Titus Andronicus (Vol. 73) - Lawrence N. Danson (essay date spring 1974)
Lawrence N. Danson (essay date spring 1974)
SOURCE: Danson, Lawrence N. “The Device of Wonder: Titus Andronicus and Revenge Tragedies.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 16, no. 1 (spring 1974): 27-43.
[In the following essay, Danson examines the thematic balance of ineffective expression, imprisoning rhetoric, and madness with action and revenge in Titus Andronicus.]
The proliferation of generic categories for Elizabethan drama is a problem as ancient as Polonius' naming of the parts: “tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited.” One firmly entrenched category is that of the tragedy of revenge, which (according to Fredson Bowers) “has been classified as a definite, small subdivision of the Elizabethan tragedy of blood”; plays belonging to that category “treat, according to a moderately rigid dramatic...
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