possible context: as a formal greeting for a public figure, as a plea for mercy, as a reunion between affectionate family members, as an expression of love, regret, grief, fear. Even the Queen of the Goths – seductress and conniver Tamora – cries for her sacrificed son; her rapist offspring express concern for their mother and shed tears in moments of distress or anxiety. So ingrained is emotional outburst in the play that Marcus, as preface to revealing Lavinia’s horrific condition, privileges Titus’ tearful reaction over her actual suffering: ‘Titus, prepare thy aged eyes to weep’ (3.1.59). At that very moment, Titus was already crying on the stones that paved his sons’ execution march. He summarizes Lavinia’s distress: Thou hast no hands to wipe away thy tears, Nor tongue to tell me who hath martyred thee; Thy husband he is dead, and for his death Thy brothers are condemned, and dead by this. Look, Marcus, ah, son Lucius, look on her! When I did name her brothers, then fresh tears Stood on her cheeks, as doth the honey-­dew Upon a gathered lily almost withered. (3.1.107–14) ‘Look on her’, Titus orders, for Lavinia exists as the embodiment of intense affect – a heightened state of emotional sensations that stirs all characters, and the audience, to feel. Even as characters face the futility of their anguish, there is no limit to the intensity of their shared affective experience: Looking all downwards to behold our cheeks, How they are stained like meadows yet not dry, With miry slime left on them by a flood? And in the fountain shall we gaze so long Till the fresh taste be taken from that clearness, And made a brine pit with our bitter tears? (3.1.125–30)

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What follows is a foursome of unmitigated, overflowing tears shed by Lucius, Marcus, Titus and Lavinia. The affective force of Lavinia’s pain is a litmus test for human connection, and thus Aaron’s exclusion from outlets of human empathy precludes his membership in the community. His physical difference is a visual confirmation of an internal depravity, not just in brutal violence (which is far from exclusive to him), but more because of his refusal to empathize with Lavinia’s mutilated, muted, suffering body. His participation in the Ovidian narrative is inflected by a racialized will iterated as inherently, as opposed to subsequently, violent. In his mockery of the Andronici ‘sympathy of woe’ (3.1.149), Aaron concocts a malicious, and tellingly superfluous, ruse. After orchestrating Bassianus’ murder, framing Lavinia’s brothers for her husband’s death, and inspiring the rape and mutilation of Lavinia, Aaron’s prank against Titus is literally over the top. In the guise of arbitrator for the Emperor, Aaron fools Titus into cutting off his own hand as ransom for two persecuted sons. Walking away with Titus’ hand, Aaron is gleeful: ‘O, how this villainy / Doth fat me with the very thoughts of it!’ (3.1.203–4). Whereas previous machinations served Tamora’s agenda of revenge, tricking Titus to cut his hand serves no function beyond Aaron’s pleasure. He is fattened by the thought of evil and sustained by others’ suffering, later recounting that he ‘almost broke [his] heart with extreme laughter’ (5.1.113). In a play that provokes tears ardently and compulsively, Aaron is impervious to shedding them. While other characters are broken by tragedy, Aaron’s heartbreak is a joyful perversion of others’ misery. His giddiness in the face of suffering is meant to be shocking, excluding him from the affective network of human empathy and conveying a form of villainy – ‘this villainy’ – unique even in the midst of widespread bloodshed. The incident is not just a superfluous prank at the height of the play’s pathos, but also a demonstration of redundant malice and excessive violence folded into physical difference: ‘Let fools do good, and fair men call for grace; / Aaron will have his soul black like his

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face’ (3.1.205–6). His declaration aligns a somatic characteristic of blackness with a rejection of widely sanctioned actions and feelings considered ‘good’, ‘fair’, ‘grace’. I extend Joyce Macdonald’s analysis of ‘blackness as the sign of absolute resistance to incorporation in any system of social and moral order’17 by examining the network of emotions that positions some subjects within, and some without, an affective community. In conveying will as violent volition, Aaron’s race is marked as desire devoid of legitimacy, represented as social participation without the emotional alliances valued in Roman society. This is not to say that Aaron is devoid of all emotion, for his passion for Tamora is second only to his desire for revenge. But he remains outside the interpersonal networks shaped and sustained by shared affective responses, for even his most heightened expressions of attachment are a plague to the collective. Beyond the disruption of sexual mores and anxieties about miscegenation depicted in his sexual conquest of Tamora, the result of their affair – a mixed-­race child – is a revealing portrayal of race and affect. Brought to him, Aaron’s son arouses a poignant articulation of parental protection. In response to the extreme racism articulated by the nurse’s description of the child as ‘A joyless, dismal, black and sorrowful issue. / Here is the babe, as loathsome as a toad / Amongst the fair-­faced breeders of our clime’ (4.2.68–70), Aaron mounts an inspired argument for the constancy and vigour of the black body. Aaron shields his son from the perils of brutal Roman racism. And yet his protection is a form of affection indistinct from fierce retaliation: Stay, murderous villains, will you kill your brother? Now, by the burning tapers of the sky That shone so brightly when this boy was got, He dies upon my scimitar’s sharp point That touches this, my first-­born son and heir. I tell you, younglings, not Enceladus With all his threatening band of Typhon’s brood,

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Nor great Alcides, nor the god of war, Shall seize this prey out of his father’s hands. (4.2.90–8) Aaron’s enactment of care, in all its intensity and heightened pathos, is loaded with images of destruction and war. Even the most emotional sentiments of the black man – the very same sentiments mobilized in Titus’ fatherly desire to commiserate with and protect his offspring in other scenes – are in Aaron reconstituted as a threat. In Brian Massumi’s analysis of what he calls the ‘political ontology of threat’, he observes that the potential of danger far exceeds any singular act: There is always the nagging potential of the next after being even worse, and of a still worse next again after that. The uncertainty of the potential next is never consumed in any given event. There is always a remainder of uncertainty, an unconsummated surplus of danger . . . The threat will have been real for all eternity. It will have been real because it was felt to be real.18 The representation of Aaron’s familial concern is not separate from the hyperbolic depiction of his violent volition. His actions and intentions, including those in defence of his child, take on the ‘nagging potential of the next’. It is not just that the child is illegitimate (born outside official marital bonds and excluded by his somatic difference from a white Roman culture); more importantly, the helpless and innocent infant is nonetheless burdened with Aaron’s ‘unconsummated surplus of danger’. The future Aaron envisions for his child – the safety he seeks to secure – is intrinsically counter to the safety of the commonweal. The child’s upbringing anticipates a menace to Rome: Come on, you thick-­lipped slave, I’ll bear you hence, For it is you that puts us to our shifts. I’ll make you feed on berries and on roots,

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And fat on curds and whey, and suck the goat, And cabin in a cave, and bring you up To be a warrior and command a camp. (4.2.177–82) Aaron’s familial affection and sustenance (feeding, sheltering, ‘bringing up’) can only be imagined as an imminent social threat. Royster notes that when Aaron plans to fetch ‘the white Moor child to infiltrate the household while his own child is to be raised in the wilderness, beyond Roman surveillance, preparing for later invasion’, he enacts the political anxieties of infiltration inherent in imperial conquest.19 In terms of its affective outcome, I would add that as much as Aaron’s paternity is the occasion to express an emotional connection, indeed as much as it might echo emotional attachments expressed by other parents in the play, it is nonetheless cast as harmful. Underwritten by his father’s violent volition, the mixed-­race progeny is an unrealized threat that is no less felt-­to-be-­real. Titus Andronicus participates in a system of racialization that envisages the black man’s will as fundamentally counter to a general sense of ‘humanity’; thus, Aaron’s actions and intentions, his emotions and desires, are primarily iterable as threats – unrealized yet felt-­as-real threats – to a communal ‘good will’ patented by the dominant culture as its own. My inquiry assesses how Shakespeare’s play shapes the fiction of the black villain and concocts the parameters of punishment; or, in Baldwin’s terms, how it is that Aaron ‘is judged a criminal and treated like one and everything possible is done to make an example of this bad nigger so there won’t be any more like him’. Titus promotes a pedagogical legacy iterated, among many ways, in its insistence that the will of a racialized subject is inherently, and not consequently, a social threat. Repeatedly, the play makes a distinction between violence as reaction and violence as an inherent inclination to enact illicit desires. Titus and Tamora’s attendant brutalities are traceable to past sins against them. Not so for the black character on the stage. Indeed, the history of performing Aaron

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is a record of the racialization of violence in the play. Famously, Ira Aldridge’s 1857 rendition of Titus Andronicus radically altered the character of Aaron in order to amend the glaring dehumanization of the Moor, opting instead to withhold Lavinia’s rape and to emphasize Aaron’s nobility.20 That Aldridge must fundamentally revise Lavinia’s suffering and exploit the pathos of parental concern in order to reconfigure audience perception of Aaron speaks to the connections between the performance of affect and the racialization of blackness. The modification proves that without this nineteenth-­ century amendment of the play text, Aaron is ultimately characterized as a physical menace through his somatic difference and a social plague through his violent volition. What to do with such a threat is the function of the fly scene. In this most consciously literary, meta-­pedagogical of plays, the scene elaborates on what to do with a body that performs individual volition interpellated as racially marked and thus socially dangerous. Titus Andronicus clearly announces its investments in literature as pedagogy. The inserted scene of fly killing is a ‘teaching moment’ in a play preoccupied with showing how literature inculcates certain attitudes and reactions; in this scene, it teaches how and whom to kill.21 Confident that Lavinia’s muteness is no barrier to her unspoken desires, Titus asserts: 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. (3.2.42–5) The claim is an extension of the sustained emotional outbursts that characterize the Andronici household, conjoining sufferers in a common cause of comfort and understanding. That this understanding is one-­sided (pedantic father translating the suffering of muted and mutilated daughter in his own terms) is subordinated to the scene’s main claim: this close circle of

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emotional commiseration is meaningful – all this violence, mutilation and misery mean something that can ‘by still practice learn to know’. Once the pedagogical scene is set, Marcus kills a fly. He is first reprimanded for his lack of kindness, for what if the fly      . . . had a father and a mother? How would he hang his slender gilded wings And buzz lamenting doings in the air. Poor harmless fly, That with his pretty buzzing melody Came here to make us merry, and thou hast killed him. (3.2.61–6) The fly is an extension of their affective network, not only in the anthropomorphic gestures of bestowing an insect with complex feeling, but also giving it a place in their emotive circle: actively commiserating by ‘lamenting doing’ and entertaining the family with ‘pretty buzzing melody’. In response to the reprimand, Marcus improvises a peculiar defence by stating that ‘it was a black ill-­favoured fly, / Like to the empress’ Moor. Therefore I killed him.’ (3.2.67–8). With little attention from critics, this statement is dismissed as familial toleration for the expected madness of the protagonist. And indeed, the quip inspires an outlandish response from Titus that exaggerates, and to an extent parodies, the madness expected of all aspiring revengers: Oh, Oh, Oh! Then pardon me for reprehending thee, For thou hast done a charitable deed, Give me thy knife; I will insult on him, Flattering myself as if it were the Moor Come hither purposely to poison me.                [Takes knife and strikes] There’s for thyself, and that’s for Tamora. Ah, sirrah!

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Yet I think we are not brought so low But that between us we can kill a fly That comes in likeness of a coal-­black Moor. (3.2.69–79) Titus corrects his humane response to killing once cued to the fly’s ‘hue’. What it means to be a black fly is to be a harbinger of social disaster, to be that which ‘comes hither to poison’. Any other fly can stay for dinner; unless it is black and then it is imbued with all the villainy that white paranoia can muster. Black hue generates a response incompatible with affinity and justifying swift eradication. Although easily dismissed as irrelevant, the scene’s insertion at the centre of the narrative is more than a stall in action. Killing a fly in the ‘likeness of a coal-­black Moor’ literalizes the pedagogical inclinations of Shakespeare’s representation of blackness. The play’s premise that literature is permission – Ovid is a manual to recreate events and frame one’s reaction to them (for instance, cook rapists in a pie) – primes the pedagogical function of the play’s treatment of Aaron. Excluded from the economy of affect and identification, catalyst of disastrous bloodshed, his death is synonymous with the eradication of social ills. In this way, Titus Andronicus functions as an instruction manual on the meaning of, and consequently the appropriate reaction to, blackness. Facing the hostile army of Lucius, Aaron leverages the hyperbolized danger of black agency in the white imaginary. His confession promises to ‘show thee [Lucius] wonderous things / That highly may advantage thee to hear’ (5.1.55–6). But in doing so, he calls out the fundamental mix of pleasure and vexation integral to the performance of villainizing black will: And if it please thee? Why, assure thee, Lucius, ’Twill vex thy soul to hear what I shall speak: For I must talk of murders, rapes and massacres, Acts of black night, abominable deeds, Complots of mischief, treason, villainies,

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Ruthful to hear yet piteously performed; And this shall all be buried in my death Unless thou swear to me my child shall live. (5.1.61–8) Demanding assurances, the moor whets his audience’s appetite for the crimes he vows to divulge. Every imaginable infraction confirms Aaron’s evil, but the list of wrongdoings is ultimately meant as exchange for another verbal performance: the assurance of his child’s life. In this proviso, Aaron alerts us to the social constructedness – ‘for I must talk’, ‘as the saying is’ – of his legendary crimes. He ‘must’ perform the stereotypes that will ‘please’ his audience, thus tying pleasure to villainy in ways that traffic the persistent threat of his will rather than the actual consequence of any single sin. He evokes common stereotypes, exploits the expected litany of dreadful misdeeds, and swears that Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things As willingly as one would kill a fly, And nothing grieves me heartily indeed But that I cannot do ten thousand more. (5.1.141–4) It is precisely for the ‘ten thousand more’ sins that he did not commit that Aaron is punished. Aaron must be contained, not just for the demonstrable potency of his agency, but also for the ten thousand disasters he wishes upon the world. The statement is haunting in its casual brutality – as ‘willingly as one would kill a fly’ – but it is worth noting that Aaron is architect rather than perpetrator of rape and mutilation; as the bodies pile up, he is the only one who seeks to protect his child; he neither cooks, nor serves, nor eats human remains. Ultimately, he is a pedantic confessor of sins he wills but may not have committed, and indeed his most glaring confession is not in fact the taking of a life but rather unearthing of the dead – a cruel and strangely derivative act with little point except to confirm what is

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repeatedly represented as a deviant inclination that portends destruction to the commonweal. His is a will that refuses to submit to a community that cannot imagine his participation in an affective network of human empathy, a will that rejects the rule of law premised on the denial of his social agency. As punishment, the simple termination of his life is insufficient, ‘for he must not die / So sweet a death as hanging presently’ (5.1.145–6). But with only one black man to kill, Lucius settles for a partial burial – demonstrating the visibility of Roman discipline over a black body forced to perform its impotence.22 Having Aaron’s head stick out of the earth is at once the greatest fear and the greatest fantasy Titus Andronicus offers: he is a physical threat constrained, a mouth cursing at the world made silent and starved, but his embodiment of violent volition is deeply embedded in Roman soil. The villainization of a willfulness counter to a dominant, universalized will that does not declare itself as white patriarchy, and the punishment of black bodies for which this Roman play is a primal pedagogical performance, is no less deeply rooted in Shakespeare.

Notes 1 I am grateful for the generous, insightful feedback of organizers and participants of the 2017–18 Race, Gender, Early Modern Studies Colloquium, The Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C. 2 This statement was made by James Baldwin during an episode of the Dick Cavett show in 1968. Baldwin’s argument extends to iterations of racism and segregation in places of worship, work, business, education and print rather than exclusively isolating racist inclinations in liberal humanism. 3 In the episode, Baldwin debated with Cavett’s other invited guest, Paul Weiss, Sterling Professor of Philosophy at Yale. This confrontation, in which Baldwin addresses Weiss’ denial of social categorization along racial lines, conveys the underlying doctrines of liberalism that seek to neutralize allegations of racial injustice.

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4 James Baldwin, ‘Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare’, in The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, ed. Randall Kenan (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010), 65. 5 William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate, third edition (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). 6 Francesca T. Royster, ‘White-Limed Walls: Whiteness and Gothic Extremism in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 51(4) (2000): 432–55, 433. 7 Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 8 Megan Pearson, ‘ “That bloody mind I think they learned of me”: Aaron as Tutor in Titus Andronicus’, Shakespeare, 6(1) (2010): 34–51, 35. 9 J. K. Barret, ‘Chained Allusions, Patterned Futures, and the Dangers of Interpretation in Titus Andronicus’, English Literary Renaissance, 44 (2014): 452–85, 473. 10 William W. Weber, ‘ “Worse Than Philomel”: Violence, Revenge, and Meta-Allusion in Titus Andronicus’, Studies in Philology, 112(4) (2015): 698–717, 701. 11 See, for instance, Eldred Jones, Othello’s Countrymen: The African in English Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), and Anthony Barthelemy, Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987). 12 Ania Loomba, Shakespeare, Race and Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 45. 13 Imtiaz Habib, ‘Racial Impersonation on the Elizabethan Stage: The Case of Shakespeare Playing Aaron’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 20 (2007): 17–45, 24–5. 14 Emily C. Bartels, ‘Making More of the Moor: Aaron, Othello, and Renaissance Refashionings of Race’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 41 (1990): 433–54, 434. 15 Margaux Deroux, ‘The Blackness within: Early Modern Color Concept, Physiology and Aaron the Moor in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus’, Mediterranean Studies, 19 (2010): 86–101, 90.

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16 Eve Kofosky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 17. 17 Joyce Green Macdonald, Women and Race in Early Modern Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 63. 18 Brian Massumi, ‘The Future Birth of the Affective Fact: The Political Ontology of Threat’, in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 52–70, 53. 19 Royster, ‘White-Limed Walls’, 450. 20 Here is an excerpt of the review published in The Era, 26 April 1857: ‘Aaron is elevated into a noble and lofty character . . . Mr. Aldridge’s conception of the part of Aaron is excellent – gentle and impassioned by turns . . . all tenderness and emotion in the gentle passages with his infant.’ Quoted from Herbert Marshall and Mildred Stock, Ira Aldridge: The Negro Tragedian (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968), 172. I wish to thank Ayanna Thompson for offering this connection to performance history. 21 3.2 – the fly-­killing scene – is a later addition. It is in the Folio but not the Quarto. See Bate (Titus, revised edition, Introduction, 115–16). 22 In an unpublished Shakespeare Association of America paper, ‘Carnival Titus Andronicus’, Erika Lin analyses cock-­baiting as a festive entertainment that informs the dehumanization of Aaron in the course of his punishment.

PART THREE

Critical approaches: Bodies, emotions and metaphor

7 Metaphorically speaking Titus Andronicus and the limits of utterance Jennifer Edwards

I can speak what I feel.1 PHILIP SIDNEY

Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language.2 ELAINE SCARRY

‘Believe my words’, entreats the Bastard of Orleans in Henry VI, Part 1, ‘for they are certain and unfallible’ (1.2.58–9).3 ‘Believe me’, Angelo pleads from across the canon, ‘my words express my purpose’ (Measure for Measure, 2.4.146–7). This

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faith in linguistic efficacy is predicated upon the assurance that there is meaning within every word, truth behind every sign, and is motivated, in Jonathan Culler’s terms, by the desire for ‘a moment of original plenitude when form and meaning [are] simultaneously present to consciousness and not to be distinguished’.4 There is, in other words, faith in our capacity to ‘speak what we feel’, as Shakespeare’s Edgar has it (King Lear, 5.3.323). In this world of ‘whirling words’ (Hamlet, 1.5.139) which, according to Jacques Lacan, ‘creates the world of things’, the subject ‘is very much at the mercy of language’: ‘there is nothing beyond the sayable’, as French philosopher Michel Serres asserts.5 Yet in Titus Andronicus, with its repeated calls for subjects to express overwhelming emotion, the tragic subject’s articulacy is pushed to its limits. It is around those limits that the following discussion rotates, situating itself between Philip Sidney’s faith – ‘I can speak what I feel’ – and Roderigo’s scepticism: ‘your words and performances are no kin together’ (Othello, 4.2.184–5). What follows therefore takes Titus as a test-­case of a text which depicts subjects lost in language, allowing it to deposit us at the edge of linguistic failure in order to demonstrate the paradoxical articulacy of Shakespeare’s inarticulate subjects. ‘Brutally raped, rendered handless and tongueless’, writes Cynthia Marshall, ‘Lavinia figures as the emblem of the voiceless woman and hence seems to invite our expression of her stifled rage and pain’.6 Indeed, when he discovers his niece after her attack, Marcus Andronicus’ response is to ‘speak for [Lavinia]’ (2.3.33), and critics of Titus such as Pascale Aebischer have identified that ‘speaking about the violence and finding the words of which Lavinia is deprived is desperately important to the characters’.7 Such discussions have considered not only depictions of rape in literature, but also the possible responses to rape that such literature represents.8 ‘What might we legitimately say of [her]?’, asks Marshall.9 Where critics such as Emily Detmer-Goebel have considered Lavinia’s lack of voice as symptomatic of female oppression and ‘culture’s need for the rape victim’s voice’, what follows will re-­situate

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Lavinia’s lost voice amongst both her literary analogues and her textual contemporaries, for whom language and expression are repeatedly problematized.10 In so doing, this chapter will consider the paradoxically expressive capacity of Lavinia’s silence and, accordingly, her alternative modes of expressing what Titus terms ‘these wrongs unspeakable’ (5.3.125). This is not a rehearsal of the male subject’s praise of ‘her prone and speechless dialect / Such as move men’ (Measure for Measure, 1.2.180–1), where the silence of ‘the chaste and unexpressive she’ (As You Like It, 3.2.10) is filled with patriarchal signs and interpretations: this is, rather, silence reclaimed. ‘This is the tragic tale of Philomel / And treats of Tereus’ treason and his rape’ (4.1.47–8): as Lavinia seeks her literary analogue in her nephew’s copy of ‘Ovid’s Metamorphoses’ (42), we are reminded of Shakespeare’s key source text. While Lavinia is able to ultimately articulate herself by ‘quot[ing] the leaves’ (50) of Ovid’s masterpiece, the text itself repeatedly presents rape narratives where the act and victim are denied articulation. Assailed by Jupiter in Book 2, for instance, Calisto ‘standeth müet’ as she finds herself unable to reveal her tale and is accor­ dingly, as Carolyn D. Williams observes, ‘alienated from the articulate community’.11 This is a fate more literally suffered by ‘fair Philomela’ (Titus, 2.3.38) – the direct source for Shakespeare’s Lavinia – who has her tongue cut out by her ravisher, her brother-­ in-law Tereus. Philomel’s tale in turn renders its reader mute, for reading the narrative that her tongueless sister has weaved in purple letters, Procne finds herself tongue-­tied – ‘sorrow tide hir tongue’ – and unable to find ‘wordes agreeable unto / Her great displeasure’ (2.743; 744–5). Elsewhere, in Ovid’s Fasti, words similarly fail Lucretia before her attack – ‘neque enim vocem viresque loquendi / aut aliquid toto pectore mentis habet’ (‘she answered never a word’ for ‘Voice and power of speech and thought itself fled from her breast’) – and after: ‘Quodque potest narrat: restabant ultima’ (‘And what she can she tells. The end she left unsaid’).12 In their failures and refusals to disclose the personal reality of rape, these narratives exhibit anxieties as to whether that felt experience can be adequately disclosed in

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language: whether words can be trusted to do justice to, or to aptly articulate, this unsayable something, this ‘speechless woe’ (The Rape of Lucrece, 1674). As the poet George Wither has it: Sure words are insufficient to expresse The Rapes, the Ravishments, and loathsome sins, Where War gives way to all Vnrulinesse, And Tyranny and Lust the conquest wins.13 Very simply, there is a clear sense that these narratives rotate around experiences and emotions that lie beyond narration. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that Shakespeare should be unwilling to figure forth acts of rape on page or stage. In Titus, Lavinia’s rape is not dramatized but is rather evoked through the simultaneous action of the pit scene, an extended metaphorical ‘conceit, more rich in matter than in words’ (Romeo and Juliet, 2.6.30) where ‘maiden blood’ stains the ‘subtle hole . . . whose mouth is covered with rude-­growing briers’ (Titus, 2.2.232; 198–9). ‘We do not’, as Jonathan Bate notes, ‘have to be card-­ carrying Freudians to see the connection.’14 Indeed, this ‘con­ nection’ is precisely the point, for to miss it is to miss the narrative trajectory that necessarily explains Lavinia’s entry, ‘ravished’, in the following scene. Yet, as Samuel Johnson attests, Titus is not a play that is by any means shy about ‘the barbarity of [its] spectacles’, and therefore ‘the general massacre which [it] exhibit[s]’ amplifies the absence of this particular act of violence, suggesting that there is something about Lavinia’s rape that Shakespeare cannot, or will not, express: it is utterly unutterable.15 The ‘counterpoint of pit and rape’ is perhaps therefore not only ‘bold’, as Bate would have it, but is for Shakespeare in some way necessary, for how could Lavinia’s undoing be aptly narrated or depicted on stage?16 In keeping this action offstage, Shakespeare spatially enacts that which obscenity etymologically demands.17 Lavinia’s undoing is therefore reduced to metaphorical conceit for it is beyond the range of words, as Marcus’ blazon demonstrates as he tries to come to terms with its aftermath:

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If I do dream, would all my wealth would wake me; If I do wake, some planet strike me down That I may slumber an eternal sleep. Speak, gentle niece, what stern ungentle hands Hath lopped and hewed and made thy body bare Of her two branches, those sweet ornaments . . .      Why dost not speak to me? Alas, a crimson river of warm blood, Like to a bubbling fountain stirred with wind, Doth rise and fall between thy rosed lips, Coming and going with thy honey breath. (2.3.13–25) Venturing to realize Lavinia’s mute and mutilated body in language, Marcus loses himself in the breach between linguistic capacity and emotion; ‘description’, as Shakespeare’s Grandpré would agree, ‘cannot suit itself in words’ (Henry V, 4.2.52). With Lavinia rendered both inarticulate and disarticulate – lacking what Farah Karim-Cooper has termed the ‘urgent signifiers of identity and character’ – Marcus becomes a victim of the narrative impetus to recount, to ‘speak for [her]’, and, accordingly, imaginatively to re-­articulate her body (that is, to reconnect it joint by joint: OED ‘articulate’, v. 9.b) through an act of sympathetic re-­memberance: ‘those pretty fingers . . . those lily hands . . . that sweet tongue’ (Titus, 2.3.33; 42; 44; 49).18 Just as, for Roland Barthes, the poetic blazon ‘expresses the belief that a complete inventory can reproduce a total body’, Marcus’ enumerative hyperbole is seemingly driven by the fantasy of articulation: ‘the total, the sum, are for language the promised lands, glimpsed at the end of enumeration’.19 In an act symptomatic of a play that creatively contrives to unite body with text, Marcus tries to find the right words to articulate this fragmented body. As D. J. Palmer observes: Marcus’ lament is the expression of an effort to realise a sight that taxes to the utmost the powers of understanding

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and utterance. . . . [T]his is, and is not, Lavinia . . . Lavinia’s plight is literally unutterable . . . Marcus’ formal lament articulates unspeakable woes.20 This closing oxymoronic assertion raises the question: how can the unspeakable be articulated? For rather than express ‘Lavinia’s plight’ or his ‘unspeakable woes’, Marcus’ despair throws him into desperate rhetorical excess. As Heather James writes, Marcus here ‘inadvertently produc[es] the play’s most bizarre conflict of rhetoric and referent’ as the spectacle of Lavinia’s body ‘sucks up and annihilates his golden poetry’.21 This web of metaphor, simile and allusion – which extends far beyond the above passage – distances Marcus from the body in front of him: not arms but ‘branches’; not hands but ‘sweet ornaments’; not the flowing of blood but a ‘crimson river’, a ‘bubbling fountain’. This failure to express oneself properly is, as Jacques Derrida would suggest, ‘the inadequation of the designation (metaphor)’ to convey emotion: Th[e] sign is metaphoric because it is false with regard to the object; it is metaphoric because it is indirect with regard to the affect: it is the sign of a sign, it expresses emotion only through another sign . . . namely through the false sign. It represents the affect literally only through representing a false reporter.22 Understood in these terms, Marcus’ surfeit of signifiers gets him no closer to Lavinia’s body; ‘false reporter[s]’ frustrate the attempt to express emotion and imaginatively re-­member this dis-­articulated body, because metaphors only ever operate at a distance. And so as language seeks to describe something – to locate emotion, to locate a body – its plenitude and volatility risk impeding that very aspiration, allowing words to function only by circulating that which they sought to describe. In a period when women’s speech about rape was ‘semantically restricted’, to borrow Garthine Walker’s term, this sense of

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metaphor-­as-distance also had a powerful impact on the way that women themselves talked about rape.23 As Laura Gowing has highlighted, in order to keep the act of sexual penetration out of women’s testimonies, assault was often explained through metaphors, thereby shifting the attention away from the damaged body, ‘from explicit description of body parts to metaphors like locks and keys’.24 Anxieties concerning the gap between text and body, emotion and expression, here bleed into correlative concerns with regards to women’s speech about sex, the body, and rape directly. Telling rape was, as Kim Solga puts it, ‘absolutely expected and yet practically impossible in early modern England’.25 In a play where grief and suffering are realized in tragic excess, the expressive capacity of language accordingly finds its limits. Just as the metaphor of the hunt distances us from the act of rape offstage, so too does it distance characters from the articulation of its aftermath: language functions as both access to and obstruction from expression. This dichotomy of avoidance and approach is, for Ian Donaldson, ‘what goes wrong with Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece’, arguing that ‘there is a sense that the central moral complexities are in some ways curiously evaded, while the simpler outlying issues are decoratively elaborated’.26 As in Titus, the act of rape is built up yet escapes narrative grasp and so seeks expression in metaphor: ‘the wolf hath seized his prey, the poor lamb cries’ (Lucrece, 677). ‘He like a dog creeps sadly thence; / She like a wearied lamb lies panting there’ (736–7): this is a text that repeatedly diverts its readers into ‘extended metaphor, lament, or topical digression’, where ‘issues are talked around, but seldom through’ and thus, like the language it employs, the poem’s narrative can never ‘come to the point’, never ‘quite attain its object’.27 In ways that Peter Brooks’ discussion of ‘the body as object and motive of narrative writing’ would find suitably apt, the body in these texts is repeatedly presented as ‘something outside of language that language struggles to mark and to be embodied in’.28 For Marcus, this struggle is intensified by the disparity between the Petrarchan language

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that, for him, once constructed Lavinia’s body – ‘those sweet ornaments / Who circling shadows kings have sought to sleep in’ – and the mutilated body that now refuses to be located in those terms: ‘what stern ungentle hands / Hath lopped and hewed and made thy body bare / of her two branches’. All that is available to Marcus, it seems, is an anatomy comprised of false signs. Similarly frustrated by its failure to capture the referent of Lucrece’s body, the language of The Rape of Lucrece is impelled to repeatedly attempt that capture: ‘Her lily hand, her rosy cheek . . . Her eyes like marigolds . . . Her hair like golden threads . . . Her breasts like ivory globes . . . Her azure veins, her alabaster skin, / Her coral lips, her snow-­white dimpled chin’ (386–420). Like Lavinia, Lucrece is represented by ‘false sign[s]’ and ‘false reporter[s]’, by a series of metonymies that can only offer a description of one thing by introducing it to a sequence of other words, an endless proliferation of signification and différance. These are works, therefore, that exhibit the treacherous nature of language. Extolling ‘the incomparable chastity of his wife Lucretia’ in the poem’s opening, for instance, Collatine assumes the role of ‘the publisher’, boasting of his wife’s ‘sov’reignty’ and accordingly betraying her in words that unwittingly spur the ‘lust-­breathèd Tarquin’ into action (Lucrece, ‘The Argument’, 33; 36; 3). In so doing, the text further confirms the Renaissance trope that sees rape narratives as correlative to male eloquence, where rape situations are understood as a battle between the male art of persuasion and the capacity of the female utterance to dissuade her attacker. But, as Philip Sidney demonstrates, language and its slippery ‘Grammer rules’ so often operate against the female subject whose ‘no’ can be rewritten as ‘yes’: For late with hart most hie, with eyes most lowe; I crau’d the thing which euer she denies. Shee lightening Loue, displaying Venus skyes, Least one should not be heard twise, saide no no. Harken Enuy not at my high triumphing: But Grammers force with sweete successe confirme,

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For Grammer sayes ah (this deere Stella way) For Grammer sayes (to Grammer who sayes nay) That in one speech, two negatiues affirme.29 In these circumstances, words not only make it difficult for subjects to express trauma, but are also in some sense seen as responsible for the traumatic event in the first place; words operate against and betray their speaker through acts of radical rescription that alienate them from their own tongue.30 For Lavinia, as for Philomel, this alienation is violently literalized, and it is no surprise that this sense of alienation should else­ where leave Lucrece frustrated by these ‘unprofitable sounds, weak arbitrators’ (1017). In a rhetorical culture where female utterance is undermined by a perceived gap between speech and intention, where meaning seemingly escapes discursive control, the subject is not found but lost in language. As we have seen, acts and accounts of rape in Shakespeare and his sources are continually presented as being beyond the limits of words – either by the act itself being elided from the stage or narrative, or through the silencing of the victim’s voice. In response, both Titus and a number of its critics articulate ‘the need for Lavinia’s voice’.31 But if we have thus far begun to lose faith in language as a medium able aptly and articulately to express one’s meaning, paradoxical value might be located in the unsaid; to listen closely to Lavinia’s silences, rather than seeking to ‘speak for [her]’ or imaginatively ‘wrest an alphabet’ (3.2.44) upon her, might allow us to relocate that meaning beyond the limits of words. As Serres considers: This wide-­spread idea that everything must be said and can be resolved by language . . . that one can cure oneself by talking, that discourse is the only way of teaching anything . . . forgets how . . . things go without saying, unspoken expressions . . . embedded in silence.32 This is not to conflate anachronistically the postmodern with the Shakespearean subject, for this sense that there are things

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that ‘go without saying’, that meaning can be ‘embedded in silence’, is shared by both: ‘I do love you more than words can wield the matter’, is Goneril’s disingenuous reply to her father’s love-­test, to which As You Like It’s romantically credulous Orlando would agree that, when it comes to love, ‘neither rhyme nor reason can express how much’ (3.2.386). And so as semiotic distrust seeps in, as subjects demonstrate an awareness of the limitations of language, a promise to ‘take thee at thy word’ (Romeo and Juliet, 2.2.49) necessarily entails some degree of risk. In a tragedy where language is self-­consciously impelled to collapse the distance between words and action (‘ “Rape” call you it . . . ?’; Titus, 1.1.410–11), words and emotion (‘these miseries are more than may be borne’; 3.1.244), words and things (‘with all my heart I’ll send the emperor my hand’; 161), the play repeatedly dramatizes the extent to which it falls short of that endeavour. This is perhaps felt most keenly in moments when metaphors that are given the potential to literalize themselves lend tragic action over to comedy; ‘lend me thy hand’ Titus asks Aaron, ‘and I will give thee mine’ (188), an action that in turn brings about a grotesquely farcical procession:      Come, brother, take a head, And in this hand the other I will bear. And, Lavinia, thou shalt be employed: Bear thou my hand, sweet wench, between thy teeth. (280–3) As Judith Butler has it, words repeatedly mark themselves out as being ‘troubled by a referent that is never fully or permanently resolved or contained by any given signified’: ‘Indeed, that referent persists only as a kind of absence or loss, that which language does not capture, but, instead, that which impels language repeatedly to attempt that capture, that circum­ scription – and to fail.’33 We find, therefore, that words cannot be trusted, and we start to lose faith in language. ‘Speechless complainer, I will learn thy thought’ (3.2.39): moving to consider Lavinia’s ‘martyr’d signs’ (36) as having

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the potential to be more expressive than what Lucrece deems ‘idle words’, I will now allow Lucrece to ‘speak [for] Lavinia’ in order to suggest Lavinia’s dis-/in-­articulacy as paradoxically more expressive than ‘had she tongue to speak’ (3.1.145): [Enter . . . Lavinia, her hands cut off and her tongue cut out, and ravished] And therefore Lucrece swears he did her wrong, / To give her so much grief and not a tongue. / ‘Poor instrument’, quoth she, ‘without a sound, / I’ll tune thy woes with my lamenting tongue . . .’ Why dost not speak to me? . . . Speak, Lavinia, what accursed hand / Hath made thee handless in thy father’s sight? . . . Speak, gentle sister: who hath martyred thee? . . . O, say thou for her: who hast done this deed? ‘Few words’, quoth she, ‘shall fit the trespass best, / In me moe woes than words are now depending, / And my laments would be drawn out too long / To tell them all with one poor tirèd tongue’ Lavinia, wert thou thus surprised, sweet girl, / Ravished and wronged as Philomela was, / Forced into the ruthless, vast and gloomy woods? [Lavinia nods] What wrong else may be imagined . . . Mine enemy was strong, my poor self weak / And far the weaker with so strong a fear. My bloody judge forbod my tongue to speak What Roman lord [was it] durst do the deed[?] Here with a sigh as if her heart would break, / She throws forth [their] name[s]: ‘[T]he[y], [t]he[y]’, she says, / But more than ‘[t]he[y]’ her poor tongue could not speak . . . (Titus interspersed with Lucrece)34 To allow Lucrece to tune Lavinia’s woes with her lamenting tongue – just as she offers her voice to the silent Philomel in the ‘well-­painted piece’ of Troy (Lucrece, 1443), just as Shakespeare offers a voice to Ovid’s silent Lucretia – reinforces the struggle of these texts and their subjects to push unspeakable events through to articulation. Here we find that this ‘helpless smoke of words doth [Lavinia] no right’ (Lucrece, 1027), for Lucrece ‘lends [her]

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words’ (1498) only to struggle with how best to articulate ‘these wrongs unspeakable’ (Titus, 5.3.125); ‘Lucrece talks of her griefs’ but, as Donaldson asserts, ‘her talk seems to get her nowhere’.35 The same may be said of Lavinia, who, before her voice was limited, found her utterances limiting; this is, after all, a world where she could not rely on language – ‘womanhood denies my tongue to tell’ – and where her words threatened to undermine her meaning, as a plea to ‘tumble me into some loathsome pit’ lends itself to lascivious misreading (2.2.174; 176, emphasis added).36 In these moments, Shakespeare draws attention to the self-­dispossessing nature of language that has the potential to cause the speaking subject to lose faith in their own utterance. On this matter, Collatine would seemingly agree: The deep vexation of his inward soul Hath served a dumb arrest upon his tongue; Who, mad that sorrow should his use control, Or keep him from heart-­easing words so long, Begins to talk; but through his lips do throng Weak words, so thick come in his poor heart’s aid That no man could distinguish what he said. (Lucrece, 1779–85) By virtue of simple contrast with Marcus’ lament, Collatine’s ‘dumb arrest’, echoing Procne’s silent anguish, here proves ultimately more expressive, an apt articulation of pain for it admits that expression lies not in ‘weak words’ but in their absence; like King Lear’s Cordelia, ‘word[s] can[not] wield the matter’, and he ‘cannot heave / [his] heart into [his] mouth’ (King Lear, 1.1.55; 91–2). But in its disruption of the verbal and gestural economies of the theatre, there rests in Lavinia’s disarticulated silence a radical amplification of expression. If ‘to see sad sights moves more than to hear them told’ (Lucrece, 1324), and if ‘Lavinia’s silence is what, paradoxically, makes her most visible’, it is worth pausing over the extent to which Lavinia’s dis-/in-­articulacy might also

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make her more expressive of the tragic events she has been written in to.37 For at issue is not only ‘the impossibility of knowing another’s pain’, as Marshall suggests, but also the impossibility of expressing it.38 In a period when the language of female testimonies was semantically restricted, where female utterance could be radically rescripted, and in a text where that language is forcefully denied, we recognize that ‘Lavinia’s plight is literally unutterable’ not simply because she is in-/dis-­articulate, but because this is a period that repeatedly makes that plight inarticulable. Lucrece, even with the physical capacity to tell of the trauma that she has suffered, cannot trust her words and so must gesture beyond them: ‘in me moe woes than words are now depending’; ‘what wrong else may be imagined’. Articulacy in some crucial sense resides not within, but beyond, words. And that is where Shakespeare situates Lavinia. In her enforced silence, at once both disenfranchised and struggling to reclaim authority over the terms of her disenfranchisement, Lavinia stands as an urgent and ultimate signifier of the inability to articulate emotion and tragic experience. And so while we find that rape, in Barbara Joan Baines’ terms, ‘deletes [Lavinia] as a speaking subject’, we are simulta­ neously urged to recognize that such deletion paradoxically amplifies the expressive capacity of her inarticulacy.39 For Lavinia is, as Cora Fox suggests, ‘more than a silenced victim’: in a world where utterance is circumscribed, where language seems inadequate and unreliable, Lavinia’s radical dis-/in-­ articulacy invites us to consider the alternative modes of expression that might reside beyond those limits.40 As KarimCooper’s analysis of gesture and Gina Bloom’s study of voice have suggested, while Chiron and Demetrius may be successful in denying Lavinia speech, they fail to render her inarticulate.41 For through gesture, through producing breath, Lavinia offers new modes of expression: ‘the tongueless Lavinia may be denied scripted lines, but she performs certain gestures that, from an early modern perspective, denote voice’.42 Lavinia might not have been able to trust language to body forth the reality of pain, but she articulates it in her silence: if, as Scarry

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suggested in the opening to this chapter, the unsharability of pain manifests itself in its resistance to language, Lavinia’s silence is overwhelmingly articulate. In a play that locates tragic expression at the far side of utterance, we are encouraged not to ‘speak for’ Lavinia, and not to intrude upon her silence. Titus has, therefore, not simply brought us to the limits of utterance, but has also gestured towards something more expressive that lies beyond language’s delimiting scope. In silence, Shakespeare is able to offer a mode of expression that words cannot. Recognizing that the subject risks losing itself in language, what remains is the proposition that it might in fact relocate itself in inarticulacy.

Coda: Shakespeare’s expressive utterance marcus Now is the time to storm. Why art thou still? titus Ha, ha, ha! marcus Why dost thou laugh? It fits not with this hour. (Titus, 3.1.264–6) ‘Physical pain’, writes Elaine Scarry, ‘does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human makes before language is learned’.43 In these circumstances, we might be inclined to agree with Nicolas Brooke’s assertion that Titus’ ‘ha, ha, ha!’ serves as a signal to the beginning of Titus’ ‘metamorphosis from man into beast’.44 Yet conclusions of linguistic or psycho­ logical regression risk glossing over this peculiar instance of inarticulacy, not only on behalf of Titus, but also on behalf of Shakespeare: an instance where ‘relinquishing control over language’ does not impede expression but paradoxically heightens

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it. While for Jeremy Lopez, the line is demonstrative of ‘the inappropriateness of laughter’, I wish to consider quite the contrary.45 Having brought us to consider that we might not be able to trust language to express us properly, the remainder of this discussion gestures towards the ways that this moment of inarticulacy can be seen as pushing beyond the limitations of the word and into something ultimately more expressive, offering a more immediate type of communication that words cannot. It is no coincidence that ‘of not more than twenty laughs in the whole canon of Shakespeare’s works’, this instance of scripted laughter survives in a text that is obsessed throughout with the limits of expression, resounding, as we have heard, with demands that its characters ‘speak with possibility’ in the face of ‘these unspeakable deserts’ (1.1.260), these ‘wrongs unspeakable’.46 If Titus’ utterance here is, as Bate suggests, ‘the play’s pivotal indecorum’, it is also pivotal in destabilizing the play’s faith in the capacity of language to properly express oneself.47 ‘Ha, ha, ha!’ at this moment not only acknowledges and confirms Marcus’ assertion that ‘these miseries are more than may be bourne’ (3.1.244), but also proves, to borrow Bate’s word, ‘pivotal’ in compelling the play and its inhabitants to dispel the incessant desire and demand for words to figure forth emotion, and to recognize instead their inadequacy. This is, after all, a scene where emotion ‘disdaineth bounds’ (72), where ‘passions [are] bottomless’ (218), where the tears shed from start to end ‘become a deluge overflowed and drowned’ (230). This is a scene, in other words, where ‘deep extremes’ undermine the capacity to ‘speak with possibility’, where the limits of utterance are exposed by emotion that knows no limits and will accordingly no longer be limited: ‘now no more will I control thy griefs’, announces Marcus as Titus looks on at his ‘two sons’ heads’, his own severed ‘warlike hand’, and ‘mangled daughter’ (260; 255–6). In these ‘deep extremes’, emotional excess ‘disdaineth [the] bounds’ of language and seeks new ways to exceed utterance. Once a character ‘whose fury not dissembled speaks his griefs’ (1.1.443), Titus’ seemingly inarticulate utterance here

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proves ultimately more expressive than words because it acknowledges the limitations of language and gestures beyond its delimiting scope. Manfred Pfister’s compelling consideration of this moment in The History of Laughter encapsulates much of this chapter’s thinking: This is neither a laughter occasioned by some comic stimulus nor a liberating or remedial laughter that would help to put his trauma at a distance; neither the laughter of superiority . . . It is a laughter beyond, or at the far side of, tears, a pathological laughter. And what it expresses – like the silence, like being struck dumb, to which it is closely related and which it disrupts – is utter helplessness and the most radical protest against the horrors of existence and the failure of language to express them discursively.48 ‘Ha, ha, ha!’: this is a subject in radical extremis. Caught in a crisis moment of abjection that throws him beside himself with agonizing force, Titus is left standing in trembling ecstasy – ‘why art thou still?’ With this eruption of emotional utterance, Titus returns to himself with a force that will propel the second half of the tragedy into ‘Revenge’s cave’ (3.1.271). In a play that is both driven by the desire for and frustrated by the failures of linguistic expression, Shakespeare here seemingly demonstrates that via inarticulacy we might paradoxically reach articulation. As Bate has it: ‘what Titus says is much more true’.49 What can be glimpsed in these moments of inarticulacy is that there is a conception of true expression residing at the far side of language. ‘There is’, for Shakespeare, ‘nothing [something] beyond the sayable’.

Notes 1 Philip Sidney, ‘Astrophil and Stella’, in Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan Jones, Oxford World Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 153–211, 6:12.

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2 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 4. 3 All quotations from Titus Andronicus are from the Arden third series edition; quotations from other Shakespeare plays are from The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, ed. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson and David Scott Kastan (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2011). 4 Jonathan Culler, ‘Structuralism and Linguistic Models: The Linguistic Foundation’, in Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (London: Routledge, 2002), 3–37 (22); Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, trans. Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley (London: Continuum, 2008), 91. 5 Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 65; Edward Sapir, Culture, Language and Personality: Selected Essays, ed. D. G. Mandelbaum (London: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 69. 6 Cynthia Marshall, ‘ “I can interpret all her martyr’d signs”: Titus Andronicus, Feminism, and the Limits of Interpretation’, in Sexuality and Politics in Renaissance Drama, ed. Carole Levin and Karen Robertson (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991), 193–209 (193). 7 Pascale Aebischer, ‘Titus Andronicus: Spectacular Obscenities’, in Shakespeare’s Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 24–63 (31). 8 See also Liz Oakley-Brown’s reading of Lavinia’s agency in relation to her use and translation of Latin in Ovid and the Cultural Politics of Translation in Early Modern England (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 23–43. 9 Marshall, 199. 10 Emily Detmer-Goebel, ‘The Need for Lavinia’s Voice: Titus Andronicus and the Telling of Rape’, Shakespeare Studies, 29 (2001): 75–92 (88). 11 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Arthur Golding (London: Seres, 1567; reprinted London: Centaur, 1961), l. 559; Carolyn D. Williams, ‘ “Silence, like a Lucrece knife”: Shakespeare and the Meanings of Rape’, Yearbook of English Studies, 23 (1993): 92–110 (98).

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12 Ovid, Fasti, trans. James George Frazer (London: William Heinemann; New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1931), 2.797–8; 827. 13 George Wither, Vox Pacifica: A Voice Tending to the Pacification of God’s Wrath (London: printed by Robert Austin, 1645), 79. 14 Jonathan Bate (ed.), ‘Introduction’ to Titus Andronicus (1995; London: Arden Shakespeare, 2018), 8. 15 Samuel Johnson, ‘Proposals for Printing the Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare’, in The Works of Samuel Johnson (London: printed by Alexander Blake, 1840), 467–92 (489). 16 Bate, 9. Shakespeare is far from alone in his decision to move this scene offstage, and instead seemingly follows the usual decorum; ‘I have found only two scenes which stage rape’, observes Jocelyn Catty in her examination of Elizabethan rape fiction in Writing Rape, Writing Women in Early Modern England: Unbridled Speech (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 26. 17 ‘Although the etymology of obscene is disputed’, notes Joanna Mansbridge, ‘it may be a modification of the Latin scena, meaning literally “what is off” or to one side of the stage, beyond presentation’ – ‘The Comic Bodies and Obscene Voices of Burlesque’, Women and Comedy: History, Theory and Practice, ed. Peter Dickinson et al. (Madison, WI, and Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013), 97–110 (103). 18 Farah Karim-Cooper, The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment, Arden Shakespeare (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 224. 19 Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 114. 20 D. J. Palmer, ‘The Unspeakable in Pursuit of the Uneatable: Language and Action in Titus Andronicus’, Critical Quarterly, 14 (1972): 320–39 (321–2). 21 Heather James, ‘Cultural Disintegration in Titus Andronicus: Mutilating Titus, Vergil and Rome’, Violence in Drama, Themes in Drama, 13 (1991): 129. 22 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Maryland: The John Hopkins University Press, 1997), 275, 277.

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23 Garthine Walker, ‘Rereading Rape and Sexual Violence in Early Modern England’, Gender and History, 10 (1998): 5. 24 Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 93. 25 Kim Solga, Violence against Women in Early Modern Performance: Invisible Acts (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 36. 26 Ian Donaldson, ‘ “A Theme for Disputation”: Shakespeare’s Lucrece’, in The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Translation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 40–56 (40). 27 Donaldson, 40; Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot (New York: Random House, 1985), 61; Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (London: Harvard University Press, 1993), 103. 28 Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1993), xi, xiii. 29 Philip Sidney, His Astrophel and Stella, Wherein the Excellence of Sweete Poesie is concluded (London: John Charlewood, 1591), 26. 30 As Joel Fineman puts it, ‘Lucrece is asking for her rape because her “no”, as “no”, means “yes” ’ – ‘Shakespeare’s Will: The Temporality of Rape’, in The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 165–221 (186). 31 Detmer-Goebel, 75. 32 Serres, 105. 33 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (London: Routledge, 1993), 67. 34 Titus, 2.3 SD; Lucrece, 1462–5; Titus, 2.3.21; 3.1.67–8; 82; 88; Lucrece, 1613–17; Titus, 4.1.51–4; Lucrece, 1622; 1646–8; Titus, 4.1.62; Lucrece, 1716–18. 35 Donaldson, 42. 36 Bate directs readers to Antony and Cleopatra: ‘it is not / Amiss to tumble on the bed of Ptolemy’ (1.4.17–18).

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37 Karim-Cooper, 227. 38 Marshall, 199. 39 Barbara Joan Baines, Representing Rape in the English Early Modern Period (Lewiston, NY: Lampster, Edwin Mellen Press, 2003), 163. 40 Cora Fox, Ovid and the Politics of Emotion in Elizabethan England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 122. 41 See Karim-Cooper (222–40), and Gina Bloom, Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 101–4. 42 Bloom, 102. 43 Scarry, 4. 44 Nicholas Brooke, Shakespeare’s Early Tragedies (London: Methuen, 1968), 38. 45 Jeremy Lopez, ‘Laughter and Narrative in Elizabethan and Jacobean Comedy’, in Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 170–200 (174). 46 Manfred Pfister, A History of Laughter: Laughter from Beowulf to Beckett and Beyond (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2001), 185. 47 Bate, 245. 48 Pfister, 185. 49 Bate, 11.

8 Granular reading Texture, language and surface marks in Titus Andronicus Whitney Sperrazza

In Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’ foundational work on ‘surface reading’, they examine and untangle a series of terms central to the history of symptomatic reading practices: What is absent is simply not there; what is latent is present but invisible . . . what is deep is fully present and thus theoretically visible, but is positioned so far down, in, or back relative to a viewer . . . that it can only be detected by an extreme degree of penetration or insight.1 In contrast to this series of keywords – absent, latent and deep – associated with reading against the grain, Best and Marcus offer ‘surface’ as the central term for their proposed mode of reading,

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employing ‘present’ and ‘manifest’ alongside ‘surface’ as separate but related ways to approach a text. For those familiar with the raped, mutilated and silent figure of Lavinia in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Best and Marcus’ set of terms resonates powerfully with both this tragic female figure as she is represented by the play text and the readings of her character we find in the body of critical work on this late sixteenth-­century play. Truly a drama about reading, Titus plays out its most robust and problematic theories of reading on the body of Lavinia, who has become the central example of the play’s tension between the literary (the characters’ ‘tireless adherence to literary texts and their troubled interpretive practice’) and the body (‘violence materialize[d] in the form of bloody bodies and body parts piling up on stage’).2 In this chapter, I propose that Lavinia’s figure offers a response to the theories of reading constructed around her body, and, subsequently, I aim to demonstrate that she has something to teach us about the act of reading itself. As I move through my brief reading of Titus, what emerges is a distinction between two groups of readers: the men surrounding Lavinia on stage and the audience members. Building on Deborah Willis’ sense that ‘there is a gap, in many scenes, between what we feel and what we think we should feel’, my analysis of Titus traces the friction between how Lavinia’s male kin read her body after the rape and how Shakespeare invites the audience to respond to this tragic figure.3 After she enters the stage in 2.3 with ‘her hands cut off and her tongue cut out, and ravished’, the play begins to articulate Lavinia’s pain for her (2.3.0).4 My argument hinges on this point, and contends that Shakespeare’s theory of reading in relation to Lavinia’s body emerges in the gap between our response to Lavinia as audience members, and what the language of the play provides – namely, Titus and Marcus’ responses to her body. Reading her mutilated body as a ‘map of woe’, Titus and Marcus search for analogies and textual precedents in order to gather knowledge about her experience, but they cannot and do not engage with her body beyond surface-­level interactions (3.2.12).

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Titus and Marcus are bad surface readers, consistently refusing the ‘messy intimacies’ of engaging carefully and closely with Lavinia’s body.5 Up to this point, feminist critical work on Titus has responded to their bad reading by exposing what they miss – exploring how her wounds function as ‘both metaphor and metonymy for the hidden, adjacent wound of rape’.6 Many of these readings challenge earlier work on Lavinia that positions her as a victim of the revenge tragedy plot,7 focusing instead on Lavinia’s sand inscription in 4.1 as an act of empowerment, an act that ‘redefines the ways in which her body and its constituent parts function together’.8 If we define Lavinia’s agency through her act of writing, though, we position her agency within a framework of semantic signification that her body constantly troubles and destabilizes. My argument here builds on and offers an alternative to such readings, and responds most directly, if belatedly, to Mary Laughlin Fawcett’s call to read Titus as ‘a meditation on language and the body’.9 While Fawcett’s argument considers how the play theorizes the relationship between the body and writing, recent critical debates on modes of reading open up space for a complementary exploration of the play’s theorization of reading, particularly the tension between the multiple readings Lavinia’s body is subjected to and the alternative responses her figure invites. Lavinia becomes a powerful figure, I argue, not because she is able to write the facts of her violation, but because her absent voice paired with her conspicuously present raped body, as well as her body’s disturbance of a tidy surface/depth dichotomy, expose the problematic reading modes at work around her on stage. In other words, Lavinia’s agency emerges through the essential role she plays in critiquing and theorizing the play’s response to her trauma. Looking beyond Titus and Marcus’ responses to Lavinia, we find a much more complex ontology of surface and depth than their mode of reading offers.10 If symptomatic reading – reading against the grain – probes a text for its absences and latent content, this seems no way to read Lavinia, a consistently

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present, visible reminder of the trauma of sexual violence. And if surface reading – ‘reading with the grain’, as Timothy Bewes terms it11 – asks us to look only at ‘what is evident, perceptible, apprehensible . . . what, in the geometrical sense, has length and breadth but no thickness’,12 this mode seems equally insufficient for reading Lavinia’s body, ‘a body riddled with holes, a body that becomes a hole’.13 Instead, I want to suggest that Lavinia’s figure requires a reading mode that exists within the liminal space between surface and depth.14 In particular, as she inscribes her rapists’ names and their crime in 4.1, Shakespeare uses the medium on which Lavinia writes – the ‘sandy plot’ – to draw attention to the complex relationship between the surface and depth of the raped female body. I propose to reread the well-­trodden critical terrain of 4.1, focusing not on Lavinia’s writing, but rather on the materiality of the sand and the textured modes of interaction it necessitates, in order to consider how Lavinia critiques the modes of reading and standards of legibility offered by the rest of the play. Offering instead a kind of granular reading mode, Lavinia’s inscription invites us to attend to both the grainy, tactile resonances of a material like sand, as well as the highly ephemeral nature of such a writing medium. Taking Lavinia’s inscription on the ‘sandy plot’ as the centre of my analysis, I find a theorization of language and the body offered by the play that takes the body as its language and offers its own highly embodied mode of expression as a model for how we should approach our reading of it.

Reading Lavinia Nowhere perhaps is the tension between the play’s insistent literariness and its exaggerated attention to embodiment made more apparent than in Marcus’ initial reading of Lavinia’s body after her rape. In this haunting, and by now infamous, monologue, Marcus describes Lavinia’s body as ‘lopped and hewed’, ‘bare’ of its ‘two branches’ (2.3.17–18). He imagines

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that the ‘crimson river of warm blood’ rising and falling between Lavinia’s ‘rosed lips’ is a ‘bubbling fountain stirred with wind’ (2.3.22–4). His grotesque blazon of her mutilated body goes on to catalogue her ‘honey breath’ (25), ‘sweet tongue’ (49), ‘blushing’ cheeks (32), and ‘lily hands’ (44). As feminist work on this ‘Petrarchan travesty’ has demonstrated,15 this scene stages the ‘stunning failure’ of poetic language as Marcus’ highly poeticized response struggles to account for the traumatized body before him.16 Marcus resorts to the rhetorical ‘pattern[s]’ and ‘precedent[s]’ for representing violence to the female body even as the play highlights the inadequacy of those patterns through its juxtaposition of his words with Lavinia’s body (5.3.43). Within critical work on the play, responses to Marcus’ reading oscillate between claims that his description ‘seals . . . off’ Lavinia’s body and arguments that his words become penetrative and violent, even to the point of reading this moment as a ‘second rape’.17 Marcus’ lines are described by scholars as ‘cold and empty in the face of Lavinia’s suffering’ and an ‘expression of hollow shock’, descriptions that characterize his response as a kind of ‘depthless hermeneutic’ that glosses over Lavinia’s body and forecloses a deeper comprehension of her trauma.18 Alternatively, scholars focus on the significant rhetorical violence at work in Marcus’ description, how his speech ‘perpetuates the violence it haltingly tries to comprehend’.19 As we work to account for a discourse that is simultaneously ‘empty’ and violent, ‘hollow’ and penetrative, our readings of Marcus’ reading become entangled within the complicated ontology of surface enacted by Lavinia’s raped body. Her raped body offers an aggregation of surfaces and depths, as well as absences and presences. Notoriously, the rape itself is absent from the staged action of the play and, as Pascale Aebischer reminds us, the crucial difference between reading Titus and seeing it performed is the absence or presence of Lavinia’s body.20 Moreover, the rape exposes the interior of Lavinia’s body on its surface; it creates holes where her hands used to be and turns her mouth into a ‘hollow cage’ (3.1.85),

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while at the same time closing off access to a depth of feeling by removing her expressive parts. Marcus manages the audience’s reading of Lavinia’s surfaces and depths, absences and presences, in part by overwriting her wounds, filling in her body’s holes with ghosts of her ‘pretty fingers’, ‘lily hands’ and ‘sweet tongue’ (2.3.44; 49), and in part by fixating on her wounds. As Cynthia Marshall notes, Marcus’ words ‘train all eyes’ on Lavinia’s body, making her visually available to the audience by focusing on the visible signs of her trauma.21 Situating Marcus’ erotic description within a broader ‘pornographic economy’ at work in the play, Marshall argues that Marcus’ words render Lavinia’s body as ‘all vagina’, all wound.22 Marcus’ highly visual interaction with Lavinia’s mutilated figure becomes the framework for his surface reading, which in turn inflicts a penetrative violence on her already violated body. As we struggle to reconcile how Lavinia’s body becomes both sealed off and re-­penetrated by Marcus’ rhetoric, the language of surface and depth permeates our critical discourse. In recognizing such a discursive tendency, we can also recognize how Lavinia’s body troubles those same terms and calls into question the modes through which we read and finding meaning in her figure. If she provides a crucially embodied juxtaposition to Marcus’ reading, might she also offer a broader critique of reading modes and the discourses through which we articulate ways of reading? Marcus’ reading fixates on Lavinia’s absent body parts, and his description of her missing hands as ‘sweet ornaments’ directly echoes our first introduction to Lavinia in the play, which comes when Bassianus extols her as ‘Rome’s rich ornament’ even before Lavinia enters the stage (1.1.55). From the play’s outset, and through the mouths of the men around her, Shakespeare frames Lavinia as conventional beauty and foreshadows the ornamental rhetoric through which Marcus will read her body after the rape. Following this first description from Bassianus, the entire opening scene of Titus unfolds as a series of readings of and increasingly aggressive claims to Lavinia from Bassianus, Saturninus, Titus and, finally, Chiron

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and Demetrius. Lavinia’s silence throughout this scene, even before she loses her tongue, is well documented in critical accounts of the play, but I want to draw attention to how her silence is read and overwritten in a manner that forecasts how Titus and Marcus read her body after the rape.23 In the opening scene, the men on stage treat her as a kind of tabula rasa – a surface on which they can inscribe, read and overwrite their desired narratives. When Saturninus claims Lavinia for his bride, he voices a response for her: ‘Lavinia, you are not displeased by this’ (1.1.274). Several lines later, the audience learns of Lavinia’s betrothal to Bassianus, but Lavinia is again silent as Bassianus claims, ‘this maid is mine’ (1.1.280), an assertion that launches a debate about the definition of rape. Titus reads Bassianus’ claim as a seizure of property promised to Saturninus, and the suggestion of rape is fully realized when Saturninus uses the term to describe Bassianus’ actions (1.1.409).24 When Bassianus responds to Saturninus’ accusation with ‘ “rape” call you it . . . to seize my own, / my true betrothed love’ (1.1.410–11), reading Lavinia and reading rape become, if not synonymous, then at least simultaneous processes. Roughly 300 lines after this staged debate on the definition of rape, Titus’ opening scene concludes with Aaron’s advice to Chiron and Demetrius – if they cannot lay claim to Lavinia ‘by words’, then they must ‘strike her home by force’ (1.1.618). Aaron’s suggestion prompts Chiron and Demetrius’ violent seizure and rape of Lavinia in Act 2, when the inscription of male desire on her body is made literal. In its arc from hailing Lavinia as ‘Rome’s rich ornament’ to outlining the plot for her rape, the play’s opening scene calls into question the actions and frameworks through which rape becomes legible and positions Lavinia as the fulcrum around which rape’s legibility is called into question. The play’s opening scene not only offers precedent for the mode of surface reading Titus and Marcus later impose on Lavinia, but also defines a grammar through which the inscription of male desire on her body is articulated by the men around her on stage – both her rapists and her male kin. At the

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opening of Act  4, in the crucial moment where information about Lavinia’s rape becomes legible to Titus and Marcus, Titus reads aloud Lavinia’s sand inscription (‘Stuprum – Chiron – Demetrius’) and responds immediately with an allusion to Seneca’s Hippolytus: ‘Magni dominator poli, / tam lentus audis scelera, tam lentus vides?’ (4.1.81–2).25 Bracketing Lavinia’s writing for just a moment, I want to emphasize first how Titus’ response to it fits within the play’s larger pattern of surface reading, and reveals the inadequacy – even perversity – of this mode of reading in relation to Lavinia’s trauma. Titus’ Senecan allusion here directly recalls a reference to the same play Demetrius makes when he, Chiron and Aaron are outlining plans for Lavinia’s rape. After Aaron’s detailed description of how and where the crime should occur, Demetrius ends the play’s opening scene with an allusion to Seneca’s Hippolytus: Sit fas aut nefas, till I find the stream to cool this heat, a charm to calm these fits, per Stygia, per manes vehor. (1.1.633–5)26 Because of its placement in the trajectory of the play, Titus’ allusion to Hippolytus echoes Lavinia’s rapists. Even as Lavinia carves Demetrius’ name in the sand, the ‘heat’ and ‘fits’ of his body as he ruminates on violating Lavinia are ghosted on stage through Titus’ words, allowing the violence of the rapist/victim relationship to erupt into Titus’ response to his daughter’s trauma. This echo aligns Titus’ response to Lavinia with the rapists’ experience of her body, and invites us to recognize that Titus’ reading, even once he has knowledge of the rape, does not amount to a genuine or empathetic understanding of Lavinia’s pain. At this crucial moment of Lavinia’s writing, Shakespeare calls attention to the inadequacy of her male kin’s response, not just because it seems to ignore the body in front of them, but because the grammar through which they articulate their response evokes the violence of Chiron and Demetrius’ desire for Lavinia’s body.

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Granular reading Lavinia’s sand inscription in 4.1 is often read as the moment when she ‘finally finds a way to reassert her agency’ after she has been raped and her body has been severed of its expressive parts.27 Through her writing in the sand, carving out ‘Stuprum – Chiron – Demetrius’ (4.1.78), Lavinia’s rape becomes legible to her male kin, who can then proceed with the process of revenge, kneeling down to ‘swear’ that they will ‘prosecute . . . mortal revenge upon these traitorous Goths’ (4.1.89–93). Functioning as a book-­end to Marcus’ reading of Lavinia in 2.3, 4.1 echoes that initial tension between the embodied presence of Lavinia’s mutilated figure and the way she is read by the men around her. Marcus’ citation of Ovid in 2.3 becomes materialized on stage in 4.1 as Lavinia rummages through Young Lucius’ books and flips frantically through a physical copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.28 Yet, as I aim to demonstrate, even as the play’s insistent literariness becomes most literal, Lavinia’s figure insists on an alternative mode of reading, a mode that extends beyond the scene’s literary props and directly critiques Titus and Marcus’ interpretations. Rather than read Lavinia’s writing as a ‘crucial task of communication’ that ‘affirms her agency . . . in relation to the larger revenge schema of the play’.29 I want to suggest that her act of writing calls our attention to alternative forms of engagement with and understanding of her trauma, forms that directly critique the modes of reading through which Lavinia and her writing are being read by the men on stage. The scene’s first moments work to disassociate Lavinia from the framework of legibility imposed by her male kin – a framework based in oral and written modes of expression, and comprehended primarily through visual means. Young Lucius, the scene takes pains to demonstrate, is trained in classical rhetoric and, like his father and uncles, turns to ‘Roman narrative’ to ‘make sense of events around [him]’.30 At the start of this scene, he runs from his aunt, calls to Titus and Marcus for help, and pleads to Lavinia, ‘I know not what you mean’

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(4.1.4). Once he recalls that ‘Hecuba of Troy / ran mad for sorrow’, he is more willing to approach and interact with Lavinia – ‘pardon me, sweet aunt’ – armed with this classical referent (4.1.20–1; 26), but can still only categorize her bodily actions as ‘some fit or frenzy’ (4.1.17). This opening exchange insistently reminds us that Lavinia’s trauma removes her from this framework of semantic signification, her physical pain, to borrow Elaine Scarry’s language, ‘not simply resist[ing] language but actively destroy[ing] it’.31 Within the first twenty lines of this scene, Lavinia, already physically severed from oral and written modes of communication due to her missing tongue and hands, is also rhetorically severed from these modes of expression, a rupture marked by Young Lucius’ inability to understand her meaning. Communicating outside the registers of legible expression her male kin comprehend, Lavinia invites a reading that instead accounts for her highly embodied expression throughout this scene, a mode of expression grounded in a tactile rather than visual perceptual system. Although she has lost her hands, Lavinia touches everything in this scene – we might even say she communicates through touch. Lavinia chases her nephew, intent on rummaging through his books. She then flips through Ovid’s Metamorphoses, ‘busily . . . turn[ing] the leaves’ to find the passage on Philomela (4.1.45), perhaps kneeling in the sand, her body in direct contact with the ground, as Laura Fraser is positioned in Julie Taymor’s film adaptation (1999). As scholars like Elizabeth Harvey and Carla Mazzio remind us, touch was a ‘full-­bodied’ sense in the early modern period.32 ‘Of the five senses’, Harvey notes, ‘touch is the most diffuse and somatically dispersed, and because the organ associated with it – the skin or flesh – covers the whole body, it is closely associated with corporeality’.33 Lavinia’s tactile exertion throughout 4.1 culminates in an intense moment of full-­bodied expression as Lavinia holds Marcus’ wooden staff and contorts her mutilated body to form letters in the sand. The tactile expression on display here recalls the earlier moment when Lavinia exits the stage with Titus’ hand between her teeth:

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‘And, Lavinia, thou shalt be employed: / Bear thou my hand, sweet wench, between thy teeth’ (3.1.282–3). Placing a hand in her mouth, Shakespeare offers touch as a substitute for the modes of expression and sensory registers from which Lavinia has been severed. The hand (and the skin, flesh, body nexus it represents) replaces the tongue as the organ through which Lavinia can engage with her surroundings and begin to articulate the depth of her suffering. When Marcus introduces the scene of writing, calling Lavinia’s attention to the ‘sandy plot’ and modelling the act of inscription, his lines evoke the patterns of surface reading I have traced thus far in Titus and Marcus’ engagement with Lavinia after her rape. His instructions make clear that the goal of the inscribing process is purely visual, the legible ‘display’ that will finally allow Marcus and Titus to ‘know’ the facts of Lavinia’s experience: My lord, look here; look here, Lavinia. He writes his name with his staff, and guides it with his feet and mouth. This sandy plot is plain. Guide, if thou canst, This after me. I here have writ my name Without the help of any hand at all. Cursed be that heart that forced us to this shift. Write thou, good niece, and here display at last What God will have discovered for revenge. Heaven guide thy pen to print thy sorrows plain, That we may know the traitors and the truth. (4.1.68–76) The very first line of Marcus’ instruction calls attention solely to the visual element of the inscribing process. Marcus repeats his call to ‘look here’, and asserts that the goal of the process, revealed several lines later, is to visibly ‘display’ both ‘the traitors and the truth’. Marcus and Titus’ words throughout the scene more broadly demonstrate that they are constrained to visual engagement with her body and its communicative

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modes. The word ‘see’ occurs ten times in this short scene, and nine of those times it is used to draw visual attention to Lavinia’s body or any knowledge she provides regarding the facts of her assault. Marcus also uses the word ‘plain’ twice in his instructions to Lavinia, signalling that his experience of this moment is all surface. Describing the sandy plot as ‘plain’ accounts solely for its function as tabula rasa, a surface on which to write, an analogy that recalls the treatment of Lavinia’s body at the play’s opening. At the moment when Marcus seems most poised to recognize and feel Lavinia’s experience in a more embodied way as he models the sand inscription for her, his words signal his continued emphasis on surface reading and his attempt to fit Lavinia’s expressive act within a familiar register of semantic legibility. Lavinia’s tactile engagement in the first half of 4.1, however, prepares the audience to read and understand her sand inscription as a haptic form of communication, of which the words themselves are only one part. When Lavinia finishes writing Chiron and Demetrius’ names in the sand, she has created visible marks that make her rape legible to Titus and Marcus. This is the moment Kim Solga deems ‘rape’s meta-theatrical return’, the moment when Lavinia’s suffering is ‘translated’ from ‘the space of [the] traumatized woman’s body into the space of the male public sphere’.34 But in the process of that translation, I want to suggest, Shakespeare uses the sand to call attention to the gap between the legible marks Lavinia writes and the invisible trauma of her experience. On a ‘sandy plot’, individual grains of sand are always shifting because sand does not have a stable surface. In fact, Titus reminds us as much when he frets, ‘The angry northern wind / Will blow these sands like Sibyl’s leaves abroad, / And where’s our lesson then’ (4.1.104–6). In response to the threat of losing the ‘lesson’, he insists that Lavinia’s words be rewritten on a more permanent, stable surface. ‘I will go get a leaf of brass’, he exclaims, ‘And with a gad of steel will write these words’ (4.1.102–3). The ‘words’ Titus is so concerned about – the names of Lavinia’s rapists and her use of the Latin stuprum –

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are not coterminous with her pain.35 Lavinia writes information her male kin need to know in order to understand her experience, and simultaneously demonstrates that rape cannot be so easily known.36 What she cannot articulate through her writing is the pain of her experience, felt at a much deeper level. The medium on which Lavinia writes, rather than what she writes, gives us a better sense of where and how to read that pain, an answer to finding, to borrow Fawcett’s language, ‘some adequate response to her presence’.37 The full substance of Lavinia’s message can be found in the materiality of the sand and her act of inscription rather than solely in the words she writes. If we put too much emphasis on Lavinia’s writing, we align ourselves with Marcus and Titus, those surface readers who can only understand Lavinia’s plight within the parameters of legible expression reading and writing represent, modes of expression consistently aligned with classical rhetorical training and predominantly visual modes of interaction. Instead, Lavinia’s raped body, particularly at the moment of writing, theorizes how an embodied response to another’s pain occurs not within a semantic register but within a haptic register. Feeling for and with Lavinia involves a haptic engagement with her exposed body and an increased awareness of how our own bodies respond to such engagement, a granular exploration not just of ‘what the visible hides but how it is that we have failed to see certain things on its surface’.38 The play’s language does not draw an explicit textural comparison between the sand inscription and Lavinia’s body, but the scene does invite us to compare the ‘sandy plot’ and Titus’ ‘leaf of brass’ with Lavinia’s body as the unnamed third surface on which the mark of rape has been inscribed (4.1.102). As she moves around the stage, her body serves as an insistent reminder of the breakdown between surface and depth, the impossibility of accounting for one without the other as we engage with this figure. The insistently exposed insides of Lavinia’s body activate a recursive relationship between surface and depth that mirrors the shifting, unstable surface

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and depth of the sandy plot as she carves out her inscription. Introducing a third medium for inscription into the scene, Titus’ ‘leaf of brass’ is a permanent and stable surface – a writing medium synonymous with the surface reading mode Titus and Marcus impose on Lavinia throughout the play. Therefore, his attempt to make Lavinia’s inscription permanent again misses the point. He does not understand the importance of the sandy plot as part of the lesson, the texture of the shifting sand as the necessary medium for articulation. Even though Titus and Marcus look past Lavinia’s body to focus instead on the visual ‘display’ of her sand inscription, we need to recognize the reading paradigm the tragedy offers through Lavinia’s figure, even as it rejects it – a paradigm for a more granular level of reading, complete with the evocations of texture a term like ‘granular’ activates. Through the sandy medium on which Lavinia writes, we find a complex ontology of surface and depth that critiques the semantic meaning offered by the play’s language. In taking the ‘sandy plot’ as the location for her inscription, Lavinia takes a writing medium that troubles the very notion of surface and invites both writer and reader to account for ephemerality in the meaning-­ making process. For ‘a subject at once all-­too-seen and not seen at all’, to borrow Anne Cheng’s language from her work on the racialized bodily surface, the ‘sandy plot’ provides a writing medium that, like Lavinia’s body in the play’s second half, exposes ‘the phenomenological, social, and psychical contradictions inhering in what it means to be visible’.39 Insistently present on stage in the aftermath of her rape, yet consistently absent from the language of the play, Lavinia invites a reading that accounts for both presence and absence, both surface and depth. Using texture to activate alternative registers of reading, knowing and understanding, Lavinia becomes the fulcrum around which this play theorizes and critiques responses to the tragic female figure and invites readings that go beyond the revenge narrative that unfolds on stage. By putting pressure on reading Lavinia’s body (and the act of reading more generally) throughout the play, Shakespeare

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invites the audience to question whether the knowledge the play presents in relation to Lavinia’s trauma – the facts Marcus and Titus are looking for – is enough. Ultimately, this conscientious gap between the play’s treatment of Lavinia and the more embodied, feeling registers of response in which the audience is invited to take part puts pressure on the act of reading and what it means to ‘know’ the trauma of rape.

Reading Titus Attending more closely to the material conditions of Lavinia’s sand inscription – ‘reading for texture’, as Eve Sedgwick proposes – we participate in a mode of reading that ‘embraces the loss of critical certainty and the gain in intimacy’ that results from the unknowability of Lavinia’s experience.40 Such a reading recognizes Lavinia’s critique of the reading modes the play enforces, and pays closer attention to the lessons her figure teaches us about reading, lessons that are intimately connected to the ontology of surface and depth enacted through her violated body. In light of Mary Thomas Crane’s observation that ‘the effect of symptomatic reading has been to empower a reader who is able to analyze the symptoms that appear on the surface of a text in order to diagnose the deep conflict that it would conceal’, reading for texture becomes a way to destabilize the reader’s agency and invite vulnerability into the scene of reading.41 Such a reading mode seems especially crucial as we approach a play like Titus Andronicus, as we struggle to respond to the highly embodied and violent renderings of surface and depth offered by this text. This is a play in which Aaron – a figure whose bodily surface is marked by blackness, and who is then accused of having a ‘soul black like his face’ (3.1.206) – confesses to digging up dead men from the ground and carving haunting messages ‘on their skins, as on the bark of trees’ (5.1.138). This is a play with a ‘gaping hollow of the earth’ at its centre, a ‘swallowing womb’ positioned on stage that multiple bodies fall into and emerge

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from (2.2.249, 239). This is a play that ends with Aaron ‘breast-­deep in earth’, his legs and torso buried in perhaps the very same spot on stage that serves as the ‘ragged entrails’ of the pit and the ‘sandy plot’ on which Lavinia writes (5.3.178, 2.2.230, 4.1.69). Indeed, Titus has something to teach us about reading surfaces and surface reading. As I have aimed to demonstrate, the lasting power of a figure like Lavinia – her enduring presence at the centre of critical work on Titus – emerges not as a result of her writing, her ability to make her rape legible, but rather through her subtler critique of the play’s reading of her trauma. When she finally offers the knowledge Titus and Marcus seek, she uses a sandy writing medium to expose the ‘open secret’ of her rape, finding a way to ‘impart [ ] knowledge such that it cannot be claimed and acted upon’, to borrow Anne-Lise François’ language.42 Titus and Marcus make every effort to act on the offered knowledge, carving her inscription into a ‘leaf of brass’ and launching the revenge plot that will structure the remainder of the play. Lavinia’s ephemeral and textured sand inscription, however, invites alternative responses alongside its critique of their efforts. The instability of the sand challenges modes of reading that prioritize language, visual interaction and semantic signification. Instead, Lavinia’s offer of knowledge finds a feminist footing through its emphasis on the embodied process of inscription and its prioritization of haptic interaction. Recognizing that Lavinia’s figure offers such a nuanced critique of reading perhaps brings us closer to answering Kim Solga’s important question: ‘how do we bear witness to Lavinia’s suffering while also bearing witness to the limits of our recognition, to the impossibility of our ever seeing or knowing that suffering intimately or completely?’43 A granular reading of this play not only reinforces our sense that the play’s articulation of Lavinia’s trauma and experience is inadequate, but also helps us recognize that our reading of the play must not reiterate the discursive and perceptual frameworks through which that articulation is scripted. Lavinia calls on us to read differently and, most importantly, to pay attention to ourselves reading.

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Notes 1 Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’, Representations, 108(1) (2009): 4. 2 J. K. Barret, ‘Chained Allusions, Patterned Futures, and the Dangers of Interpretation in Titus Andronicus’, English Literary Renaissance, 44(3) (2014): 454; Thomas P. Anderson, ‘ “What Is Written Shall Be Executed”: “Nude Contracts” and “Lively Warrants” in Titus Andronicus’, Criticism, 45(3) (2003): 301. 3 Deborah Willis, ‘ “The Gnawing Vulture”: Revenge, Trauma Theory, and Titus Andronicus’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 53(1) (2002): 34. 4 William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate, revised edition (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2018). All references from Titus are from the Arden edition and will be noted by act, scene and line number in the body of the chapter. 5 Heather Love, ‘Close but not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn’, New Literary History, 41(2) (2010): 374. 6 Coppélia Kahn, Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds and Women (London: Routledge, 1997), 60. For a small sample of the long tradition of feminist readings of this play, see Mary Laughlin Fawcett, ‘Arms/Words/Tears: Language and the Body in Titus Andronicus’, English Literary History, 50(2) (1983): 261–77; Douglas E. Green, ‘ “Her Martyr’d Signs”: Gender and Tragedy in Titus Andronicus’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 40(3) (1989): 317–26; Emily Detmer-Goebel, ‘The Need for Lavinia’s Voice: Titus Andronicus and the Telling of Rape’, Shakespeare Studies, 29 (2001): 75–92; and Kim Solga, Violence against Women in Early Modern Performance: Invisible Acts (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 7 For an example of work that reads Lavinia as ‘utter victim’, see Green, ‘ “Her Martyr’d Signs” ’, 319; and Sara Eaton, ‘A Woman of Letters: Lavinia in Titus Andronicus’, Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender, ed. Shirley Nelson Garner and Madelon Sprengnether (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), 54–74. 8 Caroline Lamb, ‘Physical Trauma and (Adapt)ability in Titus Andronicus’, Critical Survey, 22(1) (2010): 50. 9 Fawcett, ‘Arms/Words/Tears’, 263.

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10 I borrow the phrase ‘ontology of the surface’ from Stephanie Shirilan, ‘Francis Bacon, Robert Burton, and the Thick Skin of the World: Sympathy, Transmission, and the Imaginary Early Modern Skin’, English Studies in Canada, 34(1) (2008): 62. I use the phrase to refer to the aggregation of various surfaces in the play, and how those surfaces manage our reading of Lavinia’s body. 11 Timothy Bewes, ‘Reading with the Grain: A New World in Literary Criticism’, differences, 21(3) (2010): 1–33. 12 Best and Marcus, ‘Surface Reading’, 9. 13 Solga, Violence against Women, 42, original emphasis. 14 This argument relies on the premise that Titus is a play about reading, which immediately raises a question about genre. Here, I follow critics like Pascale Aebischer, who claims that the play’s literariness becomes a threat to its performance value. Lavinia’s rape is consistently greeted with ‘intertextuality and rhetorical tropes’, which, according to Aebischer, ‘constitute [ ] the greatest challenge to an “embodied” consideration of . . . rape as an act of physical cruelty perpetrated by men on the body of a woman’. See Pascale Aebischer, Shakespeare’s Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 27. Other critics often remark on the self-­conscious ‘literariness’ of Titus Andronicus, but without necessarily framing this as a play about reading. See Heather James, Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Bate, ‘Introduction’, 34–5; and Cynthia Marshall, The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). There has also been significant critical attention to the drama’s rhetorical play. For instance, see D. J. Palmer, ‘The Unspeakable in Pursuit of the Uneatable: Language and Action in Titus Andronicus’, Critical Quarterly, 14(4) (1972): 320–39; Albert Tricomi, ‘The Aesthetics of Mutilation in Titus Andronicus’, Shakespeare Survey, 27 (1974): 11–19; Andrew McConnell Stott, ‘The Petrarchan Apocalypse of Titus Andronicus: Poetic Mutilation and Elizabethan Visual Culture’, in Titus Out of Joint: Reading the Fragmented Titus Andronicus, ed. Liberty Stanavage and Paxton Hehmeyer (Newcastle-­upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 69–86; and Danielle

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St. Hilaire, ‘Allusion and Sacrifice in “Titus Andronicus” ’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 49(2) (2009): 311–31. 15 Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, 58. 16 Solga, Violence against Women, 46. 17 James, Shakespeare’s Troy, 66; Bate, ‘Introduction’, 36. 18 Vernon Guy Dickson, ‘ “A Pattern, Precedent, and Lively Warrant”: Emulation, Rhetoric, and Cruel Propriety in Titus Andronicus’, Renaissance Quarterly, 62(2) (2009): 401; Tzachi Zamir, ‘Wooden Subjects’, New Literary History, 39(2) (2008): 280; Ann Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 63. 19 Lynn Enterline, Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 8. 20 Aebischer, Shakespeare’s Violated Bodies, 26. 21 Marshall, The Shattering of the Self, 130. 22 Ibid., 134. 23 A notable exception to her silence is the beginning of Act 2, Scene 2, when Lavinia and Bassianus encounter Tamora in the woods just before the rape. On Lavinia’s voice in this scene, see, for instance, Bethany Packard, ‘Lavinia as Coauthor of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 50(2) (2010): 286–7; and Detmer-Goebel, ‘The Need for Lavinia’s Voice’, 79–80. 24 When Bassianus seizes Lavinia, Titus cries, ‘Treason, my lord – Lavinia is surprised’ (1.1.288). Titus’ use of the term ‘surprise’ and his accusation of ‘treason’ both evoke the early modern connotation of rape as a crime of property. For a detailed account of the period’s shifting legislation regarding rape, see Jocelyn Catty, Writing Rape, Writing Women in Early Modern England: Unbridled Speech (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). 25 ‘Ruler of the great heavens, are you so slow to hear crimes, so slow to see’ (Bate, Titus, note 4.1.81–2). 26 ‘Be it right or wrong, till I find the stream to cool this heat, a charm to calm these fits, I am carried through the Stygian regions’ (Bate, Titus, note 1.1.635).

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27 William W. Weber, ‘ “Worse than Philomel”: Violence, Revenge, and Meta-Allusion in Titus Andronicus’, Studies in Philology, 112(4) (2015): 710. 28 Because Lavinia follows Marcus’ model and uses his staff to write, feminist readings of this scene struggle to categorize it as anything but the stubborn insistence of patriarchal dominance, a sequence that displays ‘the complexity of women’s relations to textuality in patriarchal culture’. For instance, see Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, 62; Fawcett, ‘Arms/Words/Tears’; and Green, ‘ “Her Martyr’d Signs” ’. 29 Lamb, ‘Physical Trauma and (Adapt)ability’, 50. 30 St. Hilaire, ‘Allusion and Sacrifice’, 316. 31 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 4. 32 Carla Mazzio, The Inarticulate Renaissance: Language Trouble in an Age of Eloquence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 184; Elizabeth D. Harvey, ‘Introduction: The “Sense of All Senses” ’, in Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 1–21. 33 Harvey, ‘Introduction’, 1. 34 Solga, Violence against Women, 30. 35 As both Emily Detmer-Goebel and Bethany Packard have noted, the Latin stuprum is absent from Ovid’s tale of Philomela. Instead of the connotations of rape evoked with the more common term raptus (from the Latin rapere, signifying ‘theft’ or ‘abduction’), stuprum connotes a sense of ‘unclean’ or ‘unchaste’. As Detmer-Goebel argues, ‘in a play that examines the use of the English term “rape,” Shakespeare’s use of “stuprum” rather than “raptus” . . . allows us to surmise that Lavinia does more than identify the crime’. See Detmer-Goebel, ‘The Need for Lavinia’s Voice’, 86; and Packard, ‘Lavinia as Coauthor’, 293. 36 Solga, Violence Against Women, 50. 37 Fawcett, ‘Arms/Words/Tears’, 265. 38 Anne Anlin Cheng, ‘Skins, Tattoos, and Susceptibility’, Representations, 108(1) (2009): 101. 39 Ibid., 99, original emphasis.

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40 Best and Marcus, ‘Surface Reading’, 9. 41 Mary Thomas Crane, ‘Surface, Depth, and the Spatial Imaginary: A Cognitive Reading of The Political Unconscious’, Representations, 108(1) (2009): 78. 42 Anne-Lise François, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 1. 43 Solga, Violence against Women, 50.

PART FOUR

Performance and adaptation

9 ‘Did you see that!?’ Titus Andronicus and theatrical transgression Ralph Alan Cohen

In 1970, while I was studying for my orals, a production of King Lear came to North Carolina State in Raleigh, a thirty-­ minute drive from Duke University. I had never seen the play and was in fact working my way through criticism of it, so, armed with my researches, I decided to make the drive. I had been reading Dr Samuel Johnson and knew that he felt that the blinding of Gloucester was ‘too horrid to be endured in dramatic exhibition, and [was] such as must always compel the mind to relieve its distress by incredulity’.1 As I was taking my seat, I overheard the couple – two undergraduates – sitting to my left. The girl was sitting next to me, and her date said to her, ‘I’ve never been to a play before’. She replied, ‘You mean you’ve never been to Shakespeare?’ ‘No’, he said, ‘I’ve never been to a play before’. I thought here was a real litmus test of the play and, perhaps, of Dr Johnson’s criticism. After the

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intermission, which came before Gloucester’s eyes were put out, the two had switched seats, so that it was the young man who was sitting next to me. The production, which was strong and paid close attention to the text, had Gloucester bound to a chair as Cornwall, with impressive legerdemain, realistically gouged out an eye. When Cornwall had done the first eye, the young man, not remembering that he and his date had changed places, grabbed my leg at the awful moment and said, without turning to look at me, ‘Did you see that!?’ When I answered ‘yes’, the young man glanced at me and without apology removed his hand, obviously too absorbed in the action on stage to be the least embarrassed. Johnson, it turns out, was only partly right. The young man was incredulous, but his incredulity did not remove him from a play that had so engrossed him that he briefly misplaced his date. His unfiltered ‘Did you see that!?’ came out of that realm of audience perception that acknowledges the improbable things we see in a theatre and simultaneously accepts them. What I wish to suggest is that Titus Andronicus transgresses theatrical limits by what it makes visible, repeatedly forcing an audience to see things on stage that discomfort them not only because those things – amputations, self-­mutilation, miscege­ nation, torture, human pies, and arrows flying in a crowded theatre – violate ordinary sensibilities, but also because the presentation of those things violates the normal efficiencies of staging. The play thus adds an audience’s unconscious awareness of the physical work of putting on a play to their conscious awareness of what is normally staged, and in doing so, Titus Andronicus doubly risks itself, and – in terms of the audience’s sensations – it doubly succeeds.

The Dual Transgression Dial The claim to our attention of Titus Andronicus goes beyond a narrative of the morally horrific – a claim it shares with Oedipus, The Bacchae, and many plays since – to its insistence

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on breaking theatrical decorum by staging for its audience the moral horrors it narrates: homicide, suicide, filicide, mutilation, self-­mutilation, torture, and cannibalism. If we track those transgressions against a fairly universal set of mores,2 we can see that Shakespeare keeps adjusting those transgressions upward. For example, the play begins with Titus ignoring a mother’s pleas and ordering the death of her son. Thus, the first transgression against mores – Titus commanding the offstage execution of someone else’s son – quickly escalates to Titus killing his own son, Mutius, on stage. Shakespeare has amped up the transgression of an offstage murder of an enemy’s son, which the audience might imagine justified by revenge or the rituals of pagans, to the unjustifiable onstage killing of his own son. And if the audience thinks that the playwright has already turned up the Mores Transgression Dial pretty high, then they are in for quite a ride in a play that book-­ends Titus’ killing of his warrior son in the heat of an argument at the beginning of the play with Titus’ premeditated killing of his handless, tongueless daughter at the end of the play. I suggest that this upward calibration of the unthinkable and the unwatchable as the play progresses is Shakespeare’s exploration of the limits of his new occupation, making plays. I suggest further that in so far as the unwatchable is concerned, the playwright is testing not only the moral bounds of an audience but also the boundaries of their ability to be simultaneously in and out of the play, as that young man was at that production of King Lear. I am calling this challenge to those boundaries ‘theatrical transgression’. For the purposes of this chapter, I have invented a Dual Transgression Dial that, in good Spinal Tap fashion, goes up to eleven. In the first instance, I rate the transgression against societal norms on the Mores Transgression Dial – those moments when some cruel behaviour or mischance might prompt us to exclaim ‘can you imagine that!?’ On a Theatrical Transgression Dial, I rate the extent to which the stage work and picture go beyond theatrical norms – those moments when

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we might ask, as that young man grabbing my leg at the blinding of Gloucester asked, ‘Did you see that!?’ The rest of this chapter explains those ratings; although my experience of directing shows and watching audiences at the American Shakespeare Center’s Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virgina, informs my ratings of theatrical transgression, my sense of the moral transgressiveness of a moment, now or as it might have been for Shakespeare’s audience, is purely subjective. You will have your own dials.

Shooting arrows at the Gods I begin with a scene that doesn’t move the Mores Transgression Dial at all but seems to me the definition of theatrical transgression. In Act 4, Scene 3, the script calls for at least four men (one of whom is missing a hand) to shoot arrows at the Gods. As far as I could discover, onstage archery happens nowhere else on an early modern stage.3 Releasing any object on stage – from Malvolio’s tossing Olivia’s ring to the ground in Twelfth Night to Jessica’s dropping a casket of Shylock’s money from the balcony in The Merchant of Venice – gives actors a potentially unruly moment, the sort of unruliness an audience is aware of when a juggler is juggling, except that a juggler dropping a ball doesn’t disrupt the fictional narrative. Shakespeare substantially raises the theatrical bar by giving his company of actors the challenge of shooting arrows somewhere that does not endanger the audience.4 He has also given the audience the imaginative challenge of watching real actors who are playing fictive characters shoot real arrows in their midst and simultaneously staying in the world of the play. In short, having actors shoot arrows on stage is a transgressive theatrical action because it collapses the barrier between what is fictive and what is real.5 Mores Transgression – 0 Theatrical Transgression – 8

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Miscegenation A sexual relationship between a white queen and a black servant For the early moderns, a white woman – a queen, no less – in a sexual relationship with a black servant was certainly a transgression. Henry Peacham’s illustration of Titus, the only illustration of a play from the period, shows us Aaron actively engaged in a scene where he doesn’t speak until everyone else has exited. His prominence in this drawing – both narratively and pictorially– suggests that, for the illustrator, the salient fact of the scene, and perhaps the play, was that it featured a black character, and that fact superseded an accurate depiction of what he saw on stage.6 In Portia’s reaction to Morocco and in Brabantio’s to Othello, we may partly gauge the weight of the taboo in early modern England against miscegenation and how Shakespeare’s audience might have felt its transgression in the staging of Aaron’s relationship with Tamora.7 Mores Transgression – 5 Shakespeare, in staging this ‘outrage’ in 2.2, allows the mixed couple a brief scene alone and enough time to be discovered as lovers in their ‘experiments’ by Bassianus and Lavinia. These characters, as close to avatars of good as any in the play, both respond as racists: ‘your Moor and you’ (68), ‘your swart Cimmerian’ (72), ‘barbarous Moor’ (78), ‘raven-­coloured love’ (83). Judging by their reaction, and depending on the level of intimacy between Tamora and Aaron until their discovery (assuming not much more than embracing), the ‘Did you see that?!’ value of this scene for an early modern audience might have been high. Theatrical Transgression – 5

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A black baby from the union of a black servant and a white queen Whatever the moral affront Shakespeare’s audience might have found in the affair between Aaron and Tamora, the fact that she conceives his child raises the transgression of that relationship. The kind of moral outrage the playwright might have imagined he would stir in his audience is figured in the world of the play, in which all the white people want to kill the baby that is the evidence of that transgression.8 Mores Transgression – 6 As to theatrical transgression, I am fascinated by the stage direction: ‘Enter NURSE with a blackamoor child’ (4.2). There are plenty of reasons that the company might not have used a real infant in this scene, from how unruly an actual infant can be to how easy it is to make a bundle of cloth look like a swaddled child. But, for several reasons, we might want to take this stage direction at face value. First, the explicitness of it is in contrast to the Winter’s Tale infant, where there is no reference to a baby in the stage direction at Paulina’s entrance to Leontes in 2.3 (nor any in the text until fifty lines later), and merely the one word ‘babe’ in stage direction for Antigonus’ entry in 3.3. Second, soon after the entrance in 4.2 of Titus, Aaron calls attention to the Nurse’s ‘caterwauling’ (58), a helpful camouflage for any crying a real infant might do. Third, the baby’s colour is constantly the topic of this scene and the others in which it appears. This suggests that if it’s not an actual ‘blackamoor child’ (SD), the prop is more than a swaddle of cloth and somehow displays blackness. Modern sensibilities and infant labour laws make it unthinkable that a modern production would use a real child, but I have not seen evidence against the proposition that an early modern production might have used one, and (here’s my circular logic) especially in a play so intent on showing as well as telling. Theatrical Transgression – 4

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Torture The sacrifice of Alarbus Strictly speaking, what happens to Alarbus may not count as torture. Mutilating a dead body does not inflict pain,9 and the text – ‘Let’s hew his limbs till they be clean consumed’ (1.1.132) – is not clear about whether Titus’ four sons kill Alarbus before lopping off his limbs and feeding his entrails to the ‘sacrificing fire’ (147). Still, an early modern audience would have been acutely aware of executions that aimed to keep the condemned alive during the pain of mutilation. Because it is the mutilation that the text stresses, I have counted this event as the first instance of torture but limited the score – after all, the four boys performed the act for religious purposes. Mores Transgression – 6 As to the transgression of the staging, the only thing an audience sees of the action is ‘the Sons of Andronicus’ (SD), entering from their sacrifice to tell us that ‘Alarbus’ limbs are lopped’. In that case, the only signifier might be their bloody swords, an easily achieved and rather routine visual effect. Theatrical Transgression – 2

The rape and mutilation of Lavinia Offstage, Chiron and Demetrius violently gang rape Lavinia, cut off her hands, and cut out her tongue. Everything I know about Shakespeare’s period suggests to me that this would rate high as an outrage in his society. Mores Transgression – 9 As to the Theatrical Transgression Dial, Shakespeare does not show us this atrocity, but he does show us its outcome with the play’s notorious stage direction: ‘Enter the Empress’ Sons, with LAVINIA, her hands cut off and her tongue cut out, and ravished’ (2.4 SD). In some respects, not showing the atrocity raises its impact by leaving it to the audience’s imagination, but that gets at the extraordinary tension at the heart of

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Shakespeare’s project – what horrors can he stage? In Titus Andronicus, he has it both ways. Consider this moment in terms of Shakespeare’s theatrical strategy and the audience watching the play. When Chiron and Demetrius brutally drag Lavinia from the stage, the audience has known since Aaron’s incitement to the deed two hundred lines (about ten minutes) earlier that they will rape Lavinia. The only hints of what else they will do are Tamora’s admonitions not to let ‘this wasp outlive, us both to sting’ (2.2.132) and Chiron’s ‘. . . I’ll stop your mouth’ (184). As far as an audience knows, those lines and Tamora’s final instructions to ‘make her sure’ (187) mean Lavinia will be killed after her rape and will not reappear in the play. But she does reappear, and she does so at a very high level of theatrical transgression, by which I mean the production must do two things. The first is produce Lavinia’s stumps. The company will have to put some effort into creating the illusion that the actor has no hands, and audiences will have to put imaginative energy into accepting the theatrical choice – realistic or abstract – before them. To this theatrical chore, Shakespeare adds a second: staging Lavinia’s elinguation. Twenty-­one lines after an audience has been trying to absorb both the horror and the illusion of a mutilated Lavinia, Marcus asks her, ‘Why dost not speak to me?’ (2.3.21), and out of her mouth comes what he calls a ‘crimson river of warm blood’ (22). This is not an easy effect. Blood can ruin valuable costuming, and using an abstraction such as red cloth, even when hauntingly stylized, as in Ninagawa’s infamous production, takes a lot of work to make convincing. Thus, in spite of the fact that we don’t see the violence, the company had to put before the audience its aftermath. Regardless of how they would have managed these two visuals, doing so in a convincing way that would keep the audience in the narrative required ingenuity. Theatrical Transgression – 7

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Chiron and Demetrius bound and gagged, throats slit In moral terms, Chiron and Demetrius earned their fate, and in a revenge tragedy their deaths are inevitable and unsurprising. Is slitting their throats torture? After all, halal and kosher butchers use this method of killing cattle for its supposed humaneness. Thus, how high this action registers on the Mores Transgression Dial is a function of its staging. No matter what staging a production uses, Shakespeare does three things that move the horror meter higher. First, he brings in Lavinia with a basin between her stumps; that is, he simultaneously announces to Chiron and Demetrius what he intends to do and reminds them of their butchery and whatever pain it is they inflicted on her: 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. (5.2.181–3) Second, the very length of the scene, thirty-­eight lines from when Titus enters until he ‘cuts their throats’ (SD), prolongs the mental torture. Finally, he tells them of his plan to feed them to their mother. The audience has ample time to imagine their states of mind during Titus’ speech. Mores Transgression – 6 If the two men are merely bound and gagged (perhaps kneeling) before he slits their throats, the theatrical transgression is fairly low. The production needs to simulate a throat being cut, stage business that is not particularly demanding – a trick knife that leaves a trail of blood and the slightly more difficult trick of getting blood to flow into the bowl. Recent productions have increased the transgression against both humanity and theatrical norms by hanging the two men upside down for their slaughter, and this is an effect that Shakespeare’s theatre, with the expense of time and energy,

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might certainly have added. What’s more, it is a choice wholly in keeping with the idea of an abattoir that produces the necessary ingredients for a meat pie. In an abattoir treatment of this scene, the production requires the audience to stretch its belief. Theatrical Transgression – 6

Titus killing Lavinia As with the killing of Chiron and Demetrius, defining Lavinia’s death as torture in terms of any physical pain wholly depends on the staging, and any sensible reading would have Titus do the deed as quickly and painlessly as possible. Any ‘torture’ for Lavinia is a matter of waiting for her death, and she doesn’t have to wait long. Shakespeare sets up the expectation with Titus’ question to Saturninus: Was it well done of rash Virginius To slay his daughter with his own right hand, Because she was enforced, stained and deflowered? (5.3.36–8) Saturninus, with the one-­handed – ‘right hand’ – Titus before him and the veiled Lavinia presumably nearby, can hardly give his answer, ‘It was, Andronicus’ (39), as though he doesn’t know what will happen next. Thus, the actor playing Lavinia has fewer than ten lines to show any mental anguish about what her father is about to do, and in any case, she is veiled. Titus acts so quickly on his clear intentions that her death is neither surprising nor prolonged. That is why the frequent production choice that Lavinia is compliant in her death makes great sense. The killing itself begins and ends in two lines. Die, die, Lavinia, and thy shame with thee, And with thy shame thy father’s sorrow die.                     He kills her. (5.3.45–6)

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That no one interrupts the action and that the next line speaks of it in the past tense – ‘What has thou done . . .?’ (47) – makes clear that her death is mercifully quick. Not torture, but the hideous idea of a father killing his helpless daughter moves the horror dial, a horror made more wrenching by her acquiescence in it. Mores Transgression – 5 Theatrically, as I have said, slitting a throat is relatively easy stage business, in this case slightly complicated by the illusion of the stumps and the necessity for Titus to do it with only one hand (again, her compliance would help with this). Theatrical Transgression – 3

Mutilations An essential part of this play’s transgressive nature is its resolve to turn offstage horrors into onstage spectacles. Thus, the report of the offstage ritual death of Alarbus eventually becomes the onstage ritualization of the killing of Chiron and Demetrius, with Lavinia holding her basin as a sort of priestess. In the same way, having put dismemberment into the minds of the audience with Lavinia’s entrance with ‘her hands cut off and her tongue cut out’, the play seems to move inexorably towards an onstage enactment of mutilation.10

Cutting off Titus’ hand, the heads of two dead sons, and exit The idea of voluntarily cutting off your hand in exchange for the lives of your sons, only to be rewarded with their deaths, while your enemies mock your useless pain with your dismembered hand, as your mutilated daughter looks on, is a concept that scores high as a human outrage. Mores Transgression – 8 The play is downright mischievous in how it toys with an audience’s sensibilities about violence, and especially in the way

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it keeps returning the audience’s gaze to something it hasn’t seen – Lavinia’s amputation. Consider again the play’s first death, the ritual sacrifice of Alarbus, which, with good classical decorum, occurs offstage. That initial restraint turns out to be a kind of theatrical joke, as if the production has declared that there are some things, like the ritual sacrifice of Tamora’s son, that it will not or cannot stage. The audience in Act 1 settles in somewhere between feeling spared (we do not have to watch the atrocity) and cheated (we don’t get to see how they would stage the atrocity), only to discover that in Act 5 we do get to see the ritual sacrifice of Tamara’s son – doubled – in the deaths of Demetrius and Chiron. The mutilation of Lavinia works in much the same way by having the audience hear about an offstage amputation and assume that the production is either too discreet or too resource-­challenged to stage one. That turns out to be wrong. When Aaron enters with an offer to return Titus’ sons in exchange for his hand, Shakespeare shifts the task of the audience from the work of imagining ex post facto the amputation of Lavinia’s hands to the work of seeing that act performed before them and imagining that what they are seeing is theatrically ‘real’. He also raises significantly the production challenge for his fellow actors by having them stage it in a convincing way. Beyond that, the Grand Guignol comedy of Titus, Lucius and Marcus competing to have their hands cut off invites laughter and pushes its audience out of any comfortable response. The play further increases the level of transgression by having Aaron make explicit to the audience that the offer he brings is a hoax and that Titus will be giving up his hand for naught. Then the actor must perform, and the audience must watch, the pain of an amputation, while the company must create the illusion that a man’s hand is being separated from his body.11 But more theatrical transgression follows: ‘Enter a Messenger with two heads and a hand’ (3.1 SD). Here, the production requires the actor playing Titus to respond not only to seeing the heads of his two sons but also to his having been duped into cutting off his hand – a hand that has now, unnecessarily in narrative terms, returned to the scene. Whatever the actor’s

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response may be before he speaks, Shakespeare has given the actor playing Titus a lot of time to react to all this ghastliness (twelve lines, or more than thirty seconds), while Marcus and Lucius speak and while Lavinia kisses him. When he does speak, it is to challenge the reality of what he (and the audience) is seeing: ‘When will this fearful slumber have an end?’ (253). Marcus disabuses of him of that comfort – ‘Thou dost not slumber’ (255) – by giving an audit of the situation that serves to remind the audience of what they too are seeing – ‘See thy two sons’ heads, / Thy warlike hand, thy mangled daughter here . . .’ (255–6). Perhaps by design, Titus’ response – ‘Ha, ha, ha!’ (265) – echoes what must have been the uncomfortable laugh reflex of some of the audience members to this macabre scene. Then, Shakespeare draws attention to the three gruesome props with the most absurd visual in the play: Titus takes the head of one of his sons, has Marcus take the other, and instructs Lavinia to ‘Bear thou my hand, sweet wench, between thy teeth’ (283). An onstage mutilation, stage heads, a stage hand that we have now seen three times: when it is removed, when it is returned, and – the topper – when the young actor playing Lavinia with stumps for hands takes the hand in ‘between [her] teeth’ to exit. As Theatrical Transgression, this scene scores high. Theatrical Transgression – 10 Beyond providing an ostentatious ‘Did you see that!?’ stage moment, this stage picture of Lavinia departing the stage with a hand in her mouth seems equally to be reminding the audience of the missing tongue. The play has a reputation for making audiences queasy, and one reason is that it keeps forcing them to think about what is or what is not in the mouth. It does this initially by having the ‘crimson river of warm blood’ issue from her mouth. But her exit in 3.1 with a severed hand between her teeth forces the unconscious connection with her missing parts, and that reminder takes place again in 4.1, when ‘She takes the staff in her mouth, and guides it with her stumps, and writes’ (SD). Here, the stage direction creates a picture in which her missing parts literally point at one another through the staff that creates a straight line between her stumps and her mouth.

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Just dessert Titus’ dinner party The stage climax of the play’s interest in mouths is the dish that Titus serves up at his banquet. Audiences go to Titus for the pie. The pie is the play’s ultimate gag in both senses of the word. Perhaps that final scene surprised the first audience, but that would have been the last time no one knew what was coming. The atrocity of feeding sons to their mother is the play’s famous outrage and the one that pushes the Mores Transgression Dial beyond ten. Mores Transgression – 11 The pie, however, is not the challenging part of the scene to stage. Though it needs to be a large pie, this prop is an easy one to make (or buy), because, when Titus says, ‘Why, there they are, both baked in this pie . . .’ (5.3.59), any lumps will read as parts of Chiron and Demetrius. Here is where the audience’s imagination raises the Theatrical Transgression Dial and Shakespeare rewards them for their work with the aftermath when, in quick succession (a total of three lines), Titus stabs Tamora, Saturninus kills Titus, Lucius kills Saturninus, and the Goths, Marcus and Lucius all re-­enter.12 The scene then brings back into view the baby (real or not) – ‘Behold the child’ (118) – and then turns its attention to Aaron. Viewed through the lens of the ergonomics of production – setting up the banquet, choreographing the violence, even putting so many people (dead and alive) on a stage – and considered in terms of the audience’s ability to digest the pie and the glut of events that follow, the last scene of Titus rates high as a stage horror. Theatrical Transgression – 8

Aaron’s fate (and a transgressive suggestion) In a revenge tragedy, it matters a lot what happens to the villain, especially if he is an unrepentant black man who has ‘been breeder of these dire events’ (5.3.177). Lucius, accor­dingly, gives Aaron a pretty tough sentence: ‘Set him breast-­deep in earth and famish

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him’ (178). On any reasonable horror meter, a man buried up to his chest starving to death while people watch him beg for food moves the number to at least seven. What’s more, Lucius’ sentence picks up on the idea of eating – or, in this case, not eating – and it also conjures in the audience’s imagination a picture that connects Aaron’s punish­ment with the thought of Tamora’s eating her young. The text makes that idea explicit earlier, when Titus, before cutting their throats, tells Chiron and Demetrius he will ‘. . . bid that strumpet, your unhallowed dam, / Like to the earth swallow her own increase’ (5.2.190–1). For what it is worth, ‘swallow’, or some form of that verb, occurs four times in Titus, the most occurrences in any of Shakespeare’s plays. Mores Transgression – 7 For the play’s final theatrical transgression, I suggest that the text allows a production to stage those ideas by using the trap. We should remember that the play has already used the trap as the earth to swallow people, when Titus’ sons, Quintus and Martius, fall into it in 2.2. Let’s imagine a production in which the guards immediately act on Lucius’ sentence, and while he is speaking, they place Aaron in the trap ‘breast-­deep’ (5.3.178). Now Lucius’ line ‘There let him stand . . .’ (179; italics mine) refers to the trap where the actor is standing. We can imagine further that when Lucius follows ‘This is our doom’ (181) with ‘some stay to see him fastened in the earth’ (182), he is continuing to choreograph the blocking taking place on stage. Aaron would now speak his final lines – ‘If one good deed in all my life I did / I do repent it from my very soul’ (188–9) – standing in the trap. Then, assuming our text is the Quarto version in which no further mention is made of Aaron, the play ends ten lines later. The actors – except Aaron – do their jig, the audience applauds, and the theatre slowly empties of all but Aaron, standing in the trap saying nothing, as the audience exits. The idea of the earth swallowing its own would be the last thing the audience witnesses, and – in this director’s imagined production – the play would then be transgressing the boundaries of its own length with an actor still on stage in an empty theatre. Can you see that?! Theatrical Transgression – 11

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Appendix: insisting on the missing parts

FIGURE 9.1  Lavinia (Victoria Reinsel) exits with Titus’ hand ‘between her teeth’. Titus’ (James Keegan’s) mutilated arm is in foreground. Here, the costuming and blood illustrate the earlier stage direction: Lavinia, her hands cut off, her tongue cut out, and ravished, and makes clear she was raped.

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Notes 1 Johnson wisely added, ‘Yet let it be remembered that our author well knew what would please the audience for which he wrote’ (Preface to Shakespeare (1765), 55). 2 I intend the word ‘mores’ to convey the generally held taboos against such barbarisms as homicide, suicide, filicide, mutilation, self-­mutilation, torture, and cannibalism. The narrative of a play also includes rape, though the famous stage direction indicates with ‘ravished’ that the play means to stage its aftermath. In my discussion of miscegenation as transgessive, I look at mores or cultural norms specific to Shakespeare’s audience. 3 Alan Dessen and Leslie Thomson do not have it in their Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); further research is required here, though Dessen and Thomson note that ‘sometimes shooting is threatened but not carried out’. See also Dessen’s Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) for ‘The Arrow in Nessus’. 4 In the American Shakespeare Center production directed by Jim Warren in 2009, the actors shot their arrows at the curtains in the Lords’ Room. The ‘letters’ to the Gods were wrapped around the tips to make them harmless to the curtains or to the wood on the occasional miss. Since this solution has obvious drawbacks for any ‘lords’ seated in the Lords’ Room, we suspended our practice of inviting audience members to use the seats in the stage balcony. James Keegan as Titus solved the problem of shooting a bow and arrow with one hand: he pulled the string with his right hand and taught himself to hold the bow with his feet. 5 I saw Lucy Bailey’s 2006 production at Shakespeare’s Globe but could not recall how the company handled the challenge of shooting the arrows at the Gods. I am indebted to Victoria Lane, archivist at the Globe, for going through the archives to answer my questions on the subject. The actors stand facing the front of the stage and aim upward. They fire arrows on three cues: ‘. . . now Masters draw’, ‘. . . Give it Pallas!’ and ‘. . . Jupiter’. What Victoria could not tell me is where the arrows went. But from the stills I saw, it appeared from the angle of the arrows and the fact that the actors are so far upstage that they were aiming at

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the ‘heavens’ rather than at heaven. The actors ‘shot’ the arrows without endangering the audience. In a beautiful piece of choreography, the archers released the bowstrings but held on to the arrows in their right hands and immediately whipped the arrows out of sight behind them after the release. It wonderfully tricked the eye. 6 The interest inherent in a play’s representation of blackness might even explain the illustration’s survival. At the Blackfriars Conference in Staunton, Virginia, Robert Hornback and Rick Blunt examined the challenges of staging blackness and how it might have been achieved on the early modern stage. This topic is usefully discussed by Virginia Mason Vaughan, Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Ian Smith, ‘White Skin, Black Masks: Racial Cross-Dressing on the Early Modern Stage’, Renaissance Drama, 32 (2003): 33–67. See also in the evidence that it was a sufficiently difficult special effect to make productions with black characters an event. 7 In gauging the transgressiveness of this relationship as it might have been felt by a London audience four centuries ago, it is a helpful check against chronological chauvinism to remember that the anti-­miscegenation laws in the United States were constitutional until 1967, and as recently as fifty years ago miscegenation was illegal in fifteen US states, and that South Africa’s Act against Mixed Marriages was not repealed until 1985. 8 Lynda Boose argued long ago that a black woman with a white man was a greater racial taboo than a black man with a white woman. Such a union would be more threatening because a dark child from the union of a black woman and a white man would upset misogynist notions of male supremacy in which the man, not the woman, determines the traits of a child. See ‘The Getting of a Lawful Race’: Racial Discourse in Early Modern England and the Unrepresentable Black Woman’, in Women, ‘Race,’ and Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (New York: Routledge, 1994), 35–54. 9 That said, observe an audience at a production of Henry IV, Part 1, and you’ll invariably see people squirm when Falstaff gives the dead Hotspur a wound in the thigh.

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10 This latter effect had already been staged in Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy (c. 1582–90), and there the audience might have ‘seen’ the action when the revenger Hieronimo bites out his own tongue. 11 Onstage amputations had previously taken place on the early modern stage, but as Katharine Eisaman Maus says of the ugliness in Shakespeare’s sources, the cruelties in Titus ‘consistently exceed the prototype’; see The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 371. See also Chapter 6, ‘Amputation: The Spectacle of Dismemberment in Shakespeare’s Theatres’, in Farah KarimCooper, The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016). 12 At this point, some directors, perhaps aware of how crowded the stage is going to be with dining table, pie, and four dead bodies, have Marcus and Lucius go up into the balcony.

10 In/di/gestion Seneca→Shakespeare→ South Park Lizz Angello

Titus Andronicus is a play about limits and their erasure, about the porousness, to borrow from the late David Foster Wallace, of certain borders. It fervently upholds the fictive boundaries that we create to define ourselves, our families and our societies while destabilizing the entire concept of boundary. It is Theatre of the Absurd. This study takes up the most absurd, unstable and osmotic deployment of the play: ‘Scott Tenorman Must Die’, a particularly controversial 2001 episode of the animated television series South Park. The episode asks deeply uncom­ fort­able questions about the limits of citation, performance, comedy, consumption and agency, mimicking its Shakespearean and Senecan forebears. It distinguishes itself from these, however, in the ultimate triumph of its revenger over his victims as well as his literary precedents.

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Thyestes, Titus Andronicus and ‘Scott Tenorman Must Die’ all dramatize and ironize the creation of boundaries. The earliest iteration, Seneca’s Roman closet drama Thyestes, focuses on the limits of decorum. The play stages a confrontation between brothers with competing claims to the throne of Argus: Thyestes, who labours to maintain dignity and integrity throughout a horrific encounter with his brother, and the usurper Atreus, who stands as the antithesis of Senecan Stoicism but whose excess eventually results in his triumph. Atreus plans an elaborate revenge scheme, having become paranoid that two of his sons are the product of an illicit union between his wife and his brother. He invites the understandably reticent Thyestes to his home for dinner under the pretence of reconciliation. Trying to restore peace to the family, Thyestes accepts the invitation and leaves life as a shepherd to return to Argos with his two sons. Atreus then embarks on an elaborate exercise in cruelty – killing the children and cooking their flesh in order to serve the cannibal banquet to his brother. He watches while Thyestes devours the meal and drinks the wine mixed with his sons’ blood before confessing his crime and exulting in his brother’s mounting horror. In every action, Atreus exhibits a complete lack of restraint, while his brother consistently attempts to maintain rationality and calm. As Atreus’ mania increases, his Senecan fury growing by what it feeds on,1 Thyestes refuses to match his brother’s rage, preferring to leave vengeance to the gods. He commits to social, physical and familial boundaries, whereas Atreus knows limits only as lines to be crossed. Senecan revenge tragedy is marked by a revenger who insists that his vengeance exceed the scope of the original crime.2 Working within this tradition, Shakespeare’s (and George Peele’s) Titus Andronicus goes a step further than Thyestes in transgressing all limits of propriety. It constantly presents audiences with clearly demarcated boundaries, only to ignore, cross or destroy them. The first scene, for example, contains nearly 600 lines (three times as many as a typical Shakespearean opener) and five discrete scenes: the election, the sacrifice, two betrothals and the hatching of a villainous sub-­plot. The

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beginning sets up its prevailing interest in the interrogation of borders, and perhaps this chaotic jumble has led critics to identify Titus as, variously, vacant farce3 or sophisticated pastiche.4 Regardless, Titus enthusiastically deconstructs difference, a decidedly postmodern quality that has sponsored the recent resurgence of its popularity. A Senecan narrative also underwrites Titus’ direct descendant, ‘Scott Tenorman Must Die’, in which the antihero, eight-­year-old Eric Cartman, pursues an Atreus-­like plan of vengeance with a similar fury and dedication and also emerges victorious from a scorched landscape littered with characters attempting to hold themselves to some standards of decency. Cartman’s story is made even more transgressive by virtue of his young age and its venue. In this episode, Cartman, the bratty glutton of South Park, Colorado, discovers that the titular teenager has acquired pubic hair. Anxious to exert his own maturity and status as superior to his friends, Cartman agrees to buy some of Scott’s hair clippings and promptly glues them to his face. When his friends explain to him that faces are not where pubic hair grows, the embarrassed Cartman attempts to secure a refund, only to be outsmarted by Scott every time. After a final, very public humiliation, Cartman vows revenge and plans to shame Scott in front of his favourite band, Radiohead, at a ‘Chili con Carnival’. Fearing for Scott’s safety, Cartman’s friends alert the teenager, and Scott hatches his own counter-­plot. However, in the show’s final moments, Cartman interrupts Scott’s declaration of victory by explaining that he had anticipated Scott trying to feed him a bowl of chilli spiked with the pubic hair trimmings of every teen in town and had swapped the stews before the contest. Cartman then gives a detailed account of his own scheme, culminating in the revelation that Scott is eating ‘Mr. and Mrs. Tenorman Chili’, made with the flesh of his murdered parents. Scott begins to cry; Radiohead show up and make fun of him for not being ‘cool’, and Cartman celebrates by licking ‘the tears of unfathomable sadness’5 from his victim’s ashen cheek. Because of his age and the animated medium of South Park, ‘Scott

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Tenorman Must Die’ violates additional boundaries not available to Atreus or Titus, making it the most transgressive version of the Senecan cannibal banquet trope.

The ‘other’ white meat Of all the demarcations rendered null in these texts, one of the most important is between the texts themselves. The border between past and present proves particularly osmotic, both in the sense of the texts’ citation of each other and the characters’ citations of their literary models. Much recent scholarship on Titus has expertly linked the play to its classical intertexts,6 but Curtis Perry (Chapter 1) goes beyond source study to weave larger thematic strands, forming what he calls ‘a poetics of indigestion’;7 in particular, he argues that the sense of belatedness that haunts Titus with regard to Atreus (and Seneca) replicates Atreus’ (and Seneca’s) relationship to Ovid and Virgil. South Park, I would add, makes the same move vis-à-­vis both Titus and Atreus. Perry contends that the curse of relying so heavily on precedent is that one can never truly be said to be in control of oneself, a trap that scholars have long understood to be Titus’ downfall.8 He considers Atreus and Titus as failed stage managers or directors, futilely attempting to assert their independence in stories nonetheless shaped by the very sources that they quote. Thyestes begins with the ghost of Tantalus reminding us that Atreus merely enacts the curse on his family;9 Titus avenges the threat to his country in the shadow of the audience’s a priori knowledge that the Visigoths catalysed the fall of Rome; and both men re-­enact the story of Procne, Philomela and Tereus from Ovid’s Metamorphoses,10 which itself draws from the myth of Saturn (who lends his name to Titus’ emperor cum nemesis, Saturninus). Any revenger works within a similar tradition; one who orchestrates a cannibal banquet necessarily quotes both Thyestes and Titus Andronicus. Hence, everyone from Reddit

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contributors to online ‘listicle’-makers to Wikipedia to published scholars identify ‘Scott Tenorman Must Die’ as an adaptation of Titus.11 Very few of these mentions, however, include Thyestes (with the exception of one Redditor, who vaguely names ‘a Latin play’).12 This grievous omission elides crucial distinctions between Atreus and Titus, which revise our thinking about Titus’ descent into Senecan madness. As we will see, Eric Cartman manages to prevail where his literary ancestors did not, in part because of how successfully he ‘reads’ Thyestes. As Perry observes, each revenger attempts to wrest autonomy and control from his source material even while relying on it to script his actions. Atreus, for example, looks to Procne’s revenge for his ‘recipes’ but is preceded even in this by his grandfather Tantalus’ own such dinner. Titus also hopes to surpass Procne’s vengeance, telling Chiron and Demetrius, ‘For worse than Philomel you used my daughter, / And worse than Progne [sic] I will be revenged’ (5.2.194–5).13 He does achieve an impressive measure of directorial dominance over the nature and execution of his scheme. However, Perry points out, Titus’ ‘success’ is undermined by the Senecan verse through which he communicates his achievement, as though in his desire to be his own kind of revenger, he simply becomes Atreus’ kind.14 Further, the audience sees that, although he controls the banquet itself, Aaron proves a far more thorough stage director.15 At the play’s conclusion, he remains impressively unrepentant – and also, though condemned to death, decidedly not dead. Julie Taymor’s film further destabilizes the play’s conclusion by revealing the ‘audience’ in the gladiatorial arena,16 a stand-­in for the play’s audience that renders viewers complicit in the violence for having endorsed it as entertainment. It also reminds us that every performance has a script and a director. ‘Scott Tenorman Must Die’ inherits all of these traditions, and it is a citation to end all citations, the turducken (or mish-­ mash) of revenge tragedies: it stumbles under its own grotesque weight, laden as it is with a Titus that is stuffed with a Thyestes,

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all of which overflow with Ovid and Virgil. Even in its comedy, the South Park episode evokes Titus, as the earlier play notoriously deploys dark humour in some of its most horrific moments. For example, Jonathan Bate describes the ‘sick comedy team’ of Chiron and Demetrius, who share macabre wordplay at Lavinia’s expense, taunting her lack of tongue and hands after cutting them off themselves.17 Titus’ hand and the heads of his sons are delivered to the family by a clown, after which Titus uncomfortably attempts comedy at a dismal supper. He jokes about Marcus killing a fly and makes a succession of execrable hand puns (both Titus and his daughter Lavinia are, by this point in the play, missing hands).18 South Park makes no excuse for its humour, even when its jokes unsettle as those in Titus do. This episode trades on the series’ characteristic parody, as when Cartman feeds hot dogs to a pony in order to train it to bite off penises, an allusion to the film Hannibal, in which a serial killer trains pigs to eat human flesh. It also utilizes ‘low comedy’, such as Cartman’s telling Radiohead that Scott is suffering from ‘cancer in the ass’.19 As a whole, however, the episode is not particularly funny. The competition between Scott and Cartman plays as more uncomfortable than hilarious, such that even the despicable Eric Cartman garners our sympathy when forced to dance like a ‘little piggy’ in front of Scott’s friends. Although the teenagers laugh – much like Atreus laughs at his own cruelty and Titus laughs, perhaps hollowly, at the cruelty inflicted upon his family – less mean-­spirited members of the television audience might not. A final thematic citation, and the key to Cartman’s ultimate success, lies in each text’s cultural moment. Perhaps bizarrely, nearly every online poll names ‘Scott Tenorman Must Die’ South Park’s highest-­rated episode; one even labels it ‘Cartman’s Greatest Moment’.20 That the Thyestean feast closing the episode marks the pinnacle of Eric Cartman’s hideous career, even after fourteen additional seasons of topical, offensive, boundary-­crossing comedy, raises some interesting questions. Namely, why do we celebrate his paranoia, greed and cruelty?

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What does our interest in, and adoration for, figures like Eric Cartman say about us? If enjoyment of South Park belies a renewed interest in Theatre of Cruelty, then Eric Cartman provides perhaps the best example of our current tastes in entertainment. In this way, he resembles both Atreus and Titus. What we find deserving of our attention in these earlier plays may also be found in ‘Scott Tenorman Must Die’. Specifically, all three works dramatize the monstrous results of inhabiting a culture that celebrates revenge and violence and conflates cruelty with entertainment. Cartman’s ‘Chili con Carnival’ is as silly as it is disgusting; our detachment from the horror is intensified by the animated medium and the youth of the characters, just as Roman readers and early modern audiences were kept at a distance by hyper-­ rhetorical language and the conventions of theatre.21 This distance helps foster our enjoyment of the episode, even our sympathy for Cartman’s plight. The cannibal banquet, however, amuses without inviting tender feelings. In fact, as the action that least warrants our sympathy, the ‘Mr. and Mrs. Tenorman Chili’ displays Cartman at his most Cartman-­esque. Here, he fulfils his hideous drives to their highest potential; we have always suspected that he was capable of this. Thus, Chef Cartman is the true Cartman, the fulfilment of his ultimate Self: by positioning himself as Scott Tenorman’s host and master, Cartman participates in a long tradition of Othering-­ by-cannibalism and taps into literary and historical tropes that nevertheless testify to his position as a creation of twenty-­firstcentury America.

Dinner (as) theatre South Park may seem an unlikely venue for earnest Shakespearean adaptation, but its unmistakable reference to canonical cannibal banquets testifies to the relevance of revenge tragedy for twenty-­first-century audiences. The admittedly sensational story of Eric Cartman and Scott

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Tenorman addresses our own anxieties and makes Titus as relevant today as Thyestes was to early modern England. In Seneca’s Rome, Shakespeare’s England and Cartman’s United States, performance, violence and food are inextricably linked. Romans staged lavish banquets and ate during human sacrifices and bloody ‘games’ at the Coliseum. Elizabethans dined after public executions and anatomical dissections (which were, not incidentally, held in the kitchen),22 and they called for dumb-­ shows and masques during meals. Today, American families eat in front of the television and munch on popcorn at the movies. This fetish of consumption paired with entertainment, shared by Rome, England and the United States, heavily informs Thyestes, Titus and South Park, and helps to explain the popularity of the cannibal revenger.23 These three societies were and are also threatened by massive political turmoil and the imminent collapse of the empire. At the time of their ‘Titus moment’, fourth-­century Rome and sixteenth-­century England each contended with the stress of internal rebellion and the threat of external attack, and twenty-­first-century America faces a similar crisis. Each earlier territory had overstretched its boundaries and confronted collapse as a dominant world power, and some political theorists see the United States as posed on the same threshold; this was especially true in 2001, when ‘Scott Tenorman’ first aired.24 Each fought to maintain its national identity by literalizing traditional values and accusing enemy nations of barbarism, of which they themselves were guilty; the US employs similar tactics. These concerns are foregrounded in each of the revenge dramas under consideration here. For Seneca’s Atreus, identity equals masculinity and political power. Atreus imagines that his brother Thyestes challenges his virility by impregnating his wife and threatens his reign by returning to Argos. As a usurper, Atreus fears the instability of his rule. However, Seneca depicts Thyestes as loathe to return to their family home and agreeing to do so only because Atreus invites him under a pretence of reconciliation. Thyestes tells the ghost of Tantalus about the life he leads now in exile: ‘I

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have no woodland planted on my rooftop and swaying in the breeze, no steaming pools heated by many hands . . . But I am not feared, my house is safe without weapons, and my small domain is supplied with great peace’ (270–1).25 He contrasts his relative comfort with his struggle to accept Atreus’ dubious olive branch: ‘When you examine a gift look at the giver too’ (267). Despite Atreus’ attempt to reclaim his masculinity and power, his brother’s innocence and humility in the face of such horror only heightens our sense of Atreus’ barbarism. In other words, though Thyestes becomes the cannibal, Atreus emerges as the barbarian. In early modern England, too, the Us’s made Them’s out of outsiders through accusations of cannibalism. Such cases were often geographically motivated, as Louise Noble points out, and often had dual objectives: The cannibal distinction becomes imperative when it is linked, first, with a desire to distinguish those who are geographically remote as uncivilized; and second, with the desire to make civilized culture, and civilized behaviour and practices, more significant and morally justifiable to members of that culture.26 By dehumanizing foreigners as cannibals, the Elizabethans strengthened their national identity, assuming a position of mastery over them. England upheld itself as subject and degraded the Other as object, effectively transforming the imagined cannibal Other into food – an object to be consumed, digested and, as in the final moments of Titus Andronicus, excreted. Paradoxically, then, England tried ardently to expel that which sustained it as a nation. In a period that put so much emphasis on the performative aspects of eating and the consumptive aspects of performance, it should be no surprise to find a pervasive cannibal thread running through the drama of early modern England. The dramatists’ interest point us again toward their classical inheritance: the Roman legends digested by English schoolchildren abound with

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stories of hideous consumption. One of the earliest Roman myths described Saturn, the Titan who overthrew his father and devoured his children to prevent them from becoming patricides. Strangely, the Romans gradually converted Saturn into a fertility figure associated with the harvest, hiding his paedophagic past behind images of creation. The Romans wove Saturn’s legacy of food, violence and consumption into many later myths, including that of Tantalus, who was punished with eternal hunger for attempting to serve his own son as a meal to the gods. The curse follows Thyestes’ son Aegisthus, who murders both Atreus and his son Agamemnon, whose own son Orestes closes the cycle of vengeance.27 Echoes of Saturn reverberate in Ovid’s story of Procne, whose husband rapes her sister Philomel and cuts out her tongue to prevent her from revealing his crime. The resourceful Philomel weaves her story into a tapestry for Procne, who takes revenge against Tereus by slaughtering their son Itys and feeding him to her husband for dinner. In Ovid’s version of the story, all three parties transform into birds – Procne into a nightingale, Philomel into an aptly named swallow and Tereus into the hoopoe, which defecates in its own nest.28 The Roman cannibal legacy heavily informs Titus Andronicus in the intertexts of Saturn, Tantalus and Procne. Titus embodies a particularly literary Roman-­ness – that is, he is the kind of Roman that stories, myths and political treatises advocate, but which real Romans never resemble. As a testament to Titus’ tragic misreading, the play constantly refers to Roman literature, even bringing examples of it onstage after Lavinia’s rape. Chiron and Demetrius have read Ovid and learned from Tereus’ mistake, so they cut off her hands as well as her tongue, leaving her unable to weave such a pesky tapestry. However, the girl reveals the crime instead by ‘getting her stumps on a copy of the Metamorphoses’29 and opening it to the pages about Philomel. The figures of Tereus and Tantalus are conflated in Aaron, the hoopoe-­like villain who glories in polluting his ‘nest’, for which Lucius buries the ‘execrable wretch . . . breast-­deep in earth’ to ‘rave and cry for food’

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(5.3.176–9). Aaron’s lover Tamora plays Tereus to Titus’ Procne at the banquet, yet ultimately becomes food for the ‘beasts and birds to prey’ (5.3.197); Lucius’ doom recalls the metamorphoses of Philomel’s family when he enjoins the birds of Rome (swallows and nightingales presumably included) to feast on her corpse.

Indigestion Atreus seeks above all to re-­establish his dominance over his brother through Other-­ing him in a gruesome revenge plot.30 He gives himself over to this plan with utter abandon, playing the foil to Thyestes’ Stoic figure. Characterized by paranoia, greed and pride, Atreus grows more hyperbolic in his bloodlust, as evidenced by his own admission: ‘I can scarcely restrain my spirit, my rancor can scarcely be reined in’ (275). Atreus attempts to fix nothing and gives no thought to the state or his own children; rather, his ornate cookery results from his enthusiasm for vengeance. Allowing Thyestes to dine in peace, Atreus approaches only at the end, anticipating the moment where he will reveal the hands, feet and heads of Thyestes’ sons and nearly swooning with excitement: ‘I long to see what color he turns as he looks on his sons’ heads, what words his torment pours forth’ (307). Further, Atreus exclaims: ‘I do not want to see him broken, but to see him being broken!’ (307). Revenge in Thyestes is thus not a discrete event, but rather an agonizing process. Because his primary interest lies in Thyestes’ suffering rather than in cleansing the state, Atreus’ success arrives only with his brother’s digestive woes. Finishing his meal, Thyestes’ body rebels against its contents; he moans, ‘What is this turmoil that shakes my guts? What trembles inside me?’ (313). Atreus’ confession exacerbates his brother’s endocrine distress: ‘The flesh churns within me, the imprisoned horror struggles with no way out, seeking to escape’ (317). Remarkably, Atreus remains unsatisfied (‘Even this is too little for me’; 319), though he takes

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comfort in knowing that his brother’s agony will continue. The king has made no attempt to restore somatic integrity to either the individual or the state; rather, he glories in the fragmentation that the feast entails. Atreus knows that Thyestes will have to digest his own children, and the play implies that the process will be excruciating. Thyestes ends with the victim damning his brother to ‘the gods of vengeance’, cursing ‘my prayers consign you to them for punishment’, to which Atreus glibly replies, ‘I consign you to your children for punishment’ (322). The scatological implications make clear that Thyestes’ offspring will continue to punish their father until he excretes them, a perverse or anti-­birth. If there could be anything worse than eating one’s own children, it might well be this. Atreus emerges as ostensibly autonomous and ultimately powerful. He appears to have succeeded in directing this revenge drama – except that, as Curtis Perry reminds us, he has spent the play bound tightly to the past. First, he has had to grapple with Seneca’s citations of Ovid and Virgil; second, he is beholden to the curse on his family, which frames the play; third, the ghost of Tantalus activates the entire drama, himself spurred on by one of the Furies; and fourth, his agency must eventually surrender to the natural digestive processes taking hold of Thyestes. Even Atreus cannot control his brother’s body – any more than he could control the sun, which moved backwards in its path during the unnatural banquet. Thus, although the play ends with a megalomaniacal Atreus triumphantly getting the last word, Seneca ensures that we acknowledge the story that extends beyond the stage. We are now consigned to the text for punishment and must digest the horrors we have consumed.

Ingestion The Ovidian antecedents, as Perry points out, irrupt into Titus both on their own and through a Senecan conduit, particularly with regard to the feast. Titus distances himself from Atreus in

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the banquet scene because, acting on behalf of his beloved Rome, he accepts a difficult role and follows it to its grisly, albeit effective, conclusion. In the process, Titus falls into moral degeneracy and madness, as evidenced by his decision to ‘play the cook’ and prepare a cannibal banquet. Even in this unthinkable act, however, Titus operates on a more positive register than either of his counterparts: he explicitly uses this anthropophagy to interrogate notions of a Roman’s responsibility to Self and Nation, whereas Atreus and Eric Cartman apply it as a vehicle for exuberant cruelty and self-­ aggrandisement. His vengeance is motivated not by egomania but rather by the loss of his community. The Rome that Titus has always known, or at least read about, has evaporated under Saturninus’ leadership, and he has lost most of his children in its service. While he cannot repair the damage that has been done to his family, he can purge his beloved Rome of its toxic invaders. Any discussion of Titus Andronicus inevitably relies at some point on alimentary language, though perhaps that is a function of the play itself. Titus’ concern with eating has been well parsed by critics, particularly Marion Wynne-Davis and Cynthia Marshall.31 Shakespeare consistently emphasizes overeating, excess and hunger, tropes that undergo a tonal shift in the final third of the play. In 3.1, the Andronici vow revenge against Tamora for her horrific offences and mark the occasion with a meal – but it is a remarkably sparse one. The grieving father instructs his family in, as Julian Yates phrases it, ‘dieting for revenge’:32 ‘So, so, now sit, and look you eat no more / Than will preserve just so much strength in us / As will revenge these bitter woes of ours’ (3.2.1–3). In this, Titus anticipates the Portuguese philosopher Baruch de Spinoza, who argues that eating well – that is, morally – demands abstinence, eating only as much as one requires.33 Having previously over-­indulged to the point of (metaphorically) vomiting Lavinia’s tears, Titus now learns the virtue of restraint. His new knowledge also allows him to accept Lavinia’s own, prudent diet: ‘She says she drinks no other drink but tears, / Brewed with her sorrow,

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mashed upon her cheeks’ (3.2.37–8). Lavinia intends to sustain and nourish herself with her own grief. Titus extends this ethics of care into the play’s denouement, when he dresses as a cook to serve Saturninus. When the emperor asks, ‘Why art thou thus attired, Andronicus?’ Titus replies, ‘Because I would be sure to have all well’ (5.3.30–1). We might understand Titus’ intentions as both a genuine gesture of Jacques Derrida’s ‘infinite hospitality’ and a sardonic quip. Titus has welcomed the enemy into his home under the pretence of military reconciliation between the Romans and Goths, playing the host as well as the cook. According to Derrida’s prescription for hospitality, he simultaneously asserts his mastery over the guests by controlling the feast and discourse, and submits himself to their authority by preparing and serving the food. Marcus warns Lucius and Saturninus not to interrupt with their arguing: ‘These quarrels must be quietly debated’ (5.3.20). While Titus must ‘play the cook’ (5.2.204) to make ‘everyone officious’ (5.2.201), Tamora, his social superior, admits to being ‘beholden’ to ‘good Andronicus’ (5.3.33). Ironically, she hinted at her future submission earlier when in the guise of Revenge she promised him to ‘bring in the Empress and her sons, / The emperor himself and all thy foes, / And at thy mercy shall they stoop and kneel’ (5.2.116–18). Both parties thus acknowledge the reciprocal sacrifice required for true hospitality. Hospitality suffuses Titus’ goals and characterizes his actions, which are, unlike those of Atreus or Cartman, to some degree altruistic. Louise Noble demonstrates how corpse pharmacology informs Shakespeare’s tragedy, claiming that Titus acts as physician to ailing Rome; the banquet, ‘this obvious act of barbaric cannibalism’, figures too as ‘a dubious act of therapy’.34 Although Titus’ methods invite our scepticism, they also exhibit a significant amount of restraint in Act  5, especially in light of the changes that Shakespeare made in adapting the scene from Thyestes. Titus, in his attempt to cure Rome of its ‘intestine disorder’,35 shows no revelry in the feast’s preparation, whereas in Thyestes, Atreus merrily dismembers,

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seasons, roasts and stews his nephews to appease his own macabre desires. He ‘relaxes and takes time for his brother’s feast [. . .] heartlessly [laying] bare the joints and bones and [chopping] them away’ (295). Atreus also lacks Titus’ moral dilemma, powered instead by a frenzied bloodlust, which leads him to scream at his assistant: ‘You talk about punishment’s conclusion: I want the punishment! [. . .] In my kingdom death is something people beg for’ (251). Fittingly, Atreus stages his culinary horror-­show as a sacrifice to himself (‘the victims consecrated to his godless anger’; 291) and celebrates his achievement with self-­worship: ‘Oh, I am highest of heavenly gods, and king of kings! I have surpassed my own prayers’ (307). Atreus exploits his position as chef d’État to make Rome sicker; Titus, by contrast, does not relish ‘playing the cook’; his words are full of vengeance, not delight: ‘your guilty blood’, ‘your shameful heads’, ‘this hateful liquor’ (5.3.183–99). Where Atreus effectively poisoned his country with his infernal celebration of the Self, Titus uses his position to restore Rome’s health.36 Shakespeare may have sourced the cannibal banquet from Thyestes, but he altered the character of the revenger and the motivation for and spirit of the revenge. Titus, unlike Atreus, seeks justice – an eye for an eye, a tongue for a tongue. Although he rages to Chiron and Demetrius that his vengeance will be ‘worse than Progne’ (5.2.195), it barely surpasses his Ovidian antecedent. Unlike Atreus, Titus kills Tamora immediately after confessing his crime, leaving her almost no time to contemplate the horror of the act; he completes his revenge at ingestion. When Thyestes asks after his children, Atreus answers with a grim double entendre: ‘Consider your sons as here in their father’s embrace’ (313). By contrast, when Saturninus asks after Chiron and Demetrius, Titus shrieks, ‘Why, there they are, both baked in this pie, / Whereof their mother daintily hath fed, / Eating the flesh that she herself hath bred. / ’Tis true, ’tis true, witness my knife’s sharp point’ (5.3.59–62). Ingestion suffices in Titus Andronicus; the medicine takes effect as Titus finds personal and political justice in a single speech. In Julie Taymor’s film, Jessica

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Lange as Tamora instinctively reaches into her own mouth at Titus’ pronouncement, as though she could pull out the pie and disgorge the unnatural fare.37 But she is not permitted either to vomit her excesses as Titus earlier vomited Lavinia’s, nor damned to digest them, as is Thyestes. Titus has ensured that she has reincorporated them into herself, reversing the birth process. Carol Mejia LaPerle explains that Titus endeavours, in killing a stuffed Tamora, ‘to ostracize the source of excess that creates [a] surplus [of possibilities’.38 Tamora’s body, containing now the bodies of her monstrous children, will be thrown outside the walls of Rome to become fodder for ‘birds and beasts of prey’. Thus, Titus’ actions, in purging all Others and ‘putting a head on headless Rome’ (1.1.189), might be seen in some way as ‘hospitable’ or ‘appropriate’, if we figure him as scourge and minister.

Digestion Like his predecessors, Eric Cartman is largely motivated by a confrontation between two cultural groups, an Us and a Them, an Inside and an Outside. For him, as with Atreus and Titus, the confrontation results in difficult questions about masculinity and power. Identity and social status in ‘Scott Tenorman Must Die’ are predicated upon certain features of physical maturity (here, pubic hair); when Cartman realizes that lacking this marker denies him entry into older boys’ social circles, he attempts to acquire it and thus construct himself as a ‘natural’ citizen. When his efforts prove unsuccessful and Scott Tenorman, the key representative of the hairy status quo, openly ridicules him, Cartman vows revenge. He succeeds in his mission by making Scott cry, demonstrating his immaturity; Cartman effectively switches roles with Scott, pushing his rival to the outside as a ‘crybaby’,39 South Park’s equivalent of a barbarian. Cartman’s revenge is thus funded by his need to regain his (imagined) reputation for maturity and coolness. Resembling

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Atreus in both paranoia and self-­centredness, he believes himself superior to his friends in every way, and he looks to the pubic hairs that he purchases from Scott to be an outward marker of that dominance. Louise Noble draws on philosopher Georg Lukács’ view that we use objects to navigate relations, writing: ‘In the South Park scenario pubic hair possesses a phantom objectivity: as the false currency for male pubescence the pubes enter the South Park economy in an attempt to mediate Cartman’s superiority over other boys.’40 When Scott robs him of that opportunity, he enacts a series of increasingly cruel manoeuvres designed to publicly humiliate Scott. In other words, Cartman’s revenge focuses less on raising himself up and more on breaking Scott down. Like Atreus before him, Cartman revels in his vengeance, joyfully celebrating both his own brilliance (‘It is the most genius plan ever!’) and his eventual annihilation of Scott’s emotional and social well-­ being. ‘Your tears are so sweet, Scott’, he croons, while everyone in the town looks on in horror.41 He also aims, as did Atreus, for fragmentation rather than Titus’ attempted reincorporation: he seeks not only the continued stratification of his social world, but also the physical dismemberment of Scott’s parents.42 Cartman invokes Seneca’s revenger in staging his revenge as a process rather than an event. He wants to see Scott being broken. However, just as Titus worked within a complex web of citations from Seneca and Ovid, and as Atreus worked within a network of citations from Ovid and Virgil, so, too, does Eric Cartman yield to the demands of all of these sources and more. A sharply topical show, South Park depends heavily on current events – and is thus scripted by the present, rather than the past. As an animated programme, South Park owes many of its tropes to other cartoons; the conflation of cruelty and farce in this particular episode hearkens most clearly to classic Looney Tunes. The show ends with Cartman lapping Scott’s tears from a picnic table, saying, ‘Yummy! MMM, yummy!’ The ‘camera’ mimics the iris-­out technique, gradually closing in on Cartman before rapidly opening back up for him to poke his head out

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of the circle and say, ‘Be-­dee-be-­dee-be-­dee, that’s all folks!’43 Nearly every episode of Looney Tunes concluded in the same way, with Porky Pig calling an end to the madness. This reads as intensely performative, indicating perhaps that what we have just witnessed is farce and must not be taken seriously. Yet that dismissiveness almost makes it worse, because we cannot forget about such an atrocious display of cruelty and violence at the hands of children. Pairing the episode with Thyestes and Titus, however, illumines Cartman’s motivations in that moment: he literally does what he says he does. He brings closure to the story. That’s ALL, folks. As Porky Pig, Cartman manages to achieve what neither of his literary forebears could – total control over his narrative. Limits that actually hold. We realize belatedly in the earlier plays that the revenger was not in fact the omnipotent director calling all of the shots. Yet we come to understand in ‘Scott Tenorman’s’ final moments that Cartman has actually been controlling the narrative. Scott continually thwarts Cartman’s early attempts at restoration and retribution, constructing himself always as the older, smarter, cleverer boy. Thus, when Cartman tells his friends of his plan for the ‘Chili con Carnival’ and they inform Scott, we fully expect to see the teenager emerge unscathed once more. When Scott enacts his counter-­scheme, we sense a satisfying, symmetrical end to the whole affair. Audiences (both inside and outside the episode) are therefore necessarily shocked when Cartman reveals that he knew about his friends’ double-­ cross and the contaminated stew. He proceeds to reveal, through an extended narrated flashback sequence, that he has been playing the long game: he has trained the pony to bite human body parts, anticipated that Scott would send his parents to rescue the pony, recalled that Farmer Denkins shoots trespassers on sight, warned Denkins about pony thieves in the area, sent Officer Barbrady to the farm after shots were fired, snuck onto the farm while Barbrady interrogated Denkins, stole the bodies of Scott’s now-­dead parents, and chopped them up for the now-­infamous ‘Mr. and

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Mrs. Tenorman Chili’. In his planning and execution, as well as his appearance as Porky Pig, Eric Cartman emerges as the ultimate revenger. He secures his position as the dominant member of his social group: his best friends respond to the horror only by saying, ‘Dude, let’s never piss Cartman off again’.44 He effectively humiliates his enemy, making him cry in front of Radiohead. He also builds a completely new and terrifying ethos. This is Cartman 2.0 – and it is into his world, we must remember, that Young Lucius carries the offspring of Aaron and Tamora at the end of Taymor’s Titus. Something must be said, at this point, about limits, and what happens when we reach them, and about ideals, and what happens when we literalize them. In attempting to read Titus’ cannibal banquet literally against Derrida’s prescription for bien manger – eating well – we see that, although Titus aligns with his rules for ethical eating and infinite hospitality in a surprising number of ways, we cannot, obviously, endorse his actions as ethical, or ‘well’ in any sense. When we take a good idea too far, when we literalize our metaphors, when we actually ‘learn to give the other to eat’,45 we end up eating very, very badly. Both Atreus and Titus perform the dangers of pushing Roman values to their outer limits, adhering so strongly to tradition and ritual and inheritance that they lose sight of their humanity. As we have seen, each of these texts emerges at a time of great national anxiety over the limits of state power and how far to extend them. The concept of following a good idea to its farthest conclusion until it ceases to be a good idea proves true for Cartman as well, if we shift the value system to America, where all social relations are always already figured as competition.46 The banquet becomes a contest, and there is no hospitality at the ‘Chili con Carnival’. In the world of South Park and its audience, Cartman represents the ultimate fulfilment of the modern American man, the worst aspects of the American dream made manifest. The infinite capacity for upward mobility regardless of one’s birth leads to selfishness, unchecked ambition, greed, pride, jingoism and cruelty; it necessitates the celebration of self over community,

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prosperity over decency, and plain-­spokenness over education and objective truth. Essentially, Eric Cartman is Donald Trump.

Notes 1 For a thorough examination of fury, revenge and Seneca, see Gordon Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger’s Privilege (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 2 Braden, Renaissance Tragedy, 57. 3 Among its detractors, we can count such notable critics as Samuel Johnson, T. S. Eliot and Harold Bloom. For Johnson’s opinion, see Jonathan Bate’s Introduction to the Arden third edition of Titus Andronicus (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 1–2. See also T. S. Eliot, ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’, in Selected Essays 1917–1932 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1950), 67; and Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), 77–86. 4 Curtis Perry, ‘Senecan Belatedness and Titus Andronicus’, 8. 5 Trey Parker, ‘Scott Tenorman Must Die’, South Park, directed by Trey Parker (2001: Braniff Productions), http://southpark.cc.com/ full-­episodes/s05e01-scott-­tenorman-must-­die (accessed 9 October 2015). All subsequent quotations from this episode are taken from the same source. 6 See especially Pramit Chaudhuri, ‘Classical Quotation in Titus Andronicus’, ELH, 81 (Fall 2014): 787–810; and Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Influence of Seneca (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 11–32. 7 Perry, ‘Senecan Belatedness’, 4. 8 Most recently, Paulina Kewes has explored this idea in conjunction with the George Peele collaboration in ‘ “I Ask Your Voices and Your Suffrages”: The Bogus Rome of Peele and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus’, The Review of Politics, 78 (October 2016): 551–70. For more on Titus’ adherence to a fictitious conception of Rome, see Naomi Conn Liebler, ‘Getting It All Right: Titus Andronicus and Roman History’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 45 (1994): 263–78; and two works by Robert S. Miola, ‘Titus

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Andronicus and the “Mythos of Shakespeare’s Rome” ’, Shakespeare Studies, 14 (1981): 85–99, and Shakespeare’s Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), esp. 74–5. 9 The so-­called ‘curse on the House of Atreus’ began when Tantalus killed and cooked his own son, Pelops, and served him to the gods. The gods condemned Tantalus to an eternity spent surrounded by food and water that he was unable to eat or drink, and they resurrected and healed Pelops. Unfortunately, Pelops later broke a promise to a man named Myrtilus and drowned him to avoid punishment; Myrtilus cursed Pelops and his descendants, including his sons, Thyestes and Atreus. The curse continued through their sons, Menelaus and Agamemnon, ending with the younger brother’s eldest son, Orestes. For details, see Barry B. Powell, Classical Myth (London: Pearson Longman, 2009), 504–60. 10 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Charles Martin (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 206–18. 11 See ‘TIL that the South Park [sic] episode “Scott Tenorman Must Die” is sometimes considered a retelling of the Shakespearean play “Titus Andronicus” [sic]’, Reddit, posted 13 November 2016, https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/5co8dq/til_ that_the_south_park_episode_scott_tenorman/ (accessed 20 February 2017); ‘Cartman’s 8 Most Inappropriate Moments’, The Daily Beast, 29 November 2009, http://www.thedailybeast.com/ cartmans-8-most-­inappropriate-moments (accessed 20 February 2017); ‘Scott Tenorman Must Die’, Wikipedia, updated 6 June 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Tenorman_Must_Die (accessed 3 July 2017); Anne Gossage, ‘ “Yon Fart Doth Smell of Elderberries Sweet”: South Park and Shakespeare’, in The Deep End of South Park: Critical Essays on Television’s Most Shocking Cartoon Series, ed. Leslie Stratyner and James R. Keller (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2009), 42–62; and M. Keith Booker, Drawn to Television: Prime-Time Animation from the Flintstones to Family Guy (Westport, CN: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006), 147–8. 12 ‘TIL’. 13 For this and all succeeding quotations, I have used the Arden third edition of Titus Andronicus, edited by Jonathan Bate (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).

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14 Carol Mejia LaPerle adds a new element to the discussion of sovereignty in the revenge plot: Shakespeare. She writes in her study of revenge as a mechanism for controlling excess, ‘Just as the revenge figure annihilates his enemies and thus eliminates the excess of possibilities that threatens his autonomy, so an author highlights his creative revisions by sacrificing and banqueting upon literary precedents. In the case of Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare applies the surplus of violent resources in order to establish authorial superiority over Seneca’s Thyestes.’ See ‘The Crime Scene of Revenge Tragedy: Sacrificial Cannibalism in Seneca’s Thyestes and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus’, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, 38(1) (March 2012): 9–28, esp. 25. 15 Robert S. Miola fruitfully compares Aaron to Atreus in Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Influence of Seneca (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 25–8. 16 Titus, DVD, directed by Julie Taymor (Beverly Hills, CA: Twentieth Century Fox, 1999). 17 Bate, Titus Andronicus, 10–13. 18 ‘O, handle not the theme, to talk of hands, / Lest we remember still that we have none’, he tells Marcus, who has just chided his brother not to encourage Lavinia to ‘lay / Such violent hands upon her tender life’ (3.2.29–30, 22). See also Farah KarimCooper, The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016). 19 Parker, ‘Scott Tenorman’. 20 ‘Cartman’s Greatest Moment’, Comedy Central voting page, 11 December 2007, https://web.archive.org/web/20071211024032/ http://www.comedycentral.com/events/south_park/cartman_25/ index.jhtml (accessed 27 September 2008). 21 This may have been especially true of Titus, as Jonathan Bate suggests in his Introduction to the Arden edition of the play. He writes that the staging notes for the play, in conjunction with the famed Peacham illustration, may indicate that at least some scenes in Titus contained dramatic tableaux, or ‘freeze-­frame’ moments, to increase the distance between reality and what was happening on stage (38–43). Siobhan Keenan explores this

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possibility in more detail in Travelling Players in Shakespeare’s England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), esp. 83–5. 22 Louise Noble, ‘ “And Make Two Pasties of Your Shameful Heads”: Medicinal Cannibalism and Healing the Body Politic in Titus Andronicus’, ELH, 70(3) (2003): 677–708, esp. 700. 23 LaPerle offers an excellent analysis of the Senecan cannibal revenger with an eye toward economies of consumption, using the work of Georges Bataille to explain how sacrifice and ‘conspicuous consumption’ stem from a need to manage excess: see ‘The Crime Scene’, 10. 24 For a brief comparison between the declines of Rome and the United States, see Jeremy Grant, ‘Learn from the Fall of Rome, US warned’, Financial Times, 14 August 2007, https://www.ft. com/content/80fa0a2c-49ef-11dc-9ffe-0000779fd2ac?mhq5j=e3 (accessed 27 September 2008). See also Louise Noble, ‘I Made You Eat Your Parents!: South Park and Literary History’, in Deconstructing South Park: Critical Examinations of Animated Transgression, ed. Brian Cogan (Blue Ridge Summit, MD: Lexington Books, 2011), 145–62. Noble observes that the cannibal banquet has always ‘provided a dynamic figurative space in which to mediate the concerns of a rapacious society queasy about its own ungovernable appetities’ (148) and testifies to ‘a world seriously at odds with itself’ (150). 25 In quoting from Seneca’s Thyestes, I follow John G. Fitch’s translation in Tragedies II: Oedipus; Agamemnon; Thyestes; Hercules on Oeta; Octavia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 217–323. All succeeding quotations will be parenthetical. 26 Noble, ‘And Make Two Pasties’, 679. 27 Powell, Classical Myth, 504–60. 28 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. A. D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 134–42. 29 Katharine Eisaman Maus, Introduction to Titus Andronicus in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 372. 30 LaPerle adds that Atreus desperately needs to assert his difference from his brother, in order to manage the ‘excess of possibilities’ that he represents – namely, too many heirs to the

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throne and too many fathers of indistinguishable sons; see ‘The Crime Scene’, 11 and 14–16. 31 See Davies, ‘ “The Swallowing Womb”: Consumed and Consuming Women in Titus Andronicus’, in The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Valerie Wayne (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 129–52; and Marshall, ‘ “I can interpret all her martyr’d signs”: Titus Andronicus, Feminism, and the Limits of Interpretation’, in Sexuality and Politics in Renaissance Drama, ed. Carole Levin and Karen Robertson (Lewiston, NJ: Edwin Mellon Press, 1991), 193–213, esp. 200. 32 ‘Accidental Shakespeare’, in Shakespeare Studies, 34 (2006): 90–122, esp. 113. 33 ‘Nature’s Metabolism: On Eating in Derrida, Agamben, and Spinoza’, Research in Phenomenology, 33(1) (2003): 186–217, esp. 202. 34 Noble, ‘And Make Two Pasties’, 677. 35 Marshall, ‘I Can Interpret All Her Martyr’d Signs’, 196. 36 For more distinctions between Atreus and Titus, see LaPerle, ‘The Crime Scene’, 13–22. In particular, she posits that Atreus fails because he focuses on controlling the present, unable to see beyond the banquet (13). Titus, I would add, thinks particularly about the future and the life of Rome after his meticulously orchestrated meal. Further, LaPerle observes that Atreus destroys only the symptom of excess, the brother, while Titus annihilates excess at its source: the mother (18). 37 Taymor, Titus. 38 LaPerle, ‘The Crime Scene’, 18. 39 Parker, ‘Scott Tenorman’. 40 Noble, ‘I Made You Eat Your Parents!’, 152. 41 Parker, ‘Scott Tenorman’. 42 For more on the fragmentation of the body in this episode, and revenge tragedy generally, including a link to the late modern cannibalistic discourse moderating plastic surgery, organ transplants, the commodification of the body, see Noble, ‘I Made You Eat Your Parents!’ 43 Ibid.

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44 Ibid. 45 Jacques Derrida, ‘ “Eating Well,” or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’, in Who Comes After the Subject?, trans. Peter Connor and Avital Ronell, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), 96–119, esp. 115. 46 For this insight, I am deeply indebted to Curtis Perry, in an email to the author, 28 October 2015.

11 ‘My tears will choke me, if I ope my mouth’ Framing, feasting and speaking sexual violence in Titus Andronicus, 2006–2017 Emma Whipday

Titus Andronicus ends with the surviving Andronici weeping over Titus’ corpse: lucius O, take this warm kiss on thy pale cold lips, These sorrowful drops upon thy bloodstained face, The last true duties of thy noble son.1

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These tears quickly become competitive: Marcus matches Lucius ‘tear for tear’ (5.3.155), whilst Young Lucius tops them both with: O Lord, I cannot speak to him for weeping, My tears will choke me if I ope my mouth. (173–4) The escalation of this physical reaction to the onstage action seems designed to prompt a similar reaction in the offstage spectators: as ‘The Most Lamentable Romaine Tragedie of Titus Andronicus’ (as it is styled by the Quarto), Titus Andronicus requires audience lamentation to fulfil the promise of its title page. Yet the competitive nature of the crying, coupled with the paradox of the boy’s insistence that he ‘cannot speak . . . for weeping’ as he delivers his line, push the scene uncomfortably close to laughter, forcing the audience to confront the possibility that the expected response to tragic action may itself be comic. Perhaps for this reason, these lines are frequently cut from performance texts. Yet the concerns of these lines – the difficulty of expressing trauma in words, a meta-­theatrical awareness of spectators’ reactions, the ease with which tragedy can topple over into comedy, and the uncomfortable relationship, in tears that can be swallowed but will cause choking, between consumption and death – resonate in contemporary productions of the play. Following landmark productions by Peter Brook (1955) and Deborah Warner (1987), as well as Julie Taymor’s groundbreaking film adaptation Titus (1999), the perception of Titus Andronicus as unperformable has been challenged by a spate of innovative and discomforting productions, among them Lucy Bailey’s Shakespeare’s Globe production (2006) and Yukio Ninagawa’s Noh-­influenced staging for the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in the same year; cross-­gender Taffety Punk Theatre Company (2013)2 and Smooth Faced Gentlemen (2015) productions; the revival of Bailey’s Globe production (2014); Dundee Rep’s re-­imagining in a restaurant

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(2015); and the RSC’s contemporary 2017 production directed by Blanche McIntyre. This chapter does not offer a survey of these productions; rather, I explore how recent productions are in dialogue with Taymor’s filmic vision, which foregrounds the resonances of Young Lucius’ absent lines: the play’s meta-­theatricality; the extent to which the role of food and consumption resonates beyond the final, gruesome banquet; and how Lavinia’s attempts at communication after her mutilation stage the difficulties of speaking sexual violence. In her 1996 article ‘Sexuality as a Signifier for Power Relations: Using Lavinia’, Bernice Harris writes: An argument often made to deny that literary representations of a woman’s sexual status or death might be motivated or interpreted by sexist or misogynist impulses is that these bodies are ‘literary bodies’, not ‘real bodies’, and thus they mean something else. Yet one cannot deny a long history of violence against women in the ‘real’ world and often this violence has to do with representational meanings.3 Two decades of feminist literary and performance scholarship have transformed the critical terrain Harris discusses; the ‘literary’ body of Lavinia is discussed in terms of both the performative body of Lavinia as mediated and embodied by the actor, and the misogynist impulses implicated in her representation.4 Yet the extent to which the performance of early modern violence against women in today’s theatres interacts with the ‘real’ violence acted upon the ‘real’ bodies of women beyond the theatre’s walls remains an open question. Using Bailey’s 2006 Shakespeare’s Globe production and 2014 revival as case studies, I will interrogate how recent productions of Titus stage Shakespeare’s exploration of sexual violence as at once speakable and unsayable, visible and unperformed. In so doing, I will explore how these productions participate in wider cultural conversations about representing sexual violence, in performances of early modern drama and in popular culture today.

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Feeding Lavinia: Shakespeare’s Globe 2006 Taymor’s Titus, like so many contemporary productions, dispenses with the Andronici’s tearful closing exchange. Taymor replaces it with a narrative frame that situates this Roman tragedy in relation to the consumption of televisual violence in contemporary homes: INT. KITCHEN OF AN URBAN APARTMENT – NIGHT We could be in Brooklyn or Sarajevo. A young boy of ten, YOUNG LUCIUS, eats his supper alone at the kitchen table . . . illuminated by the glow of an unseen television set. Toy soldiers in war formation litter the table: plastic Romans, G. I. Joes, Superheroes, ketchup and mustard bottles.5 Taymor’s frame is set in an ‘anyplace’ of ‘Brooklyn or Sarajevo’, but it is saturated with images of late 1990s (Americanized) popular culture, from toys to condiments. As Peter Donaldson argues: [P]lay here is a form of cruel puppetry in which the boy takes the role of the unfeeling gods. . . . Crash landing a plastic fighter jet into his huge slice of chocolate cake, he then douses the crawling GI Joes with ketchup and sugar and drowns them in milk, anticipating in the register of play the confounding of dining and slaughter at Titus’ conclusion.6 However, this frame is quickly fractured, as Young Lucius is transported to the Coliseum, transformed into a gladiatorial arena from Titus’ Rome, and integrated into the Andronici family, and therefore into the action of the play proper. Rather than verbally encapsulating the concerns of the play with lines on competitive crying, Taymor’s Young Lucius ends the film with silent action: holding Aaron’s child in his arms, he walks

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out of the arena into the sunrise, as if, as Taymor puts it, ‘redemption were a possibility’.7 As he walks, he is watched by a contemporary audience, in modern dress, who suddenly populate the arena as silent spectators. As Donaldson suggests, the opening frame sets up the concerns of Young Lucius’ cut lines – particularly a meta-­theatrical awareness of the relationship between the contemporary audience and an ancient tragedy (here represented by a child witnessing first televisual contemporary violence, and then ‘real’ Roman violence); and the relationship between appetite and trauma. Recent productions have engaged with both these concerns and the possibilities of situating Titus in relation to the contemporary. Blanche McIntyre’s 2017 RSC modern-­dress production opens with a sequence of wordless brawls and lootings reminiscent of the 2011 London riots, setting up the lawless (and contemporary) Rome where Saturninus and Bassianus fight for power. For Taymor, the arena into which Young Lucius is carried is a Roman amphitheatre, setting up the spectacle of slaughter, but it ‘also comes to stand for the Globe Playhouse of Elizabethan London or its postmodern successor, Shakespeare’s Globe’.8 In Lucy Bailey’s 2006 Shakespeare’s Globe production, the Globe itself becomes, as Bailey puts it, ‘a temple of death’, a ‘strange, heady slaughter space’, at once the Coliseum, the Elizabethan Globe, and the here-­and-now of the contemporary Globe.9 In Taymor’s film, Young Lucius becomes a witness on behalf of the audience, who are, by the final scene, doubled by hundreds of spectators who become our counterparts; at the Globe, all audience members are witnesses. Dundee Rep’s 2015 production, adapted by Philip Howard and directed by Stewart Laing, offers its own vision of a child slaughtering its toys with condiments, in a very different kind of site-­specific performance. In a hall with a kitchen and long dining tables at which the audience are seated, Howard and Laing’s production presents Titus’ Rome as a contemporary restaurant. Rather than using a frame, it provides an immersive audience experience that renders the events of the play

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contemporary, the audience uneasily aware of their own involvement, and the relationship between food, familial affection and violence central. The production opens with Young Lucius reading a recipe aloud, setting up the central conceit. While in Taymor’s film the kitchen table-­top carnage is playfully suggestive of, but separate from, the ensuing grotesquery of Titus’ kitchen, in the Dundee Rep production the restaurant context and the play’s violence quickly become indivisible. Following the offstage rape, Lavinia is deposited by Chiron and Demetrius before the ‘diners’ on one of the long tables, almost as if she is being served to them, as Titus attempts to persuade the diners, now transformed into tribunes, to spare his sons, by offering them whisky. This production asks what it means for the aftermath of Lavinia’s rape, located in the actor’s mutilated body, to be served up, like the whisky, for our (spectatorial) consumption. Audience members are further reminded of their status as complicit diners/witnesses when they are served with tiny pies doubling those served at Titus’ banquet. While the production’s restaurant setting plays at reducing actors’ bodies to meat, with Lavinia smothered by her father at the same tables where the pies are served, the conceit also enables food preparation tools to be transformed into means of communication. When Lavinia speaks in ‘signs’ at the Andronici banquet in 3.2, here transferred to a family breakfast, she uses the objects surrounding her in the kitchen – a plastic cup for ‘drink’, a cafetière for ‘brew’ – in a charades-­ like performance that Titus is able to interpret: I can interpret all her martyr’d signs – She says she drinks no other drink but tears, Brew’d with her sorrow . . . (3.2.36–8) Familial food preparation here offers an alternative mode of cooking and eating to the grisly banquet in the final scene, and offers Lavinia an alternative mode of communication. The

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production, like Taymor’s, ends on Aaron’s child; the bundle in a box that represents the baby lies, like the food and the bodies, on a dining table, as the sound of the child’s cries fills the restaurant, in an uncertain sign of either tragedy or hope. This ending echoes a similar, but less ambivalent, final sequence, in Ninagawa’s 2006 Japanese-­language production at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. As Stephen Purcell puts it: Young Lucius holds the child of his family’s enemies in his arms. He screams. He screams until he runs out of breath, and then he screams again. He screams again. He screams again.10 Here, the image of Young Lucius carrying Aaron’s child is complicated by its aural accompaniment, as he wordlessly voices his trauma. In transforming Shakespeare’s choking tears into a breathless scream, Ninagawa highlights the difficulty of speaking trauma, while avoiding the link between appetite and violence implied by Young Lucius’ words. The decision to re-­attribute this cry to Aaron’s child, lain on a dining table, in the Dundee Rep production, rewrites this ending to reinforce links between spectatorial consumption of mutilated bodies, literal consumption of (human) food, and audience witnessing. Bailey’s 2006 production at Shakespeare’s Globe places a similar emphasis on food, control and complicity, but from a different angle: here, the force-­feeding of Tamora’s sons to an unknowing Tamora by chef-Titus is just one example of a man aiming to act upon a woman’s body by feeding her. This emphasis upon consumption and control begins in 3.2, in which Titus attempts to feed Lavinia; and is taken to its logical conclusion in the final scene, when he both feeds and kills Tamora, and kills Lavinia. For Titus, feeding Tamora is a form of revenge, but feeding Lavinia becomes symptomatic of wider

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patterns of familial affection and patriarchal control, which become both tragic and fatal. Throughout 3.2, Titus is affectionate towards Lavinia, but this affection is demonstrated via possessive behaviour that reinforces the power dynamic in their relationship. When Titus addresses Lavinia, saying ‘Thou map of woe, that thus dost talk in signs’ (12), the prompt book notes that Titus ‘kneels behind her’; to emphasize the following line, ‘When thy poor heart beats with outrageous beating’ (13), ‘T[itus] thumps Lav[inia’s] chest’.11 Unlike the Dundee production, Titus doesn’t guess at words to match Lavinia’s gestures, but rather uses his words as a prompt to act upon his daughter’s body. In the immediate aftermath of Lavinia’s rape, Douglas Hodge’s Titus seems to be trying to somehow reclaim her body from her rapists (and perhaps also from her now-­deceased husband), through repeatedly manhandling her. Unable to interpret her signs, he uses her body to create signs of his own, literalizing his descriptions of her bodily reality by thumping her chest even as he describes the beating of her heart (in an opposite choice to Anthony Hopkins in Taymor’s Titus, who uses this moment to strike at his own chest). Similarly, on the line ‘just against thy heart make thou a hole’ (17), Hodge kneels behind the seated Lavinia, and presses against her breastbone, as if attempting to carry out his own instruction to her. There is no room for Lavinia’s own agency in her father’s insistence on both linguistic and bodily interpretation: as her (silent) body becomes the means for her father to make his own signs, Lavinia is doubly silenced. This is reinforced later in the scene, on the line ‘speechless complainer, I will learn thy thought’: in speaking it, Titus places his forehead directly against his daughter’s, in what seems to be at once the act of a loving father who longs for proximity to produce telepathy, and an action that implies physical intimidation. His responses are, as Pascale Aebischer puts it, ‘indicative of the violence that is always and already involved in attempting to speak of and for Lavinia’.12 The same pattern of affection conjoined with physical threat can be seen as Titus attempts to feed Lavinia: Bailey’s choices

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reinforce the extent to which Titus compels Lavinia to eat against her will. On ‘gentle girl, eat this’ (34), Hodge’s Titus force-­feeds Lavinia, causing her to choke, which prompts Titus’ next line: ‘Here is no drink?’ (35). Her choking is savage and discomforting. In response to it, Titus rushes to get a handkerchief into which she can cough; he then pours wine into the goblet and, in the words of the prompt book, ‘makes Lav[inia] drink’, so that the drink ‘goes down her throat’. Coughs wrack her until he forces her to drink, and afterwards, her body continues to shake and spasm as he strokes her cheeks. Laura Rees’ painful spasms in response to her father’s force-­ feeding recall her physical motion in the immediate aftermath of Lavinia’s rape, when her father unwraps the bandages her uncle has provided for her wounds. Writing on the 2014 production, Thomas P. Anderson comments that: [T]he actor’s body agitates and twitches in a way that suggests volatility rather than compliance or defeat. . . her agitation appears unconscious, but the effect of her volatile body is powerful nonetheless, obviating critical questions of agency or will.13 Anderson is writing of Flora Spencer-Longhurst’s Lavinia, not of Rees’, but the effect is disconcertingly similar. In the 2006 production, Lavinia’s visceral response to her father viewing her mutilation seems as unconscious, and as potent, as her cough. Yet Rees does not altogether ‘obviate critical questions of agency’: rather, I suggest her spasms raise these very questions. Both her spasms and her cough are responses to her father’s attempt to reclaim her body, an attempt her body (and thus, perhaps, Lavinia herself) resists. This dynamic, of Titus’ violent, proprietorial fatherly affection and Lavinia’s volatile physical response, is developed further in Bailey’s vision of Lavinia’s death. The means by which Titus kills Lavinia seems to have altered during the rehearsal process; and in tracing this development, the rehearsal

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notes suggest that Bailey’s production is directly in dialogue with Taymor’s. In Titus, the screenplay records: [Titus] quickly breaks her neck. She collapses in his arms to the floor.14 In the ‘fight notes’ for Bailey’s production, taken from a fight call on 6 May 2006, Lavinia’s death is described as follows: As Lavinia sits on Titus’ knee he puts his hand over her mouth and suffocates her lowering her to the floor once she is dead. No Blood Required.15 However, an earlier (undated) version of the same document records a very different death for Lavinia: Her neck is broken: Titus and Lavinia embrace. Lav[inia’s] head is DS [downstage] and Titus[’s] head US [upstage]. Titus’[s] left hand on her forehead and right hand on back of head/neck. Titus then throws hands to sides and simultaneously Lavinia throws her head US. Lavinia then falls onto table. To make the neck breaking effective you need to create the noise . . . a brittle bottle or beaker which is scrunched up at the exact moment.16 This method of death is also referred to in early rehearsal notes: ‘Titus kills Lavinia by breaking her neck’.17 In her focus on the ‘noise’ of a broken neck, Bailey seems to be reimagining a moment from Taymor’s Titus, in which the ‘horribly clear’ sound of Lavinia’s neck breaking is highlighted by an ‘eerie’ silence on the otherwise relentlessly noisy soundtrack.18 This moment has been picked up by later directors; Smooth Faced Gentlemen’s 2015 all-­female production, directed by Yaz Al-Shaater, borrows this effect. However, Bailey later decided against this aural echo, choosing instead the relatively silent death by suffocation (a choice the Dundee production would later follow).

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Both versions of the death scene are bloodless, in contrast with the vast majority of deaths in the play, marking Lavinia’s death as occurring in a different register – less viscerally violent, but also distanced from the comedy with which such violence has become associated (and which is about to reach its apex in the bloody pies Tamora and Saturninus consume). Yet Bailey’s decision to replace one with the other is significant, because it suggests a shift from echoing Taymor’s choice to a new vision of Titus’ murder of Lavinia, in which his killing becomes the logical extension of his fatherly love.19 Young Lucius’ line ‘my tears will choke me’ may not appear in Bailey’s production, but Titus literally chokes Lavinia in response to her rape, on two occasions: first, in feeding her, and second, in killing her. The 19 April rehearsal note that registers the original decision to kill Lavinia by breaking her neck also comments that ‘Lucy [Bailey] would like Tamora to vomit after she eats the bloody pie’; the final production suggests that this decision was likewise abandoned, as the choking revulsion at force-­ feeding was displaced from Tamora (who gags, but does not vomit) to Lavinia (who chokes on her food), and in so doing, was reimagined from the obvious (Tamora vomits because she discovers she is eating her sons) to the less so (Lavinia chokes on the nourishment her father attempts to give her).20 I suggest that in Lavinia’s choking, Bailey and Rees create a tragic continuity between Lavinia’s bodily response to the rape, her father’s force-­feeding, and her father’s act of murder. The murder, like the feeding, is framed in terms of fatherly affection. Lavinia sits on Titus’ knee, looking trusting and childlike, his arm curved protectively around her. When he pulls her head over to his shoulder to suffocate her, it looks of a piece with his quasi-­affectionate, proprietary behaviour towards her. As the suffocation begins, Lavinia submits to it, docile, but as it continues, her limbs begin to twitch and struggle, recalling her spasms in response to both her uncovering and her choking. Her movements escalate until it is unclear whether these spasms are an unconscious physical

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response to suffocation, or whether Lavinia is fighting for her life. In choosing a prolonged suffocation, rather than the violent but brief breaking of her neck, Bailey forces us to confront the dangerous consequences of Titus’ fatherly affection. In her twitches and spasms, painful to watch, Rees invites us to confront the possibility that Lavinia’s agency manifests itself even as it is taken from her in death. By creating a tragic continuity between Lavinia’s violent physical responses to both her force-­feeding and her suffocation by her father, the 2006 Shakespeare’s Globe production suggests that within a patriarchal society, an affectionate fatherly response to rape can be as traumatic as the rape itself; and feeding, like suffocation, becomes another form of violence that proprietary men visit upon Lavinia.

Rape culture and Shakespeare’s Globe 2014 While Bailey’s 2014 production was marketed as a ‘revival’ of the 2006 staging, in terms of the staging of Lavinia’s experiences in the aftermath of sexual violence, there are some key differences. The relationships between affection, food, coercion and death seem to be of less interest: Titus is less physically demonstrative, and Lavinia seems more accepting of his ministrations. She eats food he offers willingly (despite difficulty in swallowing), and, when deciding not to drink, knocks the cup from her father’s hand, demonstrating greater agency. While Lavinia’s murder follows the same pattern (sitting on her father’s lap, she seemingly acquiesces to her own suffocation), Spencer-Longhurst’s Lavinia, again, has greater agency: she actively turns into her father’s embrace in order to die (a choice picked up on in McIntyre’s RSC production, where Lavinia walks into her father’s arms to be stabbed by him), and her spasms appear to be involuntary shudders rather

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than a struggle. Instead, Bailey emphasizes the extent to which the violence inflicted upon Lavinia is not only a product of the patriarchal culture of both the Rome of the play’s setting and 1590s London; it is also symptomatic of what we might, in contemporary parlance, term ‘rape culture’. I suggest that the 2014 revival, available to new audiences via Globe On Screen and the Globe Player, resonates in debates about representing rape in contemporary popular culture.21 The production draws attention to the proliferating definitions of ‘rape’ in the play. When Lavinia is ‘seized’ by Bassianus after her father betroths her to Saturninus (Matthew Needham), Needham stutters out the words ‘this . . . this . . . rape’ (1.1.409), using pauses to highlight how inapposite the term is for what has occurred, as Spencer-Longhurst’s Lavinia clings to her betrothed. Steffan Donnelly’s Bassianus echoes this, speaking his line ‘ “Rape”, call you it?’ (10) with a sceptical emphasis (a choice also used by McIntyre’s production, in which it prompted audience laughter). Later, when Lavinia points to the relevant passage in Ovid, Titus likewise pauses before uttering the word ‘rape’ (4.1.48). In the Globe Onscreen recording, these moments are caught in relative close-­up, with audible audience laughter in the first instance, and silence in the second and third, ensuring their prominence in the productions’ afterlife.22 Bailey’s choices here force us to consider how we define rape, ‘then’ and ‘now’, and whether, in the moment of contemporary production, with a visible and engaged audience, of an early modern imagining of Rome, these two categories can be separated. Bailey’s production represents Lavinia’s rape as part of a continuum of unwelcome sexual advances, from the sudden kiss Saturninus gives her following his flirtation with Tamora, to the screaming girl chased across the stage by a comic drunken Tribune after Saturninus’ election. Just as Shakespeare’s play challenges the Roman/Goth binary by demonstrating the extent to which the supposed savagery of the latter is doubled by the ‘wilderness of tigers’ in Rome, this production suggests that the rape by Chiron and Demetrius, suggested by Aaron, stems not

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from their ‘Goth’ savagery, but rather fits the rape culture of the city into which they have been incorporated. Furthermore, the production probes the audience’s complicity in this culture, forcing us to engage with the extent to which it is not ‘early modern’, but contemporary. On the line ‘she is a woman, therefore may be wooed’, Demetrius directly engages with audience members, singling out a female groundling in a way that, in the Globe Onscreen recording, provokes cheers and laughter. This moment of ‘lad culture’ prompts recognition and humour, which makes the moment when, just a few seconds later, Aaron suggests rape, all the more disconcerting (causing a sudden silence). As William Casey Caldwell suggests, direct address in reconstructed playhouses functions ‘by pointing out the ridiculous conjunction of past and present we are caught up in’; here, such a conjunction reminds the audience that the (sexually violent) past and the (enlightened) present are not so far removed as we might like to think.23 In using the performance possibilities of the ‘shared light’ conditions at the Globe, Bailey ensures the audience is forced to recognize that Lavinia’s rape stems directly from Demetrius’ audience ‘banter’; and draws attention to the relationship between the act of rape itself, and the wider culture of sexual objectification. This is not unique to the 2014 production. Purcell notes that in the 2006 production, ‘when Aaron mentioned his desire to “ravish a maid”, [Shaun] Parkes looked hungrily and menacingly at a nearby female audience member’ (causing Purcell later to question his own enthusiastic applause at the end of Aaron’s speech).24 However, I suggest that in the 2014 production, and particularly in the way in which it is filmed for the Globe On Screen, the proliferation of such moments, combined with insistent probing of the aptness of the repeated word ‘rape’, ensure that these examples, and the applause or identification they may prompt, cannot be seen in isolation, but rather create a cumulative pattern suggestive of the ‘rape culture’ in ancient Rome and in the early modern representation of it – and by implication, in the world inhabited by the responsive theatrical (and screen) audiences of the play.

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This production, in keeping with Shakespeare’s text, ensures the rape itself remains offstage: it refuses the audience the opportunity to experience rape as spectacle. This stands in stark contrast to many contemporary productions of early modern drama, which use rape as a stage effect, to give a production an injection of sensationalized sexual violence, or perhaps to suggest the logical conclusion of a patriarchal society where female sexuality is commodified – even where sexual violence is not indicated in the original text. In Jamie Lloyd’s 2016 production of Dr Faustus, in which the difficult middle section of the play is replaced by a modern morality tale about the perils of fame, Wagner is cross-­cast as female. In the final scene, Wagner enters in the place of Helen of Troy, and, while delivering Marlowe’s famous lines on her beauty, Faustus rapes her, and then kills her, in a seemingly gratuitous moment of sensationalized sexual violence of a piece with the violent objectification of women in the production as a whole. A similar decision was made by Rupert Goold in his Richard III at the Almeida, in inserting the rape of Queen Elizabeth by Richard III, in what Peter Kirwan suggests is ‘part of a broader escalation of violent strategies to silence female characters’.25 These strategies are not confined to the stage: the vision which Goold and Lloyd offer, where a culture of sexual violence and female silence is seemingly legitimized by the past-­ness of the early modern material, intersects with televisual representations of a sexually violent past, in period dramas and historically inflected fantasies alike. Two high-­profile examples in television are the rape of Cersei by her brother Jaime in HBO’s Game of Thrones (2015); and the rape of Elizabeth by Ross in the BBC’s Poldark (2016). Both have prompted debate as to whether what is being staged can be defined as rape.26 Both women explicitly deny consent, yet the directors frame these women’s responses, in the context of existing romantic relationships with their attackers, as eventually, and ambiguously, consensual. Neither woman speaks of the rape afterwards. These acts are represented as part of a wider culture of sexual violence rooted in an assumption of male proprietary rights over women, from the marital rapes

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suffered by Daenerys and Sansa, to the multiple attacks on Demelza when she attends a house party without her husband – and each of these acts is represented as simultaneously traumatic, unspoken and inevitable.27 Both the text of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, and Bailey’s visions of the play, offer an alternative to sensationalized rape and silenced victims, in foregrounding the difficulties of speaking sexual violence; the extent to which, in the aftermath of such violence, the patriarchal societal structure renders even affection violent if it silences rather than aids communication; and the tragedy of female silence. This forces audience members to engage with the traumatic aftermath of rape, as situated in Lavinia’s mutilated body, rather than with rape as spectacle. That this is more affecting than the representation of the act itself, to which we have become culturally desensitized, is borne out by the famously numerous audience faintings at both Shakespeare’s Globe productions.28 What does it mean to faint at imagined sexual violence, or when viewing its aftermath seemingly realized on a female actor’s traumatized body?29 Ninagawa suggested that audiences wouldn’t faint at his 2006 production, as ‘there is not a single drop of blood shed’, interpreting the response in relation to lifelike stage effects.30 In contrast, Erika Lin argues that in a 1994 production by the Atlanta Shakespeare Company, it is not stage gore or verisimilitude that prompts audience faintings: The production cast as Lavinia an actor, Sarah Lancaster (now Sarah Onsager), who actually has a prosthetic hand and lower arm . . . Onsager agreed to take off her prosthetic for the production, and when audience members realised what they were seeing, a number of people fainted and had to be carried out of the theatre. Lin suggests that Lavinia’s dismemberment usually prompts the realization that ‘the hands and tongue of the character Lavinia are mutilated, but the hands and tongue of the actor

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playing Lavinia are whole . . . missing in the play but present in the playhouse’.31 Lin’s description of this production emphasizes how the relationship between expectation and experience is disrupted: it is when audience members ‘realise what they are seeing’ that they faint. In the Shakespeare’s Globe productions in 2006 and 2014, Lavinia’s mutilation is a sophisticated stage effect, achieved using make-­up and properties, which the widespread reporting of the faintings (and the reputation of the play itself) prepare the audience to expect. Yet when, whether at Shakespeare’s Globe itself or via a Globe On Screen recording, we watch Lavinia, mutilated, attempting to speak sexual violence, I suggest the same effect applies. In Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, we are confronted, not with the spectacle of sexual violence, to which we have been desensitized by popular culture, but with the spectacle of the effect of silencing female experiences of sexual violence – reminding us, as Harris puts it, of the ‘real bodies’ in the ‘long history of violence against women in the “real” world’.32 A similar effect is used in the Smooth Faced Gentlemen 2015 production. In this all-­female production, a meta-­ theatrical awareness of the relationship between the female bodies we see onstage, which we are invited to imagine as male bodies performing an act of sexual violence offstage, estranges us from the ‘reality’ of the offstage action. However, in AlShaater’s vision, the imagined offstage act of sexual violence is displaced on to an onstage, wordless interlude, during which we witness the amputation of Lavinia’s hands (using a stage effect involving a bucket). The onstage mutilation stands in for the imagined offstage act – rather than watching or imagining the rape itself, we must watch its violent consequences, our attention drawn to the ‘real’ body of the actor alongside the spectacle of Lavinia’s body. In this way, the Smooth Faced Gentlemen production participates in a wider cultural conversation about rape culture by challenging the vision of rape as sensationalized spectacle, and replacing it with the embodied ‘reality’ of rape as bodily trauma.

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In the 2017 RSC production, McIntyre also uses onstage mutilation as a proxy for unseen violence: firstly, in the visible amputation of Titus’ hand, in a wordless sequence (involving a sleight-­of-hand effect by a brisk and brutal nurse) punctuated by Titus’ groans; and secondly, in the sexualized murder of Bassianus – Chiron and Demetrius stab him repeatedly before carving his groin, foreshadowing the violence that Lavinia will suffer offstage. As at the Globe, this onstage brutality prompted visceral audience responses, with ‘a vomiting, a fainting, or a leaving’ at every performance.33 Yet no such violence is visited on Lavinia onstage; instead, her suffering is presented through the grubby details of the aftermath, as when Marcus, blazoning her mutilated body and tying tourniquets at the ends of her bleeding arms, must also pull up her trousers. The coverings Hannah Morrish’s Lavinia wears to hide her wounds are not white bandages that serve as overt reminders of her trauma, but clothes that enable her to move anonymously among the crowds of Rome, and thus to confront a visibly pregnant Tamora with her speaking silence. Lavinia is doubled by the ghosts that populate McIntyre’s production: dead characters remain onstage, behind glass screens, occasionally emerging to engage with the onstage action, as when the ghosts of Martius and Quintus assist Titus in draining the blood of Chiron and Demetrius. The whole bodies of the actors onstage become proxies for the imagined mutilated bodies of the characters offstage, just as the ‘real’, covered body of Morrish reminds us of Lavinia’s bodily trauma. Like the bloodied ghosts, Lavinia’s bloodless presence suggests the difficulty of laying trauma to rest. I suggest that productions of Titus Andronicus, 2006–2017, offer an alternative to sensational and sexualized representations of sexual violence in contemporary popular culture. They do this by: questioning the relationship between various kinds of patriarchal authority and affection in Bailey’s 2006 production; drawing attention to the extent to which trauma can deprive us of language in Ninagawa’s 2006 production; asking us to question the relationship between cannibalism and voyeurism in the Dundee Rep 2015 ‘restaurant’; estranging us from the

Framing, feasting and speaking sexual violence 267

relationship between sex and gender to emphasize bodily trauma in the 2015 Smooth Faced Gentlemen production; granting Lavinia a ghost-­like agency in McIntyre’s 2017 RSC staging; and interrogating the status of rape and its relationship with rape culture in Bailey’s 2014 production (and its onscreen afterlife). In each of these productions, as Toria Johnson puts it, ‘just like the characters onstage, we have no choice but to react to [Lavinia’s] presence’.34 I suggest that in this forced ‘reaction’ we, like the audience members who fainted at the Atlanta Shakespeare Company production, are required to confront the extent to which the stage effect we view in viewing Lavinia’s ‘gruesome violation’ is in conversation with ‘the real’. These productions provoke us by presenting, not the sensation­ alized representation of an act of sexual violence, but an actor performing the trauma of sexual violence and female silence, to ‘realize’ what we are seeing – and to confront the extent to which this contemporary performance of an early modern drama of ancient Rome speaks to rape culture today.

Notes

I am grateful to Simon Smith for his constructive comments on an early draft of this article.

1 William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate (London: Arden Shakespeare, revised edition, 2018), 5.3.152–4. All further references are to this edition, and will be incorporated into the text. 2 Neither the prompt book nor an archival recording are available for the Taffety Punk production, so it is not possible to discuss it in this chapter, but I include it in this list because its existence is indicative of an increasing interest in exploring the effect of re-­gendering this play. 3 Bernice Harris, ‘Sexuality as a Signifier for Power Relations: Using Lavinia, of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus’, Criticism, 38(3) (Summer 1996): 383–406 (383). More recently, some critics have taken a feminist approach to Lavinia’s ‘literary’

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body: see, for example, Evelyn Gajowski, ‘Lavinia as “Blank Page” and the Presence of Feminist Critical Practices’, in Presentist Shakespeares, ed. Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes (London: Routledge, 2007), 121–40. 4 See, for example, Kim Solga, Violence against Women in Early Modern Performance: Invisible Acts (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), esp. 29–61; and Pascale Aebischer, Shakespeare’s Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 24–63. 5 Julie Taymor, Titus: The Illustrated Screenplay, intr. Jonathan Bate (New York: Newmarket Press, 2000), 19. 6 Peter S. Donaldson, ‘Game Space/Tragic Space: Julie Taymor’s Titus’, in A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, ed. Barbara Hodgdon and W. B. Worthen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 457–77 (459). 7 Taymor, ‘Director’s Notes’, Titus, 185. 8 Donaldson, 459. 9 Lucy Bailey, quoted in James Woodall, ‘10 questions for Director Lucy Bailey’, The Arts Desk, 26 October 2016, http://www. theartsdesk.com/theatre/10-questions-­director-lucy-­bailey. 10 Stephen Purcell, Popular Shakespeare: Simulation and Subversion on the Modern Stage (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 5. 11 Shakespeare’s Globe, Titus Andronicus Prompt Book (2006) GB 3316 SGT/THTR/SM/1/2006/TA, 57. 12 Aebischer, 31. 13 Thomas P. Anderson, ‘Titus Andronicus at the Globe Theatre: There Will Be Blood’, Shakespeare Newsletter, 63(3) (March 2014), 81–3. 14 Taymor, 164. 15 ‘Fight Notes 2’, 6 May, Titus Andronicus Prompt Book (2006). 16 ‘Fight Notes 1’ (undated), ibid. 17 ‘Rehearsal Notes Sheet 5’, 19 April, ibid. 18 Mary Lindroth, ‘ “Some device of further misery”: Taymor’s Titus brings Shakespeare to Film Audiences with a Twist’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 29(2) (2001): 107–15 (113).

Framing, feasting and speaking sexual violence 269

19 Taymor, 164. 20 ‘Rehearsal Notes Sheet 5’, 19 April, Titus Andronicus Prompt Book (2006). 21 Globe on Screen offers screenings of filmed versions of popular Globe productions in cinemas around the world, and Globe Player is an online, on-­demand platform that allows viewers to watch and download these recordings. 22 William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, dir. Lucy Bailey (DVD, Globe on Screen, 2014). 23 William Casey Caldwell, ‘The Comic Structure of the Globe: History, Direct Address, and the Representation of Laughter in a Reconstructed Playhouse’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 31(3) (2013): 375–403 (394). 24 Purcell, 2–3. 25 Peter Kirwan, Review: ‘Richard III (Almeida Live) @ Nottingham Broadway’, The Bardathon, 23 July 2016, http://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/bardathon/2016/07/22/richard-­ iii-almeida-­live-nottingham-­broadway. 26 See, for example, Kate Samuelson, ‘Poldark Sex Scene Criticized for Perpetuating “Rape Fantasies” ’, Time, 24 October 2016, http://time.com/4542245/poldark-­bbc-sex-­scene-rape-­ fantasy/. 27 See Debra Ferreday, ‘Game of Thrones, Rape Culture and Feminist Fandom’, Australian Feminist Studies, 30(83) (2015): 21–36. 28 See Hannah Furness, ‘Globe Audience Faints at “Grotesquely Violent” Titus Andronicus’, The Telegraph, 30 April 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/william-­shakespeare/ 10798599/Globe-­audience-faints-­at-grotesquely-­violent-TitusAndronicus.html [accessed 5 February 2017]; and Titus Andronicus Front of House Show Reports (2006 and 2014), Shakespeare’s Globe Archives. 29 See Penelope Woods, ‘Globe Audiences: Spectatorship and Reconstruction at Shakespeare’s Globe’, PhD thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, and Shakespeare’s Globe (2012), esp. 233–46. 30 See Benjamin Secher, ‘Death, Mutilation – and Not a Drop of Blood’, Telegraph, 10 June 2006, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

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culture/theatre/drama/3653023/Death-­mutilation-and-­not-a-­ drop-of-­blood.html. 31 Erika T. Lin, Shakespeare and the Materiality of Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 146, citing Gretchen Schulz, ‘Sharing Shakespeare: An Academic’s Adventures with the Atlantic Shakespeare Company’ (talk at Folger Institute, 30 January 1999). 32 Harris, 383. 33 Dominic Cavendish, ‘David Troughton Shines in an Otherwise Gimmicky Titus Andronicus – RSC, Stratford-­upon-Avon, review’, The Telegraph, 5 July 2017, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ theatre/what-­to-see/david-­broughton-titus-­andronicus-rsc-­ stratford-upon-­avon-review/ [accessed 20 September 2017]. 34 Toria Anne Johnson, ‘ “Piteous Overthrows”: Pity and Identity in Early Modern English Literature’, PhD thesis, University of St Andrews (2013), 133.

Index

Aaron (Titus Andronicus) 93–5, 111–14, 125–6, 137–9 child (with Tamora) 5–6, 94, 95–7, 103–5, 112–13, 120, 121–5, 126, 147–9, 208 death of 102, 126, 152–4, 194, 216–17, 232 parental role played by 6, 52, 74–5, 81, 113, 116–18, 122–4, 147–9, 153 soliloquies 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 72–8 Tamora, relationship with 5, 6, 66, 72, 78, 95, 96–7, 102–3, 112, 115, 139–40, 142–3, 147, 207 villainization of 7, 91, 94–5, 138, 141–4, 146, 150, 152–3 Aeneas (Aeneid) 26, 30 Africans 91–3, 94, 101 Shakespearean characters 90–2, 93, 97; see also under individual character names see also ‘blackness’; slave trade/slavery Alarbus (Titus Andronicus) 29, 30, 98, 99, 127 n.1, 209, 213, 214 Andromache (Troades) 27–8, 29, 30, 99

Asians 100, 101, 102 ‘asides’ 64; see also soliloquies Astyanax (Troades) 27–8, 29, 30, 99 Atlanta Shakespeare Company, Titus Andronicus (1994) 264–5, 267 Atreus (Thyestes) 9, 18–20, 22–3, 24, 25–6, 224, 226, 227, 230, 231, 233–4, 236–7 authorship see co-authorship Bailey, Lucy, Titus Andronicus (Globe Theatre, 2006) 10, 219 n.5, 250, 253, 255–60, 262, 264, 265, 266 revival (2014) 257, 260–1, 262–3, 264, 265, 267 Baldwin, James 135–7 Banquo (Macbeth) 84 n.11 barbarians/barbarism 5, 51, 89, 99, 100, 103 racial associations 7, 90, 91, 94, 98, 101, 114, 115, 143–4, 152 Baskerville, Thomas 91 Bassianus (Titus Andronicus) 5, 113, 207, 261 murder of 51, 75–6, 266 ‘blackness’ 6, 102, 105, 112, 114, 125–6, 138

272

index

and domesticity/family units 111–12, 113–15, 116–17, 119, 120–1, 126–7 negative associations with 7, 90, 91, 94, 98, 101, 114, 115, 143–4, 152 Brook, Peter 10, 250 Calisto (Metamorphoses) 161 cannibal banquets 18, 19, 24, 25, 224, 225–6, 229, 233–4, 235, 236–7, 241, 243 n.9 cannibalism 16–17, 18–19, 24, 25, 26, 216, 231; see also cannibal banquets Cartman, Eric (South Park) 9, 10, 225, 227, 228–9, 238–42 Chiron (Titus Andronicus) 28, 31, 81, 99 Aaron, relationship with 6, 52, 74–5, 81, 113, 116, 117–18 Lavinia, rape of 8, 78, 97, 185, 186, 187, 209–10, 261–2 murder of 115–16, 211, 213, 214, 216 Cicero 38, 41 De Oratore 40–1, 45, 46–7, 48, 52 co-authorship 1, 31 n.4, 39–40, 45 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 46 consumption 16–17, 223, 230, 231–2, 245 n.23, 251, 254–5, 259, 260; see also cannibalism; eating contaminatio 93

crying 144–6, 208, 225, 238, 241, 249–50 Demetrius (Titus Andronicus) 31, 48–9, 75, 81, 93, 94, 99–100, 104 Aaron, relationship with 6, 52, 74–5, 81, 113, 116, 117–18 Lavinia, rape of 8, 78, 97, 185, 186, 187, 209–10, 261–2 murder of 115–16, 211, 213, 214, 216 Derrida, Jacques 236, 241 Dr Faustus (Lloyd, 2016) 263 Drake, Sir Francis 107 n.9 Dundee Rep, Titus Andronicus (2015) 10, 250–1, 253–5, 258, 266 eating 16–17, 254, 255, 256–7, 259, 260; see also cannibalism; food Elizabeth I, Queen of England 91 ethnicity 89, 97; see also ‘blackness’; race/racial identity food 16–17, 230, 231, 232–3, 243 n.9, 251, 254–5, 259, 260; see also cannibal banquets Game of Thrones (HBO, 2015) 263 Goold, Rupert, Richard III (Almeida, 2016) 263 Goths 6, 49, 51, 90, 98, 102, 113

index

Greene, Robert, Greene’s Groat’s-worth of Wit (1592) 38, 46, 57 Hecuba (Metamorphoses) 29, 100, 187 Howard, Philip 253; see also Dundee Rep, Titus Andronicus (2015) human sacrifice 21, 25, 26, 27–8, 29, 30, 209, 213, 214, 230, 245 n.23; see also cannibalism humanism 3–4, 44, 136 isocolon 49, 52 Johnson, Samuel 46, 162, 203 Jonson, Ben, Bartholomew Fair (1614) 2, 37 Kyd, Thomas, The Spanish Tragedy (c.1586) 65, 83 n.6, 221 n.10 Laing, Stewart 253; see also Dundee Rep, Titus Andronicus (2015) laughter 172–4, 215, 228, 250, 261 Lavinia (Titus Andronicus) 7–8, 48–9, 78–9, 117, 146, 207 Bassianus, marriage to 113, 185, 261 murder of 24, 212–13, 257–61 mutilation of 160–3, 165, 171, 182–5, 188, 209–10, 214, 218, 232, 264–5

273

rape of 8, 39–40, 78–9, 116, 145, 160–3, 165, 171, 181–8, 190–1, 254, 261–2 sand-writing scene 8, 181, 182, 186, 187, 188–92, 194 and voice, absence of 160–1, 167, 170–1, 180, 181, 185, 188–9, 215, 251, 254, 256, 265 Lloyd, Jamie, Dr Faustus (2016) 263 London 91–3 theatres 48, 253 Loony Tunes 239, 240 Lucius (Titus Andronicus) 41, 98, 102–3, 104, 121, 124–5, 126, 249–50 and Aaron, death of 152, 154, 216–17, 232 Saturninus, murder of 24, 216 soliloquies 64, 69, 79 Lucrece (Rape of Lucrece) 7, 162, 165, 166–7, 169–70, 171 Lucretia (Fasti) 161, 169 Macbeth (Macbeth) 84 n.11 Marcus (Titus Andronicus) 6, 26, 54–5 fly-killing scene 118–21, 150, 151–2 Lavinia’s rape and mutilation, reaction to 162–4, 165–6, 181, 182–4, 189–90, 192 soliloquies 64, 66, 80 Marlowe, Christopher 40, 55, 73

274

index

Martius (Titus Andronicus) 30, 74, 75, 119, 217, 266 McIntyre, Blanche, Titus Andronicus (RSC, 2017) 251, 253, 260, 261, 266, 267 Memnon (Metamorphoses) 101, 102 Middleton, Thomas 39 Muliteus (Muly) (Titus Andronicus) 94, 96, 97, 98, 104–5, 122, 123 Mutius (Titus Andronicus) 118, 205

Philomela (Metamorphoses) 18, 23, 100, 161, 169, 188, 198 n.35, 232 Plautus, Menaechmi 93 Poldark (BBC, 2016) 263–4 Polymestor (Metamorphoses) 100 Polyxena (Troades) 29, 30 Procne (Metamorphoses) 18–19, 21, 25, 161, 227, 232 Publius (Titus Andronicus) 23

Ninagawa, Yukio, Titus Andronicus (RSC, 2006) 10, 250, 255, 264, 266

race/racial identity 4–7, 89, 97–8, 143–4, 149–50; see also ‘blackness’ racial mixing 6, 89–90, 91, 95–8, 100, 103, 105, 113, 114, 207 within family units 115, 117, 119–22, 124, 149 racism 71, 114, 120–1, 136, 147, 154 n.2, 207 rape 9, 100, 160–2, 164–5, 166, 167, 182, 185, 191, 193, 261–4 staging of 78, 165, 183, 209–10 see also under Lavinia (Titus Andronicus) Ravenscroft, Edward 15 repetition, use of 26, 29, 30, 42–5, 47–9, 51, 52–4, 55 Richard III (Goold/Almeida, 2016) 263 Roman literature 15–16, 41, 93, 94, 95, 231–2; see also

Othello (Othello) 90–1 ‘otherness’ 5, 102, 126, 144, 231; see also racism Ovid 38, 39, 228, 234 Fasti 161, 169 Metamorphoses 15, 16, 18–19, 21, 23, 25, 100–2, 140, 161, 169, 187, 188, 198 n.35, 226, 227, 232 Peacham, Henry The Garden of Eloquence (1593) 40, 45, 50–1 Titus (illustration) 207, 244 n.21 Peele, George 1, 3, 31 n.4, 38, 39, 40, 45–6, 47–9, 64 performance 41, 42–4, 52, 55; see also theatre productions, staging

Quintus (Titus Andronicus) 31, 74, 75, 119, 217, 266

index

under individual authors’ names Roman people/culture 25–6, 29, 89–90 Rome, ancient 25–6, 48, 52, 89–90, 99, 230 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) audience research project (2017) 2–3 Titus Andronicus productions 10, 250, 251, 253, 255, 260, 261, 264, 266, 267 Sandys, George 101–2 Saturn (Roman mythical figure) 226, 232 Saturninus (Titus Andronicus) 5, 24, 212, 226, 236, 261 murder of 24, 216 Tamora, relationship with 79, 96, 97, 105, 109 n.21, 113, 115, 116, 138, 185 Scythia/Scythians 28, 99 Seneca 17–18 Agamemnon 26 Epistles 16–17, 19 Hippolytus 186 Oedipus 33 n.20 Thyestes 3, 9, 18–21, 22–4, 25–6, 224, 226, 227, 230–1, 233–4, 236–7 Troades 3, 26–8, 29–30, 99 Shakespeare, William As You Like It 161, 168 The Comedy of Errors 93 Hamlet 160 Henry V 163 Henry VI, Part 1 159

275

King Lear 73, 160, 170, 203–4 Macbeth 84 n.11 Measure for Measure 159, 161 Othello 78, 160 Rape of Lucrece 7–8, 162, 165, 166, 168–9, 170 Richard III 263 Romeo and Juliet 64, 168 The Taming of the Shrew 95 writing style 40, 41, 45–6, 47–9, 56–7 Sherley, Thomas 92 Sidney, Philip 159, 166–7 silence 161, 167–8, 171–2, 175, 263–4, 265, 267 slave trade/slavery 90, 92, 94, 95, 112 Smooth Faced Gentlemen, Titus Andronicus (2015) 10, 250, 258, 265, 266–7 soliloquies 4, 63, 64–71, 81; see also under individual character names South Park 9–10, 223, 225–6, 227–30, 238–42 Spain 90 speech denial of see silence public 4, 70 self-addressed 4, 70–1, 82; see also soliloquies Spinoza, Baruch de 235 symploce 42–3, 44, 55 Taffety Punk Theatre Company, Titus Andronicus (2013) 10, 250

276

index

Tamora (Titus Andronicus) 5–6, 21–3, 27–8, 29, 49–50, 78–9, 95–6, 99–100 Aaron, relationship with 5, 6, 66, 72, 95, 96–7, 102–3, 112, 139–40, 142–3, 207–8 death of 24, 31, 216, 233, 237–8, 255 lovechild of (with Aaron) 5–6, 95, 112–13, 118, 120, 122, 208; see also under Aaron (Titus Andronicus) Saturninus, marriage to 113, 115, 123 soliloquies 64, 65, 68, 78–9 Tantalus (Thyestes) 19–20, 21, 226, 227, 231, 232, 234, 243 n.9 Taymor, Julie, Titus (1999) 10, 227, 237–8, 250, 251–3 Tereus (Metamorphoses) 18, 100, 161, 226, 232 theatre productions, staging 2–3, 9–10, 48, 52, 206, 208, 210, 211–12, 213, 217, 244 n.21, 258–9 and violence 8–9, 10, 204, 205, 209, 263, 264, 265–6 see also Titus Andronicus, stage adaptations of Thracians 100 Thyestes (Thyestes) 19, 24, 224, 230–1, 233–4 Titus (Taymor, 1999) 10, 188, 227, 237–8, 250, 251, 253

Titus (Titus Andronicus) 5, 6, 23–4, 25, 26, 28–9, 30–1, 47–8, 53–4, 93, 226 Alarbus, sacrifice of 30, 98–9, 213, 214 banquet scene 216, 234–5, 241 Chiron and Demetrius, murder of 211, 213, 214, 227 death of 216 fly-killing scene 6, 118–21, 150, 151–2 hand-cutting scene 76, 77, 94, 146, 213, 214–15, 218 Lavinia, murder of 24, 205, 212–13, 255, 257–61 Lavinia’s rape, reaction to 181–2, 186, 189–90, 192, 256–60 Mutius, death of 118, 205 soliloquies 64, 65, 66, 71–2, 78 Tamora, murder of 24, 237, 255 Titus Andronicus, stage adaptations of 10, 48, 52; see also under individual productions/director names Troy, legends of 3, 27, 28, 29, 101 Ulysses (Troades) 27–8, 30, 99 Van Senden, Casper 91–2 violence 7, 30–1, 149–50 sexual 10, 182, 251, 263–4, 265, 266–7; see also rape

index

spectacle of 2–3, 213, 265–6 see also cannibalism; human sacrifice Virgil 29, 30, 228, 234 Aeneid 26, 30 Warner, Deborah, Titus Andronicus (RSC, 1987) 10, 250 Webbe, William 51

277

weeping see crying Wither, George 162 Young Lucius (Titus Andronicus) 116, 124, 187–8, 241, 250, 252–3, 254, 255, 259 soliloquies 64, 65, 68, 80–1 Zeus (Metamorphoses) 101, 140