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Titus Andronicus provides uniquely direct dramatizations of allusive authorship and reception, particularly through its sustained engagement with Ovid's tale of Philomela's rape and revenge. Heroes and villains alike make use of this source: Aaron, Chiron, and Demetrius use it as explicit inspiration for their rape and mutilation of Lavinia; Marcus Andronicus invokes it as part of an eloquent rhetorical escape from the insufferable immediacy of finding his savaged niece; Lavinia directly quotes the material text of Ovid in order to communicate the full extent of her suffering; and Titus models his culinary revenge on that visited upon the rapist Tereus. One key distinction that can be made between certain of these instances of allusion is how they affect the action of the drama: the rapists clearly use Ovid as a pattern for their actions, and Lavinia's explicit reference to the tale provides the impetus to revenge. Marcus's allusive lament, though, notably fails to do anything. The reason for this absence of action is, this essay argues, the lack of perceivable authorial intentionality behind the allusion. This reading suggests that William Shakespeare emphasizes his own creative power, but in a way that implicates it in the destructively imitative cycle of revenge.
RAPE, torture, murder, dismemberment, cannibalism: William Shakespeare's first tragedy contains as much gruesomeness as the rest of his plays combined. Focused on the figure of Lavinia, the excess of violence knows virtually no bounds and resists being compartmentalized in brief moments of horror. One would think that nothing could surpass the brutality of the tongueless, handless, and newly widowed woman being mocked by her rapists, but soon Shakespeare confronts us with the image of Titus's severed hand taking the place of his daughter's excised tongue; then, in the course of taking her revenge, Lavinia's bloody stumps mirror the slashed necks of her assailants as she catches their lifeblood in a mixing bowl; finally, in the climax, Titus's ritualized murder of his daughter forms a fitting counterpoint for Tamora's cannibalistic ingestion of her offspring. Even in the context of the sensationalized Senecan violence popular in the drama of its time, Titus Andronicus stands out as especially histrionic in its virtuosic, almost gleeful depiction of bodily destruction.
Inseparable from the play's pervasive violence is its equally...