Titus Andronicus: The State of Play

Farah Karim Cooper

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781350178786
• eBook ISBN: 9781350027404
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

Shakespeare's and Peele's Titus Andronicus has had a theatrical and a critical revival in the last fifteen years; the critical revival was perhaps prompted by Jonathan Bate's Arden edition of the play and its revision of the traditional critical account that it is an immature work and overly sensationalistic with its emphasis on non-essential violence. Recent debates and approaches have drawn closer attention to the play's classicism; re-defined its genre (for example the revised edition of the New Dramatic Sources will re-classify the play as one of Shakespeare's Roman plays); re-considered the nature of violent spectacle, family relations and kinship, political alliance, race and miscegenation. This study will explore how the revitalized critical responses to early modern and contemporary performance histories has had a significant impact upon the wider reception of this play.

PART ONE

Genre, style and sources

1

Senecan belatedness and
Titus Andronicus

Curtis Perry

It was not all that long ago that Titus Andronicus was thought to be (in Edward Ravenscroft’s memorable formulation) an ‘indigested piece’ of Shakespearean juvenilia.¹ Ironically, since Ravenscroft responds in part to the play’s obtrusive literary borrowing, this turn of phrase seems to have been derived from Ovid’s description of primeval chaos as an unrefined and indigested mass (‘rudis indigestaque moles’) near the beginning of the Metamorphoses: the play is seen as being chaotic in an Ovidian sense, unshaped by the mature hand of the bard.² The irony of Ravenscroft using an Ovidian metaphor to criticize Titus for its undigested-seeming use of classical texts underscores the fact that Roman literature, in addition to providing early modern writers with a set of culturally authoritative models to imitate, also provided them with models for thinking about imitation and invention. Roman writers like Virgil, Ovid and Seneca provided matter, but they were also understood as theorists of imitation and cultural transmission. In Elizabethan England, therefore, the association of such writers’ texts with questions about imitation and translatio imperii could become complex and recursive.

Nowadays, thanks to scholars like Jonathan Bate and Heather James (and many others too, of course), we tend to think that Titus Andronicus is designed as ‘a complex and self-conscious improvisation upon classical sources’.³ But we should remember, too, that the postmodern-seeming sophistication we have come to discover in Titus’ allusive texture owes something to the Augustan and post-Augustan Roman literature that Shakespeare and/or Peele drew upon.⁴ It is not only the case that brilliant, modern-minded Elizabethans put Roman sources in relation to one another in interesting ways; Roman sources are themselves already involved in a sophisticated intertextual conversation with one another about imitation, citation and Romanitas. This proposition, in turn, invites a re-examination of the question of Senecan tragedy’s importance for Titus Andronicus. For while Seneca has typically been subordinated to Ovid in discussions of the play’s sources – for good reason, since Metamorphoses is the book that characters within the play use to make sense of its pattern of rape and cannibal banquet – Senecan tragedy thematizes literary belatedness in a distinctive manner that informs Titus Andronicus’ obsessively allusive construction.

In relation to a play that is both about cannibalism and obsessed with citation and allusion, Ravenscroft’s ‘indigested’ also (perhaps unwittingly) evokes another classical topos, one associating the smooth operation of literary influence with the healthy consumption and digestion of food. The locus classicus for this metaphor, a commonplace in early modern discussions of literary imitation, is Seneca’s Epistle 84, where the ability to create something new out of one’s reading is compared to the way humans digest food:

Quod in corpore nostro videmus sine ulla opera nostra facere naturam: alimenta, quae accepimus, quamdiu in sua qualitate perdurant et solida innatant stomacho, onera sunt; at cum ex eo, quod erant, mutata sunt, tum demum in vires et in sanguinem transeunt. Idem in his, quibus aluntur ingenia, praestemus, ut quaecumque hausimus, non patiamur integra esse, ne aliena sint. Concoquamus illa; alioqui in memoriam ibunt, non in ingenium.

This is what we see nature doing in our own bodies without any labour on our part; the food we have eaten, as long as it retains its original quality and floats in our stomachs as an undiluted mass, is a burden; but it passes into tissue and blood only when it has been changed from its original form. So it is with the food which nourishes our higher nature, – we should see to it that whatever we have absorbed should not be allowed to remain unchanged, or it will be no part of us. We must digest it; otherwise it will merely enter the memory and not the reasoning power.⁵

To see the play as ‘indigested’ in this sense is to understand its obsessive allusiveness as a sign of its authors’ failure to transform or subsume received material into a new, organic corpus.

Titus Andronicus is, among other things, a play about indigestion (in a Senecan sense) as a metaphor for the problematics of cultural transmission.⁶ I want to argue here that Shakespeare and/or Peele draw upon Seneca not only for motifs, plot devices and quotations but also for a set of ideas about belatedness and allusion that pervade the play and contribute centrally to its sophisticated, pessimistic and, above all, citational evocation of Rome.⁷ To make this case is to build upon a suggestion that Alessandro Schiesaro put forward some time ago now, namely that ‘the strong meta-theatrical component of Titus is … inspired by Seneca rather than Ovid’.⁸ My argument is not that we should be thinking of Seneca instead of Ovid, but rather that the self-consciousness about belatedness that shapes Titus Andronicus’ use of Roman cultural authority owes something to the palimpsestic texture of the Senecan dramatic text and to the way Seneca’s tragedies themselves thematize belatedness in relation to Virgil and Ovid.⁹

* * *

Atreus – the outsized revenger of Seneca’s Thyestes – models his crime, as does Titus, on the precedent of Ovid’s Procne. Early in Thyestes we are told that Atreus’ crime will be like Procne’s, but ‘performed with larger numbers’ (‘fiat … maiore numero’).¹⁰ Later, as Atreus casts about for a suitably over-the-top crime, he too finds precedent in Procne’s cannibal banquet:

vidit infandas domus

Odrysia mensas – fateor, immane est scelus,

sed occupatum: maius hoc aliquid dolor

inveniat. animum Daulis inspira parens

sororque; causa est similis: assiste et manum

impelle nostram. liberos avidus pater

gaudensque laceret et suos artus edat.

bene est, abunde est: hic placet poenae modus

tantisper.

The Odrysian house [i.e., the Tracian house, the house of Procne and Tereus] saw an unspeakable feast – that crime is monstrous, admittedly, but already taken. My bitterness must find something greater than this. Breathe your spirit into me, you Daulian mother and sister [Procne and Philomela]: our cause is comparable. Stand by me, drive my hand. Let the father rend his children avidly, gleefully, and eat ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Series preface
• Introduction
• Part One Genre, style and sources
• 1 Senecan belatedness and Titus Andronicus
• 2 Titus Andronicus: Elizabethan classicism and the styles of new tragedy
• 3 Soliloquies in Titus Andronicus: An empirical approach
• Part Two Critical approaches: Race, culture and politics
• 4 ‘I have done thy mother’: Racial and sexual geographies in Titus Andronicus
• 5 Remixing the family: Blackness and domesticity in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus
• 6 ‘If I might have my will’: Aaron’s affect and race in Titus Andronicus
• Part Three Critical approaches: Bodies, emotions and metaphor
• 7 Metaphorically speaking: Titus Andronicus and the limits of utterance
• 8 Granular reading: Texture, language and surface marks in Titus Andronicus
• Part Four Performance and adaptation
• 9 ‘Did you see that?!’: Titus Andronicus and theatrical transgression
• 10 In/di/gestion: Seneca→Shakespeare→South Park
• 11 ‘My tears will choke me, if I ope my mouth’: Framing, feasting and speaking sexual violence in Titus Andronicus, 2006–2017
• Index
• Copyright