SOURCE: Detmer-Goebel, Emily. “The Need for Lavinia's Voice: Titus Andronicus and the Telling of Rape.” Shakespeare Studies 29 (2001): 75-92.

[In the following essay, Detmer-Goebel concentrates on the rape and silencing of Lavinia as it depicts the male repression of women's authority in Titus Andronicus.]

In Act 2 of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, Lavinia refuses to name rape; she refers to an impending sexual assault as that which “womanhood denies my tongue to tell” and as a “worse-than-killing lust” (2.3.174, 175).¹ Lavinia's chaste refusal to say the word “rape” reminds the audience that even to speak of rape brings a woman shame. As feminists have pointed out, an environment that makes it shameful to speak of rape disallows a critique of rape and the culture that sustains it.² And yet, while the world of the play suggests how early modern culture's construction of gender “denies” a woman the “tongue” to talk of rape, the play also feeds on the unrest that such silence creates.

Feminist critique of rape representations often explores “telling” as a question of authorship or subjectivity. For example, the first question that many feminist critics ask of various early modern representations of rape is: Who is really doing the talking; who is telling this story of rape?³ Such questions are particularly useful when pursuing the cultural politics of lines such as Lavinia's quoted above. Feminist scholars have rightly pointed to the myriad ways that patriarchal culture silences women, but it is too simple to say that silence always serves (and is preferred by) patriarchal culture. Sometimes patriarchal culture needs and wants female speech—of a certain kind, under certain conditions.

Few have considered the way these texts also reveal patriarchy's discomfort with silence about rape.⁴ For many feminist critics of Titus Andronicus, for example, Lavinia's enforced silence is posed as simply an oppressive requirement of patriarchal culture.⁵ No doubt the mutilation of Lavinia is brutally oppressive, yet Lavinia's silence is troubling to some men in her world. Speaking may be threatening, but so is silence. Revealing rape may be dangerous for some men (the rapists), but it is necessary for others (the father, the current or future husband). Until Lavinia is able to testify about her rape, it goes undetected and unpunished. Lavinia's family depends on her willingness and ability to tell that she has been raped if they are to revenge it.

Just as the play illustrates the cultural need for both a raped woman's silence and her testimony, statutory laws of rape and abduction reflect a legal tradition undergoing change with regards to a woman's non-consent and accusation of rape. While statute law represents legal principles that may or may not line up with practice, I read both the legal and dramatic discourses as evidence of how power is assigned to raped women's claims, and how, in turn, that powerful speech is perceived, represented, and contested. By exploring the relationships between statutory law and the play, I argue that Titus Andronicus dramatically registers the culture's anxiety over men's increased dependence on women's voices and, in doing so, shapes and sustains early modern England's contradictory attitude toward a woman's accusation of rape.

“‘RAPE’ CALL YOU IT”?

Rape is the centerpiece of Shakespeare's fictional history of Rome.⁶ More than any other early modern English play, Titus Andronicus has the “pattern, precedent, and lively warrant” (5.3.42) of rape hovering throughout. References to the legendary rape stories of Philomela, Lucrece, and Virginius are used as shorthand for understanding character and motive in four of the most important actions in the play: Aaron's tutorial in rape, Lavinia's revelation of the crime, Titus's murderous revenge against the rapists, and his killing of his own daughter.⁷ Even the play's “precedent,” Ovid's Metamorphosis—the grandfather of rape stories—is literally brought onto the stage.

These heavy-handed references to rape suggest an interest in rape as rape rather than just as a convenient metaphor for chaos or disorder.⁸ In a like manner, Lavinia's silence elucidates more than just an oppressive gendered ideal of feminine decorum. Shakespeare's play calls our attention to the act of revealing rape; suspense builds as each character responds to the spectacle of the mutilated and raped Lavinia. The variety of responses to her—from the laughter of the rapists and the poetry of her uncle, to the fear of young Lucius and the budding madness and bloody revenge of Titus—suggests how Lavinia's telling of rape can be seen as dramatizing the culture's multifaceted stance regarding a woman's claim of rape.

Examining the actual moment of telling in several other early modern dramas reveals the culture's ambiguous attitude towards a woman's revelation of rape. On the one hand, Lucrece honorably postpones suicide until she reveals her rape in Heywood's Rape of Lucrece (1607), and Jacinta's struggle to tell her father is dramatically crucial in Rowley's All's Lost by Lust (1622). On the other hand, Castiza's confessors instruct her not to tell her husband that she was raped in Middleton's Hengist, King of Kent (1619). Clara in Middleton's The Spanish Gypsie (c. 1614-23) asks for a promise of silence from her rapist, and the play's “happy ending” seems to condone her own silence. Increasingly, early modern dramas that feature rape build on the dramatic tension created when a woman must decide if she should (or can, in Lavinia's case) reveal her rape; I suggest this might be due, in part, to relatively recent changes in the law of rape.

Early statutory law dating from the late thirteenth century conflated sexual assault with abduction, blurring the distinction between the two. Long understood as a property crime, “rape” either by physical abduction (which would often include a forced marriage and sexual consummation) or by “defilement against her will” fell into the same category of wrong. Based on how men experience the “rape” of a woman in whom they have ownership, the law suggests that men apparently found the loss from sexual assault and abduction to be more similar than different.

During the sixteenth century, however, the definition of rape came to exclude abduction. Although no single statute was written precisely to distinguish sexual assault from abduction, a 1558 statute (4&5 Philip & Mary, cap 8) addressed the abduction of heiresses without reference to sexual assault and a later statute in 1576 (18 Elizabeth cap. 7) addressed rape without reference to abduction.⁹ According to the historian Nazife Bashar, these acts of law taken together “had the indirect effect of establishing rape and abduction as separate offenses.”¹⁰ Thus, early modern culture began to understand rape and abduction as distinct kinds of wrongs.¹¹

With benefit of hindsight, modern readers see this as the evolution of rape into a crime against a person (assault, as opposed to theft).¹² Lorraine Helms points out that Titus Andronicus “maps both the residual and emergent ideas of rape,” helping to distinguish “bride theft” from sexual assault.¹³ The play certainly does register the differences between abduction and sexual assault, but it does more. Shakespeare's play powerfully dramatizes how the evolving rape laws were also changing the role of women's authority in the new version of “rape.”

Before the definition of rape excluded abduction, a woman's voice was subsumed under her father's or husband's authority. In other words, in medieval law, the right to accuse a person of rape/abduction did not rest with the victim but with her male relatives such as her father, husband, or guardian. As the historian J. B. Post argues, the earlier, medieval statutes were written precisely in such a way as to take the “legal remedies” (the appeal) away from raped or abducted women themselves.¹⁴ Several legal historians conclude that the laws were often used to address consenting relationships that were against the parents' wishes; a woman might “elope” with a husband of her own choice or escape an abusive husband.¹⁵ The conflated rape/abduction laws marginalized a woman's speech acts, be it her consent or her accusation; the father's authority far outweighed the woman's in either case of “rape.” As the definition of rape came to exclude abduction, men's authority narrowed.

When rape became a separate offense, the status of a woman's voice, meaning her consent, her accusation, and her right to appeal in her own name gained authority. While men retained their authority in abduction cases, some women gained the exclusive right to charge a man with rape. While a married woman still required her husband's consent to bring an appeal, an unmarried woman (single or widowed) had the right to bring the appeal of rape in her own name.¹⁶ Although changes in the law theoretically increased women's authority to claim rape, it should not be assumed that women began prosecuting rape without male relatives. On the contrary, what I am considering is how this legal change left male relatives, who were still very much involved in the legal process, dependent on women's voices and their knowledge.

WHOSE CLAIM OF “RAPE” IS IT?

As if dramatizing these recent legal maneuverings, when both forms of “rape” take place in Titus Andronicus, the play interrogates the different sources of authority in both kinds of crimes. When Bassianus seizes and flees with Lavinia in the first act of the play, Saturninus claims “rape,” which reflects the older legal definition of the term.¹⁷ Early modern readers/audience members would likely find Saturninus's first reference to abduction as “rape” an increasingly rare usage, but certainly not unknown.¹⁸ Significantly, the drama clearly illustrates how the competing claims of “rape” are represented as disagreements between men. Titus's parental claim is a customary and legitimate source of authority; after all, we just saw Titus consent to Saturninus, the newly crowned king. In contrast, Bassianus's ambiguously “lawful” claim, which is specifically not based on prior sexual activity, gains authority only when other members of Lavinia's family support him. When the rest of Lavinia's family take arms against their sovereign and father in “Lavinia's cause” (1.1.377), the reader/audience member must give some credence to Bassianus's claim. Who raped Lavinia from whom is unclear, but it never becomes a question of “he said, she said.”¹⁹ The ambiguities surrounding the first rape/abduction of the play accentuate the fact that it is a question of men's authority.

Shakespeare's display of men's competing claims of authority in cases of abduction also highlights the marginalization of a woman's claim. All of the men in the play believe their own interpretation of rape (and lawful possession), but none consults Lavinia. Unlike Desdemona, who is called to speak of her free choice of Othello, Lavinia's past promise, consent, or her present feelings play no part in defining this first rape nor is she asked to identify which is the real rapist. By calling Lavinia's abduction “rape,” the play illustrates women's customary lack of authority to define rape in the medieval form of the law. In the second and increasingly modern understanding of “rape”—that is, a form of rape that excludes abduction—the role her voice plays increases, as Shakespeare's play powerfully explores. Even though Lavinia's silence in the first rape/abduction scene is presented as appropriate, it becomes vexed in the second rape.

“AND STRIKE HER HOME BY FORCE, IF NOT BY WORDS”

In many early modern rape scenes, the rapist first tries to seduce the woman into consenting to him; however, Chiron and Demetrius never address Lavinia. She learns of their plans as they explain to their mother that instead of killing Lavinia, they propose to “First thresh the corn, then after burn the straw” (2.3.123). Lavinia's non-consent is assumed. Although she does not need to say “no,” Lavinia depends on her voice to plead against the rape: yet Shakespeare makes Lavinia a poor pleader. When Demetrius tells his mother to listen, to “see her tears,” but not to relent (2.3.140), Lavinia chides Tamora's son for attempting to teach his mother: “When did the tiger's young ones teach the dam?” (2.3.142). On the heels of this remark, which might insult both mother and sons, she taunts “the boys” about their masculinity with images of nursing: “The milk thou suck'st from her did turn to marble; / Even at thy teat thou hadst thy tyranny” (144-45). Most critics agree that Lavinia speaks the “wrong argument to the wrong audience,” as Clark Hulse puts it.²⁰

Shakespeare undoubtedly makes Lavinia's verbal defense against rape less persuasive (emotionally moving) than, say, Lucrece's, and this suggests, I think, the limitations of the authority vested in Lavinia's voice. Shakespeare does not use eloquent language to capitalize on Lavinia's feminine vulnerability. But neither logical nor eloquent arguments against rape necessarily save victims; they did not save Lucrece, after all. For many, the absence of an eloquent plea against rape heightens the persuasive force of Lavinia's mutilated body after the rape. For instance, Carolyn Asp notes that for many readers “she persuades through the pathos of sufferings, through non-linguistic means.”²¹ Significantly, Lavinia needs to do more than evoke pity; she needs to reveal the rape.

Thus the play explores the limitations of the power of a woman's voice and various men's relationship to that power. While her voice is not needed at all in abduction, it has a limited need and power at the scene of rape; where it becomes crucial is after the rape. The specific mutilations of Lavinia's hands and tongue (as opposed to breasts or nose, which women often suffered in war crimes) illustrate how her rapists needed to silence her powerful voice, not just disfigure or humiliate her.²² While her assailants need a woman to be silenced and unauthorized to name rape, the Andronici men need Lavinia's testimony if they are to know the damage their family has suffered and avenge it.

“SPEAK, GENTLE NIECE”

The importance of the raped woman's voice is immediately underscored when Lavinia's silence is mocked; at the first sight of her, the rapists jeer and joke that she can no longer tell “Who 'twas that cut thy tongue and ravished thee” (2.4.2). They mock her inability to speak, write, wash, or even hang herself. While these jokes function in several ways, the brutality of the rape is somehow intensified by their grotesque satisfaction with Lavinia's enforced silence. This immediately infuses the reader/audience member with the sense that Lavinia needs to tell.

Even though the audience knows she has been raped, the play builds on the tension created by the fact that Titus and Marcus do not know.²³ At the first sight of Lavinia, Marcus immediately calls to mind Philomela's story, which suggests that her mutilations would somehow “speak” or hint of rape. He says to her: “But sure some Tereus hath deflowered thee, And lest thou shouldst detect him, cut thy tongue” (2.4.26-27). But two acts later, Marcus is surprised when Lavinia reveals that she has been raped. A great deal of critical interest has been generated about the nature of Marcus's Ovidian speech.²⁴ Less speculation has been made regarding why Marcus first thinks of rape when he sees her and then forgets it. A recent exception is Coppelia Kahn, who argues that “Marcus's amnesia” creates for the audience an irony that serves to “dramatize and thematize the erasure of the feminine in patriarchy.”²⁵ While Kahn sees this as suppression of knowledge linked to censoring female experience and complaint, my point is that the effect of Marcus's remarks about Philomela tease the audience with the idea that the men should know that she has been raped. Rather than simply the erasure of gendered authority, it highlights men's ultimate reliance on Lavinia's words.

Although she has the opportunity, Lavinia does not immediately “admit” the rape. When Marcus first mentions rape, she blushes and turns away instead of giving him nods of recognition (“Ah, now thou turn'st away thy face for shame; / And notwithstanding all this loss of blood, / … Yet do thy cheeks look red” [2.4.28-29, 31]). Lavinia's silent blushes again underscore how the cultural prescription of silence “denies” women “the tongue to tell.” While her shameful turning away assures Marcus of her innocence, it also registers the need for her willing confirmation of the rape.

At this point, the play begins to play out the cultural drama of the raped woman's need to tell. Lavinia's first impulse was to hide her shame, but she misses the chance to confirm her rape. What the audience sees enacted is that a woman's silence protects the rapists and harms the family of the victim. When the new law takes the authority to make the claim of rape out of the father's hands, it makes him dependent on her cooperation in ways that were not previously necessary. A father may still speak for her in court, but his authority is limited to the role of advocate. The play registers this cultural anxiety over losing male authority by dramatizing the Andronici family's dependence on her words.

After reading her reaction of shame to the question of rape, Marcus offers to speak for her:

Shall I speak for thee? Shall I say 'tis so?
O, that I knew thy heart, and knew the beast,
That I might rail at him to ease my mind!
Sorrow concealed, like an oven stopped,
Doth burn the heart to cinders where it is.

(2.4.33-37)

Marcus recognizes the need to “rail,” but his railing quickly conflates with hers; to “rail at him” will “ease [his] mind.” Their suffering (it too is conflated) appears to be the inability to tell; railing will relieve the “burn”—not of rape, but of a rape “concealed.” After Marcus's poetic outburst and lament, he seems sated. Without Lavinia's needful confirmation and testimony, Marcus seems to feel the truth will never be known. He deals with his powerlessness and lack of authority in the situation by forgetting about the rape entirely; he does not even mention the possibility to Titus.

Shakespeare creates a situation where the audience watches missed opportunities for the men to know about Lavinia's rape; her mutilated yet muted presence keeps the rape in mind for the audience while the repeated attempts to “read” Lavinia foregrounds the men's need for her words. Like Marcus, who thinks of literary rape at the sight of her, Titus's impulse in seeing Lavinia is to compare her to a picture:

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

(3.1.103-5)

This repeated impulse to compare Lavinia to a text suggests the men's discomfort with dealing with the actual raped woman on her own terms. When Marcus depends on the authority of the classical rape story of Philomela to discuss rape with his niece, few can miss the initial disparity between the men's knowledge of literary precedents and their knowledge of Lavinia's situation.

While a discussion of Shakespeare's critique of the efficacy of literary representations of rape is beyond the scope of this current project, the degree in which the play questions these texts as sources of men's knowledge seems apt. Aaron's knowledge of the classics incites the rape, but the same text fuels Titus's method for revenge. Thus, the texts of Lucrece and Philomela seem to operate as cultural scripts for action. The classic tales of rape, however, are initially less reliable when it comes to helping men recognize the rape. The play shows the men confused by the intersection of two different sources of authority: the real woman and the literary text that her situation mirrors.²⁶ Richard Brucher argues that this disparity dramatizes how “the reality is more savage than the legend” while Gillian Kendall suggest it adds to the play's exploration of “how language itself is fragmented.”²⁷ Both of these explanations read the references to classic stories of rape as in some way blinding, either to the horror of “real” rape or just to the existence of it. For me, the repeated evocation of classic precedents illustrates men's unfamiliarity of needing to rely on women as authorities, even as the authority of their own experiences of rape.

In contrast to Marcus, who unconsciously censors or misrecognizes the reality of what he sees, Titus is shown to be too confident an authority of Lavinia's experience. He is an unreliable, although sincere, interpreter of Lavinia's raped body, which again emphasizes their dependence on her words. As many critics have discussed, Lavinia becomes an emblem, a cipher, a mirror, a text, or, in the words of Titus, a “map of woe” to read (3.2.12).²⁸ Yet, when Titus claims “I understand her signs. / Had she a tongue to speak, now would she say / That to her brother which I said to thee” (3.1.143-45), he still does not know about the rape. We in the audience remain disturbed by what the men do not know. If Lavinia could speak, she would first tell them of the rape.

Shakespeare emphasizes the significance of Titus's role as sympathetic but flawed translator in the “fly-scene,” a late addition to the play according to many editors. While many consider it a stock scene that provides “additional testimony to (and witty performance of) the protagonist's madness,” it also allows for a repetition of Titus's claims to be the interpreter of Lavinia.²⁹ After Lavinia is called “a map of woe, that thus dost talk in signs” (3.2.12), Titus has his epiphany:

Hark, Marcus, what she says—
I can interpret all her martyred signs—
She says she drinks no other drink but tears,
Brewed with her sorrow, mashed upon her cheeks.
Speechless complainer, I will learn thy thought;
In thy dumb action will I be as perfect
As begging hermits in their holy prayers.
Thou shalt not sigh, not kneel, nor make a sign,
But I of these will wrest an alphabet,
And by still practice learn to know thy meaning

(35-45)

There is no doubt that Titus expresses the desire to be his daughter's translator, but the play also questions how reliable or complete can his knowledge ever be without his daughter's words. Titus waxes poetic about the source of Lavinia's tears, but still does not know all about why she weeps. As Karen Cunningham points out, Titus's claims and promises of access to Lavinia's thought and knowledge “dissolve in the face of Lavinia's actions.”³⁰ Titus may be like a “begging hermit” in that he must make do with what he has; but his claims to perfection actually highlight just how flawed his interpretation is.

While in the first rape/abduction in Titus, the men do not require Lavinia to speak, but until Lavinia reports the second rape, it remains hidden, unknown, and unpunished. Lavinia's physical inability to define what has happened to her as rape and to identify her attackers is posed as a problem in the play and illustrates a family's dependence on the rape victim's ability and willingness to claim rape. Titus can confidently claim to “wrest an alphabet” (3.2.44) from Lavinia and to interpret her “signs,” but without her knowledge and her authority, he remains ignorant of the rape.

LAVINIA AS A SOURCE OF KNOWLEDGE

Since Lavinia is deprived of the ability to speak, to write, or even to weave, most of her male relatives stop asking her questions after their initial inquiries; they give up thinking she can tell them anything of importance. Heaven and the will of God will bring revelation, not Lavinia (4.1.36, 73-74). But Lavinia's ability to be a source of knowledge is underrated; her disabilities do not render her incapable of communication. These men are so used to being the “generator” of meaning and interpretations that they fumble when Lavinia tries to convey meaning. When she holds up her arms, Marcus cannot tell if she is reporting the number of her assailants or swearing revenge (4.1.38-40). Even when Lavinia tries to communicate using the familiar texts of rape, her message is not immediately intercepted. Lavinia “busily” “turns the leaves” (45) and “tosses” Ovid's Metamorphoses with her stumps, but Marcus does not consider the book as a means for her to reveal rape; rather he suggests her action is in remembrance of a loved one (44). Marcus, who immediately spoke of Philomela when he first saw her, fails to read Lavinia's use of the same source. Mary Fawcett calls this scene “a charade of the interpretation process,” but it also reveals how the men are unaccustomed to seeing Lavinia as an authority and as a source of knowledge.

Dramatic tension increases as the men have trouble understanding Lavinia's “reading” of Ovid. In the play, books are presented as a source of comfort for Lavinia, not as sources of knowledge. Titus thinks reading “sad tales” of misery will ease their minds: “Lavinia, go with me. I'll to thy closet, and go read with thee / Sad stories chanced in the times of old” (3.2.80-82). Even though she is “deep[ly] read and better skilled” than the present book's young owner, Lavinia is understood more as a receiver of texts than an author of meaning (4.1.33). When she tries to tell them of her rape by pointing to the book, they assume she uses the book to comfort and “so beguile [her] sorrow” (4.1.35). It's not that men refuse to recognize Lavinia as a “generative source” of knowledge. Instead, as Karen Cunningham argues, “Shakespeare is careful to point out that the [men's] reconstitution is ambiguous and untrustworthy.”³¹ In this way, the play accentuates men's anxiety about their dependence on women's authority in cases of rape.

Several critics suggest that the play's depiction of Titus as interpreter illustrates men's desire for control over language, reading, and interpretation (e.g., Fawcett and Wynne-Davies). In this line of argument, Lavinia cannot report the rape without relying on men, such as her father and Marcus (as interpreters) and Ovid (as author/text). As Emily Bartels argues, she can only tell her own story by aligning herself with Philomela and “inscribing herself within ‘the texts of the fathers.’”³² Reading the marks on her body and, eventually, her scratches in the sand might seem to uphold men's power as interpreters, but first Titus's interpretation of Lavinia's body is shown to be limited and unreliable. Thus, Lavinia may be dependent on men to tell her story, but at the same time, the men are positioned as dependent upon her; without her authorship, they cannot know, let alone revenge, the rape.

The men come to know of the rape when Lavinia scratches her deposition in the sand. Her language and word choice, “Stuprum—Chiron—Demetrius” (4.1.77), are provocative. Just as Lavinia's relatives have trouble seeing her as a source of knowledge, editors of the play fail to look closely at Lavinia's words. Critics have paid more attention to the sexual overtones of her scratching in the sand than what she says. Some have discussed the significance of her use of Latin, but little has been said about her choice of the word “Stuprum.”³³

Editors of the play gloss the term “stuprum” as Latin for rape without further comment (e.g., see Bate; Hughes; Waith). Interestingly, when Lavinia writes “Stuprum” in the sand, she uses the term for rape not found in Philomela's story. According to the Concordance of Ovid, this term for unchastity (possibly through rape, in the context of the fable) is used only once in Metamorphoses, in book 2, the story of Callisto.³⁴ Callisto, a member of Diana's chaste group of women, was raped by Jove, who had assumed the form of Diana. Callisto does not tell anyone of her rape, but her “uncleanliness” is revealed by her pregnancy. With this unquestionable evidence of the loss of her chastity, she is driven from Diana's group. As the story goes, Juno, the wife of the rapist, becomes enraged by the injury done to her bed, and calls Callisto “Stupri” as if calling her “whore.”³⁵ Early modern Latin-English dictionaries do indeed define “stuprum” as rape.³⁶ Yet, in a play that examines the use of the English term “rape,” Shakespeare's use of “stuprum” rather than “raptus” calls the reader's attention to yet another Ovidian rape and allows us to surmise that Lavinia does more than identify the crime. Lavinia's “Stuprum” is suggestive not only of her sense of shame; it also testifies to the consequence of her defilement.

Like Lavinia's word choice, Marcus's idea of scratching in the sand could have been inspired by another rape story from Ovid, which Maxwell first noted in the second edition of the Arden Shakespeare. After being raped and transformed into a cow, Io uses her hoof to scratch her own name onto the ground. According to Bate, “Io writes her own name; Shakespeare adapts the device into a substitute for Philomel's revelation of her rapist's identify in her ‘tedious sampler.’”³⁷ I want to speculate about the way that Lavinia writes to identify, not just the rapists, but also herself; not who she was (as Io does) but who she has become. Just as Io's father could not recognize her, neither Titus nor Marcus recognize Lavinia for what she is, a rape victim. “Stuprum” might be read as naming her “transformation” as much as it names what was done to her.

When Lavinia finally reveals the full extent of her injuries and her transformation, her family's reaction is revealing. Lavinia is never consoled for this newly revealed source of pain and humiliation. Titus asks, “Lavinia, wert thou thus surprised, sweet girl? / Ravished and wronged, as Philomela was?” (4.1.51-52). After they “see” that this is so, both Titus and Marcus respond by shifting the focus away from Lavinia and onto the forest and its poetic description as “By nature made for murders and for rapes” (4.1.57). By blaming the forest, they suggest that Lavinia is a victim of being in the wrong place; cold comfort indeed. Although they lament that such a place exists, they find no words to acknowledge Lavinia's deeper source of pain.

Instead of comfort, knowing the names of her attackers becomes of greater importance. As soon as Lavinia dutifully writes in the sand the names of her attackers, she is not addressed or consoled, but told to kneel down with the others present and swear revenge; Marcus simply says, “Lavinia, kneel” (4.1.86). Lucrece, “that chaste dishonored dame” (89), and her father get a word of consolation—not Lavinia. Titus does not address Lavinia directly other than to say “Lavinia, come” (4.1.119). But like Philomela's story, once the rape is disclosed, the focus of the story shifts to the revengers. Lavinia's telling of rape is valued because men need to know and not because her experience counts. In other words, telling is constructed as enabling men's revenge rather than authorizing women's experience.

Titus clearly values the words that motivate men's actions, so much so that he plans to rewrite them in brass. Lavinia's writing in the sand is too temporary; it seems to speak too much of Lavinia's experience. He calls for a more permanent remembrance and says that he will “go get a leaf of brass, and with a gad of steel will write these words, and lay it by” (4.1.101-3). Yet he cannot bear another remembrance of the rape—his daughter's “lively body”; this account of the crime needs to be silenced, while its record, as precedent for revenge, needs to be engraved by him onto brass. Titus says he kills her out of pity, but also to bury his sorrows: “Die, die, Lavinia, and thy shame with thee, / And with thy shame thy father's sorrow die” (5.3.45-46). Once Lavinia is able to inform them of the particular details that they needed, they prefer to “bury” her specificity. In other words, the men will save her reappropriated words in brass and bury the real woman.

While the play registers the problem of the rape remaining hidden, it constructs the problem as limiting the agency of male relatives rather than that of the victim. Lavinia is a witness for the men's revenge rather than for herself (or her experience).³⁸ Significantly, Lavinia tells her family and leaves the decision of action to them. No one asks if Lavinia wants to pursue a bloody revenge or seek another form of legal remedy. Thus, while the play registers increasing cultural anxiety over men's dependence on women's willingness to tell through Lavinia's silence, it represses the women's new authority in terms of deciding on a response.

Just as the plot and structure of the play seem to parallel the development of the legal definition of abduction and rape, the play also interrogates the increased authority granted to women by relatively recent changes in the law. While Lavinia's silence in the first rape scene is constructed as appropriate, it becomes vexed in the second rape. Where Ovid allows Philomela her outrage and her lament before her tongue is cut out, Shakespeare silences Lavinia. Rather than reading this as a signal of female oppression, what follows in the play highlights the culture's need for the rape victim's voice as informer/witness. While Titus Andronicus acknowledges the need for women's voices, this limited agency is hardly something for feminists to celebrate.

Notes

1. William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Eugene M. Waith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984); further citations will be in the text.

2. Susan Brownmiller (Against Our Wills: Men, Women and Rape [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975]) and Susan Griffin (“Rape: The All-American Crime,” Ramparts 3 [1971]: 26-35) first ignited the feminist exploration of the politics of rape. Brownmiller, for example, argues that rape legitimizes patriarchy and women's subordination; it functions through fear, whereby women limit their own behavior and freedom. Patriarchy benefits from rape when women perceive they need men's protection from other men. See also Sharon Marcus's discussion of rape “as a question of language, interpretation, and subjectivity” (“Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler & Joan W. Scott [London: Routledge, 1992], 387). Much has been written on the intersections of rape, silence, and shame—for example, see Anna Clark, Women's Silence, Men's Violence: Sexual Assault in England 1770-1845 (New York: Pandora, 1987); Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York; Vantage, 1981); Susan Estrich, Real Rape (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987); and Diane Russell, Rape in Marriage, rev. ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).

3. Coppélia Kahn, “Lucrece: The Sexual Politics of Subjectivity,” in Rape and Representation, ed. Lynn A. Higgins & Brenda R. Silver (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 142.

4. For an exception, see Christina Luckyj, “‘A Moving Rhetoricke’: Women's Silences and Renaissance Texts,” Renaissance Drama ns 24 (1993): 33-56. Luckyj argues that various early modern texts problematize such silence and “invest feminine silence with considerable power and danger” (34). While Luckyj proposes silence as a space for subversion, I am interested in the play's complex representation of a woman's troubling and powerful silence in relation to disclosures of rape. For those who have discussed the act of telling in literary texts, see Patricia Klindienst Joplin, “The Voice of the Shuttle Is Ours,” in Rape and Representation, ed. Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 35-66; and Carolyn D. Williams, “‘Silence, like a Lucrece knife’: Shakespeare and the Meanings of Rape,” Yearbook of English Studies 23 (1993): 93-110. For historians of the early modern period who have profitably explored this area, see Miranda Chaytor, “Husband(ry): Narratives of Rape in the Seventeenth Century,” Gender & History 7 (1995): 378-407; and Garthine Walker, “Rereading Rape and Sexual Violence in Early Modern England,” Gender & History 10 (1998): 1-25. For feminist literary criticism on representations of rape and the erasure of women's experience of violence, see the wide variety of essays in Rape and Representation, ed. Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).

5. See Mary Fawcett, “Arms/Words/Tears: Language and the Body in Titus Andronicus,” ELH 50 (1983): 261-77; and Marion Wynne-Davies, “‘The Swallowing Womb’: Consumed and Consuming Women in Titus Andronicus,” in The Matter of Difference: Material Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Valerie Wayne (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 129-51. While Fawcett claims that Shakespeare characterizes Lavinia as simply “a mute body to be disputed over” (267), to Wynne-Davies her muteness signals the culture's need to control the female subject (136). See also Douglas E. Green, “Interpreting ‘her martyr'd signs’: Gender and Tragedy in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 317-26. Green finds Lavinia's “muteness” complex; while it signifies powerlessness, her voice must be silenced because it has the power to critique not only the “the premeditated violence of the rapists” but also her father's “thoughtless cruelty” (323).

6. Discussions of rape in Titus include Jonathan Bate, “Introduction,” Titus Andronicus, Arden Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1995); Lorraine Helms, “‘The High Roman Fashion’: Sacrifice, Suicide, and the Shakespearean State,” PMLA 107 (1992): 554-65; Gillian Murray Kendall, “‘Lend me thy hand’: Metaphor and Mayhem in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 299-316; Sid Ray, “‘Rape, I fear, was root of thy annoy”: The Politics of Consent in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 49 (1998): 22-39; Catharine R. Stimpson, “Shakespeare and the Soil of Rape,” in The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Green, and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 56-64; Ann Thompson, “Philomel in Titus Andronicus and Cymbeline,” Shakespeare Survey 31 (1978): 23-32; David Wilburn, “Rape and Revenge in Titus Andronicus,” English Literary Renaissance 8 (1978): 159-82; Williams, “Silence, like a Lucrece knife”; and Wynne-Davies, “‘The Swallowing Womb.’”

7. Aaron suggests his plot of rape by claiming that Lavinia is another Lucrece: “Lucrece was not more chaste / Than this Lavinia” (2.1.109-10). Aaron also uses Philomela as shorthand to explain his revenge plot to Tamora: “His Philomel must lose her tongue today, / Thy sons make pillage of her chastity, / And wash their hands in Bassianus' blood” (2.3.43-45). Lavinia is able to convey that she was raped by literally using the text of Ovid (4.1.). When Titus enacts his revenge, he calls attention to the precedent found in Ovid: “For worse than Philomel you used my daughter, / And worse than Procne I will be revenged” (5.2194-95). Virginius's story is used as justification and “warrant” for Lavinia's murder (5.3.35-51). References to legends of Lucrece and Philomela are also made throughout (2.4.26-27, 38-39; 4.1.47-48, 62-63).

8. Traditionally, rape in the play has been read as a symbol of the overall chaos in Rome; for example, see Eugene M. Waith, “The Metamorphosis of Violence in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Survey 10 (1957): 26-35; and Robert S. Miola, “Titus Andronicus and the Myth of Shakespeare's Rome,” Shakespeare Studies 14 (1981): 88.

9. A Collection of Sundry Statutes, ed. Fardinando Pulton (London, 1640). The 1558 statute (4&5 Philip & Mary, cap 8) deals with the “disparagement” of propertied women under the age of sixteen, who are “secretly allured and wonne to contract matrimony with the said unthrifty and light personages, and there upon either with slieght or force, oftentimes be taken and conveyed away from their said parents” (A Collection, 997); punishment was increased if the maid was also “deflowered.” In 1576, Statute 18 Elizabeth cap. 7 addresses rape (“unlawfully and carnally know and abuse”) as a felony without benefit of clergy.

10. Nazife Bashar, “Rape in England between 1550 and 1700,” in The Sexual Dynamics of History: Men's Power, Women's Resistance, ed. The London Feminist History Group (London: Pluto, 1983), 41. For additional discussion of rape law, see J. B. Post, “Ravishment of Women and the Statutes of Westminster,” in Legal Records and the Historian, ed. J. H. Baker (London: Royal Historical Society, 1978), 150-60; and his “Sir Thomas West and the Statutes of Rapes, 1382,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 53 (1980): 24-30. Detailed discussion of accusations of rape can be found in Chaytor, “Husband(ry),” and G. Walker, “Rereading Rape.”

11. Classical and medieval Latin texts used “raptus” for both abduction and rape; however, legal treatises such as Bracton (c. 1220-30) utilized “raptus” in the narrower definition, to mean forced coitus (Bracton, On the Laws and Customs of England, trans. Samuel E. Thorne, 4 vols. [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968]). Thus, the first English statutes (Westminster I [1275] and II [1285]) codify the conflation of the meanings. Two important early modern sources regarding rape in legal terms include T. E., The Lawes Resolution of Womens Rights (London, 1632); and Matthew Hale, Historia Placitorum Coronae: The History of the Pleas of the Crown, 2 vols., 1736 (London: Professional Books Ltd., 1971).

12. Cf. Wynne-Davies who claims, too optimistically I think, that the 1597 act “tacitly accepts the crime committed as one against the corporal person of the women, rather than one of theft against her family” (“‘The Swallowing Womb,’” 131). Chaytor's work also suggests that this change did not take hold until the mid to late seventeenth century.

13. Helms, “‘The High Roman Fashion,’” 557.

14. Post, “Ravishment of Women,” 150.

15. Sue Sheridan Walker, “Punishing Convicted Ravishers: Statutory Strictures in Medieval England,” Studies in Medieval Culture 4 (1974): 237 and 245; see also Post, “Ravishment of Women”, 160. One further statute, written in 1382 (6 Richard 2), made clear the priority of family interests: women who consented to their abductors were disinherited. T. E. succinctly says that this statute punishes women for their consent (382).

16. T. E., The Lawes Resolutions, 390.

17. For brief discussions of the two kinds of rape in Titus, see Helms, “‘The High Roman Fashion,’” 557; Williams, “‘Silence, like a Lucrece Knife,’” 99-100; and Wynne-Davies, “‘The Swallowing Womb,’” 130-31.

18. In The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights, T. E. acknowledges the long confusion over the two terms, and notes that the terms “rape” and “ravishment” are often used interchangeably. In an effort to be clear, T. E. suggests using “ravishment” for abduction; in practice, he often refers to rape as ravishment and to abductors as “takers for lucre” or “covetous ravishers” (402). That T. E. returns to the confusion over terms twenty pages later suggest that ambiguity over the terms persists. In contrast, Michael Dalton, in The Country Justice: Containing the Practice of the Justices of the Peace out of their Sessions (London, 1618), consistently uses the verb “to ravish” to mean rape and “to take” to mean abduct (248).

19. Cf. Ray, who argues that Lavinia has clearly given her hand to Bassianus, and Titus disregards her prior consent, an act that leads to disastrous ends, which he finds akin to disregarding the people's right to political consent.

20. Clark Hulse, “Wresting the Alphabet: Oratory and Acting in Titus Andronicus,” Criticism 21 (1979): 109. Critics have long noted the problem of Lavinia's voice in the first part of this scene: when she opens her mouth, critics find her unappealing; see for example, Green, “Interpreting ‘her martyr'd signs,’” 322; Alan Sommers, “‘Wilderness of Tigers’: Structure and Symbolism in Titus Andronicus,” Essays in Criticism 10 (1960): 286; and A. C. Hamilton, Titus Andronicus: The Form of Shakespearean Tragedy,” in Titus Andronicus: Critical Essays, ed. Philip Kolin (New York: Garland, 1995), 143; and most famously, Dover Wilson, in the 1948 Cambridge edition of the play, calls her an “insulting hussy” and approves of Arthur Symond's judgment that “her punishment becomes something of a retribution” (lvii, lix; qtd. in Hamilton, 143).

21. Carolyn Asp, “‘Upon her wit doth earthly honor wait’: Female Agency in Titus Andronicus,” in Titus Andronicus: Critical Essays, ed. Philip Kolin (New York: Garland, 1995), 229. See also Karen Cunningham, “‘Scars can witness’: Trials by Ordeal and Lavinia's Body in Titus Andronicus,” Women and Violence in Literature: An Essay Collection, ed. Katherine Anne Ackley (New York: Garland, 1990), 149; Fawcett, “Arms/Words/Tears,” 266).

22. Other examples are available, but Milton's History of Britain (which reworks Dion Cassius) is interesting in comparison with the grisly mutilations and murders of Titus: “The Roman Wives and Virgins [are] hang'd up all naked, had their Breasts cut off, and sow'd to thir mouthes; that in the grimness of Death they might seem to eat thir own flesh” (The Works of John Milton, ed. Frank Allen Pallerson, 20 vols. [New York: Columbia University Press, 1932], 10:67). Might this tale, in whatever source Shakespeare might have found it, suggest the troubling moment where Titus places his own mutilated hand into Lavinia's mouth as they march offstage?

23. See Peter Stallybrass, “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 126. Stallybrass shows how according to patriarchal ideology surrounding women's bodies, the violation of a woman's mouth would have sexual overtones in early modern culture.

24. Waith's essay began the twentieth-century inquiry into the issue of the dissonance created by the Ovidian poetry and the “crude violence.” See also Richard Brucher, “‘Tragedy, Laugh On’: Comic Violence in Titus Andronicus,” Renaissance Drama ns 10 (1979): 71-91; Helms, “‘The High Roman Fashion,’”; Hulse, “Wresting the Alphabet,”; Kendall, “‘Lend me thy hands,’” D. J. Palmer, “The Unspeakable in Pursuit of the Uneatable: Language and Action in Titus Andronicus,” Critical Quarterly 14 (1972): 320-39; and Albert H. Tricomi, “The Aesthetics of Mutilation in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Survey 27 (1974): 11-19.

25. Coppelia Kahn, Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women (London: Routledge, 1997), 58.

26. See Kendall, “‘Lend me thy hands,’” where she argues that the “problem is that Lavinia's plight so mimics the Philomela story that her own story is hidden” (309). See also Brucher, “‘Tragedy, Laugh On,’” and Katherine A. Rowe, “Dismembering and Forgetting in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994): 279-303.

27. Brucher, “‘Tragedy, Laugh On,’” 88; Kendall, “‘Lend me thy hand,’” 309.

28. Numerous critics have persuasively detailed the interest in “writing, reading, quoting, and deciphering;” for an overview of this line of argument see Philip Kolin, “Performing Texts in Titus Andronicus,” in Titus Andronicus: Critical Essays, ed. Philip Kolin (New York: Garland, 1995), 249-60; see also Kendall, “‘Lend me thy hand,’” 305, and Rowe, “Dismembering and Forgetting,” 295.

29. Bate, ed., Titus Andronicus, 118.

30. Cunningham, “‘Scars can witness,’” 150.

31. Cunningham, “‘Scars can witness,’” 150.

32. Emily Bartels, “Making More of the Moor: Aaron, Othello, and Renaissance Refashioning of Race,” Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990): 444.

33. On Lavinia's use of Latin, see Palmer, “The Unspeakable in Pursuit of the Uneatable,” 335.

34. A Concordance of Ovid, ed. Roy J. Deferrari, M. Inviola Barry, and Martin R. P. McGuire, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 1939).

35. Cf. Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 224-25, for his discussion of Shakespeare's use of the Callisto myth in The Winter's Tale.

36. See, for example, A Copious and Critical English-Latin Dictionary, ed. William Smith and Theophilus D. Hall (New York: American Book Co., 1871.)

37. Bate, ed., Titus Andronicus, 215.

38. While some critics point to Lavinia's participation in the revenge, I question how much agency is located Lavinia's actions surrounding the murder. When Titus cuts off their heads, Lavinia holds a basin to catch the blood. Titus's command, “Lavinia, come, / Receive the blood” (5.2.196) is an image that eerily evokes the “stained” blood her culture believes that she has already received by the rape; it also parallels Tamora's punishment, who will unknowingly “receive” her sons' blood in her dinner.