[In the following essay, Harris focuses on Lavinia’s role as the currency used in the play's political exchanges, observing that the treatment of her body serves as a means of identifying the source of authority in Titus Andronicus.]

One of the most gruesome images of a woman on the Elizabethan stage occurs when Lavinia, in Shakespeare's early Roman play, Titus Andronicus, enters the stage, according to stage directions, with “her hands cut off, and her tongue cut out, and ravished” (at the opening of Act II, Scene 4).¹ Of course, the literary canon is strewn with dismembered or ravished women's bodies; Lavinia is one of many. 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. Bodies in the material world, much like “literary” bodies, are also seen and used as discursive constructions; bodies in the material world often function as sites of cultural meaning—as a ground on which cultural meaning is articulated. A recent newspaper clipping, headlined “Rape Victims Killed in Bosnia,” illustrates this:

Washington (AP) - The number of rapes has diminished in Bosnia but more Muslim rape victims are now being killed by relatives who feel disgraced, an American relief official said Tuesday.

“A sister who is raped brings shame to the family,” said Karel Zelenka, in charge of the U.S. Catholic Relief Services office in Zagreb, Croatia.

“Even brothers will kill a sister if she's been raped,” he said. “And nobody really knows how to handle it because these women do not want to be contacted because of the shame.”

Zelenka said the number of rapes by Serbs has declined because of the world outcry but the killings of raped women has increased as more pregnancies become evident. He provided no numbers on such deaths.

The relief official said at a news conference that large-scale rape had been an unprecedented attempt by Serbs to dilute an ethnic group, the Bosnian Muslims.²

The Serbian rapes expose the bodies of these Bosnian women as constructed sites of ethnic origin, a signification apparently shared by both Bosnian Muslim men and women, as well as the Serbian rapists. The murders of these women expose their bodies as constructed representations of Muslim family honor and, conversely, shame. This news report illustrates how women's bodies have a dangerously useful representational function; the body or sexual status of a woman, whether “real” or “literary,” is often textualized and used to signify something else.

Literary scholars repeatedly mine the representational value of women's bodies, or of a woman's sexual status, and Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus proves rich indeed. Lavinia—first as virgin daughter, then chaste wife, and finally mutilated widow—is repeatedly read as a signifier for something else, as an overview of the scholarship on this play reveals. Yet, as Eve Sedgwick asserts, much more work is needed to arrive at an understanding of “what it may mean for one thing to signify another.”³ More careful examination is needed, not of what these representations mean, but of how—the conflicting and complex ways in which women's bodies are invested with meaning.

Using Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, as well as an early pamphlet published under the name Jane Anger, I will show how representations of virginity, chastity and rape facilitate identifications of authority and function in the construction of gender. These representations are also useful for appropriating, articulating or validating more general claims to political authority. That is why these representations are often found in close proximity to what is defined as state power. Indeed, Titus Andronicus illustrates a profound relationship between sexuality and the state.

Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus is a play about circulations and exchanges of power; it is also a play which dramatizes relationships between representations of virginity, chastity and rape and constructions of masculine power. Both in sexual terms and in terms of exchange value, Lavinia is a “changing piece” (1.1.309), as she is called in this play; she is a means by which power is marked as masculine and is then transferred and circulated.

The play opens with brothers Bassianus and Saturninus each threatening to resort to arms against each other, if need be, to decide who is to succeed their father, the late emperor of Rome. Saturninus, as the “first-born son” (1.1.5), presumes privilege on the basis of birth; Bassianus, asserting succession by election, admonishes the citizenry to intervene: “Romans, fight for freedom in your choice” (1.1.7). In the midst of this, Marcus Andronicus enters to announce that the people of Rome have chosen, “by common voice,” his brother, the valiant warrior, Titus (1.1.21-22). While Saturninus' immediate response to Marcus’ speech is sarcasm, “How fair the tribune speaks to calm my thoughts!” (1.1.46), Bassianus' response is to surrender his armed supporters:

Marcus Andronicus, so I do affy
In thy uprightness and integrity,
And so I love and honour thee and thine,
The noble brother Titus and his sons,
And her whom my thoughts are humbled all,
Gracious Lavinia, Rome's rich ornament,
That I will here dismiss my loving friends.

(1.1.47-53)

It is in Lavinia's name that Bassianus is the first to defer a use of force.⁴ Thus, Lavinia's introduction into the play is as a device to effect a transfer of power. Soon Saturninus will attempt to “one up” Bassianus' political use of Lavinia.

Titus is reticent: claiming “age and feebleness” (1.1.188), he asks instead for “a staff of honour for [his] age, / But not a sceptre to control the world” (1.1.198-99). Titus is not politically naive. To be proclaimed ruler is one thing; but to maintain rule is a further task. As he says, one may “Be chosen with proclamations today, / Tomorrow yield up rule, resign [one's] life” (1.1.190-91). This difficulty, of maintaining rule and order, is even more evident as a quarrel between Saturninus and Bassianus erupts now in front of him, with Titus himself the brunt of Saturninus' venom: “Andronicus, would thou were shipped to hell” (1.1.207).

Titus' shrewd response is to solicit the people's “suffrages” so that he can appoint someone besides himself as emperor (1.1.218), a gesture which will not only situate him as less vulnerable, but can also establish him as the preeminent patriarch of Rome. The people of Rome agree to accept “whom he admits” and Titus names “Lord Saturnine” (1.1.222-25). When Saturninus then calls Titus the “father of [his] life” (1.1.253), he is acknowledging Titus' role in this transfer of imperial power as well as Titus' undoubted patriarchal authority.

To demonstrate his thanks as well as his newly established authority, Saturninus claims Lavinia to serve as “Rome's royal mistress” (1.1.241). He is even more explicit: he will make her the “mistress of [his] heart, / And in the sacred Pantheon her espouse” (1.1.241-42); he intends to claim her virginity. Yet his interest in her is not strictly lascivious, for it is Tamora, the stolen Gothic queen, who incites Saturninus' lust (1.1.261-62). Saturninus says that he intends to use Lavinia to advance the Andronici name and family (1.1.238-41) which, of course, can strengthen his own political position: to claim sexual access to Lavinia places him in a potential kinship relationship with Titus. Titus cedes Lavinia and gives Saturninus his prisoners as well: the Gothic queen, Tamora; her three sons, and Aaron, the Moor.

At this moment, Bassianus seizes Lavinia and proclaims, “this maid is mine” (1.1.276); he claims that he and Lavinia are already betrothed to each other. Emily C. Bartels reads this circumstance as an event that “places the idea of ‘Roman justice’ in crisis, as it brings different interpretations of that idea into a conflict that the play refuses to resolve”; Bartels explains, Saturninus has “royal prerogative and Titus' parental support on his side,” while Bassianus claims Lavinia with a prior and, therefore, legal claim.⁵ This conflict mirrors the conflict with which the play opens, where Saturninus assumes rights to Rome on the basis of blood ties and Bassianus supports an elective process for determining succession. To resolve this dispute over Lavinia, Marcus asserts a particular definition of “Roman justice”—“Suum cuique” [to each his own] (1.1.280)—but it is, as Bartels explains, the “policy itself” which “presages just the sort of anarchy and ambiguity Marcus attempts to avert,” in that both Saturninus and Bassianus are claiming their own.⁶

Yet neither Marcus nor Bartels see differences or similarities in Titus' “gifts” (1.1.255) to Saturninus: an empire; his virginal daughter, Lavinia; and a stolen queen, Tamora. For both Marcus and Bartels, the means of exchange is the issue, rather than what is exchanged. Neither Marcus nor Bartels raise a question, as the play seems to, about how these three entities—Lavinia, Tamora, and the empire—might be different from each other. Along with being an investigation of “what kind of prerogative legitimates possession,” to use Bartels' language,⁷ this play raises questions about what can be possessed, and how possessions have meaning.

Titus gives all to Saturninus—his virgin daughter, a stolen queen, and an empire—and all are valued as significations of power. When Titus surrenders Lavinia to Saturninus and hands over Tamora as well, as “tribute” (1.1.251), he is treating these two women similarly; both serve as markers of his own prowess and authority. Yet, there are differences. Tamora is desired because she serves as a signifier of one group's ability, the Romans, to disempower another, the Goths. Her value depends primarily on the political juxtaposition of the Romans and the Goths, and outside of that reference she has little value unless she is found to be sexually attractive. Fortunately for her, Saturninus finds Tamora physically appealing: when Titus hands her over, Saturninus remarks in an aside: “A goodly lady, trust me, of the hue / That I would choose, were I to choose anew” (1.1.261-62).⁸ As a sexual object, Tamora is able to claim a degree of authority for herself; it is the only way she can invest herself with a value beyond being a signifier of who won and who lost a battle.

Tamora's illicit liaison with Aaron marks her as explicitly sexual, and here she functions as that feared side of female sexuality: an insatiable sexuality turned loose—a sexuality uncontrolled and uninhibited. Audrey Eccles, in Obstetrics and Gynaecology in Tudor and Stuart England, uses English obstetrical textbooks dating from the mid-1500s to explain sixteenth-century understandings of female sexuality: because it was thought that women as well as men emitted a seed upon orgasm, procreation required that women be as sexually aroused as men.⁹ And, “it was also strongly believed that women whose sexual needs were not satisfied were in danger of illness.”¹⁰ It was important then that women achieve orgasm and experience sexual satisfaction. However, as Lawrence Stone explains, a delicate balance was required: “The husband was expected to give his wife sufficient satisfaction to avoid her being obliged to seek consolation elsewhere, but not so much as to arouse her libido to the extent of encouraging her to seek extra-marital adventures.”¹¹ Moreover, as Stone suggests, a woman's ability to have multiple orgasms probably accounted for a more serious concern—that a woman's sexual needs would drive her to illicit sexual couplings.¹²

The fear was that a woman's sexual appetite, if turned loose, represented a potential social threat. Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus, in Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540-1640, discuss the frequent occurrences of the stereotype of the seductress in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century pamphlets.¹³ “The Renaissance,” claim Henderson and McManus, “viewed women as possessed of a powerful, potentially disruptive sexuality requiring control through rigid social institutions and carefully nurtured inhibitions within the woman herself.”¹⁴ Tamora is a figure of a woman whose sexuality has no external controls and no internal inhibitions; she is a woman who owns and enjoys her own sexuality. This could account for Saturninus' attraction to her, in that she functions as a figure of uninhibited sexuality itself. This also accounts for how dangerous she is. Though she is transferred as if she were property, because she refuses to be owned sexually, she remains a threat to social order. Indeed, this is the primary role she plays in this drama.

Lavinia's power is also related to her sexuality—to her function as a “changing piece” (1.1.309), a function which is initially contingent on her virginity and later contingent on her marred marital chastity. First, Bassianus calls her “Rome's rich ornament,” as if she belonged to all; then, her father claims her as the “cordial” for his later years. Next, Saturninus possessively names her not only Rome's royal mistress, but also his own. Titus complies. When Bassianus seizes her and proclaims, “this maid is mine” (1.1.276), Lavinia is silent. Lavinia appears to have no voice in any of these exchanges, for as she is passed about she does not speak.¹⁵

These exchanges are a classic example of an exchange of women where, as described by Gayle Rubin, the “social relations of a kinship system specify that men have certain rights in their female kin, and that women do not have the same rights either to themselves or to their male kin.”¹⁶ Within this frame, rape means the abduction of a woman, as property. This is how the term “rape” is used in this play and it is not clear which rape of Lavinia—Bassianus' or Tamora's sons'—inspired the transition in her father's eyes, from her being an image of virtue to becoming an image of shame.

Although the word “rape” is used by Saturninus and Titus, the term is vehemently denied by Bassianus, who by now is Lavinia's husband.¹⁷ He asserts that he is simply “possessed” of what was already his (1.1.407). The definition of the word is based on ownership: “rape” is an appropriate term only if what is taken is not rightfully owned. Bassianus assumes legal sanction for his ownership rights: “let the laws of Rome determine all,” he defiantly declares (1.1.408). Yet, both Titus and Saturninus had presumed ownership of Lavinia and are “dishonored” now that she has been taken by Bassianus (1.1.425, 432). “Honour,” then, is a function of ownership.¹⁸ Also, it is not insignificant that the term “possess” has sexual meaning as well.

In the exchange of women, it is as if, on the one hand, when ownership presumptions are violated, rape is the resulting charge and it is the original owner who is the victim. On the other hand, if an exchange is mutually agreed upon between men, no matter how politically invested the exchange is, it is as if there were no victims. Tamora, Titus' prisoner, serves as an example of both situations. She had been Queen of the Goths when Titus seized her and took her with him. This is rape, as in an abduction, in that the Goths are dishonored by this exchange. His display of her extends the dishonor and is thus a display of his own power, as Tamora recognizes when she says: “we are brought to Rome / To beautify thy triumphs” (1.1.109-10). However, when she is passed on to Saturninus, he has asked for her and she is freely given, so “rape” would not be an appropriate term. The same is true with Lavinia. When Saturninus claims her and Titus agrees, possession is not perceived as rape; they both assume that Saturninus, as Emperor, can rightly claim Lavinia and that Titus, as Lavinia's father, can surrender her to him. When Bassianus claims that he “justly may / Bear his betrothed from all the world away” (1.1.285-86), Saturninus and Titus either do not know of Bassianus' earlier betrothal, or they choose not to acknowledge it, for they cry “rape” when Bassianus seizes her. The term rape can range in meaning, but the violation that remains constant is the violation of the right of ownership.

Lavinia's abduction is not an insignificant event. By claiming her, Bassianus is able to disrupt the power alliance that is about to be established between Saturninus and Titus through her, an alliance that is worth—to Titus—even the life of one of his own sons. Or, does he kill his son, Mutius, because Mutius dares to question his recently heightened posture as one who gives away empires? Titus says to Mutius, before killing him: “Barr'st me my way in Rome?” (1.1.291).¹⁹

The passion that compels Titus to kill his own son could also be misdirected rage at Lavinia, who had remained silent when she could have asserted a defensive voice in her “abduction.” That Bassianus could claim they were already betrothed implies some volition on Lavinia's part, for betrothal presumes a contractual agreement. Her brother's reference to her as being a “lawful promised love” (1.1.298; the stress is mine) reinforces the notion of her connection with Bassianus as having been previously arranged as well as being, now, legally binding. If not her father, who but Lavinia could negotiate this alliance with Bassianus? Did Lavinia offer prior consent, independent of her father? It could very well be Lavinia who bars Titus' “way” in Rome.

Lavinia's claim to control of her own maidenhead denies Titus' claim which is based on social, familial and gendered rights: as her father, he cannot claim sexual access himself but he can presume control of sexual access to her body. He successfully battles with the Goths and is chosen by the people to stand as Emperor of Rome: these events prove him powerful. Yet, for an Elizabethan audience, Queen Elizabeth herself was proof that a woman could accomplish the same. It is primarily in regard to Lavinia's body, and most especially in regard to her maidenhead, that Titus can mark his power as specifically masculine. Lavinia's silence, when she is—according to Titus—“abducted,” suggests Lavinia's autonomous assent and thus violation of Titus' masculine and patriarchal authority.

Lavinia's silence, when she is still able to choose silence, is useful to her.²⁰ Not only is silence recommended as a virtue for women,²¹ it is also shrewdly convenient for Lavinia: when Bassianus claims Lavinia, she does not offer assent or resistance; she may or may not be complicit. Her silence is potentially her own tool and weapon.²² The only way to truly disarm her is to take away her ability to choose silence and to literally “dis-arm” her as well. In this way, the power that she might have claimed, by using silence, is appropriated. All three—Bassianus, Saturninus and Titus—use Lavinia, but because it is not clear who can rightfully use her, successful use of her offers a promise of being all the more powerful. That it is not clear who can claim her, either to have or to give away, means she can potentially be used by any of these three men. That Lavinia might make choices on her own functions even more to destabilize power arrangements and negotiations. Thus Lavinia can potentially function as a primary agent for the construction of masculine power and authority for any one of them. Lavinia is a construction deeply invested with discursive function and, as an unstable signifier, she can provide for any one of them an assured masculinity: Lavinia is a “changing piece.”

Using Gayle Rubin's definition of “gender”—“a socially imposed division of sexes … [and] a product of the social relations of sexuality,” the fact that Bassianus, Saturninus and Titus can claim use of Lavinia functions to create gender.²³ Their use of her has no biological basis, is socially imposed male behavior, and is a product of the social relations of sexuality.²⁴ While defined as virginal or chaste, Lavinia serves all three men as both agent and marker of their being male.

If Lavinia is “Rome's rich ornament,” possession of her signifies power; she is the crown of the empire. Some readers argue that Lavinia's rape, by Tamora's sons, is motivated by their libidinal desires, while others see the rape as a representation of profound political disorder.²⁵ One could also argue that the play illustrates both the eroticism of political power and the political power of erotic attractions, and demonstrates how both the political power and the erotic attraction are held in place by Lavinia's purported virtue. As a virgin maid or a chaste wife she is valuable and desired property and politically very useful. Once raped, her ability to serve as a mark of authority or power is undone.

Much like property, and like the empire and the Gothic prisoners, Lavinia is passed from Titus to Saturninus. She is also a conduit for power; through Lavinia, both Bassianus and Saturninus attempt to secure access to Titus' power. And she is a device for disrupting power: both Bassianus and Saturninus attempt to use her to disrupt a power alliance between Titus and the other brother. For all three men, she functions to signify power that is specifically masculine. Yet, no one has to “get the girl” for Lavinia to function to establish their masculinity; simply to be in a position to have a claim on her is sufficient.

All of this is acted out in a public arena; they are all, as Marcus says, in the “eyes of Rome” (1.1.170), and thus the stakes are high, especially in terms of the construction of masculine power and patriarchal authority. Yet, the stakes are not higher than if these events were enacted in private, for even private sexual arrangements ultimately have public consequences. Virginity and chastity, especially, are where the public and the private spheres meet in that the maintenance and/or violation of them, though both a result of private acts, are matters of public and political concern, especially in regard to replenishing a citizenry, lineage, inheritance, and public patriarchal authority, as well as masculine signification. Virginity and chastity expose both sexuality and gender as indelibly political constructions.

Early in the play all of the seeming desire for Lavinia is contingent on her virginity. If Lavinia is the crown of Rome, her maidenhead is the crown's most precious gem. When Lavinia first enters, she offers an invocation for her father: “In peace and honour live Lord Titus long; / My noble lord and father, live in fame?” (157-580). Titus responds: “Lavinia, live, outlive thy father's days—/ And fame's eternal date, for virtue's praise!” (1.1.167-68). Of course a daughter is likely to outlive her father; his concern is that she remain virtuous. As in King Lear, this ability, or right—to withhold or give away sexual access to a daughter—is presumed to belong to the father. Titus appreciates that Lavinia is as yet perceived as a virgin; he appreciates “Kind Rome, that hast thus lovingly reserved” her for him (1.1.165). Only by being yet a virgin can she still be his. Because she is sexually chaste, she can be the “cordial” of his age, to “glad” his heart (1.1.166).

Lavinia's virtue, in the form of virginity, is also valuable to Saturninus. Were she suspected of having lovers, he could not confidently presume use of her as a conduit for an alliance with Titus, for only if their offspring are assuredly his can he assume a kinship relation with Titus. Lavinia is valued because there appears to be no public doubt about her virtue. This public view is where an appearance of virtue counts the most, which may explain why Bassianus is so explicitly public with his claims. To claim a prior commitment and to make it clear that her virginity is to be claimed by him is a brilliant move: he is thus able to establish sexual ownership of her without implicating her virtue.²⁶ Of course, it is only with her virtue intact that Lavinia can have continued political currency, even for him.

While each one—Titus, Bassianus, and Saturninus—has a stake in Lavinia's virtue, Tamora would have Lavinia's virtue undone; as a chaste wife, Lavinia is Tamora's antithesis. Yet Lavinia would have Tamora see the two of them as similar: when Demetrius and Chiron threaten rape, Lavinia pleads with Tamora on the basis of shared gender: “O Tamora, thou bearest a woman's face” (2.3.136). She pleads with Chiron: “Do thou entreat [Tamora] to show a woman's pity” (2.3.147). With a comment that foreshadows what is to come, Tamora refuses the comparison between them: “I will not hear her speak,” is her response to Lavinia's claims for an essential womanhood. Tamora also uses Lavinia as an exchange item, just as Bassianus and Saturninus do. Tamora has been thwarted by Aaron in her attempt to place her own sexuality within her own sphere of control and she has no other access to power—other than through Lavinia. As one critic explains, “Since she cannot strike directly at the men who oppress her, Tamora chooses to revenge herself on Lavinia.”²⁷

Lavinia is valuable only as long as her virginity and chastity are maintained. Her virtue, in the form of virginity, cannot be regained or reclaimed once it is taken; in the act of being possessed, her is lost. This contradiction marks virginity as the most unstable and yet the most attractive of all properties of possession. It is the same contradiction which also marks virginity as most productive of masculine power. In terms of virginity, it is the father who can come closest to possessing a woman's virginity, for only he can have it and yet not lose it. Better than that is to give it away, in the same way that Titus gives the empire away at the opening of this play. By Roman convention, as the father, Titus can choose death over life for a disobedient son; similarly, he can withhold or give away his daughter's sexuality. Marital chastity functions similarly: only a husband can possess a chaste woman's marital virtue. To keep or give away a daughter's maidenhead or to possess a chaste wife is to identify one's power as masculine.

That Lavinia is sexually assaulted and maimed is inevitable, for how else can the power that she represents—for the Andronici family, and then for Bassianus—be defused or put back into circulation? The only way a chaste woman, once she is married, can continue to function as a “changing piece”—as a conduit for power or as a disruption of power—is to be made into debased currency.²⁸ After Lavinia is described in the stage directions as appearing with “her hands cut off, and her tongue cut out, and ravished” (2.4), she has no recognizable value. She becomes an unfamiliar, unknown presence to the men around her: Marcus leads her to Titus and says, “This was thy daughter” (3.1.63, stress added); Lucius, Lavinia's brother, exclaims, “This object kills me” (3.1.65; stress added). For the uncle she is no longer a daughter and for the brother she is no longer a sister. For Lavinia's nephew, although he knows she is his aunt, she is a feared unknown; running from her, he says, “Alas, sweet aunt, I know not what you mean” (4.1.49). For her father, she becomes a “map of woe” (3.2.12). No longer able to reflect his masculinity or his power, she now represents his shame and sorrow (5.3.42). When Lavinia's role as a “changing piece” is used up, she becomes deflated currency and can be discarded.

Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus dramatizes a crisis of authority. The question is not simply, “Who will be the new emperor?” It is also a question of who will decide and on what terms. The play illustrates how the authority of either an emperor or a father can be at risk, and how images of a woman's sexual status can be used to represent as well as undermine, reclaim or enact that authority. In this play, women's bodies are used in more than one way as “changing pieces.” Tamora initially serves to mark an exchange of power. Yet, in claiming her own sexuality, Tamora serves as a primary disruption to social order. As virginal daughter and chaste wife, Lavinia also serves as a token of exchange of authority. By altering her sexual status, she can function as a determining device for establishing masculinity and masculine power as well.

For literary scholars, Lavinia serves a variety of representational functions. For Eugene M. Waith, after she is raped, Lavinia “is the central symbol of disorder, both moral and political.”²⁹ For A. C. Hamilton, Lavinia serves as both “the instrument through which Tamora seeks revenge against Titus” and a “tragic symbol”; her ‘martyred' and ‘mangled’ body” symbolizes a fallen Nature.³⁰ Hamilton continues: “Her ‘descent into hell’ is the vehicle for the tragic action.”³¹ For Lawrence Danson, Lavinia is “an emblem for the plight of the voiceless Andronici in a now alien Rome.”³² Also, for Danson, Lavinia is a “central such device” of a series which “adumbrate the frustrated need to speak”; in a gender-blind yet gender-specific summary, Danson sees Lavinia as “a conceit for the nearness of man to monster when deprived of the humanizing gift of expression.”³³ Rudolf Stamm opens his discussion of this play by immediately identifying Lavinia as a “purely visual theatrical element” that serves as a stimulus for the violent emotions and speeches of her relatives.”³⁴ For Douglas Green, Lavinia's “mutilated body ‘articulates’ Titus' own suffering and victimization.”³⁵ Because Lavinia is a virgin, and then because she is raped and mutilated, she assumes a central role in this play; yet she always serves as a stand-in for something else.

An origin for this refiguring of Lavinia is found in the play itself. As Gillian Murray Kendall shows, both Marcus and Titus turn Lavinia's body into a “picture” of something else.³⁶ For example, Marcus calls Lavinia's tongue the “engine of her thoughts,” but he then immediately recasts her tongue as a “sweet melodious bird” (3.1.82-85). Kendall also cites Titus' turning the “fresh tears” on Lavinia's cheeks into “honey-due / Upon a gath'red lily” (3.1.111-13); for Kendall; “the point here is not so much that characters are trying to avoid seeing Lavinia by using metaphor and language … but that they have difficulty seeing Lavinia for language.”³⁷ Thus Kendall concludes that “Lavinia is a reality that language distorts and refracts that in turn shows how language itself is fragmented.”³⁸ Kendall carefully explains in a footnote that her use of the term “reality” is not to refer to “the world external to the play,” but to the hypothetical “as if” world posited by the play.³⁹ Kendall's argument is that the play is self-consciously staging how “rhetoric dismembers the very reality it would portray or influence.”⁴⁰

In the play, the most explicit example of the refiguring of Lavinia and of the way that language “distorts and refracts” is Marcus' often repeated response on first seeing Lavinia with “her hands cut off, and her tongue cut out, and ravished” (2.4); the “hands cut off” become, for Marcus, a “body bare of her two branches”; her “tongue cut out” is

a crimson river of warm blood,
Like to a bubbling fountain stirred with wind, [which]
Doth rise and fan between rosed lips,
Coming and going with honey breath.

(2.4.17-25)⁴¹

Marcus sees Lavinia but cannot seem to say what he sees without using hyperbolic metaphor. Even though she has been radically disfigured, he can see her only in the standard overwrought Petrarchan terms in which women were often described. Given the stage direction description of Lavinia, it is hard to say which is more grotesque: that stark and direct description, void of rhetorical adornment, or Marcus' depiction of this violent image in bucolic pastoral terms.

For Gillian Murray Kendall, once Lavinia is disfigured, she becomes “an emblem of the way in which, throughout this play, facts resist the violent manner in which characters define and transform their world through language.”⁴² Yet Kendall, admitting contradiction, goes on to claim that “Lavinia, as speechless emblem, becomes a work of art (made by Shakespeare) designed to show the limits of art and artful language.”⁴³ Of course, Kendall, in recasting Lavinia as an emblem of a schism between reality and language, is also refiguring Lavinia. Indeed, aren't all who name Lavinia an emblem, or symbol, or representation of something else, also attempting to “re-picture” her?

Of course, training in literary scholarship precludes essentialist or literal interpretations of Lavinia's rape, and if Lavinia is always seen as a literary construction, or a “textual determination,” to use Jonathan Goldberg's term,⁴⁴ then emotional involvement in the misogynist brutality depicted in this play can be dismissed. A literary critic is required to turn a brutal rape into a literary device or a metaphoric device of language, devoid of literal meaning, as Marcus does on seeing Lavinia. This requirement is the same insistence on objectivity that Stephanie H. Jed dramatizes at the opening of her book, Chaste Thinking; The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism:⁴⁵

QUESTIONS TO THE JURORS:

A woman will testify that on a particular night, in or around the year 510 BC, the son of the tyrant came to her home and forcibly raped her. She will describe the experience of things a man did to her body. Do you think you can be totally unemotional and impartial in deciding the facts of this case?

Yes.

Does the crime of forcible rape have any tangible significance to you?

No.

Will it be awkward for you to sift through the evidence in the jury room?

No.

Do you find my questions nosy, an intrusion into your privacy?

Yes.

Will you find the description of this rape distasteful?

No.

When you heard the charge “forcible rape,” did you hope to be chosen as a juror?

Yes.

In this book, Jed explains how Lucrece—probably a better-known literary representation of rape—is seen as “a literary topos to be studied by literary scholars, not a real event to be adjudicated by a court of law.”⁴⁶ However, Jed goes on to show how—in either a court of law or a literary text—jurors and literary interpreters “are complicitous in the continued reproduction of Lucretia's testimony”: because of continued concern for “what actually happened,” Lucretia describes again and again what happened to her.⁴⁷ Jed continues: “By including ourselves as the end of this narrative, we can assume responsibility for the continued reproduction of the rape of Lucretia.”⁴⁸

Albert H. Tricomi's readings of Titus Andronicus provide an illustration of Jed's concerns.⁴⁹ Tricomi, as do most critics and readers, refigures Lavinia. In the play, Aaron suggests to brothers Demetrius and Chiron that they take Lavinia by force:

The woods are ruthless, dreadful, deaf, and dull.
There speak, and strike, brave boys, and take your turns;
There serve your lust, shadowed from heaven's eye,
And revel in Lavinia's treasury.

(2.1.129-32)

For Tricomi, this last line—“And revel in Lavinia's treasury”—“simultaneously creates, in prurient delight, a literally-imagined picture of Lavinia's ravished chastity at the moment of violation.”⁵⁰ This picture, which is his, creates for him “an ugly beauty.”⁵¹ With evident enjoyment of this play—“Whatever we may think about the success of this use of figurative language, there is no escaping the fact that Titus Andronicus is … a very witty play”—Tricomi engineers yet another picture of Lavinia, one of her “holding a pole between her stumps and grasping the pole's end inside her mouth.”⁵² Though, admittedly, as Tricomi explains in a footnote, it is “Shakespeare's own invention” to have Lavinia use “her stumps and her mouth” (his stress) to reveal her rapists, it is Tricomi who provides the image of a woman with a pole inside her mouth (this stress is mine).⁵³

Also, although in this essay Tricomi refers to the “one horror the dramatist could not depict upon the stage,” which is “the fact of Lavinia's violated chastity”⁵⁴ in an essay of his that appeared two years later, he is able to give the reader a picture of this horror, one that may have been inspired by his own autoerotic image of Lavinia with her stumps holding a pole “inside” her mouth. Using the Song of Songs image of the stopped fountain and its “symbolic associations with virginity and the virtue of chastity,” Tricomi sees in “the most vividly developed metaphor in Marcus' ode to Lavinia's lost beauty”—in the famous “bubbling fountain” image—“an appropriate, tasteful, and almost conventional image of lost virginity and consequent shame”; the bubbling fountain is, he claims, associated with “the female sexual organs”; it is an “opened fountain whose seals have been broken.”⁵⁵ Lavinia's rape is reproduced again and again.

However, it is possible to locate sixteenth- and seventeenth-century models for uses of representations of chastity and virginity which disrupt a seeming patriarchal domination of these images: women in Renaissance England appropriated representations of chastity to empower themselves and to validate not just their own cultural authority, but gender superiority as well.

In 1589, a defense of women, possibly the first one in English to be written by a woman, was published in pamphlet format in London, called “her Protection for Women.”⁵⁶ Claiming that “it was ANGER that did write it,” the pamphlet is signed by Jane Anger, and is presumed to be a defense against the claims of a pamphlet published a year earlier. Anger's pamphlet is subtitled: “To defend [women] against the Scandalous Reports of a late Surfeiting Lover, and all other like Venerians that complain to be so overcloyed with women's kindnesse.” The basis of the defense of women in this document is an interpretation of scripture that favors women as more pure than men, and an indictment of men in general.⁵⁷ Contrasting women and men, Anger argues that “In women is only true fidelity: except in her, there be [no] constancy … Our virginity makes us virtuous; our conditions courteous; and our chastity maketh our trueness of love manifest. … We are contrary to men because they are contrary to that which is good … our behaviors alter daily because men's virtues decay hourly” [the brackets above are not mine].⁵⁸ Here is a voice, one presented as speaking as a woman and for women, claiming that what has been heretofore imposed on women—requirements of virginity and chastity—are indeed essential truths about them, truths which mark them as superior to men. The Anger essay is evidence of women's complicity in the construction of women as chaste figures, a complicity motivated by a desire to appropriate a commonly used representation to overturn a presumed subordinate position of women in relation to men.

Of course, Elizabeth I had been doing this all along: making political use of her discursively constructed woman's body. Philippa Berry, in Of Chastity and Power; Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen, provides a sufficiently detailed account of Elizabeth's reign to show how she created and exploited ideologies of herself as both virgin queen and chaste mother to her country.⁵⁹ Other scholars attempt to explain why. For example, Mary R. Bowman's rationale for “the dynamics of Elizabeth's self-figuration” is that Elizabeth desired to project herself in a favorable contrast to the threatening female sexuality represented by Mary Stuart.⁶⁰ Most historians do assume that identifying herself as both virgin and chaste was a way for Elizabeth to enhance her own political authority.

No doubt, Elizabeth's virginity was used by others as well, simultaneously and variously, for their own agendas. Linda Woodbridge, in “Palisading the Elizabethan Body Politic,” asks, “was not England, for a Protestant country, oddly obsessed with virginity?”⁶¹ Woodbridge argues that, on the basis of issues related to pollution, politics, and geography, and the way that women's bodies are used as metaphors for threatened societies, in fact, “England needed a virgin queen.”⁶²

Other scholars argue that Elizabeth's singular sexual status is used to elide the contradiction supposedly inherent in a woman functioning as a political authority. For example, Pamela Joseph Benson asserts that Spenser defeats both the humanist and the Anglican arguments used to explain the legitimacy of rule by women, and yet is able to glorify Elizabeth by extending the Calvinist argument that “only women specially raised by God to office ought to rule.”⁶³ Using descriptions of Elizabeth which are literary rather than historical and on the scale of the divine rather than human, Benson continues, Spenser is able to render Elizabeth as extraordinary in relation to other members of her sex.⁶⁴ For Benson, Spenser creates Elizabeth as sexually anomalous: rather than investing political authority in a woman, Spenser instead renders Elizabeth in metaphorical metaphysical terms, thus turning her sexuality into a literary commodity which can then be subject to his own uses and authority as a writer. Indeed, if sexuality itself is a social and literary construction, then both Elizabeth I and Edmund Spenser can easily manipulate it for their own purposes.

The Jane Anger publication complicates the argument that Elizabeth I was somehow “anomalous.” Women's bodies have long been a product of public and political discourse, carried on by poets, playwrights, pamphleteers and historians, and have long been literary commodities and representational devices. The Jane Anger pamphlet suggests the possibility that women other than Elizabeth may claim the authority of representation; it also illustrates ways in which women can use the same representational strategies for their own purposes.

In the opening to an essay about Erasmus' writings on pedagogy, Barbara Correll cites a commonplace in English Renaissance studies: a tendency to look to Elizabeth I as the primary or even singular “unsettling force” that “exploited and provoked psychological anxieties in her male subjects, anxieties of male selfhood.”⁶⁵ To counter these regiocentric notions, Correll looks to Erasmus' writings on pedagogy and sees, on the European continent and early in the century, before Elizabeth acceded to the throne, “signs of a kind of psychopolitical crisis of masculine identity and authority among members of a rising intellectual bourgeoisie who sought to negotiate positions of authority in a power structure still largely determined by the hereditary nobility and the institution of the Church.”⁶⁶ Correll argues that Erasmus' discourse “on civility and the fashioning of secular male selfhood” discloses an “insistent concern for the beleaguered masculine identity.”⁶⁷ Women became, continues Correll, “a cause of concern” because notions of subordination and superiority in general were jeopardized by conflicts between hereditary and intellectual or bourgeois claims to power.⁶⁸ In other words, there is much anxiety about gender and authority long before Mary and Elizabeth took their thrones and long before Edmund Spenser wrote even the beginnings of The Faerie Queene.

The pamphlet to which Jane Anger is responding is evidence of what Correll calls an “uneasy presence of the socially constructed feminine, threatening to erupt from its place.”⁶⁹ There was, in the 1580s and 1590s, a spate of shrill diatribes against what was then defined woman, all being published in pamphlet format by printers who presumably found such publications profitable. These misogynist publications and the responses to them, wherein women sometimes claim for themselves to be that which defines them, are further evidence that anxieties about the ideological construction of gender persist in the late sixteenth century, and that the authority to fully determine the outcome is still up for grabs.

The editors of A Biographical Dictionary of English Women Writers 1580-1720 suggest that printer Thomas Orwin “seems to have organized a ‘gender debate”’ for he printed both of these pamphlets—the one by Jane Anger and the one to which it is a response.⁷⁰ Authorship and authority of representation are now commercial commodities in that, to the printer, it does not matter if Jane Anger is a woman or not. What matters is simply that the pamphlet is marketable, possibly even more profitable, with a woman's name on it.

That further “debates” continued in the following decades indicates continuing concern regarding gender and authority. Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty S. Travitsky assert that it was common practice for men to be the authors of purported women's responses in these “woman questions debates.”⁷¹ If men are admittedly writing both the men's and the women's parts, the profitability of this issue and these pamphlets is assumed. Although Simon Shepherd offers no evidence to support his claim that although it is not known how Jane Anger came to be involved—“it seems that she was put up to it by a printer,” he discusses in general “the distortions produced by commercially exploitative publishing” and cites specific examples of women's “replies” which were written by men.⁷²

Shepherd, however, raises an issue even more interesting: “There were, in fact,” he says, “the immediate material conditions for all-female production of pamphlets”: there were women authors and women printers.⁷³ Curiously, he proposes that these women printers did not necessarily print work by female writers because “the articulate shared consciousness of womanhood was missing. There was no shared objective, no common movement, to draw together the separate female producers.”⁷⁴ Yet, the Jane Anger pamphlet functions to dispute this claim; it claims to be speaking in a collective voice, for women. Shepherd himself, in comments which preface the Jane Anger text, in his edited collection of these pamplets, notes the “‘we women’ manner” of this pamphlet as well as others.⁷⁵ Also, in the “End piece” to this collection of pamphlets, he relates how “when women spoke with sufficient force for their message to be public they spoke as a community of women, and as women who were no longer going to entrust what they had to say to men. They spoke as women together for women together.”⁷⁶ To support this claim Shepherd quotes “the Leveller women's petition to Parliament, 7 May, 1649, signed by ten thousand women” (stress mine).⁷⁷ Women apparently did speak for women's concerns and did speak in a collective voice.

Readings of historical and literary representations of virginity, chastity and rape do not have to require complicity in repeated reproductions of misogynist violence, or pleasure in abusive circulations of power and claims to authority. Eve Sedgwick argues that “an analysis of representation itself is necessary. Only the model of representation will let us do justice to the (broad but not infinite or random) ways in which sexuality functions as a signifier for power relations.”⁷⁸ My purpose has been to expose and disrupt continued uses of representations of chastity and rape in the service of erotic pleasure and circulations of exclusively masculine power; constructions of gender-specific placements of authority; and uses of a woman's sexual status to determine gender superiority or inferiority. To that end I also use Lavinia.

Notes

1. This and all subsequent quotations from Titus Andronicus are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 1023.

2. Tulsa World 10 February 1993.

3. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 11.

4. In her essay, “‘Scars Can Witness’: Trials by Ordeal and Lavinia's Body in Titus Andronicus,” in Women and Violence in Literature; An Essay Collection, ed. Katherine Anne Ackley (New York: Garland, 1990), 157-9, Karen Cunningham identifies this moment in the play as the point at which “the sexual politics begins.”

5. Emily C. Bartels, “Making More of the Moor: Aaron, Othello, and Renaissance Refashionings of Race,” Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (Winter 1990): 443.

6. Idem. Bartels uses the translation that is offered in most editions of this play: she cites Sylvan Barnet, a Signet editor. In “The Dismemberment of Hippolytus: Humanist Imitation, Shakespearean Translation,” in Classical and Modern Literature (1990), 104, Mihoko Suzuki sees a relationship between the untranslated Latin tags in this play and the various physical mutilations carried out on the stage: “these obtrusive Latin phrases not only break the dramatic verisimilitude of the play but serve to emphasize the gap between the two languages and between the two cultures [Roman and Elizabethan]. These fragmentary phrases also point to the fragmentation and dispersal of classical learning, as well as mirror the various actual dismemberments in the play.”

7. Bartels, 443.

8. Douglas Green, in “Interpreting ‘her martyr'd signs’: Gender and Tragedy in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (Fall 1989), identifies Saturninus' initial response to Tamora as “lust-at-first-sight.”

9. Audrey Eccles, Obstetrics and Gynaecology in Tudor and Stuart England (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1982), 33.

10. Ibid., 35.

11. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage: In England 1550-1800, abridged ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 314.

12. Ibid., 311.

13. Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus, Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540-1640, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985).

14. Ibid., 55.

15. Citing Catherine Belsey's work, in The Subject of Tragedy; Identity & Difference in Renaissance Drama (New York: Routledge, 1985), Cunningham, 158-9, explains Lavinia's silence: “Lavinia's submissiveness throughout these exchanges is perhaps more understandable when we recall that during the sixteenth-century for a woman to complain was a punishable offense.” Yet, at the same time, stereotypical sixteenth-century prescriptions for women do not explain Tamora's behavior. In “The Alphabet of Speechless Complaint: A Study of the Mangled Daughter in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus,” in The Triple Bond: Plays, Mainly Shakespearean, in Performance, ed. Joseph G. Price (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975), 256, Rudolph Stamm argues that Lavinia's silence, as she is passed from Titus to Saturninus to Bassianus, “foreshadows the mainly passive role that will be hers throughout the rest of the play.” Although he does cite, as exception, the forest scene with Tamora (2.3), Stamm overlooks how Lavinia, though mute, asserts a reading of Ovid; how, though she has no hands with which to hold a pen, she writes the legal charge of rape and names the guilty ones as well; and how she holds a basin to collect Chiron's and Demetrius' blood when Titus cuts their throats.

16. Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Towards an Anthropology of Women, ed Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review, 1975), 177. See also Sedgwick's Between Men.

17. For a fundamentally different discussion of the use of the term rape, as well as the play, see Nancy L. Paxton's “Daughters of Lucrece: Shakespeare's Response to Ovid in Titus Andronicus,” in Models in Literature, ed. Rediges Par (Innsbruck: AMOE, 1981), 217-24. Paxton argues that Shakespeare is expressing a “more serious moral attitude toward rape” (219) and suggests that Shakespeare is exposing a man [Titus] who misreads female chastity and silence (223).

18. Gregory W. Bredbeck, in Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 98, argues that “honor is not an a priori characteristic of the golden Ur-world of desire but is rather an ex post facto construction of the brazen world of chastity, rape, and sexuality.”

19. Beryl Rawson, in “The Roman Family,” in “The Family in Ancient Rome” New Perspectives (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 7, defines the Roman family as follows: “The Roman familia consisted of the conjugal family plus dependents (i.e. a man, his wife, and their unmarried children, together with the slaves and sometimes freedmen and foster-children who lived in the same household). … The formal head of the legally recognized family, the paterfamilias, was the oldest surviving male ascendant, and his authority over his descendants lasted until his death, unless formally dissolved by a legal act.” Peter Garnsey and Richard Soller, in The Roman Empire: Economy, Society and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 126, provide further description: “In early Rome discipline in the family was hard and standards of virtue high; in paradigmatic exempla fathers executed adult sons for disobedience in battle, and virtuous women esteemed their chastity more highly than their lives.” Eugene M. Waith, in “The Ceremonies of Titus Andronicus,” in Mirror up to Shakespeare: Essays in Honor of G. R. Hibbard, ed. J. C. Gray (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 163, reads the killing of Mutius as motivated by “Titus' loyalty to the new emperor and to his own promise.”

20. Jane Hiles, in “A Margin for Error: Rhetorical Context in Titus Andronicus,” in Style 21 (Spring 1987), 67, also notes Tamora's use of silence.

21. Henderson and McManus, 54.

22. For Gillian Murray Kendall, in “‘Lend me thy hand’: Metaphor and Mayhem in Titus Andronicus,” in Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (Fall 1989), 305, Lavinia's silence “renders her a kind of cipher.” It is after she is raped that she becomes “a kind of code, a cipher that needs deciphering”: Lavinia, she says, “embodies (or disembodies?) [sic] the mysteries of language” (314).

23. Rubin, 179.

24. Rubin, 178-79.

25. David Willbern, in “Rape and Revenge in Titus Andronicus,” in English Literary Renaissance 8 (1978), 173, assumes that “the central force behind Lavinia's fate” is sexual desire. Suzanne Gossett, in “‘Best Men are Molded out of Faults’; Marrying the Rapist in Jacobean Drama” in English Literary Renaissance 14 (Autumn 1984), 306, argues that “the men's motives are primarily sexual.” Yet, Paxton, 221, sees the rape as “the result of political and familial disorder.”

26. For Lorraine Helms, in “‘The High Roman Fashion’: Sacrifice, Suicide, and the Shakespearean Stage,” in PMLA 107 (May 1992), 557, this scene “evokes the marriage strategy known in Roman law as raptus, or bride theft,” where the purpose is to force the woman's parents to consent to marriage. Helms also notes that this scene registers conflicts in English law as well, for while the medieval Westminster statutes also distinguish between lawful and unlawful exchanges of women, sixteenth-century statutes begin to redefine rape as a violent crime against a woman rather than as a property crime against her guardians.” However, Lavinia's abduction is seen by both Titus and Saturninus as an abduction of property in that her silence, as Helms explains, “proclaims the victim's ritual consent.”

27. Paxton, 222.

28. Helms, 557, argues that “dismemberment provides the evidence required to distinguish rape from raptus,” and that sexual violence demands that “Lavinia be not only silent but—notoriously—silenced.”

29. Eugene M. Waith, “The Metamorphosis of Violence in Titus Andronicus,” in Shakespeare Survey 10 (1957), 44.

30. A. C. Hamilton, The Early Shakespeare (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1967), 69-70.

31. Idem.

32. Lawrence Danson, “Introduction: Titus Andronicus,” in Tragic Alphabet: Shakespeare's Drama of Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 11.

33. Idem.

34. Stamm, 255.

35. Green, 322.

36. Kendall, 308.

37. Ibid., 309.

38. Idem.

39. Ibid., 299n1.

40. Ibid., 299.

41. James Hirsh, in “Laughter at Titus Andronicus,” in Essays in Theatre 7 (November 1988), 64, claims that “the inappropriateness of this ‘crimson river’ speech is one of the most frequently noted features of the play.” According to Kendall, 306-14, “Marcus' speech is so problematic that almost no critic has written about Titus Andronicus without attempting to deal with it.” Waith, in “The Metamorphosis of Violence,” 39, offers the most frequently cited explanation for the “combination of crude violence with … fanciful description.” According to Waith, a broad reading of Ovid's Metamorphoses demonstrates how Ovid uses violence and “the transforming power of intense states of emotion” to effect transformations (41); “Violence, as Ovid describes it,” is, concludes Waith, “an emblem” of transformation (43). Waith goes on to explain the great popularity, for “Renaissance Englishmen,” of Ovid, for his style as much for his depictions of nature and love, and how, “In generation after generation students were encouraged to imitate him” (43). Albert H. Tricomi, in “The Mutilated Garden in Titus Andronicus,” in Shakespeare Studies 9 (1976), 90, calls the “bubbling fountain” speech a “prettified Ovidian monologue.” Hamilton, 66, argues that such passages are sites where Shakespeare is attempting to “overgo Ovid.” Green, 318, is obviously correct when he says that the play has been “accused” of “Ovidian verse.” Finding it difficult to accept Waith's defense of this kind of rhetoric in the play, D. J. Palmer, in “The Unspeakable in Pursuit of the Uneatable: Language and Action in Titus Andronicus,” in Critical Quarterly 14 (Winter 1972), 321, finds the effect “certainly bizarre” and “literally unutterable”; Palmer, 322, reads Marcus' speech as a “formal lament [which] articulates unspeakable woes.”

42. Kendall, 306.

43. Idem.

44. Jonathan Goldberg, Voice Terminal Echo: Postmodernism and English Renaissance Texts (New York: Methuen, 1986), 3.

45. Stephanie H. Jed, Chaste Thinking; The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 1.

46. Ibid., 2

47. Ibid., 4.

48. Ibid., 6.

49. Albert H. Tricomi, “The Mutilated Garden” (cited above), and “The Aesthetics of Mutilation in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Survey 27 (1974), 11-19.

50. Tricomi, “The Aesthetics of Mutilation,” 15.

51. Idem.

52. Ibid., 16.

53. Idem.

54. Tricomi, “The Aesthetics of Mutilation,” 17.

55. Tricomi, “The Mutilated Garden,” 94. Tricomi is not the only one to read female genitalia in this scene: both Goldberg, 176n18, and Green, 325, cite S. Clark Hulse's description, in “Wrestling the Alphabet: Oratory and Action in Titus Andronicus,” in Criticism 21 (1979), 116, of this scene as fellatio. Also, Mary Laughlin Fawcett (as Goldberg also notes), in “Arms/Words/Tears: Language and the Body in Titus Andronicus,” in ELH 50 (1983), 262, sees Lavinia's mouth as vagina dentata. Karen Newman, in Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 11, cites a common sixteenth-century comparison between a woman's mouth and a woman's genitals: “An open mouth and immodest speech are tantamount to open genitals and immodest acts.”

56. Jane Anger, “her Protection for Women: To defend them against the Scandalous Reports of a late Surfeiting lover and all other Venerians that complain so to be overcloyed with women's kindness,” The Women's Sharp Revenge: Five Women's Pamphlets from the Renaissance, ed. Simon Shepherd (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985). Henderson and McManus, 14, cite this pamphlet as “the first English defense written by a woman.” Also, according to the bibliographic annotations by the editors of The Renaissance English Woman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty S. Travitsky (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 351, this is the first defense of women by a woman. Betty S. Travitsky makes this claim initially in The Paradise of Women; Writings by Englishwomen of the Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press. 1989), 103, which she published a year earlier: “The individual who wrote under this pseudonym apparently is the earliest woman to have written a feminist pamphlet in England.” For Shepherd, in The Women's Sharp Revenge (cited above), 30, Jane Angers's pamphlet “marks the first time that [he] is aware that a woman participated in the Renaissance gender controversy.”

57. Anger, 39.

58. Ibid., 30, 36.

59. Philippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power; Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (New York: Routledge, 1989).

60. Mary S. Bowman, “‘she there as Princess rained’: Spenser's Figure of Elizabeth.” Renaissance Quarterly 43 (Autumn 1990), 519.

61. Linda Woodbridge, “Palisading the Elizabethan Body Politic,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 33 (Fall 1991), 341.

62. Idem.

63. Pamela Royce Benson, “Rule, Virginia: Protestant Theories of Female Regiment in The Faerie Queene,” English Literary Renaissance 15 (Autumn 1985), 277. Using sixteenth-century publications as evidence, James E. Phillips, Jr., in two essays, “The Background of Spenser's Attitude Toward Women Rulers” and “The Woman Ruler in Spenser's The Faerie Queene,” in Huntington Library Quarterly 5 (1941-2), provides a thorough account of the published controversy—framed in almost exclusively religious terms—over government by women, a controversy well under way before Elizabeth took the throne.

64. Benson, 287.

65. Barbara Correll, “Malleable Material, Models of Power: Women in Erasmus's ‘Marriage Group’ and Civility in Boys,” ELH 57 (Summer 1990), 241.

66. Idem.

67. Idem.

68. Idem.

69. Ibid., 257.

70. Maureen Bell, George Parfitt and Simon Shepherd, A Biographical Dictionary of English Women Writers: 1580-1720 (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990), 7.

71. Haselkorn and Travitsky, 357.

72. Shepherd, 30, 22-23.

73. Ibid., 23.

74. Idem.

75. Ibid., 30.

76. Ibid., 197.

77. Idem.

78. Sedgwick, 7.