SOURCE: “Getting It All Right: Titus Andronicus and Roman History,” in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 45, No. 3, Fall, 1994, pp. 263-78.

[In the following essay, Liebler maintains that while much of Titus Andronicus is fictitious and without identifiable sources, Shakespeare's portrayal of Rome was influenced by Herodian's History.]

Some thirty-five years ago, Terence Spencer proposed the context in which an Elizabethan audience would have received Titus Andronicus. Although he did not positively claim it as a source for the play, he referred in some detail to Antonio de Guevara's Decada, translated in 1577 by Edward Hellowes as A Chronicle, conteyning the liues of tenne Emperours of Rome and dedicated to Queen Elizabeth. Spencer noted that among the “lives,” an Elizabethan reader would have found

[A] blood-curdling life of a certain Emperor Bassianus, … one of almost unparalleled cruelty. … I will not say that it is a positive relief to pass from the life of Bassianus by Guevara to Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (and there to find, by the way, that Bassianus is the better of the two brothers). … Titus Andronicus is Senecan … and its sources probably belong to medieval legend. Yet … it is also a not untypical piece of Roman history, or would seem to be so to anyone who came fresh from reading Guevara. Not the most high and palmy state of Rome, certainly. But an authentic Rome … from which the usual political lessons could be drawn. … Titus Andronicus is a more typical Roman play, a more characteristic piece of Roman history, than the three great plays of Shakespeare which are generally grouped under that name.¹

Spencer's citation of Guevara, which seems to have been ignored generally by critics and editors of the play, raises more questions than it answers. The first of these is what analogous contemporary materials can in any sense be said to have served as “sources” for a play that does not offer the usual clues for source study (e.g., specific episodes of plot or lines of dialogue borrowed or imitated). A second question concerns the absorption of antecedent texts by any cultural artifact and the technology of tracking such absorption. As Fredric Jameson has reminded us, “we never really confront a text immediately, in all its freshness as a thing-in-itself. Rather, texts come before us as the always-already-read; we apprehend them through sedimented layers of previous interpretations, or—if the text is brand-new—through the sedimented reading habits and categories developed by those inherited interpretive traditions.”²

Jameson's remarks suggest complications beyond those of reader response and indicate that the identification of “source” in any cultural production is often a convoluted procedure indeed. Spencer was correct in saying that Titus Andronicus offered its original audience “the usual political lessons” for which they turned to Roman history in the first place. But, perhaps because Guevara's text is represented on Hellowes's title page as primarily a work of moral instruction,³ Spencer dismissed his own discovery with a characteristically witty but uncharacteristically wrong guess: “The play does not assume a political situation known to Roman history; it is, rather, a summary of Roman politics. It is not so much that any particular set of political institutions is assumed in Titus, but rather that it includes all the political institutions that Rome ever had. The author seemed anxious, not to get it all right, but to get it all in.”⁴

Spencer's reading leaves us with a Titus whose Rome is assumed to have been entirely fictional because it was apparently unidentifiable. Such a fictional Rome is not in itself a bad thing; as Robert Weimann cautions us, we should not “ignore or minimize the fictional status of theatrical discourse.”⁵ But Titus has continued to challenge readers to trace its sources, and the work of critics who have rightly resisted consigning it to an entirely fictional status has produced a bricolage Roman context patched together out of various bits of literary and historical lore.⁶ Even the most careful critics have assented to Spencer's conclusion. Robert S. Miola, for example, says that “any approach which seeks to fit the various incarnations of Shakespeare's Rome to a single political or theological Procrustean bed does violence to the heterogeneity of the city's origins and character,”⁷ not because the play's historicity remains hidden but because the city's does.

The project of Titus's historical recuperation is further problematized by the fact that the Hellowes-Guevara 1577 Chronicle was itself based on another text, one that was already available in English circa 1550.⁸ That original, Herodian's De imperatorum Romanorum praeclarè gesti, had been translated into English by Nicholas Smyth as The history of Herodian, from the Latin of Angelo Politiano, and issued in quarto by William Coplande (STC 13221) twenty-seven years before the Hellowes-Guevara Chronicle.⁹ I wish to argue that in the English translation of Herodian's History the Rome of Titus Andronicus is identifiable. The play's “political situation” includes certain very specific situations represented by Herodian and thus tells of a particularly disastrous period “known to Roman history.” Herodian's History was certainly known, if not well known. Although the circa 1550 quarto seems not to have been reprinted in the sixteenth century, the History resurfaced in three closely timed editions in the mid-seventeenth century, just before the outbreak of the Civil War: a quarto entered in the Stationers' Register on 29 March 1629 (STC 13222) in an English translation by I. M[axwell], a duodecimo copy of the same entered 15 September 1634 (STC 13223), and a Latin octavo entered 3 February 1638 (STC 13220). Thus the History cannot be said to have lost interest among English readers; its temporary disappearance from the canons of authorized historiography during Elizabeth's and James's reigns and its triple reemergence during Charles's is itself a subject worth pursuing, but one that lies beyond the scope of this essay.¹⁰

Herodian's History constitutes a “con-text” for Titus Andronicus in the sense formulated by Francis Barker and Peter Hulme in their discussion of The Tempest:

con-texts are the precondition of the plays' historical and political signification. … Source criticism, which might seem to militate against autotelic unity by relating the text in question to other texts, in fact only obscures such relationships. … In general, the fullness of the play's unity needs protecting from con-textual contamination, so ‘sources’ are kept at bay except for the odd verbal parallel. But occasionally … that unity can only be protected by recourse to a notion of source as explanatory of a feature otherwise aberrant to that posited unity.

The authors explain their formulation in an endnote: “Con-texts with a hyphen, to signify a break from the inequality of the usual text/context relationship. Con-texts are themselves texts and must be read with: they do not simply make up a background.”¹¹ If we insist on tracking Titus's “sources” in the conventional way, seeking “the odd verbal parallel,” we end up where Spencer and others have left us. But accepting Barker and Hulme's “discursive con-text” allows us to avoid the traps inherent in such conventional approaches, the most silencing of which is the requirement of demonstrating not only that Shakespeare could have read Herodian but that he actually did, marshalling “the odd verbal parallel” as proof. Recognizing Herodian's History as a discursive con-text activates an awareness that “each individual text, rather than [being] a meaningful unit in itself, lies at the intersection of different discourses. … The text must still be taken as a point of purchase on the discursive field—but in order to demonstrate that, athwart its alleged unity, the text is in fact marked and fissured by the interplay of the discourses that constitute it.”¹² Put a bit differently, such a recognition comprises what Foucault in his widely read essay “What Is an Author?” called “returning to” a particular discourse, which he describes as “always a return to a text in itself, specifically, to a primary and unadorned text with particular attention to those things registered in the interstices of the text, its gaps and absences.” Foucault's essay concludes with a list of desiderata for literary inquiry: “New questions will be heard: ‘What are the modes of existence of this discourse?’ ‘Where does it come from; how is it circulated; who controls it?’ ‘What placements are determined for possible subjects?’ ‘Who can fulfill these diverse functions of the subject?’”¹³ These questions encircle a “return to” Herodian as a discursive con-text—i.e., a historical source—for Titus Andronicus, distinct from previously recognized literary or literal sources like Ovid and Seneca. Not only did Shakespeare “get it all in,” he also “got it all right.”

Herodian's History comes closer than Guevara's text to Shakespeare's interest in dynastic issues in Titus Andronicus. Although this preoccupation was sustained in one form or another throughout Shakespeare's career, it seems to have centered in particular ways during the early stages. Witness Shakespeare's contemporaneous concerns in the First Tetralogy, where, as in Titus, the author inflects the material of history to show a society in the process of fragmentation, though here he is somewhat constrained by the fact that his subject was the English monarchy. In the Roman plays (not only Titus but also Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus) the political emphasis is, with greater safety because with greater political and historical distance, deflected onto a Roman rather than an English form of government.¹⁴ Reading Herodian does not yield very many “odd verbal parallel[s],” but it does reveal certain incidents and composites which suggest that Shakespeare was aware of the History.

Herodian narrates a sixty-year period when imperial Rome was ruled by an Afro-Asiatic dynasty, its Roman religion converted to a Syrian theocracy spearheaded by one Julia Domna, a politically clever and ambitious mater-familias (whose influence is understated by Guevara); her son, Geta; and her step-son, Bassianus. Bassianus murdered his half-brother and proceeded to rule, under the names of Caracalla and Antoninus, an honorific surname adopted by all emperors from Bassianus onward. He was, as Spencer said, one of the more vicious tyrants in Roman history. Guevara makes Caracalla not the same person as Bassianus but the unacknowledged illegitimate son of Bassianus,¹⁵ thereby distending and diluting the narrative of intrafamilial violence. Herodian's Caracalla, Antoninus, and Bassianus are one person, a single composite ruler of extraordinary amorality, comparable to Nero and Caligula. In Herodian we find together in a single text characters named Bassianus and Saturninus, and a representation of Julia Domna (more victim than villain in Guevara) that provides an apt model for Tamora. The Andronici, Aaron, and Tamora's sons may have been fictional, but the Rome they inhabit in this play was certainly not.

I

Smyth's translation of Herodian was in every sense an authorized quarto. Coplande's imprint on the title page bears the license: “Cum gratia & priuilegio regali ad imprimendum solum.” Smyth's long dedicatory epistle is addressed “To the ryghte honorable Lorde, Wyllyam Earle of Pe[m]broke, Lorde President of the Kyng and Queenes Maiesties Counsayle, in the Marches of Wales, and one of theyr Maiesties most honorable preuie Counsaile. …” He begins by announcing his intention to recognize the contributions of historiographers to the cause of learning:

Amongest all those, that haue by theyr wrytynge, beautifyed the Greke & Latin tonge, none are supposed … so much to haue profited mortall affaires, as Historiographers, who haue faythfully reduced into writyng the actes & deades of such, as in fame (either good or euyll) haue passed thys transitorye lyfe. … Chieflye, through the manyfold examples, bothe good, and euyll, conteyned in Histories, all sortes of people may attayne by them, to more knowledge in shorte space, then otherwyse they might in al theyr liues, if y' same were much longer then the common age of man. …

(sig. Aii)

The lessons of Herodian's history, “not before (I thynke) brought into oure Englyshe tonge” (sig. Aii^v), form the ground of this translation. Herodian claims the authority of an eyewitness to much of his subject matter. This claim may well be believed, since his history covers a period of only some sixty years (180-238 a.d.): “And when by the space of lx. yeres, the Citie of Rome had sustained more gouernours then for the time sufficed, it came to passe, that many straunge thinges and worthy admiracion chaunced” (sig. Bi^v). Here is the lesson (possibly one of Spencer's “usual political” ones) that Tudor England would have learned from Herodian.

The historical Rome that failed to stave off the fifth-century Gothic invasion had already long since destroyed itself from within. The story of Rome's self-destruction began under Bassianus's father, Septimius Severus, who had gained control of the city without significant opposition during an interregnum when Rome had no central leadership (193 a.d.). His main rival for this control was one Niger, a former consul and governor of Syria. Niger's belated (and futile) efforts to defeat Severus involved the deployment of troops of Moroccan javelin-throwers, famous (says Herodian) for bravery, brutality, and savagery, and in Herodian's account Shakespeare might have found inspiration for his Moor.¹⁶ Severus's most famous exploit was the subjection of Britain, to which Herodian devotes detailed attention. While in Britain, in the midst of this prolonged and ultimately successful campaign, he died of disease and old age, despite the malign efforts of his son Bassianus, who “laboured to perswade hys fathers Physycions, and mynysters to rydde in anye case, wyth all celerytye possyble, the olde man oute of the world: untyll that Seuerus, beyng rather throughe thoughte, then syckenes, consumed, eanded hys life” (sig. Niii).¹⁷ At first Bassianus and Geta ruled together “as Conqueroures of Brytayne” (sig. Niii^v), but their partnership was sustained only for the sake of appearances; following Severus's death, they returned to Rome,

vsyng in their iorney continuall rancor and debate. For they neuer lodged in one Inne, or vsed one table: suspecting daily, all theyr mete, and drynke, leste eyther of them preuenting other, should couertly in their seruices, worke hys seate wyth poyson. … They chose besydes, eyther vnto hym selfe a sundrye Garde, and neuer came togithers, unles it were some tyme for a lytle whyle to be seen of the people.

(sig. Oi)

After a week-long funeral observance for their father, they resumed hostilities, “where they dayly exercysed priuye grudges, lying in awayte one for an other, and ymagynyng al y' meanes, whereby they myght entrappe eyther other. Fynallye, they omytted nothynge, wherewyth eyther of them might destroy, and defeate other, and aspire to thole Monarchye by hym selfe” (sig. Oii^v).

Shortly after their return to Rome, and despite Julia's efforts to reconcile them, the brothers agreed to divide the empire, Bassianus retaining the European portion (including, of course, Rome) and Geta the Asiatic. But this resolution failed, inevitably, as any dual government is likely to fail, and for the most ordinary of reasons:

their rancor, and enuy, encreased daily. For when any Capitaines, or Magistrates, were elected, either of the brethren, acted as his own frende chiefly. Or when they sate in iudgement, they helde euer dyuerse opinyons, to the intollerable domage, & losse, of the party, who had y' matter in controuersye. They omytted besides no kynde of secrete wyles, and entrappynges, labourynge to entyse eyther others Cookes, Butlars, and Cupbearers, to poyson theyr Mayster.

(sig. Oiii)

Finally Bassianus grew impatient and took both matters and daggers into his own hands: “Wherfore, sodeynlye breakynge open hys Brothers Chaumbre dore, he moste cruelly there slew hym, vpon hys Moothers lap” (sig. Oiii^v). He then fled into his own camp, spreading the tale (reminiscent of Edmund's intrigue against Edgar in King Lear) that he had just barely escaped “a maruaylouse daunger, and Treason, of a malycyouse manner, hys enemye, for so he named hys brother” (sig. Oiii^v). In justifying his actions to his people, Bassianus cited several historical precedents for “kynred”-killers, naming “Romulus hym selfe, the buylder of this Citye,” who “forbare not his Brother, which deluded hys workes of so greate importaunce.” Continuing, he lists “Germanicus the brother of Nero, and Tytus the brother of Domitian” and mentions that “Marcus the Philosopher, did not suffre y' checkes of his Son in lawe” (sig. Oiiii^v). The juxtaposition of the names Titus and Marcus here could have suggested those of the principal Andronici. Bassianus next had all the surviving friends, allies, and servants of Geta put to death, and indeed “anye one, which was but of lytle acquayntaunce with Geta” (sig. Oiiii^v). Herodian then narrates a reign of terror in which Bassianus destroyed every artifact that had given any pleasure to Geta. Bassianus also slew every senator, every sympathizer, every member of the nobility, and all of the Vestal Virgins; the victims included his own wife, a few of his cousins, and all of the citizens who had hissed at a certain player whom Bassianus had found amusing (sig. Pi). Having exhausted both himself and his supply of enemies, he departed Rome for the provinces, leaving the city without any government at all.

Bassianus's wife, unnamed in Herodian's account, was no accidental victim of the bloodbath. This marriage to the daughter of Plautianus, one of his Libyan compatriots, had been arranged by Severus some years before he died. It was an unhappy union, and to avenge Bassianus's neglect and daily death threats (sig. Mii), Plautianus hired a tribune out of the praetorian guard to kill both Bassianus and Severus. This tribune's name was Saturninus, and he too was Syrian by birth (sigs. Miii-Ni). The plot failed when Saturninus betrayed his employer and we read no more of him in Herodian, but the names of the characters may have lingered in Shakespeare's memory; perhaps the name Saturninus sounded more “Roman” than that of the historical Geta for the brother of Shakespeare's Bassianus.¹⁸ If Saturninus is indeed a substitution for Geta, Shakespeare simply reversed the personae of the brothers.

One further episode from Herodian may be worth mentioning. Although most of the material Shakespeare would have absorbed from the narrative has been described so far in terms of names and characterization, at least one segment of Shakespeare's plot seems modeled on Herodian. The second half of 2.3 in Titus—the scene in which Aaron tricks Quintus and Martius into the pit where they are framed for Bassianus's death—is suggested in Herodian's narrative: during a review of troops in Alexandria, Bassianus took revenge on that city's army for its failure to pay him due respect. He ordered the youth of the city to assemble in a certain field outside the city walls, promising to constitute them as a phalanx in honor of their late prince, Alexander.

When thei were so assembled, he commaunded them, to separate themselfes in bandes, a greate space one from an other, that he mighte electe oute of them, the apteste ages, statures, and personages, for the warres. The yonge men creditynge the same, and perswaded wyth a coloure of truthe, thrughe the greate honoure, he had before shewed towardes theyre deade Prince, resorted thither in many companyes, bringinge with them, their Parentes and Bretherne, with ioyouse acclamacions & shoutes. Then … [Bassianus], went about eche companye, vewing them, and praisinge this and that, in euerye one as he liked, vntil his whole host had compassed them vnwares, and loking for no such thinge. And when he perceaued them al to be enclosed with his armie, & entangled, as it were with nettes, him selfe came furth with his garde, and gaue a watche word vnto the Souldiours: who furthwith ran vpon the people, and slewe with meruaylous slaughter, the naked, and vnarmed youth, & al other that wer present. Of the Souldiors, some were occupied in murdering onely, other some buried the dead corpses, in huge pyttes, & coueringe them with earth againe, raysed a meruaylous highe hil. Many were drawen half dead into y' pittes, & many were buryed quicke. There perished besides very many of the Souldiours them selfes. For they, which had any breth remaining, and not fully lost theyr natural strength, clipping the Souldiors, which ranne vpon them, drewe the same also, into the pittes wyth them.

(sig. Piii^v)

In the end Bassianus was slain by a member of his own guard, one Martialis (Shakespeare's Marcus?), the surviving brother of yet another of his victims. The manner of his death is worth noting: returning from worship at the Temple of Diana in Mesopotamia, he stopped, as Herodian narrates,

to do the requisites of nature. Then Martialis, (which awaited euery conuenient howre) seyng the Emperour alone, & all other farre of, made haste towardes him asthough he were called for some businesse, & running vpon him unwares, as he was vntrussing his pointes, stabbed him in with a dagger, which he of purpose, secretly bare in hys sleaue.

(sig. Qii)

The reign of Bassianus lasted a total of six years and ended, with humiliating irony, in an act of defecation.

II

Post-Derridean critics such as Jonathan Goldberg have sensitized readers—perhaps overly—to the pitfalls that attend not only what used to be understood as “source study” but also, or especially, to the language deployed in those studies: terms such as source, analogue, antecedent, parallel text, influence, and the like are either suspect or hopelessly indeterminate. Such terms suggest a hierarchy that is in turn undone by the challenge of radical indeterminacy, although such a “hierarchy” is itself an interpretive rather than an inevitable construct.¹⁹ When these semantic challenges are combined with new-historicist interrogations of “historicity” (another troublesome word), the likelihood of saying anything concrete about Shakespeare's recycling of antecedent literary or historical texts, whose examination or acknowledgment might make some significant difference in the way we read a play, diminishes exponentially. Yet faced with a text, such as Herodian's History, that demands consideration in relation to Titus (and would so demand even if other historiographical “sources” had already been identified as certain), does the reader dismiss the project because any and all “decidability” has been theoretically undermined? With Titus such a project seems all the more problematic because the date of the play, its original performance conditions, and other important data are as uncertain as its historiographical models.²⁰ One example of the chain of interpretive logic which has obscured Titus's con-textualization in recorded Roman history will serve to illustrate how we have arrived at this impasse between a Spencerian fictionality and a Goldbergian indeterminacy. Because the prose version in the eighteenth-century Folger chapbook (see note 6, above) names its emperor “Theodosius,” critics have widely assumed that Shakespeare followed this lead, that he substituted a fictional Saturninus for Theodosius and set the action during the last years of the Empire, just before one of the early Gothic invasions in 410 a.d. Such an assignment positions the prose story as a source, not as a sequel, and constitutes a critical anachronism requiring the existence of an unknown earlier version of which the chapbook text would be a later copy.

Other than Spencer's suggestion of Hellowes-Guevara (which he then dismisses), no specific historical material has been aligned with Titus—no record of particular Goths or particular Romans. Thus it is all the more remarkable that there has recently been so much excellent critical discussion of ideology in Titus,²¹ given that the identity of the represented ideology has not been established. All of Shakespeare's usually accepted classical readings long antedate the famous “Sack of Rome,” leading critics to believe that no history of the late Roman Empire was available to him. Among those works available in English during the early part of Shakespeare's career, Tacitus's Histories and Annals (translated into English in 1591 and 1598, respectively) and Pliny's Natural History (translated into English in 1566) merely mention among various Germanic tribes certain “Gothones” (Tacitus) or “Gutones” (Pliny), and in any case both historians, as well as Suetonius (whose Lives of the Caesars was not translated until 1606), wrote during the first century a.d., long before any “Goths” became a threat to Roman borders or territories. Moreover, in Shakespeare's play it is the Romans who are victorious, and nothing in the play indicates who started the war or who invaded whose territories.

It may be said with some safety, then, that Shakespeare's “Goths” are not the same people who overthrew Rome in the fifth century and indeed may not represent any particular historical Goths at all. The term Goth was deployed generically in Shakespeare's time to signify “barbarian,” especially barbarians of Eastern origin and of fierce reputation. Donne, in “A Valediction: of the Book,” employs the image of “ravenous / Vandals and Goths” to signal the end of civilization and especially of literacy and learning.²² In As You Like It, Touchstone compares his displacement in Arden with that of “honest Ovid … among the Goths” (3.3.8-9), alluding to Ovid's description of his banishment among the Getae (formerly identified with “Goths”) in the Pontic Epistles. Lear, in banishing Cordelia, compares her to “The barbarous Scythian, / Or he that makes his generation messes / To gorge his appetite” (1.1.116-18), incorporating a reminder of the reputation of invaders from the East for intrafamilial cannibalism, which is, of course, reflected in Tamora's unwitting consumption of her children.²³

Herodian supplies the connective material: long before any actual Gothic invasions, the Rome that was so popular in the late-Elizabethan imagination was effectively undone, un-Romanized by several generations of Afro-Asiatic emperors, beginning with Septimius Severus, a Libyan (193-211 a.d.), and his second wife, Julia Domna, a Syrian; and continuing through Bassianus (211-17 a.d.); his successor, Macrinus, an African from Mauretania (217-18 a.d.); and Elagabalus (218-22 a.d.), grandson of Julia Domna's sister. The dynasty finally ended with Alexander Severus (222-35 a.d.), a pacifist whose weak military command ultimately led to the return of “European” leadership under Maximinus (235-38 a.d.), who was born in Thrace. Of the three contemporary records of the late Roman Empire from the reign of Marcus Aurelius (161-80 a.d.) through that of Gordian III (238-44 a.d.)—an extraordinary period of internal destruction and disintegration by an Afro-Asiatic force that ruled from within Roman borders—only Herodian's (rivalling in its detail Plutarch's Lives) was extant in English during Shakespeare's time.²⁴ The Roman history that Tudor England would have read about in Herodian was not the masculine, European, Roman history of Marcus Brutus, Julius Caesar, and Marc Antony; it was not the Rome on which England in part rested its own cultural genealogy. Rather it was a Rome dominated by female influence ²⁵ that subverted everything understood by the ideology of romanitas and governed by a miscegenized culture; it was a political anomaly—perhaps a political anathema²⁶—to its Elizabethan heirs. Thus in Herodian we find not only some of those names that have baffled Titus's editors but, perhaps more important, we find a slice of Roman history which saw Rome dominated from within by “barbarians”²⁷—its values compromised and its pollution led and orchestrated by a politically ambitious and calculating matriarch (mirrored in Tamora) and by a dynasty of African rulers. Titus Andronicus may be Shakespeare's attempt to accommodate that long and problematic episode in the history of a “Rome” that England preferred not to recognize.

III

The horrors that the play represents—however shocking they may be to our supposedly kinder, gentler culture—would probably not have shocked an audience regularly entertained by what Steven Mullaney calls the “dramaturgy of the margins,” by which “the horizon of community was made visible, the limits of definition, containment, and control made manifest,” and which included “hospitals and brothels, … madhouses, scaffolds of execution, prisons, and lazar-houses,”²⁸ not to mention the various animal and human atrocities occurring virtually next door to the Theatre in bear-baiting and cockfighting dens, and similarly heterodox, disorderly, or “incontinent” cultural entertainments. As John W. Velz has pointed out, “The most important edifice in Shakespeare's Rome, its wall, is seldom spoken of by scholars. To Shakespeare, Rome is above all urbs in its etymological sense, the enclave of civilization ringed round with a protective wall, outside of which the dark forces of barbarism lurk.”²⁹ Evidently one did not have to venture very far outside those walls, if at all, to find barbarism lurking.

A margin is not only linear, defining a city's limits, but also spatial, a topology inhabited and informed by a social behavior and a political status. It is a space meant to delimit indefinition, ambiguity, and flux, to define and contain by describing a boundary. A margin is itself, as Mullaney has argued, a locus for alteration. In the terms by which a polis defines itself, margin represents the verge, the limits by which one is citizen or alien, “one of us” or “one of them.” Moreover, as the anthropologist Mary Douglas has argued, “all margins are dangerous. If they are pulled this way or that the shape of fundamental experience is altered. Any structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins.”³⁰ The reason for this metamorphosis, as Foucault has explained, is that margins, or boundaries, define the licit, the permissible, the orthodox.³¹ Margins contain cultural definitions and ideologies. Altering margins can in some ways prove more dangerous than penetrating or transgressing them. If corrected, a transgression stands as violation of an orthodoxy which is retained; if uncorrected, it has the far more serious effect of actually altering that orthodoxy by changing the definitions of licit and illicit, that is, the definitions of a culture itself. The contestation of the meaning and practice of romanitas—triggered in the play by Tamora's “captivity,” quickly transformed into power, and Aaron unservile service—unleashes alterations in that very model of what has previously constituted romanitas, that is, in Titus himself. Nothing less than the definition of Roman cultural values is at stake in this play. “Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds,” Shakespeare writes in Sonnet 116; neither does romanitas remain romanitas.

Rome in Titus Andronicus, as represented by Saturninus, attempted to subvert the alien Goths by incorporating them into Roman citizenship and Roman values through union with Tamora. But the dismembered polity “headless Rome” (1.1.186), split from the beginning of the play by antagonistic brothers, has already been fractured beyond any unified set of values. Since gender and racial distinctions are two especially visible tactics for defining culture, Shakespeare's use of a feminized and racialized dialectic to render Rome's cultural disintegration concrete enables his audience to “see” the consequences of abandoning cultural definitions.

The crisis of Roman cultural definition is illuminated from the very start of the play through the contesting claims for “piety,” defined separately by Tamora and Titus (1.1.106-26) as “vengeance” and as proper burial rite. We immediately find that the problem of definitions has spread to members of Titus's own family, as when Titus disowns and kills Mutius. In his refusal to allow Mutius's burial, Titus enacts the definitional crisis, a process that Marcus recognizes: “Thou art a Roman, be not barbarous” (1.1.378). Roman values are themselves revealed as the site of contestation. Since one hallmark of romanitas is filial obedience, Mutius's refusal to remand Lavinia to Saturninus seems nothing less than treason to Titus. But Rome's belief in its own laws is equally compelling, and Lavinia was legally contracted to Bassianus. In order to resolve this particular conflict, Titus kills the “traitor,” disclaiming kinship: Mutius is deliberately misrecognized, made other-alien. As Titus says to Lucius: “Nor thou, nor he, are any sons of mine, / My sons would never so dishonor me. / Traitor, restore Lavinia to the Emporer” (1.1.294-96). Only as an alien can Mutius be denied proper ritual burial in the family tomb (1.1.349-54); since he is an Andronicus, Titus refusal to allow Mutius proper burial is called by his brother Marcus “impiety” (l. 355), the charge now coming not from Tamora, as at 1.1.13, but from within the family.

The crisis of identification or definition spreads in yet another direction when Saturninus establishes Tamora as his empress. Tamora and her son, former prisoners of war, are redefined as members of the community. Tamora's empowerment enables her to avenge her son's death, but she does so as a new-made Roman, and the distinction of otherness is thereby obliterated. For the remainder of the play, with the exception of Aaron, the permanent alien,³² all participants in this internecine slaughter are either Romans or neo-Romans by definition, and the entire community, in a chaos of kin-killing and self-mutilation, turns on itself in the ultimate pattern of annihilation. Later in his career, Shakespeare gave a very specific language to this kind of situation: in Lear we hear about “Humanity … [preying] on itself, / Like monsters of the deep” (4.2.49-50), and in Coriolanus, Rome is again defined by images of dismemberment and is three times warned against omophagia (1.1.85, 3.1.288-92, and 4.2.50-51).

At the play's start, little more than halfway through 1.1, we first see the consequences of contestation between separate communities; as the play proceeds, the arena narrows to a specifically Roman venue, contracting yet again into the smaller arena of a single family. Before the play has ended, that arena will contract still further to its most microcosmic version, that of the individual: Titus himself will become the locus, the site of contestation, and the divisions we have already witnessed between communities, within a community, and within a family will become manifest in the literal dismemberment of the patriarch and his only daughter, and the beheading of two of his three remaining sons.³³ Martius and Quintus die from their dismemberment, as does Alarbus; but the images presented by both Titus and Lavinia are images of life-in-death, terrifying indistinctions that pollute by their very failure to separate the living from the dead, which is the aim and the design of burial rites and mourning practices. Critics have struggled to define Titus's killing of Lavinia in a range of meanings from cruelty to mercy; but within the play, even Saturninus calls him “unnatural and unkind” (5.3.48). Moral evaluations aside (and who among those present, except perhaps for Lucius and Marcus, is qualified to make any?), Titus completes Lavinia's definition as “dead,” recounting the sequence of events to Tamora: “'twas Chiron and Demetrius: / They ravish'd her, and cut away her tongue, / And they, 'twas they, that did her all this wrong” (ll. 56-58).

Ironically, the “headlessness” by which Rome is identified at the opening of the play is filled in by the image of Aaron's punishment at the end of the play. Set “breast-deep,” “fast'ned in the earth” (ll. 179 and 183), he appears to be a disembodied head; “planted,” he epitomizes the paradox of an unregenerable polity. While he is not the corn or seed Marcus hopes to gather, his seed, half Moor and half Roman-Goth, will eventually destroy what is left of Rome (4.2.175-80). By that time (and indeed before the play is over) Rome will have lost all vestiges of its political identity as well. Titus will have had a hand in that, too, having sent off Lucius, “the turned forth” (l. 109), to rally the Gothic army to march against what was once his city and against a woman who was once their queen. All cultural definitions are nullified in this play by the confusion or neglect of cultural markers. Rome, which has long since become a “wilderness of tigers,” is in the end identified with the incorporated aliens Tamora and Aaron, each of whom is separately called by Lucius a “ravenous tiger” (ll. 5 and 195).³⁴ G. K. Hunter has written that “Rome clearly has forgotten how to be Rome. It takes a political convulsion and a blood-bath to re-establish the city as different from the wilderness of tigers.”³⁵ Here Hunter, along with most of this play's analysts, takes Marcus's “Let me teach you how to knit again” (l. 70) and Lucius's promise “to heal Rome's harms, and wipe away her woe” (l. 148) at face value; that is, he assumes that Rome will indeed arise from its “scattered corn.” Lucius's first act of “healing” is properly constructed as the reestablishment of funeral rites, which bring us back to the play's beginning. Funeral rites are, and were from the start in this play, one of the cultural distinctions separating “Roman” from “other”: Lucius buries Titus and Lavinia in the Andronici tomb while planting Aaron and throwing Tamora “to beasts and birds to prey” (l. 198). Aaron and Tamora are denied such rites not only as an act of revenge but also because there are no rites appropriate to them; as incorporated aliens, they remain demonized and marginal. One may live, like Titus, or be brought to live, like Tamora and Aaron, within a city's walls, yet still be demonized as marginal. That, surely, is another one of the “usual political lessons” to which Spencer refers.

But no regeneration is possible in such a fractured polity, and that, too, is one of the play's political lessons, though not, perhaps, one of the “usual” ones. Throughout Titus Andronicus both Roman and Gothic cultural distinctions are confounded: early on, Demetrius counsels his mother to wait for the “opportunity of sharp revenge” that would “favor Tamora, the Queen of Goths / (When Goths were Goths and Tamora was queen)” (1.1.137, 139-40). By the play's end, Goths are still not Goths (no more than Romans are Romans); they return with Lucius as his allies. Rome, too, is hybridized by Saturninus's marriage to Tamora, who refers to herself as “incorporate in Rome, / A Roman now adopted happily” (1.1.462-63). After this, Tamora's coupling with Aaron and the birth of their interracial child simply extends the blurring of distinctions already set in motion. Finally, Lucius's attempt to restore those distinctions is undermined by the truth about the bodies he would inter in the Andronicus tomb, once a locus of ritual integrity, as Titus had argued in his initial refusal to bury the son he had killed. The bodies of Titus and Lavinia are fragmented; they are missing parts. Despite Lucius's fiat, then, which is too little and comes too late, the Rome of Titus Andronicus, like its historical counterpart under Bassianus and his successors, cannot (and could not) be reestablished. By the end of Shakespeare's play, we know why and how Rome fell.

Titus Andronicus is, in many respects, a marginal play. Shakespeare's first tragedy is the terminus a quo for the rest of his work in that genre; as Charney has suggested, it forms the initial boundary for the Shakespearean tragic corpus.³⁶ As a play whose direct sources have hitherto defied most attempts at identification, it has been the object of a great deal of critical ambivalence, as both its detractors and apologists demonstrate. But most important, and central to the present essay, is the fact that the play is concerned in its structure and characterization with marginality and the threat it poses to political identity. Rome in this play is a city of ambiguity, whose cultural identification is challenged from the outset by the incorporation of aliens within its boundaries, by confusion and dissension about its rules of conduct and their consistent applications, and by the hybridization of its central leadership.

IV

The intersections of axes along which culture is produced also mark its vulnerable points; that which can be joined can also be sundered. Mary Douglas has distinguished four kinds of social pollution: “danger pressing on external boundaries”; “danger from transgressing the internal lines of the system”; “danger in the margins of the lines”; and “danger from internal contradiction.”³⁷Titus Andronicus neatly packages all four dangers; as Herodian's history tells us, Rome itself was for sixty years a sutured patchwork of European and Afro-Asiatic peoples, politics, and religions.

What happens to a civilization that has lost or confused its cultural integrity? What are the vulnerable intersections of cultural coordinates? In Titus culture is literally articulated in terms of body parts, ³⁸ which in turn are arranged into male and female categories. These anatomical assignments are expanded into gendered social roles, which are then undermined by constant inversion and reinversion in this play. How else does culture define itself? It distinguishes “self” from “other,” “them” from “us,” citizen from alien, and does so along both national and racial lines of demarcation. Out of such definitions, or rather to secure them, ideology is formed. But the Rome we encounter in Titus Andronicus has no unifying ideology. What classical historians have identified as romanitas may or may not have prevailed as a cohesive cultural construction during the period of the Republic and that of most of the Empire. But by the closing decades of the Empire, “Rome” itself as an integral and identifiable culture had already devoured itself by its own internalized alienization, its margins erased by cultural indefinition. Herodian's History did indeed offer “the usual political lessons” to Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and those lessons—the answers to the questions just noted—are embodied, dissected, and reassembled in Titus Andronicus.

Notes

1. T. J. B. Spencer, “Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Romans,” Shakespeare Survey 10 (1957): 27-38, esp. 31-32.

2. Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY, 1981), 9. See also Jonathan Goldberg, “Speculations: Macbeth and source,” and Robert Weimann's cautionary response, “Towards a literary theory of ideology: mimesis, representation, authority,” both in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor, eds. (London and New York, 1987), 242-64 and 265-72, respectively.

3. The title page reads: “A Chronicle, conteyning the liues of tenne Emperours of Rome. Wherein are discouered, their beginnings, proceedings, and endings, worthie to be read, marked, and remembred. Wherein are also conteyned Lawes of speciall profite and policie. Sentences of singular shortnesse and sweetenesse. Orations of great grauitie and Wisedome. Letters of rare learning and eloquence. Examples of vices carefully to be auoyded, and notable paternes of vertue fruitfull to be followed. Compiled by the most famous Syr Anthonie of Gueuara, Bishop of Mondonnedo, Preacher, Chronicler, and counsellour to the Emperour Charles the fift: and translated out of Spanish into English, by Edward Hellowes, Groome of her Maiesties Leashe. Hereunto is also annexed a table, recapitulating such particularities, as are in this booke mentioned. Imprinted at London for Ralphe Newberrie dwelling in Fleetestrete. Anno Gratiæ 1577.” Guevara was a Roman Catholic priest, interested primarily in promoting Christian values: the other work for which he was known in England was Archontorologion, or The Diall of Princes (translated into English by Thomas North and printed by Bernard Alsop in 1619), a compilation of the moral writings of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, “Declaring what Excellency consisteth in a Prince that is a good Christian: and what euils attend on him that is a cruell Tirant.”

4. Spencer, 32. Recently critics such as Robert S. Miola, in “Titus Andronicus and the Mythos of Shakespeare's Rome” (Shakespeare Studies 14 [1981]: 85-98), and Maurice Charney, in Titus Andronicus (Hemel Hempstead, UK, 1990), have likewise attempted to locate Titus's “historicity” by suggesting a hybrid Elizabethan-Roman point of view.

5. Weimann in Howard and O'Connor, eds., 269.

6. Earlier attempts to identify the play's “sources” have yielded an array of less than satisfactory nominations, aside from the well-known echoes of Ovid, Seneca, and Virgil—that is, literary analogues. Even Geoffrey Bullough hedges every suggestion, noting how little may be said with certainty about Shakespeare's acquisition of the plot concerning the Goths and Aaron, as well as any story about any actual Andronici (Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. [New York, 1957-75], 6:3-82). The closest parallel texts are a prose story and a ballad printed in an eighteenth-century chapbook owned by the Folger Shakespeare Library. As Bullough says, these are as likely to have followed Shakespeare's play as to have preceded it, although, having said that, he then goes on to treat the prose version as “the main source,” which “probably goes back to a sixteenth-century original” (6:7). A similarly inchoate list of suggestions is offered in J. C. Maxwell's introduction to the Arden edition of the play ([London, 1953] xxvii-xxxii). Charney also notes that the “exact” historical source is unknown (7), as does D. J. Palmer, in “The Unspeakable in Pursuit of the Uneatable: Language and Action in Titus Andronicus” (Critical Quarterly 14 [1972]: 320-39, esp. 323). Palmer offers a lengthy and detailed attempt to link Saturninus (as well as the rest of the imperial family in the play) with the iconography generally associated with Saturn throughout the Renaissance (323-26).

7. Miola, 95.

8. This early date is given in the first edition of the Short Title Catalogue as approximate and unverified. I am very grateful to Daniel Traister of the University of Pennsylvania Library for expediting the loan of a photocopy of this quarto.

9. All quotations of Herodian follow Smyth's translation and will be cited parenthetically in the text, with abbreviations silently expanded.

10. As Margot Heinemann has noted, the texts of classical historians were pressed into (and of course occasionally suppressed from) political service by various Tudor and Stuart interests. Tacitus, for example, “who had first been translated into English in the 1590s and promoted as the favoured historian of Essex, Greville, and the aristocratic critics of absolutist monarchy … was deeply distrusted by King James, who thought him favourable to tyrannicide. … Although classical republican ideas were an inspiration or a warning, rather than a programme, for dissident aristocrats and intellectuals in early Stuart England, they were not purely nostalgic and backward-looking but survived underground among the classically educated (notably in the Sidney and Neville families) and were to surface again as one strand of revolutionary thought in the 1640s” (“‘Let Rome in Tiber melt’: Order and Disorder in ‘Antony and Cleopatra’” in Antony and Cleopatra, John Drakakis, ed., New Casebook Series [Basingstoke and London, 1994], 166-81, esp. 175-76).

11. Barker and Hulme, “Nymphs and reapers heavily vanish: the discursive con-texts of The Tempest” in Alternative Shakespeares, John Drakakis, ed. (London, 1985), 191-205, esp. 195-96 and 236, n. 7.

12. Barker and Hulme in Alternative Shakespeares, 197.

13. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed, Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY, 1977), 113-38, esp. 135 and 138.

14. I am grateful to John Drakakis for suggesting this connection between the First Tetralogy and Titus and for suggesting as well that the Roman plays together constitute a “Third Tetralogy.”

15. Hellowes, “The Life of the Emperour Heliogabalus,” Chronicle, 374-77.

16. Both Maxwell, in a line gloss at 4.2.20 of the Arden edition, and Grace Starry West, in “Going by the Book: Classical Allusions in Titus Andronicus” (Studies in Philology 79 [1982]: 62-77, esp. 70), note the reference to “Moorish javelins” in the line from Horace's Odes (I.22) that Titus inscribes on the bundle of arrows presented to Chiron and Demetrius, and both consider this a reference to Aaron. But the Moorish reputation for javelin-throwing was a commonplace assumption: Herodian mentions it at several points, as does Horace.

17. Readers will notice the similarity between the language of this passage and that of Richard's aside regarding Gaunt's illness (Richard II, 1.4.54). All quotations of Shakespeare follow the Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston, 1974).

18. Shakespearean editors, baffled by all attempts to identify Saturninus and any link between that name and Bassianus, ought to consult Herodian. The name Saturninus is mentioned just once in Dio, but in that instance he is the joint-prefect with Plautianus, who preceded Bassianus's father in power and whose daughter married Bassianus; that Saturninus was killed about ten years before Bassianus came to power. It is, in any case, very unlikely that Dio's fragments would have been known to Shakespeare, since the two versions by R. Stephanus (1548 and 1551) were in Latin and stopped short of Bassianus's reign, and a later one in Latin by Leunclavius (1592) contained only fragments of Books LXXVII-LXXIX (Dio's Roman History, ed. and trans. Ernest Cary, 9 vols. [1927; rpt. Cambridge, MA, 1955], l:xxvi-xxvii and 9:203-435). It is also possible that Geta's name suggested Goth to Shakespeare; in fact early histories of the Goths refer generally to the scattered tribes of Goths as “Getae” or “Geticae.” But it is more likely that the suggestion of Goths comes from Bassianus's preference, among his many armies, for “y' Germanic horsemen” (sig. Qii) with whom he surrounded himself in his final days, Goths having been identified historically with marauding Germanic tribes (see Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed., “Goth,” sb. 1).

19. On this matter, see especially Michael D. Bristol's important discussion in Shakespeare's America, America's Shakespeare (London and New York, 1990), 116-17; see also Goldberg in Howard and O'Connor, eds., passim.

20. In addition to the play's numerous modern editions, see also R. F. Hill, “The Composition of Titus Andronicus,” SS 10 (1957): 60-70.

21. See especially Emily C. Bartels, “Making More of the Moor: Aaron, Othello, and Renaissance Refashionings of Race,” Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990): 433-54; John D. Cox, Shakespeare and the Dramaturgy of Power (Princeton, NJ, 1989); and Ania Loomba, Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (Manchester, UK, 1989).

22. The Songs and Sonets of John Donne, ed. Theodore Redpath, 2d ed. (New York, 1983), 247-52, esp. ll. 24-25.

23. I am grateful to John W. Velz for the references to As You Like It and King Lear. Although Scythian invasions of the area around the Black Sea, where the Greeks encountered them, apparently ceased by the end of the second century B.C., their reputation for barbarism was easily conflated with that of the various “Goths” who were active during the first several centuries a.d.

24. The other texts covering this period include: Dio Cassius's Roman History, fragmentary and in any case not translated into English until the twentieth century (its sixteenth-century Latin fragments do not extend to the reign of Bassianus, although later editions do); and the extremely popular, anonymous Scriptores Historiae Augustae, which was known throughout Europe in Latin codices (six editions from 1475 to 1518), including those owned by Petrarch and Erasmus, but was never translated into English until the twentieth century. Its details differ from those in Herodian: it does not mention Saturninus; it diminishes Julia Domna's role (although she is identified as a notorious adulteress); and it underemphasizes the conversion of Rome to Syrian religion. See the bilingual edition by David Magie for the Loeb Classical Library (3 vols. [Cambridge, MA, 1922], Vols. 1 and 2).

25. Julia Domna's extraordinary influence during Bassianus's reign is generally acknowledged by historians and translators of Herodian. See Edward C. Echols, trans., Herodian of Antioch, A History of the Roman Empire from the Death of Marcus Aurelius to the Accession of Gordian III (Berkeley, 1961), 5; and ed. and trans. C. R. Whittaker, Herodian, 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library (London and Cambridge, MA, 1969), 2:367n.

26. It is important to recognize that modern interpretations of “Elizabethan” attitudes may be more modern than Elizabethan. As Martin Bernal argues in “The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985,” the first volume of the provocative and controversial Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (2 vols. [New Brunswick, NJ, 1987]): “For 18th- and 19th-century Romantics and racists it was simply intolerable for Greece, which was seen not merely as the epitome of Europe but also as its pure childhood, to have been the result of the mixture of native Europeans and colonizing Africans and Semites” (1:2 [with italics deleted]); in the Renaissance “no one questioned the fact that the Greeks had been the pupils of the Egyptians, in whom there was an equal, if not more passionate, interest” (1:24), and who were “deeply respected for their antiquity and well-preserved ancient religion and philosophy” (1:23). If Elizabethan England inherited the Classical period's acceptance of Greece's Afro-Asiatic roots, we may need to reevaluate our assessments of Shakespeare's representations of Moors—not only of Aaron but more obviously of Othello and Portia's Moroccan suitor in The Merchant of Venice—all of whose very noble traits are misrecognized by their Italianate fellow characters. It must be noted that Bernal's thesis has been challenged not only on points of historical accuracy but also for its failure to recognize a distinction between “objective” and “subjective” ethnicity. The former entails “a biological category which defines groups of human beings in terms of their shared physical characteristics resulting from a common gene pool,” whereas the latter identifies “the ideology of an ethnic group by defining as shared its ancestors, history, language, mode of production, religion, customs, culture, etc., and is therefore a social construct, not a fact of nature” (Edith Hall, “When Is a Myth Not a Myth? Bernal's ‘Ancient Model,’” Arethusa 25 [1992]: 181-201, esp. 185). Herodian's history (along with that of Dio and the Scriptores Historiae Augustae) affirms that between 183 and 236 a.d. Rome was governed by an Afro-Asiatic dynasty, in terms that satisfy both of Hall's important distinctions of ethnicity. How the Elizabethan heirs to this history interpreted that ethnic admixture is a question that merits further careful consideration beyond that undertaken by Bartels and Loomba (see note 21, above), and by Michael Neill, who, in contrast with Bartels, argues that racial distinction is one of the clearest, least ambiguous representations of “difference” in Shakespearean and other Renaissance drama; see “Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and the Hideous in Othello,” SQ 40 (1989): 383-412. Taken together, the works cited by Neill and Bartels constitute a substantial annotated bibliography of current scholarship on the problematics of interpreting representations of race in Renaissance drama.

27. Echols reminds us that Herodian was himself a Syrian living in Roman exile (and, interestingly, writing in Greek) and adds that “his early association with the Syrian dynasty at Rome would account for the amazing ‘Romanness’ of his outlook. Herodian is so thoroughly patriotic and so Romanized that he can speak of his fellow non-Romans as barbarians and can offer an analysis of his fellow Syrians that is thoroughly unflattering” (5).

28. Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago and London, 1988), 31.

29. Velz, “The Ancient World in Shakespeare: Authenticity or Anachronism? A Retrospect,” SS 31 (1978): 1-12, esp. 11.

30. Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London, 1966, 121).

31. See Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. …

32. Grace Starry West points out that Aaron is “the black man with the Jewish name” (71), thus anchoring Aaron's alienation via two identities demonized in Shakespeare's time. Leslie A. Fiedler, in The Stranger in Shakespeare (London, 1973), was the first to offer this insight (178).

33. Miola focuses primarily on Lavinia's rape as the iconic representation of Rome's destruction: “Since Lavinia is portrayed more as the daughter of Titus and the sister of Lucius than as the wife of Bassianus, the rape is a direct assault on the Andronici family and the Roman virtue which it represents. … Such violation of the family amounts to a violation of the larger order in human affairs. … Instead of beginning the Roman Empire, the rape of Lavinia signals the end of whatever civilization Rome possesses and the triumph of lawless savagery” (88-89).

34. Loomba makes this point in Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (46).

35. Hunter, “Shakespeare's Earliest Tragedies: ‘Titus Andronicus’ and ‘Romeo and Juliet,’” SS 27 (1974): 1-10, esp. 6. See also D. J. Palmer, 338.

36. Charney, 9-10.

37. Douglas, 122.

38. For excellent discussions of the instances of dismemberment in Titus, see Palmer; Albert H. Tricomi, “The Aesthetics of Mutilation in ‘Titus Andronicus,’” SS 27 (1974): 11-19; Gail Kern Paster, “‘In the spirit of men there is no blood’: Blood as Trope of Gender in Julius Caesar,” SQ 40 (1989): 284-98, esp. 289; Gillian Murray Kendall, “‘Lend me thy hand’: Metaphor and Mayhem in Titus Andronicus,” SQ 40 (1989): 299-316; and Katherine A. Rowe, “Dismembering and Forgetting in Titus Andronicus,” in this issue of SQ, pp. 279-303. The consistency with which Shakespeare attaches such imagery to Roman history is remarkable: we find it again in Coriolanus in Menenius's fable of the belly. Remarkably, Shakespeare's first tragedy looks ahead to his final tragedy when, in Titus, Aemilius looks “backward” by invoking the “historical” Coriolanus as a model for Lucius's revolt against Rome (4.4.68).

This essay began as a paper presented in the seminar on “Tragedy and Death” at the 1992 annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America in Kansas City. I am particularly grateful to John W. Velz, Barbara Mowat, David Bevington, and John Drakakis; to my colleague Professor David Kelly, Department of Classics, Montclair State University; and to the referees for Shakespeare Quarterly for their invaluable suggestions and encouragement.