George Washington University

Interpreting "Her Martyr'd Signs": Gender and Tragedy in Titus Andronicus

Author(s): Douglas E. Green
Source: Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 3 (Autumn, 1989), pp. 317-326
Published by: Folger Shakespeare Library in association with George Washington
University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2870726
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 Interpreting "her martyr'd signs":
Gender and Tragedy in
Titus Andronicus
DOUGLAS E. GREEN

Today we are questioning the cultural definitions of sexual identity

inherited. I believe Shakespeare questioned them too, that he was critic
of the masculine fantasies and fears that shaped his world, and of h
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, re-
creates 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.

1 Coppelia 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).

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 318 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

Still, as Jonson's singling out of The Spanish Tragedy an

suggests, Shakespeare's first experiment in the revenge
old-fashioned, both exemplary and memorable.5 As is s
Shakespeare touches the limits of the genre and expose
trying to come to terms with Titus as revenge play, criti
today the relative influence of Ovid and Seneca. Titus' cu
and the banquet scene recall both Seneca's Thyestes and t
Tereus, Philomela, and Procne.6 Because of the play's Ov
its use of the Metamorphoses as a stage prop, recent int
Ovid. Thus, for Leonard Barkan, "in a very real sense, t
book of Ovid generates the events of Titus"; he notes that th
to have read the work even before the book appears on s
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

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 assess-
ment of Seneca's contribution to English Renaissance drama is Gordon Braden's recent Renais-
sance 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

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 GENDER AND TRAGEDY IN TITUS ANDRONICUS 319

dramatic tradition and to the medieval and early Renaissance narr

tragedies, as well as to Ovid and Seneca. In this Polonian pastiche, her
pastoral, elegiac, revenge, and tragic fragments combine, like the comb
of a morality psychomachia, to illustrate the progress of Titus' soul.8
emblems, visible mutilations signify hidden violations, both physical
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 entertain-
ments, "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 construc-
tion 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.

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

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 eigh-
teenth-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.

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 320 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

opposite, marking his strength by her own status as vict

goodness by her own evil. Her desperate plea to save
acknowledges that her captivity is the sign of Titus' power: "S
we are brought to Rome / To beautify thy triumphs, and retu
thee and to thy Roman yoke . . . ?" (1.1.109-11). Titus' coo
to Tamora's emotional appeal ratifies that acknowledged au
yourself, madam, and pardon me" (1.1.121). Her evil, too,
early, before she takes any action or admits malign intent, in
lust-at-first-sight represents Tamora as the very occasion
lady, trust me, of the hue / That I would choose were I to
(1.1.261-62).13 Tamora's aside to Saturninus exposes the
woman's subtle power-"My lord, be rul'd by me, be w
Dissemble all your griefs and discontents" (1.1.442-43
well her intention to "find a day to massacre them all [the
rase their faction and their family" (1.1.450-51). We kn
opposite; if he has erred in killing Alarbus, at least the m
believe, is "piety"-albeit, from the perspective of the que
a "cruel, irreligious piety" (1.1.130).
On the other hand, Tamora also illustrates and demarcates
Titus' character, measures the evil to which this patriarch
resorted and must resort. Her comment on the barbarity,
gious piety," of Roman religion suggests as much: it inad
Titus' error as a product of benighted pagan belief but also
in a whole range of human blindness, imperfection, and cr
of Mutius gives weight to her view of Titus' Roman mora
adherence to the oppressive laws of his fathers and his own
paternal authority. We know Titus, and sometimes Titus eve
by his mirror image in Tamora.
Near the end of the play, for example, when Titus receive
sons disguised as Revenge, Murder, and Rapine, he obviou
the charade but also plays along, feigning a lunatic blindnes
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

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).

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 GENDER AND TRAGEDY IN TITUS ANDRONICUS 321

this scene, albeit as part of her own plans for revenge. In Titus' on
union with Tamora-Revenge, Shakespeare gives us the emblem of th
er's tragedy: the avenger mirrors the enemy, commits the very evils fo
retribution is sought. 14
And perhaps there is a further implication linked to those "miserable,
mistaking eyes" of Titus: if his "mistakings" in the first act
indication, "worldly men" like Titus are indeed questionable wielder
absolute power to which they aspire. In a sense the words and the
remind us that Titus' judgment and one-armed justice against his
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 assump-
tions 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 declara-
tion 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

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.

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 322 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

and wrong"15 applies even to Titus. But the "justice" of T

rically embodied in the villainous Moor, with the result th
eyes, she seems as if in league with a devil; Titus, though
sometimes mirroring her, is kept at one remove from her app
with the devil. The evil of Titus is displaced onto Tamora:
made to seem, though deserved, nonetheless tragic; hers, m
ing 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 fiance, on the other,
she later reveals a proud, baiting wit as she rebukes Tamora for her "raven-
colored love" (2.3.83):

15 p. 115.
16 Belsey, p. 165.
17 H616ne 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).

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 GENDER AND TRAGEDY IN TITUS ANDRONICUS 323

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-righ-
teousness; 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 powerless-
ness.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 fiance, 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 reconsti-
tution 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

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).

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 324 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

"speech" because it might threaten the reestablishment of o

hand, it suggests that Lavinia, like Philomela, can and sh
severest of restrictions on communication, restrictions the
first to mock (2.4). Since her "signs and tokens" (2.4.5)
sible to most of the other characters, Marcus begins the pro
Lavinia's meaning: "Shall I speak for thee? shall I say 't
is the one who lights upon the Ovidian myth as an expla
which she assents by averting her face "for shame" (2.4
to suggest that the process of articulation begun by Mar
certain.20 To be sure, his explanation fits the facts, the plot
play is always trying to exclude the possibility of "p
"Perchance she weeps because they [her brothers] kill'd
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,

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.

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 GENDER AND TRAGEDY IN TITUS ANDRONICUS 325

47).23 When Marcus must teach her to write in the "sandy plot" by
the staff with her mouth and feet, the significance of the revelat
"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 re-
creates 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. Never-
theless, 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 per-
formances, 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

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 Ql'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.

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326 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

Lavinia's suffering,27 as well as modern refuge in aesthetic

in fact signify the extent to which both English Renaissa
audiences, with their particular patriarchal assumptions,
tempt 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 can-
not 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 unassimi-
lable 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.

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.

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