At the height of Titus Andronicus’s final banquet, Titus cites a version of the supposed history of “rash” Virginius, who killed his daughter “because she was enforced, stained and deflowered,” questioning Saturninus on the propriety of the act (5.3.35–8).1 Saturninus agrees briefly that the act was “well done” (36), offering at Titus’s renewed urging what sounds like a textbook answer: “Because the girl should not survive her shame, / And by her presence still renew his sorrows” (40–41).2 That this answer does not reflect Saturninus’s feelings (and seems instead to be merely a rote answer) is made clear when Saturninus responds, after Titus explicitly links his actions with Virginius’s precedents, with immediate horror at Titus’s subsequent killing of his own “enforced” daughter Lavinia: “What hast thou done, unnatural and unkind?” (47). Saturninus’s wording emphasizes that Titus’s action—now performed, instead of discussed hypothetically—goes against all notions of decorum or propriety. The act is seen as monstrous and inhuman, inappropriate for Titus as both father and person. Why does Saturninus, whom Titus has overtly addressed in search of guidance from the emperor and “mighty lord” (5.3.35, 39), immediately question the propriety of an action he has just proclaimed in a parallel example to be appropriate, even well done?
Before slaying Lavinia, Titus states he is taking Saturninus’s response as “A reason mighty, strong, and effectual; / A pattern, precedent, and lively warrant / For me, most wretched, to perform the like,” and then specifically echoes Saturninus’s own answer as he kills Lavinia: “Die, die, Lavinia, and thy shame with thee, / And with thy shame thy father’s sorrow die” (42–6). Yet, Saturninus immediately questions his own public judgment, based on a known historical precedent. Titus’s actions, which follow both Virginius’s behavior and Saturninus’s wording, and Saturninus’s unwillingness to accept his own public reading of precedents, reflect Titus Andronicus’s intense questioning of character-shaping practices. This questioning is repeated throughout the text as characters are continually presented as modeling themselves (or modeled) on history and historical fictions, forming their lives and actions in response to what has gone before, seemingly bound to communal precedents too “mighty, strong, and effectual” to break away from.
This kind of patterning reflects the play’s involvement in examining emulation and related rhetorical and educational practices and beliefs. The process of modeling actions based on prior precedents has deep roots in the Renaissance, as Titus’s own contexts manifest. Not only is Titus Shakespeare’s emulation of Ovid’s tale of Procne and Philomela—as well as reflective of Seneca’s emulation of Ovid in Thyestes and Shakespeare’s emulation of Marlowe, Kyd, Peele, and other contemporaries—but the characters are also themselves enmeshed in emulative practices, seeking precedents from a wide range of classical sources—Horace, Seneca, Ovid, Homer, among others—in order to “rival and vie with the original,” to use Quintilian’s phrase.3 As the characters compete to outdo available texts and each other’s imitations of these texts and precedents, they weave throughout Titus a destructive pattern of conflicted, partial, and uncritical emulations.
In reference to one example of the repetitive emulative discourse of the text, Albert Tricomi argues that the “craftier Tereus” of which “Marcus speaks [2.3.41] is really Will Shakespeare laying claim to having outwitted the Roman poet in the telling of a tale,” and that in Lavinia’s revealing of her attackers Shakespeare creates a “solution to this puzzle … that is much more unexpected and original than Ovid’s.”4 Tricomi also speaks of “a witty competition with Ovid and Seneca,” but this competition is about much more than wit, and indeed strikes at the social theories implicit in the earlier authors’ works and the common decorous and emulative readings of these works in Shakespeare’s time.5 Beyond this, Shakespeare’s criticisms, as Heather James’s work suggests, go after Elizabeth’s own intertextual political self- and social constructions.6 James also argues that “Shakespeare both joins and rivals Kyd and Marlowe in a collective struggle to transform the theater into a legitimate sphere of social influence,” claiming that Shakespeare specifically imitates and appropriates ancient Roman figures, “disturb[ing] the normative uses for Roman authority and claim[ing] no small share of this authority for his theater.”7 Shakespeare, in writing Titus, is himself engaged in intense and broad rivalry, not just with central figures in his own period, but across periods and cultures. Shakespeare’s emulative mode then both authorizes his own work and his theater, while also appearing to aim at refiguring the emulation of ancient precedents, creating a critique of emulative rivalry through its own exaggerated outdoing of earlier models, deconstructing humanist notions of judgment and understanding.
Given the complex and often brutal nature of Titus’s emulative patternings, the text is about more than just the (in)ability to judge, understand, and apply proper precedents. Titus’s excessive repetition of emulative strategies (even to the point of parody) is a performative rebuttal of straightforward humanist models of character, judgment, self, and decorum: a confounding enactment, similar to Titus’s performance of precedence before Saturninus.8 T. W. Baldwin’s work makes clear that Shakespeare’s plays have ample links to the humanist-driven grammar school of the time—and perhaps also to the critique of it.9 Robert Miola has suggested that Shakespeare’s early depictions of grammarians and schoolmasters show a kind of comical revenge on them; in a sense, Titus acts as a tragic counterpoint to these.10 With its rehearsal of almost all of the forms and patterns of the grammar school, including the twelve progymnasmata, the play can be read as a kind of schoolboy’s revenge on his own education.11 The humanist education and practices depicted in the play repeatedly turn to dark and violent renderings rather than artful declamations, thoughtful imitations, and exemplary judgment. Within the atrocities and uncertainties of the text and the discontinuous and self-contradicting characters lies a strong questioning of the didactic models of self-construction taught through a grammar-school education.12 By pressing the patterns of imitation to varying extremes, the play enacts emulative self-fashioning as resulting in monstrous characters, decisions, and texts that are fragmented, partial, even horrid. The supposed aim of the grammar-school education, the ability to judge well, is conflicted by Titus’s exposure of judgment as itself a contested idea, locked within a circularity of intertextual precedents, a concept I will develop in this chapter.
Further, as the politically-charged nature of the feast at Titus’s house highlights, emulation is not solely related to literary developments or social humanist agendas. Emulation is squarely located in Titus as a significant factor in the social and political messages of the text. In recounting the tale of Virginius, Titus connects his loss to the patriarchal and homosocial struggle in which Virginius found himself. As Virginius was disempowered through Apius’s legal maneuverings, Titus finds himself repeatedly disempowered by Saturninus’s and Tamora’s political tactics. As Robin L. Bott describes it, the battle over Virginia is homosocial, a “patriarchal rivalry manifested through rape.”13 (That this is a patriarchal rivalry is emphasized by the fact that both Saturninus and Titus reflect on Virginia’s death in terms of the sorrow of her father, never her own sorrow or loss.) Apius is able to use his political position to legally transfer Virginia’s custody to a friend who will then turn her over to Apius. Without political recourse (as Titus finds himself repeatedly), Virginius “moves to surer ground, his home, and counterattacks Apius”—specifically citing Apius’s sentencing as he kills Virginia: “Take thou thy deeth, for this is my sentence.”14 As Botts puts it, “Using the same legal rhetoric of sentencing as Apius, he [Virginius] asserts the superiority of his own laws and judgements.”15 In a similar way, Titus is about the move to reassert control through emulative patternings that recall and outdo the actions of enemies.
Emulation lies near the heart of the legal and political power of the play, as power is often connected to negotiations and reinterpretations of precedent, thus also linking emulation and political power to rhetoric and oratory. Further, the desire to gain power and impose one’s will is a mimetic desire that breeds factionalism, political unrest, and continual contests for control, such as the one that begins the play, between brothers, Saturninus and Bassianus. In Titus the link between emulation and power is further emphasized in the many patterns of emulative revenge, the patterning of seeking self-justified, self-imposed empowerment through precedents of personal revenge-taking. In addition, much of the rhetoric in the play relies heavily on precedents of empowerment through successful patterns of manipulation and control. Titus’s central tragedy may be largely personal, radiating from the twin losses of Titus and Tamora, but this is specifically played out in a highly-charged political scene, the potential rise or fall of the Roman Empire.
As I developed in the preceding chapter, imitation and emulation stand at the heart of ancient and Renaissance educational practices, and can be argued to be a central aim throughout the Renaissance period. Quintilian’s statement, “I do not want Paraphrase to be a mere passive reproduction, but to rival and vie with the original in expressing the same thoughts” (10.5.5), contains, as I noted earlier, both an assumption that this rivalry will remain fixed within “the same thoughts” (accepted codes of decorum—aesthetic and ethic) and the material reality that imitation can be an act of transcendent (potentially transgressive) invention, as Titus explores in its various violent departures from decorum through emulative rivalry. These violent departures recall Ascham’s claim for the necessary linking of good judgment in words and decency in action:
For mark all ages, look upon the whole course of both the Greek and Latin tongue, and ye shall surely find that when apt and good words began to be neglected and properties of those two tongues to be confounded, then also began ill deeds to spring, strange manners to oppress good orders, new and fond opinions to strive with old and true doctrine, first in philosophy and after in religion, right judgment of all things to be perverted, and so virtue with learning is contemned and study left off. Of ill thoughts cometh perverse judgment; of ill deeds springeth lewd talk.16
Significantly, not only does Ascham treat the misuse of language as the source of ill deeds and perverted judgment and virtue, but he also claims that ill deeds and thoughts create perverse judgment and lewd language. This circularity of cause and effect, and linking of judgment in language and action, pervades (and muddies) the discussion of decorum and imitation.
Emulation in its proper place in the grammar school was intended to teach judgment and analysis and was meant to create excellence of character as well as speech, through lively written examples and precedents. Quintilian declares that the process of imitation, a multi-step process, including analysis, synthesis, paraphrase, composition, and performance, was directed toward allowing the teacher to “test his pupils’ judgement” (2.5.13). Quintilian makes clear that imitation should always be based on the “excellence” of the model, which in turn requires careful judgment to determine—he repeatedly counsels that imitation should only be undertaken with the best of models and that even with those models care should be taken to examine the models closely, recognizing that even the best of sources have blemishes that are to be avoided (10.2.15). He also warns strictly against only having a façade of excellence (10.2.15). In his prooemium, Quintilian states his end goal:
So let our orator be the sort of man who can truly be called “wise,” not only perfect in morals (for in my view that is not enough, though some people think otherwise) but also in knowledge and in his general capacity for speaking. Such a person has perhaps never existed; but that is no reason for relaxing our efforts to attain the ideal. (18–19)
Quintilian’s ideal orator is himself a model to be vied with, clearly stated as a quest for perfection in character and capability. The ideal orator is the good man who acts and speaks well.
Quintilian repeatedly holds up this ideal, calling on his readers and pupils to strive for an impossible excellence. This orator was also to be an expert in the study of grammar, as defined by Quintilian:
This subject comprises two parts—the study of correct speech and the interpretation of the poets—there is more of it behind the scenes than meets the eye. The principles of writing are closely connected with those of speaking, correct reading is a prerequisite of interpretation, and judgement is involved in all these. (1.4.2–3)
While grammar then, as now, included the rules of syntax, it also included the ability to understand and interpret literature, guided by judgment. Judgment becomes even more important as imitation and rhetoric call on the orator-citizen to act with propriety based on models and precedents, real and literary, historical and contemporary.
Judgment, then, is always tied into the very acts and texts it judges, a troubling circularity that Titus explores. Judgment and excellence are learned through reading the same texts that are to be evaluated. Excellence is gained by accurately judging and following—and, where appropriate, superseding—the necessarily imperfect texts of others. The search for excellence and proper judgment is a cyclical search within complex, interlayered texts in order to gain the means to judge those same texts and understand a code of moral behavior and appropriate action from them. For Quintilian this complexity only reifies the need for the right teacher, one who is also a model of excellence, but, as I will develop further, in Titus Quintilian’s teacher-as-model is problematic, another deferral in an ambiguous search for judgment. Juan Luis Vives, tutor at one time to Mary Tudor, also encourages the teacher to watch over the pupils’ use of models, though a bit later in his work he emphasizes that judgment derives from God (arguably a different kind of deferral).17 Vives links imitation to judgment: “To attain good imitation there is a need of a quick and keen judgment, as well as a certain natural and hidden dexterity. Therefore a true imitation of what is admirable is a proof of the goodness of the natural disposition.”18 Again, circularity exists, though of a slightly different kind. The core point here remains much the same: to imitate well requires judgment and excellence, which can in turn be proven to exist when imitation is done well.
While of course there were external, socially constructed, and known markers of excellence in the period, Titus largely elides these to point out the circularity in reasoning located in value judgments, a circularity that had grounding even among the most excellent of instructors and texts available in the Renaissance. Further, Titus emphasizes that some of this circularity is tied to the difference between accepting theoretical or esoteric statements about propriety or excellence within a text and enacting, or seeing enacted, these same judgments. As my opening example illustrates, this cycle of precedents, even in a single, seemingly straightforward example in Titus—where a model is chosen overtly and read directly and publicly, similar to how it would have been in a classroom—shows the difference between a theoretically proper interpretation of a model and the public enactment of that model, confounding to a degree the supposed applicability of classroom learning. The circularity of emulated precedents creates in Titus uncertain conceptions of self-construction and lively warrants for horrific action that question humanist reliance on imitative learning practices.
Read with this understanding of imitative and educational practices, Titus’s repeated (even parodic) patterns of emulation can be seen as pushing this questioning of circular judgment to a dramatic extreme, interrogating the emulative beliefs and practices of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, whether poets, pedants, or politicians. Accordingly, it is not surprising that Saturninus’s response to Titus’s claim for precedence sounds like a textbook reply. Titus features at least three different textbooks in the play itself, Cicero’s Orator, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and, most likely, Lily’s grammar, Brevissima Institutio, not to mention foregrounding several references within the text that apparently derive from schoolbooks familiar to the audience, such as Cooper’s Thesaurus.19 The most overt references to schoolbooks surround the longest appearance of the Boy on stage and the discovery of Lavinia’s rape, indicating a connection between the acquisition and the application of knowledge as well as a focus on the training of youth.20 However, through parallel examples of training, Titus explodes the emulative model, revealing its easy descent into error and suggesting that the space between believed universal decorum and enacted rivalry leads, at least within the world of the play, more often to violent repetition than to a transcendent means to excellence.
The play’s structure parallels Aaron and Tamora as instructors to Chiron and Demetrius with Marcus and Titus as instructors to the Boy. Chiron and Demetrius, in fact, seem at times little more than boys, unaware of the dangers in pursuing Lavinia, naïve in their belief of attaining her, parroting proverbs thoughtlessly, and dismissing both counsel and instruction out of hand, with a specific disregard for education exhibited through their inability to read Titus’s warning, so clearly apparent to Aaron (4.2.18–31). Bate notes that Titus’s warning, from Horace, was an example cited twice in Lily’s Brevissima Institutio, a core book of the English grammar school.21 Chiron does say it was something he read “in the grammar long ago” (23), creating a connection (though neglected) between him and early education. There is also the sense here that Chiron and Demetrius have been trained in Roman models to some depth, blurring further the boundary between Romans and Goths in the play. Bate also claims that Chiron and Demetrius “have an unusually high frequency of proverbial language: they talk in clichés.”22 That Chiron and Demetrius stand out as using proverbs in a play littered with them, speaks to their assimilation of culture and learning through decontextualized bits and pieces. It also speaks to their failures in using their acquired knowledge according to patterns of decorum recognized by the audience—their speeches stand out as piecemeal, which is perhaps appropriate given their final subjection to Titus’s cookery.
Further, we repeatedly see Aaron instructing Chiron and Demetrius in what is appropriate and in how to act, such as when he manipulates their dangerous rivalry over Lavinia into her brutal rape and mutilation (1.1.544–635). Aaron also specifically takes credit as “their tutor to instruct them” in their “bloody mind” (5.1.98, 101). Similarly, Lavinia, pleading for mercy before her rape and mutilation, calls attention to Tamora’s instruction of her boys: “O, do not learn her wrath: she taught it thee. / The milk thou suckst from her did turn to marble; / Even at thy teat thou hadst thy tyranny” (2.2.143–5). Tamora and Aaron each are foregrounded in the play as tutors to Chiron and Demetrius.
From this instruction Chiron and Demetrius create their brutal overdoing of Ovid, failing to recognize their own mortal danger—such as when Tamora instructs them to enact Murder and Rapine, falling easily into Titus’s hand—and attesting to emulation’s failure socially as well as personally, deriving in this case from the thoughtlessness of Chiron and Demetrius’s repetition, as well as the impropriety of the instruction they receive and the models they choose to follow. In no way do they exhibit the judgment that Quintilian espouses. As Bate puts it,
What Chiron and Demetrius have learnt from their reading of the classics at school is not integer vitae, but some handy information about how a rape victim was able to reveal the identity of her attacker even though he has removed her tongue because he had left her with her hands.23
The imitation of Ovid is here based on what Quintilian would see as a poor reading of the text, which allows it to become a model for surpassing villainy, rather than a tale with a strong moral warning. The emulative act shifts from being about trying to wrest the moral from “lecherie” and “wickednesse extreeme” to become instead about how to rape better than Tereus—not the condemnable lack of virtue rape entails.24
Titus’s and Marcus’s instructions for the Boy also reflect emulative models and practices as Titus and Marcus compete to instruct him in appropriate action after the discovery of Lavinia’s rapists. Marcus calls the Boy “Roman Hector’s hope,” arguing for well-thought-out “mortal revenge” as appropriate prosecution for Chiron and Demetrius, and approving of the Boy’s desire to kill the sons in “[t]heir mother’s bedchamber,” based on Lucius’s example (4.1.88, 92–4, 107–11). However, Titus rejects these suggestions for action as foolhardy, calling Marcus “a young huntsman,” and speaks instead of copying the “lesson” from the sand, emphasizing the significance of Lavinia’s written text: “And where’s our lesson then? Boy, what say you?” (95–106). In response to the Boy’s overbrave claim—“I say, my lord, that if I were a man / Their mother’s bedchamber should not be safe / For these base bondsmen to the yoke of Rome” (107–9)—and Marcus’s encouragement and citation of Lucius—“Ay, that’s my boy! Thy father hath full oft / For his ungrateful country done the like” (110–11)—Titus instead suggests sending a message, instructing the Boy that he will “teach [him] another course” (119).
While Marcus worries Titus is not planning revenge and calls on heaven to do so, Titus’s claim of another course raises the possible hope, inevitably frustrated in the play, of an alternative beyond tragic revenge, beyond the cycle of killing modeled in Titus from Seneca’s Thyestes, which in turn revisits the text of Ovid’s tale of Philomela, though without the hope of divine transformation or intervention.25 In fact, this hope for divine metamorphosis and salvation is mocked in Titus in the repeated commonplace Terra Astraea reliquit (Astraea, the goddess of justice, has abandoned the earth) and also in Titus’s futile arrows to petition the gods, as well as perhaps in Tamora’s own feeble portrayal of Revenge with Rapine and Murder, the closest thing this text gets to any divine presence.26
Of course, Titus’s other course ends up being little more than Hamlet’s plan to delve beneath the enemies’ mines to “blow them at the moon.”27 It is also, as with Hamlet, a move to feigning, which ties into Shakespeare’s own elaborate emulative uses of intertextualities, linking to Hieronimo’s feigned madness in the Spanish Tragedy, Amleth’s in the Saxo Grammaticus, and Brutus’s in Roman legend.28 As James has argued, Titus foregoes the epic genre and traditional modes of heroism, such as those that Marcus and the Boy espouse, and instead chooses another Roman precedent, “the feigned imbecility of Brutus, Rome’s early champion.”29 Instead of the ending that might have derived from Titus’s citation of Horace’s claim about needing no more weapons (4.2.20–21), we are given Titus’s gruesome outdoing of Tamora, Chiron, and Demetrius, as well as Ovid’s Procne and Thyestes’s Atreus: “For worse than Philomel you used my daughter, / And worse than Progne I will be revenged” (5.2.194–5). Titus’s alternative is deception rather than the open bravery Marcus advocates and the Boy reiterates—deception that, as Aaron puts it, Tamora would applaud (4.2.30). Though Titus does not abandon revenge, he abandons a straightforward model of revenge—the one he cautions against when Marcus calls for revenge even in “their mother’s bedchamber”—opting instead to outdo the imitation of the tale of Philomela that Aaron has initiated, to outdo Tamora at her own machinations, to become even more devious and deceptive (and to capture the mother bear as well as her whelps), but not to give up revenge.30
Titus’s move to outdo Tamora—as well as Procne and Atreus—by creating a banquet of her sons, and his likely imitation of Brutus, connects Shakespeare to his own contemporaries, not just to Ovid, Seneca, and other ancient writers. Tamburlaine, for example, refers to a similar emulative banquet, “And may this banquet prove as ominous / As Progne’s to th’adulterous Thracian king / That fed upon the substance of his child.”31 The reference to Marlowe is thus also an emulation of another purposeful emulation of ancient theater—and, within the play, of characters emulating other characters with precedents in ancient drama. In fact, throughout Titus Shakespeare borrows from his contemporaries—Peele, Kyd, Marlowe, Nashe, and others—purposefully highlighting his own emulative place, his own outdoing of his rivals, creating a bloodier work than any by his contemporaries, and pointing to the emulative core of the work itself.32
That a core model, physically present on the stage, in Titus and its exploration of emulation is Ovid, and specifically his Metamorphoses, is significant, since it was a staple of the English grammar school: “Extensive reading and memorizing of the Metamorphoses was almost universally required in sixteenth-century grammar schools.”33 In fact, Bate claims that “Ovid, being perhaps the easiest to read and to imitate in verse-writing exercises, occupied the foremost place” among the major Roman poets in the upper school where “rigorous rhetorical training was undergone,” adding, “It is not an exaggeration to say that Shakespeare’s first lessons in poetry were lessons in the imitation of Ovid.”34 For a play so absorbed in imitation, it is fitting that Shakespeare returned to his own early learning to shape a dramatic lesson about imitation. Such a lesson bitingly counters the humanistic trust in imbibing moral virtues through reading and learning from ancient models, while also emphasizing the power, though morally clouded in this case, of emulation and learning through example.
Though most clearly emphasized in Act 4, with its multiplication of textbooks and its references to learning and teaching, interest in education and emulation as well as in rhetorical practices runs throughout Titus. The text enacts these practices, showcasing the potential failure of judgment and understanding, at both the social and individual levels. The play is littered with references to historic precedents and stories, such as in my opening example. In the first act alone, Titus is compared to Aeneas and Priam, and perhaps to Polymestor and Abraham.35 These comparisons are often quite subtle, but add tremendous subtext to the play and amplify the emulative nature of allusions and associations within the text. Marcus’s subtle allusion to Virgil’s “pius Aeneas” links Titus to Rome’s lauded founder, while Titus’s reference to his own children as half of King Priam’s recalls Priam’s sacrifices for Troy and links Titus to one of the greatest tragic figures of Rome.36 In each case, Titus is compared positively to these popular ancient models of leadership, action, sacrifice, service, and nobility, thus increasing his own social place and identity within Rome. Demetrius’s recasting in this same scene of Tamora as Hecuba (wife of Priam) flips the comparison, turning Titus from Priam to Polymestor, who betrayed Troy and Priam’s trust by killing his son Polydorus after Troy’s fall—a choice that attempts to invoke Roman sentiment and history in favor of Tamora. This kind of self-construction in relation to historical and legendary precedents acts as a kind of shorthand for character building (and defaming) throughout this scene and the play as a whole. For example, 2.2 follows the many character referents in Act 1 with Tamora and Aaron’s bantering, linking themselves to Dido and Aeneas and Saturn and Venus. This scene also includes Aaron’s first direct reference to Philomel (2.2.43), which is picked up and continues throughout the play. Of course, many plays have similar cited precedents; however, I agree with Bate’s claim that “From the outset, the characters in Titus establish mythical and historical patternings for the action,” and that “the play’s classical allusiveness is deep, [though] not wide.”37 Shakespeare appears to purposefully invoke a particularly strong sense of historical modeling and comparative emulation throughout the play.
Shakespeare begins Titus with a formal debate, carefully balanced and staged as a kind of representative dialectic inquiry that highlights competing precedents within Roman ideals. Each son of the deceased emperor enters at opposite sides of the stage, presenting opposing perspectives for their rule of Rome: Saturninus argues for primogeniture and Bassianus for election and virtue. The initial speeches are structurally balanced. Saturninus specifically addresses the patricians (1.1.1) and Bassianus the tribunes (1.1.66), their initial deliberations are respectively eight and nine lines, and after Marcus’s reply their lines are again formally counterpoised: Saturninus speaks a single line, Bassianus nine, Saturninus seven, and Bassianus one. Marcus’s reply (from above them on the upper stage in Bate’s reading of the text) seemingly displaces them, putting Titus forward as yet another candidatus in an encomium of his character equal in length to all their lines added together.38
However, through Titus each brother’s claim is, in a certain way, simultaneously achieved. While Titus has the election of the people and embodies the Roman virtue Bassianus called for, he chooses Saturninus as emperor, supporting traditional primogeniture.39 As James argues, Titus’s own rhetoric reflects a Virgilian exemplarity: “Through a deeply traditional simile and address, Titus transforms the political scene from chaos to stately triumph.”40 He “imitates the august citizen in Vergil’s simile for Neptune,” who, in James’s translation, when mobs rage, ready for political revolt, they see as “a man dignified by his patriotic duty and service,” and accordingly “they fall silent and stand with attentive ears; he rules their spirits with words and softens hearts.”41 However, Titus’s apparent dialectic positioning leads rather to social and political disaster, as his repeated choice of precedent—the killing of Alarbus, and the election based on primogeniture—leads to Saturninus’s alliance with Tamora and a questionable rule that begins with an improper vying for Lavinia, who is already betrothed to Bassianus, and ends in multiple murders, with Rome on the verge of being overrun in battle.42 Titus’s personal losses begin here as well, with his loss of place and honor, as well as the killing of his own son in the contest for Lavinia. Thus, the germ of Titus’s tragedy—for both the play and its title character—lies in Titus’s rote following of precedent.43 Equally, the personal failures of the play, tied up in imitative acts, are replicated and intensified in the political failures of Rome, deriving from traditional emulative models of action. These include virtues that have been torn from their roots through rote followings of precedent, not all that dissimilar from the play’s uncritical and indecorous patternings of Ovidian imitation, which have also been torn from their root moral messages and humanist beliefs.
Marcus’s encomium of Titus demonstrates the play’s bridge of political, moral, and rhetorical elements, reading Titus as an emulative pattern that represents a stable, strong model of public virtue, an exemplar such as Quintilian suggests. The speech highlights Titus’s moral and political worth: he is not only personally virtuous—likened unto “Pius” Aeneas, Rome’s hero and founder (1.1.23)—but also represents a source of political and social stability through his successful campaign against the Goths and the barbarism they represent for the Romans. Just as Titus is linked to Aeneas, he is freely associated to every Roman, “A nobler man, a braver warrior, / Lives not this day within the city walls” (25–6). Marcus’s allusion to Titus’s sacrifice of expiation further highlights his moral character and also suggests his relation (like Aeneas) to the gods and the fate of Rome. To accept Titus as emperor is to select another Aeneas: morally strong, politically effective, and divinely supported. James states “the Andronici virtually claim the Aeneid as family history,” linking Titus to Virgilian and Roman honor and glory.44 Marcus is also careful to connect the election to the customary symbols of political power in Rome—the deceased emperor, the capitol, and the senate. His focus on honor, mentioned three times in 1.1.39–45, reflects the merging of Roman political strength and moral character. Accordingly, Marcus ends his speech with a lesson in appropriate action: “withdraw you and abate your strength, / Dismiss your followers and, as suitors should, / Plead your deserts in peace and humbleness” (1.1.46–8, emphasis in original). That is, Marcus ends his oration by evoking proper character and choices, blending the political and moral messages with rhetorical eloquence.
Most significant to my argument here, Saturninus’s response, “How fair the tribune speaks to calm my thoughts” (1.1.49), does not necessarily suggest his agreement. The lines do, however, suggest that Marcus’s moral and political rhetoric must be accepted in the socially-charged setting. Marcus is the good man skilled in speaking for whom Quintilian argues: his points are grounded in socially-embedded Roman beliefs, practices, and precedents that are so weighted that they almost necessarily have to be conceded. Saturninus recognizes that Marcus’s appeal to Titus’s worth and to the appropriate symbols of governmental power, from the gods to the deceased emperor to the capitol and senate, cannot be questioned. Saturninus concedes, then, but not without foregrounding that he has been forced to do so by powerful eloquence. This is a concession that does him no harm: he can always rally his supporters again, as he attempts to do when the election does not seem to go his way and there is again a moment in which to question the appropriateness of the election’s choice (1.1.207–11). Alternatively, Bassianus’s reply foregrounds Marcus’s “uprightness and integrity” (1.1.51), his personal honor (the good man skilled in speaking), and concedes to Titus as an honorable choice: for Bassianus, virtue is the focus of action and choice. He cannot but accept Marcus as emulative of ideal Roman oratory (and public choice) because of Marcus’s personal virtue, not to mention the virtue of Titus, Marcus’s “noble brother” (1.1.53).
Against this background of Virgilian honor and virtue, enacted by Marcus and Titus, the play foregrounds Tamora and Aaron as representative of opposing—though, significantly, not always different—political and moral views.45 Tamora’s first lines create a parallel between herself and Titus, and between her sons and his own, questioning Titus’s heralded strength, piety, and the symbol of his honor, his family tomb filled with noble sons:
But must my sons be slaughtered in the streets
For valiant doings in their country’s cause?
O, if to fight for king and commonweal
Were piety in thine, it is in these.
Andronicus, stain not thy tomb with this blood. (1.1.115–19)
The juxtaposition of similar values though in the name of a different cause undercuts Titus’s absolute claim for justice, arguing for fair judgment and treatment, based on mutually accepted precedents and values.46 Titus, in this formulation, should live up to his emulation of Roman virtues and show mercy and honor to the warrior Alarbus.47 When Titus dismisses Tamora’s pleas, her exclamation of “O cruel, irreligious piety!” joins with her sons’ comparisons of Rome to barbarous Scythia and of Tamora to Hecuba (1.1.133–44), reflecting and rejecting Titus’s and Marcus’s early speeches that praise Rome’s honor and suggest Titus as another Aeneas and Priam. Together Tamora’s family creates an opposing voice to the predominantly Roman voices in the text; indeed, the family’s voice is reinforced by Titus’s own later rejection of Rome’s worth and honor, including his famous label of Rome as “a wilderness of tigers” (3.1.54). Through parallels in the characters that run throughout the play, Rome is seen as not unique in virtue but as common in reproducing warring emulations from conflicted and uncertain texts.
Titus relentlessly shows emulative patterns and parallels that are exhibited (and questioned) in all the play’s characters. As already discussed, Titus and Tamora become twin revengers, each seeking to outdo the other in the name of a child whose limbs are “lopped” (Alarbus, 1.1.146, and Lavinia, 2.3.17), while Aaron and Tamora parallel Marcus and Titus as instructors of a new generation. In addition, Lucius parallels Tamora, as a bridge between the Romans and Goths: Tamora begins the play as Queen of the Goths and then Empress of Rome, while Lucius ends the play as the military leader of the Goths and then Emperor of Rome. Tamora and Lavinia oppose each other as respectively “Rome’s rich ornament” (1.1.55) and one who “overshine[s] the gallant’st dames of Rome” (1.1.322), each sought by Saturninus to be empress, and each in distinctive ways represents the moral center of Rome. These formal parallels reinforce the pattern of emulative rivalry that points to the core of the play: the potential failure of imitation as self-creation, owing to the uncertainties and circularity of textual judgment and to the impossible balance between accepted decorum and mounting rivalry. This line of argument is not meant to suggest that there is no difference between these paralleled figures; however, the parallels emphasize the slipperiness of judgment that the play enacts—its uncertainties more than its complete obscurity. Just how much do we finally approve of Titus’s actions or of Lavinia’s (perhaps unwise or ill-timed) berating of Tamora? We know where the lines between good and bad seem to be drawn in the play, but how we know, and how comfortable we are with even the purportedly good characters’ actions, remain for many productions and audiences unclear.
Returning to Act 4, which most clearly foregrounds the educative and emulative texts of the play, especially those of Ovid, we see the failures of imitative reading emphasized. The Boy, Marcus, and Titus all try to read Lavinia after her rape and mutilation, each failing as they apply inappropriate models to her actions: Marcus compares her to Cornelia, mother and educator of the divisive political reformers, the Gracchi, and thinks she wishes to read with the Boy to continue his education, while the Boy compares her to Hecuba run mad with sorrow, reading the tale of Hecuba as a kind of exemplar of his aunt’s state.48 Even when they finally realize that “somewhat doth she mean” (4.1.9), Titus dismisses the texts, judging them too easy and considering the works only as a means to “beguile thy sorrow till the heavens / Reveal the damned contriver of the deed” (35–6), completely missing the point that the tale of Philomela is the means of revealing the deed, a perfect model for her own circumstance.
When Lavinia attempts to signal that two were “contriver[s] to this deed” (4.1.36), Marcus grasps immediately what her gestures indicate, only to back away from the reading—“I think she means that there were more than one / Confederate in the fact. Ay, more there was— / Or else to heaven she heaves [her arms] for revenge” (38–40)—which instead matches his own actions in calling on heaven for revenge just lines later. Immediately after this, Marcus fails to read her well again, this time thinking that Lavinia has chosen Ovid for sentimental reasons, “For love of her that’s gone, / Perhaps she culled it from the rest” (43–4). Marcus consistently overreads the text before him, applying abstract and often personal models to Lavinia, perhaps locked into the pervasively self-focused rivalry of Rome that the play emphasizes, one that harkens back the self-assertions of Senecan tradition.49 Lavinia is of course able to read precedent perfectly in her situation, but this seems to be a horrible parody, an emulative reading made all too clear because of a perfect parallelism of circumstances made horribly literal through Chiron and Demetrius’s overdoing of Ovid’s tale.50
The drawn-out realization of exactly what has happened to Lavinia is amplified for the audience, since Marcus has already made the connection between Ovid and Lavinia’s horrible circumstances when he first saw Lavinia after her rape (2.3.11–57). This earlier reading is lost (dismissed as too literal, perhaps) as the process of seeking understanding begins again in Act 4. Just as this arrival at understanding is a slow, even painful, parodic reading of emulation’s place in society and education, Marcus’s first meeting with Lavinia is equally painful, a slow comprehension of reality, spoken in stylized rhetoric incapable of realizing in words the truth of Lavinia’s mutilation. Perhaps no other speech more clearly displays the failure of reading emulatively, of seeking for understanding in precedent. Marcus repeatedly tries to use literary patterns to understand Lavinia’s loss, though his evocation of textual precedents, such as Orpheus’s ability to calm Cerberus, offer little in the face of Lavinia’s reality.51 Marcus also returns to a personal model of (largely ineffective) revenge, ignoring his opportunity to console Lavinia: “O that I knew thy heart, and knew the beast, / That I might rail at him to ease my mind” (2.3.34–5). Marcus seeks to know Lavinia’s heart not to comfort her, but to comfort himself, to ease his mind, through railing.52 Only after Lavinia recoils from Marcus, at the thought of having to face her father and subject him to her ravishment, does he sincerely speak of comforting her, though this comfort is delayed more than 40 lines into his speech: “Do not draw back, for we will mourn with thee; / O, could our mourning ease thy misery!” (56–7). Marcus’s following of Roman models of retribution is cold and empty in the face of Lavinia’s suffering, and not all that different from Titus’s slaying of Alarbus before Tamora and his later slaying of Lavinia at the play’s final feast.
The references to popular schoolbooks in Act 4 connect to yet another schoolbook, Ascham’s The Schoolmaster, which contends with Quintilian’s emulative model of education and emphasizes a need to revise flawed ideas of learning through vying in rivalry. When Marcus alludes to Cornelia, he summons her as an example of the proper education of youth.53 A similar passage from the first pages of The Schoolmaster recalls Titus’s concern with patterning, education, and judgment:
In very deed, if children were brought up in such a house, or such a school, where the Latin tongue were properly and perfectly spoken, as Tiberius and Caius Gracchi were brought up in their mother Cornelia’s house, surely then the daily use of speaking were the best and readiest way to learn the Latin tongue. But now commonly, in the best schools in England, for words, right choice is smally regarded, true propriety wholly neglected; confusion is brought in, barbarousness is bred up so in young wits as afterward they be not only marred for speaking but also corrupted in judgment, as with much ado, or never at all, they be brought to right frame again.54
While Ascham is here directly concerned with the instruction of Latin, his focus is the lasting impact that poor models have on judgment—social, moral, and rhetorical. Moreover, my earlier citation of Ascham’s grim, Babel-like vision of a world without linguistic and rhetorical decorum emphasizes his totalizing view of the need for “true propriety” in education and language use.
A central point of Ascham’s Schoolmaster is to put forward his process, which follows Cicero’s model, of “double translation,” urging its link to “true judgment.”55 Later in his work, he specifies that his model is in opposition to Quintilian’s ideal of emulative imitation. Ascham cites Cicero, Crassus, and Plinius Secundus as opposing Quintilian’s belief in “striv[ing] and contend[ing]” with the best models.56 Plinius calls this modeling “a bold contest” (Audux contentio) to which Ascham adds,
It is a bold comparison indeed to think to say better than that is best. Such turning of the best into the worse is much like the turning of good wine out of a fair, sweet flagon of silver into a foul, musty bottle of leather, or to turn pure gold and silver into foul brass and copper.57
Ascham continues to speak of this modeling as “chopping, and changing the best into the worst,” an apt phrase for Titus’s treatment of Lavinia and Titus, among others.58
However, Ascham’s double translation—learning to model ancient texts by translating them from one language to another and back again, with a period of time between translations—is only slightly removed from the imitative paraphrasis championed by Quintilian, mostly an academic quibble and by no means directly related to generating improved judgment. Using Plinius as his source, Ascham claims his method will facilitate apt and comely choice and states,
following diligently thus the steps of the best authors, like invention of arguments, like order in disposition, like utterance in elocution is easily gathered up, whereby your scholar shall be brought not only to like eloquence but also to all true understanding and right judgment, both for writing and speaking.59
Again, Ascham’s goal is patterning based on models, with true judgment as the outcome. As he later argues, his method is more correct because the perfect pattern—the original text that is translated and then restored as exactly as possible—remains always before the eyes as a “touchstone” and measuring rod.60 However, in Lavinia’s case exact repetition and an attempt at double translation would have hardly mitigated Chiron and Demetrius’s horrific translation of Ovid. It would certainly not by itself have taught them more appropriate patterning or have increased their judgment and understanding.
While Ascham offers a revision of Quintilian’s emulative rivalry, his model equally fails to escape the recycling of precedents unsuited to new circumstances or lively reenactment. Imitation, whether precise translation or emulative patterning, fails to teach social codes of behavior, because it does not offer an apparatus able to judge texts, to weigh their applicability, or to guide their repetition—judgment and discretion is needed to attain and apply deepened judgment. In Titus, where imitation is linked to revenge and justice—and not, as Tamora pleads, to mercy or forgiveness—rivalry leads to escalating violence only slightly worse than the simply repetitive quid pro quo of attempting exact retribution.
Marcus’s inability to read effectively, discussed earlier, seems to derive directly from this inability to escape the cycle of precedents that imitation offers him, including related self-focused notions of rivalry and revenge. After the final banquet, as Marcus and Lucius take over the education of the Boy and, indeed, all the people of Rome (and likely the Goths as well), their lessons of emulation and judgment embody frightening principles of choice and bias. Marcus’s final speech, meant to “teach you how to knit again / This shattered corn into one mutual sheaf” (5.3.69–70), is notably one-sided, and macabre after the repeated “chopping, and changing the best into worst” exemplified in the play. It emphasizes, as always, the honor of the Andronici and Rome (via the safe, post-mortem pardon of Saturninus) and attacks the wickedness of Aaron and Tamora, as betrayers of both the Goths and Romans. In fact, the only possibility of unity offered in Marcus’s closing oration is through the scapegoating of Aaron as “irreligious,” “misbelieving,” and “wicked” (120, 142, 144), and Tamora as bestial—“a ravenous tiger,” whose “life was beastly” (194, 198). Rebhorn, reading carefully the various myths extant in the period about rhetoric’s early civilizing influence on human beings—who are often seen as naturally violent and bestial, as Tamora is described—offers a view of rhetoric as a coercive force, a view that fairly aptly describes Marcus’s biased and self-protecting oration:
If human beings in their natural state are creatures of violence, the orator, too, in taming them, visits a kind of violence upon them, and his doing so may be interpreted as serving his own interests, his own will, no matter how much it supposedly serves theirs.61
Marcus speaks to justify his own family, his way of life, and his view of society and civilization, which is often egocentric and colonizing in nature. His kind of unifying speech is a questionable move toward constructing self-focused homogeneity. Rebhorn’s reading exemplifies the kind of exclusive universalizing that Ascham, Puttenham, and Quintilian each imply in their theories of language use, decorum, and imitation. Marcus’s one-sided sewing together of the play’s happenings, shared as “the truth” (127), becomes a kind of blackmail of the Roman people into passing positive judgment on the Andronici—if Lucius and Marcus were to hurl themselves to their death, as Marcus suggests, it would precariously leave the Goth army inside of Rome without Lucius at their head (118–35).
While Marcus does bring political order to an incredibly volatile situation, he does so in a way that is notably self-serving and one-sided. In fact, read back from this final scene, Marcus’s early proclamation, “Titus, thou shalt obtain and ask the empery” (1.1.204), so quickly rebuffed by Saturninus, seems to be a moment of political juggling. Marcus is often viewed as a stable and sensible character throughout the play, but here and elsewhere—as with his own calls for vengeance, at the hands of others, and his manipulation of Titus throughout the play—we realize that his drive for stability is perhaps most directly a selfish drive for political empowerment, most clearly evident in the final lines of the play. For Marcus, precedent allows him room, even pragmatic warrant, for political manipulation—his models seem to be kingmakers and the kinds of civilizers that Rebhorn addresses.
Lucius’s final acts of judgment in the play reify the accepted cultural stereotypes of the play, especially in the pitiless treatment of Aaron and Tamora (5.1.178–82, 190–99). Lucius punishes the accepted enemies of Rome and now of the Goths as well. He equally follows Roman precedent in pardoning Saturninus, despite the latter’s transgressive actions, upholding Roman honor and condoning Saturninus’s emulative vying for power and glory (it is the Roman way, the text seems to say). Saturninus’s actions are finally judged decorous, despite the slaying of Lucius’s own father—perhaps not all that different from Titus’s slaying of Lucius’s brother—largely, it would seem, because Saturninus is Roman, and thus ipso facto socially acceptable and politically linked to Roman precedent. Lucius’s judgments programmatically replicate Roman tradition, following Titus’s example at the play’s beginning.
Beyond this, the education of the Boy at the play’s end (5.1.159–74) reinforces, despite all that has occurred, the idyllic encomium of Titus that Marcus gave at the play’s beginning.62 The Boy is told to remember Titus and the “pretty tales” he taught (164). Given what the play has done with the pretty tales of Ovid—and the tales Titus teaches through his actions, as well as the punishments Lucius, the Boy’s father, inflicts—the Boy is left, as is the audience, with a portrayal of questionable patterns.63 Anderson argues that “In Shakespeare’s hands … Roman inheritance is not a thing already passed on to England and possessed by its citizens. Instead, the inheritance resembles a promise still to be completed, one that can, therefore, go violently and unpredictably awry.”64 However, given the emulous rivalry and violence reproduced in the play, going awry seems anything but unpredictable, and the desire to inherit Rome’s patterns is thrown into question.65
Lavinia’s rape offers a powerful site for the broad rejection of English emulation of Roman patterns. Returning a final time to my opening example of Titus before Saturninus at the final banquet, Titus, even in invoking the precedent of Virginius, seems skeptical, calling Virginius “rash” (36) and appearing to expect the horror and dismay that his slaying of Lavinia brings, including the resulting bloody denouement. The following of precedent is questioned even as it is invoked. The citation of Virginius’s tale can be read as evoking a larger social and political questioning of England’s emulation of Rome. Bott argues that this
tale informs the larger issue of the play: the effect of the growth and spread of a type of “sovereyn pestilence” [cited from the Virginius tale] or political corruption of the body of Rome. Shakespeare’s references throughout the play to Rome as an unhealthy body invite a comparison of the political and social causes of Rome’s malaise and a disease plaguing a physical body.66
Bott’s assertion links the tale to interrelated sexual and political transgressions and failures. The chaos of the political state is directly connected to, and enacted in, the vying over Lavinia that begins the play.67 Further, Aaron, particularly in his first monologue (cf. 1.1.511–14), specifically links political conquest to sexual conquest and political ruin to sexual transgression—patterns replicated throughout the play.68 The evocation of Virginius’s example ensures that the audience does not miss the connection between the political and legal (Apius’s unjust legal attempt on Virginia mirrored in Saturninus’s similar attempt) and the personal and social (for example, the terrible impact of Titus’s losses on all of Rome) associated with the play’s repeated emulative enactments.
Heather James has further developed the way Lavinia’s rape and mutilation tie literary imitation directly to political discourse, including a potential rejection of an English translation of empire.69 Marcus’s discovery of Lavinia and subsequent attempt to find sense in her condition through Petrarchan lines are connected to Shakespeare’s powerful overlap of Ovid, Virgil, and Petrarch in a kind of horrid blazon of Lavinia. James claims that Shakespeare translates Ovid into “the theatrical medium to radicalize Ovid’s habit of disconnecting events from their poetic representations. … [B]ut improves on his master’s technique.”70 This emulative overdoing of Ovid is meant to improve on and make more graphic Ovid’s skepticism of imperial values: “Shakespeare, whom Francis Meres called the Elizabethan Ovid, adopts Ovid’s contentious imitations in the speech he gives to Marcus, who inadvertently turns Lavinia’s maimed body into an emblem of Vergil’s contamination by Ovid.”71
However, the work here is even more complicated in its imitative actions. James argues that Shakespeare’s evocation of Petrarch again links Lavinia and Tamora, this time through his critique of the adoption of Petrarchism in the Elizabethan court.72 James pushes Bradbrook’s earlier linking of Tamora to Elizabeth’s own images—Phoebe, Astraea, Diana—further arguing that “Shot in the lap, Astraea, virgin goddess of justice and forerunner among Elizabeth I’s celebratory guises, is anatomically exposed as the whoring queen of the Goths,” in direct opposition to works like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Elizabethan pageant plays.73 For James,
Shakespeare’s play does not hold out the promise of rejuvenation once Roman models make the quantum leap to early modern England: instead, he challenges the capacity of privileged classical models to translate political and literary authority from Troy to imperial Rome and the Elizabethan court. His strenuous critique of petrarchism, attached to Lavinia’s body, serves indirectly to interrogate the literature and iconography used to consolidate royal power in the court.74
Shakespeare’s violent emulative practices threaten not just classroom practices and pedagogical and social systems of imitative learning and self-fashioning, but also monarchial forms of self-construction. Titus questions the emulative patterns invoked by the queen and in the process attacks the idea of the translation of empire.
The emulation of Rome is repeatedly and violently interrogated throughout Titus, and the political, social, and humanist movements to recreate Roman ideals in England are critiqued from multiple and overlapping points of investigation. Titus’s critique goes beyond the literary or even political spheres. The Roman emphasis on emulative patterns and precedents is shown to lead to political and social, personal and psychological chaos and tragedy. Humanist texts and educational practices, both contemporary and ancient, are dissected and shown to easily slide into immoral and horrid acts. Political modes of government and modes of representation are questioned and shown to be unstable. Ancient, inherited value systems are laid bare and uncertain: honor, familial unity, sexual norms, martial might, among many others. Personal modes of self-construction are shown to be easily perverted. Though social order may be restored (for the moment) at the end of Titus, the judgments, beliefs, and precedents that the play enacts undercut the final order, questioning the models of self-creation and political construction employed in both ancient Rome and in England, its self-proclaimed heir.
1 All references to Titus Andronicus are to The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series, ed. Jonathan Bate (London: Routledge, 1995). References will be given throughout parenthetically. Holger Norgaard, “Never Wrong but with Just Cause,” English Studies 45 (1964): 137–41, traces the likely origin of this version of Virginius, which does not follow Livy’s account. In Livy, Virginius kills Virginia to avoid her being raped by Appius Claudius.
2 The significance of a “textbook answer” is amplified by the fact that textbooks were not readily available in Elizabethan England, requiring the grammar-school education to rely heavily on memorization—some teachers even asking students to memorize entire books. Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), claims that Titus is here acting as a schoolmaster, drilling a student on his exercises, and that Saturninus gives the response of “a well-rehearsed pupil” (106). In terms of the setting of the questioning, when Tamora describes Titus’s banquet as “thy solemn feast” (5.2.115), contemporary readers may have heard an echo (parodical, finally) of the conviviums of Erasmus (and others), such as the convivium sobre, convivium profanum, or the convivium religiosum, in which deep philosophical matters, including questions of precedent, are earnestly discussed between guests at these private banquets. Craig R. Thompson, ed., Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 40 (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press), argues in introducing “The Sober Feast” that the colloquies are instructive gatherings that show Erasmus’s belief “that essential lessons of history can be learned from the words and deeds of the ancients” (925).
3 Quintilian, Orator’s Education 10.5.5.
4 Albert Tricomi, “The Aesthetics of Mutilation in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Survey 27 (1974): 11–19, 16.
5 Tricomi, “Aesthetics,” 16.
6 Heather James, Shakespeare’s Troy, esp. 79–84.
7 James, Shakespeare’s Troy, 42.
8 My reading of the horrid parody of emulation in Titus finds a parallel reading in Ticomi’s work, which focuses on a similar hyperbolic overdoing of dramatic metaphor in the play. In discussing the literalized use of metaphor, Tricomi focuses on how the “ironic denigration of metaphor,” such as Lavinia’s all too real rape, “deliberately ‘exposes’ the euphemisms of metaphor by measuring their falseness against the irrefutable realities of dramatized events” (“Aesthetics,” 13). As Tricomi claims about the excessive parody of metaphor, the use of emulation is “always conceived with the utmost literalness of imagination” (15), leading to a similar parade of parodic imitation literally coupled to the ugliness of emulation indecorously pursued. Gillian Murray Kendall, “‘Lend me thy hand’: Metaphor and Mayhem in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 40.3 (1989): 299–316, expands Tricomi’s work, beginning with the insightful claim that “words in Titus distort the way characters view their world, and the patterns of previous fictions and myths influence, transform, and mutilate the action of the play” (299).
9 T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine, 464, cites Thomas Spencer Baynes’s claims that “one main object of [Love’s Labor’s Lost] being to satirise pedantry, to expose the tasteless display of learning, the mere parade of scholastic technicalities, the writer must obviously have had some personal knowledge of the things, paraded in order that the satire may be relevant and effective.” While Baldwin never explicitly agrees with the statement that he cites, he does immediately refer to the play as an “exposé” (464). Baynes, Shakespeare Studies and Other Essays (London: Longmans and Company, 1894), 149, also cites Titus as evidence of Shakespeare’s learning. Emrys Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), entwines Shakespeare and Tudor humanism, adding, “without Erasmus, no Shakespeare” (13). While Jones may be a bit too emphatic, the strong connections between Shakespeare’s writing and humanist traditions has become nearly commonplace in Renaissance studies.
10 Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare’s Reading (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), 167.
11 For more on the progymnasmata, see Donald Lemen Clark, Rhetoric in Greco-Roman Education (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1957). James J. Murphy, “Key Role of Habit in Roman Writing Instruction,” in A Short History of Writing Instruction from Ancient Greece to Modern America, 2nd edition, ed. James J. Murphy, 35–78 (Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 2001), esp. 56–64, presents a brief account as well.
12 For more on the early English grammar schools, see Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), esp. 11–47; Don Paul Abbott, “Rhetoric and Writing in the Renaissance,” in A Short History of Writing Instruction from Ancient Greece to Modern America, 2nd edition, ed. James J. Murphy, 145–72 (Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 2001); Rebecca Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1996); Donald Lemen Clark, John Milton at St. Paul’s School, a study of ancient rhetoric in English Renaissance education (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1948); and T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine.
13 Robin L. Bott, “‘O, Keep Me From Their Worse Than Killing Lust’: Ideologies of Rape and Mutilation in Chaucer’s Physician’s Tale and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus,” in Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, ed. Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose, 189–211 (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 195. Bott offers a powerful gendered rereading of the social and political ideologies that allow for the brutal deaths of Virginia and of Lavinia. In a sense Saturninus enacts (following the history of Virginius) the role of Apius, the corrupt political figure responsible for Virginia’s (potential) rape, who attempts to punish Virginius for the killing of his daughter—a reading that reemphasizes the political duplicity and social disintegration that pervades the text of Titus.
14 Bott, “Ideologies of Rape,” 196 (emphasis in original).
15 Bott, “Ideologies of Rape,” 196.
16 Ascham, The Schoolmaster, 115.
17 Juan Luis Vives, Vives: On Education: A Translation of the De Tradendis Disciplinis of Juan Luis Vives, trans. Foster Watson (1913; repr. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1971), 194–5, 275.
18 Vives, 194. It is worth noting that Vives devotes a full chapter to imitation immediately after his chapter on the study of rhetoric, the only other chapter directly related to rhetoric in this text.
19 Cicero’s Orator is mentioned by Marcus at 4.1.14; Ovid’s Metamorphoses is alluded to throughout the play, but is referred to directly on stage at 4.1.42; finally, Lily’s Institutio is the likely reference when Chiron claims he knows the origin of Titus’s revealing citation of Horace (see Bate, ed., Titus, especially 4.2.20–21fn and 4.2.23fn). Cooper’s Thesaurus is the likely source of the Boy’s version of Hecuba running mad (see Bate, ed., Titus, especially 4.1.20fn).
20 Bate notes that the likely staging of this scene would have the Boy entering from one side of the stage, running from Lavinia toward Marcus and Titus and dropping his books halfway across the stage, leaving the books “centre stage, well placed for the subsequent business” (4.0.3fn).
21 Bate , Shakespeare and Ovid, 20; Bate, ed., Titus, 4.2.23fn.
22 Bate, ed., Titus, 1.1.582–3fn.
23 Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, 108.
24 Ovid, Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation (1567), ed. John Frederick Nims (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2000), 6.606.
25 Curtis Perry has developed the significance of Titus’s links to Seneca’s Thyestes in an unpublished paper, “Senecan Belatedness in Titus Andronicus,” presented at the 35th Annual Meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, April 5–7, 2007, San Diego, CA. Perry’s work also significantly links Seneca to the kinds of questions of self-representation and self-assertion that my own work explores.
26 As Bate notes, the phrase Terra Astraea reliquit is borrowed from Ovid and is repeated twice in The Spanish Tragedy (Titus, 4.3.4fn), as is the search for justice by digging, as Titus instructs Publius and Sempronius to do while the others shoot the petitions to the heavens (4.3.10–15).
27 Harold Jenkins, ed., Hamlet (1982; repr. London: Methuen, 2003), 3.4.211.
28 Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005), 187–8, links Brutus to Hamlet (who in turn is closely related to Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy).
29 James, Shakespeare’s Troy, 71.
30 It is important to note that Shakespeare’s refiguring of ancient stories and precedents follows, as Karen Robertson has pointed out, a continued move to elide the agency of women and yet equally emphasize feminine culpability (“Rape and the Appropriation of Progne’s Revenge in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, or ‘Who Cooks the Thyestian Banquet?’” in Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, ed. Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose, 213–37 [New York: Palgrave, 2001]). Repeatedly, Titus is able to outdo all earlier precedents, most of whom are female, and to counter and best Tamora, while at the same time killing his own daughter. No female characters in this retelling of ancient models are able to stand parallel to Progne. At the same time, however, it is also important to add that with Tamora dressed as Revenge on the stage, and the main line of the plot moved from the public sphere to the private, Shakespeare creates a strongly feminine connotation of revenge. See Ann Christensen, “‘Playing the Cook’: Nurturing Men in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Yearbook 6 (1996): 327–54, and Brecken Rose Hancock, “Roman or Revenger?: The Definition and Distortion of Masculine Identity in Titus Andronicus,” Early Modern Literary Studies 10.1 (May 2004): 7.1–25, for more on this femininization of revenge.
31 Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, Part 1, in English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology, ed. David Bevington, Lars Engle, Katharine Eisaman Maus, and Eric Rasmussen, 183–243 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002), 4.4.23–5.
32 Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, 102, argues that Shakespeare “trumps his contemporaries in their own suit,” showcasing his own abilities despite a lack of advanced education, perhaps even responding to Greene’s “upstart crow” accusation. Bate also further addresses the range of Shakespeare’s borrowings in the introduction to his edition of the play, especially in the “Origins” section, cf. Titus, 69–95.
33 Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, 21.
34 Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, 21, 22.
35 The comparisons are found at Titus 1.1.23, 83, 141fn, and 387fn, respectively. Other comparisons include that of Rome to Scythia (134) and to the Greeks (384); implicitly, the Goths and Romans to each other throughout; Tamora to Hecuba (139), Phoebe (321), and Semiramis (521), and to a goddess, a nymph (521), and a siren (522); Alarbus to Polydorus (139); Saturninus to his father and to Titan (230); Mutius to Ajax (384); Marcus to Ulysses (385); Tamora’s new position as empress to “Olympus’ top” (500) and Tamora herself to the Greek gods and goddesses; and so on.
36 Aeneas is frequently called “pius” in the Aeneid, an association familiar to both Roman and Elizabethan audiences; cf. Virgil, Aeneid, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (1916; repr. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999), 262 (1.305), 266 (1.378), among others.
37 Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, 103.
38 For Bate’s reading see 0.1–4fn and 1.1.17sd.
39 This kind of partial representation that Titus stands for here reflects the endemic misuse of synecdoche throughout the play, a point well documented by Nancy L. Christiansen, “Synecdoche, Tropic Violence, and Shakespeare’s Imitatio in Titus Andronicus,” Style 34 (Fall 2000): 350–79.
40 James, Shakespeare’s Troy, 49.
41 James, Shakespeare’s Troy, 49.
42 James argues that “Vergilian pietas has ossified over the centuries” and “Titus’ religious and patriotic observances conform to the letter rather than the spirit of the law” (Shakespeare’s Troy, 52). James also notes that Titus’s choices of precedent would have unsettled an Elizabethan audience who would have seen Titus as unsettling a balanced, mixed government and “seek[ing] to base his own political power on a dynastic claim” (53).
43 Coppelia Kahn, “The Daughter’s Seduction in Titus Andronicus, Or, Writing is the Best Revenge,” Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women, 46–76 (New York: Routledge, 1997), has discussed how Titus’s overzealous loyalty to Roman male ideals leads to tragedy in this play.
44 James, Shakespeare’s Troy, 51. Titus’s later move away from this pattern of Virgilian honor to Ovidian imitation is also developed by Heather James, who ably reads the imitations of the earlier texts as critique of Rome and an important reexamination of England’s own place in the 1590s—a historical reexamination that is further taken up by Rebecca Ann Bach, “Titus Andronicus, Transcendence and Succession,” Journal of Narrative Theory 29.1 (Winter 1999): 1–26. Eugene M. Waith, “The Metamorphosis of Violence in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Survey 10 (1957): 39–49, develops the first thorough reading of Titus as pervasively echoing Ovidianism, and not just the tale of Philomela. For a larger study of Shakespeare’s imitation of Ovid, see Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, esp. 83–117.
45 In fact, the writings of Ovid, Horace, Seneca, and others create an intertextual union between the differing groups as presented in the play (their cultures and educations are finally more similar than different, despite protestations for differentiation). Each character, despite their background, is finally based in the same ancient models. For example, Aaron’s character emphasizes not a difference in textual references—he is the one who chooses Ovid, who recognizes Titus’s citation of Horace, etc.—rather he represents a different application of the knowledge, a choice of different precedents within the sources. He literally plays the villain, acting his role of blackness out. (See the preceding footnote for a reference to James’s excellent work on the overturning of Virgilian honor in Titus.)
46 Tamora’s argument, though unsuccessful, acts as a kind of ulterior argument to the Andronici. In a way, her voice—and that of her family in the play—acts in accordance to Joel Altman’s excellent discussion of the period’s active support of contrasting argumentation, argument on both sides of a question (in utramque partem), purposefully creating what he has called “a great complexity of vision” with “probable ambivalence and multiplicity of view(s)” (Joel Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1978], 3–4).
47 Tamora calls Titus “thrice noble” (123), echoing Marcus’s triple repetition of Titus’s honor.
48 Cornelia is used by Ascham in The Schoolmaster as an example of the most proper and perfect learning of language in the home (17); she is often referred to in this kind of exemplary way. Tiberius and Caius Gracchi, sons of the consul Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus (a plebeian), attempted together to work, each in turn serving as tribune, to reform social policy in Rome, especially in limiting the size of patrician farms to allow the plebeians to compete with the wealthy landowners. They are in a sense, then, the exact antithesis to Saturninus and Bassianus and the intense and pervasive rivalry of Titus, though their deaths for their attempt to improve the social condition also suggests that Rome may indeed be the “wilderness of tigers” Titus calls it (3.1.54).
49 Bott argues that the misreading is directly related to the “dominance of patriarchal modes of communication” and “highlights the male characters’ urge to control communication” (“Ideologies of Rape,” 202–3). Certainly, Lavinia’s final success at communication, writing with a staff within her mouth, reflects, as Bott puts it, “Lavinia’s dependency upon the patriarchy and the language of the patriarchy” (203). It also reiterates the fact that her current condition is part of the rivalry of patriarchy Bott explores in her work: “Rape in this play also serves as a political message of conquest etched on Lavinia’s body, sent from one rival to another” (201).
50 The discovery of this brutal rape also relies on another unspoken intertextuality. Marcus’s instruction to write on the sand emulates Ovid’s tale of Io whose act of writing on the sand revealed her true, terrible circumstances to her father.
51 Kendall argues that reading reality (even the staged reality of the play world) through precedents “make[s] for an inflexibility of mind” (“Metaphor and Mayhem,” 303). Her charge would be damning to the rhetoricians and teachers of the period, who emphatically felt that emulative thinking contributed to facilitas and copia, powerful inventive qualities—and perhaps this is part of the play’s seeming attack on and parody of extant educational practices. Certainly we see a lot of mental inflexibility in this play—notably, Titus’s initial rote following of precedents that precipitates the continuing actions of the play—though this represents as much a failure to understand the inventive potential of emulation as it does any limit of emulative thinking and patterning. Marcus’s own actions here seem to be as much about his self-absorption in the face of another’s tragedy as his inflexibility of thought. What we see repeatedly is how failures of judgment and propriety lead to thoughtless emulative choices, whether lacking in imagination or simply in decency.
52 There is here an echo of Titus’s own selfish slaying of Lavinia based on Virginius’s precedent in order to end “thy father’s sorrow” (5.3.46), though Titus embodies the idea in action, while Marcus does so in words alone.
53 Marcus specifically connects Cornelia’s excellent educational practices with Cicero, whom Ascham overwhelming puts forward in his own work as the best model of education and oratory.
54 Ascham, The Schoolmaster, 17. Ascham repeatedly conjures the Goths as symbols of disorder and “barbarousness.”
55 Ascham, The Schoolmaster, 14. The terms double translation and double translating are introduced later, on 83–7, 94.
56 Ascham, The Schoolmaster, 87.
57 Ascham, The Schoolmaster, 88.
58 Ascham, The Schoolmaster, 88.
59 Ascham, The Schoolmaster, 86.
60 Ascham, The Schoolmaster, 84.
61 Rebhorn, Emperor, 27 (emphasis in original).
62 Here is a kind of double translation, with the result being a simple repetition of the same idea, unquestioningly reiterated. These ideas, Hancock, among many others, has made clear, include a very narrow definition of masculinity that dogmatically embraces violence.
63 The omission in the First Folio (The Norton Facsimile: The First Folio of Shakespeare, prep. Charlton Hinman, [London, 1968]) of the reference to remembering Titus’s “pretty tales” is perhaps suggestive of an attempt to clean up the play’s ending. The Folio has Lucius specifically speak to appropriate action, in this case loving grief:
Many a matter hath he told to thee,
Meete, and agreeing with thine Infancie:
In the respect then, like a louing Childe,
Shed yet somme small drops from thy tender Spring,
Because kinde Nature doth require it so:
Friends, should associate Friends, in Greefe and Wo. (5.3.164–9)
Interestingly, the plea to follow kind nature reflects Saturninus’s condemning of Titus’s killing of Lavinia as unnatural and unkind.
I am, of course, not the only reader to note the questioned value and role of Lucius as the final ruler (and pitiless punisher) of Rome. Recently, Anthony Brian Taylor (“Lucius, the Severely Flawed Redeemer of Titus Andronicus,” Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate 6.2 [1996–1997]: 138–57) elicited a number of scholarly responses to the role of Lucius in Titus. While there are variances in the reading of Lucius, his final actions raise significant questions about the future of Rome and the patterns and precedents he is reiterating at the close of the play (see, for example, Jonathan Bate’s response to Taylor: “‘Lucius, the Severely Flawed Redeemer of Titus Andronicus’: A Reply,” Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate 6.3 [1996–1997]: 330–33). See also, Jeanette S. White, “‘Is Black so Base a Hue?’: Shakespeare’s Aaron and the Politics and Poetics of Race,” CLA Journal 40.3 (1997): 336–66—who describes Lucius as “just another vindictive character” (360), Hancock, “Roman or Revenger?” and Molly Easo Smith, “Spectacles of Torment in Titus Andronicus,” Studies in English Literature 36.2 (1996): 315–31.
64 Thomas P. Anderson, “‘What is Written Shall Be Executed’: ‘Nude Contracts’ and ‘Lively Warrants’ in Titus Andronicus,” Criticism 45.3 (2003): 301–21, 303 (emphasis in original). Anderson also notes that “by linking historical continuity to the violence within the precedent texts, Shakespeare’s play challenges the imperialism of classical models in an era of translatio imperii” (313).
65 Kendall, “Metaphor and Mayhem,” 316, appropriately ends her article with the simple statement that “The violence of Titus Andronicus promises never to cease.”
66 Bott, “Ideologies of Rape,” 197.
67 The rape of Lavinia, who has been called “Rome’s rich ornament” (1.1.52) and whose name is that of Aeneas’s first wife (a name that literally embodies the land of Latinus), is a rape of Rome, as well as a personal tragedy; see Bott, “Ideologies of Rape,” 201.
68 Aaron links his sexual domination over Tamora to her coming domination of Saturninus and Rome’s resulting “shipwreck” (Titus 1.1.523). Bott claims, “Aaron specifically links adultery to social and political ruin,” believing that his unlawful union with Tamora will spread like a “pestilence downwards from the ruling head of Rome through its entire social and political body” (“Ideologies of Rape,” 198).
69 The “potential” here is critical, in my mind. As James asserts, Shakespeare had to “keep a question-mark against his name” (Shakespeare’s Troy, 83) in political matters and, citing Muriel Bradbrook, his goal was “open form,” since “to set the audience debating meant full houses” (84). For Bradbrook’s complete argument, see Muriel Bradbrook, The Living Monument: Shakespeare and the Theater of His Time (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976), 115. This open form is critical to rhetorical studies of the period, as developed by Joel Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind. Altman’s work is a thorough look at rhetoric’s place in the period’s drama and emphasizes the integral use and need for argument “in utramque partem—on both sides of the question,” a central rhetorical and pedagogical precept in the Renaissance (3). Altman’s work reminds us to be ever careful in making too definite a statement on drama’s uses in the period.
70 James, Shakespeare’s Troy, 61.
71 James, Shakespeare’s Troy, 62.
72 Cf. James, Shakespeare’s Troy, 65.
73 James, Shakespeare’s Troy, 72.
74 James, Shakespeare’s Troy, 83.