SOURCE: “The Construction of Barbarism in Titus Andronicus,” in Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the Renaissance, edited by Joyce Green MacDonald, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997, pp. 165-180.

[In the essay below, Vaughan analyzes the way in which the Romans of Titus Andronicus—who commit barbarous acts—are compared with the barbarians they have conquered. Vaughan contends that the play reveals the anxieties of Shakespeare's time regarding England's own role as a colonizer.]

1

Marcus chides his brother in the opening scene of Titus Andronicus for refusing to bury his son Mutius inside the family tomb:

Thou art a Roman; be not barbarous:
The Greeks upon advice did bury Ajax
That slew himself; and wise Laertes' son
Did graciously plead for his funeral.
Let not young Mutius then, that was thy joy,
Be barr'd his entrance here.

(1.1.378-83)¹

Marcus's words establish a binary opposition that seems to run through the play. Originally, the OED reports, a barbarian was one who was not Greek. Under Roman rule, he became “one living outside the pale of the Roman Empire and its civilization.” He was also a “rude, wild, uncivilized person.” The barbarian was thus defined by what he was not—Greek, Roman, civilized.

John Gillies demonstrates in his thoughtful discussion of Shakespeare's poetic geography how the Greek construction of peoples from outside the polis as barbarians was adopted by Roman philosophers and embedded in Senecan tragedy, ensuring transmission to Shakespeare.² The need to define “home” (self, family, community, or emergent nation state) in opposition to an alien, exotic other is perhaps universal. But as Gillies observes, in the midst of European encounters with new lands and alien peoples, not to mention “the growth of geographic information and the outward push of imperial borders, came ever more others, renewing the need to differentiate and perpetuating the need for a symbolic border and ever new rites of exclusion.”³ With each new discovery, the barbarian had to be reconstructed; though he might be defined in classical terms, his significance was not simply a matter of historical curiosity, but immediate and palpable.

It is therefore not surprising that Montaigne should choose “the caniballes” as a topic for meditation in the first book of his essays. Long noted as a source for Gonzalo's discussion in The Tempest of the plantation he would build on Prospero's island, “Of the caniballes” addresses the broader issues of Europe's colonial enterprises in Africa and the New World. Montaigne begins with the Greeks, who were “wont to call all strange nations” barbarous, and then observes that opinions and customs different from our own always strike us as barbarous or savage.⁴ Montaigne suggestively applies a colonial paradigm in his essay, comparing the “savages” of the New World to the flora found growing wild in nature:

They are even savage, as we call those fruits wilde, which nature of her selfe, and of her ordinarie progresse hath produced: whereas indeed they are those which our selves have altered by our artificiall devices, and diverted from their common order, we should rather terme savage. In those are the true and most profitable vertures, and naturall properties most lively and vigorous, which in these we have bastardized, applying them to the pleasure of our corrupted taste.⁵

The philosopher's wilderness is construed as pristine, wild but uncorrupted by humankind. In itself it is virtuous; its danger lies in the attempts of people to subdue and civilize it. The result of such tampering is bastardization, or, to use a more modern term, miscegenation.

Underlying Montaigne's defense of the cannibals' untainted virtues is his symptomatic cultural anxiety, the inevitable accompaniment to the age of exploration. Much of the colonial discourse of the late sixteenth century expresses this worry: what happens when we colonize the barbaric other? Fearing pollution by the enemies it conquered, Rome attempted to erase otherness by widening its boundaries and extending rights of citizenship. Still, Rome fell, overcome by alien barbarians. What would become of Europe if it became intwined with a new kind of barbarians, “savage” Indians from the New World or “black” strangers from Africa?

This essay positions Titus Andronicus, an ostensibly Roman play, within the colonialist discourse of the late 1580s and early 1590s, a discourse that explored seemingly clearcut conceptions of “barbarism” and “civility.” During the early 1590s, vivid European representations of the inhabitants of the New World circulated in England. One way that Europeans digested this bombardment of verbal and visual images was to find analogues in ancient Greece and Rome. José de Acosta, a sixteenth-century Jesuit who spent more than a decade in Peru and Mexico, urged his readers to consider such parallels:

And if any one wonder at some fashions and customes of the Indies, and wil scorne them as fooles, or abhorre them as divelish and inhumane people, let him remember that the same things, yea, worse, have beene seene amongst the Greekes and Romans, who haue commanded the whole world.⁶

Hugh Honour, a modern art historian, speculates that once images of New World natives began to circulate in Europe, “Comparisons were inevitably being made; awkward questions were being asked. Might not the ancestors of modern Europeans have been like the inhabitants of America?”⁷ While Titus Andronicus is not directly about the New World, it does raise awkward questions about what it means to be civilized, and its depiction of Rome as a colonizer embodies 1590s anxieties about the confrontation between a European power and the “barbarian” peoples it seeks to conquer.

2

The opposition between Roman and Goth, civilized person and barbarian, has long been noted by critics of Titus Andronicus. Alan Sommers contended in 1960, for example, that “The essential conflict in Titus Andronicus is the struggle between Rome … and the barbarism of primitive, original nature.”⁸ In contrast to urban, “civilized” Rome, the Goths practice an agrarian lifestyle, rooted in nature. They are by definition uncivilized. “That is the theme,” insisted Nicholas Brooke in 1968: “the contrast of the ‘Roman’ nobility of Man, and the ‘Gothic’ barbarity.”⁹ Or, as Maurice Charney declared more recently, “At the heart of the play is a struggle between Roman values and barbarism.”¹⁰

At first glance, this opposition seems obvious. But in the play's opening scene, the Goths who are led in chains to Rome do nothing barbarous. The Romans, rather, commit unsettling barbarous acts: Lucius's demand for human sacrifice is, in Tamora's words, a “cruel irreligious piety,” and Titus's murder of his son Mutius is unexpectedly savage. The remainder of the play accelerates the slipperiness of categories that at first seem clearly opposed. The Goths are represented in double vision. Tamora's lust for Aaron and her vengefulness, compounded by the cruelty of her rapacious sons, presents the negative side, a view of a fiercely violent people who wantonly destroy Roman culture.¹¹ But the “lusty” and “warlike” Goths who condemn Tamora in act 4 and declare Lucius emperor in act 5 are more benign. They resemble the image of Goths propagated by northern European reformers; “in their youth, vigor and moral purity,” according to historian Samuel Kliger, they were perceived as having destroyed “the decadent Roman civilization and brought about a rejuvenation or rebirth of the world.”¹² If the conclusion of Titus Andronicus holds any promise that Lucius can “heal Rome's harms, and wipe away her woe” (5.3.148), that hope comes from the presence of Gothic warriors who support him. The term “Goth,” which seems at first to be a safe label for “barbarian,” is thus by the play's final scene turned on its head.

Aaron seems less ambiguous. He rapes, mutilates, and murders simply for delight; he curses the day wherein he “did not do some notorious ill.” Yet Aaron is also problematic. Jack D'Amico insists that Aaron's fierce allegiance “to the image of himself seen in his son” moves him from “the alien who lives for destruction to a father who thinks of schooling his son.”¹³ In contrast to Titus, who kills his son for what he believes is family honor, Aaron will do anything to preserve his son's life. “[B]y demonstrating some humanity,” contends Anthony Gerard Barthelemy, “Aaron undermines the univocal symbolism of blackness.”¹⁴

Instead of presenting the opposition between civilized society and barbarism, Titus Andronicus is thus a ruthless demonstration of the imprecision of such categories. That these characteristics are problematized in a play written in the early 1590s and performed in London in 1594 should not be surprising¹⁵; England had experienced its first substantial contact with peoples of the New World during the Roanoke expeditions of the 1580s and was sorting out the often contradictory impressions and accounts. If the Rome of Titus Andronicus is, as Ronald Broude affirms, a culture “in a period of crisis and transition, menaced by … the replacement of an ailing dynasty and the assimilation of a conquered people into the Roman commonweal,”¹⁶ Elizabethan England was in a similar transition. During the period of Titus Andronicus's composition, England was at war with Spain, governed by an aging queen who had no heir and faced with the loss of its first New World colony. It was also redefining itself in response to the alien and “barbaric” peoples it discovered in Africa and the New World.

3

Romantically known to posterity as the Lost Colony, Roanoke was the first English settlement in the Americas.¹⁷ It began in 1584 under sponsorship of Sir Walter Raleigh, who was granted license by Queen Elizabeth “to discouer, search, finde out, and view such remote, heathen, and barbarous lands, Countries, and territories, not actually possessed of any Christian Prince.”¹⁸ Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe completed a preliminary voyage the same year and reported back that “Wee found the people most gentle, louing, and faithfull, void of all guile, and treason, and such as liued after the manner of the golden age.”¹⁹ The following year Sir Richard Grenville led an expedition to the Outer Banks along the coast of what is now North Carolina, accompanied by Thomas Harriot, a scientist later connected to Raleigh's “School of Night.” Harriot chronicled the colony's adventures in A briefe and True Report, first published in London in 1588 and reprinted two years later by Theodore de Bry with illustrations engraved from John White's paintings. English readers thus had graphic as well as literary evidence of England's first serious effort at New World colonization and an extensive introduction to the inhabitants of Virginia.

The story is well known. The 1585 expedition ended when the starved colonists returned to England with Sir Francis Drake and a subsequent, larger settlement began in 1587 under John White's leadership. This time women and children were among the one hundred fifty colonists. Again plans went awry when the settlers mistakenly raided and killed a group of friendly Croatan Indians. The colonists persuaded White to return as their delegate to England where he would arrange a relief expedition. The all-consuming threat of the Spanish Armada blocked immediate relief. The colonists were never heard from again, and Virginia was not settled for another twenty years.

Despite their futility, the abortive Roanoke expeditions captured popular attention through the enthusiastic accounts of armchair explorers like Richard Hakluyt the younger, whose Principal Navigations first appeared in 1589. Though Hakluyt's collection included English voyages worldwide, the third part, pages 506-825, was devoted entirely to accounts of the New World. The following year, 1590, the German engraver Theodore de Bry began publishing the “Grand Voyages” in Latin, French, German, and English; these thick folios contained travel narratives about “America.” Center stage in many of these stories were the inhabitants of the New World, indigenous peoples whose difference was a source of wonder and anxiety. But the tales of America that circulated in England during the late 1580s and early 1590s were double-edged, revealing what Stephen Greenblatt terms “a fundamental inability to sustain the simultaneous perception of likeness and difference.”²⁰ From the beginning, Europeans were ambivalent about the people they found in North America.

Propagandists like Harriot, who sought to attract investors to England's New World, emphasized the Indians' tractability. Though they lived simply and practiced “savage” customs, Harriot contended, “if meanes of good gouernment bee used, … they may in short time be brought to ciuilitie and the imbracing of true religion.”²¹ To bolster the case for Indian educability, de Bry added an appendix to his 1590 volume that displayed John White's engraving of ancient Picts and Britons whose appearance is strikingly similar to the same artist's watercolors of Virginia's Indians. In a note to the Reader, de Bry claimed these figures were intended, “to showe how that the Inhabitants of the great Bretannie haue bin in times past as sauuage as those of Virginia.”²² Britain's forebears had begun in the same barbaric condition as Virginia's Indians; with proper instruction in religion, morals, and manners, the Indians could become just as civilized as the English.²³ Their difference could be transformed into similarity.

Other sixteenth-century accounts were not so positive. Beginning with Columbus, many explorers had used classical models to represent New World natives as monstrous and uncivilized. Indians were often associated with ancient monstrous races and medieval wild men.²⁴ They were thus depicted as inherently and ineluctably other, and like the barbarians who sacked Rome, they could be used to define civilized society by showing what it was not. Andrew Thevet's New Found World (translated and published in England as early as 1568) is a case in point; the peoples of the New World, argued Thevet, were wild and brutish, “without Fayth, without Lawe, without Religion, and without any civilitie; but living like brute beasts.”²⁵ The two most flagrant symbols of difference exploited in such accounts were human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism²⁶—which appear in Titus Andronicus. Sir George Peckham referred to both practices in his argument for western colonization, published in Hakluyt in 1589:

the traffike and planting in those countries, shall be vnto the Sauages themselues very beneficiall and gainefull … for ouer and beside the knowledge how to till and dresse theyr grounds, they shall be reduced from unseemely customes to honest maners, from disordered, riotous routs and companyes to a well gouerned commonwealth … and which standeth them most upon, they shalbe defended from the cruelty of theyr tyrannicall and bloud sucking neighbors the Canibals, whereby infinite number of theyr liues shall be preserued. And lastly, by this meanes many of theyr poore innocent children shalbe preserued from the bloudy knife of the sacrificer, a most horrible and detestable custome in the sight of God and man, now and euer heeretofore used amongst them.²⁷

England's civilizing influence could efface difference because it would remove the two most potent signifiers of difference—cannibalism and human sacrifice.

By the time Shakespeare wrote Titus Andronicus, then, contradictory images of Virginia's natives were in circulation. Though the benign view was underscored by writers like Harriot who sought to promote England's colonial enterprise, reports of violent Indian attributes and attacks, not to mention the likely loss of the Roanoke colony to Indian hostility, undermined the positive view. In the early 1590s, the verdict was still out as to whether America's natives would succumb to English “civility.” At the same time, through privateers like John Hawkins, England had begun to participate in the African slave trade. In the darkhued people of West Africa it had found alien men and women whose difference was not only cultural but physical.

4

In Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare's Rome is a strange amalgam. The Andronici are shaped, G. K. Hunter observes, “to the model of the granitic founders of the republic, with their dedication to military discipline, to a harsh family ethic, and a contempt for individualism.”²⁸ At the same time, Saturninus's abuse of power reflects the ethos of the late Roman Empire, when it was beseiged by Goths and Vandals from without and decay from within. Titus's Rome is, in other words, a conflated, unhistorical city, the representation of a society in transition where traditional values are interrogated and occasionally abandoned by the younger generation.

This Rome is also a colonial power. “Colonization” initially entailed the cultivation of newly acquired lands to feed an urban population.²⁹ The Roman Empire was an “assembly of civitates, of cities, surrounded by agricultural regions intended to feed them and under their authority.” While the empire was strong, the barbarians (non-Romans) exchanged their labor as soldiers or farmers for a share of the urban population's abundant resources. As the empire lost power, the barbarians commandeered those resources by intermittent invasions, the sack of Rome in 410 ad, and the eventual dissolution of the empire.³⁰

Titus Andronicus begins with the Roman army's success over the barbaric Goths, but it ends with a new emperor whose power depends upon the loyalty of those same Gothic soldiers. It concludes, in other words, with the triumph of the colonized people and the establishment of a new Rome, an amalgamation of urban and agrarian cultures. In Shakespeare's play, the relation between colonizer and colonized is problematic; the act of gain (conquest) entails a loss of racial and cultural purity.³¹

The problematics of colonial power relations are especially apparent in the opening scene of Titus Andronicus, when the revered Roman general arrives in the imperial city after a hard-fought victory, Gothic prisoners in tow. The tomb of the Andronici symbolizes ancient Roman values—piety, family loyalty, honor, and service to the state. This “Sweet cell of virtue and nobility” (1.1.93) contains the bodies of Titus's valiant ancestors and will hold the corpses of his newly slain sons. But the funereal dignity is immediately interrupted by Lucius's request for human sacrifice and ritual dismemberment:

Give us the proudest prisoner of the Goths,
That we may hew his limbs, and on a pile
Ad manes fratrum sacrifice his flesh
Before this earthly prison of their bones,
That so the shadows be not unappeas'd,
Nor we disturb'd with prodigies on earth.

(1.1.96-101)

This request shocks us now and must have startled an Elizabethan audience. Robert S. Miola, a scholar well-versed in Shakespeare's Latin sources, denies that Roman burial rituals required human sacrifice. Lucius's Latin phrase, ad manes fratres, he further argues, jolts the audience and “suggests that Roman ritual is barbaric savagery and blood lust.”³² The putative source for Lucius's demand is Seneca's Troades, a revenge play that depicts the ghost of Achilles calling for Polyxena's sacrifice; her blood must be spilt upon his tomb so that his aggrieved spirit can rest at peace.³³ There is no reference in the Troades, however, to ritual dismemberment. In Titus, Lucius commands:

                                                                      make a fire straight,
And with our swords, upon a pile of wood,
Let's hew his limbs till they be clean consum'd.

(1.1.127-29)

This strikes Tamora, as it strikes us, as “cruel, irreligious piety.”

Our reaction to this strange yoking together of opposites—the public assertion of Rome as a civilized state and the ritual enactment of slaughter and dismemberment—is akin to the early explorers' accounts of Aztec religious rites. “Europeans,” explains historian Inga Clendinnen, “from the first Spanish conquerors who saw Mexica society in action to those of us who wistfully strive to, have been baffled by that unnerving discrepancy between the high decorum and fastidious social and aesthetic sensibility of the Mexica world, and the massive carnality of the killings and dismemberings: between social grace and monstrous ritual.”³⁴ Early missionaries labeled these practices the works of the devil and often saw in them a perversion of the mysteries of holy communion.³⁵ The sacrifices that were most notorious, moreover, were “the great ceremonies which celebrated major moments in imperial rule” such as the installation of a new ruler; often the victims were captured warriors, “delivered as a tribute to be consumed in a Mexica triumph.”³⁶

Montaigne describes this custom as he understood it:

After they have long time used and entreated their prisoners well, and with all commodities they can devise, he that is Master of them; sommoning a great assembly of his acquaintance; tieth a corde to one of the prisoners armes, by the end whereof he holds him fast, … and giveth the other arme, bound in like manner, to the dearest friend he hath, and both in the presence of all the assembly kill him with swords: which done, they roast, and then eat him in common, and send some slices of him to such of their friends as are absent. It is not as some imagine, to nourish themselves with it, (as anciently the Scithians wont to doe,) but to represent an extreme and inexpiable revenge.

While the sage admits the “barbarous horror of such an action,” he concludes that “there is more barbarisme in eating men alive, then to feed upon them being dead.”³⁷

The parallel with Titus Andronicus is obvious. The drama begins with a dispute over the succession; the emperor has died, a war has been won, a new ruler is to be installed. The sacrifice of Alarbus, ostensibly an act of “inexpiable revenge” that will “appease their groaning shadows that are gone” (1.1.126), is also a ritual celebration of Roman triumph and hegemony. The incongruity, so apparent to us, never seems to dawn on Titus or his family. Still, the absurdly alliterative phrase, “Alarbus' limbs are lopped,” bespeaks the arbitrariness of this ritual murder.

Chiron and Demetrius highlight Roman barbarity: “Was never Scythia half so barbarous!” “Oppose not Scythia to ambitious Rome” (1.1.131-32). Ancient historians had characterized the Scythians as a nomadic people; unattached to any place, they were inherently opposed to the Grecian city-states. But as Greenblatt observes, Herodotus found in them a mirror image of Athens's own strategies for survival. The Greek historian's account of the Scythian presents the “discovery of the self in the other and the other in the self.”³⁸ So do the remarks of Tamora, Chiron, and Demetrius in 1.1.130-32, for the Goths describe the barbarian in Roman behavior.

The cannibalism that concludes Titus Andronicus has clearer classical antecedents than the sacrifice of Alarbus. Shakespeare, who was clearly indebted to Ovid in writing Titus Andronicus, surely had the story of Philomel in mind when he composed Lavinia's rape and mutilation.³⁹ Titus refers to Ovid's story himself as he slices Chiron and Demetrius's throats:

For worse than Philomel you us'd my daughter,
And worse than Progne I will be reveng'd.

(5.2.194-95)

Still, the pasty that Titus serves his enemies might have reminded some in the audience of strange Indian banquets of human flesh cooked with maize, or of lurid engravings from de Bry's 1592 America Tertia Pars that depicted body parts roasting on Indian barbecues.⁴⁰ Whatever its origins and analogues, the cannibalism that concludes the play can be seen as a ritual purging of the evil that afflicts Rome. But because Lucius, the Roman who initiated the play's atrocities with Alarbus's sacrifice, is the new emperor and the play's final spokesman, a return of “civility” to Rome remains in doubt.

5

A frequent theme in the colonial discourse concerning America was the representation of the land as an Indian maiden. In an oft-quoted passage, Raleigh referred to Guinea as “a Countrey that hath yet her maydenhead,” and engravings from the latter half of the sixteenth century frequently emblemized America as a naked woman in Indian headdress.⁴¹ The question for Raleigh was, who would possess this virgin, the Spanish or the English? Similarly, in Titus Andronicus the female body is the locus of contestation between Roman and Goth in Lavinia, and between Roman and Moor in Tamora. Lavinia, especially, emblemizes traditional Rome, dismembered by the factions within. Her body, contends Leonard Tennenhouse, figures as the “synechdoche and emblem of the disorder of things.”⁴² By raping and dismembering her, rendering her silent, Chiron and Demetrius assert the barbarians' possession of Rome.

Lavinia is carefully contrasted with the play's other female figure, Tamora, Queen of the Goths, Empress of Rome. While Lavinia is a chaste Roman matron, Tamora is assertive, deceptive, and lascivious. By marrying her, Saturninus immediately debases the Roman state.⁴³ As Tamora herself remarks, she becomes “incorporate in Rome” (1.1.462). Then her imperial body is possessed by Aaron the Moor, and from that adulterous union comes a mulatto child whose color signifies to Elizabethan audiences the impurity of the newly constituted Roman body politic.

Possession of the colonized female body is not an act of passion but a violent assertion of control. In Lavinia's case the effort at containment fails; she uses a stick to draw the rapists' names in the sand. In Tamora's case, the controller is himself contained when Aaron is doomed to be buried waist-deep in the earth. His son, the bastardized product of his mesalliance with Tamora, presumably lives on.⁴⁴

In his explanatory speech to the assembled Romans, Marcus displays Aaron's child as visual proof of Tamora's corruption. “Behold the child,” he commands,

The issue of an irreligious Moor,
Chief architect and plotter of these woes.

(5.3.122-23)

The bastard mulatto child, visible symbol of the polluted state, is attributed to Aaron, who, in turn, becomes the scapegoat for Rome's confusion. Lucius's own responsibility for Alarbus's death is ignored. This passage also marks a radical shift from the play's opening scenes: instead of Rome being characterized in opposition to Gothic barbarism, the state is now defined in opposition to a black Moor.

Visually the play ends as it began, with Aaron led on stage as a prisoner. In the initial act, however, he had no speaking lines; Tamora spoke for him. In the conclusion he has the power of defiant speech, and he uses it to deplore Roman values, choosing their evil to be his good:

Ah, why should wrath be mute, and fury dumb?
I am no baby, I, that with base prayers
I should repent the evils I have done;
Ten thousand worse than ever yet I did
Would I perform, if I might have my will.
If one good deed in all my life I did,
I do repent it from my very soul.

(5.3.184-90)

While the Goths have become “incorporate” in Rome, Aaron remains ineluctably other. His evil behavior and his physical features—black skin and wooly hair—have been made to signify a new sort of barbarousness. Beginning with act 2, after Tamora's union with the Roman emperor, the play's crescendoing demonization of Aaron opens a space where Roman and Goth can unite against a common enemy. Thus Titus Andronicus foreshadows the direction race relations would soon take in England's New World, where blackness became the dominant signifier of bestiality in a white culture that practiced chattel slavery.

6

I do not mean to put more weight on the colonial dimensions of Titus Andronicus than they can bear. Titus is not a New World play, and its major sources are well-known texts from Ovid and Seneca.⁴⁵ Yet, there are some common discursive threads between Shakespeare's early tragedy and contemporary literature of travel and exploration. The disintegration of Rome in the face of the “barbaric” alien from outside in Titus Andronicus depicts cultural concerns and anxieties, particularly, worry about what will happen when a society confronts what it perceives as its opposite. Titus demonstrates that in the effort to expand, conquer new territories, and dominate foreign peoples, Rome changed. England, too, feared change. As several travel accounts demonstrated, even labels like “cannibal” could be applied to the colonizer as well as the colonized; Hakluyt includes among his narratives, for example, the report of Master Hore after a journey to Newfoundland. Under the pressure of starvation, one of his men had “killed his mate while hee stouped to take up a roote for his reliefe, and cutting out pieces of his body whome he had murthered, broyled the same on the coles and greedily deuoured them.”⁴⁶ Underlying such fears was the apprehension that instead of finding difference, the colonizer would find similarity, that instead of civilizing the natives, he himself would “go native.” This is, of course, what happens in Shakespeare's play where Romans, at least for a while, are more barbaric than the barbarians.

Titus Andronicus also demonstrates that in the effort to expand its empire, Rome was irreversibly transformed. Colonialism is not, we know now, a one-sided exchange; the dominant power is likely to be transformed nearly as much as the culture it colonizes. Montaigne's “bastardization” was the most potent symbol of such transformations, and miscegenation was frequently condemned by imperial spokesmen. Fear of the loss of racial purity bespeaks a culture's anxieties about changing values and identities. And during the era of exploration, as Emily Bartels observes, blackness became “the one stable and unambiguous sign of Otherness within a ‘wilderness’ of meanings.”⁴⁷

Bloody as it is, Titus Andronicus is not simply a case of Shakespeare trying to out-Kyd Kyd or shed Senecan blood on the English stage. For Londoners in 1594, caught in a continuing war with Spain and facing seriously for the first time the dangers of territorial expansion, anxieties about cultural exchange were very real. Titus's exploration of a conflated Roman history must have mirrored, to some extent, their own fears.

Notes

1. Quoted from Titus Andronicus, 3d ed., ed. J. C. Maxwell (London: Methuen, 1961).

2. John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 4-18.

3. Ibid., 6.

4. Quotes from Montaigne's “Of the caniballes” are taken from Montaigne's Essays, vol.1, trans. John Florio (London: Everyman's Library, 1965), 215-29. Though I recognize that Florio's translation is imperfect, his version presumably circulated in manuscript in London during the 1590s and was published in 1603. Since Shakespeare probably used this text while he was writing The Tempest, it seemed the best version to use in my discussion. The quote used here is from p. 215.

5. Montaigne, “Of the caniballes,” 219.

6. José de Acosta, The Natural & Moral History of the Indies vol. 2, ed. Clements R. Markham for the Hakluyt Society (London: Hakluyt Society, 1880), 296.

7. Hugh Honour, The New Golden Land: European Images of America from the Discoveries to the Present Time (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), 78.

8. Alan Sommers, “‘Wilderness of Tigers’: Structure and Symbolism in Titus Andronicus,” Essays in Criticism, 10 (1960): 275-89; quote from 276.

9. Nicholas Brooke, Shakespeare's Early Tragedies (London: Methuen, 1968), 23.

10. Maurice Charney, Titus Andronicus (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), 6.

11. See Ronald Broude, “Roman and Goth in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Studies, 6 (1970): 27-34; and Samuel Kliger, The Goths in England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952) for discussion of contradictory images of the Goths within English culture and in the text of Titus Andronicus.

12. Kliger, The Goths, 34.

13. Jack D'Amico, The Moor in English Renaissance Drama (Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1991), 143.

14. Anthony Gerard Barthelemy, Black Face Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 96.

15. See J. C. Maxwell's introduction, xi-xxvii, for particulars on the dating of Titus.

16. Broude, “Roman and Goth,” 30.

17. See David Beers Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, 1584-1606 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1985) for a detailed historical account of the Roanoke expeditions. A shorter narrative account is Karen Ordahl Kupperman's Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allenheld, 1984).

18. Cited from Richard Hakluyt, The Principall Navigations Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation (London: 1589), 725. For a photographic facsimile, see The Principall Navigations Voiages and Discoveries, 2 vols., ed. David Beers Quinn (Cambridge: Published for the Hakluyt Society), 1965.

19. Hakluyt, Principall Navigations, 731.

20. Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1990), 31.

21. Thomas Harriot, A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia (Frankfurt: Theodore de Bry, 1590), 25.

22. De Bry, in ibid. (Frankfurt, 1590), E 1 recto.

23. See Alden T. Vaughan, “Early English Paradigms for New World Natives,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 102 (1992): 33-67, esp. 50-55.

24. See Ibid., 35-45.

25. Andrew Thevet, The New Found World, or Antartike, trans. T. Hacket (London: by Henrie Bynneman for T. Hacket, 1568), [45].

26. See Stephen Greenblatt's discussion of European narratives in Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), esp. 131-32.

27. Hakluyt, Principall Navigations, 713-14.

28. G. K. Hunter, “Sources and Meanings in Titus Andronicus,” in Mirror Up to Nature: Essays in Honour of G. R. Hibbard (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 171-88; quote from 185.

29. This definition is taken from Charles Verlinden, The Beginnings of Modern Colonization (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), ix-x.

30. Verlinden, Modern Colonization, ix-xi; quote from x.

31. One hundred years later, at the height of England's colonial enterprise in the New World, Edward Ravenscroft felt the need to unproblematize this relationship by changing Lucius's supporters from Goths to disaffected Roman soldiers who are true to traditional Roman values.

32. Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare's Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 46-47.

33. Shakespeare probably read Seneca's tragedy in the original, but he might also have known Jasper Heywood's translation, The Sixt Tragedie of the most graue and prudent author Lucius Anneus, Seneca, entitled Troas (London: Printed by Thomas Powell for George Buck, 1560). For discussion of the Roman sources of Titus Andronicus, see Robert Adger Law's “The Roman Background of Titus Andronicus,” Studies in Philology, 40 (1943): 145-53; Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 6 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), 3-79; and G. K. Hunter, “Sources and Meanings” (cited above).

34. Inga Clendinnen, Aztecs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 2. Clendinnen surveys the materials she uses for her analysis in “A Question of Sources,” 277-93; they include native codices, the “Anales” of Tlatelolcol, and numerous explorers' narratives.

35. See Clendinnen, Aztecs, 2-3.

36. Ibid., 90.

37. Montaigne, “Of the caniballes,” 223.

38. Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 127.

39. For a discussion of the play's Ovidian properties, see Eugene M. Waith, “The Metamorphosis of Violence in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Survey, 10 (1957): 39-49. See also Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference, 14-18, 103.

40. Cf. Hans Staden's account of Brazilian cannibals in Johann Theodore de Bry, America Tertia Pars (Frankfurt, 1592), 101-34. The volume's frontispiece depicts a male Brazilian Indian chewing on a leg while the female opposite munches on an arm. Below, naked figures consume human body parts, and other body parts are laid on a grill over an open fire. Cannibalistic cookouts also appear in graphic pictures on pp. 126, 127, and 128.

41. See New World of Wonders: European Images of the Americas, 1492-1700 (Seattle: University of Washington Press for the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1992), 37 for both images. See also Hugh Honour, The New Golden Land, 85-89, for a variety of engravings that allegorize the New World as a naked female.

42. Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare's Genres (New York: Methuen, 1986), 107. See Tennenhouse's discussion of the connection between rape and dismemberment, 106-12.

43. Gillies contends that the moral of Euripedes's Medea is that “barbarians don't make good wives.” Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference, 15.

44. In the BBC/Time-Life television version, Lucius kills the infant, an act that vividly depicts his ruthlessness and commitment to Realpolitik.

45. G. K. Hunter has convinced me that the unique eighteenth-century chapbook in the Folger Library should not be regarded as a reprint of a late sixteenth-century narrative used by Shakespeare. See “Meanings and Sources,” passim.

46. Hakluyt, Principall Navigations, 518.

47. Emily C. Bartels, “Making More of the Moor: Aaron, Othello, and Renaissance Refashionings of Race,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 41 (1990): 433-54; quote from 442.