SOURCE: Bate, Jonathan. Introduction to Titus Andronicus, by William Shakespeare, edited by Jonathan Bate, pp. 1-122. London: Routledge, 1995.

[In the following excerpted introduction, Bate surveys the structure, language, and critical reception of Titus Andronicus, and studies the drama's themes of revenge, passion, grief, and rape.]

SPACE AND STRUCTURE

The theatres built by the Elizabethans allowed for triple-layered performance. There was a gallery or upper stage (Juliet's window is the most famous use of this ‘above’ or ‘aloft’ space), the main stage which projected into the auditorium and on which the actors—in Hamlet's image—‘hold as 'twere the mirror’ up to the lives of the theatre audience, and the ‘cellarage’ below the stage, reached by a trap-door (through which Dr Faustus descends and the weird sisters' apparitions arise). In Titus Andronicus Shakespeare made bold and innovative use of all three levels.

Trumpets sound, heralding the beginning of the play. But the stage remains empty: the first entrance is that of the Roman tribunes and senators ‘aloft’. The biggest theatrical hit of the early 1590s, Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, had also begun with an entrance above, but there the personages on the upper stage represented a dead man and a personification of Revenge: the tragedy performed below is imagined as an acting out of revenge upon the dead man's enemies, with him as spectator throughout. The stage-manager, ‘Revenge’, is a figure from ancient Roman tragedy, so what Kyd offers his audience is a classicized version of the medieval image of God looking down on the theatre of the world. But where Christian iconography had God and Kyd had Revenge, Shakespeare begins with human, secular authorities in the commanding position aloft.

Below them, on the main stage, there are doors at either end of the tiring-house which serves as a backdrop. … Through them come rival claimants for power: the use of opposite doors dramatizes the brothers' opposition in terms of the stage space. When Titus Andronicus enters in his victory procession, the third level, the darkness below the stage which figures the underworld, comes into play. His first task is to give a proper burial to his sons who have died in combat, ‘They open the tomb’ and the nether world is invoked for the first time. Once buried, the dead sons would be free to cross the Styx into the underworld; once the gods were propitiated, peace could return to Rome. The city prided itself on not being barbaric: the word civilized comes from civilis, which means ‘of citizens, of the city’, and Rome was the city. The religious rituals of a civilized culture, it was believed, involved animal rather than human sacrifice. When Lucius demands that the shadows be appeased through the lopping of the limbs of ‘the proudest prisoner of the Goths’ and the consuming of his flesh in fire, barbarism has entered the city.¹ The first of the play's many reversals of expected linguistic and behavioural codes takes place, and the supposedly barbaric queen of Goths speaks a Roman language of valour, patriotism, piety, mercy and nobility, whereas the Roman warriors go about their ritual killing. Theirs is, as Tamora says in a telling oxymoron, a ‘cruel, irreligious piety’. It will provoke the bloody requital of what Demetrius here calls ‘sharp revenge’. The ground is immediately laid for the play's brutal but elegant symmetrical structure: ‘Alarbus' limbs are lopped’ in Act 1, so Lavinia's will be ‘lopped and hewed’ in Act 2; Tamora is made to kneel and plead for her son's life, so Titus will later be made to kneel and plead for his sons' lives.

To read the timing of entrances and exits is to see these patterns unfold: Titus' sons enter with their swords bloody from the sacrifice of Alarbus, their dead brothers are laid to rest and then their sister comes on. Her entrance is perfectly timed to draw her into the spiral of retribution. It also serves to link the domestic political plot with the opposition between Titus and Tamora. The opposite doors come into play again when Saturninus and the Goths take off for the upper stage just as the Andronicus boys help Bassianus bear Lavinia away through the other door. Having just been at the centre of a triumphal procession, Titus suddenly finds himself alone on stage with the body of a son whom he has slain out of a mistaken sense of honour and loyalty to the new emperor who at the very same moment has gone off to marry the queen of Goths, thus further dissolving the distinction between insiders and outsiders, civilized and barbaric. There is then a re-entry through the opposite doors in which the two sides are seen in tableau against each other. Having begun with Saturninus against Bassianus, then moved to Romans against Goths, the scene ends with Saturninus and Goths versus Bassianus and Andronici, but in uneasy truce. Since that truce has been brokered by Tamora, with her ulterior scheme revealed in an aside, we know it will not last—especially since the general departure for the double wedding has left the sinister and hitherto menacingly silent figure of Aaron alone in control of the stage.

Hunting for sport is ‘civilized’ society's way of getting back in touch with the wild. The second act of the play moves swiftly from a cheerful aubade, complete with hunter's peal, to a dark forest, evoked through a verbal iconography of shadowiness and banefulness. … A second-act movement away from city and court anticipates the journeys not only of pastoral plays such as A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It and Cymbeline, but also of Lear. Where the first act is dominated by the question of who controls the upper stage, symbolic of the Capitol, of power over Rome, the second is dominated by the pit, represented by the trap-door. Aaron is in his element here, hiding the gold, springing the trap, leading in the hapless Quintus and Martius. Attention shifts from the body politic to the human body. The forest is a place where desire can be acted out: Tamora comes to make love to Aaron, Chiron and Demetrius rape Lavinia.

The rape cannot be shown onstage, but it is evoked through the simultaneous action of the pit scene. We do not have to be card-carrying Freudians to see the connection between what we know Chiron and Demetrius are doing to Lavinia, and Quintus' description of a ‘subtle hole’, ‘Whose mouth is covered with rude-growing briers / Upon whose leaves are drops of new-shed blood’, or Martius' reference to ‘the swallowing womb / Of this deep pit’ where the dead Bassianus lies ‘bathed in maiden blood’.² ‘This detested, dark, blood-drinking pit’, ‘Cocytus' misty mouth’, ‘this fell devouring receptacle’, ‘this gaping hollow’ (OED's earliest record of the adjective), ‘the ragged entrails of this pit’: the language becomes darkly obsessive, evocative not only of death and hell but also of the threatening female sexuality that is embodied in Tamora. There is a suggestion of Lear's disgust at what he calls the ‘sulphurous pit’ of woman's genitals.³ The ‘mouth’ of the pit becomes crucial when we realize that Lavinia is not only being raped but also having her tongue cut out; throughout the play, the action turns on mouths that speak, mouths that abuse and are abused, mouths that devour.

If the onstage/offstage counterpoint of pit and rape is bold, how much bolder is the following scene in which the elaborate poetic language of Marcus is juxtaposed onstage to the physical image of Lavinia's multilated body. The best account of the effect is by D. J. Palmer, and it is well worth a long quotation:

Marcus' lament is the expression of an effort to realise a sight that taxes to the utmost the powers of understanding and utterance. The vivid conceits in which he pictures his hapless niece do not transform or depersonalise her: she is already transformed and depersonalised, as she stands before him the victim of a strange and cruel metamorphosis. … Far from being a retreat from the awful reality into some aesthetic distance, then, Marcus' conceits dwell upon this figure that is to him both familiar and strange, fair and hideous, living body and object: this is, and is not, Lavinia. … Lavinia's plight is literally unutterable … Marcus' formal lament articulates unspeakable woes. … Here and throughout the play, the response to the intolerable is ritualised, in language and action, because ritual is the ultimate means by which man seeks to order and control his precarious and unstable world.

(Palmer, 321-2)

I return to Marcus' speech later, in the context of Peter Brook's and Deborah Warner's very different treatments of the scene.

In terms of the structure of the play, the post-rape scene is pivotal because it shifts the balance from the language-registers associated with action to those associated with reaction. It introduces two registers which have been apparent only in passing up to this point: comedy and grief. Grief is the register of Marcus' speech, as it is of much of Titus' language in the following scene. But the first reaction to the rape is a series of jokes. Chiron and Demetrius become a sick comedy team, offering feed line and punch line:

CHIRON
Go home, call for sweet water, wash thy hands.
DEMETRIUS
She hath no tongue to call, nor hands to wash.

and again,

CHIRON
And 'twere my cause, I should go hang myself.
DEMETRIUS
If thou hadst hands to help thee knit the cord.

There is a decorum of character in this—it is not unknown for rapists to think of their actions as a bit of a laugh. There is also an anticipation of Lear, where Cornwall accompanies the gouging of Gloucester's eyes with some grimly witty word-play. But does comedy effect a simultaneous heightening and release of tension in the audience here, as it does in the Porter scene in Macbeth, which occupies a closely comparable structural position? I suspect that it is intended to, but that the cultural gap between our time and Shakespeare's makes it difficult for us to share in the release. Among our few taboos are having a laugh at the expense of people who haven't got any hands or women who have been raped.

Titus' first words to his mutilated daughter are ‘what accursed hand / Hath made thee handless in thy father's sight?’ Features such as the relentless play on the word ‘hands’ from this point onwards have led some critics to suppose that the whole play is ‘a huge joke’, a parody in which Shakespeare watched the groundlings ‘gaping ever wider to swallow more as he tossed them bigger and bigger gobbets of sob-stuff and raw beef-steak’ (Dover Wilson, Cam¹, lvi). This is a wrong-headed but understandable reading. There is a lot of comedy in the second half of the play—it was brought out brilliantly by Brian Cox in the Deborah Warner production—but that does not make it a parody. Rather, what it does is blur the conventional distinctions between tragedy and comedy, grieving and laughing. As the decorums of Roman honour disintegrate, so do the decorums of dramatic expectation.

What do you do when twenty-one of your sons have been killed in battle, you've killed the twenty-second in a fit of pique, your daughter has been raped and had her hands cut off and her tongue cut out, two further sons have been wrongly accused of murdering your son-in-law and the remaining one sentenced to exile, you've been told that the two who are condemned will be reprieved if you chop off your hand, and you do so, only to have the hand and the heads of the two sons sent back to you in scorn? Dramatic decorum dictates that you should rant (‘Now is a time to storm,’ says Marcus). But human nature does not obey dramatic decorum. What Titus says is much more true: ‘Ha, ha, ha!’ At the end of the scene, he and Marcus carry off the heads; but, so as to be sure that Lavinia is not left out, he says ‘Bear thou my hand, sweet wench, between thy teeth’. This is a visual joke, for it shows that she has become the handmaid of Revenge (a role which will later involve her in dextrous work with a basin between her stumps). If we laugh at Titus' line, as the audience in all three productions I have seen certainly did, we are sharing in Titus' experience. By laughing with him, we also participate in what he calls the ‘sympathy of woe’. Where Lear has his Fool and then the company of Poor Tom, Titus and Hamlet play their own fools; in each case, the moments of laughter intensify rather than diminish the passionate fellow-feeling of tragedy.

Titus certainly gets the last laugh against his enemies. He spends the fourth act sending jokey messages, first to Chiron and Demetrius, then to Saturninus via arrows and Clown. He turns the tables on Tamora in the scene in which she impersonates Revenge and he then enjoys himself playing the cook. … Comedy depends on a sense of satisfaction, of one thing answering neatly to another. So there is a kind of comic satisfaction in the gagging of Chiron and Demetrius and the slitting of their throats: it answers exactly to their gagging of Lavinia and cutting of her tongue. It is no coincidence that the two longest speeches in the play are Marcus' address to the raped Lavinia and Titus' address to her rapists prior to his act of retribution. Furthermore, in the preceding scene, Aaron has bragged of his villainy in what Palmer (336) aptly calls ‘a parody of the need under which Titus ritualises suffering in speech and action’, so that ‘tragedy is transformed into jest’ (the trick is learnt from Marlowe's Jew of Malta). Aaron's ‘bitter tongue’ torments his enemies until, like other tongues in the play, it is gagged and stopped. As we come to the close and reflect on the hand that Titus has played in the second half, Palmer is again our surest commentator on the game:

Titus' passion is a continued struggle, not merely to endure the unendurable, but to express the inexpressible; he performs his woes out of the need to grasp what is all too real but virtually inconceivable in its enormity. The impulse to play, in other words, arises in Titus not as a retreat from the hideous world that confronts him, but as a means of registering its full significance. His more bizarre fantasies, in which his mind seems to have collapsed under the unbearable suffering, are certainly symptoms of a precarious sanity, yet far from losing his grip on reality, through these obsessive pantomimes Titus' mind becomes fixed on its object.

(Palmer, 330)

Subsequently, I will suggest what the political consequences of the performance of revenge might be. Meanwhile, the resolution of the main political action is achieved through a structural device which Shakespeare replicated in Coriolanus. The successful Roman warrior is sent into exile, where he joins up with his former enemies and then marches with them against the city which has cast him out. There is a full trial run for Coriolanus in Lucius' self-description in the closing scene, with its images of banishment, closed gates, relief among Rome's enemies, discomfort at being a vaunter, the wounded body as witness, and construction of the self as the archetype of ‘the turned-forth’ (5.3.103-17).

Titus Andronicus differs from Coriolanus in that there is no turning back outside the city gates. When Lucius is proclaimed as emperor, he has an army of Goths in support. Their role in the final scene has been insufficiently recognized, because they are silent at the climax. But they are unquestionably present, and there is every reason to suppose that when Lucius kills the emperor Saturninus, the imperial guard will rise against him and the Goths will come to his defence. It is clear from the ensuing dialogue that Lucius and Marcus move at this point to the dominating above space. … Where Saturninus went aloft with the ‘evil’ Goths in the first act, Lucius escapes aloft through the offices of the ‘good’ Goths in the last act. When he is proclaimed emperor and comes down on to the main stage, the symmetry which marks so much of the play's action suggests that there should be ‘A long flourish till the Andronici come down’, echoing the trumpet flourish at the corresponding moment when Saturninus was proclaimed in the first act.

The wheel has come full circle. Andronicus refused the crown at the beginning of the play; an Andronicus takes it at the end. Will he usher in a new golden age? His name is propitious, as I shall show, but his final action raises questions (quite apart from the matter of how the Goths are going to be paid off for their assistance): the troubles of the Andronici began with the question of proper burial rites and the sacrifice of Alarbus; the play ends with the living burial of Aaron and the refusal of proper burial rites for Tamora. It ends on a rhyme of ‘pity’ with ‘pity’, and pity has reached its zenith in the moving farewell kisses upon the dead Titus, but what Lucius is advocating in the final couplet is an absence of pity.

ROMANS AND GOTHS

No subject affecteth us with more delight than history, imprinting a thousand forms upon our imaginations from the circumstances of place, person, time, matter, manner, and the like. And what can be more profitable, saith an ancient historian, than sitting on the stage of human life, to be made wise by their example who have trod the path of error and danger before us.

(Peacham, 64)

So wrote Henry Peacham, whom we will meet again, in a handbook for gentlemen that is typical of the age. When we speak of the Renaissance we mean above all a renewed grasp of the ancient world. Sir Thomas North wrote in the address to the reader at the beginning of his English version of The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans that ‘there is no prophane studye better than Plutarke’. He dedicated his translation to Queen Elizabeth because, he wrote, there was no other book ‘that teacheth so much honor, love, obedience, reverence, zeale, and devocion to Princes, as these lives of Plutarke doe’.⁴ Peacham approvingly cites the sentiment that, if the world had to choose one author (in addition to the Bible) and burn the rest, that one should be Plutarch. As England sought to establish itself as a great nation and an imperial power, it looked to the example of classical Rome.

Shakespeare's treatment of Roman political institutions in Titus Andronicus has been mocked: is the state a commonwealth or a monarchy, is succession based on election or heredity? In T. J. B. Spencer's words,

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 seems anxious, not to get it all right, but to get it all in.

(Spencer, 32)

To which the best critics of the play reply: quite so, but this is exactly the point.⁵ Far from being a matter of anxiety or youthful incompetence, the eclecticism is deliberate. Shakespeare is interrogating Rome, asking what kind of an example it provides for Elizabethan England; in so doing he collapses the whole of Roman history, known to him from Plutarch and Livy, into a single action.

The first book of Livy's Roman history narrates two key events in the foundation of the city: first, the escape of Aeneas from Troy and his arrival in Italy, and second the expulsion of the Tarquins. Near the end of Titus Andronicus, a Roman Lord speaks of ‘Our Troy, our Rome’. According to the theory of the translation of empire (translatio imperii), history consists of a gradual westward shift of the greatest imperial power; myths are created to story that shift. Thus, when the city of Troy fell, Aeneas escaped and founded Rome. In an effort to sustain the pattern, British writers created the myth of Brutus, who also escaped from Troy and founded Britain, London serving as another new Troy (‘Troynovant’): our Troy, our Rome, this England. In order to establish Rome, Aeneas had to reject the amorous advances of Dido in Carthage and sail on to Italy; there, according to Virgil's Aeneid, Lavinia, the daughter of Latinus, king of Latium (the region where the Trojans made landfall), was betrothed to Turnus, but then given by her father in marriage to Aeneas, who kills Turnus in single combat at the climax of the poem.

According to Livy, Rome first went into decline when L. Tarquinius Superbus ‘usurped the kingdome, without the election, either of the Senators or the people’; but he was then expelled because of his son's rape of the chaste Lucretia. The Romans then decided that they'd had enough of tyrannical monarchs and established the republic. The man who was chiefly instrumental in expelling the Tarquins was Lucius Junius Brutus. The parallel of his names with the Brutus who was supposed to have established Britain and the Lucius who was supposed to have been the first Christian king of Britain facilitated the Elizabethan extension of the translatio.

The relevance of this early history to the action of the play should be readily apparent. Like Tarquin, Saturninus abuses the electoral process; like Lucretia, Lavinia is raped; as a consequence, Lucius, following in the footsteps of Lucius Junius Brutus, brings political change. Like Aeneas, Titus is ‘surnamed Pius’, and, as in the Aeneid, the main threat to him is an exotic woman from a rival empire. But in a deliberate debasement of the famous encounter between Aeneas and Dido in a cave during a hunt, Tamora's sexual involvement is with the Moor, not with a Roman, and Virgil's celebrated image of the impassioned woman as a stricken deer (Aen. 4.68-73) is displaced on to the rape of Lavinia: ‘Chiron, we hunt not, we, with horse nor hound, / But hope to pluck a dainty doe to ground’ (2.1.25-6). Virgil's Lavinia, the mother of early Rome, becomes the mutilated daughter of late Rome. The high history of the foundation of the city and the advent of its republican government, with senators balanced against tribunes, is replayed in the decadent key of the late empire. As Heather James puts it in her ground-breaking article on this theme, ‘the founding acts of Empire turn out to contain the seeds of its destruction’ (James, 123).

Everybody knows that the Roman empire was eventually overrun by Goths and Vandals, heralding the ‘middle’ age in which, according to the imaginings of Renaissance historiographers, darkness fell over Europe. But the Goths in the play are not historically specific. They are all the enemies of Rome, including the Carthaginians whose wars were a main preoccupation of Livy and the Gauls whose wars were a main preoccupation of Julius Caesar. Titus' ten-year war against the Goths is an echo of the length not only of the Trojan war but also of Caesar's Gallic wars. As the play begins, Titus has spent ten years expanding the empire, as if during its heyday; when it ends, an army of Goths is in the city, as if during its decline. But the Goths who join with Lucius are a very civilized lot in comparison with the ones who are paraded through the streets in the first act. This will seem puzzling until we know what the Elizabethans thought about the Goths.⁶

In his Perambulation of Kent (1570), William Lambarde wrote, ‘The Saxons, Jutes, and Angles, were the Germaines that came over (as we have said) in aide of the Britons, of which the first sort inhabited Saxonie: the second were of Gotland, and therefore called Gutes, or Gottes’ (Lambarde, xiii). To the Elizabethans, Jutes, Getes, Goths and Germans were not only interchangeable, they were also their own ancestors. Lambarde tells of how they established themselves in Kent, a county which, as Shakespeare reminds us, was especially associated with freedom and valour (see King Henry VI Part 2 4.7.60-4; tradition had it that William the Conqueror never forced Kent under the Norman yoke). Titus Andronicus begins with a Roman stigmatization of Goths as barbarians, but modulates towards a very different view.

If the Second Goth is a barbarian, what is he doing gazing ‘upon a ruinous monastery’ (5.1.21)? For the Elizabethans, history had lessons to teach the present, so this anachronism is purposeful. It brings a Reformation context into play. The Goth's meditation upon Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries, the most drastic consequence of England's break with Rome, carries forward the translatio imperii ad Teutonicos:

The translatio suggested forcefully an analogy between the breakup of the Roman empire by the Goths and the demands of the humanist reformers of northern Europe for religious freedom, interpreted as liberation from Roman priestcraft. In other words, the translatio crystallized the idea that humanity was twice ransomed from Roman tyranny and depravity—in antiquity by the Goths, in modern times by their descendants, the German reformers. In their youth, vigour, and moral purity, the Goths destroyed the decadent Roman civilization and brought about a rejuvenation or rebirth of the world. In the same way, the Reformation was interpreted as a second world rejuvenation.

(Kliger, 33-4)

Other passing phrases also suggest a Reformation context, most notably ‘popish tricks and ceremonies’ (5.1.76), but perhaps also the references to Lavinia as a ‘martyr’ (mutilation is the keynote of one of the most-read books in Elizabethan England, John Foxe's virulently Protestant martyrology, Acts and Monuments) and even the words with which Titus slits the throats of his victims, ‘Receive the blood’ (Protestants could say that Roman Catholics were barbaric because they made the Eucharist into a cannibalistic feast in which the wine was literally the blood of Christ).

The most urgent question facing England in the 1590s was the succession to the unmarried and childless Elizabeth, and in particular the preservation of the Protestant nation against the possibility of another counter-Reformation, like that of Mary, which, it was thought, would inevitably lead to subjugation to the Catholic power of Spain. Arguments about the basis on which the succession should be decided—heredity, election, desert—were widespread, as was fear of tyranny and foreign invasion. All this suggests that the issue of succession and the mixed nature of Roman government explored in the first act of the play would have had strong contemporary overtones. The descent into imperial tyranny could well have looked like a warning as to what might happen once Astraea, the virgin Queen, had left the earth. Lucius brings back the light; in the shooting scene, his son, another Lucius, scores a direct hit on Astraea's lap. One of the writers who said that ‘the christian faith’ was received into Britain ‘in the time of Lucius their king’ was none other than John Foxe (Acts and Monuments, 16). The Goths who accompany Lucius, we may then say, are there to secure the Protestant succession.

They also serve as an antidote to the intrigues of high politics. Saturninus is like one of the wicked emperors described in Suetonius and Tacitus. One of Tacitus' ways of condemning imperial rule was by means of the contrasting image of wholesome, pastoral Germans who fed on berries, roots, goatsmilk, curds and whey, as Aaron plans to have his baby fed among the Goths. Tacitism was a code for political disaffection and even republicanism in certain circles in the 1590s, such as that which gathered around the Earl of Essex.⁷ The emperor Saturninus, like Claudius in Hamlet, is very worried about the popular will slipping away from him. This, combined with the central role played in the elections in both the first and fifth acts by Marcus Andronicus, elected tribune of the people and spokesman for ‘the common voice’, suggests that Shakespeare's earliest tragedy may be shot through with an unexpected vein of republicanism.

REVENGE

The play's interest in political institutions is not confined to its examination of Roman government. The matter of revenge raises inevitable questions about the institutions of the law.

Halfway through Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, Hieronimo stares an old man in the face and assumes or pretends to assume that the ‘Senex’ is an avenging Fury sent from hell (3.13.133-75). In Titus Andronicus Shakespeare picked up on this detail and decided to have a character actually impersonate a Fury sent from hell. The framing device whereby Kyd makes his whole play a performance staged by a personification of Revenge is therefore dropped and Revenge becomes a disguise assumed by Tamora (the ballad based on the play says that at this point she was indeed dressed to look like a Fury). But, as with the masque of Muscovites in Love's Labour's Lost, this is a disguise which is instantly seen through and then played along with to wonderful comic effect. This encounter between Titus and Tamora in 5.2 is a brilliant piece of theatre because of the way that one character takes over the other's plot, and turns it against the inventor. By a superb act of improvisation, Titus expands the cast of the masque-like show, making Tamora's companions into what they are, Rape and Murder; by the end of the scene, the device has been fully reversed—the vehicle of Tamora's revenge against Titus for the death of Alarbus has become the vehicle of Titus' revenge against Tamora for the rape of Lavinia and the deaths of Bassianus, Quintus and Martius.

By trumping one character's performance with another's, Shakespeare makes the point which he went on making throughout his career: that we are all role-players. By representing Revenge as a character's device rather than a ‘reality’ outside the action, as it is in Kyd's frame, he suggests that retribution is a matter of human, not divine will. This is a world in which people make their own laws; as in Lear, the gods are frequently invoked but never reply. When the post comes with the answer to the letters which Titus shoots into the heavens, it is in the form not of some message from the gods of the sort we get in Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale, but of a Clown with a basket and two pigeons. Jupiter is replaced by a gibbet-maker and the poor fool is hanged.

In George Peele's The Battle of Alcazar, there is a bloody banquet complete with dish of heads, but it is performed in dumb-show and therefore has the same status as that play's other insets, such as its show of Nemesis and three Furies. In Titus Andronicus, however, the show is put on by a character instead of Peele's extra-dramatic ‘Presenter’. Nemesis comes from within, not without. Titus is an unusual dramatist in that he knocks up a pie rather than a curtain; he plays the cook, not the author and the actor. But a dramatist he is none the less: he has written the script for the climax of his play. He doesn't hesitate to list his literary authorities for it, such as the myth of Progne and the story of Virginius. … Like Hieronimo's play in sundry languages at the climax of The Spanish Tragedy, Titus' banquet serves to render violence structured and ritualistic instead of arbitrary and chaotic. It is no coincidence that later plays in the revenge genre, notably The Revenger's Tragedy and Marston's Antonio's Revenge, perform their retributions by means of that most structured and ritualistic Renaissance dramatic form, the masque.

Would playgoers have drawn comparisons between the revenger's ritualized violence and the ritualized violence that they were familiar with in real life? Is there a paradoxical sense in which self-conscious performance serves to say not ‘this is only a play’ but ‘this is just like life’? The ritualized violence which an Elizabethan audience would have known best was public execution, itself a highly theatrical activity. Consider a typical sentence passed on a nobleman found guilty of treason in 1589:

That he should be conveyed to the Place from whence he came, and from thence to the place of Execution, and there to be hanged until he were half dead, his Members to be cut off, his Bowels to be cast into the Fire, his Head to be cut off, his Quarters to be divided into four several parts, and to be bestowed in four several Places.⁸

Such dismemberment takes us very close to the world of Titus Andronicus. Furthermore, it could elicit the same kind of black wit as that of Shakespeare's play—on being told at the end of his trial that his head and quarters would be disposed at her Majesty's pleasure, Essex replied: ‘I think it fit my poor Quarters that have done her Majesty true Service in divers parts of the World, should be sacrificed and disposed of at her Majesty's Pleasure’ (State-Trials, 1.173). Essex plays on quarters and parts very much in the manner of Titus' puns on hands.

The resemblances between tragedy of blood and live execution did not escape notice in the period: in Basilicon Doron, James I famously wrote that ‘a King is as one set on a skaffold, whose smallest actions and gestures all the people gazingly doe behold’, but in later editions ‘skaffold’, with its simultaneous summoning of theatre and place of execution, was changed to ‘stage’; Stephen Orgel suggests that the emendation was the result of ‘the danger James must have felt to be inherent in the royal drama’—‘To mime the monarch was a potentially revolutionary act’ (Orgel, 45, 47). The players who represent the enactment of revenge undertake the same kind of usurpation of the law as the revenger himself does. By casting revenge in the form of an elaborate public performance, the drama reveals that the public performance known as the law is also a form of revenge action; the submission of one kind of action to critical scrutiny opens the way for the submission of the other to similar scrutiny. The audience that shares in Hieronimo's and Hamlet's troubled inquiries as to whether they should take vengeance into their own hands or leave it to God is in a position to reflect upon the insufficiencies and inequalities of the law.

In this regard, it is highly significant that Hamlet is a prince, that Hieronimo is not some marginal or subversive figure but the Knight Marshall, one of the senior law officers of the land. So, too, is Titus a patron of virtue, Rome's best champion, a potential emperor and an actual arbiter of emperors. According to the late sixteenth-century perception of Calvinist political theory, which was widespread in the early 1590s, revolt against the civil order was justified when led by magistrates. God may use those in positions of lesser authority as ‘avengers’ who will ‘punish the tyranny of vicious men and deliver the oppressed from their wretched calamities; at other times he turns the frenzy of men who intended something quite different to the same end’ (Calvin, 4.20.30). An Hieronimo or an Andronicus acting beyond the law was a very different proposition from a Jack Cade or a Roman mob doing so.

This is where Fredson Bowers's influential position in his book on Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy fails to catch the complexity of the drama. As far as Bowers is concerned, both the law and the drama are unequivocal in their condemnation of blood-revenge. It is the product of malice prepense and as such it is murder in the first degree. Private action undermines the authority of the state:

Elizabethan law felt itself capable of meting out justice to murderers, and therefore punished an avenger who took justice into his own hands just as heavily as the original murderer. The authorities, conscious of the Elizabethan inheritance of private justice from earlier ages, recognized that their own times still held the possibilities of serious turmoil; and they were determined that private revenge should not unleash a general disrespect for law.

(Bowers, 10-11)

Bowers is confident in his application of this principle to the drama, suggesting that whenever the revenger acts above the law the Elizabethan audience would condemn him. Quite apart from its questionable assumption that the Elizabethan audience all felt the same about such matters, this argument is flawed by its reliance on a rigid distinction between private revenge and legal retribution.

This distinction must be made more subtly, as in fact it was by Bacon in his brief essay ‘Of Revenge’. That essay begins with an apparent endorsement of the views summarized by Bowers: revenge is a kind of wild (uncultivated) justice; it puts the law out of office, so the law should weed it out; revenge is perhaps ‘tolerable’ if it is for a wrong which there is no law to remedy, but the method of revenge had better be one which is not punishable by law. But the conclusion is surprising: ‘Public revenges are for the most part fortunate: as that for the death of Caesar, for the death of Pertinax, for the Death of Henry the Third of France, and many more. But in private revenges it is not so. Nay rather, vindicative persons live the life of witches, who, as they are mischievous, so end they infortunate’ (Bacon, 73). The public revengers cited—Augustus, Severus, and Henry IV of France—proved to be, according to the official Renaissance view, good and successful rulers. If we believe that Lucius will rule Rome well, then the revenges in the final act of Titus, which are certainly performed very publicly, come into the category of the fortunate. Like Hieronimo and Hamlet, Titus pretends to be mad, gives the appearance of having turned his vindictiveness inward in the auto-destructive fashion of Bacon's private revengers, but in fact all along he is preparing for a public act. His revenge takes place as part of a public performance which brings political change.

The necessity to revenge reveals the inadequacy of the law; the formalization of revenge in performance acts as a substitution for the law, simultaneously revealing the law to be itself nothing other than a performance, replete with processions, costumes, symbolic geography, dialogues, epideictic utterances, and gestures. Critics who believe that revengers like Hieronimo and Titus are really mad read the play-within-the-play as ‘a symbol of the revenger's subjective world’ and argue that the ‘entrance into this self-created illusory world is what finally allows the revenger to act’ (Hallett, 10). I would argue on the contrary that the revenger is but mad north-north-west and that his play or banquet serves as a mirror of the civic world, revealing it to be not illusory but dependent upon the performances of power.

Because of the censorship it would not have been possible to stage a play demystifying an English courtroom or a London execution. Strikingly, the most notable 1590s tragedy of blood set in contemporary England, Arden of Faversham, ends not with private vengeance but with the Mayor and the Watch fully in control and the pronouncement of public death sentences. Where The Spanish Tragedy, Titus, and Hamlet move towards the wild justice of the revenger, Arden ends with an affirmation of English justice—the legal system may be a little rough, but it is eminently capable of punishing evildoers without the assistance of aggrieved family members acting in their own capacity. But this is not to say that revenge plays set abroad could not comment on England. Thomas Heywood claimed that ‘If wee present a forreigne History, the subject is so intended, that in the lives of Romans, Grecians, or others, either the vertues of our Countrymen are extolled, or their vices reproved.’⁹ If their vices, why not their institutions? Titus Andronicus tells a story of the failure of established legal remedies: one notes in particular the unsuccessful appeal for clemency in 3.1 (‘Titus' two sons bound, passing on the stage to the place of execution, and Titus going before, pleading … the Judges pass by him’) and the treatment of the Clown, whose attempt to settle a matter of a brawl between his uncle and one of the emperor's men leads to instant hanging for himself.

Consequent upon the failure of imperial law is the revenger's establishment of an alternative procedure. Barbaric as the feast in the final scene may be, Titus still uses the language of the law: he speaks of ‘precedent’ and ‘warrant’ (5.3.43). It is as if the breakdown of established law is such that he has to create a new system of case-law, based on historical and mythological sources. The appeal to ‘precedent’, the bedrock of the common law, in a play set in Rome, the home of civil law, suggests something of the contemporaneity of the play's exploration of justice. It may even suggest an intervention in the late Elizabethan argument about the relative weight of civil (also known as imperial) and common law. Recent historians note that ‘by the early seventeenth century the civil law was associated with arbitrary government’—‘When Coke elevated past decisions into rules which bound the present, he introduced a major new innovation, one which gave history, albeit mythical history, an importance it had not enjoyed in the sixteenth century’ (Sharpe, 175-6). The play foreshadows these developments: the case of the Clown reveals the tyranny of civil or imperial law, as does Saturninus' chilling insistence that Martius and Quintus ‘died by law’ (4.4.53); Titus' argument from ‘precedent’ makes him into the voice of the English common law, a dramatic antecedent to Sir Edward Coke—whose commitment to the common law would bring him into conflict with two kings and lead to the framing of the Petition of Right in 1628.

Queen Elizabeth was mythologized as the returned Astraea of Virgil's fourth eclogue. But Titus Andronicus imagines a time when justice has left the earth; it locates itself in Ovid's Iron Age when ‘Terras Astraea reliquit’ (4.3.4). Where Saturn was supposed to have ruled Rome in the Golden Age, the reign of Saturninus is a new Iron Age (see the wordplay at 4.3.57). The play vividly dramatizes Justice's absence when Titus shoots arrows into the air to try to bring Astraea down. As so often, the three-decker stage works as an image of the three-decker universe; to dramatize so self-consciously the search for justice above is to show that it is not to be found on the stage that is the world. The latter is an empty space which must be filled with the actor's own version of justice, his alternative juridical structure; wild at heart but supremely cultivated in action, he performs his revenge as coolly, as stylishly, and as professionally as any self-respecting judge or executioner going about his daily business.

PASSIONATING GRIEF

Titus resorts to laughter, ritual or self-conscious performance when his ability to express emotion in language is stretched to breaking point. The full title of the play is The Most Lamentable Roman Tragedy of Titus Andronicus. The original sense of ‘lamentable’ is ‘Full of or expressing sorrow or grief’ (OED a. 1). The classical model for ‘Tragedy’ which was widely available to the Elizabethans was the Roman one of Seneca.¹⁰ Senecan tragedy was based on declamation more than on action: the expression of emotion in elaborate rhetorical form was its very life-blood. Although the explicit ‘pattern’ of Titus' cannibalistic banquet is Ovid's story of Tereus and Progne, not the feast of Atreus in Seneca's Thyestes,¹¹ ‘Senecanism’ in a broader sense is a key to the rhetoric of the drama.¹²

Two Senecan themes exercise a deep influence on the play, as they did on Renaissance high culture more generally: that death is a release into rest which is not to be feared and that the wise man has an inner stability which makes him immune to the blows of fortune. The Elizabethans did not doubt that the stoic philosopher Seneca who put forward these views in works such as his Epistles was the same man as the dramatist whose Tenne Tragedies were collected in English translation in 1581. When Titus discovers that his daughter has been raped, he follows Kyd's Hieronimo in speaking Latin at a moment of extreme emotional stress: ‘Magni dominator poli, / Tam lentus audis scelera, tam lentus vides?’ (4.1.81-2). This means ‘Ruler of the great heavens, are you so slow to hear crimes, so slow to see?’ It indicates that Titus is turning himself into Senecan man, for it is from a moment of discovery of appalling sexual knowledge in the Hippolytus (671-2). But there the passage begins ‘Magne regnator deum’—Titus' ‘dominator poli’ is incorporated from a well-known passage of verse contained in one of Seneca's prose epistles on accepting death and enduring whatever nature throws at you: ‘Duc, O parens celsique dominator poli, / Quocumque placuit’ (‘Lead me, O master of the high heavens, whithersoever thou shalt wish’—Epistulae Morales, 107). Philosophical Seneca's idea of submission to the will of the universe is thus skilfully combined with tragical Seneca's scene of anagnorisis, of terrible recognition.

Typically, the hero of Senecan tragedy undergoes an explosion of passion (‘furor’) which elicits on the one hand grief and lamentation, and on the other consolation in the wisdom of stoic philosophy. In a famous chorus in the Agamemnon, the Trojan women led by Cassandra welcome death as ‘a peaceful port of everlasting rest, a refuge from woes which opens wide and with a generous hand invites the wretched’ (‘cum pateat malis / effugium et miseros libera mors vocet / portus aeterna placidus quiete’). It is a place where there is no fear, no storm of raging fortune, no civil war, no military wrath, no falling city (Seneca, Agamemnon, 589-604). When Titus lays his sons to rest, Shakespeare writes a formal imitation of this:

In peace and honour rest you here, my sons;
Rome's readiest champions, repose you here in rest,
Secure from worldly chances and mishaps.
Here lurks no treason, here no envy swells,
Here grow no damned drugs, here are no storms,
No noise, but silence and eternal sleep:
In peace and honour rest you here, my sons.

(1.1.153-9)

And when Duncan is in his grave Macbeth reiterates it, adapted to the new context:

After life's fitful fever he sleeps well.
Treason has done his worst; nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,
Can touch him further.

(Macbeth 3.2.23-6)

Senecan man's ability to stand still and suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune is nowhere better seen than at the moment when Titus is presented with the sight of his mutilated daughter. Where Lucius faints to his knees, Titus remains firm and looks:

MARCUS
This was thy daughter.
TITUS
Why, Marcus, so she is.

(3.1.63-4)

This is a man of ‘metal’, ‘steel to the very back’. But he is ‘wrung with wrongs more than our backs can bear’. And stoic restraint can be harmful, as Marcus recognizes: ‘Sorrow concealed, like an oven stopped, / Doth burn the heart to cinders where it is.’ Titus cannot keep his centre wholly hard; he must break into what Marcus calls ‘consuming sorrow’. ‘Consuming’ is a key word in the play, in that it is only after sorrow has eaten away Titus' heart, his kindness, that he turns himself into a revenger and prepares himself to kill his daughter and force Tamora to devour her sons. Passion batters and pierces: the warrior's scarred body is further punctured by grief (see in particular the extraordinary image of the knife, the hole, the tears and the heart at 3.2.16-20). It erodes: Titus is an ancient building, his tears streaming down its side like rain. And it drowns: after Lavinia is brought to him, Titus stands ‘as one upon a rock, / Environed with a wilderness of sea,’ waiting to be swallowed by the water. After he cuts off his hand, there can be no rational restraint. Passion is bottomless and woe cannot be bound. Titus becomes the sea, the sighing Lavinia becomes the wind:

When heaven doth weep, doth not the earth o'erflow?
If the winds rage, doth not the sea wax mad,
Threatening the welkin with his big-swollen face?
And wilt thou have a reason for this coil?
I am the sea. Hark how her sighs doth blow.
She is the weeping welkin, I the earth.
Then must my sea be moved with her sighs,
Then must my earth with her continual tears
Become a deluge overflowed and drowned …

(3.1.222-30)

What is astonishing about these lines is the way in which, even as passion expresses itself through the overflowing imagery, reason restrains it through the controlled rhetoric, the balance of the lines, the doublings and formal repetitions. Rhetorical tragedy proposes that humankind, even in the greatest extremity, is capable of something other than the howl of the wounded animal. The grief is expressed—pressed out—yet a dignity remains.

Renaissance man is rhetorical man, whose repertoire of formal linguistic structures and accompanying physical gestures is a way of ordering the chaos of experience. In Titus' ‘I am the sea’ there is a kind of consolatory decorum. As the stoic Edgar says in Lear, ‘The worst is not / So long as we can say, “This is the worst”’ (King Lear 4.1.27-8). When Titus says ‘I am the sea’, the worst is still to come: the moment his speech ends, a Messenger enters with his severed hand and the heads of the sons he thought he had saved. Marcus, the voice of decorum, recognizes that now is the time ‘to storm’, that he should no longer ‘control’ his brother's griefs, that a full tragic performance is called for: ‘Rend off thy silver hair, thy other hand / Gnawing with thy teeth’. But, as we have seen, Titus breaks this decorum and laughs instead. One reason why he does so is suggested in the fly-killing scene:

Thy niece and I, poor creatures, want our hands
And cannot passionate our tenfold grief
With folded arms.

(3.2.5-7)

Rhetorical tragedy demands hand gestures to help perform the passion. Dismemberment denies these and forces Titus into his alternative course of black comic theatricality. When language no longer works for him, he takes to literalizing metaphor: instead of crying to the elements and the gods, as Lear will do, he writes his message about universal injustice down on arrows and shoots them in the air; instead of talking about ‘consuming sorrow’, he makes Tamora consume her own children.

READING AND RAPE

Titus Andronicus has been despised by great Shakespearean critics from Samuel Johnson, who thought that ‘The barbarity of the spectacles, and the general massacre which are here exhibited, can scarcely be conceived tolerable to any audience’ (Johnson, 6.364), to T. S. Eliot, who called it ‘one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written’ (Eliot, 82). There have, it is true, always been glimmers of praise: A. W. Schlegel, for example, found ‘no want of beautiful lines, bold images, nay, even features which betray the peculiar conception of Shakespeare’ (Romantics, 543). But only in the second half of the twentieth century did criticism begin to do justice to the play's sustained artfulness. Hereward Price (1943) was the first critic fully to appreciate its highly-wrought structure, Eugene Waith (1957) the first to hear its Ovidian language, David Palmer (1972) the first to catch its tone scene-by-scene, Albert Tricomi (1974) the first to draw attention to its distinctive way of literalizing its metaphors, G. K. Hunter (1983) the first to perceive the purposeful eclecticism of its Romanness, Heather James (1991) the first to discern the translation of empire. Theirs have, however, been isolated voices; most general books on Shakespearean tragedy still pass the play quickly by.

The linguistic turn taken by post-1960s literary theory put criticism in a position from where it could begin to catch up with the play's characteristically Renaissance obsession with the problem of meaning. The silencing of Lavinia raises exactly that problem: ‘I can interpret all her martyred signs,’ claims Titus in the manner of a confident semiotician, but he finds that gesture is more ambiguous than spoken language. Only when a text is inscribed upon the ground can interpretation be confirmed. At times the play seems to dramatize the movement from speech to writing: ‘See how with signs and tokens she can scrawl’, says Demetrius after the rape, ‘scrawl’ seeming to suggest not only the gesture of spreading the limbs abroad in a sprawling manner, but also scrawling handwriting and perhaps a scroll, a written text.¹³

When the characters are not revenging or raping, they spend their time reading—reading events, reading texts and citations, reading the book of Ovid in which the narrative of the drama is pre-written. Writing demands to be read but it is always open to misconstruction: when Titus sends a message on a scroll to Chiron and Demetrius to the effect that he has deciphered their action, they misinterpret its meaning (though that cunning reader, Aaron, does not). This interest in the signifying potential and the limitations of language plays straight into the hands of the playful deconstructive interpreter:

Arms means offensive and defensive gear, the stuff of war and wounding; it also designates the part of the body which deploys such stuff and which connects the hands with the body. Hence, the word designates both instruments and instrumentality. In the case of tears, we need a context to pronounce the word correctly. It can mean the act of rending and separating, or the bodily sign of mourning a loss. In Titus Andronicus such dual meanings and plays on words are frequent (as for example, ‘hue’ and ‘hew’ or ‘hands’ and ‘handle’); the play goes further still to display words—to literalize them by writing out on stage, as when the ravished Lavinia writes her Latin lesson on the dusty ground of Rome. Words are embodied and disembodied through this work. One person becomes the text for another's explication, a challenge for interpretation.

(Fawcett, 263)

There is no doubt that the text is full of word games, puns and verbal sleights, and in this respect Titus takes us towards the extraordinary linguistic self-consciousness of Hamlet. But it is important to register that it does not end in some hermeneutic blockage or deconstructionist's ‘aporia’. There is a truth behind the words, a meaning which through painful interpretative work can be unfolded: ‘But I of these will wrest an alphabet / And by still practice learn to know thy meaning.’ That truth is rape.

Where Lucrece sometimes seems to disappear in the ‘helpless smoke of words’ of her poetic complaints (The Rape of Lucrece 1027), Lavinia is a ‘Speechless complainer’ but a bodily presence. Her body is at the centre of the action, as images of the pierced and wounded body are central to the play's language. It is in reflection upon the display of the woman's body (complicated by the fact that in the original staging it would have been a boy actor's body) that another late twentieth-century critical practice, feminist reading, has much to offer to our apprehension of Titus. In two provocative articles, Nancy Vickers has suggested links between voyeurism, rape and dismemberment and the poet's part-by-part enumeration of his mistress' beauties in the Petrarchan convention of the blazon. For all that it is an attempt at empathy, might Marcus' perversely Petrarchan display of the raped Lavinia be a kind of second rape upon her? Again, Stephanie Jed has read the Lucrece story as an example of how the price of ‘progress’ towards the male republic of Rome is the rape and death of a woman. So, too, the rape and death of Lavinia may be read as the price of Lucius' knitting together of Rome. Frequently in the play the female body is figured—in proto-Freudian fashion, one has to say—in terms of absence, severance and open wounds. The pit containing the corpse of the husband, over which Chiron had previously planned to perform the rape, is one figuration of Lavinia's body. But what are we to make of Lavinia being forced to put her father's hand in her mouth, which is as wounded as her genitals? And of her uncle then making her put a stick in that mouth, with which she writes the word ‘rape’? These moments seem ‘to reenact her rape in a way that oppressively reinscribes her absence from the sphere of articulation and action’.¹⁴

And, it might be said, if woman is not silenced and mutilated, then she must be demonized, as she is in the figure of Tamora. Heinrich Heine noticed the way in which ‘Shakespeare places two women of entirely different mould next to one another, in order that we may read their characters by the force of contrast’ (Romantics, 544). Are not such contrasts typical of a male need to cast all women as virgins or whores? But, then, Tamora is a victim, too, a mother whose child is heartlessly wrenched from her. Heine thought that she had the charisma of Milton's Satan: ‘a bewitching, imperial figure with the marks of a fallen divinity on her brow’ (Romantics, 544). I would say that she also has touches of the complexity which makes Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra no mere demons but rather two of the most rewarding female roles in the repertory of world drama.

Notes

1. On sacrifice, hunting and the play's dissolution of the distinction between city and wild forest, see Marienstras.

2. For a full psychoanalytic reading, see Willbern, 168: ‘Here is Freud's plenty. The passage [describing the dark wood] expresses highly sadistic fantasies of sexual attack … “The abhorred pit” will soon assume its central and over-determined symbolic significance as vagina, womb, tomb, and mouth.’

3. King Lear 4.6.128; the link is made by Serpieri, 205-6.

4. Plutarch, sigs *ii^r-iii^r.

5. See especially, Hunter, ‘Sources and Meanings’, and James, whose highly original essay on the play is further developed in her forthcoming The Fatal Cleopatra: Shakespeare's Translations of Empire.

6. What follows is much indebted to Kliger; see also Broude.

7. See Levy, 251, 261-2; M. James, 418-19.

8. ‘The Tryal of Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, the 18th day of April, 1589[,] and in the 31st Year of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth’, in State-Trials, 1.140-4.

9. An Apology for Actors (1612), sig.F3^v.

10. Jones (85-108) has argued for the influence on Titus of a Latin translation of Euripides' Hecuba, but there is scant, if any, evidence for Shakespeare's direct knowledge of Greek tragedy.

11. For a strong refutation of a previous generation of critics' belief that Thyestes was a major source, see Baker, 119-39.

12. On this, see Brower, 173-203, and Miola, 11-32; for Renaissance Senecanism more broadly, Braden.

13. But see note to 2.3.5 regarding dates of OED's first citations.

14. Katherine Rowe, in an essay in Shakespeare Quarterly (Fall, 1994) which usefully criticizes the tendency of some feminists to read Lavinia as an emblem of the absolute oppression of the female, seeing her instead as an emblem for the general loss of agency in the play and thus Titus' counterpart, not his opposite.

Abbreviations and References

Abbreviations

Modern Productions Cited

Brook: Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, Stoll Theatre, London, and European tour, directed by Peter Brook, 1955-7

Warner: Royal Shakespeare Company, Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, The Pit, London, and European tour, directed by Deborah Warner, 1987-8

References

Editions of Shakespeare Collated

Cam¹: Titus Andronicus, ed. John Dover Wilson, The New Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1948)

Johnson: Plays, ed. Samuel Johnson, 8 vols (1765)

Serpieri: Tito Andronico, ed. and trans. Alessandro Serpieri (Milan, 1989). My trans. in quotation.

Other Works

Bacon, Francis. The Essays, ed. John Pitcher (Harmondsworth, 1985)

Baker, Howard. Induction to Tragedy (Baton Rouge, 1939)

Bowers, Fredson. Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy (Princeton, 1940)

Braden, Gordon. Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition (New Haven, 1985)

Broude, Ronald. ‘Roman and Goth in Titus Andronicus’, Shakespeare Studies, 6 (1970), 27-34

Brower, Reuben A. Hero and Saint: Shakespeare and the Graeco-Roman Heroic Tradition (Oxford, 1971)

Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536), trans. Harro Höpfl, in Luther and Calvin on Secular Authority, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge, 1991)

Eliot, T. S. ‘Seneca in Elizabethan translation’, in his Selected Essays 1917-1932 (1932), 65-105

Fawcett, Mary Laughlin. ‘Arms/words/tears: language and the body in Titus Andronicus’, ELH, 50 (1983), 261-77

Foxe, John. Acts and Monuments (1563)

Hallett, Charles A. and Elaine S. Hallett. The Revenger's Madness (Lincoln, Nebr., 1980)

Hunter, G. K. ‘Sources and meanings in Titus Andronicus’, in The Mirror up to Shakespeare, ed. J. C. Gray (Toronto, 1983), 171-88

James, Heather. ‘Cultural disintegration in Titus Andronicus: mutilating Titus, Vergil and Rome’, in Violence in Drama, Themes in Drama, 13 (1991), 123-40

James, Mervyn. Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1986)

Jed, Stephanie H. Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1989)

Jones, Emrys. The Origins of Shakespeare (Oxford, 1977)

Kliger, Samuel. The Goths in England (Cambridge, Mass., 1952; repr. New York, 1972)

Lambarde, William. A Perambulation of Kent (1570), quoted from 1826 repr. of 2nd edn (repr. Bath, 1970)

Levy, F. J. Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino, 1967)

Marienstras, Richard. ‘The forest, hunting and sacrifice in Titus Andronicus’, in his New Perspectives on the Shakespearean World (Cambridge, 1985), 40-7

Miola, Robert S. Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Influence of Seneca (Oxford, 1992)

Oxford English Dictionary (citations from 2nd edn; where there is ambiguity as to which entry is cited, reference is given in the forms used in the dictionary itself)

Orgel, Stephen. ‘Making greatness familiar’, Genre, 15 (1982), 41-8

Palmer, D. J. ‘The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable: language and action in Titus Andronicus’, Critical Quarterly, 14 (1972), 320-39

Peacham, Henry. The Complete Gentleman, The Truth of Our Times, and The Art of Living in London, ed. Virgil B. Heltzel (Ithaca, 1962)

Plutarch. The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, compared together by that grave learned Philosopher and Historiographer, Plutarch of Chaeronea: Translated out of Greek into French by James Amyot … and out of French into English, by Thomas North (1579)

Price, Hereward T. ‘The authorship of Titus Andronicus’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 42 (1943), 55-81

The Romantics on Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Bate (1992)

Rowe, Katherine. ‘Dismembering and forgetting in Titus Andronicus’, Shakespeare Quarterly, Fall, 1994

Seneca. Tragedies I & II, Loeb Classical Library (1917, repr. 1968)

Sharpe, Kevin and Christopher Brooks, ‘History, English law and the Renaissance’, Past and Present, 72 (1976), 133-42; repr. in Sharpe, Politics and Ideas in Early Stuart England (1989), 174-81

Spencer, T. J. B. ‘Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Romans’, Shakespeare Survey [ShS], 10 (1957), 27-38

A Complete Collection of State-Trials and Proceedings upon Impeachments for High Treason, and other Crimes and Misdemeanours; from the Reign of King Henry the Fourth, to the end of the Reign of Queen Anne, 4 vols (1719)

Tricomi, Albert H. ‘The aesthetics of mutilation in Titus Andronicus’, ShS, 27 (1974), 11-19

Vickers, Nancy J. ‘Diana described: scattered woman and scattered rhyme’, Critical Inquiry, 8 (1981-2), 265-79, and ‘“The blazon of sweet beauty's best”: Shakespeare's Lucrece’, in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York, 1985), 95-115

Waith, E. M. ‘The metamorphosis of violence in Titus Andronicus’, ShS, 10 (1957), 39-49

Willbern, David. ‘Rape and revenge in Titus Andronicus’, English Literary Renaissance, 8 (1978), 159-82