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SEL36 (1996)
ISSN 0039-3657
Spectacles of Torment in
Titus Andronicus
MOLLY EASO SMITH
only the terrorizing power of the prince, there was the whole
aspect of the carnival, in which the rules were inverted, authority mocked and criminals transformed into heroes."3 Indeed, the
considerable popularity of this tragedy may be attributed, like
that of The Spanish Tragedy, to the author's ingenious transference of the spectacle of death and dismemberment from Tyburn
and other such precincts to the theatrical arena.4
In other words, though initially drawn into a complacent
Molly Easo Smith teaches Shakespeare and Renaissance drama at the
University of Aberdeen. She has also taught at Saint Louis University and is
the author of The Darker World Within: Evil in the Tragedies of Shakespeare and His
Successors (1991). Her essays have appeared in previous issues of SEL and in
Papers on Language and Literature.
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TITUS ANDRONICUS
ble thus exploits his audience's interest in the excesses associated with Otherness (in what one critic describes as "emblems
audiences relied upon for entertainment.6 I am especially interested in the myth of the Other as more violent and horrible than
the Self that Titus initially exploits and then completely decon-
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M O L LY E A S O S M I T H
317
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TITUS ANDRONICUS
legally recognized by the common law in England, it was nevertheless, as George Ryley Scott points out, used frequently and
justified under the name of discipline and punishment.11 Interestingly, "judicial torture reached its greatest ecumenity in the
reign of Elizabeth," as Scott documents, and this perhaps
explains Shakespeare's reliance on the spectacle of torture in
this Elizabethan tragedy and his later departure to an exploration of psychological torment in plays such as Macbeth and King
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319
(I.i. 104-8)15
In a reciprocal representation of alterity, the play dramatizes the
irony and falseness of the Self-Other binary most vividly in this
opening scene as Tamora and her sons, seen by the Romans as
barbaric and violent, in turn decry the Roman spectacle of retaliation and vengeance as primitive and inhuman. To Titus's
summary claim that religious rites demand a sacrifice, Tamora
responds "O cruel irreligious piety!" and her son adds "Was
never Scythia so barbarous!" (I.i.130-1). Thus, from the very
start, the play dramatizes the ironies that typified public punitive measures, and this opening scene, which began by reiterating the polarity between Self and Other, Roman and Goth,
moves swiftly through a series of events that emphasize instead
the slippery margins between these axes. Titus, after bemoaning the loss of his sons at the hands of the Goths, kills Mutius
in a fit of passion; Tamora's role shifts abruptly from enemy and
prisoner to empress of Rome; and the Andronici hailed as
Roman heroes are shortly after condemned as traitors. If one of
the central elements in the Self-Other dichotomy remains the
Self's desire to convert and civilize the Other, Tamora's absorp-
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TI T US AND R O NI C U S
tration of monarchical power, but an exposition of its hollowness. In the two instances where the Emperor Saturninus orders
such deaths, his sentences constitute gross miscarriages of
justice: the innocent boy bearing Titus's letter receives the death
sentence for his role as messenger in the employ of his enemy,
and Titus's two sons, wrongly accused of murdering Bassianus,
are beheaded on false evidence carefully manufactured by
out orders for a fee from Titus. His summary disposal by the
emperor and his inability to understand the sentence of death
passed on him-"How much money must I have?" he asks in
response to the death sentence-emphasize Saturninus's inefficacy as emperor. Thus, the Clown's hanging, a marginal event
in comparison to other rituals of death, nevertheless carries
the same general import as the mutilation of Alarbus; it reiterates the hollowness of Roman authority as manifested through
the figure of the emperor.19
The play's emphasis on mutilation, especially in the form of
execution, is symbolically reiterated throughout by the image of
Rome itself as dismembered and headless. Marcus invites Titus
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321
(I.i.462-4)
was he who first initiated revenge against Tamora by demanding a sacrificial prisoner from the Goths to appease the spirits
of the slain Andronici. In that scene, he also orchestrates the
sacrifice of Alarbus and returns with tokens of his deed to revel
in Tamora's humiliation as he announces its successful operation with vivid detail:
See, lord and father, how we have performed
Our Roman rites: Alarbus's limbs are lopp'd,
And entrails feed the sacrificing fire,
Whose smoke like incense doth perfume the sky.
(I.i. 141-4)
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TITUS ANDRONICUS
(V.iii.179-82)
(V.iii. 184-6)
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323
First hang the child, that he may see it sprawlA sight to vex the father's soul withal.
(V.i.50-1)
thee, Lucius, / 'Twill vex thy soul to hear what I shall speak"
(V.i.61-2). Indeed, Aaron waxes so eloquent and expresses such
(V.i.147-50)
Lucius's recognition of Aaron's power to use language as a
means of psychological torment emerges in his response: "Sirs,
stop his mouth, and let him speak no more" (V.i.151).
But Aaron's ascendancy has been effectively demonstrated by
his manipulation of Lucius's authority. The scene suggests that
a change which Karin Coddon traces to the early seventeenth
century was already emerging in the late sixteenth; arguing a
similar point about the inefficacy of executions in Macbeth, she
notes that "[i] n seventeenth-century England, the spectacle of
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TITUS ANDRONICUS
Becker who "on a visit to England, had noted the custom with
surprise. The convict resembled a minister on the pulpit, Becker
wrote, were it not for the rope around his neck."23 However,
though such speeches were intended to present a repentant
criminal reiterating the power of law, this was not always the case.
Commenting on the propensity for travesty inherent in the
format of the public execution, Foucault explains that because
the ritual of torture was sustained "by a policy of terror" which
made everyone aware "through the body of the criminal of the
unrestrained presence of the sovereign," it was especially suscep-
tible to manipulation by its participants.24 The public execution's social relevance depended so fully on its proper enactment
through the collusion of all its participants, including the hangman as an instrument of the law, the criminal as a defier of
divine and sovereign authority, the spectators as witnesses to the
efficacy of royal power and justice, that the slightest deviation
could lead to redefinitions and reinterpretations of power relations between subjects and the sovereign. Indeed, this happened
frequently enough to cause some concern to authorities. The
speech delivered on the scaffold by the victim provided an especially suitable opportunity for such manipulation; intended to
reinforce the power of justice, it frequently questioned rather
than emphasized the efficiency of the law. Certainly, Aaron's
vaunting speech on the scaffold may be regarded as typical of
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325
(V.i.125-44)
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3 TITUS ANDRONICUS
power.
displays of authority:
At the top of one tower almost in the centre of the bridge,
were stuck on tall stakes more than thirty skulls of noble men
who had been executed and beheaded for treason and for
other reasons. And their descendants are accustomed to boast
of this, themselves even pointing out to one of their ancestors'
heads on this same bridge, believing that they will be esteemed
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327
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328
TITUS V ANDRONICUS
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NOTES
cle in The Spanish Tragedy," SEL 32, 2 (Spring 1992): 217-32; for connections
PMLA 105, 2 (March 1990): 209-22; for an analysis of Macbeth along similar
lines, see Karin Coddon, "'Unreal Mockery': Unreason and the Problem of
Spectacle in Macbeth," ELH 56, 3 (Fall 1989): 485-501; for an analysis of
drama's connections with the ritual of women's executions, see Frances E.
Andronicus [London and NewYork: Methuen, 1968], p. xxxiv. Readers may wish
to consult the newest Arden edition, edited byJonathan Bate, which appeared
too late to be consulted for this article.
3Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan
yard voices this view in Shakespeare's History Plays (New York: Macmillan, 1944),
pp. 137-8, as does Muriel Bradbrook, who notes that "Titus Andronicus is a
Senecan exercise; the horrors are all classical and quite unfelt, so that the
violent tragedy is contradicted by the decorous imagery. The tone is cool and
cultured in its effect" (Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy
[Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1935], pp. 98-9). Critical opinion since
Tillyard and Bradbrook continued to corroborate this stand until recently; in
the last decade the play has received considerable revisionist critical attention.
Examples include Maurice Hunt, "Compelling Art in Titus Andronicus," SQ28,
2 (Spring 1988): 197-218; Eugene Waith, "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; Gillian Murray Kendall,
"'Lend me thy hand': Metaphor and Mayhem in Titus Andronicus," SQ 40, 3
(Fall 1989): 299-316; and Douglas E. Green, "Interpreting 'her martyr'd
signs': Gender and Tragedy in Titus Andronicus," 5Q40, 3 (Fall 1989): 317-26.
For an early analysis of a specific connection between a hanging and Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors, see T. W. Baldwin's William Shakespeare Adapts a Hanging (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1931); I am grateful to Douglas Bruster
for drawing my attention to this study.
5See Gary Miles's essay, "How Roman Are Shakespeare's Romans?" in SQ
40, 3 (Fall 1989): 257-83, for a sustained discussion of Renaissance conceptions of Romanness.
and England in the Ancien Regime (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1977). Also
of interest is Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines
of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press,
1992). William Harrison's "Of Sundry Kinds of Punishment Appointed for
Offenders," in The Description of England (1587), ed. George Edelin (Ithaca:
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TI T US ANDRONI C US
7For a study of Aaron's role in the context of attitudes toward Moors, see
Emily Bartels, "Making the Moor: Aaron, Othello, and Renaissance Refashioning of Race," SQ40, 4 (Winter 1990): 433-54; also see her recent book, Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe (Philadelphia: Univ. of
Pennsylvania Press, 1993), for a study of Renaissance notions of Otherness. For
studies that focus specifically on Moors in the drama, see Anthony Gerard
Barthelemy, Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representations of Blacks in English
Renaissance Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
Univ. Press, 1987), and Elliot H. Tokson, The Popular Image of the Black Man in
Renaissance Drama, 1550-1688 (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982).
'Scott, p. 89.
'3Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution
of Repression: From a Preindustrial Metropolis to the European Experience (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), p. 77.
4Scott, p. 136.
8Foucault, p. 61.
'9Francis Barker invests this scene with considerable cultural significance.
"The episode," he argues, "is a marginalized 'representation' which but barely
represents . . . both in extent and intensity, the death by hanging among the
ludic rustics and non-elite clowns of early modern England and Wales-the
real dead . . . The lack of effect associated with the demise of the Clown in
Titus Andronicus makes it casual . . . part of the routine, 'natural' landscape
and lifescape of the poor" (The Culture of Violence: Tragedy and History [Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1993], pp. 191-2).
24Foucault, p. 49.
25John Chamberlain, "Letter to Dudley Carleton," in Thomas Birch, The
Court and Times ofJames I, ed. R. F. Williams, 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn,
1849), 1:215.
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31In this sense, Bruce Boehrer's claim about Hamlet must extend equally
to Titus: "Hamlet enacts the promised end of Tudor imperial culture: an end
. . . that was by 1599 almost inevitable." Boehrer argues that during the last
decade of the sixteenth century, English subjects must have been acutely
conscious of and nervous about the issue of succession; Hamlet's preoccupation with this issue and dramatization of the end of a dynasty must have
invested its actions with a particular contextual relevance (Monarchy and Incest
in the English Renaissance [Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1992], p.
77). A similar argument might be made about Titus, a play whose actions
32Scarry, p. 4.
34Cohen, p. 90.
35Ibid.
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