Content area
Full text
THE DRAMATIC RISE IN FAVOR of Titus Andronicus among critics and directors has-perhaps not coincidentally-closely paralleled the growth of feminist Shakespeare criticism.1 While feminists have not been the only critics writing about this play in the past twenty years, they have contributed substantially to the expanding body of commentary on it. Prominent among their concerns have been the play's vivid representation of Lavinia's victimization and rape; its foregrounding of patriarchal attitudes; its monstrous, sexualized mother, Tamora; and its imagery of womb, tomb, and pit.2 This feminist work has highlighted the many ways in which the play is informed by gender ideology. The Rome of Titus Andronicus is an almost exclusively male world; its two female characters, their roles sharply circumscribed by patriarchal norms, are both dead by its end, and few other women are even referred to in passing. As Coppélia Kahn has recently written, in Shakespeare's plays and in the traditions Shakespeare inherited, "Romanness is virtually identical with an ideology of masculinity,"3
Seldom, however, has feminist criticism taken a close look at what genre and tradition have cited as the play's main concern: revenge. To the extent that feminists have confronted the issue, they have tended to downplay women's participation in revenge, emphasizing instead their role as victim. In such readings Tamora's excessive cruelty and violence is held to have its ultimate source in male fantasy; Lavinia's insulting treatment of Tamora in Act 2 and her active participation in her family's revenge plot in Acts 3 through 5 are either ignored or viewed as imposed on her; and Titus and the other male members of his family are represented as reducing Lavinia to an object, silencing her, or subjecting her to a patriarchal script,4 The play as a whole is taken to be structured around the spectacular display of the female body, written on by violence, while violence against the male body is ignored.5
Such readings may speak to a wish to construct the violence of revenge as a purely "male" problem or an effect of patriarchy.6 They are consistent with a tendency in a good deal of feminist writing beyond the domain of Shakespeare criticism. Women are the noiiviolent sex, far more likely to be victims of violence than its perpetrators. When they...