[In the following essay, Mead investigates the relationship between ritual and the cycle of violence depicted in Titus Andronicus.]

Shakespeare's first tragedy has often been defined as a spectacular tragedy of blood that is shed for its own sake.¹ Frank Kermode writes in the introduction to the Riverside edition of the play,

there is small point in denying that an exhibition of horror … is a prime motive of Titus Andronicus.²

Certainly Titus is a tragedy of blood, but to attribute this fact to an Elizabethan taste for grotesque violence is to ignore the profound role ritual, often violent ritual, played in ordering Elizabethan cosmology. In Titus, Shakespeare manifests a profound interest in the ability of sacrifice to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate violence, and in the chaos that ensues when such distinctions become ambiguous. Educated in Seneca and other Roman dramas steeped in ritual, Shakespeare appears to have associated Rome with ritual, for his Roman works—including even the marginally Roman Romeo and Juliet—stand out from the rest of the canon in their use of ritual as a major dramaturgic device. Recalling Lucrece's death scene and the noble Romans' dipping their hands in the blood of the slain Caesar, one also suspects that Shakespeare's own violent society might well seek meaning or reference in associating Roman civilization with a more primitive—and direct—confrontation with the violence that occurs routinely in a community and sometimes spectacularly in an empire, and which is often regulated by religious ritual.

Shakespeare's understanding of pagan rituals has proven enigmatic to modern audiences, whose unfamiliarity with or rejection of ritual colors their understanding of Shakespeare's Roman world. Modern anthopological commonplaces concerning primitive religious culture can disclose patterns of meaning in Shakespeare's rendition of ritual, and a better understanding of primitive religion may well improve our understanding and appreciation of the function of ritual in Shakespeare's Rome.

For a primitive community to survive, it must have a clear and definable sense of distinction—not just social distinction (although certainly that), but, more primally, distinctions between the living community and the dead community, between community members and aliens, and between purity and pollution. The idea of holiness includes a fundamental separateness, as Mary Douglas has argued:

Holiness requires that individuals shall conform to the class to which they belong. And holiness requires that different classes of things shall not be confused.³

To make or acknowledge something holy, one must remove it from the profane, an action that in effect makes removal or insulation a precondition to sanctity; in Durkheim's words, “the world of sacred things is, by definition, a world apart.”⁴ The great enemy of any community is routine and indiscriminate interaction, and the role of religious ritual is to combat this enemy. Ritual and religion function to define what is pure and impure, and thereby enable people to achieve purity and establish clarity in a threatened community.

Ritual is, then, more than the outward expression of commonly held human needs, fears, and desires. It is perhaps the most effective means by which human beings have created order in the world and in their lives. In Titus, Shakespeare employs a pre-Reformation conception of ritual, a concept established before the paradigm moderns have inherited, which states that all ritual is really self-deluding, merely empty form. Mary Douglas makes a crucial point when she notes,

The Evangelical movement has left us with a tendency to suppose that any ritual is empty form, that any codifying of conduct is alien to natural movements of sympathy, and that any external religion betrays true interior religion.⁵

In the Roman world of Titus, Shakespeare creates a community in which ritual is of vital and immediate importance.

One of the most pervasive indicators of distinction in the pagan culture that Shakespeare recreated (however imperfectly) is the manes, the Roman dead who, if properly interred, become something very much akin to local genii.⁶ But far from being a term thrown in to give the tragedy some Roman color, the manes in Titus are the cynosure of the play's energy: through them the dramatist distinguishes the living community from the underworld and, even more specifically, distinguishes those who have been ritually cleansed from those who are impure. Shakespeare's use of the manes also connects the two communities of the living and the dead. If the manes are properly cared for (typically by offerings of food and drink at the grave site, but in Shakespeare's play by the human sacrifice), the distinction between the living and the dead will keep its integrity. Apparently, the satisfied dead do no particular good for the living, but the unsatisfied are feared as agents of great harm.⁷ Quite beyond the plagues, famine, and misbirths they might bring, the greatest disaster would be the blurring of boundaries of the two communities by the palpable presence of the dead (here more correctly called the undead) amid the living community. Such a disaster is much more threatening to a community than, say, a flood or some other “natural” calamity, because some fraction of the community will most likely survive even the worst of elemental disruptions. The presence of the dead in the world of the living threatens not only the members of the community, but the very idea of the community. Thus, classical literature and drama is replete with visits to the underworld (Orpheus, Odysseus, Theseus, Aeneas), and these trips point to a terror of the underworld per se. A special kind of terror, however, arises when there are trips from the underworld because in this case the revenant challenges the very definition of worlds. The revenant's challenge to the definitions of worlds is the source of the terror that Seneca invokes so frequently. His Hippolytus, which Shakespeare quotes twice in Titus, draws much of its energy from the fear aroused when the boundaries between the living and the dead are breached.

Finally, the notion of distinction needs to be clarified by noting the specific social problems of too-alikeness. A community must have a means of overcoming the obstacle that too-alikeness poses. In some primitive societies, for example, twins inspire a particular terror, and one or both is often destroyed.⁸ In Western societies, systems such as primogeniture have traditionally fought off the threat of chaos that too-alikeness poses. The problems in Titus Andronicus might well be summarized as a community's contention with a preponderance of twins: Saturninus and Bassianus, Chiron and Demetrius, Lavinia and Tamora, and—ironically—Titus and Aaron.⁹ These pairs represent an increasingly complicated and threatening series of obstacles to the survival of the community.

These are the problems ritual addresses in Titus. In addition to—and much more important than—the triumphs, elections, marriages, trials, role playings, feasts, and negotiations, the human sacrifice of Alarbus and its dual functions of appeasement and expiation offer a meaningful and even logical cause for every subsequent act of violence in the play.¹⁰ Peter Brook has written that

Everything in Titus is linked to a dark flowing current out of which surge the horrors, rhythmically and logically related—if one searches in this way one can find the expression of a powerful … barbaric ritual.¹¹

Miola suggests that “The hint of blood ritual at the end of Lucrece becomes a potent symbol in Titus Andronicus. …”¹² If we read Titus as a crisis of community-binding ritual, the drama of blood increases in coherence. And the Elizabethan anxieties concerning “Englishness,” in an increasingly competitive European and New World market, may explain the great popularity of Titus among Elizabethans and early seventeenth-century audiences. From this perspective, the violence of Titus appears less as gratuitous spectacle and more as the result of a failed ritual—that is, the failure of sacrifice to protect a community from its own violence by channelling that violence into a ritually meaningful experience. This channelling is made possible only by the communally acceptable choice of a victim, what René Girard calls “the unanimity-minus-one of the surrogate victim.”¹³

The crisis of community that Rome faces at the play's inception is indicated by two ritually significant topoi. First, the audience sees a volatile, competitive Rome threatened by the chaos that results from a loss of social distinctions. As elder brother, Saturninus argues for distinction based on birthright:

Noble patricians, patrons of my right,
Defend the justice of my cause with arms;
And, countrymen, my loving followers,
Plead my successive title with your swords.
I am his first-born son, that was the last
That ware the imperial diadem of Rome,
Then let my father's honors live in me,
Nor wrong my age with this indignity.

1.1.1-8

Brother rivalry is a common form of internal strife in any community. Like Eteocles and Polyneices, Saturninus and Bassianus are too alike to coexist; their alikeness threatens the community. Acknowledging this, Saturninus appeals to primogeniture, a system whose primary function is to impose distinctions upon like persons and claims. The second topos is that of the conquering hero returning home. Like Euripides's Heracles and Homer's Odysseus, Shakespeare's Titus returns from a war (of ten years' duration, reminiscent of Odysseus) victorious, but made impure by the blood spilt.¹⁴ Marcus informs the royal brothers that Titus “hath return'd / Bleeding to Rome” (1.1.33-34). Unless Titus is ritually cleansed, the residual violence of the Gothic Wars, which clings to him like dried blood, threatens to contaminate Rome and to erupt into civil violence. According to the First Quarto, Titus must perform a “sacrifice of expiation.”¹⁵ A sacrifice of blood must, paradoxically, wash the impure blood away. These sacrifices must be performed in a spirit of piety to be successful—and Titus, when first mentioned, is called by his surname Pius (1.1.23). These two topoi represent violence from within and without Rome that must be channelled into “spending itself on victims whose death will provoke no reprisals.”¹⁶

The physical properties of blood are of great importance in ritual and help to distinguish the pure from the impure. Classical tales repeatedly emphasize that dried blood is impure. Girard explains the matter:

Blood that dries on the victim soon loses its viscous quality and becomes first a dark sore, then a roughened scab. Blood that is allowed to congeal on its victim is the impure product of violence, illness, or death. In contrast to this contaminated substance is the fresh blood of newly slaughtered victims, crimson and free flowing. This blood is never allowed to congeal, but is removed without trace as soon as the rites have been concluded.¹⁷

Sacrificial blood maintains the distinction between the pure and the impure, much as sacrifice asserts the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence. Shakespeare was certainly aware of this illustrative nature of blood in classical literature and its importance in the social function of ritual. In The Rape of Lucrece, after Lucrece has effectively sacrificed herself, he describes her blood:

Bubbling from her breast, it doth divide
In two slow rivers, that the crimson blood
Circles her body in on every side,
Who like a late-sack'd island vastly stood
Bare and unpeopled in this fearful flood.
Some of her blood still pure and red remain'd,
And some look'd black, and that false Tarquin stain'd.
About the mourning and congealed face
Of that black blood a wat'ry rigol goes,
Which seems to weep upon the tainted place,
And ever since, as pitying Lucrece' woes,
Corrupted blood some watery token shows,
And blood untainted still doth red abide,
Blushing at that which is so putrefied.

Rape of Lucrece 1737-50

As a sacrifice, Lucrece's suicide is both necessary and lamented. The purpose of the ritualized death is the same as the purpose of all sacrifices: to maintain in the community the distinction between purity and contamination—and hence to assure the survival of that community. Her blood is both pure and tainted, just as Rome's community contains both pure members (Brutus) and corrupt members (Tarquin). Lucrece's sacrifice will expedite the purgation of Rome and ensure the community's survival.

The first act of Titus, then, serves to expose the violence already fomenting within Rome which is about to clash with the residual violence of the Gothic campaign. Between these two forces, the burial of Titus's sons and its attendant sacrifice become a potential means of removing violence on both sides by relocating it in the death of Alarbus and the prayers over the dead Andronici. In addition, the fresh blood of the victim shed over the stale blood of the slain Andronici will wash away the impurity of the slain and allow them to cross over the river of the dead.¹⁸ This ritual fails—for a number of reasons—but paramount among them is the sudden disappearance of the social distinctions that the ritual requires.¹⁹

The religious rationale for the sacrifice—that is, the reason the Andronici perform the sacrifice—is “so the shadows be not unappeased, / Nor we disturbed with prodigies on earth” (1.1.100-101). While the sacrifice is an attempt to keep the dead separate from the living, the typical effect of the sacrifice should be to stem the tide of violence from within and without that would otherwise break out into a cycle of reciprocal vengeance—which would eventually destroy the community. The unappeased dead can instigate forms of reciprocal violence among the living such as feuds, wars, revenge, and individual acts of assault, rape, and murder; these are the “prodigies” that Lucius fears.²⁰ In Titus, Shakespeare asks us to understand revenge not solely as a product of human will, but also as a supernatural consequence of bad sacrifice. A sacrificial ritual isolates violence from provocation; the sacrificial victim is not guilty of any crime. Into this victim the community invests all its violent impulses. However fanciful the religious motivation for the sacrifice may sound to modern ears, one cannot deny that the subsequent action of Titus is an array of the disasters Lucius has attempted to prevent—his worst fears come true.

The choice of Alarbus for sacrificial victim is crucial—not only to the working of the sacrifice, but also to the play as a whole. His very name is temptingly reminiscent of Alaric (ad 370-410), the Visigoth who was for a time the commander of Gothic forces in the Roman army and whose sack of Rome in 410 symbolized for Shakespeare's audience the end of the Roman Empire. This connection may be more than nominally significant, for Alaric, like his possible namesake, was both an insider and an outsider in regard to Rome. In order to understand the importance of Alarbus as a focal point upon which all subsequent actions in Titus turn, we must review the usual requirements for a sacrificial victim. For a sacrifice to protect a society from its own violence, the victim must be both like and unlike the community members. That is, the victim must in some way resemble a community member, but this resemblence must be superficial. Girard asserts that

this resemblance must not be carried to the extreme of complete assimilation, or it would lead to disastrous confusion.²¹

Initially, Alarbus is ideal. He is a young man, son of a queen, a soldier—in short, like the Andronici in every way except that he is a Goth. Moreover, as eldest son, Alarbus reflects the primogeniture that Titus will support as the Roman Way in the brothers' rivalry for the throne. Lucius formally requests from his father

… the proudest prisoner of the Goths,
That we may hew his limbs and on a pile
Ad manes fratrum sacrifice his flesh
Before this earthly prison of their bones.

1.1.96-99

Titus's response is equally ritualized, verbally echoing his sons' request:

I give him you, the noblest that survives,
The eldest son of this distressed queen.

1.1.102-3

The exchange indicates why Alarbus is the ideal victim. He is an alien whose availability is enhanced by his relation to royalty, his nobility, and his pride (all attributes of the slain Andronici): Alarbus is a mirror image of the slain Andronici. He will join the Andronici in death, even at the family tomb. Shakespeare's insertion of the Latin phrase ad manes fratrum, is more than mere historical color. Alarbus literally becomes brother to the slain Andronici by his sacrifice. The details of the manner of his death, the hewing and lopping of his limbs and the setting of those limbs on a pile, are intended to disguise the lack of resemblance between the victim and the corpses. But, as Douglas reminds us in Purity and Danger, the body in ritual is always an image of society at large.²² This heap, in fact, looks ahead to the splintering of the Roman community. Still further, the heap of mangled limbs recalls the corpse of Hippolytus—an abomination in Seneca, a failed sacrifice which brings on abominations in Shakespeare.

Tamora's plea for her son's life attempts to undo the ritual by capitalizing on the brotherhood of Roman and Goth. In a way, she turns the unanimity-minus-one to unanimity-minus-four: Chiron and Demetrius call Titus a Scythian, the most barbarous name they can think of. While the ritual has been functioning to impose a faceless yet familiar identity upon Alarbus, Tamora attempts to save her son's life by insisting on universal ties among human beings:²³

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!

1.1.104-8

Her tactics, however, only reinforce the mirror-imaging that the ritual has instigated. At this point, on the stage, Alarbus is presumably with Titus's sons, and as she calls to these brothers, Alarbus is further incorporated into his identity as surrogate victim for the slain brothers. Titus responds by using Tamora's own word and theme to justify the sacrifice:

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

1.1.121-24

To Titus, passion is the very emotion that the ritual is meant to erase. Sorrow and revenge are precisely the human responses that lead to reciprocal violence; ritual attempts to channel these responses into a cold-blooded, passionless ceremony.

But the ritual causes the mayhem and cyclical violence it means to obviate: the slain are unappeased, and Rome will immediately be visited by the “prodigies” Lucius has hoped to avoid.²⁴ The distinction upon which everything hinges has been blurred. Tamora has unknowingly caused this blurring by intensifying the similarity between Alarbus and the dead Andronici, while the dissimilarity between them—crucial for the sacrifice to work—dissolves. Her words cause Titus to hasten this loss of distinction by repeating the word brethren twice. In effect, Alarbus has been too fully assimilated into the Roman community to serve as an appropriate sacrificial victim. The ritual immediately skews the social structure and redistributes individual identity rather than binding the community in an affirmation of its identity. Saturninus thinks Titus will steal the empire from him; son rises up against father, and father kills son; most significantly, the quintessential outsider, Tamora, becomes subsumed into the center of Rome: “I am incorporate in Rome,” she tells Titus (1.1.462). By her accession, Alarbus retroactively becomes a Roman prince—the legitimate sacrifice of an ideal victim is transformed into regicide, and conquering Titus into a criminal outcast.

The very plot elements that have given Titus its singular, if unflattering, status in Shakespeare's canon are the direct and logical results of the sacrificial crisis that occurs because of the failed ritual. Titus himself indicates the significance of the sacrifice when he asks,

Titus, unkind and careless of thine own,
Why suffer'st thou thy sons, unburied yet,
To hover on the dreadful shore of Styx?

1.1.86-88

The burial and its attendant rituals are means of separating the living and the dead—a separation that serves first and foremost to bind the living community.

The sacrificial ritual in act 1 also gives voice to the needs of the living community; hence, it both connects and distinguishes the two communities. Titus may spur himself to the sacrificial act by reminding himself that his sons hover by the shore of the Styx, but his benediction speaks more eloquently of the good life than the good death:

In peace and honor 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 honor rest you here, my sons!

1.1.150-56

Titus's speech of farewell aptly expresses the needs of the living community. We should recall that ritual confronts a community's deepest fear: the inexorable death of each community member. To allay this fear, a community establishes a group identity that will survive the death of the individuals. Deaths are attended by ritualistic ceremonies that serve to reaffirm the collective life of the community as much as to construct a positive meaning for the individual death. Especially in the case of the violent, untimely death of an individual, burial rituals often incorporate sacrifices. And sacrifices serve two purposes: to serve the dead and to separate the dead from the living.

Lavinia's first words as she enters the stage, cued by this speech of Titus, are therefore especially apt, as they redefine and redirect the living community, thus distinguishing it from the realm of the dead: “In peace and honor live Lord Titus long! / My noble lord and father, live in fame!” (1.1.157-58). Lavinia's address twice directs Titus to “live,” underlines the ideal conditions of life (peace, honor, fame), and emphasizes Titus's civic and domestic identity in the community (“lord and father”). Her exhoration to the living is amplified by other members of the community, giving flesh to the body politic. Titus responds to Lavinia: “Lavinia, live, outlive thy father's days, / And fame's eternal date, for virtue's praise!” (1.1.167-68). Marcus, who has just returned, speaks to Titus's sons: “you that survive, and you that sleep in fame!” (1.1.173). He reinforces the idea of the community at large by asking Titus to “set a head upon headless Rome” (1.1.186). Once Saturninus is installed as that head, both Titus and Marcus exhort the crowd to shout out, “Long live our Emperor,” “Long live our Emperor Saturnine!” (1.1.229, 233). The movement from the death of the individual to the life of the community is clear. Saturninus and Tamora, as the Emperor and his Consort, invoke domestic and civic peace on this occasion. Tamora (disingenuously) declares that “This day all quarrels die” (1.1.465), and Saturninus proclaims that “This day shall be a love-day” (1.1.491). The Emperor's proclamation is followed immediately by Titus's suggestion that the next day they participate in that timeless celebration of community, the hunt.²⁵

Until this point in the play, all seems (to the Andronici and in-laws) to be well. The potential outbreak of chaotic violence—urged by the convergence of residual war-violence, internal rivalry, and the introduction of aliens into the community—appears to have been rechannelled through a steady but many-phased process of sacrifice, burial, reaffirmation of the community, marriage, and reinstatement of its members. The capstone of this process is the community hunt. The hunt subsumes the incipient violence in the community and redirects it outside that community, in effect turning possible murder and mayhem into recreation and food gathering. It is also the community's chance, after a crisis, to resume business as usual.²⁶

It seems then no mere coincidence that Titus offers us Shakespeare's only direct quotation of Seneca (4.1.81-82) and a rather startling adaptation (2.1.135), as Seneca's art was especially concerned with ritual in community.²⁷ Little has been made of Shakespeare's superabundant allusions to classical works in Titus.²⁸ From Spencer's witty conclusion that the young Shakespeare sought not to get it all right, but to get it all in, to Forker's more penetrating idea that the allusions point to a “restless search for forms of expression equivalent to a ‘wilderness of tigers,’” critics have apparently dismissed the possibility of a sound artistic purpose to Shakespeare's use of classical—and particularly Senecan—sources.²⁹ In general, the classical allusions point to recurring motifs of pagan sacrifice, to taboo and the pollution of substances that taboos are designed to prevent.

In the second scene of the play, Demetrius imperfectly quotes Seneca to describe his yearning anticipation of enjoying Lavinia:

Sit fas aut nefas, till I find the stream
To cool this heat, a charm to calm these fits,
Per Stygia, per manes vehor.

1.1.133-35

The lines in Seneca are spoken by Phaedra over the mangled corpse of Hippolytus:

per Stygia, per amnes igneos amens sequar.
placemus umbras.
through Styx, through rivers of fire will I
madly follow thee. Let me appease thy shade.(30)

In Newton's 1581 edition of Seneca's plays, the lines are translated:

Through Styx and through the burning lakes I will come after thee:
Thus may we please the lowring shades.(31)

There are two striking elements to Shakespeare's adaptation.³² First is the direction of travel. In Seneca, the speaker is yearning to enter the underworld to be with her loved one; in Shakespeare, the speaker is metaphorically in hell until he is with his “loved” one. Second, Shakespeare chooses the word manes to speak of the dead, as opposed to Seneca's umbra. Both these elements work in concert to establish the failure of ritual in the first act. If part of the purpose of a funeral ritual is to keep the dead at bay in the underworld, then the ritual is both literally and figuratively a failure, for Demetrius will have Lavinia and his having her constitutes one of the dangers that the ritual was meant to prevent. The repetition of Lucius's word manes by Demetrius connects the Goth's lust with the wrath of the unappeased dead. Further, both Titus and Demetrius mention the Stygian realm. Titus adopts the traditional distinction between the worlds of the living and the dead in wanting his sons to cross over the river that divides the two kingdoms. Demetrius, on the other hand, uses Stygia to signify the whole region, not just the river. For him, the distinction that Titus relies upon is already blurred since he is experiencing the Stygian realm on earth (and will go on to create hell on earth for others). Finally, there may be an anagrammatic play at work when Shakespeare deliberately or unconsciously misquotes Seneca: Seneca's per amnes becomes Shakespeare's per manes. If this is deliberate, Shakespeare may be taking his cue from Seneca's own anagrammatical play upon the word (amnes igneos amens). Such a “misremembering” underlines and reinforces the central idea of dissolving boundaries. The border that separates the living and the dead, the river (amnes) becomes the dead themselves who are currently recking havoc on earth (manes). Such a transformation signals a pernicious collapse of the distinctions between the living and the unliving.

Also of great importance is the internal strife between Chiron and Demetrius, Their rivalry is a complex of taboos: brothers wanting the same woman, who is already married. Their problem and Aaron's solution begin to dissolve the boundaries of marriage and the integrity of incest laws, civil peace, and ordered government.

The hunt, then, when it does occur, will expose the failure of the sacrifice. The melting of Lavinia's identity into that of a “dainty doe” signals the initial loss of distinction between a member of the community and a sacrificial victim to the community.³³ This loss quickly turns the violence back into the community and, not surprisingly, initiates the cycle of reciprocal civil violence. Moreover, the transformation of the word rape, signalled in the exchange of two other brothers (1.1.404-5), from meaning “elopement” to meaning “sexual assault” suggests a loss of lexical distinction which reflects and affects the community. The separate and distinct meanings of rape, one licit and the other ilicit, melt into each other, just as the communal hunt substitutes human beings for animals as the target of human violence. Hence, when Aaron instructs Chiron and Demetrius that the forest walks are “fitted by kind for rape and villainy,” he is both recalling and redefining the lexigraphical function of rape in 1.1 (2.1.116). Sommers and Tricomi have both noted the symbolic nature of the forest and how it turns from the pastoral playground to the wilderness of tigers—in short, from civilization to savagery.³⁴ The blurring of distinction occurs also in other ways. Community members, who are supposed to be in the community and pure, suddenly transform into abominable aliens: Quintus and Martius, in sharp contrast to their dead brothers interred in the family monument in act 1, are living but condemned (and hence neither living nor dead) and ascend out of the pit.

As Shakespeare's most abstract and disturbing dramatis persona, Lavinia is deprived of human characteristics early in the play, but nevertheless must plod across the stage until the final scene.³⁵ Precisely speaking, she is an abomination (one thinks of her nephew running away from her in horror and fear in act 4, scene 1). Her mangled physical condition consistently signifies the loss of distinction, of separation of the pure from the corrupted. It is not that, for three and a half acts, the audience must view her blood-spewing stumps and mouth, but rather that the audience must watch that fresh, sacrificially-charged blood that Marcus discovers (and so ritualistically identifies as fountains—moving fluid) slowly congeal. What allows Marcus, with whatever success, to make poetry out of her mutilation is the sacrificial nature of the wounds—the freshness of the blood: Marcus sees a “crimson river of warm blood” (2.4.22), a “bubbling fountain” (23), a “conduit” (30), “issuing spouts” (30). All the images of blood are moving images—sacrificial. Later, when Titus and Lavinia revenge themselves on Chiron and Demetrius by slitting their throats, Titus speaks in unmistakably sacrificial language. The Lavinia of acts 3, 4, and 5 is the living figure of Failed Sacrifice, and her rape, which follows close upon her marriage, signifies in another way the loss of distinction, the blurring, of societal boundaries. If, as Mary Douglas argues, the body is a symbol of society, then Lavinia signifies not only the dismembered state of Rome, but also the sacrifice that fails to knit together the community members.

Aaron, for whom Chiron and Demetrius are mere tools and who is silent and insignificant during the initial ritual, is subsequently set loose upon the other characters. Like Chiron and Demetrius, he becomes the agent of the undead who populate the play in a vast multitude and who visit the earth with prodigies and disasters. In act 2, the body of Bassianus is stowed in the pit, then exhumed, as is the bag of gold that Aaron buries. In act 3, Quintus and Martius return from the dead as heads on a platter. In act 5, Chiron and Demetrius reappear at the supper table. Perhaps the starkest image of the undead occurs in Aaron's gleeful confession before Lucius and the Goths:

Oft have I digg'd up dead men from their graves,
And set them upright at their dear friends' door,
Even when their sorrows almost was forgot,
And on their skins, as on the bark of trees,
Have with my knife carved in Roman letters,
“Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead.”

5.1.135-40

By depriving the dead of their graves, Aaron conjures up an image of the play's central problem. His grotesque story is merely a graphic image of what has occurred throughout the play. Here, even death does not bless the bereaved with finality. Aaron's tale looks forward to his own torture and death, half-buried and starving. The multilations also represent a kind of undying, a further disintegration of the community. Titus's severed hand returns to him, and Lavinia's condition marks her as a symbol of the undead, unappeased Andronici, of the sacrifice that has failed.

Aside from these more obvious effects of the sacrificial crisis, the play is filled with images of violence that are not arbitrary, but stem directly from the events of act 1. Chiron and Demetrius, arguing over Lavinia, reflect the quarrelling Roman brethren Saturninus and Bassianus. Lavinia's plea to Tamora and Titus's plea to the judges echo Tamora's earlier plea to Titus. In short, the violence that the ritual means to avoid accelerates to the point of immediate reciprocity in the split-second revenges of Titus (killing Tamora), Saturninus (killing Titus), and Lucius (killing Saturninus).³⁶

A series of sacrificial events stops this cycle and ensures—at least until the next crisis—a stable community. If we accept Lavinia as a figure of the corruption of failed sacrifice, we must expect the dried blood to be washed away by fresh, sacrificial blood in order for Shakespeare's pagan world to recover its integrity. The abomination that Lavinia has become must be purified by a new sacrifice. This purgation begins with the ironically appropriate appearance of Tamora and her sons at Titus's house dressed as Revenge, Murder, and Rape—the underworld has literally found its way to Rome. In the highly dramatic and ritualized deaths of Chiron and Demetrius, much is made of the flowing and the collecting of their blood.³⁷ Titus's nearly liturgical, “Lavinia, come, / Receive the blood” (5.2.196-97) underlines the ritualized, sacrificial nature of the revenge. The simple killing of Alarbus's brothers in part corrects the failed sacrifice of act 1 in that two persons who most objected to the sacrifice are gone—the unanimity-minus-one is a step or two closer. By cooking the flesh and blood of the two Gothic boys, Titus creates his own controlled abomination.³⁸ By feeding it to Tamora—from whence it ultimately came—Titus in effect causes the pollution to subsume itself. Moreover, since Tamora has already presented herself as Revenge from the Underworld, Titus's pasties ironically suggest the typical food offering for appeasing the dead. Secondly, Lucius plays an essential role in ending the cycle of violence, not by simply killing Saturninus, a victim whose death (now) will provoke no reprisal, but rather by mirroring the initial sacrificial victim, Alarbus. As Lucius was the one to call for a sacrificial victim in act 1, he is the logical person to rectify the failed ritual. In both condition and circumstance, Lucius reflects, one might even say resurrects, the figure of Alarbus. By the end of the play Lucius's relationship to Rome is nearly identical to Alarbus's: he is both Roman and Goth, alien and emperor. By entering Rome as he does, Lucius revives the figure of the sacrificial victim with both similarities and differences intact.

The obsequies that conclude the play offer a sharp contrast to those of act 1 in their precise affirmation of social distinction.

Some loving friends convey the Emperor hence,
And give him burial in his fathers' grave.
My father and Lavinia shall forthwith
Be closed in our household's monument.
As for that ravenous tiger Tamora,
No funeral rite, nor man in mourning weed,
No mournful bell shall ring her burial,
But throw her forth to beasts and birds of prey.

5.3.191-98

Each disposition reestablishes the social context that defines Rome, asserting who is in the community and who is not and what identities distinguish members of the community from one another. As an image of the undead, Aaron is fittingly half-buried, a figure stuck between two communities. It is probably also significant that he will shout and cry for food—which is the recurring need of the Roman manes.³⁹

Still, the conclusion of the play is unsatisfying—only partially due to modern audiences' skepticism regarding ritual. For while the funereal dispositions reassert community, the Gothic army stands ready to reinfuse Rome with non-Roman community members. Of course, Shakespeare's audience knows that these Goths will soon enter and dominate the Roman civis. And perhaps there is a hint of this doom in the Alarbus-Alaric association: perhaps the play's greatest prodigy is that Rome fell in spite of its rituals.

The tale of Titus Andronicus, as Shakespeare probably received it, was no doubt a tale of blood as spectacle.⁴⁰ But that tale, we will recall, lacked both the character of Aaron and the sacrifice of Alarbus. By these crucial additions, Shakespeare imbues the tale with a serious consideration of ritual and sacrifice in societies whose internal and external violence continually threaten to dissolve the community. In all his Roman works, Shakespeare unfolds a dynamic of humankind's participation in its history by easing and making taut the tension between the grounding of ritual and the groundbreaking events that alter the world in which we live. The crisis in Titus Andronicus is that more often than not ritual is too static for the play's changing Rome.

It is now a commonplace to assert that Shakespeare was especially interested in the importance of a strong central government in and after times of crisis. Critics have generally examined this interest in terms of power: how it is wielded and who wields it. The intricate underpinnings of ritual in Titus Andronicus may well reveal other, more primal, impulses that affect the much debated power structures of Roman or Elizabethan or other violent societies. If this is so, then perhaps a host of Elizabethan anxieties, from the Catholic-Protestant debate over ceremony to emerging notions of nationalism, may be explored through shifting definitions of ritual as agent, reflection, or consequence of social and ideological change.

Notes

1. I would like to thank Professor Sara Hanna for her many suggestions of substance and style while this paper was being written; I also wish to thank the anonymous reader for Exemplaria, whose suggestions were most helpful.

2. The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 1021; all references to Shakespeare's work are from this edition.

3. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Praeger, 1966), 53. See also 49 for Douglas's version of the root meaning of “holiness.”

4. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (New York: The Free Press, 1968), 357.

5. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 61.

6. See Durkheim, Elementary Forms, 309-12.

7. See E. O. James, Sacrifice and Sacrament (London: Thames and Hudson, 1962), 182-83.

8. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 56.

9. See Eugene Waith, “The Metamorphosis of Violence in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Survey 10 (1957): 45. Waith argues in his groundbreaking essay that Titus and Tamora are meant to be seen as a pair. Titus and Aaron are less obviously twins; still, each is conspicuously willing to sacrifice all for his offspring, and each is, at different times, the most marginal character in the play's world.

10. Human sacrifice to the manes, of course, was not historically a Roman practice. That Shakespeare deliberately departs from historical accuracy probably suggests the importance of this trope in the play. See Miola, Shakespeare's Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 46-47; see also Ronald Broude, “Roman and Goth in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Studies 6 (1970): 27-34, esp. 30.

11. Peter Brook, The Empty Space (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 95.

12. Robert Miola, Shakespeare's Rome, 16.

13. Girard, Violence, 259.

14. See 1.1.380, where Marcus makes explicit the connection between Titus and Odysseus.

15. Riverside Shakespeare, 1051.

16. Girard, Violence, 36.

17. Ibid., 36-37.

18. For an opposing view, see Larry S. Champion, Shakespeare's Tragic Perspective (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1976), 11:

    The human sacrifice is never justified; the occasional comments that these are rites enacted to appease the dead simply fail to provide the rationale so distinctly needed when the action has been openly challenged; no god's name is invoked, no spiritual efficacy described.

    And while I am here challenging much of Miola's argument, his observation on the ritualization of burial is significant (Shakespeare's Rome, 46):

    Prominent in the center stage, the Andronici tomb joins the historical past of Rome with its living present and undreamed future. It is the focus of a communal ritual that transforms the deaths of sons and brothers into an affirmation of Roman life.

19. See Emily C. Bartels, “Making More of the Moor: Aaron, Othello, and Renaissance Refashionings of Race,” Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990): 455-69. Bartels writes (443) that

    What puts the play, the state of Rome and Titus himself in crisis is the breakdown of distinctions between ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’, and the destabilization of legitimating rights. Before Titus hands the rule to Saturninus, the bounds between Romans and Goths are clearly and absolutely in place.

    See also Jacqueline Pearson, “Romans and Barbarians: The Structure of Irony in Shakespeare's Roman Tragedies,” Shakespearian Tragedy (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1984), 159-82. Pearson writes (169) that

    the central contrast in the play is between the ‘barbarous’ (seven times in Titus, more than in any other Shakespeare play) and the Roman. Almost at once, though, the sharp distinction in blurred. As Lucius demands the Gothic prince Alarbus to be sacrificed, the distinction between barbarian and Roman is abolished.

20. Tamora, of course, becomes the great figure of the blurring of the dead and the undead and a figure of the unappeased dead when she calls herself and is welcomed by Titus as “dread fury,” accompanied by Rapine and Murder (5.2.82).

21. Girard, Violence, 11.

22. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 115.

23. See Miola (Shakespeare's Rome, 47, 48):

    Tamora appeals to the individual persons beneath the Roman togas; [she appeals to] Roman pietas to encompass these brothers outside the immediate family, to recognize the human identity that transcends national disputes.

24. Titus's slaying of Mutius (a true mutineer, as he is the loyal son who turns his sword against his father) probably recalls Heracles's slaughter of his family in Hercules Furens. See Frank Justus Miller, trans., Seneca's Tragedies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), 1:87ff. See also Girard, Violence, 39-41, for a relevant discussion of Euripides' play.

25. I am indebted to Professor Michael Curley for pointing out the ritual and community-binding significance of the hunt.

26. See Donald Willbern, “Rape and Revenge in Titus Andronicus,” ELR [English Literary Renaissance] 8 (1978): 159-82. He reads the hunt differently (164), as

    a version of what happens after marriage. … Hunting and sexuality are traditionally connected in myth and literature.

27. A debate has long endured over the relative influence of Ovid and Seneca on Titus Andronicus. Since Professor Waith's first article on the subject, Ovid has usually been deemed the greater or more important influence. Without wishing to enter this debate, I have concentrated on Seneca, as seems most appropriate for my topic. See Grace Starry West, “Going by the Book: Classical Allusions in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus,” SP [Studies in Philology] 79 (1982): 62-72, esp. 63n. Also see Barbara A. Mowat, “Lavinia's Message: Shakespeare and Myth,” Renaissance Papers (1981), 55-69; esp. 56n.

28. West, of course, does make much of the classical allusions. She argues that Shakespeare may be trying “to show the limits of Roman tradition as well as Roman literary education” (“Going by the Book,” 75). See also R. A. Law, “The Roman Background of Titus Andronicus,” SP 40 (1943): 145-53.

29. T. J. B. Spencer, “Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Romans,” Shakespeare Survey 10 (1957): 27-38; see esp. 32. Charles R. Forker, Fancy's Images: Contexts, Settings, and Perspectives in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 33.

30. Miller's translation, 414-15.

31. Thomas Newton, ed., Seneca: His Tenne Tragedies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), 180.

32. See West (“Going by the Book,” 64n.) for a differing but engaging response to these lines.

33. François Laroque connects “dainty doe” here with Titus' assertion in act 5 that Tamora has “daintily” fed on her sons:

    The framework of Titus' culinary revenge is thus a direct extension of the ritual of the hunt … [and] echoes the circumstances in which they raped Lavinia.

    See Shakespeare's Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal Entertainment and the Professional Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

34. See Alan Sommers, “Wilderness of Tigers,” EIC [Essays in Criticism] 10 (1960): 275-89.

35. See Waith, “Metamorphosis of Violence,” 44: “The rape and mutilation of Lavinia is the central symbol of disorder, both moral and political.” Albert H. Tricomi, “The Mutilated Garden in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Studies 9 (1976): 89-105, argues that Lavinia becomes “an emblem of ceaseless suffering and loss” (94). Peter Sacks, “Where Words Prevail Not: Grief, Revenge, and Language in Kyd and Shakespeare,” ELH 49 (1982): 576-601, writes that Lavinia is “a frozen emblem of loss” (590). Douglas S. Green, “‘Interpreting her martyr'd Sign’: Gender and Tragedy in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 317-26, argues that Lavinia's mutilated body “‘articulates’ Titus's own suffering and victimization” (322). Gillian Murray Kendall, “‘Lend me thy hand’: Metaphor and Mayhem in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 299-316, asserts that “Lavinia, as a speechless emblem, becomes a work of art (made by Shakespeare) designed to show the limits of art and artful language” (306). This idea seems indebted to Charles R. Forker, “Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, and the Limits of Expressibility,” Hamlet Studies 2 (1980): 1-33.

36. See A. R. Braunmuller, “Early Shakespearian Tragedy and its Contemporary Context: Cause and Emotion in Titus Andronicus, Richard III, and The Rape of Lucrece,” Shakespearian Tragedy (n. 19 above), 97-128, esp. 115.

37. In its formality, repetition, and rhythm, Titus's speech at 5.2.166-205 is highly ritualized. It may also be significant that the chapbook illustration (reprinted in Riverside Shakespeare, 1022) emphasizes the blood pouring out of Chiron and Demetrius, and Lavinia catching the blood in a bowl. S. Clark Hulce, “Wresting the Alphabet: Oratory and Action in Titus Andronicus,” Criticism 21 (1979): 106-18, argues that the death scene of Chiron and Demetrius is “a second visual recapitulation both of her [Lavinia's] rape, and of the death of Titus's sons” (116); even Miola, who views the Titus of act 5 as a “demented man, completely out of touch with human realities,” acknowledges Titus's understanding of the human pasties (Shakespeare's Rome, 70):

    Titus considers this gruesome desecration of familial bonds [Tamora's eating her sons] an assertion of his own pietas, of the values that bind the Andronici together.

38. Laroque, Shakespeare's Festive World, argues (275) that Tamora's eating the pies “represents the transgression of a triple taboo” of cannibalism, castration, and incest.

39. The final lines of Q2-3, F1, probably not Shakespeare's, nevertheless support the argument that Shakespeare's audience would have understood Titus as a play of how a community must order itself to meet the continual challenges of human violence (Riverside Shakespeare, 1054):

    See justice done on Aron that damn'd Moore,
    By whom our heavie haps had their beginning:
    Than afterwards to order well the State,
    That like events may nere it ruinate.

    The mysterious poetaster of the printing house seems to have believed that Aaron's evil was the source of the play-world's earthly woes and that a well-ordered state was the best security against the “like events,” which in this context seem inevitable.

40. See Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949), 618-22, for an early, helpful discussion of Titus. Higher also points to Edgar H. McNeal, “The Story of Isaac and Andronicus,” Speculum 9 (1934): 324-29, for a fascinating glimpse at a possible source for Shakespeare's play.