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IN ANY DISCUSSION OF SHAKESPEARE and the New World, it seems The Tempest "must follow, as the night the day." I propose instead to analyze the use of American exploration narratives in Shakespeare's earliest tragedy. In its preoccupations with Rome, Ovid, Virgil, and Seneca, Titus Andronicus is usually read in dialogue with Renaissance humanism. Without discounting its classical context, we may profit by examining the play alongside representations of New World cannibalism in sixteenth-century writings about American conquest. These representations involve a distinctly different set of conventions from those of classical stories. Crucially, accounts of Old World anthropophagy emphasize the physical act of eating, while in visual and verbal depictions of New World cannibalism the act of eating occurs as an afterthought or a leftover of the ritual killing that precedes it.1 The sources available to Shakespeare frame questions of anthropophagie behavior and ethics in ways that are highly relevant to the play's dynamics. An examination of these conventions sheds new light upon one of the play's cruces, the apparent anticlimax of the cannibal banquet scene that closes the play's action. An analysis of Titus in an American context shows us a play organized around misuses of cooking and eating with roots not only in classical literature but in the behaviors of Iberian, Brazilian, and Aztec warriors. Cannibalism, the play's central metaphor, provides a mechanism by which victims and victors debase each other, producing an ethical landscape controlled by variegated forms of devourment and dismemberment. In any act of eating, one organism is destroyed to serve another, and the resulting collapse of self and other provides sustenance and regeneration for both. In Titus, eating destroys, but produces neither sustenance nor regeneration for eater or eaten. In such a world, the collapse of the self/ other boundary that eating necessitates does not liberate, but rather degrades all parties. In Titus, the heuristic of consumption is the uncovering of one's own inhumanity.
Revenge and Anticlimax
In the final scene of Titus, the title character presents the Gothic queen Tamora with a pie in which he has baked her sons, which she proceeds unwittingly to eat. When asked to account for the sons' whereabouts, Titus reveals his plot in the gloating tones of the Renaissance revenger:
Why, there...