SOURCE: “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, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975, pp. 255-73.

[In the following essay, Stamm explores Lavinia's role in Titus Andronicus, viewing her as a “stimulus” for the expressions of violence performed by her relatives. Finding that Shakespeare endowed Lavinia with individuality, Stamm further demonstrates that Shakespeare used Lavinia to refine his theatrical techniques, specifically the non-verbal portrayal of emotion.]

In a recent article on Shakespeare's mirror technique in Titus Andronicus¹ I tried to show how the young playwright, conscious of his power of language and his sense of the theatre and stimulated by the competition of Kyd and Marlowe, experimented in this play with various methods of coordinating speech and gesture, elaborate poetical patterns, and effective stage situations to create a poetic tragedy capable of satisfying the demands of the learned lovers of classical poetry as well as those of the naive friends of sensational spectacle and of uniting the two groups in a common theatrical experience. The problem was pursued in connection with a small group of scenes, all of them dominated by the titular hero, and little attention was paid to the most extraordinary secondary figure in the play: Lavinia, who is deprived of the power of speech in the second act and can express herself through gestures only in all her later scenes, in which she becomes, of necessity, a purely visual theatrical element, in danger of being no more than a passive image of horror, a stimulus for the violent emotions and speeches of her relatives. This inquiry observes how Shakespeare uses her in this function, but is also at pains, often with the help of his mirror technique, to give her sparks of an active life and touches of individuality. In doing this it will throw light on the larger theme of the playwright's struggle to come to terms with the competing claims of his poetic and his theatrical ambition.

In the opening scenes of the play Lavinia appears to be very much her father's daughter. She shows the same fatally idealistic bent, the same respect for duty and righteousness, the same readiness to neglect the claims of instinct, natural emotion, and common sense. She is ready to marry Saturninus because her father wills it so, although she is betrothed to Bassianus, with whom she is clearly in love. When the new emperor suddenly shows his extraordinary interest in the captive Queen of the Goths and makes her rather ambiguous promises, Lavinia remains unperturbed. To his tactless question:

Lavinia, you are not displeas'd with this?

(I.i.270)²

she answers politely, patiently, and according to the highest ethical standards:

Not I, my lord, sith true nobility
Warrants these words in princely courtesy.

(I.i.271-72)

This is a proud answer, too, since it rejects both Saturninus's suspicion that she could feel jealousy and the idea that he could be as weak and foolish as to desert her for the sake of Tamora. A moment later Lavinia is claimed by Bassianus, and, without comment, she allows him to carry her off. This foreshadows the mainly passive role that will be hers throughout the rest of the play with the exception of the forest scene (II.iii). When her husband is killed before her eyes and she finds herself at the mercy of the cruel empress and her lustful sons, desperation makes her eloquent for once. She refuses to believe possible the utter depravity of her three opponents, and frantically searches for a spark of humanity in their breasts. She does so without humiliating herself before the vile creatures. Realizing that they are obdurate she renounces her pleas for mercy and curses Tamora until she is silenced by brute force and carried off by Chiron and Demetrius.

The next entry of Lavinia and Tamora's sons is introduced by the stage direction: Enter the Empress' sons, DEMETRIUS and CHIRON, with LAVINIA, her hands cut off, and her tongue cut out, and ravish'd. It is a superfluous direction since Lavinia's condition becomes perfectly clear through the derisive mirror speeches of the two ravishers:

Dem. So, now go tell, an if thy tongue can speak,
Who 'twas that cut thy tongue and ravish'd thee.
Chiron. Write down thy mind, bewray thy meaning so
An if thy stumps will let thee play the scribe.

(II.iv.1-4)

The rape as well as the loss of her tongue and hands are mentioned in transitive mirror passages to clarify the physical means used by the actor (or actress) to illustrate Lavinia's plight. At the same time these passages are integrated in the characterization of the two ogres by their brutal tone. Demetrius's “See how with signs and tokens she can scrowl” (II.iv.5) stands apart from the rest as it depicts her present behavior; a wild kind of gait, posture, and gesticulation, expressive of mental and physical torture. This mirror passage is of the suggestive rather than the representative type as it leaves it to the reader's or actor's imagination to find the gestic equivalents of the “signs and tokens.”

Thus when her ghastly figure is discovered by her uncle Marcus the audience is already aware of her condition. The effect of contrast sought by the playwright is between the cruel contempt of the two cowardly criminals and the horrified solicitude of Marcus. Marcus's famous—or perhaps notorious—soliloquy is the most ambitious experiment with the mirror technique in the play. It is a question whether it can properly be called a soliloquy as it is, in fact, the language part of an exchange between a speaking and a mute character. What it aims at first is to transform the grotesque figure of horror left by Chiron and Demetrius into an object of sympathy and pity. Lavinia's mutilations are not mirrored directly again; instead, they are subjected to a double process of comparison. The images appearing in it want to function as bridges between a spectacle so horrific as to deaden and pervert our responses and our normal human experience. If they do not quite succeed in doing this the excessive elaboration characteristic of the whole speech is responsible. It is clearly inspired by the ideals of Euphuistic rhetoric. The three themes—the lost hands, the lost tongue, the rape—are arranged in a balanced pattern. From the motif of the hands the speech moves to that of the tongue; the central position is taken—as it implies the loss of honor—by the rape; then the motif of the hands is resumed, and the parallel pattern is completed by a second handling of that of the tongue.

The peculiar complications of the passage are due to what we have called a double process of comparison, in the course of which Lavinia's present condition is on the one hand expressed by poetic imagery and on the other confronted with her former state of perfection. It appears clearly in Marcus's second address:

Speak, gentle niece. What stern ungentle hands
Hath lopp'd and hew'd, and made thy body bare
Of her two branches—those sweet ornaments
Whose circling shadows kings have thought to sleep in,
And might not gain so great a happiness
As half thy love?

(II.iv.16-21)

The initial metaphor, comparing Lavinia's body to a tree whose branches have been lopped, is a striking synchronic mirror passage. It passes into diachronic description when the speaker, in a daring development of his imagery, contrasts the present mutilated state of Lavinia's arms with their former beauty. The combination of the two images of sleep in the shade of the beautiful branches of a tree and sleep in Lavinia's beautiful arms is unexpected and original, but the passage peters out in the redundant:

And might not gain so great a happiness
As half thy love?

Even without this unfortunate coda it is open to criticism. Its second, diachronic part disturbs the dramatic rhythm by introducing an epical slow-motion effect; it makes Marcus dwell too long and insist too much on one single aspect of his niece's disaster; it oversteps the limits within which the relation of imagery to fact can be dramatically effective. Besides, it entirely disregards Lavinia's feelings: to remind her at the present moment of her former perfection and beauty is to increase her suffering instead of alleviating it.³

The four lines mirroring the flow of blood from Lavinia's mouth suffer less from the same blemishes:

Alas, a crimson river of warm blood,
Like to a bubbling fountain stirr'd with wind,
Doth rise and fall between thy rosed lips,
Coming and going with thy honey breath.

(II.iv.22-25)

The diachronic element is present again, but it is restricted to the two short and comparatively inconspicuous words “rosed” and “honey.” The simile built into the main metaphor is artificial, but the description of Lavinia's intermittent hemorrhage itself is impressive: it is a striking illustration of our author's method of taming horror by poetic elaboration.

Now, invoking the fundamental myth of the play, Marcus jumps to the correct conclusion:

But sure some Tereus hath deflowered thee,
And, lest thou shouldst detect him, cut thy tongue.

(II.iv.26-27)

These and the following sixteen lines are given to the central theme of the rape of Lavinia. They are, as we shall see, rather successfully integrated in the dramatic score with the exception of two of the similes included in them. Whereas the line “As from a conduit with three issuing spouts” (II.iv.30) is strong and sufficiently rapid, what follows appears too elaborate and slow again:

Yet do thy cheeks look red as Titan's face
Blushing to be encount'red with a cloud.

(II.iv.31-32)

The same objection is provoked by the sententious insertion:

Sorrow concealed, like an oven stopp'd,
Doth burn the heart to cinders where it is.

(II.iv.36-37)

The following comparison of Philomel's and Lavinia's plights stresses the connection between the myth and the play once more, introducing at the same time the dramatically relevant problem of the identification of the authors of Lavinia's misery. Then the symmetrical rhetorical pattern is completed in a return to the retrospective description of Lavinia's former perfection. The lost hands, as well as the lost tongue, are praised as sources of delightful music. The idea that the sight of Lavinia's fingers moving on the lute and the sound of her voice could have influenced Tamora's ruffianly sons is not without a piquant touch of irony. Essentially, this passage is another epical element not completely assimilated to the dramatic style. Although it contains gestic images and a number of dramatically effective references to Lavinia as she is now standing before Marcus, it offers her no opportunity of action or reaction, thus forcing upon her the posture of a frozen statue of misery, which she must keep up too long.

But the young Shakespeare had too much of the playwright's instinct to have the whole scene spoilt by the demands of the rhetorical pattern in his mind. In fact, it was his ambition to integrate this pattern in a thoroughly dramatic event, and he was at least partially successful in realizing it. In what follows we shall observe his method of theatrical innervation in some detail.

The opening line:

Who is this?—my niece, that flies away so fast?

(II.iv.11)

is a question asked and immediately answered in Marcus's mind, but it is given the form of a spoken aside, which might draw passionate assent from an excited audience. It implies a situation: Marcus unexpectedly catching sight of his niece as she is running away from her torturers; and it introduces at once the motif to which the scene owes its dramatic life: Marcus seeking his way, step by step, from his happy ignorance to the knowledge of the full extent of Lavinia's violation. The dramatic and the mirror function of the line are combined with the help of a very unusual syntactical form. Hardly has the main question been asked when the recognition occurs, forcing Lavinia's name into its forward position, before the relative clause can complete the question. This sequence is so unusual that its punctuation has proved difficult from the start as is shown by the differences between the poor solution found in Q_1-2 and the various improvements offered by Q₃, and F, and by the modern editions. The most adequate form would probably be as follows:

Who is this—my niece!—that flies away so fast?

In the first three words of the next line Marcus requests his niece to stand and speak:

Cousin, a word: where is your husband?

(II.iv.12)

In this four-stress line there is a rhythmical gap after the heavy caesura, which is not without a theatrical function. It permits Lavinia to stop and remain standing with her face averted from her uncle, and Marcus to approach her. Before he realizes her condition he utters the first thought that struck him when he recognized her: why should she be alone here in the woods? A moment later he has seen that she is without her hands. So far the movement of the scene has been very rapid; now the first retardation occurs, Marcus being given three lines to express his reaction to the enormity before his eyes:

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!

(II.iv.13-15)

This carefully balanced rhetorical structure is also dramatically effective. The thought of dreaming and sleeping suggests a low use of the voice and the eleven monosyllabic words of the first line a staccato effect of even stresses, toned down by the alliteration of four w's to a kind of thick speech, expressive of the paralysis of emotion under the impact of horror. The same paralysis is in the anaphorical beginning of Marcus's second antithetical wish. Then a more energetic rhythm makes itself felt, indicating that paralysis is giving way to pity, sorrow, and anger. The gestic implications of all this remain unspecified, but the rhythm suggests that Marcus comes to a sudden standstill in his rapid approach to his niece, that he remains nailed to the ground for a few seconds, closing his eyes and stretching out his arms with raised hands to protect himself from the nauseating sight. The moment of immobility passes; with the words “Speak, gentle niece,” he completes his advance to her in an impetuous movement of sympathy. Now instead of the simple direct question “Who had done this?,” which the mature Shakespeare would have given him, we find the complicated metaphorical structure discussed above. Lavinia must continue in her posture of distress, her face turned away from her uncle. Since she fails to respond to his question, there is a pause at the end of his speech. It provokes his next urgent inquiry: “Why dost not speak to me?” Before he speaks again an implied gestic event intervenes: in a shy, hesitant movement Lavinia turns her face to him so that he can see the blood flowing from her mouth or—another response to the implication—can take her head between his hands in an affectionate way and turn it toward him. As he declaims on the flow of blood, she stands motionless again, with lowered eyelids rather than with wide-open, horror-stricken eyes, until he reaches his conclusion that she must have fallen victim to a new Tereus. Her reaction to this is the subject of the following mirror passage, which almost sinks under its burden of simile and metaphor. Lavinia turns her face away again, but not before Marcus has seen the blush of shame on it. Taking this for an affirmation he insists eagerly:

Shall I speak for thee? Shall I say 'tis so?

(II.iv.33)

His next lines presuppose an unmistakable reaction of hers: a grave and meaningful nod or one of the more passionate forms of gestic assent. Now Marcus becomes obsessed by the thought of the unknown author of Lavinia's disaster and indulges in his long declamation on his own suppressed emotions and on the influence her former charms should have exerted on the ravisher. The playwright tries to make the most of the contrast between the mute, immobile, disfigured Lavinia before our eyes and her former active and lovely self. The references to her presence are few: she is addressed twice, as “lovely niece” and “cousin.” A very extraordinary effect is achieved by the demonstratives in “those pretty fingers,” “those lily hands,” and “that sweet tongue.” The spectator tends to take them in their primary local sense and directs his attention to the places on Lavinia's person where her hands and tongue should be, only to realize more acutely than before that these limbs are lost things of the past, the demonstratives having acquired a temporal function.

The return to present action is introduced by the impulse words “Come, let us go,” followed by a prospective mirror passage heavily charged with metaphor:

Come, let us go, and make thy father blind,
For such a sight will blind a father's eye;
One hour's storm will drown the fragrant meads,
What will whole months of tears thy father's eyes?

(II.iv.52-55)

This is a perfect introduction to Titus's coming reaction and tear imagery, but it is hardly an encouragement for Lavinia to appear before her father. Her reluctance to become the cause of so much sorrow makes her move away from her uncle, a movement mirrored in the first words of his final couplet:

Do not draw back, for we will mourn with thee;
O, could our mourning ease thy misery!

(II.iv.56-57)

To overcome her scruples he mentions the little her family can do to relieve her misery: their sympathy of woe. At this Lavinia acquiesces and follows her uncle.

Looking back upon the whole of this fascinating speech we conclude that its author tried hard to integrate a pattern derived from epical poetry in a dramatic event and that, although he did not fully succeed, he was able to create a scene with a greater theatrical potential than is usually conceded.

In the next scene in which Lavinia appears (III.i.) she plays a secondary role. She acts as a foil for the lamentations of the titular hero; her fate is one of the blows of fortune driving him from one paroxysm of grief through the next into half-madness and dreams of revenge. Yet the playwright tries to make more of Lavinia than a passive emblem of suffering by giving her opportunities of reaction and, on rare occasions, even of spontaneous action. When Lavinia is led in by Marcus she remains a passive object at first. Lucius uses the very word when he exclaims:

Ay me! this object kills me.

(III.i.64)

Her whole plight is not sized up by Titus and Lucius at a glance although they see at once that she is handless. For Lucius the shock is so severe that it not only wrings from him the above exclamation but literally knocks him off his feet. This is the implication of Titus's line:

Faint-hearted boy, arise, and look upon her.

(III.i.65)

The imagined action seems to be that of a few steps backward ending in a kneeling posture with hands clapped to face so as to wipe out the horrid vision. Titus's reaction is verbal. He wants Lavinia to name the perpetrator of the crime and develops, in his highest rhetorical style, the half-crazy punning associations striking his fevered imagination at her sight. As Lucius repeats his question Marcus finds himself obliged to tell his brother and nephew of the loss of her tongue. Shakespeare is using the device developed in the scene of her encounter with Marcus: the step-by-step discovery of Lavinia's condition, but, having taken the first two steps, he omits the third. The rape is not mentioned, nor is there any reference to it in the whole of the present scene. It is reserved for act IV, scene i, where it will become the dominating theme: a point to be remembered before we accuse our author of writing in terms of individual scenes only and of neglecting the overall structure of his play. Instead of pursuing his inquiry into Lavinia's plight, Titus is sidetracked by the punning possibilities in the word “deer.” Then his mind wanders to the desperate situation of all his family, and he undertakes an emblematic representation of it, referring to himself in a powerful simile, to the way his wretched sons have gone to death, to Lucius, and, finally, to Marcus and Lavinia, who are shown weeping. This allusion to her tears is the first sign that she is more in this scene than a mere object of the scrutiny and sympathy of her family. The end of Titus's speech mirrors a more specific reaction:

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 gath'red lily almost withered.

(III.i.110-13)

It is when she hears Titus speak of the possibility that his two condemned sons might really have killed Bassianus that her response becomes more active; indeed, she is able to reject this possibility unequivocally. This is made clear by the following mirror speech coming from Titus:

No, no, they would not do so foul a deed;
Witness the sorrow that their sister makes.

(III.i.118-19)

It is suggestive rather than representative, implying gestures of revulsion and sadness at the thought that even her father can entertain suspicions of this kind while she is unable to clear her brothers of them. The passage introduces a new and moving motif into the play: an ideal relationship of paternal and filial love endows Titus with a partly intuitive faculty of reading Lavinia's imperfect gesticulation correctly and of becoming her best interpreter. At the present moment he is so touched by her mute but energetic defense of her calumniated brothers that he wishes to show her his gratitude and love:

Gentle Lavinia, let me kiss thy lips,
Or make some sign how I may do thee ease.

(III.i.120-21)

The unmistakable implication is that she avoids his kiss, probably because she considers her wounded mouth and her dishonored self unworthy of receiving it. He does not resent this repulse, sensing the honorable motives behind it, and therefore adds his second, rather helpless invitation, which remains without visible response. Thus Titus resorts to his verbal method of consolation again. He depicts an imaginary scene of shared sorrow, an emblem of the family's “sympathy of woe.” As he is speaking, his mind becomes clouded, and his imaginings turn violent and bitter. This is not the way to assuage her grief. Lucius interrupts his father reproachfully:

Sweet father, cease your tears; for at your grief
See how my wretched sister sobs and weeps.

(III.i.136-37)

The scene is then brought to a provisional conclusion by two parallel pieces of business. Marcus, in an attempt at supporting Lucius's intervention, offers Titus his handkerchief with the words: “Good Titus, dry thine eyes.” The offer is rejected because the handkerchief is soaked with Marcus's own tears. In spite of this Lucius tries a similar experiment with Lavinia when he says:

Ah, my Lavinia, I will wipe thy cheeks.

(III.i.142)

She turns away from him, and Titus interprets her gesture:

Mark, Marcus, mark! I understand her signs
Had she a tongue to speak, now would she say
That to her brother which I said to thee:
His napkin, with his true tears all bewet,
Can do no service on her sorrowful cheeks.

(III.i.143-47)

In the subsequent parts of act III, scene i, Lavinia intervenes on two occasions with spontaneous actions of her own, and in either case they express her sympathy with her father. When Titus, after the Aaron episode and the sacrifice of one of his hands, resumes his complaints and tries to pray, he mirrors and appreciates her gesture of sympathy with the words:

                                                  What, would'st thou kneel with me?
Do, then, dear heart; for heaven shall hear our prayers.

(III.i.210-11)

Quite soon the two kneeling figures rise again as Titus's exasperated mind converts his prayer into threats and hyperbolical lamentations, identifying Lavinia's sighs with the wind thrashing the sea and herself with “the weeping welkin” inundating the earth. When Titus sees himself as the tormented sea and as the drowned earth her sighs and tears become the expression of her dismay at the sight of her deranged father. Her behavior, not mirrored but implied in the text, could be a sudden frightened jumping up from her kneeling position, a few steps backward, away from the raving old man, the raising of her miserable stumps in an imploring gesture, and a solicitous stare at him, accompanied by the sighs and tears referred to in his speech.

Now the messenger with the cut-off hand and the heads of the executed sons arrives, and the horror of the scene reaches its climax. Lavinia's reaction is as unexpected as that of her father a moment later. She cannot go beyond her earlier demonstrations of woe, nor does she try to. Instead, she shows her fine mettle by simply walking up to her father and kissing him affectionately. The fact that this kindly action has no effect whatsoever on him becomes a measure of his suffering. Like the rest of the family Lavinia witnesses his paroxysm of laughter and is relieved when he saves himself by turning his thoughts toward revenge. She participates in the ceremony of revenge staged by him and accepts his vow and, as well, the gruesome and grotesque role he provides for her in the crazy procession in which she finally leaves the stage.

Thus Lavinia is an agent in this scene in spite of all her handicaps, and the touch of Shakespeare's humanizing hand makes itself felt in the way the father-daughter relationship is developed. Although this relationship is a secondary theme, it was considered promising enough to be resumed in the first part of the following banquet scene. At its beginning Titus shows himself troubled by the question how he and Lavinia, in their maimed condition, can express the only emotion that interests him: grief. His preoccupation has its origin in the sight of Marcus standing there with his arms folded before his breast, a gesture seen by Titus as the classical expression of grief:

Marcus, unknit that sorrow-wreathen knot;
Thy niece and I, poor creatures, want our hands,
And cannot passionate our tenfold grief
With folded arms.(4)

(III.ii.4-7)

His mind then goes in search of the second-best gesture, within the reach of crippled complainers like Lavinia and himself. For himself he finds the thumping of his breast with his remaining right hand; and he not only describes this gesture but demonstrates it as well while he is speaking the defective line:

Then thus I thump it down.

(III.ii.11)

The beating of his breast coincides at first with the stressed words “thus,” “thump,” and “down,” and after that it may supply the missing stresses. Turning to his daughter, Titus continues:

Thou map of woe, that thus dost talk in signs!
When thy poor heart beats with outrageous beating,
Thou canst not strike it thus to make it still.

(III.ii.12-14)

The irregular accentuation of the second line successfully represents the irregular heartbeat. …

The “thus” in the first line is best interpreted as a reference, accompanied by a glance, to an imploring gesture Lavinia is making in order to assuage the agitation of her father. The “thus” of the third line is a retrospective and therefore nongestic reference to Titus's preceding demonstration. As he pursues his line of thought his mind becomes increasingly deranged. His ravings about what Lavinia should do to her heart and about the loss of their hands come to an end when he remembers the purpose of the “banquet” and invites the company:

Come, let's fall to; and, gentle girl, eat this:
Here is no drink. Hark, Marcus, what she says—
I can interpret all her martyr'd signs;
She says she drinks no other drink but tears,
Brew'd with her sorrow, mesh'd upon her cheeks.
Speechless complainer, I will learn thy thought;
In thy dumb action will I be as perfect
As begging hermits in their holy prayers.
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.

(III.ii.34-45)

After his general invitation to the company he turns to Lavinia, who has sat down by his side. He starts feeding her, lifting a morsel to her mouth with his remaining hand. She accepts it but seems to find the chewing of it difficult. This is implied by what seems to be a question (“Here is no drink?”) inspired by his solicitude for his daughter and accompanied by a searching glance across the table. Before any other response is possible Lavinia declines the offer by a gesture interpreted by Titus in terms of one of the tear conceits by which he is obsessed. This is one of the passages in the play where we are tempted to think that the conceit was first in the playwright's mind and that he was then at pains to invent a dramatic situation for it. The situation does not suit the conceit too well. There is a touch of homely realism and of spontaneous human feeling in Titus's attempt to feed his mangled daughter, qualities conspicuously absent from his rhetorical interpretation of her gesture as well as from most of his other poetic flights. They make themselves felt again in the following address to the “speechless complainer,” in which Titus reasserts his wish to be his daughter's best interpreter, enumerating specifically five of the “signs” by which she tries to make herself understood. After Lavinia has shown her appreciation of her father's kind intentions by gestures that have left no sign in the text, she becomes a mute and unobserved witness of the fly episode, in which the correlation of speech and action is strikingly successful. At the end of the scene Titus's tender concern for her appears once more in his invitation:

                                                                                Lavinia, go with me;
I'll to thy closet, and go read with thee
Sad stories chanced in the times of old.

(III.ii.81-83)

This passage provides an easy transition to the next scene (IV.i.), in which Lavinia is more active and shows more initiative than anywhere else in the play. This scene, especially its first part leading up to the disclosure of Lavinia's secret, aims at the same kind of interaction of speech and gesture as the fly episode, but it lacks its finish. The theatrical notation in it is so defective it suggests that it was printed without having gone through the author's final revision. Forming a clear idea of what happens in the scene is a difficult task. The following reconstruction is based on an evaluation of, it is hoped, all the available direct and indirect data.

If we want to make theatrical sense of what follows, a critical view of the initial stage direction is necessary: Enter young LUCIUS and LAVINIA running after him, and the boy flies from her with his books under his arm. Enter TITUS and MARCUS. It is a full direction, but leaves out of account the boy's remark:

Which made me down to throw my books, and fly—

(IV.i.25)

The solution of this puzzle seems to be that the boy drops his books immediately after his entry at the start of act IV, so that they remain scattered on the floor on one side of the stage. Then he runs up to Titus, crying “Help, grandsire, help!” Coming to a stop in front of him he adds breathlessly:

                                                                                my aunt Lavinia
Follows me everywhere, I know not why.

Before he has finished Lavinia arrives in pursuit of him. As Titus, knowing too well the harmless good nature of his daughter, hesitates to respond to his appeal, the boy turns to Marcus:

Good uncle Marcus, see how swift she comes!

He tries to hide behind him and, from this shelter, addresses his aunt, who has come to a stop in front of Marcus:

Alas, sweet aunt, I know not what you mean.

Marcus, gently pulling the boy from behind him to his side, comforts him:

Stand by me, Lucius; do not fear thine aunt.

Titus walks up to the group to second his brother's admonition:

She loves thee, boy, too well to do thee harm.

The boy, being only half convinced, replies:

Ay, when my father was in Rome she did.

Now Marcus turns his attention to Lavinia's gesticulation and asks his brother:

What means my niece Lavinia by these signs?

In the light of what follows her “signs” would seem to be friendly gestures inviting Lucius to accompany her to the spot where his books are lying. Instead of answering Marcus's question, Titus decides to take over the care of the boy and to reassure him by an explanation of Lavinia's behavior. When he says

Fear her not, Lucius; somewhat doth she mean,

the boy is still standing by Marcus. Turning from his general to a more specific interpretation of Lavinia's “signs,” Titus takes young Lucius by the hand and talks to him in a very personal way adapted to his youthful psychology:

See, Lucius, see how much she makes of thee.
Somewhither would she have thee go with her.

This is the correct interpretation of her behavior. F and Qq are certainly right in giving these lines to Titus, who proves in this scene that he has realized his plan of becoming an expert in the reading of Lavinia's “signs,” whereas Marcus, to whom the lines are transferred by Maxwell, shows himself puzzled by her gesticulation in line 8 and completely misunderstands it in lines 38ff., as I hope to show. Maxwell justifies his transfer by pointing to the use of the name Lucius in two successive lines; the apparent awkwardness of this disappears if the lines become part of the theatrical action described above.

For all that, I should agree with Maxwell that F and Qq are in error where they give all the lines from 9 to 15 to Titus, since line 18, in the boy's answer,

For I have heard my grandsire say full oft

makes it clear that Marcus, and not Titus, is addressed. I have substantiated the view that lines 9, 10, and 11 should come from Titus. The following lines 12 to 15 can plausibly be given to Marcus:

Ah, boy, Cornelia never with more care
Read to her sons than she hath read to thee
Sweet poetry and Tully's Orator.
Canst thou not guess wherefore she plies thee thus?

The last line, with its uncertainty about the “signs,” fits Marcus extremely well and cannot possibly come from Titus. The reason for giving him lines 12 to 14 as well is less cogent: Titus appears too much absorbed by his observation of Lavinia's present behavior to switch over suddenly to memories of her past actions.

At the end of his long answer to Marcus's question Lucius has regained enough confidence in his aunt to say:

And, madam, if my uncle Marcus go,
I will most willingly attend your ladyship.

(IV.i.27-28)

The next line is very short, a hint that, after Marcus's remark “Lucius, I will,” the group begins to move in the direction indicated by Lavinia. According to such a reading their expedition comes to a stand-still where the books are lying. Here Lavinia expresses a new intention by a new kind of gesture. Most probably she is searching for the book she desires with the help of one of her stumps, or feet, or both. Titus is at a loss for a moment, then he understands:

How now, Lavinia! Marcus, what means this?
Some book there is that she desires to see.
Which is it, girl, of these?—Open them, boy.

(IV.i.30-32)

Lucius, on his knees, helps her in her search, opening book after book to show her the title page. At the sight of this Titus is struck by the thought that these are merely schoolbooks and that he could put a much better supply at Lavinia's disposal. He tells her so in four lines (33-36) to which she pays no attention, absorbed as she is by her search, which ends during his speech when she has found the desired volume. Her gestures at this moment are mirrored in Titus's question:

Why lifts she up her arms in sequence thus?

(IV.i.37)

It sends Marcus off on a wild-goose chase, which deserves this name although he stumbles on a fact in the course of his mistaken diagnosis of Lavinia's gestures:

I think she means that there were more than one
Confederate in the fact; ay, more there was,
Or else to heaven she heaves them for revenge.

(IV.i.38-40)

In reality Lavinia's thoughts are less disconnected and her gestures more practical than he thinks. The signs she is making are an invitation to Lucius to take the chosen book up from the floor and place it before her on a table. Her wish is fulfilled during Marcus's speech, at the end of which Titus sees her already busy with the book. He asks:

Lucius, what book is that she tosseth so?

The boy replies that it is Ovid's Metamorphoses and throws in the extra information: “My mother gave it me,” very much in the manner of a child. At this, Marcus comes in with a particularly obtuse interpretation of Lavinia's action:

                                                                                For love of her that's gone,
Perhaps she cull'd it from among the rest.

(IV.i.44-45)

This, taken together with his earlier vague and confused guesswork, but with the fact also that it is he who, eventually, renders the discovery of Lavinia's secret possible, might suggest that the playwright was tempted to enhance the interest of the scene before us by making it an illustration of the proverb “A fool's bolt may sometimes hit the mark,” and that he cast Marcus for the part of the fool, a part that is certainly not his in the rest of the play. Conversely, Titus is given the role of the wise man for the time being.

He keeps observing his daughter closely and giving correct and helpful interpretations of her behavior:

Soft! So busily she turns the leaves!
Help her.
What would she find? Lavinia, shall I read?
This is the tragic tale of Philomel
And treats of Tereus' treason and his rape;
And rape, I fear, was root of thy annoy.

(IV.i.46-50)

Titus's “Soft” is a friendly hint to Marcus not to distract attention from Lavinia by his irrelevant talk. Its gestic equivalent is a light silencing movement with the hand. While Titus observes his daughter and mirrors her activity in speech, he feels the need to help her. It seems a good idea to take the extra metrical “Help her,” found at the beginning of line 47 in Qq and F, as an exclamation and to assign a line of its own to it,⁵ one of the defective lines pointing to stage action. After his exclamation Titus moves up to where Lavinia is standing (or possibly sitting) at the table. As soon as he is in reading distance of the book, he asks himself rather than the rest of the company: “What would she find?” before he addresses Lavinia: “Lavinia, shall I read?” Upon an implied nod from her he adjusts the book to his own sight-line and finds that she is busy with “the tragic tale of Philomel.” Marcus, now standing on the other side of his niece, puts in his:

See, brother, see! Note how she quotes the leaves,

(IV.i.51)

implying that she not only wishes to draw their attention to the tale as such, but to a particular passage in it. She finds the passage, points it out to Titus; he reads it and understands:

Lavinia, wert thou thus surpris'd, sweet girl,
Ravish'd and wrong'd as Philomela was,
Forc'd in the ruthless, vast and gloomy woods?

(IV.i.52-54)

With his isolated “See, see!” he triumphantly points out her eager nods and other signs of assent. He shows a rather disproportionate interest in the similarity of the wild places where Philomela and where Lavinia were wronged and expatiates on it in a way that reminds us again how often the playwright and the poet were at odds with each other in the author of Titus Andronicus. What is excessive dramatically becomes a bridge to a striking expression of one of the play's key themes in Marcus's question:

O, why should nature build so foul a den,
Unless the gods delight in tragedies?

(IV.i.60-61)

With his next speech Titus shows that, at long last, he has discovered the way of common sense to the ravishers' names:

Give signs, sweet girl, for here are none but friends,
What Roman lord it was durst do the deed.
Or slunk not Saturnine, as Tarquin erst,
That left the camp to sin in Lucrece' bed?

(IV.i.62-65)

Lavinia's answer to this must be a shaking of her head. Titus could now go on enumerating the other possible authors of the crime, and, with the help of Lavinia's signs of affirmation or negation, the detection of Demetrius and Chiron would be easy. But this would be a bad anticlimax, which could raise such awkward questions as why so obvious a method had not been used immediately or soon after Marcus's discovery of the maimed Lavinia, and it would deprive the play of one of its most spectacular scenes. Therefore Titus is not allowed to pursue his inquiry; Marcus silences him with his more sensational plan, and the writing in the sand is staged.

After it Lavinia kneels down in the new ceremony in which the family swear again to revenge their wrongs and then disappears from the stage until she is called upon to play her part in Titus's cruel rites of revenge and, finally, to become a willing sacrifice to her father's and her own sense of honor.

Practically, our author's experiments with his mute heroine come to an end at the beginning of act IV. I hope I have shown that they were important experiments because they permitted Shakespeare to train himself in one of the playwright's most essential skills, in the art of expressing emotion and meaning not through language alone, but through gesture and the other visual elements of the theatre as well.

Notes

1. Rudolf Stamm, “Der Gebrauch der Spiegeltechnik in Titus Andronicus,” Sprachkunst: Beitrage zur Literaturwissenschaft, 1 (1970): 331-57. This article appeared in modified form in English Studies, 55 (1974): 325-39.

2. The quotations are taken from Peter Alexander (ed.), The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, The Tudor Shakespeare (London and Glasgow: Collins, 1951). Departures from his text are accounted for where they occur.

3. Here we come close to a reaction of Professor G. R. Hibbard, who confessed in his paper, “The Forced Gait of a Shuffling Nag,” read at the World Shakespeare Congress at Vancouver, that, on hearing lines 29-32 of our soliloquy, he feels tempted to yell at Marcus: “For God's sake, man, get her to a doctor before she bleeds to death, instead of standing there talking.” The paper has been published in Shakespeare 1971, ed. Clifford Leech and J. M. R. Margeson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), pp. 76-88.

4. B. L. Joseph's remark in his Elizabethan Acting (London: Oxford University Press, 1951), p. 73, on what he believes to be the normal meaning of the “wreathed arms” (melancholy) is not applicable to the passage before us. It leads him to his unhelpful comment quoted by J. C. Maxwell in the notes of his New Arden Edition (London: Methuen, 1953), p. 70: “whilst they [Titus and Lavinia] feel more than a dull grief, their multilations do not allow the expression of what is really within.”

5. This is the solution of Capell, Dover Wilson, and Peter Alexander; it recommends itself again in the case of the “See, see!” of line 55. To follow Dyce and print “Help her” as a (quite superfluous) stage direction creates more difficulties than it solves.