[In the following essay, Green suggests that the female characters in Titus Andronicus are reflections of the protagonist and that his revenge mirrors theirs, even as it obscures their suffering and distress. Green maintains that both Tamora and Lavinia represent a threat to patriarchal power: Tamora, because the murder of her son gives her just cause to seek retribution; and Lavinia, because if she could speak she would tell of her domination by male authority, in the persons of her kinsmen as well as her rapists.]

Today we are questioning the cultural definitions of sexual identity we have inherited. I believe Shakespeare questioned them too, that he was critically aware of the masculine fantasies and fears that shaped his world, and of how they falsified both men and women.¹

… by text we mean not something that is self-same on the page, not the inertness of an implacable letter, but rather those slippages and multiplications which determine and fix only to unmoor again, making all places provisional, all sites relational, all identity a matter of differences scarcely perceivable because forever changing.²

In Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus the parallels to other popular plays of the period are evident: bits of Marlowe and Kyd, for instance, abound. Shakespeare introduces Titus (1.1.70-295) as a Roman Tamburlaine, with trumpets, triumphs, chariots, and domestic murders, but places this martial heroism in the context of a revenge tragedy.³ The analogies with plays like The Jew of Malta and The Spanish Tragedy are too many and too obvious to ignore. Shakespeare employs and comments on theatrical conventions, recreates them, re-produces them with a difference.⁴ With Shakespeare the motives for so doing are undoubtedly various: crime may not pay, but it does pay off.

Still, as Jonson's singling out of The Spanish Tragedy and Titus Andronicus suggests, Shakespeare's first experiment in the revenge mode is, however old-fashioned, both exemplary and memorable.⁵ As is so often the case, Shakespeare touches the limits of the genre and exposes its limitations. In trying to come to terms with Titus as revenge play, critics are debating even today the relative influence of Ovid and Seneca. Titus' culinary preparations and the banquet scene recall both Seneca's Thyestes and the Ovidian story of Tereus, Philomela, and Procne.⁶ Because of the play's Ovidian rhetoric and its use of the Metamorphoses as a stage prop, recent interest has focused on Ovid. Thus, for Leonard Barkan, “in a very real sense, the presence of the book of Ovid generates the events of Titus”; he notes that the characters seem to have read the work even before the book appears on stage. John Velz sees a general “interest on Shakespeare's part in Ovidian disjunctions of all kinds” and in this case “the juxtaposition of elaborated descriptive rhetoric with violent and bloody action.”⁷ But the play is also indebted to the native dramatic tradition and to the medieval and early Renaissance narrative tragedies, as well as to Ovid and Seneca. In this Polonian pastiche, heroic, pastoral, elegiac, revenge, and tragic fragments combine, like the combatants of a morality psychomachia, to illustrate the progress of Titus' soul.⁸ Like emblems, visible mutilations signify hidden violations, both physical and spiritual.

In Titus Andronicus almost every spectacle, deed, and character is absorbed into the titanic presence of the protagonist. Certainly Lavinia and Tamora, as utter victim and as consummate avenger, threaten to usurp Titus' centrality. But just as Elizabeth's gender was submerged, in interludes and entertainments, “in the complex iconography of her paradigmatic virtue,” always in accord with patriarchal notions of her power as prince,⁹ so Shakespeare's notable and notorious female characters are here made to serve the construction of Titus—patriarch, tragic hero, and, from our vantage point, central consciousness. But contradictions beset this enterprise. I maintain that the pressures of Shakespeare's characterization of Titus, of creating this tragic protagonist, are evident in the Others—notably Aaron, Tamora, and Lavinia—who surround the revenge play's central Self.¹⁰ In the case of Tamora and Lavinia, on whom I will focus, gender both marks and is marked by Shakespeare's first experiment in revenge tragedy. It is largely through and on the female characters that Titus is constructed and his tragedy inscribed.

I

This closing with him fits his lunacy.

(5.2.70)

We can assume that any theory of the subject has always been appropriated by the “masculine.”¹¹

Stereotypes define what the social body endorses and what it wants to exclude.¹²

Tamora is one pole on the female scale by which we measure Titus—but as one might expect of this “lascivious Goth” (2.3.110) and monstrous woman, hers is a double measure. On the one hand, she stands as Titus' direct opposite, marking his strength by her own status as victim, as well as his goodness by her own evil. Her desperate plea to save her son Alarbus acknowledges that her captivity is the sign of Titus' power: “Sufficeth not that we are brought to Rome / To beautify thy triumphs, and return / Captive to thee and to thy Roman yoke … ?” (1.1.109-11). Titus' coolly formal reply to Tamora's emotional appeal ratifies that acknowledged authority: “Patient yourself, madam, and pardon me” (1.1.121). Her evil, too, manifests itself early, before she takes any action or admits malign intent, in that Saturninus' lust-at-first-sight represents Tamora as the very occasion of sin: “A goodly lady, trust me, of the hue / That I would choose were I to choose anew” (1.1.261-62).¹³ Tamora's aside to Saturninus exposes the dangers of this woman's subtle power—“My lord, be rul'd by me, be won at last, / Dissemble all your griefs and discontents” (1.1.442-43)—and exposes as well her intention to “find a day to massacre them all [the Andronici], / And rase their faction and their family” (1.1.450-51). We know Titus by his opposite; if he has erred in killing Alarbus, at least the motive, we are to believe, is “piety”—albeit, from the perspective of the queen of the Goths, a “cruel, irreligious piety” (1.1.130).

On the other hand, Tamora also illustrates and demarcates the extremes of Titus' character, measures the evil to which this patriarchal avenger has resorted and must resort. Her comment on the barbarity, the “cruel, irreligious piety,” of Roman religion suggests as much: it inadvertently excuses Titus' error as a product of benighted pagan belief but also implicates Titus in a whole range of human blindness, imperfection, and crime. The murder of Mutius gives weight to her view of Titus' Roman moral code—his strict adherence to the oppressive laws of his fathers and his own claim to absolute paternal authority. We know Titus, and sometimes Titus even knows himself, by his mirror image in Tamora.

Near the end of the play, for example, when Titus receives Tamora and her sons disguised as Revenge, Murder, and Rapine, he obviously sees through the charade but also plays along, feigning a lunatic blindness to the facts. His words and actions are instructive:

Good Lord, how like the Empress' sons they are!
And you, the Empress! but we worldly men
Have miserable, mad, mistaking eyes.
O sweet Revenge, now do I come to thee,
And if one arm's embracement will content thee,
I will embrace thee in it by and by.

(5.2.64-69)

Titus' lines and actions here, though localized in a grotesque, specific moment, bespeak the ambiguity surrounding Tamora and Titus' relation to her throughout the play. Titus certainly sees her as she is, comprehends her motives in a way she does not intend. He also acknowledges his own “embracement” of Revenge, of the vengeance she is merely counterfeiting in this scene, albeit as part of her own plans for revenge. In Titus' one-armed union with Tamora-Revenge, Shakespeare gives us the emblem of the avenger's tragedy: the avenger mirrors the enemy, commits the very evils for which retribution is sought.¹⁴

And perhaps there is a further implication linked to those “miserable, mad, mistaking eyes” of Titus: if his “mistakings” in the first act are any indication, “worldly men” like Titus are indeed questionable wielders of the absolute power to which they aspire. In a sense the words and the scene remind us that Titus' judgment and one-armed justice against his own son Mutius are little more than willful vengeance and, like his support of Saturninus over Bassianus (for emperor and for son-in-law), examples of faulty reason and blindness. The rule of “worldly men,” despite the play's ending, is shown as problematic so long as men are fallible. Perhaps our recognition of this fact contributes to an initially uncertain response to Tamora, in that her maternal plea for mercy is understandable, moving, and just. Moreover, when Tamora reappears as Revenge, she reminds us not only that her own unforgiving will, so cruel in the scene with Lavinia, has made her the very essence of evil, but also that she has had as much cause for vengeance as has Titus—a fact from which the play keeps trying to deflect our own “miserable, mad, mistaking”—and complicit—eyes. In one sense, then, Tamora embodies dangers already inherent in the rule of men like Saturninus, Titus, and even Marcus.

Tamora is all the more effective at this double duty because of her gender. Every desire she voices threatens Titus, Rome, and the patriarchal assumptions of the audience. Here her link with Aaron is crucial. In Act 1 the Moor is a silent, disturbing presence in the queen's party; at the beginning of Act 2, however, he declares that he will “wanton with this queen, / This goddess, this Semiramis, this nymph, / This siren that will charm Rome's Saturnine, / And see his shipwrack and his commonweal's” (2.1.21-24). This declaration not only confirms the threats Tamora has voiced in her aside to the emperor but also shifts the audience's attention away from Tamora's original motive. By having Aaron voice Tamora's designs at this point, Shakespeare forces a judgment against Tamora; thus, when Lavinia pleads for mercy (2.3), Tamora's reminder that she herself once “pour'd forth tears in vain” (2.3.163) cuts both ways: it establishes Titus' error as the source of Lavinia's plight, but it also transfers Titus' inhumanity to Tamora's unwomanly, “beastly” nature in the present circumstance (2.3.182).

Titus' reflection in—and of—Tamora reveals that, as Catherine Belsey puts it, all “revenge exists in the margin between justice and crime”; Belsey's statement that, as “an act of injustice on behalf of justice, [revenge] deconstructs the antithesis which fixes the meanings of good and evil, right and wrong”¹⁵ applies even to Titus. But the “justice” of Tamora is theatrically embodied in the villainous Moor, with the result that, to Elizabethan eyes, she seems as if in league with a devil; Titus, though mirrored in and sometimes mirroring her, is kept at one remove from her apparent complicity with the devil. The evil of Titus is displaced onto Tamora: thus his death is made to seem, though deserved, nonetheless tragic; hers, merely the rewarding of just deserts.

II

Stuprum—Chiron—Demetrius.

(4.1.78)

But the construction of stereotypes cannot ensure permanent stability, not only because the world always exceeds the stereotypical, but also in so far as the stereotypes themselves are inevitably subject to internal contradictions and so are perpetually precarious.¹⁶

If woman has always functioned “within” the discourse of man, a signifier that has always referred back to the opposite signifier which annihilates its specific energy and diminishes or stifles its very different sounds, it is time for her to dislocate this “within,” to explode it, to turn it around, and seize it; to make it hers, containing it in her own mouth, biting that tongue with her very own teeth to invent for herself a language to get inside of.¹⁷

Lavinia is the other pole of the scale—and the more telling. Her mutilated body “articulates” Titus' own suffering and victimization. When he sums up all his losses and pains, Titus ends with “that which gives my soul the greatest spurn / … dear Lavinia, dearer than my soul” (3.1.101-2): “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). Like Marcus' much-decried and much-excused “conduit” speech (2.4.11-57),¹⁸ Titus' speech re-presents Lavinia as both the occasion and the expression of his madness, his inner state. Their “sympathy of woe …, / As far from help as limbo is from bliss” (3.1.148-49), transforms her irremediable condition into the emblem of his.

But there is in Lavinia a greater, though less conspicuous, threat than in Tamora: she mirrors Titus not only humbled but also superbus, though without Tamora's obvious taint. Initially the silent pawn in the struggle between her father, on the one hand, and her brothers and fiancé, on the other, she later reveals a proud, baiting wit as she rebukes Tamora for her “raven-colored love” (2.3.83):

Under your patience, gentle Emperess,
'Tis thought you have a goodly gift in horning,
And to be doubted that your Moor and you
Are singled forth to try thy experiments.
Jove shield your husband from his hounds to-day!
'Tis pity they should take him for a stag.

(2.3.66-71)

Lavinia's speech here caps a series of dialogue references to the Diana-Actaeon story: Bassianus ironically compares Tamora to Diana the Huntress; Tamora retorts, wishing Actaeon's fate on Bassianus; Lavinia's speech outdoes the queen by turning her own witty remark against her. Certainly there is no parity between such verbal besting and Lavinia's fate, nor is there justification for the rape or for Tamora's goading on her sons to brutality or for her sanctioning the rape even when Lavinia pleads for death instead (2.3.168 ff.). But the blind pride with which Lavinia speaks, as if assuming her own moral rectitude and consequent power, mirrors Titus' mistaken assumption about his own omnipotence: “I will restore to [Saturninus] / The people's hearts, and wean them from themselves” (1.1.210-11). What follows on Titus' claim exposes his hubristic will to power, most notoriously in the murdering of his son Mutius. Similarly, concurrence in Bassianus' decision to tell Saturninus of Tamora's infidelity—“Good king, to be so mightily abused” (2.3.87)—mirrors Titus' (and her husband's) self-righteousness; at the same time, it also reveals her as the victim of a false sense of security, of a belief that virtue (or at least good intentions) are their own defense. As Lavinia finds out, there is no impermeable self; raped and mutilated, she embodies the very lesson the proud conqueror Titus is forced to learn.

Lavinia's muteness, too, is complex. It, of course, signifies powerlessness.¹⁹ But oddly, in this case, it also belies any simple evocation of pathos in an audience. Because of what Lavinia knows, her voice must be silenced. Just as her tongue might speak of the premeditated violence of the rapists, so an autonomous Lavinia might tell of the thoughtless cruelty of her father, which had undone her betrothal and united her temporarily with an unworthy man. Indeed, Lavinia's speech—or any uncurtailed mode of signification on her part—could expose to the public (and to the audience) her subjection to the arbitrary wills of men, to the contradictory desires of father, husband, rival fiancé, brothers, and rapists. Her voice might not only bring down Chiron, Demetrius, Aaron, and Tamora but might also accuse Titus as well. For Lavinia to speak now would undermine the play's design—the reconstitution of patriarchy under Lucius. But the play makes us aware of the price that this reconstitution, this order, exacts from women (and younger sons, and those without power, or those who are otherwise peripheral): they, their pain, and all their experiences are consigned to silence and illegibility.

Nonetheless, as I have already suggested, Shakespeare's recollection of the Ovidian myth brings into the play more than Lavinia's victimization. On the one hand, as noted above, the text thoroughly circumscribes Lavinia's “speech” because it might threaten the reestablishment of order; on the other hand, it suggests that Lavinia, like Philomela, can and should overcome the severest of restrictions on communication, restrictions the perpetrators are the first to mock (2.4). Since her “signs and tokens” (2.4.5) are incomprehensible to most of the other characters, Marcus begins the process of articulating Lavinia's meaning: “Shall I speak for thee? shall I say 'tis so?” (2.4.33). He is the one who lights upon the Ovidian myth as an explanation, a reading to which she assents by averting her face “for shame” (2.4.28). But I would like to suggest that the process of articulation begun by Marcus is never entirely certain.²⁰ To be sure, his explanation fits the facts, the plot; nevertheless, the play is always trying to exclude the possibility of “polysemic” signs:²¹ “Perchance she weeps because they [her brothers] kill'd her husband, / Perchance because she knows them innocent” (3.1.114-15). Titus dispels such ambiguities by establishing a “sympathy of woe” between himself and his daughter; we are to believe that his pain comprehends hers in every sense: “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). Lavinia mirrors Titus—his present loss and pain—but Titus' words determine what her image, her “signs and tokens,” mean: “But I, of these, will wrest an alphabet, / And by still practice learn to know thy meaning” (3.2.44-45).²² At one and the same time, Titus acknowledges the integrity and otherness of Lavinia's experience and intentions and yet claims the power to determine their meaning—along with her whole system of signs.

The young Lucius' fearful flight from his maimed aunt, however, suggests something beyond her appropriation to her father's or even the playwright's ends. There is some excess beyond the Ovidian pages that she “quotes” with her stumps and that Titus identifies as the “tragic tale of Philomel” (4.1.50, 47).²³ When Marcus must teach her to write in the “sandy plot” by guiding the staff with her mouth and feet, the significance of the revelation—“Stuprum—Chiron—Demetrius” (4.1.78)—lies not only in what is written but in how. The scene ostensibly confirms the centrality of Titus, of the father, in that, though Lavinia names crime and criminals, only Titus and the other male family members can decide on revenge;²⁴ as is suggested by the scene in which Lavinia carries off his hand between her teeth, Titus is the center of the—in this case, of her—revenge plot. The fragmentary writing that others must read to us, that must fast disappear from the “sandy plot,” is all the language allowed the victim. Yet despite the interpretive distractions that surround the attempt to express herself, for one moment Lavinia recreates and embodies the act of violation, signals the painful point these men keep missing, expresses what can only be hinted at through Ovidian myths and named in Latin.

As Clark Hulse has noted, “Lavinia took a staff in her mouth when she named the rapists, enacting fellatio, or, if we take seriously the pun that Act 2 made on hell-mouth [i.e., ‘this fell devouring receptacle, / As hateful as Cocytus' misty mouth’ (2.3.235-36)], re-enacting her own violation.”²⁵ Our attention is at least partially displaced from this subtle enactment of Lavinia's suffering, produced by her attempt to express it, to the written words interpreted by Titus, Marcus, and the family's heir, young Lucius. Nevertheless, as sign, Lavinia is polysemic and disruptive: a sign of the passive suffering attributed to women (like Philomela) by authorities (like Ovid), a sign of impotence roused to active vengeance (a metamorphosis attributed to women by the same authority in the story of Procne), and a sign beyond complete containment by the patriarchal assumptions of Shakespeare's time—and in some ways our own.

Lavinia's “alphabet” may provoke morose laughter in modern-day performances, but such macabre mirth arises, I would argue, as much from patriarchal dis-ease as from a sense of aesthetic failure. In spite or perhaps because of Shakespeare's circumscription of Lavinia's voice, Titus confronts its audience with the devastating portrait of a woman's attempt to articulate her experience in a society that ignores and prohibits her self-expression: as Irigaray says in a more general context, “‘she’ comes to be unable to say what her body is suffering. Stripped even of the words that are expected of her upon that stage invented to listen to her.”²⁶ Indeed, Elizabethan laughter at Lavinia's suffering,²⁷ as well as modern refuge in aesthetic superiority, may in fact signify the extent to which both English Renaissance and modern audiences, with their particular patriarchal assumptions, find Lavinia's attempt to speak, to write, uncalled for.

III

Ah, why should wrath be mute and fury dumb?

(5.3.184)

Aaron, the racial Other, is still speaking at the end of the play, even after the women, good and bad, have been killed—silenced and finally fixed. The unrepentant words of Aaron, though they cannot prevent his punishment, undercut Lucius' pronouncements. The restoration of patriarchal power cannot undo all that has been done, cannot contain it absolutely, however much such power aims to do so. Lavinia may ultimately be absorbed by and into that restoration, but the live burial of the still-railing Aaron and the casting forth of Tamora's body signify what this patriarchy cannot digest. The unassimilable elements—racial as well as sexual otherness, and all that issues from such difference—crystallize in the sign of other life: at the end, whether dead or alive, whether an absence or a silent presence, the child of Aaron and Tamora, the infant for whom the Moor gave himself up, cannot be contained by Lucius' new order or by Shakespeare's play.

Notes

1. Coppélia Kahn, Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1981), p. 20. This quotation may seem incompatible with the deconstructive passage from Goldberg that follows and inconsistent with much that the new historicism has taught us, but I include this statement because its feminist stance counters the ostensibly apolitical approach of much deconstruction and some historicism.

2. Jonathan Goldberg, “Shakespearean inscriptions: the voicing of power” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, eds. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 116-37, esp. p. 130.

3. All quotations from Titus Andronicus are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). From his entrance through the murder of Mutius, Titus' appearance and actions resemble, in miniature, both the magnificent Tamburlaine of Part I and the tyrannical Tamburlaine of Part II, who kills his slothful, cowardly son, Calyphas. See Tamburlaine the Great, Parts I and II, in Drama of the English Renaissance, eds. Russell A. Fraser and Norman Rabkin, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1976), Vol. I, 205-61, especially Tamburlaine, Part II, 4.1. Though Titus' son Mutius is no ignoble Calyphas, Titus believes him a traitor and therefore kills him. Obviously, the name of this laconic offspring—who says a few lines, does what he must, and is then silenced—resonates throughout the play.

4. For instance, in “Early Shakespearian Tragedy and Its Contemporary Context: Cause and Emotion in Titus Andronicus, Richard III and The Rape of Lucrece,” Shakespearian Tragedy, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 20 (London: Edward Arnold, 1984), A. R. Braunmuller discusses how “Shakespeare includes as dramatic characters the structural, framing elements that his contemporaries, even Marlowe, often made allegorical and/or extra-dramatic” (p. 112).

5. In 1614, about twenty years after the composition of Titus, Jonson wrote that “He that will swear Jeronimo or Andronicus are the best plays yet, shall pass unexcepted at, here, as a man whose judgment shows it is constant, and hath stood still, these five and twenty, or thirty, years” (Induction to Bartholomew Fair, ed. Edward B. Partridge [Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1964], p. 10).

6. Though Titus has been variously accused of Senecan horrors and undramatic Ovidian verse, most critics argue for the primacy of either Seneca or Ovid as its inspiration. The play obviously recalls in many details Ovid's famous story of Tereus, Philomela, and Procne (see 6.424-674 in Vol. I of Ovid's Metamorphoses, trans. F. J. Miller, 3rd ed., rev. G. P. Goold, 2 vols. [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984], 316-35). But Book VI of the Metamorphoses also alludes obliquely to the cannibalism of the house of Tantalus, who fed his son Pelops to the gods (6.172-73, 403-11). Such references and parallels might very well have sent Shakespeare to another well-known precedent for the banquet scene, this one also a revenge tragedy in dramatic form—Seneca's Thyestes, which begins with the ghost of Tantalus and details Atreus' gastronomic revenge on Thyestes (see Volume II of Seneca's Tragedies, trans. F. J. Miller, Loeb Classical Library, 2 vols. [New York: Putnam, 1917], pp. 89-181). Indeed, since Seneca's Thyestes alludes to the tale of Procne, Philomela, and Tereus (pp. 96-97, 114-15), settling on either Ovid or Seneca as the source of this Shakespearean tragedy's staged banquet seems rather arbitrary (see Douglas E. Green, “Seneca's Tragedies: The Elizabethan Translations” [Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1984], pp. 1-12, especially pp. 4-8). The most sophisticated assessment of Seneca's contribution to English Renaissance drama is Gordon Braden's recent Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger's Privilege (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 153-223, 247-54.

7. See Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1986), p. 244. In a fascinating argument, Barkan treats Titus as Shakespeare's response to an Ovidian “myth of competitive mutilation,” which is simultaneously “a myth about communication”—“a myth about the competition amongst media of communication as Philomela becomes a walking representative of them” (pp. 244-45). See also John Velz, “The Ovidian Soliloquy in Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Studies, 18 (1986), 1-24, esp. p. 3. Though his discussion of the influence of the Ovidian soliloquy, especially Medea's, on “Shakespeare's meditative soliloquies” (p. 1) does not apply to Titus, which lacks this kind of deliberative monologue, Velz notes the distancing effect of Ovidian description on the violence in Titus—“the outrages in Titus Andronicus are to be seen through a rhetorical screen” (p. 9). Both Barkan (p. 347) and Velz (p. 3) acknowledge Eugene Waith's article, “The Metamorphosis of Violence in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Survey, 10 (1957), 39-49, for focusing on Ovidian elements as central to the play. For Waith Titus is an aesthetic failure: “In taking over certain Ovidian forms Shakespeare takes over part of an Ovidian conception which cannot be fully realized by the techniques of drama” (p. 48). Recently Waith has tempered this view by examining “The Ceremonies of Titus Andronicus” in Mirror up to Shakespeare: Essays in Honour of G. R. Hibbard, ed. J. C. Gray (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1984), pp. 159-70: “The double vision provided by this elaborate picture [in Marcus' famous speech to Lavinia (2.4.11-57)] is neither rationalization nor wishful thinking but may be a desperate effort to come to terms with unbearable pain” (p. 165). In the same collection of essays, G. K. Hunter's “Sources and Meanings in Titus Andronicus” questions the hypothetical ancestor of an eighteenth-century chapbook as the narrative source for Shakespeare's version of Roman history in this play (pp. 171-88).

8. In Shakespeare's Early Tragedies (London: Methuen, 1968), pp. 13-47, Nicholas Brooke's analysis of Titus suggests a generic, poetic, and tonal hybrid. S. Clark Hulse summarizes the play's debt to the native medieval roots of Elizabethan drama, especially in the handling of space and characterization (“Wresting the Alphabet: Oratory and Action in ‘Titus Andronicus,’” Criticism, 21 [1979], 106-18, esp. p. 113). Frank Kermode's introduction to Titus in The Riverside Shakespeare provides a sensible view of the background material (pp. 1019-22).

9. See Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Sussex: Harvester Press; Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble, 1983), p. 177; see also p. 195.

10. On the terms “Other” and “Self,” see Linda Bamber's Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 27-28.

11. Luce Irigaray, “Any Theory of the ‘Subject’ Has Always Been Appropriated by the ‘Masculine,’” Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 133-46, esp. p. 133.

12. Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and difference in Renaissance drama (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 165.

13. These lines are usually marked “aside,” but there is no reason why the lines cannot be spoken aloud as courtly compliment to the captive queen of the Goths, even in front of Lavinia, Saturninus' betrothed (Brooke, p. 25). In fact, if they are spoken aloud, they underscore the ironic import of Saturninus' subsequent question: “Lavinia, you are not displeas'd with this?” (1.1.270).

14. In discussing Ovidian metamorphosis, Leonard Barkan suggests that “it follows from the metaphor of transformations that human experience is a series of contagions. If things turn into other things, then so do individuals, concepts, rules, emotions. … If objects and persons contain secret histories, then they have secret relations to each other” (p. 91). Titus' embracing Tamora as Revenge reproduces the physical and metaphysical correspondence between Tamora and Revenge or, to borrow Barkan's metaphor, spreads the contagion. The “secret intimacies of different things” that Barkan finds in Ovid (p. 91) may also operate in the world of Titus—for instance, in the corresponding methods, motives, and aims of righteous avenger and hardened villain.

15. p. 115.

16. Belsey, p. 165.

17. Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa” in New French Feminisms, eds. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen (1980; New York: Schocken, 1981), pp. 245-64, esp. p. 257.

18. In “The Ceremonies of Titus Andronicus” Eugene Waith has recently revised his estimate of the scene: “Another way of interpreting the scene is to take the discrepancy between what we see on the stage and what Marcus says as a kind of double vision, analogous to those ritual gestures in the first act which make piety of human sacrifice or honour of the murder of a son. The strange images that Marcus substitutes for the mangled body of his niece provide a way of holding the experience off rather than expressing the emotion it arouses” (p. 165).

19. John Velz notes that “the fugitives from rape in the early books of the Metamorphoses are languageless sufferers” and compares Lavinia to Philomela, “another Ovidian languageless victim” (p. 4).

20. In a paper delivered at the 1988 MLA Annual Meeting and entitled “Performance versus Text: Emblematic Tragedy in Titus Andronicus,” Maurice Charney reminds us that this play is in many ways more engaging on the stage than on the page; he also discusses how Marcus' words imply certain actions and gestures by Lavinia. Textually, then, Marcus' words intimate the way an Elizabethan boy or a modern woman should interpret the part; moreover, without Lavinia's theatrical presence, these words virtually determine a reader's conception of Lavinia. But the presence of a skilled actor like Sonia Ritter in Deborah Warner's 1987 production (Royal Shakespeare Company, Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon) can complicate the effect. Though her actions matched Marcus' words, one could never be quite sure whether Lavinia's turning away “for shame” (in which sense of the word?) ratified Marcus' lighting upon the apt Ovidian analogy or sought to avoid this painful contact altogether or indicated rejection. Here indeed was a powerful instance of the ways in which women's playing parts originally meant for boys has historically altered readings of the text. At times this production, rather than cutting the offensive rhetoric as other productions have done (see Waith, “Ceremonies,” p. 165), dramatized the disjunction between Marcus' Ovidian rhetoric, however well-intentioned or ceremonial, and Ritter's physical responses as rape victim and perhaps familial chattel. For a somewhat different view, see Alan C. Dessen's excellent review and analysis of Warner's production in Shakespeare Quarterly, 39 (1988), 222-25.

21. See Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 158.

22. Barkan sees a Shakespeare fascinated with the “language-denying metamorphosis” that compels Ovidian victims like Philomela “to create a new medium, a composite of words and pictures.” Furthermore, the “alphabet” that Titus is wresting from Lavinia “represents the beginnings of a definition of Shakespeare's medium and his art: part picture, part word, part sound; part ancient book, part modern dumb show; part mute actor, part vocal interpreter” (p. 247). But though this scene thus suggests a parallel between Shakespeare and Titus as writers (and readers), the vehemence of the search for Lavinia's meaning recalls the wrath, if not the destructive motives, of Tereus.

23. See Barkan's discussion of quoting, deciphering, and reading in the play (p. 246). The Riverside edition (4.1.50) uses the word “cotes” (their variant of Q1's “coats”) instead of F's “quotes.”

24. In this respect Lavinia resembles Bel-Imperia in Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy. The strong-minded Bel-Imperia is subject to her brother's will, to the will of an unwanted suitor, to wars and rivalries (among men) that kill first one lover and then another, and to the whims of a sluggish avenger. In order to spur the latter on, she writes Hieronimo a letter in blood, which, like Lavinia's writing, initiates the revenge (see especially 3.2.24-52 of The Spanish Tragedy in Fraser and Rabkin, Vol. I, 167-203). In this case, as with Ovid and Seneca, Titus attempts to outdo its model—whether in the mode of vengeance or in the difficulty the victims have in making themselves heard and understood, particularly the women. Needless to say, in Shakespeare's play Lavinia herself becomes the “bloody writ” (The Spanish Tragedy, 3.2.26).

25. Hulse, p. 116. See Velz, p. 4, on the Ovidian source of this scene in the story of Io (Metamorphoses, 1.647-50).

26. p. 140.

27. Clark Hulse argues that laughter “has been an appropriate and necessary response to the play since 1600” (p. 107, n. 5). See also pp. 117-18.