SOURCE: Little, Arthur L., Jr. “Picturing the Hand of White Women.” In Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-Imperial Re-Visions of Race, Rape, and Sacrifice, pp. 25-67. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000.

[In the following excerpt, Little concentrates on the figure of Lavinia in Titus Andronicus, observing her resemblance to the classical model of Lucrece, viewing her rape as a symbolic sacrifice for Rome, and examining the racial overtones of the her attack.]

PICTURING LAVINIA; OR, THE STORY OF THE PIT

Lavinia's rape is no more an accident to republican Rome than is Lucrece's. The official Roman world wishes to tell the story otherwise, and it is precisely this fiction—of how Lavinia's sacrifice counterbalances, corrects, or chastises her rape—that Rome (not necessarily Shakespeare's play) promotes to the status of a cultural truism. Rome demands Lavinia's rape as much as it demands her sacrifice; these are concomitant acts. Her rape completes the picture, simply becoming the mechanism through which the Roman world defines and celebrates its racial and masculine wholeness and clarity. Already in the opening scene, before the Goths and the African Aaron become part of the Roman drama, Lavinia finds herself the potential object in a sacrificial story when Titus demands that his son Lucius give Lavinia back to Saturninus. Like Virgininus (Titus will also evoke him at the end of the play), who kills his daughter instead of letting the king have his sexual way with her, Lucius says he will return her dead but not as Saturninus's wife (1.1.294-98). And just before the rape Lavinia makes it clear as she begs Tamora to protect her that she prefers death to rape: “And with thine own hands kill me in this place. … O, keep me from their worse-than-killing lust” (2.3.169, 175). But it is not only the rape and death of Lavinia that need attention here.

To understand better the participation of Rome in Lavinia's sacrificial rape we need to understand Rome's sacrificial crisis, that is, its need for a sacrifice, for a symbolic act that would establish the difference between, say, pure blood and impure blood. As René Girard defines it, a sacrificial crisis is “a crisis of distinctions—that is, a crisis affecting the cultural order. This cultural order is nothing more than a regulated system of distinctions in which the differences among individuals are used to establish their ‘identity’ and their mutual relationships.”¹ Rome's crisis becomes evident in its confusion of categories: the Roman and the barbarous (as Tamora becomes “incorporate in Rome”), piety and impiety, war and peace, civil war and national war, enemy and ally (Saturninus marries Tamora, Titus kills his son Mutius, the brothers Bassianus and Saturninus struggle with each other for Rome's imperial seat), Tamora's allegiance to both a racial whiteness and a racial blackness, and murder and sacrifice. Lavinia quickly emerges as Rome's symbolic sacrificial object, a body in crisis, caught in its own confused signification between being virginal and being raped. Almost immediately after her entrance she finds herself inscribed in a story of raptus, of bride theft, of becoming, ideologically and representationally, a raped body. Saturninus accuses Bassianus of rape, of stealing Lavinia, whom Titus has just promised to Saturninus, reneging on his earlier promise of giving Lavinia in marriage to Bassianus, “‘Rape’ call you it, my lord, to seize my own” (1.1.405). Lavinia's body becomes one of indistinction because in stealing Lavinia Bassianus steals her back, in effect rechastising her instead of raping her. Still, Lavinia's body is caught between these two readings, and Rome finds itself without any real strategy for distinguishing between raptus and the more proper patriarchal bestowal of marriage rites.²

Furthermore, not only Lavinia but Rome itself will come to remind us of Lucrece. When the play opens, the brothers Saturninus and Bassianus, each with his army, are debating rather intensely about which of them should become Rome's emperor, Saturninus proposing a strict patrilineage system (which would favor him) and Bassianus a government by election (which would presumably favor him):

SATURNINUS (to his followers):
Noble patricians, patrons of my right,
Defend the justice of my cause with arms;
And, countrymen, my loving followers,
Plead my successive title with your swords.
I am his first-born son that was the last
That ware the imperial diadem of Rome;
Then let my father's honours live in me,
Nor wrong mine age with this indignity.
BASSIANUS (to his followers):
Romans, friends, followers, favourers of my right,
If ever Bassianus, Caesar's son,
Were gracious in the eyes of royal Rome,
Keep then this passage to the Capitol,
And suffer not dishonour to approach
The imperial seat, to virtue consecrate,
To justice, continence, and nobility;
But let desert in pure election shine,
And, Romans, fight for freedom in your choice.

(1.1.1-17)

But the rhetoric that actually makes their debate cohesive has less to do with the kind of government they represent per se than with their contention about which form of government best replicates Rome's honor, a word that comes at least retrospectively in Titus Andronicus to call attention to the honor, the virginity or chastity, of the female body. When Bassianus's call to his followers is read also as a response to Saturninus, Saturninus's toying with virginity becomes more obvious. Bassianus's word choice—dishonour, consecrate, continence, and pure—conjures an image of a chaste body, particularly a virginal body that, having been surprised while on its “imperial seat” (its bed), resists the predacious hands of the rapist. In other words, and we will return to this discussion at the end of the chapter with reference to Lucius, this struggle over whose body will signify Rome echoes Tarquin, Collatinus, and the other Roman soldiers' debate over the purity of their respective wives. The brothers are themselves vying over which of their bodies can best represent Lucrece's honor. To the extent that these contests are the same, the question is not simply whose body will represent Rome but whose body will actually become Rome, incorporate Roman virtue into itself. The publicanism scripted into Bassianus's last line, “And, Romans, fight for freedom in your choice,” works especially to recall not merely Lucrece's sacrificial purity but the bed on which she consecrates herself to a Roman freedom.

The focusing of the sacrificial story on Lavinia's body becomes all the more acute after she is raped. The sacrificial principle is not lost on Demetrius and Chiron, who tell her to go hang herself if she can find the hands to help her knit the cord (2.4.1-10). And following the rape, Titus offers the play's most explicit comparison between the sacrificial Lavinia and the sacrificial Lucrece:

Thou map of woe, that thus dost talk in signs,
When thy poor heart beats with outrageous beating,
Thou canst not strike it thus to make it still.
Wound it with sighing, girl, kill it with groans;
Or get some little knife between thy teeth,
And just against thy heart make thou a hole,
That all the tears that thy poor eyes left fall
May run into that sink, and soaking in,
Drown the lamenting fool in sea-salt tears.

(3.2.12-20)

Titus and Tamora's two sons highlight Lavinia's problem as far as the sacrificial narrative is concerned. At least at this point in the play she lacks a signature text. She cannot speak her innocence nor write her chastity upon her breast. Furthermore, Lavinia serves as a compendium of sacrificial deaths. Between Titus and Tamora's sons Lavinia is envisioned as stabbing, hanging, and drowning herself. Not lost in this play's sacrificial vocabulary after Lavinia's rape are the several mentionings of the word martyr, a word occurring only four times in the play but appearing more than once in only one other Shakespeare play. (It appears twice in the second part of Henry IV.) And it takes on an even more emphatic significance when it is considered in the context of the other sacrificial words and images saturating the play. As A. Robin Bowers argues, although editors of Shakespeare's play commonly gloss this word to mean “mutilate,” the primary meaning of martyr is very much evident in the play, as well as in pictorial representations and in other narratives indebted to Lucrece's sacrifice: “Lavinia, like Lucrece, is easily associated with martyrdom as well as mutilation.”³ Furthermore, for the Andronici the word martyr acts as more than a euphemism: it serves also to erase the narrative space between her rape and her death. It serves in effect to “cut off” any other narrative possibilities for the raped virgin/woman. To be raped (not just mutilated) is to be martyred.

When Lavinia is taken offstage to be raped, the pit substitutes for her body.⁴ It is no longer her wedding night, but the pit completes her sexual passage from viginity to marriage. (As a sign of Lavinia's unwavering virginity, when Saturninus says the morning after Lavinia's nuptials that Titus has blown the horns “lustily” and “somewhat too early for new-married ladies,” Lavinia protests and says she has been “broad awake two hours and more” [2.2.14-17]. Figuratively, the sexual bed has yet to consume or perhaps claim her.) The scene in which Martius and Quintius happen on the pit is almost mythic in its recognition of this rite of passage. The “fall” into the pit is no less consequential than the Edenic fall to the extent that the fall into the pit forces Rome to expose its postlapsarian self. As A. C. Hamilton and Albert H. Tricomi have argued, the pit also recalls the classical underworld.⁵ In this regard the shift from the nether regions of the underworld to the nether regions of the female body replays such a move in Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and anticipates one in Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's The Changeling, where (in the latter play) the prying into the secrets of Beatrice-Joanna's body replaces the prying into the secrets of the castle. Frequently in early modern tragedy the play world “falls” into or finds itself confronting the devouring female body. This is one way that the early modern period evinces its misogynistic nightmare: on the stage the female body is seen as incorporating, devouring, or wounding the state.

Titus Andronicus refers three times to this “fell” pit as a mouth. Although it could prove useful to explore more classical associations between mouth and vagina (as Giulia Sissa has done in her study of Greek virginity),⁶ the link between mouth and vagina in Titus Andronicus is quite visible. The mouth becomes a sign of an invisible pornography. As Gail Kern Paster argues, “The blood flowing from Lavinia's mutilated mouth stands for the vaginal wound that cannot be staged or represented, which has charged these images of warmth, movement, and breath with a peculiar eroticism and horror.”⁷ Also, Paster reminds us, “vaginal or menstrual blood was thought to issue sometimes from other parts of the body—from breast or mouth” (98). The pit becomes like Tamora, who, according to Lavinia, is beastly and has “no grace, no womanhood” (2.3.182). But the pit is the “bad” vagina magnified, deformed into a gaping and cannibalistic monster—an “unhallowed and bloodstained hole” (210). It is a “fearful sight of blood and death” (216), a “detested, dark, blood-drinking” (224) thing, a “devouring receptacle” (235), a “swallowing womb” (239), a “grave” (240). The female genitalia receive here one of their most horrific depictions in Shakespeare (with King Lear providing the most graphic and damning example [4.6.124-29]). The pit also becomes a sacrificial site, a kind of sacrificial cauldron for Bassianus, the “slaughtered lamb” (223), a container for “ragged entrails” (230). In the Oxford edition of Titus Andronicus Eugene M. Waith glosses “ragged entrails” as “rough interior,” but the phrase refers to entrails that are, perhaps more suggestively, similar to Alarbus's (1.1.144); and also, but perhaps more imaginatively, the phrase evokes for the offstage audience (who are at that moment engaged in the act of knowing Lavinia's rape) an enlarged picture of Lavinia's torn and violated vaginal interior.

Despite the horrific portrayal of this pit, this scene has about it a kind of pastoral mythos. When Martius falls into the pit, Quintius says to him,

What, art thou fallen? What subtle hole is this,
Whose mouth is covered with rude growing briers,
Upon whose leaves are drops of new-shed blood
As fresh as morning dew distilled on flowers?

(198-201)

And a few lines later the light reflecting from the dead Bassianus's ring will make Martius fancy that “so pale did shine the moon on Pyramus / When he by night lay bathed in maiden blood” (230-31). In these images of virginity and defloration, the body undergoing the rites in this scene is not Tamora's of course but Lavinia's.⁸ This rude awakening into the rites of sexual penetration is Lavinia's story. In the image of the pit, the virgin/woman's rape and the virgin/woman's more mythic passage from parthenos to gyne, from virginity to womanhood, come very close to collapsing the one into the other and recalling in the process the uneasy relationship established earlier in the play between marriage and rape. Moreover, if Tamora is beastly and has no grace or womanhood, Lavinia must expurgate or prove she does not have this aspect of herself. She must in effect “cut off” herself from the kind of Tamora. Lavinia, like Lucrece (or her father), must enact or have chaste thinking enacted upon her own body. More than anything else perhaps, Lavinia's mutilated body signifies a move toward the sacrificial act of chaste thinking. Notwithstanding the blatant nature of the female genitalia imagery in the pit scene, it is not Lavinia's but Bassianus's body that plays through her sacrificial story—his blood stains the leaves and reminds Martius of Pyramus and Thisbe. Bassianus's murder, a kind of Girardian “sacrificial substitution,” absorbs the language and impact of Lavinia's rape. In Girard's analysis the “sacrificial substitution” contributes to the “certain degree of misunderstanding demanded by the sacrificial process.”⁹

The substitution here works to keep Lavinia's body seemingly dissociated from any kind of prurient knowledge. When she reenters mutilated, the signs of rape are on her. In what has become one of the most notorious speeches in the play, Marcus talks to and about the raped and mutilated Lavinia (2.4.11-57). As Bowers has argued, critics tend to neglect the emblematic aspects of Marcus's speech and instead offer up objections to his dilatio, his seemingly unending mythopoesis of a traumatized body in need of some kind of urgent response.¹⁰ His speech, situated as it is between the classical cohesion of the first half of the play and the disjunctive immediacy of the second half, commands the emblematic center of the play. Marcus's mythopoesis, his “notoriously Senecan amble” as Helms calls it,¹¹ does threaten to slow “the usually hectic action to an almost Senecan torpor.”¹² But critics are often misdirected in passing judgment on Marcus's speech and in arguing that the speech is otiose (to use Helms's word). Marcus's speech is perhaps ineffective in the sense that it does not return Lavinia to her former condition; nonetheless, his speech is far from being a textual distraction.

Marcus's speech is strained to arrest her—to fix her as a Lucrece pictura—but she flies away, turns away, draws back (2.4.11, 28, 56), always resisting the structuration of his speech. He tries to retreat into mythopoesis by evoking Daphne and Philomela, but in each instance the figure simultaneously or quickly deconstructs before his own eyes. Daphne, with her victorious transformation into a tree to protect her from her rapist, finds herself in Titus Andronicus “bare” and with her dissevered “two branches” (16-18). And Philomela, says Marcus, “but lost her tongue, / And in a tedious sampler sewed her mind; / But, lovely niece, that mean is cut from thee” (38-40). His lyricism evokes and competes with the spellbinding music of the lavishness of Orpheus, the lyricism of that “Thracian poet” (48-51), but his poeticizing can neither restrain her the way Orpheus's music could wild animals nor restore her to her former self the way Orpheus's music could his wife, Eurydice. By gazing on and lyricizing about Lavinia's mutilated body, Marcus tries to piece her body together even as he blazons it, recalling images of her “rosed lips,” “honey breath,” “pretty fingers,” “lily hands,” and “sweet tongue” (24-49).¹³ Marcus's dilatio is his desperate attempt to establish a picture of Lavinia's chaste body, that is, of Lavinia as a modest virgin/woman who still blushes (31-32).

Calderwood has argued that “in Titus [and particularly in Marcus's speech] Shakespeare fails to mold his verbal style to the contours of shifting dramatic occasions; and as a result word and deed become dislocated and often grotesque in their mutual isolation or come together with a disfiguring clash.”¹⁴ He is right to the extent that word and deed become dislocated and often grotesque, but this is not a failure on the playwright's part. Marcus's own convoluted, classically inscribed verse suggests, especially to Marcus himself, that there are no poetic words, no myths, to articulate the image of the raped and mutilated Lavinia. There are no paintings or drawings either; this is Titus's point when he gazes on her and says,

Had I but seen thy picture in this plight,
It would have madded me; what shall I do
Now I behold thy lively body so?

(3.1.103-5)

This is also Lavinia's point when she comes close to hysteria just before turning to the story of Philomela and Tereus in Ovid's Metamorphoses (4.1.1-59).¹⁵ Lavinia's body works against the easy reading of her body within any kind of poetic or artistic mythos or stasis. What the play repeatedly argues and Marcus's speech emphatically marks is a kind of disjunctive mythopoesis, the failure of Lavinia's body to fit even those classical tableaux of horrific rape.¹⁶

STEALING BACK LAVINIA

Lavinia comes close to these classical representations, particularly to the martyred virgin/woman, when in her signature moment she puts the staff in her mouth and writes “Stuprum” (that is, “rape”) and the names of her two rapists (4.1.77), finally opening up and bespeaking the act of vaginal penetration. Here she taps into the classical lexicon of rape, presumably breaking through the silence of her victimization and claiming it as a basis for her sacrificial desires. What she signs, in effect, is the warrant for her own death, the willful abandonment of her self.¹⁷ It is also, as Marjorie Garber has argued about Caesar's signifying “Et tu, Brute” in Julius Caesar, “a survival, a remnant of authentic Romanness, a sign of origin … a quotation of a quotation.”¹⁸ Following through on my earlier discussion about the relationship between the mouth and the vagina, the staff in Lavinia's mouth places her within an iconic framework similar to that found in representations of Lucrece, whose story frequently gets played out, symbolically and synchronically, through the dagger that writes and threatens, rapes, kills, and apotheosizes her.¹⁹ Marcus makes clear the association between the signifying Lavinia and Lucrece:

There is enough written upon this earth
To stir a mutiny in the mildest thoughts,
.....And swear with me, as, with the woeful fere
And father of that chaste dishonoured dame,
Lord Junius Brutus sware for Lucrece's rape,
That we will prosecute by good advice
Mortal revenge upon these traitorous Goths,
And see their blood, or die with this reproach.

(4.1.83-84, 88-93)

Marcus passes over the fact of Lucrece's suicide, her signature moment. … [W]ithin Rome's logic Lavinia's sacrificial death is a foregone conclusion. When Lavinia writes “Stuprum,” she is, as Marcus understands, providing the signature of her own chastity, the call for her own death. It is a coup de theatre, a moment in which Lavinia's pure white hand—however disembodied, however physically missing—still manages (etymological pun intended) to inscribe itself in Rome's sacrificial iconography.²⁰

Shakespeare's Rome presumes to impress on its audience the horrific nature of rape and the chastising and repatriative spirit of sacrifice. When Titus kills Lavinia in the spirit of sacrifice, he presumably does so because of the horrific nature of rape. To accept Titus's reasoning is also, of course, to accept Rome's masculinist fiction, which argues that rape leads to sacrifice. Rome and Titus stress that no matter how “unnatural and unkind” this sacrificial act is, this nonetheless chastising “outrage” (5.3.47, 51), it is merely a mimetic reflection, an undoing, of Lavinia's horrific rape. Girard's point about the “essentially mimetic character of sacrifice with regard to the original, generative act of violence” deserves consideration here.²¹ The penetrating penis and the penetrating dagger are both one. Like the child playing through and repeating the primal scene in order to free “himself” from it or to chastise it, the penetrating of Lavinia with the dagger, like Lucrece's self-penetration, plays through that earlier scene of violence. (In the cases of Lavinia and Lucrece this private and unseen scene gets replayed before the pornographic gaze of an on- and offstage public.) In the end Rome insists that a proper understanding of Lavinia's chastising sacrifice, or of Titus's self-sacrifice, depends on an understanding of the truly horrific nature of the crime committed against Lavinia's body.

According to the sacrificial principle, Lavinia becomes free of this private crime by having the crime publicly reenacted on her body. The evocation of the sacrificial traditions of Lucrece and Virginia presumably enables Rome to ensure the strict stage management of Lavinia's death. It allows Rome to affect a correct sacrifice, that is, “to conceal the murder lurking beneath the sacrifice.”²² Within the strictures of sacrifice's mimetic framework, the outrageous and “the unthinkable [become] a recital of events.”²³ Rather than create the sacrifice, the horrific act allows the sacrifice to happen. The initial violence and the sacrifice are part of the same narrative strategy; both share the same origin.

Although mimesis is undeniably at work in Lavinia's death, the way Lavinia's death also supposes to cut her off from the precipitating event must not be missed. Titus's “Die, die, Lavinia, and thy shame with thee” (5.3.45) cloaks a sexual dying in a mortal one. This being cut off from contact, of being chastised even as she is violated, is one of Jed's primary arguments and one given too little attention by Girard.²⁴ (It is also an argument not understood by Augustine.)²⁵ Shakespeare's Rome insists on establishing some kind of logical continuity from rape to sacrifice; it insists also on cutting off contact between them and affirming their ideational or ideological differences. The sacrificial story must be protected from contamination by the rape story. Even as Lavinia sexually and chastisingly dies as her sacrificial self reaches climax, Rome continues to see itself as acting within the bounds of civilized imperium; in fact, the proof of its civilized imperium is the strictly stage-managed killing of Lavinia. Not surprisingly, it is the outsiders, Tamora and now Saturninus, who are shocked by Titus's killing of Lavinia. To be Roman is to be able to sacrifice and be sacrificed. The message is clear: only a chaste Rome truly understands sacrifice. Rape belongs to Rome's cultural Others. Barbarians rape; Rome chastises. This is Rome's other story of chaste thinking, or at least its chaste thinking about Others.

Rome finally kills Lucrece not because her body is polluted but because her mind is pure—“[H]er bodye was polluted, and not her minde”—and Brutus swears to seek vengeance in the name of her “chast bloud” (Painter, 24). And she dies willingly because in her purity even her life opposes any kind of corporeal contamination. In this respect Lucrece is like those sixteenth-century criminals who on the scaffold publicly confess their crimes to ask for forgiveness before welcoming the execution.²⁶ The execution does not punish them for their crimes, then, as much as it becomes evidence of their willing intervention between the state and its pollutants. This is precisely the place of Lavinia, who from the beginning of the play to its end has inscribed herself and has allowed herself to be inscribed in Rome's story of intervention. From Rome's perspective Lavinia dies as a Roman, not as a barbarian. When Titus kills her, he replays the sexual violence by masturbating her with his sacrificial knife and reenacts both the rape and the raptus. He incestuously steals back her chastity by stealing the place of Tamora's sons and Aaron, making himself the agent of Lavinia's rape, transforming it into his own orgasmic experience—“And with thy shame thy father's sorrow die” (5.3.46). Like Ravenscroft's play, with its “greater Alterations or Additions,” Shakespeare's play, at least Shakespeare's Titus, insists that this second rape of Lavinia displaces the obscene crime with an invisible pornographic scene. As Ravenscroft writes in his preface to the reader, in order to show the Popish Plot and such, he has forced himself to stage this play: “Which were the reasons why I did forward it at so unlucky a conjuncture, being content rather to lose the Profit, then not to expose to the World the Picture of such knaves and Rascals as then Reign'd in the opinion of the Foolish and Malicious part of the Nation.”²⁷ He exposes in order to chastise, or so he says. Shakespeare's Titus effectively strips Lavinia again, chastises her, cuts her off not only from the rape but from a foreign and “barbarous” contamination. In Shakespeare's Rome, incest is better than miscegenation. Lavinia dies not as the (raped) body stolen by the Goths and the Moor but as Rome's sacrificial property.

BLACK RAPISTS AND WHITE REDEMPTION

The dominant culture emphatically marks the difference, the official difference, between rape and sacrifice, even as it forges the relationship between them. Catherine R. Stimpson has made a point I wish to generalize; she has argued that “Shakespearean rape signifies vast conflicts: between unnatural disorder and natural order; raw, polluting lust and its purification through chastity or celibacy; the dishonorable and the honorable exercise of power.”²⁸ The question becomes, how does this conflict end? What finally makes, decides, and visualizes the difference between an unnatural and polluting rape and an honorable suicidal or homicidal chastisement? I will argue as I end this [essay] that a racial blackness enters textual play, especially in early modern tragedy, as a way of culturally marking and proving the difference between sacrifice and rape. Nonetheless, cultural or racial difference as signifying the difference between rape and sacrifice is not new to the early modern period. In Euripides' Greek tragedy Iphigenia in Aulis, for example, Agamemnon and Iphigenia concur that more horrific than rape per se is the fact of being raped by a barbarian, a cultural or racial outsider:

O child, a mighty passion seizes
The Greek soldiers and maddens them to sail
With utmost speed to the barbarian place
That they may halt the plunder of marriage beds
And the rape and seizure of Greek women.

(1263-67)

And, after some serious thought, she agrees:

Because of me, never more will
Barbarians wrong and ravish Greek women,
Drag them from happiness and their homes
In Hellas.

(1379-82)

Through the guises of enthusiastic consent and good stage management, Iphigenia's sacrifice presumes silently and in tricky fashion to return rape to the community. Being raped by one's own isn't really rape. (Hence, the difficulty of prosecuting husbands and other family members for one's rape in present-day society.) After all, real white men don't rape. Barbarians do. … In classical and early modern culture rape happens primarily to the woman perceived as man's property, not to the woman perceived as an individual subject with her own claims to the boundaries of her body.²⁹ In this respect rape by a member of one's own community fits all too well into men's ongoing negotiations about their various inventories. To be raped, to be stolen, by one's proprietor becomes an ideological conundrum. Following the same logic, to be raped by an outsider, to be claimed by one who has or is given no local claims, signifies nothing less than an act of aggression against the body politic itself. Within the misogynistic frame of the nation-empire, rape really comes to mean something when its perpetrator comes from the outside; and rape comes into its most visual, catastrophic sign when it is committed by a black outsider. Lavinia's chastity is implicated in her racial whiteness, her pure Romanness or Englishness. Like England, or like Elizabeth I herself, Lavinia must rise from the emerging cultural and racial complexities as a symbol, an ornament of national and imperial purity. Her role is similar to that of Elizabeth, whose Protestant portraiture presumes to protect her body from the potential miscegenational contamination of Catholics and especially of the French and the Spanish. … Lavinia's imperial virginity is also presented as something that must get cut off from the kind of miscegenation imported “from those eastern parts,” for the telling of which John Stubbs sacrifices his own hand. Lavinia, like Elizabeth, becomes the advocate too for a white England, one populated only by its “natural subjects.”³⁰ Tamora's miscegenated body and miscegenated affair become potential titillating stepping-stones to Lavinia's body. Tamora's national-imperial claim once she becomes empress—“I am incorporate in Rome” (1.1.462)—her sexual relationship with Aaron, and her urging her sons to rape Lavinia toy together with the easy move from one kind of racial contamination to the next. The danger of the racial Other leads all too easily from one racial pollutant to one that is presumably even more racially contaminating.³¹ All too easily interracial bodies and interracial sex get visualized as a scene of miscegenational rape.

The black man has an almost omnipresent place in early modern rape drama but, not surprisingly, is never actually allowed to rape the white woman. For some examples in addition to Titus Andronicus we may consider Dekker's Lust's Dominion, in which Eleazar threatens to rape the virtuous Isabella; the second part of Thomas Heywood's The Fair Maid of the West (1631), in which Mullisheg desires to rape Bess; or William Rowley's All's Lost by Lust (1619), in which Mulymumen first tries to marry Jacinta after revenging her rape by the Spanish king Roderigo. After her refusal, however, Mulymumen comes close to raping her, pursuing her across the stage as she answers his protestations of love, “Love thee? as I would love my ravisher” (5.5.1-10).³²

Throughout early modern plays, the black man maintains a peculiar relationship to the rape narrative: although often enjoying the role of most nefarious and flagrant villain in a play in which a rape is the most catastrophic and constitutive act, his black body and the woman's white one become the twain that never do meet. His blackness serves to mark rape with racial pollution without insisting on a literalization of this contamination. Does the sexism of patriarchal culture require racial difference in order to make rape truly (that is, emblematically) violent? Without race the catastrophic nature of rape remains too ambiguous, too enfolded in cultural narratives of a natural masculine domination. Furthermore, the presence of the black body becomes a way of visualizing, of fantasizing, the pornographic narrative across the border of racial difference. Blackness makes rape happen. The black body simultaneously enables and distances (makes foreign) the pornographic story. By the end of All's Lost by Lust, for example, horror at the very possibility of even consensual sexual contact between Mulymumen and Jacinta overshadows and overwhelms the play's constitutive act, her rape by the white king. Mulymumen's presence both defines the play's pornographic threat and conspicuously marks Spain's difference from pornography.³³ The black bodies in these rape plays help accentuate this racializing.

Rape often pollutes or visualizes its pollution by racially marking the body. Valentinian, All's Lost by Lust, and William Heminge's The Fatal Contract (1640) exemplify a range of racializing possibilities. In Beaumont and Fletcher's Valentinian, which has no black body, Lucina insists on locating her rape in a black corporeality that signals the black race (and not just allegorical coloring) by effectively contrasting the emperor/rapist to a (white) blushing face and through a catalogue of invectives often used to describe the lecherous African infidel:

Wilt thou not kill me, Monster, Ravisher,
Thou bitter bane o'th' Empire, look upon me,
And if thy guilty eyes dare see these ruines,
Thy wild lust hath laid level with dishonour,
The sacrilegious razing of this Temple,
The mother of thy black sins would have blush'd at,
Behold and curse thy self. …
.....Women, and fearfull Maids, make vows against thee;
Thy own Slaves, if they hear of this, shall hate thee.

(3.1)

A disguised Jacinta kneels before her father, Julianus, in All's Lost by Lust, hypothesizing and visualizing her rape in unmistakable anatomical terms:

Say that some rapine hand had pluckt the bloome,
Jacinta like that flower, and ravisht her,
Defiling her white lawne of chastity
With ugly blacks of lust; what would you do?

(4.1.72-75)

Lest we forget, the black Mulymumen is the play's diabolo incarnato (devil incarnate), but the white king, Roderigo, is Jacinta's rapist. And, finally, taking one step further Ben Jonson's concealment from his audience of the boy bride's gender in Epicene, or The Silent Woman (1609-10)), the end of The Fatal Contract reveals to the audience on- and offstage that the black eunuch and villain, Castrato, is really the raped white Crotilda, whom the audience has only heard about in passing. Her black male disguise not only presumably frees her to revenge her rape and commit villainous acts but to perform more far-reaching cultural work. It forges a schizophrenic or hysterical link between the raped Crotilda and the rapist Castrato,³⁴ effectively turning the white Crotilda, who has been raped by the white king, into her own, nevertheless black, rapist. Were he himself no eunuch, Castrato muses,

I'd search the Deserts, Mountaines, Vallies, Plaines,
Till I had met Chrotilda, whom by force
I'd make to mingle with these sootie limbs,
Till I had got on her one like to me.

(1.2.59-62)

(Throughout, Castrato echoes Shakespeare's Aaron, except Heminge allows Castrato to voice a more explicit desire to rape the best virgin or, at least, the best virgin-that-was.) Rape racially pollutes.

Sacrifice, however, racially purifies. All three plays I have discussed here, for example, stress the raped woman's sacrificial death as “returning” her to the purity of a racial whiteness. In Valentinian Lucina's very name originates in whiteness (in “light” [Latin]), and her husband quickly sends her off with his sacrificial approbation and shrouds her in a discourse of whiteness, calling her a “Lilly,” a “sweetly drooping flower,” and a “silver Swan” (3.1). When Mulymumen of All's Lost “tricks” the blinded Julianus into stabbing Jacinta,³⁵ Julianus's own daughter, Julianus offers what is presumably the play's official aphoristic and chastising/whitening response: “Forgive me, my Jacinta, 'twas in me / An innocent act of blood, but tyranny / In that black monster” (5.5.184-86). And in The Fatal Contract, with the uncovering of the fact that Castrato is really “no sun-burnt vagabond of Aethiope” (5.2.463), Crotilda wills her sacrificial/sexual return to whiteness at the hands of the man who raped her:

Thou injurd'st me, and yet I spar'd thy life;
Thou injurd'st me, yet I would dye by thee;
And like to my soft sex, I fall and perish.

(5.2.484-86)

Crotilda's whiteness is underscored in her femininity. The sacrifice of these raped women knowingly reinscribes them in a discourse of whiteness. The violence of their deaths works most decisively to cut them off from a racial pollution.

More obviously, rape informs Lavinia's rape-sacrificial story. She too must be cut off from Rome's racial Others, these outsiders who do not invade Rome but are forced into it by Titus. Early in the play Titus especially emphasizes a chastising and chastised Rome; thus, his bringing the Goths and the Moor into Rome seems somewhat counterintuitive or at least somewhat extravagant. But the role of the racial Other has a use value and is far from being a mere ornament or curiosity. The racial Others are part of Rome's ethnographic allegory—its humanistic chaste thinking, its sacrificial redemption. Their entrance is no less significant than Titus's: they all participate in Rome's chastising and chastised agenda. On an ethnographic allegorical level, by admitting the Goths and the Moor into Rome, Rome does nothing less than guarantee the presence of rape and mayhem in the imperial city. For Rome (and for England) this is what racial Others are for: they are the bearers of national, imperial, familial, and social violence. This is the perennial story of “them” and “us.” Like Shakespeare's other Other rapists, Aaron cannot be totally closed in by the allegorical or ethnographic tradition for which he not only presumably stands but for which he presumes to stand. Although not enough time is spent in critical studies, including this one, on the myriad implications of Aaron's seeking “to identify himself as a character outside a preordained allegory,”³⁶ I would like to think here about how Aaron nonetheless participates in Rome's and Shakespeare's ethnographic allegory. Notwithstanding his new son's being a sign of Aaron's adulterous relationship with Tamora, the child also allows Aaron to be seen in his own youth, his own innocence. Aaron can be “pictured” through reproduction, whereas Lavinia, whose chastised picturing is such a concern to Rome, can only be pictured through sacrifice and death.

In Titus Andronicus Tamora's two sons and Aaron with his “slavish weeds and servile thoughts” (2.1.18) have roles that are respectively analogous to those of the Etruscans and the slave voyeur in the myth of Lucrece. Tamora's sons rape Lavinia, and Aaron watches from the margins. The Goths are only half-barbarous, half-foreign. After all, they will ally themselves with Lucius in his attack on Saturninus and Tamora. Tamora, a Shakespearean prototype for Cleopatra, is herself doubly racialized: although Romans see her as effectively black, her sons see her (and themselves) as white. Saturninus is taken with her “different hue,” but her sons are flabbergasted when she produces a black child with Aaron. Also, as doubly racialized, Tamora both makes possible the rape of the white Lavinia and stands between Aaron and Lavinia, providing a sexual barrier between them. Aaron is, presumably, the total barbarian, the fully signifying black Other. Even though Tamora's sons rape and mutilate Lavinia, Aaron is the most vilified character in the play and in its criticism. Marion Wynne-Davies, for example, has recently referred to him as “the Moor, who repudiates all moral standards and stands in the play as an incarnation of evil.”³⁷ But how does he stand? Where? Perhaps erect over Lavinia?

As the sexually potent mastermind behind Lavinia's rape, Aaron is the play's real rapist, a sentiment as emotionally emphatic in the closing lines of the second quarto as it is visually affective in Peacham's drawing. He belongs to what becomes Shakespeare's ongoing commentary on or participation in the Western ethnographic tradition in which the racial male Other is seen as someone who is a rapist, a rapist especially of white virgins: Caliban is so depicted by Prospero, Othello by Brabantio; and then there is the “valiant” (that is, conquering) prince of Morocco, who seems parodically to indict himself when he suggests to Portia that he has had sex with the “best-regarded virgins” of his clime (Merchant of Venice 2.1.10). (Suggestively, Morocco threatens perhaps to darken or blacken Portia the way Shakespeare's Lucrece is supposed to be contaminated by someone of a different hue.) Dismissing Aaron simply as a diabolo incarnato is to displace him too quickly from the miscegenational rape narrative to which he belongs. It also marks a neglect of the complexities of the ethnographic aspects of Shakespeare's allegorical devil.

Such superficial readings fail to account for Aaron's role in Lavinia's sacrificial rape, making Aaron too Other to be truly integrated into the sacrificial and rape semiotics of Shakespeare's play. As Helms writes, Aaron “turns the traditional blackness of the stage devil into racial difference.”³⁸ And as Wynne-Davies herself argues, when Aaron refuses the sacrificial killing of his own child—“My mistress is my mistress, this myself, / The vigour and the picture of my youth” (4.2.107-8)—the sympathy he arouses “can hardly be reconciled with [his] demonic role.”³⁹ Similar to his speaking of himself as a lamb or his refusal to sacrifice his own child (Aaron may be no biblical Abraham but neither is Tamora's Rome part of any biblical covenant), Aaron seems poised throughout the play to mock Rome's sacrificial seriousness and hypocrisy, as, for example, in his exchange with Lucius in the last act of the play:

AARON:
They cut and ravished her,
And cut her hands and trimmed her as thou sawest.
LUCIUS:
O detestable villain! Call'st thou that trimming?
AARON:
Why, she was washed and cut and trimmed.

(5.1.92-95)

Lucius's horrified response to Lavinia's trimming, her getting barbered—cut and groomed, “O barbarous, beastly villains like thyself!” (5.1.96)⁴⁰—tells at best only a partial story and conveys only an officially sanctioned sentiment. All along, Rome (not Aaron) has been adamantly trimming Lavinia, sacrificially preparing her. Such sacrificial trimmings would become an almost voyeuristic stamp in a few of Shakespeare's plays: before the discovery of Juliet, for example, who has presumably already trimmed herself in her sacrificial scene: “Go awaken Juliet, go and trim her up” (Romeo and Juliet 4.4.25); as a capstone to Cleopatra's own sacrificial drama: “I found her [Cleopatra's gentlewoman] trimming up the diadem / On her dead mistress” (Antony and Cleopatra 5.2.341-42); and most vividly in Shakespeare's Hotspur, who speaks first of a “certain lord, neat and trimly dressed, / Fresh as a bridegroom” (1.3.33-34) and later urges,

… Let them come.
They come like sacrifices in their trim,
And to the fire-eyed maid of smoky war
All hot and bleeding will we offer them.
The mailed Mars shall on his altars sit
Up to the ears in blood.

(1 Henry IV, 4.1.112-17)

Such sacrificial preparations allude, too, to Revelations 21:2: “And I Iohn sawe the holie citie newe Ierusalem come downe from God out of heauen, prepared as a bryde trimmed for her housband.”⁴¹ Lavinia, whose wedding to Bassianus has been cut off, finds her own marriage rites prolonged, as her trimming readies her for sacrifice. As King has argued about Greek wedding rituals, they share many elements found in the preparation of a beast for sacrifice, including “cutting hair, washing, giving a sign of consent and wearing a garland.”⁴² Lavinia's trimming recalls these other trimmings. Aaron exposes and mocks the lie that is Rome's fantasy of trimming, of chaste thinking—of cutting off ideological and narrative contact between rape and sacrifice, between Romans and outsiders. Aaron argues that however marginal he may officially be to Rome's community, it is he (as community member) who has prepared and stage-managed Lavinia's sacrificial Roman death.

Besides Lavinia, Aaron is the most visible character in Rome. It is perhaps for some Shakespeare audiences a relief (and a little surprising) that Aaron the Blackamoor, the icon of libido and rapaciousness, does not rape Lavinia. In any event, Aaron in his visibility stands in a role similar to that of the black servant in several representations of Lucrece. He is also the play's most voyeuristic character, watching and plotting without a word, for example, through the entire first act. Also in The History of Titus Andronicus (c. 1594), the chapbook prose story, the author points out that during the rape Aaron is set “to watch on the outborders.”⁴³ On the “outborders” is also, one may recall, where Aaron is located in Peacham's drawing. Aaron stands in the margins with his black hands in full evidence, and his sword points to the kneeling and bound Chiron and Demetrius as he reveals not only his managing role in the rape and mutilation of Lavinia but also his iconographical place in pictorial representations of Tarquin and Lucrece.

Although the Romans find it expedient to racialize and differentiate Chiron and Demetrius from themselves, they also find it necessary to keep Aaron's blackness at a distance from Lavinia. This miscegenational rape would be no less horrifying to Chiron and Demetrius: they may rape and mutilate Lavinia, but they are disgusted and shocked into disbelief when they see the proof of Aaron's consensual sexual affair with their mother. (White-on-white rape is also more acceptable than consensual interracial sex.) Even though Aaron does not rape Lavinia, he stands in the play as the visible sign of the cultural otherness that Rome attempts to chastise with Lavinia's death. He becomes the horror that Rome claims it cannot imagine even as it does. Notwithstanding the importance of the Roman imagination, there can be in the play no literal racial contamination of the pure white Lavinia, just as there can be no such contamination of Lucrece. As foreign as Rome's and Shakespeare's ideological constraints will allow, Lavinia can only really be contaminated by a white Other. In a semiotics more nuanced perhaps than that of a racial conversion from white to black or from black to white (fairly available tropes in early modern England), Lavinia is a white woman who is made functionally and temporarily to pass as a black woman. Stretching, perhaps, the limits of my analogy, I suggest that Lavinia's body becomes for the moment like the octoroon in Joseph Roach's analysis, whose “nearly invisible but fatal blackness makes it available; [whose] whiteness somehow makes it clean.”⁴⁴ In short, Roman contamination, like Roman sacrifice, is a story about symbolic relations (as opposed to real or literal ones), with Rome bringing in Aaron both to mask and to help expedite its symbolic story of sacrifice. But to leave the argument here seems to cheat somewhat the affectivity of the racial and pornographic story of Lavinia's (or Lucrece's) rape. There is something literal about Aaron's raping Lavinia, just as there is something literal in those many other early modern depictions of black men raping white women. In the rape-sacrificial story, in which the community is always at pains to separate its desires for the sacrifice from its desires for the rape, his black body is the textual trick, the incorporation of the sacrificial hoax, the misunderstanding, that differentiates rape from sacrifice. However much Aaron may be on the textual or representational border, Shakespeare's Rome consistently conceptualizes and imagines his body at its textual center. Given this play's obsession with the sociopolitics of identifying oneself as a brother, an early modern audience would most immediately recognize Aaron's name as belonging to the brother of Moses. This biblical Aaron helped Moses liberate the Israelites from Egypt (Joshua 24:5, 1 Samuel 12:6, 8; Psalms 77:20; 105:26), assisted him and the elders at significant sacrificial events (Exodus 18:12, 24:9-11), and served as the first high priest of the children of Israel (Exodus 31:10; 35:19; 38:21; Leviticus 13:2; Numbers 18:28). Admittedly, Shakespeare's Aaron is no high priest, and Shakespeare's Rome may have its reasons for finally reading Aaron's body as the real body threatening the palisading of white virginity—hence the closing lines of the second quarto. But in the end what makes Aaron no mere allegorical object is the fact that the metatheatrical Aaron knows and manipulates his place as sacrificial hoax and host.

At the end of Shakespeare's play Rome fantasizes that Lucius recovers not only Rome's virginity but its whiteness. As Calderwood has argued, Lucius, who is not in any of Shakespeare's conjectured sources and whose name means “light,” functions as Rome's “political redeemer” and stands in contrast to Aaron, the nonlight, the Blackamoor.⁴⁵ To become Rome's redeemer Lucius leaves the city and stages a reentry. In the most classical tradition of the sacrificial victim, he is the outsider who is also an insider.⁴⁶ As the redeemer, Lucius emerges as the cultural product of Rome's ethnographic allegory. By being put in contradistinction to Aaron, he assumes a crucial role in what Clifford calls a “redemptive Western allegory.” He is more than Rome's political redeemer in any abstract sense. By stepping in at the end to save the scattered (that is, “mutilated”) body of Rome from doing “shameful execution on herself” (5.3.66-75), Lucius is also Rome's final substitute victim. Whereas Marcus himself pulls back from Rome's sacrifice of itself, its proof of its purity, Lucius offers up himself and symbolically inscribes the Lucrece story on his own body:

I am the turned-forth, be it known to you,
That have preserved her welfare in my blood,
And from her bosom took the enemy's point,
Sheathing the steel in my advent'rous body.
Alas, you know I am no vaunter, I;
My scars can witness, dumb although they are,
That my report is just and full of truth.

(5.3.108-14)

In two gestures, figuratively taking the sword from the raped woman's body and putting it in his own, Lucius becomes Brutus and Lucrece. After all, Brutus's full name is Lucius Junius Brutus. Shakespeare's Lucius emerges as the latest incorporation, the latest picture, of Lucrece's chaste body. But he does not simply imitate his namesake. Instead of simply taking the dagger from Lucrece's bosom and going on to sacrifice his own sons (Brutus would kill his sons who did not support Rome's move to republicanism), Lucius symbolically sacrifices himself. He brings the sword to its final resting place, to a final resolve, by symbolically “sheathing” it in his own body, turning this Roman drama into a political morality play.⁴⁷ Through him Rome becomes male and female—more accurately, the male body incorporates the female body into itself. Lucius's determined move here to a symbolic understanding of Rome's chastity transforms sacrifice from a physical act into a discursive practice. In a more cynical view of Rome's achievements at the end of Shakespeare's play, one may perceive sacrifice not just as a discursive practice but as a discursive trick, a theatrical trick, that allows Lucius to picture himself as both Brutus and Lucrece, Titus and Lavinia. He is both the wounded soldier returning from battle and the wounding, self-sacrificing, and preserving Lucrece. And … Lavinia loses her corporeal place in the story. In his coolness Lucius has chastised Lucrece, remembering the actions of her white hand, her sacrifice, her invisibility, even as he forgets her rape.

Notes

1. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 49. The entire chapter is worth a look; see “Sacrificial Crisis,” 39-67.

2. Cf. Eva C. Keuls's discussion of the relationship between marriage and rape in ancient Greek culture in The Reign of the Phallus, 52-57.

3. Bowers, “Emblem and Rape,” 91. For a more thorough discussion of Christian sacrificial virgins, see Jane T. Schulenberg, “Heroics of Virginity.”

4. Marion Wynne-Davies, “Consumed and Consuming Women,” discusses the pit as a symbolic vagina; however, she does not link it to any particular body in the play. See especially 135-36.

5. Albert Charles Hamilton, Structure of Allegory, 69-72; and Albert H. Tricomi, “Aesthetics of Mutilation,” 18.

6. See Giulia Sissa, Greek Virginity.

7. See Gail Kern Paster, Body Embarrassed, 98-99.

8. Cf. Coppélia Kahn, Roman Shakespeare: “Though Lavinia is ‘a newmarried lady’ (2.2.15) when she is raped, Tamora uses the term ‘deflower’ (2.2.191) to describe what is done to her, thus representing her as virginal daughter rather than chaste wife, even before her husband is murdered and she returns to her father in the daughter's position (2.2.191)” (54).

9. See esp. 4-7 of Girard's Violence and the Sacred, although Girard elaborates on the importance of sacrificial substitutions throughout his book.

10. Bowers, “Emblem and Rape,” 13.

11. Lorraine Helms, “‘High Roman Fashion,’” 558.

12. Ibid., 559; see also James L. Calderwood, Shakespearean Metadrama, 34-35.

13. Particularly relevant here is Nancy J. Vickers's classic reading of the blazon in “Diana Described: Scattered Women and Scattered Rhyme,” which takes its impetus from Petrarch's poetic sequence Rime sparse (scattered rhymes). The scattering of the woman by ostensibly celebrating her body parts in effect dismembers the woman whom the poet presumably praises. Poetic scattering becomes a form of masculinist poetic revenge. Vickers points out that some cognate of spargere (to scatter [Italian]) appears some forty-three times in Petrarch's poetic sequence, with nineteen of these being used to describe Laura, the object of his lyrics. Here in Shakespeare's play, the scattered body of Lavinia, a body that has experienced sparagmos, i.e., a ritual dismemberment, betrays the violence inherent in Petrarchanism, especially for this study, the early modern Petrarchanism of Lucrece. Marcus's own discourse becomes doubly tortured because Marcus cannot find a way of describing that will allow him to separate sparagmos from poetic spargere.

14. Calderwood, Shakespearean Metadrama, 35.

15. See Gillian Murray Kendall, “‘Lend Me Thy Hand,’” 307-8.

16. See Richlin, “Reading Ovid's Rapes.”

17. Wynne-Davies, “Consumed and Consuming Women,” reads this moment differently. She sees Lavinia here as taking “over the textual discourse, thereby castrating the source of male power” (146-47). We do agree, however, that Lavinia's writing moment is the play's “narrative fulcrum.”

18. Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare's Ghost Writers, 54-55.

19. See esp. Bowers, “Emblem and Rape”; and Kahn, “Sexual Politics of Subjectivity,” 156-57.

20. Katherine A. Rowe offers a highly suggestive reading of the play in her argument that it “insists on hands as the central emblem of effective political action” (301). Unlike Rowe, however, who imagines “Lavinia as a kind of antiemblem of the Just Virgin, ‘lopp'd’ of the iconic hands that might hold scales and sword, and made the center of a vengeful demand for justice” (285 n), I would argue that Lavinia is lopped most significantly of the iconic hand that directs chastising demands toward her own body. In the end our readings do share some important foundational points.

21. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 102-3.

22. Loraux, Tragic Ways, 32.

23. Ibid.

24. Jed, Chaste Thinking, esp. 8, 18-50; Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 269-73, 295-306.

25. Donaldson, Rapes of Lucretia, 21-39.

26. See Karen Cunningham, “Trials by Ordeal.”

27. Quoted in Anthony Barthelemy, Black Face, 101-2.

28. Stimpson, “Soil of Rape,” 57.

29. For examples see critique of this phenomenon in Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display, 106-22; also Guido Ruggiero, Boundaries of Eros, 89-108.

30. For a fuller text of the 1601 edict from which I take this phrase see my introductory chapter. For the complete text see Hughes and Larkin, Tudor Royal Proclamations, 3:221-22. I will make more explicit and implicit use of this document in Chapter 2.

31. We see this kind of racial contamination in many early modern texts. It's as though one kind of cultural or racial pollution makes possible a more dangerous kind of racial contamination. The infiltration of Jewishness can lead to the infiltration of blackness; the Anglo-Irish can open the doors to the Irish, who can in turn lead the presumably racially pure state into Spanishness and even Africanness. (See, for example, my discussion of the Irish in Chapter 3.) The bottom line of England's national-imperial project is that it can't be too careful when it comes to any kind of cultural or racial mixing.

32. For some later examples see Edward Ravenscroft's adaptation of Shakespeare's play, Titus Andronicus, or the Rape of Lavinia (1687), and Aphra Behn's Abdelazer; or, The Moor's Revenge (1677), an adaptation of Dekker's Lust's Dominion.

33. English plays dramatizing the possibility of interracial sex and rape are often set in Spain or Italy, and a more extensive discussion of these plays would require a deeper reading of these geographical signifiers. Spain and Italy are in important ways interim cultural spaces, floating somewhere between an English whiteness and an African blackness. See, for example, my discussion of Venice in Chapter 2.

34. I would especially like to emphasize the term hysterical here, since I am using it to mean something more emphatic than is immediately available in popular parlance. The notion of hysteria here signifies Crotilda's split female self, the woman divided against herself. In Mary Jacobus's reading of hysteria, Crotilda experiences “self-estrangement, fracturing into two dimensions the unity which the hysteric yearns to recreate on the site of her body.” Jacobus, Reading Woman, 206. (For a succinct analysis of hysteria and the woman's body, see also Charles Bernheimer, “Introduction Part One,” in In Dora's Case, 5-12.) The split between what is in effect Crotilda's chaste white self and her raped black self points, too, to the way woman (in whatever circumstance) is seen as naturally divided against herself. For some attention to the dilemma of the hysterical woman in early modern tragedy, see my essay “‘Transshaped’ Women.”

35. I put “tricks” in quotation marks here because although Mulymumen does ostensibly mislead Julianus into killing his daughter, I am insisting still that Julianus participates in a sacrificial economy similar to Titus's when he kills his daughter (an argument made below). Julianus's stabbing of his daughter, whom the play explicitly links to Lucrece, three times (1.1.11-12, 1.2.97-98, 4.1.99-101) presumes to shift the narrative from one of a foreign and polluting rape to a saving and protecting sacrifice. The sacrifice, the barbarity of sacrifice, does not (or perhaps cannot) announce itself as desired or stage-managed. In other words, sacrifice for Julianus conveniently enters textualization as a trick—as a mockery, to use Julianus's own word (5.5.181)—but it still does the sacrificial work. A sacrifice by any other name. …

36. Barthelemy, Black Face, 97.

37. See Wynne-Davies, “Consumed and Consuming Women,” 138-39.

38. Helms, “‘High Roman Fashion,’” 558.

39. Wynne-Davies, “Consumed and Consuming Women,” 138-39.

40. For another example of Shakespeare's punning on barber and barbar(ism) see my discussion in Chapter 3 of Antony's getting barbered in Cleopatra's Egypt.

41. Unless otherwise noted, all biblical quotations are from the 1560 Geneva Bible.

42. Helen King, “Sacrificial Blood,” 120.

43. Titus Andronicus, Oxford ed., 202.

44. Joseph R. Roach, Cities of the Dead, 220.

45. Calderwood, Shakespearean Metadrama, 42.

46. For further explanation I direct the reader to Girard's argument in Violence and the Sacred about the insidedness and outsidedness of the sacrificial victim (see, e.g., 11-13).

47. Calderwood, Shakespearean Metadrama, 45.

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