SOURCE: Hiles, Jane. “A Margin for Error: Rhetorical Context in Titus Andronicus.” Style 21, no. 1 (spring 1987): 62-75.

[In the following essay, Hiles centers on the rhetoric of Titus Andronicus and its relation to the play's theme of revenge.]

Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus is a work whose plot turns on a series of rhetorical failures. The play abounds in rhetorical confrontations that dramatize the violent struggles for power occurring offstage, and Shakespeare's characters repeatedly fail to rise to these occasions. Tamora's plea for Alarbus's life, Lavinia's plea for mercy, and Titus's plea for the lives of his sons all fall wide of the mark. Consistently, these failures of language occur because characters mistake the context in which they are speaking, and it is axiomatic that discourse depends upon context.¹ Aristotle and Cicero expounded at length the means by which the particulars of an address could and should be matched to the orator's purpose in delivering it, to the circumstances of its presentation, and to the prejudices of its auditors. Contemporary rhetoricians have attempted to define even more closely the nature of the interrelationship between text and context. According to contemporary theory, context is not merely the occasion to which oratory should be adapted as a matter of decorum, as it is for Aristotle and Cicero; rather, context defines the semantic field and thus determines the meaning of discourse.² Drawing on Tatiana Slama-Cazacu's theory of context, James Kinneavy defines discourse in terms of its operation within semantic, syntactic, temporal, and social parameters; according to his definition by operation, discourse functions within cultural, situational, and verbal contexts, which correspond respectively to milieu, occasion, and prior utterance (22). Signification, then, emerges from the interplay of text and context:

Every discourse … is, at the moment of delivery located in the field of the “situation,” and is best understood only in the light of that unique historical moment. … In this crucial sense, no discourse is autonomous.

(Kinneavy 403-04)

Thus context “determine[s]” text (Kinneavy 24). It follows that a discourse which is at odds with its context or one that arises from a mistaken sense of context will fail to achieve its purpose, and this is repeatedly the case in Titus Andronicus, a drama of language in which offense and revenge, in nearly every case, are manifested rhetorically. Here the power of language fails due to shifts in context that render first the Goths' and then the Romans' rhetoric ineffective. Power in Shakespeare's Senecan play consists not merely in the ability to manipulate words, but in the ability to manipulate the contexts in which they occur.³

Rhetorical failures occur in Titus when a character's context shifts without his realizing it, so that he fails to answer the occasion with the appropriate mode of discourse, adopts an inappropriate style of diction, predicates his argument upon a mistaken perception of his audience, or is confounded by an opposition between implicit and explicit semantic systems. Tamora's speech in behalf of her son, Alarbus, is a case in point. Inserted parenthetically into the political debate that determines Rome's next ruler, Tamora's address overlooks the forensic occasion—Alarbus's defense—and instead takes its cue from the political deliberation that has preceded it (1.1.1-69). Her speech is an essentially deliberative one misplaced in a forensic context, and it ignores a crucial difference between the deliberative (political) and forensic (judicial) modes: deliberation is predicated upon kindred interests; forensics on opposed interests.⁴ Although Tamora's argument for her son's life is intended to stand in opposition to Titus's argument for Alarbus's execution, it is founded on an erroneous assumption of shared interests that takes the rhetorical form of an argument by analogy. Tamora's address opens with an appeal to her “Roman brethren”—an epanaphora that repeats but intensifies the epithets “Romans, friends” and “friends” employed in Bassianus's and Saturninus's political deliberations. At the same time, this figure glances at Titus's intention to bury his dead “by their brethren” and Lucius's contemplation of sacrifice “Ad manes fratrum” (1.1.9-104). This strategy indicates Tamora's awareness of the deliberative political forum preceding her audience with Titus and signals her mistaken attempt to adhere to the decorum of the prior occasion. Basing her argument upon a comparison between her sons and Titus's sons, she cries, “O, if to fight for king and commonweal / Were piety in thine, it is in these” (114-15). She has, however, forgotten crucial circumstances that undercut her case. Having lost the war, her vanquished sons are no longer in a position analogous to Titus's victorious offspring, nor is she on an equal footing with Titus, although her logic assumes such parity. Amazingly enough, Tamora seems at this point to have forgotten that she is addressing an adversary whose notion of piety is a priori the obverse of hers: piety for each, in this case, consists in killing the other. She fails to recognize that the situation precludes a deliberative comparison of cases. Even if her analogy held, she has forgotten that Titus has sons both “alive and dead” (81); her analogy intends a comparison with the living, but it serves only to remind Titus of the slain and of the justness with which he may claim Alarbus's life.

Tamora then draws on a topos common to deliberation in order to complete the argument: justice.⁵ Her development of the theme of justice reads like a page from Cicero's Rhetorica ad Herennium, in which the topos is defined as a specifically deliberative concern for right action, action performed “in accord with Virtue and Duty” (3.2.3). Unfortunately for Alarbus, Tamora's address also represents a singular case of cultural misinterpretation, for it fails to take into consideration the hierarchy of values that informs the linguistic context in which it operates. Cicero opens his discussion of the topos of justice with a general statement defining the nature of such arguments by their ends:

We shall be using the topics of Justice if we say that we ought to pity innocent persons and suppliants; if we show that it is proper to repay the well-deserving with gratitude; if we explain that we ought to punish the guilty. …

Immediately thereafter, Cicero's explication becomes case-specific, establishing a hierarchy of values for individual arguments:

… if we urge that faith ought zealously to be kept; if we say that the laws and customs of the state ought especially to be preserved; if we contend that alliances and friendships should scrupulously be honoured; if we make it clear that the duty imposed by nature toward parents, gods, and fatherland must be religiously observed; if we maintain that ties of hospitality, clientage, kinship, and relationship by marriage must inviolably be cherished. …

Cicero's import seems to be that religious piety takes precedence over civic, and that civic outweighs familial piety. He concludes with a summation of general arguments apparently intended to operate within this Roman hierarchy of values:

… neither reward nor favour nor peril nor animosity ought to lead us astray from the right path; … in all cases a principle of dealing alike with all should be established.

(Rhetorica ad Herennium 3.3.4)

It is this “principle of dealing alike with all” on which Tamora bases her argument. She, however, is a stranger to Rome, and Shakespeare dramatizes her misprision of the cultural context as a misreading of Titus's Ciceronian values, for she fails to recognize the hierarchical structure implicit in them. Tamora employs various tenets of Cicero's argument as equivalents, assuming that the admonition that “neither reward nor favour nor peril nor animosity ought to lead us astray” applies equally to all cases. By addressing her captors as “Roman brethren,” she implies “alliance and friendship”—even metaphoric kinship—between the Romans and the Goths, but, as Titus recognizes, this is not the case. His response at once reasserts the literal definition of kinship and the adversarial nature of the relationship between Roman and Goth:

These are their brethren, whom your Goths beheld
Alive and dead, and for their brethren slain
Religiously they ask a sacrifice.

(1.1.122-24; emphasis added)

Titus's speech contains an implied stage direction to gesture toward his sons, living and dead, thereby correcting Tamora's loose definition of kinship with a reassertion of lineage as its sole criterion. Further, Titus reasserts the priority of “zealously” observing religious duties over even justified claims of kinship and friendship: both his living sons and “the groaning shadows,” their deceased counterparts, “religiously … ask a sacrifice” (1.1.124-26). Titus's refutation also glances at the issue of preserving “laws and customs of the state,” an issue implicit in his contemplation of ritual sacrifice following a battle. This civic piety answers Tamora's implicit appeal to “the duty imposed by nature towards parents” (107-08). Tamora generalizes the Roman notion that one should honor one's own parents into a much broader notion that parenthood in and of itself demands special concessions, and it is upon this misconstruction that she bases her self-characterization as a grieving mother. Her strategy fails because Titus's experience as a bereaved father has proven that parenthood confers no such special privilege and because civic piety, as evinced by observance of ritual and custom, ranks above familial piety in his value system: it is important that a sacrifice be made in order that the state not be “disturbed with prodigies on earth” (1.1.101).

Tamora, like the Roman Lord in act 5, wishes to “force” her audience to “commiseration”; unlike him, she falls far short of the mark (5.3.93). Her own misprision has defeated her. She has mistaken a forensic setting for a deliberative one, and her argument by analogy is consequently inappropriate to the occasion. Her implicit claims to brotherhood demonstrate that she has a mistaken sense of her audience as well. Further, Tamora's misconception of Roman cultural values provides the means by which her arguments undermine themselves, for the pieties she urges are consistently lower in the Ciceronian hierarchy of values than those Titus advocates. Finally, to the degree that her speech presumes to echo the diction of the deliberations that precede it, Tamora succeeds only in reminding Titus of his injury. Having accommodated her address to what she supposed to be the decorum of Roman speech, she is shocked and confused at its ineffectiveness, and her sense of this contrariety is aptly expressed by an oxymoron: “O cruel, irreligious piety!” (1.1.130).

Titus's refusal to accede to Tamora's plea for Alarbus comprises a rhetorical offense as well as a physical one. By insisting upon placing issues in their proper, forensic context, Titus has effectively denied Tamora the power of speech; his rhetoric has silenced her on stage just as it has silenced Alarbus offstage. Language here displaces action as a form of violence, and it is therefore appropriate that rhetorical offense be answered with rhetorical revenge. To requite the offense, Tamora attempts to silence the Andronici as she has been silenced: through manipulations of rhetorical contexts, she first reduces Lavinia's communication to dumbshow and then uses her influence with Saturninus to render Titus's rhetoric as ineffective as her own once was.

The play's second major rhetorical occasion occurs just prior to Lavinia's rape and disfigurement, and it is generally considered problematic. As David Willbern notes, “Lavinia's participation in the baiting of Tamora”—in part justifying her abuse at the hands of Tamora's sons—“has bothered many critics” because it complicates the otherwise straightforward morality of the situation (168). Viewed as a singular instance of rhetorical revenge and as an obverse parallel to Tamora's first rhetorical confrontation with the Andronici, however, the scene is much less dissonant. It is, in fact, another confrontation between a rhetorical adept and a rhetorical inept: just as Tamora's language subverted her cause in the first scene, so Lavinia's subverts hers in this scene. Lavinia's pleadings, like Tamora's in scene 1, are defeated in part by context: the woods by definition are “ruthless, dreadful, deaf, and dull” (2.1.128; emphasis added). Like her foil, Lavinia is a rhetorical novice who fails to assess correctly the requirements of the occasion. Having stumbled upon Tamora in Aaron's embrace, Lavinia takes her cue from Bassianus's offensive, not realizing that Tamora is operating from a hidden agenda:

Why are you sequest'rèd from all your train,
Dismounted from your snow-white goodly steed,
And wand'red hither to an obscure plot,
Accompanied but with a barbarous Moor,
If foul desire had not conducted you?

(2.3.75-79; emphasis added)

Here Lavinia, in an unwitting pun, captures the essence of the situation. Tamora is indeed both situated in and engaged in “an obscure plot” to satisfy a “foul desire” for both lust and revenge.

Such puns connect the apparent context of Tamora's affair with the hidden context of her revenge and provide an index of deception. Together, Tamora and Aaron attempt to control the power of language by controlling the contexts that determine the meanings of specific utterances. By constructing dual contexts for their speech, Tamora and Aaron create dual semantic systems, implicit and explicit, which allow them at once to use words defensively—to mask their plot—and offensively—to condemn their victims. Aaron, for example, inverts the usual primacy of literal meaning over metaphorical meaning in puns, thus providing a paradigm for the inversions of reality that he and Tamora work on their victims. In one such metaphorical inversion, Aaron disguises his literal treachery with the seemingly innocuous hope that the gold pieces that he buries will “coin a strategem” to confound Quintus and Martius (2.3.5; emphasis added). The metaphor is deceptive insofar as it works to shift attention from Aaron's malicious act of “invention” to the metaphorically self-indicted “coin.” This syntactic shift from verb to noun in Aaron's pun parallels the role that the coins will play in his ruse: the gold itself will become the focus of the Romans' attention, at once implicating the Andronici and diverting suspicion from Aaron. Quintus and Martius's condemnation on the basis of these “alms out of the empress' chest” will then represent the misanthropic charity of the empress's heart (2.3.9). Aaron's semantics here illuminate the device used in his metaphoric admonition to Chiron and Demetrius to force Lavinia's unwilling charity to their suit (“revel in Lavinia's treasury”), ultimately suggesting that the Andronici's rewards for service to the state will be the bounty of Tamora's hatred rather than the bounty of Rome's gratitude (2.1.131). The reward that a state confers upon its servants depends upon the nature of its treasury, and in this case Tamora's bitter heart is Rome's treasure chest: in this ambiguous context, a just reward can signify unjust punishment. Tamora's rhetoric in the interlude with Aaron emphasizes this duality of context, for the birdsong in the glade seems to her “As if a double hunt were heard at once” (2.3.19).

Tamora engages as well in a different sort of verbal disguise: silence. She endures Bassianus's and Lavinia's baiting without response (“Why, I have patience to endure all this”), encouraging them with her apparent ineptitude to continue their offensive and to condemn themselves by condemning her. Tamora's rhetorical strategy here is to conceal her control of the situation and, as the confrontation with Titus has taught her, to turn Lavinia's and Bassianus's words back upon them. Tamora's rhetorical finesse at this juncture is apparent in the ease with which she transforms a landscape of ambiguous motives into a physically ambiguous one. In the interlude with Aaron, Tamora has described the forest as a pastoral idyl:

The birds chaunt melody on every bush,
The snakes lies rollèd in the cheerful sun,
The green leaves quiver with the cooling wind,
And make a checkered shadow on the ground. …

(2.3.12-15)

Upon Chiron and Demetrius's arrival, she presents the wood in another aspect entirely:

A barren detested vale, you see it is;
The trees, though summer, yet forlorn and lean,
Overcome with moss and baleful mistletoe:
Here never shines the sun; here nothing breeds,
Unless the nightly owl or fatal raven. …

(2.3.93-97)

This facile manipulation of setting dramatizes Tamora's mastery of the situation. Taken together, these descriptions comprise an antithesis that is crucial to the unfolding of the scene, for this dual landscape represents the duality of the linguistic and situational contexts that Lavinia confronts. Beneath the seeming idyl in the wood lies Tamora and Aaron's “obscure plot.”⁶

Lavinia's inability to save herself, then, is in part the result of having misconstrued her role in the situation. Had she been privy to Tamora's hidden agenda, Lavinia might have tried to escape; instead, she not only aggravates Tamora's anger, but she also participates rhetorically in shaping the mode of her own destruction. Although she rightly identifies the occasion as forensic, she fails by prosecuting when she should be defending, and even while she sues for mercy, Lavinia cannot refrain from insulting Tamora by lapsing into the accusatory mode. To compound the problem, Lavinia is singularly incapable of constructing a logical argument and consequently drowns in a rhetorical quagmire of her own making.⁷ Invariably, her syllogisms lead either to illogic or to logically disastrous conclusions:

O, do not learn her wrath; she taught it thee.
The milk thou suck'st from her did turn to marble;
Even at thy teat thou hadst thy tyranny.

(2.3.143-45)

Having established the Goths' inherent cruelty as a major premise, Lavinia has proved the invalidity of her own argument. In order to continue, she must recant: “Yet every mother breeds not sons alike” (146). Chiron's response to her subsequent plea implicitly recognizes the arc in logic: “What! Wouldst thou have me prove myself a bastard?” (148). Once established, this pattern of palliation and concession characterizes Lavinia's attempts at persuasion:

'Tis true; the raven doth not hatch a lark:
Yet have I heard—O could I find it now!—
The lion, moved with pity, did endure
To have his princely paws pared all away.
Some say that ravens foster forlorn children,
The whilst their own birds famish in their nests:
O, be to me, though thy hard heart say no,
Nothing so kind but something pitiful!

(2.3.149-56)

Tamora at once responds to Lavinia's decontextualized—and therefore meaningless—fable of the lion and to the more appropriate fable of the raven with a double entendre: “I know not what it means” (157). On the one hand, Tamora's rejoinder expresses justifiable puzzlement over the disjointed argument that she has just heard; on the other, the comment rightly suggests that she knows not the meaning of pity.

Lavinia's final appeal, however, seals her doom. By pleading for mercy in her father's name, “That gave thee life when well he might have slain thee” (159), Lavinia reminds Tamora of Titus's sacrifice of Alarbus, much as Tamora's argument in scene 1 caused Titus to recall his sons' deaths at the hands of the Goths. Tamora's reply to Lavinia emphasizes the indecorousness of the plea:

Hadst thou in person ne'er offended me,
Even for his sake am I pitiless.
Remember, boys, I poured forth tears in vain
To save your brother from the sacrifice,
But fierce Andronicus would not relent.

(161-65)

A final antithesis indicates Tamora's intractability: “Therefore away with her, and use her as you will; / The worse to her, the better loved of me” (166-67).⁸ Lavinia then proceeds to provide the verbal cue for her own disfigurement. By alluding to an event that “womanhood denies [her] tongue to tell,” she suggests to Chiron a way to “stop [her] mouth” (174, 184). The Goths' amputation of Lavinia's tongue is a literalization of her overstated claim to be unable to speak of rape. Duality of context here guarantees Lavinia's complicity in her own destruction, thereby perfecting Tamora's revenge. Lavinia is reduced to using signs and dumbshows to communicate in a rhetoric of despair that her father claims to be able to translate:

I can interpret all her martyred signs—
She says she drinks no other drink but tears,
Brewed with her sorrow, meshed upon her cheeks.
Speechless complainer, I will learn thy thought;
In thy dumb action will I be as perfect
As begging hermits in their holy prayers:
Thou shalt not sigh, nor hold thy stumps to heaven,
Nor wink, nor nod, nor kneel, nor make a sign,
But I of these will wrest an alphabet. …

(3.2.36-44)

This disfigurement requites Tamora's belief that she has been wrongly silenced.

Tamora's treatment of Lavinia is paradigmatic of her subsequent attempts to exact rhetorical revenge on the Andronici and to exact their unwitting complicity in that revenge. She is aware of the power of rhetoric:

… I can smooth, and fill his agéd ears
With golden promises, that, were his heart
Almost impregnable, his old ears deaf,
Yet should both ear and heart obey my tongue.

(4.4.96-99)

Consistently, her tactic is to arrogate this power unto herself and to attempt to deprive the Andronici of it. She tries to accomplish this end either by destroying their ability to generate language or by hindering their audience's ability to perceive their discourse. Both tactics estrange her victims from their proper verbal contexts. In the play's third major rhetorical occasion, Tamora has succeeded in displacing Titus's speech from its rightful context by removing its audience. Her subterfuge has deafened Saturninus's ears to pleas for Quintus's and Martius's lives: “Let them not speak a word; the guilt is plain” (2.3.301). Deprived of a hearing, Titus engages in a rhetoric of despair analogous to that which Lavinia will later employ. His “tears” become “prevailing orators,” so that his language, too, is mime. In practical terms, speaking without being heard is tantamount to being unable to speak, and Titus is surely unheard.⁹ Lucius remonstrates with him: “you lament in vain, / The tribunes hear you not, no man is by, / And you recount your sorrows to a stone” (3.1.27-29). Titus acknowledges the futility of his attempt to communicate:

Why, ’tis no matter, man, if they did hear
They would not mark me, if they did mark
They would not pity me, yet plead I must,
And bootless unto them.

(33-36)

Titus's position in this scene is comparable to Tamora's in the first scene. Further, Lavinia's entrance, disfigured, suggests a parallel between her inability to speak and Titus's to be heard, a parallel that is reinforced by Aaron's ruse to force Titus to amputate his own hand.

Aaron's final subterfuge depends heavily upon context, for it consists in what Harold Bloom calls “troping” on a “trope” (132). Aaron presents Titus with a spurious offer of clemency for his sons that is contingent upon his adherence to a rigorous bargain:

                                        chop off your hand
And send it to the king: he for the same
Will send thee hither both thy sons alive,
And that shall be the ransom for their fault.

(3.1.153-56)

The effectiveness of Aaron's strategem depends upon customary definitions of the act of giving one's hand. The meaning of the figure derives from the cultural context, and it is on the basis of this context that Aaron intends to confound his victim. Titus's perception of the meaning of giving one's hand emerges from a series of colloquial plays on the figure of speech. “Lend me thy hand,” he asks Aaron, “and I will give thee mine” (187). To lend one's hand in this context is to lend aid; to give one's hand, here as in Euripides's Alcestis, is to pledge faith to an agreement. The Alcestis centers on the violation of a promise that was sealed with the giving of a hand. Admetos swears to honor his wife's memory, and as Alcestis accepts his word, she commands him, “Then give me your hand”; the stage directions then call for her to take his right hand, the same one that Titus offers to the king through Aaron (Alcestis 350-86). The Euripidean ethic resonates in Titus's interpretation of Aaron's offer: Titus assumes an implicit offer of succor and fidelity where none exists. By leading Titus to believe in his beneficence as a proxy who will “give his majesty my hand,” Aaron succeeds in wielding the cultural values that Andronicus assigns to words against him.¹⁰ Revenge in Titus Andronicus is thus “oral” in more senses than Willbern recognizes (171).

Tamora's rhetorical revenge is everywhere effected by creating disjunctions between her victims and various aspects of their surroundings, and she is only defeated by a reassertion of context. This reversal is worked by Titus's retreat into a literary context that reestablishes a continuity of meaning through a series of metonymies:

                    Lavinia, go with me:
I'll to thy closet, and go read with thee
Sad stories chancèd in the times of old.
Come, boy, and go with me; thy sight is young,
And thou shalt read when mine begin to dazzle.

(3.2.81-85)

Ovid's Metamorphoses supplies Lavinia's want of speech by providing a context for her transformation, revealing through the tale of Philomela the nature of the abuse that she has suffered. From this substitution of written discourse for oral, it is a small step to a metonymy of action that discloses all.¹¹ Using her mouth, the instrument of speech, as a means of writing, she reveals the identity of her attackers by creating a literary artifact, albeit a limited one: “Stuprum. Chiron. Demetrius” (4.1.78). This proof text is nothing short of prophetic for Titus, who likens it to “Sibyl's leaves” (4.1.105), for it reverses the contextual distortions that Tamora has worked. This restoration of context enables Titus to discern and defeat Tamora's (literary and strategic) “plot”: to penetrate to the literal meaning of her allegory and to recognize Tamora and her sons in their too apt disguises of Revenge, Rape, and Murder. Not only does he recognize the figure of thought as personification, but, more importantly, he recognizes the trope as a reciprocal metaphor: just as the Goths represent the three allegorical characters (an unholy trinity), so Revenge, Rape, and Murder represent the essences and the actions of Tamora and her sons.¹² In a final scene of literary deflation, Titus reestablishes literal significance over allegorical by “play[ing] the cook” for Chiron and Demetrius—and by cooking them (5.2.204).

The final rhetorical failure of the play is Tamora's. Like Lavinia and Bassianus previously, Tamora here fails to recognize a submerged context, Titus's new awareness of her subterfuge. And, like her own victims, she too is victimized by a rhetoric of her own construction. The failure of Tamora's “Rape and Revenge” ploy hinges on the secret context that has been exploded. Language is a double-edged sword, and Tamora once again finds herself a rhetorician defeated by her own language. Her death and Lucius's speech of blame bring the play full circle. It has moved through each of the three modes of speech—from the epideictic in which Titus's sons are eulogized, to the deliberation over Rome's next ruler, to the forensics in which Alarbus's, Lavinia's, and the Andronici's cases are argued—and has returned to the first of these modes with the negative epideictic in which Tamora is anathematized (5.3.196-200). The play has also moved from the initial context of Roman ethics, through a series of contextual distortions that mark Tamora's arrogation of power, to a single, self-referential context that marks the reestablishment of Roman control.¹³ The final scene, which parallels the opening one, reestablishes Roman ethics and Roman power as the proper context for meaning as the Romans deliberate about another burial—Tamora's:

No funeral rite, nor man in mourning weed,
No mournful bell shall ring her burial;
But throw her forth to beasts and birds to prey.
Her life was beastly and devoid of pity,
And being dead, let birds on her take pity.

(5.3.196-200)

This speech of blame stands in opposition to the praise accorded Titus's fallen sons in the epideictic mode of scene 1 (1.1.70-95). The Romans' refusal to bury Tamora constitutes a curse that can be rightly interpreted only by reference to the first scene: as Titus and Lucius explain, the “unburied” are constrained to “hover” forever “on the dreadful shore of Styx”; their “shadows” will remain “unappeased” (1.1.87-100). Tamora is thus consigned to an unrest in the afterlife that corresponds to the unrest that she created in life. Her rhetoric has been defeated, not merely by the power of the language in which the curse is cast, but by the power vested in the context that defines that language and gives it meaning.

Notes

1. Contemporary rhetorical theory suggests that the meaning of an utterance emerges from the interplay of its syntactic and semantic elements with situational elements and that the efficacy of discourse therefore depends upon the exploitation of these linguistic and situational contexts. Such Burkian claims for context or occasion as an integral part of discourse are the hallmarks of twentieth-century rhetorical studies, but the concept is hardly new. In the Renaissance, the concern for context (inherited from the classical tradition) was most frequently expressed as adherence to decorum: decorum of situation, decorum of character, decorum of style. In Shakespearean terms, observation of the rules of decorum consisted in suiting “the word to the action” that comprised the situational context of the rhetoric and suiting “the action to the word” that comprised its semantic context. Hamlet's advice to the Players, and indeed the entire play-within-the-play, centers on the issue of decorum as it relates to context: not only does Hamlet caution the Players to observe the decorums of situation and character, but the play that they are engaged to perform is most self-consciously attuned to its occasion and audience. Titus Andronicus reveals its concern with such rhetorical issues in a series of set pieces in which rhetoric itself is an issue and in an explicit reference to “Tully's Orator” (4.1.14).

2. In his discussion of referential discourse, Kinneavy argues that “to be informative, a statement must enable us to relate the factual basis [of the information conveyed] to some explicit or implicit system about which information is desired. The content of the statement then comes to be equivalent to the logical implications about this system which may be inferred from the statement. In effect, the content of a statement consists in how much about a system is implied by the given statement” (93). “Content,” however, is equivalent to “comprehensiveness,” to the “completeness … of the discourse vis-à-vis the reality being talked about,” and “in order to be comprehensive … a statement must have a context, must exist within a discernable system” (93). If content and comprehensiveness are equivalent, and if context determines comprehensiveness, it is then fair to argue that context determines content. A number of contemporary theorists subscribe to this view. In his seminal study, A Grammar of Motives, Kenneth Burke argues that “words are aspects of a much wider communicative context, most of which is not verbal at all” (482). Wittgenstein similarly finds that “words … cannot be understood outside the context of the non-linguistic human activities into which the use of the language is interwoven” (Kenny 14). In Titus Andronicus, communication often fails because characters mistake the context in which they are speaking, and thus they rely upon shared premises that do not exist or upon a mistaken perception of the identity of their audience. In Kinneavy's terms, Shakespeare's characters make mistaken assumptions about the systems in which they are operating; as a result, their arguments fail to follow logically from the information bases of those systems.

3. Traditionally, studies of Shakespeare's language in Titus Andronicus have been subordinated to nonrhetorical concerns. J. C. Maxwell and H. T. Price, for example, approach the question of authorship from lexical, grammatical, and syntactic perspectives. A number of studies analyze the play's imagery, including Alan Sommers's discussion of symbolic settings and actions, John P. Cutts's analysis of image and structure, and R. Stamm's study of the figure of Lavinia. Others focus on Shakespeare's indebtedness to classical sources: Andrew V. Ettin treats the play's classical allusions, and Eugene M. Waith details the “relationship between [violent] action and [Ovidian] style” in the play, concluding that Shakespeare's descriptions comprise a “rhetoric of admiration,” or—in Elizabethan terms—“astonishment” (39, 48). Brian Vickers, however, defends rhetorical studies of Shakespeare on the grounds that “we must re-create, re-experience” Shakespeare's interest in figures of diction and figures of thought “if we are properly to understand his poetic development”; the “challenge facing students of rhetoric,” he maintains, “is to integrate the appreciation of stylistic detail into a response to the whole” (85, 92). In his recent study of the comedies, Keir Elam discusses the almost tangible presence of rhetoric in drama as an invitation to analyze its role: “one of the salient characteristics of much comic drama from Aristophanes to Stoppard has been the foregrounding, or bringing to prominence, of the linguistic sign itself as phonetic, syntactic or semantic presence, a material factor to be bandied or toyed with or tortured or otherwise offered as [an] immediate object of audience attention” (5). As Elam suggests, plot, character, theme and diction in the comedies interact dialectically, and this is equally true in Shakespeare's tragedies. An increasing number of studies now integrate rhetoric with other theoretical approaches: D. J. Palmer discusses ritualized language and action; Lawrence Danson considers the problem of “imprisoning rhetoric” (19); Mary Laughlin Fawcett treats metonymies for the speech act from a feminist perspective; and S. Clark Hulse details the play's progression from classical oratory to “a new language of action” (108).

4. According to Aristotle, commonality of interest is one of the principal characteristics of the deliberative mode:

   The deliberative branch, that of the statesman, since it deals rather with communal interests, affords less room for trickery. In a debate upon communal interests, the judges decide questions which really touch them as individuals, so that nothing more is needed than to prove that affairs are as the advocate of a given policy states; but in forensic speaking this is not enough, [the judges have not the same interest in the outcome of a given case] and it pays to win the audience over [by working on their emotions]. Here the judges make award regarding interests that are not their own.

   (Rhetoric 4; sec. 1.1; Cooper's emendations)

   Tamora's argument by analogy erroneously assumes a commonality of interest that does not exist.

5. According to Cicero in Rhetorica ad Herennium “advantage in political deliberation has two aspects: Security and Honour”; “the Honourable is divided into the Right and the Praiseworthy. The Right is that which is done in accord with Virtue and Duty. Subheads under the Right are Wisdom, Justice, Courage, and Temperance” (bk. 3, ch. 2, para. 3). This division forms the basis for Tamora's suit in behalf of Alarbus.

6. Antithetical figures are characteristic of Aaron's diction as well as of Tamora's: “He that had wit would think that I had none” and “so repose, sweet gold, for their unrest” (2.3.1,8). Like Aaron's puns, these antitheses emphasize the duality of the semantic systems in use.

7. Viewed as rhetorical criticism, this scene finds its parallel in the Mechanics' Prologue in Midsummer Night's Dream. The former comprises a commentary on the misuse of syllogistic logic, whereas the latter satirizes errors of diction, syntax, and grammar. Hulse similarly finds Lavinia's to be “the wrong argument, directed to the wrong audience” (109); Stamm, however, finds that “desperation makes her eloquent for once” in this scene (326).

8. Tamora's topic of better and worse is a sophisticated development of Aristotle's topos of more and less.

9. Palmer sees Titus's plea for mercy as a repetition of Tamora's plea for Alarbus, as well (330).

10. Sommers notes that Titus here dramatizes his “impotence” by cutting off “the hand with which he had defended Rome” (289).

11. Palmer finds displacements of one character by another to be one of the “unifying elements in the play” (329); the metonymy here suggests that the displacement motif functions rhetorically as well.

12. Hulse also notes that Tamora's and her sons' disguises “reveal their inner natures” (115).

13. Sommers finds as well that the “whole action develops from, depends upon, and in a sense returns to, the opening situation” (278).

Works Cited

Aristotle. The Rhetoric of Aristotle. Trans. Lane Cooper. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1932.

Bloom, Harold. A Map of Misreading. New York: Oxford UP, 1975.

Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. New York: George Braziller, 1955.

Cicero, M. Tullius. Rhetorica ad Herennium. Trans. Harry Caplan. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1954.

Cutts, John P. “Shadow and Substance: Structural Unity in Titus Andronicus.” Comparative Drama 2 (1968): 161-72.

Danson, Lawrence. Tragic Alphabet: Shakespeare's Drama of Language. New Haven: Yale UP, 1974.

Elam, Keir. Shakespeare's Universe of Discourse: Language-Games in the Comedies. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984.

Ettin, Andrew V. “Shakespeare's First Roman Tragedy.” ELH 37 (1970): 325-41.

Euripides. Alcestis. Trans. William Arrowsmith. New York: Oxford UP, 1974.

Fawcett, Mary Laughlin. “Arms/Words/Tears: Language and the Body in Titus Andronicus.” ELH 50 (1983): 261-77.

Hulse, S. Clark. “Wresting the Alphabet: Oratory and Action in Titus Andronicus.” Criticism 21 (1979): 106-18.

Kinneavy, James L. A Theory of Discourse. New York: Norton, 1980.

Kenny, Anthony. Wittgenstein. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1973.

Maxwell, J. C. “Peele and Shakespeare: A Stylometric Test.” JEGP 49 (1950): 557-61.

Palmer, D. J. “The Unspeakable in Pursuit of the Uneatable: Language and Action in Titus Andronicus.” Critical Quarterly 14 (1972): 320-39.

Price, H. T. “The Authorship of Titus Andronicus.” JEGP [Journal of English and Germanic Philology] 42 (1943): 55-81.

Shakespeare, William. Titus Andronicus. Ed. Sylvan Barnet. The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare. New York: Harcourt, 1972. 290-320.

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

Stamm, R. “The Alphabet of Speechless Complaint: A Study of the Mangled Daughter in Titus Andronicus.” English Studies 55 (1974): 325-39.

Vickers, Brian. “Shakespeare's Use of Rhetoric.” A New Companion to Shakespeare Studies. Ed. Kenneth Muir and S. Schornbaum. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1971. 93-98.

Waith, Eugene M. “The Metamorphoses of Violence in Titus Andronicus.” Shakespeare Survey 10 (1957): 39-49.

Willbern, David. “Rape and Revenge in Titus Andronicus.” English Literary Renaissance 8 (1978): 159-82.