SOURCE: Smith, Molly Easo. “Spectacles of Torment in Titus Andronicus.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 36 (spring 1996): 315-31.

[In the following essay, Smith offers a theoretical approach to the play's juxtaposition of philosophical categories, particularly the Self-Other dichotomy, and studies the ways in which such oppositions symbolically collapse over the course of Titus Andronicus.]

In its reliance on spectacles of death, Shakespeare's early Roman tragedy, Titus Andronicus, resembles The Spanish Tragedy, though unlike Thomas Kyd's play, which exploits the theatrical value of the hanged body as entertainment, Titus also accentuates the value of dismemberment and mutilation even as it undermines the efficacy of physical public punishment.¹ J. Dover Wilson's remarks about the play present an early recognition of its more than Senecan content; his suggestion that the play is “like some broken-down cart, laden with bleeding corpses from an Elizabethan scaffold, and driven by an executioner from Bedlam dressed in cap and bells” captures with vivid accuracy Titus's roots in carnivalesque public punishment.² In fact, Michel Foucault's more recent description of public executions that, from the State's perspective, went awry, accurately summarizes the effect of Titus: “In these executions, which ought to show only the terrorizing power of the prince, there was the whole aspect of the carnival, in which the rules were inverted, authority mocked and criminals transformed into heroes.”³ Indeed, the considerable popularity of this tragedy may be attributed, like that of The Spanish Tragedy, to the author's ingenious transference of the spectacle of death and dismemberment from Tyburn and other such precincts to the theatrical arena.⁴

In other words, though initially drawn into a complacent vision of excesses authorized and sanctioned by corrupt and ineffective rulers in decadent Rome, we ultimately confront a horrific world with punitive practices not unlike those held at Tyburn or Tower Hill.⁵ Shakespeare's vividly brutal exposition of Roman and Goth practices as intrinsically violent and horrible thus exploits his audience's interest in the excesses associated with Otherness (in what one critic describes as “emblems of exoticism” which typify characterizations of the Other) even as it forces a recognition of the spectacles of punitive excess that audiences relied upon for entertainment.⁶ I am especially interested in the myth of the Other as more violent and horrible than the Self that Titus initially exploits and then completely deconstructs.⁷ The play begins by reiterating the dominant discourses of triumphant Rome, presented as a sharp contrast to barbaric Scythia, but by the final scene barbaric Goths have invaded Rome and placed the exiled Lucius on the throne. The carefully constructed polarities between Self and Other have been expertly displaced and rendered problematic. Titus, in short, epitomizes Renaissance conceptions of alterity as simultaneously horrific and fascinating, alien and similar.

Inevitably therefore, these categories of Self and Other continually compromise and realign themselves in the course of Titus, and we move through the play's invocation of horror as if through a series of frames of gathering intensity: from the world of Romans such as Titus and Marcus who at least partially share the world view of Renaissance England with its concerns with patriarchal and monarchical hierarchies, to the captured Goth Tamora who subverts these hierarchies from the start, to Aaron the complete outsider recognized and categorized as such both by characters within the play and the audience without. And yet, precisely at the moment when we encounter the full horror of Aaron's evil presented through Lucius as a hallmark of his outsideness (during the last stages of the play as he mounts the scaffold and reiterates his commitment to evil), we also see him as a typical figure of the scaffold, one of several criminals celebrated in popular ballads and broadsheets as they defied authorities through their brave speeches and bold demeanor during their last moments. The most Otherly of the play's characters becomes, at the very moment when he celebrates his Otherness publicly, quite clearly a version of the Self.

The Self does not completely subsume the Other in the play, however. On the contrary, this text purporting to transcribe Roman experiences can be seen as the site for a “reciprocal representation” of Self and Other. Indeed, Shakespeare's tragedy also provides a vivid illustration of R. S. Khare's caution about studying “Otherness”: “to recognize the Other … is also to examine the unresolved issues of one's own self-identity, especially as we privilege self via different critical accounts … But such privileging processes have a cost: they increase ethnocentricism, alienate the Other, and produce ‘a crisis of representation.”⁸Titus, like many Renaissance plays set in other lands such as Spain and Italy, might be described as producing such an effect, for despite the play's attempted erasure of differences, Lucius's Rome continues to assert its ethnic superiority over Goths and Moors. Indeed, Titus begins by asserting polarities, proceeds to undermine them by collapsing boundaries that separated Self from Other, and yet concludes with an attempted reiteration of those very polarities that had proved so fragile. Thus, in the concluding scene, despite Lucius's alliance with the Goths, the new Emperor speaks with the voice of the old as he orders the concluding funeral arrangements: Saturninus, despite his passive complicity in the play's central actions, receives a royal burial and interment in the grave of his ancestors, but Tamora, despite her royal status, will feed vultures, and Aaron whose villainy remains inextricably linked to his status as a Moor merits a more torturous punishment. As Khare insists, “Some cultures may actually so formulate their ideal and philosophical positions on the self-Other dichotomy that they are able to (consciously or unconsciously) ‘decenter (but neither neutralize nor remove) the politics of privilege.”⁹ Precisely such a decentering occurs in Titus, for the play closes with an elision of categories initially established as polar opposites, but characters such as the newly-crowned Lucius continue to rely, especially in their exercise of punitive authority, on the Self-Other dichotomy in order to legitimize their power and control. One might even argue that the “politics of privilege” reasserted by Lucius at the end receives greater reinforcement through this process of decentering. Indeed, the play's pattern of asserting differences in order to undermine and then reassert them with greater vengeance may indicate a fundamental aspect of Renaissance depictions of alterity and the experience of theatergoers in Renaissance England as they subsidized productions whose success rested on an exploration of the Self-Other dichotomy. My reading of Titus focuses on the reciprocal representation of Selfhood and Otherness especially as it manifests itself in depictions of punitive violence.

Unlike The Spanish Tragedy which presents quick and sudden deaths, Titus lingers on the spectacle of death as slow and torturous. Colin Burrow's general assertion about Shakespeare's plays seems especially appropriate to this early tragedy: “Cruelty is part of Shakespeare's world, and it generates a high proportion of the energy of his drama.”¹⁰ Though torture was never legally recognized by the common law in England, it was nevertheless, as George Reyley Scott points out, used frequently and justified under the name of discipline and punishment.¹¹ Interestingly, “judicial torture reached its greatest ecumenity in the reign of Elizabeth,” as Scott documents, and this perhaps explains Shakespeare's reliance on the spectacle of torture in this Elizabethan tragedy and his later departure to an exploration of psychological torment in plays such as Macbeth and King Lear.¹² But Titus more than any other of Shakespeare's plays dwells on the spectacle of dismemberment and mutilation, a reliance that may have much to do with popular Tudor practices and evolving changes in popular attitudes. Pieter Spierenburg points out that mutilation, which was common among the Tudors, became less popular in the course of the seventeenth century, the early Stuart period even registering what he describes as an increasing revulsion against mutilation.¹³ Scott also draws attention to the fact that, officially, judicial torture ended in England in 1640, and in Scotland by Act of Parliament in 1708.¹⁴ It is reasonable to assume that in the late Elizabethan and early Stuart periods new attitudes toward the use of torture as punishment and discipline were emerging, though these changes reached the legal books only in 1640. In Shakespeare's clear association of villainy with sadistic pleasure in prolonged punishment, we might discern a record of this growing skepticism about the value of torture as discipline or punishment.

Titus opens with the spectacle of multiple deaths, Titus's arrival in Rome with the bodies of his sons killed in battle. Titus's ceremonious speech emphasizes the ritual of death as a combination of public mourning and celebration, in this case because these deaths occurred as a result of encounters between Roman conquerors and barbarous Goths. Interestingly, every subsequent death or violence in the play occurs as a byproduct of public ceremony and celebration. Alarbus's burning, conducted by Lucius to appease the common people as much as the gods, provides ritual public revenge; Bassianus's death occurs during the course of a ceremoniously conducted royal hunt; and the multiple deaths of the concluding scene occur in the midst of a royal feast.

Alarbus's burning, a public ritual of celebration to the Romans, emerges through Roman eyes as a moderate and necessary response to the losses suffered by the Andronici; this attitude is, however, effectively compromised by the presence of Tamora and the Goths, the Others in this scene, though Tamora's initial pleas for her son's life emphasize her similarity with the Romans as a parent:

Stay, Roman brethren! Gracious conqueror,
Victorious Titus, rue the tears I shed,
A mother's tears in passion for her son:
And, if thy sons were ever dear to thee,
O think my son to be as dear to me.

(I.i.104-8)¹⁵

In a reciprocal representation of alterity, the play dramatizes the irony and falseness of the Self-Other binary most vividly in this opening scene as Tamora and her sons, seen by the Romans as barbaric and violent, in turn decry the Roman spectacle of retaliation and vengeance as primitive and inhuman. To Titus's summary claim that religious rites demand a sacrifice, Tamora responds “O cruel irreligious piety!” and her son adds “Was never Scythia so barbarous!” (I.i.130-1). Thus, from the very start, the play dramatizes the ironies that typified public punitive measures, and this opening scene, which began by reiterating the polarity between Self and Other, Roman and Goth, moves swiftly through a series of events that emphasize instead the slippery margins between these axes. Titus, after bemoaning the loss of his sons at the hands of the Goths, kills Mutius in a fit of passion; Tamora's role shifts abruptly from enemy and prisoner to empress of Rome; and the Andronici hailed as Roman heroes are shortly after condemned as traitors. If one of the central elements in the Self-Other dichotomy remains the Self's desire to convert and civilize the Other, Tamora's absorption into the Roman system through marriage to Saturninus and her subsequent concentration on emulating the Roman example of vengeance effectively deconstruct these binaries yet again.

Alarbus's death and mutilation may be seen to inaugurate this deconstruction in a variety of ways. Foucault illustrates that the ceremony of public punishment in early modern Europe enacted the terror of monarchical authority: “the public execution,” he argues, “is to be understood not only as a judicial, but also as a political ritual. It belongs, even in minor cases, to the ceremonies by which power is manifested.”¹⁶ J. A. Sharpe makes a similar point about executions in England: “Every public execution was … a spectacular reminder of the powers of state, doubly effective because of its essentially local nature.”¹⁷ Frequently, however, it remained open to manipulation by the condemned, who “under the protection of imminent death” could say anything and thus reduce the terror of punishment into a carnivalesque mockery of authority.¹⁸ Interestingly, deaths in Titus invariably expose the inefficacy of law and monarchical authority rather than its omniscience and accuracy. Alarbus's burning, for example, takes place in a “headless” Rome where combatants are still arguing about succession to the emperorship. In its enactment as a vacuous ritual performed by the Andronici themselves before the issue of succession to the throne has been decided, Alarbus's death and mutilation graphically illustrate the nature of all subsequent deaths in the play as enactments of private revenge conducted without royal or legal approval.

Public death, in other words, becomes in Titus, not an illustration of monarchical power, but an exposition of its hollowness. In the two instances where the Emperor Saturninus orders such deaths, his sentences constitute gross miscarriages of justice: the innocent boy bearing Titus's letter receives the death sentence for his role as messenger in the employ of his enemy, and Titus's two sons, wrongly accused of murdering Bassianus, are beheaded on false evidence carefully manufactured by Tamora and Aaron. The death of the Clown provides a grotesque parody of public punishment not unlike that enacted by Kyd in his depiction of Pedringano's death, though unlike Pedringano, the Clown is entirely innocent and simply carries out orders for a fee from Titus. His summary disposal by the emperor and his inability to understand the sentence of death passed on him—“How much money must I have?” he asks in response to the death sentence—emphasize Saturninus's inefficacy as emperor. Thus, the Clown's hanging, a marginal event in comparison to other rituals of death, nevertheless carries the same general import as the mutilation of Alarbus; it reiterates the hollowness of Roman authority as manifested through the figure of the emperor.¹⁹

The play's emphasis on mutilation, especially in the form of execution, is symbolically reiterated throughout by the image of Rome itself as dismembered and headless. Marcus invites Titus to ascend the throne in the opening scene by depicting the crisis in these terms:

Be candidatus then, and put it (the crown) on,
And help to set a head on headless Rome.

(I.i.185-6)

Despite the early resolution of this crisis through the crowning of Saturninus, the image persists throughout the play. Saturninus's very first act as monarch emphasizes his weakness; when Tamora insists that the Andronici need to be publicly forgiven, Saturninus gives in immediately despite his natural inclinations to the contrary. In fact, it is Tamora who addresses the audience with a politic speech of diplomacy and stratagem, now speaking as a full-fledged Roman:

Titus, I am incorporate in Rome,
A Roman now adopted happily,
And must advise the Emperor for his good.

(I.i.462-4)

The scene which began so ceremoniously with assertions about patriarchy and male jostling for power ends ironically with Tamora (the Other in terms of race and gender) determining the course of events.

Interestingly, the image of Rome as headless even dominates the concluding scene, thus presenting the ominous possibility that tragedies will continue and that Lucius's crowning simply presents a superficial solution similar to Saturninus's at the beginning of the play. In fact, as Lucius ascends the throne, we are reminded constantly of the extent to which actions in this last scene duplicate events in the opening scene. The “common voice” hails Lucius as emperor even as it had done Titus in the opening scene; Marcus again appears as a spokesperson for the commoners in their choice; and Lucius's return to Rome as a successful warrior repeats Titus's similar entry earlier. And even as we perceived Saturninus as an inappropriate choice because of his feud with his brother and his first act of revenge once in power manifested by his choice of Lavinia for wife, we are reminded of Lucius's role as revenger in the opening scene. It was he who first initiated revenge against Tamora by demanding a sacrificial prisoner from the Goths to appease the spirits of the slain Andronici. In that scene, he also orchestrates the sacrifice of Alarbus and returns with tokens of his deed to revel in Tamora's humiliation as he announces its successful operation with vivid detail:

See, lord and father, how we have performed
Our Roman rites: Alarbus's limbs are lopp'd,
And entrails feed the sacrificing fire,
Whose smoke like incense doth perfume the sky.

(I.i.141-4)

Thus, his election to the emperorship remains suspect because of his complicity in central tragedies of the play; in fact, he might be regarded as the author of all vengeful acts, for he sets the precedent and presents revenge as an acceptable mode of behavior against abuses to oneself or one's kin.

The irony of Rome's headlessness is further underscored at the end by the presence of powerful outsiders, the Goths who have helped to place Lucius on the throne and the talking head of Aaron, the only part of his body visible to the public, still knocking the Andronici for their vulnerability to his schemes and boasting about his successes against them. Lucius orders Aaron's punishment as a spectacle of royal power and authority:

Set him breast-deep in earth and famish him;
There let him stand and rave and cry for food.
If any relieves him or pities him,
For the offense he dies. This is our doom.

(V.iii.179-82)

But Lucius underestimates Aaron's intelligence, assuming that his utterances while thus immersed under earth will consist of pleas to be fed, freed, or pitied. Aaron's response to his punishment undermines Lucius's naive assumption:

Ah, why should wrath be mute, and fury dumb?
I am no baby, I, that with base prayers
I should repent the evils I have done.

(V.iii.184-6)

In fact, Lucius's experiences with Aaron thus far should have enabled him to expect such a response. The play presented a parallel situation earlier when Aaron's reaction to Lucius as he faced imminent death consisted not of desperate pleas for life, but clever manipulation of Lucius's mind. On encountering Aaron with his bastard child, Lucius while on his way to Rome determines to hang Aaron and the infant immediately. Like his father's enactment of authority in ordering Alarbus's death immediately after his arrival in Rome, Lucius's sentence on Aaron lacks full legitimacy, for Lucius is yet to be crowned and Saturninus still retains his titular claim to the emperorship. Foucault's point about the political import of public executions mentioned earlier remains especially appropriate in this context, for Lucius pronounces sentence partly to rally support and to ensure allegiance from Goths and Romans as he attempts to unseat Saturninus and Tamora. He even orders the ladder to be brought and the audience is promised an on-stage hanging quite in the manner of Kyd's tragedy:

First hang the child, that he may see it sprawl—
A sight to vex the father's soul withal.

(V.i.50-1)

Indeed, the ladder is brought on stage and Aaron even ascends the ladder, though he soon manages to reduce the sentence passed on him by promising to “show thee (Lucius) wondrous things / That highly may advantage thee to hear” (V.i.55-6). In a gradual reversal of roles, Lucius bargains with the victim, promising to nourish and bring up Aaron's child in exchange for details of villainies at court. Aaron's eagerness to talk about his misdeeds reveals his primary goal hereafter in the play, namely, to inflict psychological torment on his hearers by recounting their vulnerability to his villainies. He revels in this power as he turns Lucius's own words against him: “why, assure thee, Lucius, / 'Twill vex thy soul to hear what I shall speak” (V.i.61-2). Indeed, Aaron waxes so eloquent and expresses such a lack of contrition for his misdeeds that Lucius finds himself commuting the sentence even further and ordering that Aaron be retained for torture rather than allowed so easy and “sweet a death as hanging” (V.i.146). Aaron's response suggests that Lucius has simply acceded to his victim's priorities; Aaron would like to live so that he might torment the Andronici with reminders of his villainies against them:

If there be devils, would I were a devil,
To live and burn in everlasting fire,
So I might have your company in hell,
But to torment you with my bitter tongue!

(V.i.147-50)

Lucius's recognition of Aaron's power to use language as a means of psychological torment emerges in his response: “Sirs, stop his mouth, and let him speak no more.” (V.i.151)

But Aaron's ascendancy has been effectively demonstrated by his manipulation of Lucius's authority. The scene suggests that a change which Karin Coddon traces to the early seventeenth century was already emerging in the late sixteenth; arguing a similar point about the inefficacy of executions in Macbeth, she notes that “(i)n seventeenth-century England, the spectacle of punishment was clearly becoming as equivocal as the ‘fiendish nature of its treasonous objects, a demonstration of sovereignty's impotence as well as power.”²⁰ And if, as Douglas Hay argues, the death sentence was “the climactic emotional point of the criminal law—the moment of terror around which the system revolved,” the initiative for enacting terror has transferred at least partially in this instance from Lucius to Aaron, from an agent of justice to his victim who, despite being captured redhanded, has managed to contrive a temporary reprieve.²¹ The survival of Aaron's baby further accentuates the Self-Other dichotomy, for it foregrounds the primacy of familial bonds to Aaron, a sharp contrast to the violence against kin that Romans have enacted for us in scene after scene starting with Titus's killing of Mutius and concluding with his killing of Lavinia. Aaron's natural cunning in ensuring the survival of his line thus separates him from the Romans and adds to our perception of him as simultaneously horrific and fascinating.

In this remarkable scene where Aaron climbs the ladder, we encounter the typical Elizabethan hanging, including the eloquent and unlimited speech by the victim on the scaffold. Spierenburg describes the scaffold speech as a particularly English custom: “From Tudor times on the authorities actively encouraged the condemned to address himself to the public with a moralistic story, explaining how he had sinned and deserved his punishment.”²² He cites travelers such as Balthazar Becker who “on a visit to England, had noted the custom with surprise. The convict resembled a minister on the pulpit, Becker wrote, were it not for the rope around his neck.”²³ However, though such speeches were intended to present a repentant criminal reiterating the power of law, this was not always the case. Commenting on the propensity for travesty inherent in the format of the public execution, Foucault explains that because the ritual of torture was sustained “by a policy of terror” which made everyone aware “through the body of the criminal of the unrestrained presence of the sovereign,” it was especially susceptible to manipulation by its participants.²⁴ The public execution's social relevance depended so fully on its proper enactment through the collusion of all its participants, including the hangman as an instrument of the law, the criminal as a defier of divine and sovereign authority, the spectators as witnesses to the efficacy of royal power and justice, that the slightest deviation could lead to redefinitions and reinterpretations of power relations between subjects and the sovereign. Indeed, this happened frequently enough to cause some concern to authorities. The speech delivered on the scaffold by the victim provided an especially suitable opportunity for such manipulation; intended to reinforce the power of justice, it frequently questioned rather than emphasized the efficiency of the law. Certainly, Aaron's vaunting speech on the scaffold may be regarded as typical of numerous such defiant ones recorded in broadsheets and ballads detailing Renaissance scaffold proceedings. As in many such situations, Aaron refuses to cooperate with the authorities by expressing apt contrition and revels in his misdeeds instead; he at least partially subverts the authority of those who accuse him by refusing to die a model death:

Even now I curse the day, and yet, I think,
Few come within the compass of my curse,
Wherein I did not some notorious ill:
As kill a man, or else devise his death;
Ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it;
Accuse some innocent, and forswear myself;
But I have done a thousand dreadful things
As willingly as one would kill a fly,
And nothing grieves me heartily indeed
But that I cannot do a thousand more.

(V.i.125-44)

In fact, the speech presents dramatic argument for curtailing victims' rights, a view expressed by figures such as John Chamberlain, who in a letter to Dudley Carleton bemoans the custom of allowing the condemned to address the audience and cautions about the danger of this practice; describing a speech by a priest who hanged at Tyburn, he notes that “the matter is not well handled in mine opinion, to suffer them (condemned prisoners) to brave and talk so liberally at their execution.”²⁵

Interestingly, Aaron's punishment, which constitutes a form of public imprisonment and torture, presents an obverse rather than equivalent condition to that reserved for the worst criminals in Elizabethan England. In Newgate, the most notorious of the London prisons, for example, the worst offenders suffered isolation; Father Garnet, the Jesuit priest imprisoned there on suspicion of treason, describes the punishment in one of his letters: “Newgate is the worst of the twelve prisons in London and Limbo is the worst place in it, being underground and without any breathing hole to admit air or light, and that is reserved for the worst malefactors.”²⁶ Aaron, by contrast, suffers a very public humiliation and imprisonment, a sentence which, though intended as prolonged torture, instead provides him with yet another opportunity to use his considerable talent for persuasion. Elaine Scarry defines torture as “the invariable and simultaneous occurrence of three phenomena which, if isolated, would occur in the following order. First, pain is inflicted on a person in ever-intensifying ways. Second, the pain, continually amplified through the person's body, is also amplified in the sense that it is objectified, made visible to those outside the person's body. Third, the objectified pain is denied as pain and read as power.”²⁷ In Aaron's extended imprisonment, intended by Lucius as a deterrent and negative example, Titus enacts torture as this threefold phenomenon. But Lucius's perception that a sentence on Aaron needs to be augmented by an equally ferocious sentence against any who might come to Aaron's aid hints at the emperor's misgivings in choosing torment over hanging, contrary to his natural inclination. Aaron's own preference for a punishment whereby he retains his ability to rail at the Andronici adds an ironic dimension to Lucius's sentence. Thus, though the concluding scene demonstrates the Andronici's victory over Aaron, it also deconstructs the validity of Lucius's sentence as a decisive enactment of power.

The image of Aaron as a talking head left to torment Lucius and the Roman public in general by reminding them of his past victories over the Andronici dominates our final impression of the play. Rome continues to remain dismembered, headless because of its ineffective emperor, and tormented by an articulate head constantly reminding her of the tragedies that an outsider had managed to inflict upon its leading citizens. Thus, Aaron at least partially subverts the intention of the authorities as they make a spectacle of his torment; he even becomes a version of the numerous heads on poles that greeted visitors to London and whose subversive effects Thomas Platter records in a description of his visit. Bemused irony marks Platter's recognition of the inherent subversive potential in such public displays of authority:

At the top of one tower almost in the centre of the bridge, were stuck on tall stakes more than thirty skulls of noble men who had been executed and beheaded for treason and for other reasons. And their descendants are accustomed to boast of this, themselves even pointing out to one of their ancestors' heads on this same bridge, believing that they will be esteemed the more because their antecedents were of such high descent that they could even covet the crown, but being too weak to attain it were executed for rebels; thus they make an honour for themselves of what was set up to be a disgrace and an example.²⁸

The complementary image of Rome's headlessness and Aaron's talking head further deconstructs the Self-Other dichotomy which opened the play, for in the end, noble Rome and the barbaric Moor retain their identities as polar opposites and yet remain functionally (dysfunctionally may be more appropriate in this context) similar because of their incomplete nature. Aaron, mocking and still gleeful about his successes, reiterates the extent to which images of disjuncture and dismemberment pervade the play; his mockery dominates our final impressions.²⁹ Gillian Murray Kendall, who sees in the play's conclusion a failed attempt at the traditional ordering of state typical in Shakespeare's tragedies, makes a crucial point when she insists that the play ends “with a focus on Aaron that leaves him forever awaiting his punishment, forever speaking, the state forever fragmented … The violence in Titus Andronicus promises never to cease.”³⁰ If, as Foucault insists, public punishment “did not re-establish justice; it reactivated power,” Lucius's show of authority constitutes a failed attempt at reactivating power, for the concluding vision of Aaron's talking head reiterates the inadequacy of his punishment and the dangers that face Lucius who has effected only a temporary peace.³¹

In this sense, as critics have long recognized, the silenced and mutilated Lavinia, a figure who retains much of our attention despite her silence, best represents the plight of Rome. In her inarticulate vocality, Lavinia visibly illustrates a connection between language and violence that Scarry underscores: “Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.”³² As a body ravished and mutilated by the outsiders Demetrius and Chiron, her plight captures in miniature the enslavement and degradation of Rome, though Romans, Goths, and the Moor are implicated in her tragedy. As an emblem for Rome itself, she even embodies the conundrum of the Self-Other dichotomy through her plight as a commodity of considerable value (“that changing piece” as Saturninus categorizes her) transferred by Titus to Saturninus, subsequently snatched by Bassianus, Demetrius, and Chiron in succession, and then left to wander in the woods until picked up by Marcus and returned to her father. But by now she is almost unrecognizable and Marcus's words as he presents her to Titus—“This was thy daughter”—emphasize her transformation and alienation most vividly. It might be argued that by the end of the play Rome, now hospitable to the Goths and its royal family eliminated, has similarly lost its identity. Thus, Titus's wanton erasure of his daughter reiterates the inadequacy of the apparent restitution ceremoniously proclaimed by Lucius's ascension, an ascension which simply reenacts the hollowness of monarchical authority demonstrated in detail by Saturninus in the course of the play.

The play's collapse of categories is symbolically and literally reiterated in the concluding scene by the survival of Aaron's baby, whose multiple ethnic status as Roman, Goth, and Moor and dual social status as royalty and slave, suggest the danger of his presence; Lucius, having promised to “save, nourish, and bring him up,” presumably intends to keep his promise. Marcus even makes a spectacle of the baby, presenting him to the public as proof of misdoings at court:

Behold the child;
Of this was Tamora delivered,
The issue of an irreligious Moor,
Chief architect and plotter of these woes.

(V.iii.119-22)

His “tawny” presence further undermines the play's restitution of order and illustrates the Roman state's inability to define it.³³ Derek Cohen argues that the baby's male gender remains crucial, for “he is invested with the chief value of males in patriarchal social groups.”³⁴ The play implies that such gendered power will inevitably provide another instance of the connections between patriarchy and violence enacted so vividly in scene after scene. But as Cohen also demonstrates, Aaron's progeny remains curiously allied to female vulnerability, for it provides a “kind of symbolic counterpart to Lavinia; innocent like her, it becomes a target of violence from the start.”³⁵ The play's collapse of categories thus receives its most vivid demonstration in the final spectacle of Aaron's child held up for public scrutiny by the triumphant Andronici.

Aaron's baby symbolically reiterates the play's political, social, and ethnic preoccupation with the Self-Other conundrum: security in Lucius's Rome (and by extension, in Elizabeth's England) might depend on a clear separation of Self from Other, but the action of Titus repeatedly demonstrates that this separation also remains hard to maintain. Through its focus on the issue of political security and its fascination with public punitive practices, Titus records the threat that the process of self-definition increasingly faced in Renaissance England; this early experiment in Roman tragedy provides a metacritique of the process of self-definition as inevitably elusive and inadequate.³⁶

Notes

1. For a reading of The Spanish Tragedy that focuses on its spectacles of death and dying, see Molly Smith, “The Theater and the Scaffold: Death as Spectacle in The Spanish Tragedy,” SEL [Studies in English Literature 1500-1900] 32, 2 (Spring 1992): 217-32; for connections between punitive practices and Elizabethan theater, see Karen Cunningham, “Renaissance Execution and Marlovian Elocution: The Drama of Death,” PMLA 105, 2 (March 1990): 209-22; for an analysis of Macbeth along similar lines, see Karin Coddon, “Unreal Mockery: Unreason and the Problem of Spectacle in Macbeth,” ELH 56, 3 (Fall 1989): 485-501; for an analysis of drama's connections with the ritual of women's executions, see Frances E. Dolan, ‘“Gentlemen, I have one thing more to say: Women on Scaffolds in England, 1563-1680,” MP [Modern Philology] 92, 2 (November 1994): 157-78.

2. Quoted by J. C. Maxwell in his Introduction to the Arden edition of Titus Andronicus (London and New York: Methuen, 1968), p. xxxiv. Readers may wish to consult the newest Arden edition, edited by Jonathan Bate, which appeared too late to be consulted for this article.

3. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), p. 61.

4. As in the case of Kyd's play, Titus has been seen traditionally as a strictly academic exercise in Senecan drama by an immature playwright. E. M. W. Tillyard voices this view in Shakespeare's History Plays (New York: Macmillan, 1944), pp. 137-8, as does Muriel Bradbrook, who notes that “Titus Andronicus is a Senecan exercise; the horrors are all classical and quite unfelt, so that the violent tragedy is contradicted by the decorous imagery. The tone is cool and cultured in its effect” (Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1935), pp. 98-9). Critical opinion since Tillyard and Bradbrook continued to corroborate this stand until recently; in the last decade the play has received considerable revisionist critical attention. Examples include Maurice Hunt, “Compelling Art in Titus Andronicus,” SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly] 28, 2 (Spring 1988): 197-218; Eugene Waith, “The Ceremonies of Titus Andronicus,” in Mirror up to Shakespeare: Essays in Honour of G. R. Hibbard, ed. J. C. Gray (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1984), pp. 159-70; Gillian Murray Kendall, ‘“Lend me thy hand: Metaphor and Mayhem in Titus Andronicus,” SQ 40, 3 (Fall 1989): 299-316; and Douglas E. Green, “Interpreting ‘her martyr'd signs: Gender and Tragedy in Titus Andronicus,” SQ 40, 3 (Fall 1989): 317-26. For an early analysis of a specific connection between a hanging and Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors, see T. W. Baldwin's William Shakespeare Adapts a Hanging (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1931); I am grateful to Douglas Bruster for drawing my attention to this study.

5. See Gary Miles's essay, “How Roman Are Shakespeare's Romans?” in SQ 40, 3 (Fall 1989): 257-83, for a sustained discussion of Renaissance conceptions of Romanness.

6. R. S. Khare, “The Other's Double—The Anthropologist's Bracketed Self: Notes on Cultural Representation and Privileged Discourse,” NLH [New Literary History] 23, 1 (Winter 1992): 1-23, 5. For historical studies of torture and punishment in the Renaissance, see John Laurence, A History of Capital Punishment (New York: Citadel Press, 1960), and John Langbein, Torture and the Law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancien Régime (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1977). Also of interest is Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1992). William Harrison's “Of Sundry Kinds of Punishment Appointed for Offenders,” in The Description of England (1587), ed. George Edelin (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 187-8, remains a useful Renaissance source. For a discussion of physical and psychological torment in The Tempest within the context of official strategies for coping with treason, see Curt Breight, ‘“Treason doth never prosper: The Tempest and the Discourse of Treason,” SQ 41, 1 (Spring 1990): 1-28.

7. For a study of Aaron's role in the context of attitudes toward Moors, see Emily Bartels, “Making the Moor: Aaron, Othello, and Renaissance Refashioning of Race,” SQ 40, 4 (Winter 1990): 433-54; also see her recent book, Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), for a study of Renaissance notions of Otherness. For studies that focus specifically on Moors in the drama, see Anthony Gerard Barthelemy, Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representations of Blacks in English Renaissance Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1987), and Elliot H. Tokson, The Popular Image of the Black Man in Renaissance Drama, 1550-1688 (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982).

8. Khare, pp. 1-2.

9. Khare, p. 2.

10. Colin Burrow, “Is Shakespeare Still a Player?” in The Sunday Times: The Culture Magazine (London), 24 July 1994, p. 9.

11. George Ryley Scott, The History of Torture throughout the Ages (London: Torchstream Books, 1940), p. 89.

12. Scott, p. 89.

13. Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression: From a Preindustrial Metropolis to the European Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), p. 77.

14. Scott, p. 136.

15. Unless otherwise indicated, all references to Titus are to the Arden edition of the play edited by J. C. Maxwell (London and New York: Methuen, 1953), and will be cited parenthetically in the text.

16. Foucault, p. 49.

17. J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), p. 142.

18. Foucault, p. 61.

19. Francis Barker invests this scene with considerable cultural significance. “The episode,” he argues, “is a marginalized ‘representation which but barely represents … both in extent and intensity, the death by hanging among the ludic rustics and non-elite clowns of early modern England and Wales—the real dead … The lack of effect associated with the demise of the Clown in Titus Andronicus makes it casual … part of the routine, ‘natural landscape and lifescape of the poor” (The Culture of Violence: Tragedy and History (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 191-2).

20. Coddon, pp. 499-500.

21. Douglas Hay, “Property, Authority, and the Criminal Law,” in Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G. Rule, E. P. Thompson, and Cal Winslow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), pp. 17-63, 28.

22. Spierenburg, p. 63.

23. Ibid.

24. Foucault, p. 49.

25. John Chamberlain, “Letter to Dudley Carleton,” in Thomas Birch, The Court and Times of James I, ed. R. F. Williams, 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1849), 1:215.

26. Quoted by Father John Gerard in Contributions towards the Life of Father Henry Garnet, S. J. (Roehampton, England: J. Griffin, 1898), p. 41.

27. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York and Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), p. 28.

28. Thomas Platter, Travels in England (1599), trans. Clare Williams (London: Jonathan Cape, 1937), p. 155.

29. Coddon makes a similar point about Macbeth: “Macbeth is informed by a conception of treason at its most spectacular, theatrical manifestation, but rather than endorsing the ideological efficacy of the performance of punishment—on either scaffold—the play posits spectacle itself as the locus of ‘unreal mockery and radically ambiguous effects” (p. 485).

30. Kendall, p. 316.

31. In this sense, Bruce Boehrer's claim about Hamlet must extend equally to Titus: “Hamlet enacts the promised end of Tudor imperial culture: an end … that was by 1599 almost inevitable.” Boehrer argues that during the last decade of the sixteenth century, English subjects must have been acutely conscious of and nervous about the issue of succession; Hamlet's preoccupation with this issue and dramatization of the end of a dynasty must have invested its actions with a particular contextual relevance (Monarchy and Incest in the English Renaissance (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), p. 77). A similar argument might be made about Titus, a play whose actions revolve around the issue of succession.

32. Scarry, p. 4.

33. My argument that the play's enactment of violence is intimately linked to its collapse of categories and its inability to separate Self from Other runs counter to Derek Cohen's recent study of the violence in the play; he concludes that “from the beginning, with the first onstage killing, a kind of ethical anarchy becomes the hallmark of the plot. Such a condition is possible only in a world where contrasts are stark and immediate. Black and white stand out in vivid opposition in Titus” (Shakespeare's Culture of Violence (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993), p. 80). On the contrary, the presence of Aaron's baby symbolically reiterates the play's continual insistence that stark oppositions never existed and could never be maintained.

34. Cohen, p. 90.

35. Ibid.

36. An early version of this paper was presented in Susan Zimmerman's session at the Shakespeare Association of America convention in 1994; I am grateful to Professor Kiernan Ryan for his valuable critique of my paper and to Professor Zimmerman and other participants who, by their responses, contributed to my revisions. I am also grateful to St. Louis University for a summer grant which enabled me to revise the manuscript, to the anonymous reader of SEL whose suggestions forced me to work out my arguments more fully and thus to produce a considerably improved final draft, and to the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Edinburgh and the John Rylands Library at the University of Manchester where fellowships in the summers of 1992 and 1994, respectively, enabled me to further my research into connections between theater and public punishments.