We're talking today about Titus Andronicus case, I like the six lectures which are already on I tunes, these lectures are each going to be about an individual Shakespeare play. And I'm going to try and approach it by a kind of matter. Questions. I'm going to try and distil what criticism has been interested in into one question, often a question which seems ridiculously oversimplified.
Let's try and use that as a way of showing some of the different things we might try and do when we study Shakespeare plays. So I hope that the question is going to be a starting point for you to think about how you might approach this play and what you might do with it in relation to other plays. The first one I want to talk about is Titus Andronicus, a play written probably in fifteen ninety three. The first play of Shakespeare's to go into print in fifteen ninety four.
The question I've chosen for Titus Andronicus is why doesn't Marcus give Lavinia first aid? Why doesn't Marcus give Lavinia first aid? And I'm going to back up and talk a bit about the play and why. That's a question. I'm not expecting you when you come to these lectures, particularly to have read the play. And I hope that the way I talk about it will give you enough sense of the context to make sense of the points. So let's back up and talk about what's happening in Titus Andronicus.
So as many of you will know, Titus Andronicus is a Roman play, which begins with two interwoven plotlines in a tightly packed and unbroken long first act. So the first of those plotlines is about who rules Rome. So it's got that Roman play interest in it, in rule, in the qualities of a good ruler and in political succession forms of succession. You could see those in Julius Caesar or in Coriolanus also.
So saturnine US and Bassi honours, who are the sons of the previous emperor, are vying for the emperor shape of Rome. They're also vying for the hand of Titus Andronicus, his daughter, Lavinia. In the end, these two prises are separated out saturnine as becomes emperor and Bassi honours. Who is Lavinia's chosen husband gets the girl. And this all takes place against the backdrop of the triumphant return of Titus Andronicus at the head of his victorious and much depleted army.
Titus brings with him to Rome prisoners from the Goths who he's conquered, Tamura, queen of the Goths, her sons Kyron Demetrius and the Labus and the mysterious more Aaron Saturnine US takes tomorrow for his queen. Her son, a labus, is sacrificed, locked to pieces and burned by Titus and his eldest son Lucio's as an offering to the gods tomorrow secretly vows revenge. And when Lavinia and her husband Bassi Ana see tomorrow having an assignation in the woods with her lover Aaron,
they are attacked by tomorrow's sons, Catherine and Demetrius. The brothers kill Bassi Arnis and they rape Lavinia on the body of her husband. And then in order that she cannot reveal their names, they cut out her tongue and cut off her hands. It's in this state that she is found by her uncle, Marcus Andronicus. And this is the scene that I want to focus on. It's a scene which has caused critics and theatre directors enormous difficulty.
Marcus describes in a long speech a long and highly polite political speech. Lavinia's bleeding and mutilated body seeming to do nothing other than address her and to set aside her now because the length of the speech is important. My arguments here. I'm actually going to read it out in its entirety. So this is an Act two scene for Act two. Scene three, if you're using Jonathan Bates Ardern, three additions, active scene four. More generally, the stage direction reads wind horns.
Enter Marcus from hunting. And then this is Marcus, his speech. Who is this. My niece that flies away so fast. Cousin, a word. Where is your husband? If I do dream would all my wealth would wake me. If I do wake some planet strike me down that I may slumber and eternal sleep speak gentle. What stern ungentle hands have locked and hued and made thy body bare of her two branches.
Those sweet ornaments who's circling shadows kings have sought to sleep in and might not gain so greater happiness as half thy love. Why does not speak to me? Alas, a crimson river of warm blood like to a bubbling fountain stirred with wind, doth rise and fall between thy rosett lips coming and going with thy honey breath. But sure, some terrier's have deflowered the and lest I should detect him cut by term.
Now, that turns to the way they face for shame and notwithstanding all this loss of blood, Aastrom, a conduit with three issuing spouts, yet did our cheeks look red as Titan's face blushing to be encountered by a cloud? Shall I speak for the shall I say it is so. Oh, that I knew my heart and knew the beast that I might rail at him to ease my mind. Sorrow concealed like an oven stopped doth burn the heart to cinders where it is fair.
Phil Amela why she lost her tongue and in a tedious sampler sewed her mind but lovely knees that mean is cut from the craftier terrier's cousin has damit and he have cut those pretty fingers off. That could have better so than Philomel. Oh had the monster seen those lily hands tremble like Aspen leaves upon a lute and make the single sorry and make the silken strings delight to kiss them.
He would not then have touched them for his life. Or had he heard the heavenly harmony which that sweet tongue has made, he would have dropped his knife and fell asleep as Cerberus at the Thracians Poet's feet come. Let us go and make thy father blind for such a sight will blind a father's eye one. Our storm will drown the fragrant Medes. What will whole months of tears thy father's eyes do not draw back for we will mourn with thee.
Oh, could our morning ease thy misery now we don't really know how quickly plays Bould along in the Elizabethan theatre, but Greg Doren, contemporary data director at the RNC, cites a figure of eight hundred lines an hour on the modern stage. So a speech of forty five lines would last between three and four minutes is quite a long static time on stage,
just as it felt quite a long static time in this lecture. And as most state histories of the play will tell you, this is a speech which has tended to be drastically cut in performance is a speech which slows down the action, making Lavinia into an object to be contemplated, to be understood or interpreted in some disturbing sense. The abiding rhetorical figure of Markus's speech is that of phrases like phrases, the verbal description of a visual work of art.
Some of you may have read Laurie McGuire's excellent book, Where There's a Will. There's a way it's subtitled All I Really Needed to Know. I learnt from Shakespeare. It's a good premise, but never go to this woman for first aid. For all Shakespeare's human expansiveness, he would never teachers what to do in a medical emergency.
He doesn't really do paramedics after Gloucester has had the vile jelly of his eyes gouged out in King Lear, a play which shows that very graphic violence is not confined to his early period of Shakespeare's writing, but continues as a part of his understanding of tragedy all the way through. After that awful scene, the quartette text has some servants come to bathe Gloucester's face and to dress his wounds.
But they are not there in the revised folio text. They've been taken out in that revision. And elsewhere, Shakespearean characters are much more interested in applying poison than applying its antidote. They're more interested in stabbing than in binding wounds. So, of course, one immediate problem about Marcus's response to Lavinia is that it is completely unrealistic.
What man coming across a seriously wounded woman, let alone his own niece, would spend several minutes apostrophes ing the fluorescence of blood issuing from her body rather than comforting her or beginning to treat her injuries. This is a time, surely, for tourniquets, not tropes, surgery, not similes. In some ways, this common sense objection to Markus's behaviour I think rests on a misapprehension. And that's a widespread misapprehension that Shakespeare is a realist playwright.
I don't think Shakespeare is a realist playwright or he isn't. Only that if you remember the plays of Christopher Marlowe, a strong influence on Titus Andronicus. This is this is been very close to Marlos death in 50 93. We can see the character of Aaron the more who is a kind of Barabas from the Jew of Malta who wants to be Tamburlaine. If you remember those plays of Mahler's, you remember that people don't go to the theatre in the early fifteen nineties for a slice of life.
Kitchen sink drama like kitchen sinks have yet to be invented. Thomas Platter, visiting London from Switzerland in fifteen ninety nine, attended a performance at the Globe and he observed that the English do not travel much and prefer to learn foreign matters at home. The idea being that the stage brings unfamiliar things into people's lives rather than representing the things that they already know.
Being that's true in terms of the plot and particularly the language of plays of the early fifteen nineties, so that the theatre was a non realist medium at this point in the fifteen nineties, we might want to modify that. If we think about city comedy or citizen comedy, which you may be familiar with from works by Johnson or Decca or Middleton at the beginning of the 17th century, that might modify this at all. But it think about the early 50s, nineties, which is where we are with Titus.
It's important to remember that the theatre is non realist, particularly given all the subsequent criticism of Shakespeare, which has found his psychological realism, his most enduring claim on our attention. I'm not sure that Titus is a psychologically realistic play in this sense, in the sense that roundly drawn plausible figures act and speak in ways which are coherently linked to an individual personality.
I don't think I think it'll be hard to find that in Titus Andronicus. And another common idea about Shakespeare. Coleridge's idea that the plays require a suspension of disbelief, a suspension of disbelief, that would mean we would overlook the absurdity of Markus's speech at this point because we thought that's what the play needed us to do.
That also, I think, is something of a myth. It seems quite perverse to me to argue that plays which, for instance, consistently show characters in disguise or female characters dressing as men or which allude to the vocabulary of all the world's a stage, are really requiring us to forget that these are plays that everyone on stage is in disguise and that all female characters are played by men anyway. It seems to be flagging that up for our attention rather than attempting to erase it.
So maybe then the problem, our problem with what Marcus does here is actually a problem about expectation. It's a problem about our sense that Shakespeare's character should respond like real human people because that's what they are. I guess I'm arguing that maybe that's not what they are hearing, Titus, but Shakespeare's characters, or at least some of them at some moments and in some plays do reach towards more recognisable models of selfhood.
At the time of Titus Andronicus, the theatre is a rapidly developing new representational technology. It's analogous in its technical advances and in its whirlwind energy to early cinema or television or Internet 2.0. It's experimenting with different modes of representation and perhaps in Markus's lengthy address to Lavinia. We can see something of how the experiment works.
Later in his career, Shakespeare is going to use the device of the soliloquy to reveal something of what's inside his characters. What Hamlet calls that, within which passages show that within which passage, show and soliloquy comes to be the means in Shakespeare's tragedies that we feel we are given insight into what's inside. It's not actually particularly a technique which is taken up by other playwrights. It's not the only way the theatre has of showing the inside.
Even Shakespeare, I think experiments with different kinds of representational modes forgetting to what's interior the technique of separating out a single consciousness across different characters. We might see a fellow in the argot as a kind of. A divided psyche rather than two separate people. We might think about the relationship between Macbeth and the witches in a similar way, these later techniques.
The division of characters, the division of personalities across different characters or the use of soliloquy all implicitly acknowledge that they are fictional. It's a characteristic of what's inside, that it cannot be seen or known that externalising or revealing or articulating the inner essence also changes it in some deeply unrealistic ways.
Writing of a landmark production of Titus Andronicus at Stratford, directed by Deborah Warner in 1987, Stanley Wells described the speech of Marcus as a different kind of psychological portrait. It's a review you can read in the journal Shakespeare survey. This is Welles. It became a deeply moving attempt to master the facts and thus to overcome the emotional shock of a previously unimagined horror.
We had the sense of a suspension of time, as if the speech represented an articulation necessarily extended in expression or a sequence of thoughts and emotions that might have taken no more than a second or two to flush to the character's mind. So Welles is saying this time was suspended not because this is a realist representation of what Marcus or Marcus figure might do at this point.
But because this is the way that you show a whole lot of whirling impressions and an attempt to come to terms with and to process what's happened. Once you put that into language, it takes longer than it would do in your mind. So it's an analysis derived from the stage. And I really would encourage you to read theatre reviews and reflections by actors for their insights into the plays. Markus's long speech, then, is to be understood as a kind of extended nightmare.
A sequence of images flash across his brain as he encounters Lavinia and he struggles to process them. So rather than representing real time those minutes of poetic verse, Markus's speech represents the dramatist attempt to give an impression of inner perceptions. The exploration of how the inner can be represented might have its nearest analogy, perhaps in ideas of stream of consciousness from modernist fiction.
Stream of consciousness attempts to show what it's like to think certain things or to receive certain impressions and to begin to process them. But it does that in a in a in a style which is actually non naturalistic, even though it tries to be representational. Now that the dimensions of early modern theatrical fiction, both spatial and temporal, need not be the same as the physical dimensions of the theatre is a really important way in which the early modern stage is not realist.
Shakespeare, as we know, rarely observes the classical unities by which a play represents continuous time because of the unity of time, as you know, suggests that the time that the play takes is the time of its action. So the action of a play should be two or three hours. We see that only in the comedy of errors and in The Tempest elsewhere. Shakespeare's not interested in that at all. Nor is he interested in the unity of place. Many of Shakespeare's plays are split between two locations.
Aren't they unsubtle toggled between those without regard to the unity of place and the unity of action? The idea that the theatre should represent one single plotline unschooling itself in one time in one place is also something which Shakespeare entirely disregards. We have subplots and and counter plots in just about all of his plays. So Shakespeare doesn't doesn't stick to the unities. But he also uses stage time in some quite interesting ways.
There's a moment in much remeasure, which I'm not talking about today, but this moment in measure for measure where the Duke tells Isabella that she must tell a very complicated plot to marry Ana. And he stands at the front of the stage and says a few lines, while presumably Isabella Marijana walk around and the plot is revealed to her. It's absolutely inconceivable that it could have taken that amount of time.
So we seem to have on the stage then two different ideas of stage of stage time, not as kind of realist's single spatial dimension. We could think about that spatially when there are characters on the stage who say things that other characters don't hear. And so we've tended to think about that as an aside in editorial convention. But the whole idea of an aside suggests that really everybody on the stage can hear everybody else in Shakespeare very rarely uses the space at the stage in that way.
So. So sometimes the distance between characters physically on the stage in front of us is not the distance between them in the in the fiction of the play. We have to imagine that they're further apart or that the space stands in for something different. So this is all a long way of saying that perhaps Marcus's speech has been a problem to us because it conflicts with our assumptions about the level of realism we expect from Shakespeare and our assumption that realism equals naturalism.
So that for things to be realistic and to get to the essence of things, there must also be naturalistic. There must occur in in real time. Perhaps then we've underestimated this place sophistication by assuming that it needs as credulously to accept its fictions rather than to understand them just as in the play itself. To Mora, dressed as revenge in an attempt to torment Titus assumes that he has been entirely taken in by this illusion.
In fact, Titus knows very well that this is tomorrow in disguise. Part of the problem, as you will have heard with Marcus's speech, is it's incongruous, rhetorical flourish. I want to try and talk about this under two related headings. The first is the role of women in the play. And the second is about poetry and the influence of of it. Let's take the second of these, first of it, so of its metamorphoses.
Translated by Arthur Golding in Fifteen Sixty Seven is a work on which Shakespeare draws repeatedly throughout his career. It's also a work which, as you all know, generates a whole genre of a video and poetry. The so-called Papillion, or miniature epic, including Mahler's Hero and Leander Shakespeare's own narrative poem, Venus and Adonis and Nash's choice of Ballantine's. But of it is often behind Duns, Satie's and Thomsons on its and so on all these works.
As you'll recall, a clever erotic verse is largely targeted at a sort of young buck readership from the London is. Of course, they play with narrative devices of arousal and delay that are both literally Lintz that are both literary but obviously also sexual. There are kind of pre pornography, and Ian Milton has talked about them as a kind of erotic writing before pornography so often provides one of the major sources for Titus Andronicus.
It's interesting in this play that there is no Roman historical source. Shakespeare seems to have made up this moment of Roman history. It doesn't come from Plutarch, which is his source for the Roman political system elsewhere in his plays. Instead, the source is the this this fit the fictional erotic source of it. So of improvised one of Titus Andronicus, his major sources. But Shakespeare does something unfamiliar with the source here.
He makes the source material into the source for the character's actions. So Shakespeare has read of it. But so to have Titus, Lavinia, Aaron Kairouan and Demetrius Young Lucio's is studying of it and brings the book on stage. The Mute Lavinia uses Lucy ASRS school book to begin to reveal what has happened to her. Now, the sense of it and the ovidio and pattern is governing what's happening.
Maybe a way of asking an important, tragic question about human agency, how far the humans have the freedom to act or not. Given that this story has already been written. But it also offers an interesting overlap, a potentially interesting overlap between the figure of the dramatist and the figure of the villain doing bad things with his sources. Is something Shakespeare shares with the rapists, Karen and Demetrius.
They're both perverting of it. They're both perverting the story of Philomel, just as the term plot has an obvious dramatic meaning. But tens in Shakespeare to have negative or criminal connotations. There is some kind of version of play writing and plotting, which is actually negative in Shakespeare's work. Think about the Duke in measure for measure. Think about Iago in Othello.
And rather, as the contemporaneous smash hit Doctor Faster shows us that learning is not, in fact, a path to self-improvement. One of the important ideas of the humanist revolution in education that learning makes people better, makes them moral doctor faster shows us that, in fact, learning leads to damnation, not salvation, or it doesn't fasters this case here, too. In Titus Andronicus, the Renaissance project of rediscovering classical texts to build a moral humanist society is distorted.
Reading the classics does not make Karenin Dimitrius better. It makes them worse. It makes them realise, as Marcus pointed out, that they should cut off Lavinia's hands as well, so that unlike Philomel, she can't stitch that her accusation into a sampler. The fact that the young child Lucio's in this play is also reading of it makes that sense of moral and intellectual decay all the more foreboding.
These literary models are engagingly literal in Titus, it's the only play of Shakespeare's to turn the source into a prop and to bring it on stage. Marcus, as we heard, understands what has happened to Lavinia by means of literary prototypes. Some terriers have deflowered them, he says, referring to big story of Philomena's rapist and notes that while fair Phil Amala, while she but lost her tongue, Lavinia's attacker has out terrorist terrier's by cutting those pretty fingers off.
That could have sold better than sorry, could have better sold than Philomel. Later, Titus asks her work how surprised sweet girl ravished and wronged as Philomel was. It is as if Lavinia's plight is unthinkable, except within this literary frame. Prompted by the copy of Of It and by Marcus's example, Lavinia writes in the dirt to reveal the names of Karen and Demetrius. The Quarto stage direction manages like the play itself.
I think to be both graphic and detached, she takes the staff in her mouth and guides it with her stumps and writes. She takes the stuff in her mouth and guides it with her stumps and writes. So of it is the handbook, both the Lavinia's rape and for its revelation. Just as another literary precedent, this time from Livi, is cited by Titus at the banquet, which ends the play tomorrow helps herself to the PI. She does not realise contains the meat of her son's.
Cannibalism here might be a useful metaphor for the way the play is ingested, its source material, lots of Renaissance theories of immortality, of that idea of imitating classical sources, talk about it as a model of eating and digesting and taking nourishment from the sources. And cannibalism in this play is itself a wonderful perversion of that. So tomorrow is eating a pie containing Karenin.
Dimitrius is Flesh is a wonderful scene in Julie Tamers film, which I really recommend to film titles with Anthony Hopkins as as Titus, where this wonderfully jaunty music plays and beautiful steaming pie on the windowsill and this sort of fluttering curtain over it. So it's a kind of 1950s ideal housewife kind of moment. Very good at juxtaposing tones in the way that the play does. So tomorrow has to more eat. Titus asks saturnine us what he should do next.
This request is coded as another piece of classical interpretation. This time it's from the Roman author, Livi. Was it welldone of Rasht Virginias to slay his daughter with his own right hand because she was enforced Staind and deflowered Saturnine as his gormless answer it was is elaborated. The girl should not survive her shame and by her presence still renew her father's sorrows. Titus takes this as a pattern, precedent and lively warrant and kills his daughter.
Di di Lavinia by shame. With the and with thy shame. By Father's sorrow. Di. We can see here that Lavinia's treatment throughout the play is overdetermined, pre written, we might say, by the classical texts. So Titus Andronicus asks those interesting questions about tragedies, perennial fascination with the issue of agency or will who are what controls events?
How far can individuals and tragedies be held responsible for their own actions and more importantly, for the consequences of those actions? That's something I talk about in the lecture on Macbeth. If you're interested in seeing how this question recurs later in Shakespeare's tragedies. So the literary precedents that are so prominent in titles complicate our response to their autonomy.
When the characters seem to be taking their most decisive actions, they can also see be seen to be populated by a pre-existing narrative. Can't exist. Titus Andronicus takes place in a universe where of a rules rather than God being the source, the source is God. Part of the purpose, then, of Marcus's speech to and about Lavinia is to establish this pattern of parallels and precedent. It becomes a kind of extended marginal note or gloss, a kind of reading list or footnote.
And in that it has its nearest analogies, perhaps in each case, annotations to the Shepard's calendar. Spencer Shepard's calendar or the annotations to the Geneva Bible, that is to humanist models of annotation and scholarly explication, not to the dramatic action of the theatre. Marcus doesn't give Lavinia first aid because he's having a scholarly viddy and moment now related to the play's inscription of a video and material more commonly used in the narrative.
Poetry of the period is its use of language, as I've already said. Part of the pleasure of the opinion. There's a video, an erotic poems that are so popular in the early 50s, 90s. Part of the pleasure of that is an elaborate form of linguistic deferral. The use of rhetoric to dilate the reading experience and to defer the pleasure of narrative and sexual consummation. Rhetoric then is deliberately delaying in a video and poetry. It stops us getting to the point.
It thickens response and anticipation while putting off the conclusion. Maybe that's a way of understanding Markus's speech. And one way to think about that might be to try and consider how it works in the rhythm of the whole play. I think the easiest way to do this is to look at the Norten facsimile of the First Folio. That's pretty widely available in in in Oxford libraries. So is a facsimile text of the First Folio.
The good thing about it is for each play it has something called through line numbering T.L. and through line numberi. That just means it numbers the lines from one that the beginning to three thousand at the end. But it does give you a sense of where you are in the play. If you've got a cumulative total of lines. So from the Norten First Folio facsimile, the Folio Titus is just over 2700 lines long.
And Marcus finds Lavinia. The bit that we're focussing on this morning, Marcus finds a veneer at line 1082 1082. So just a little more than a third of the way through the play. Remember that the way we tend to organise plays in the theatre now as a slightly longer first half an interval and a slightly shorter, we hope, second half. That's a very 20th century late 19th into 20th century phenomenon.
That's not an early modern phenomenon at all. So these are not slides which we should think of structurally as being into two halves. It's actually a really great interpretive question about plays where you should put the interval, where I really suggest as a kind of interesting idea about how you want to divide the place. But it's not a it's not an early modern idea. It's it's a modern one. So we're thinking about the play as a whole thing then rather than two two 1/2.
So by line 1082, which is where we are when Marcus comes back from hunting to find Lavinia by this point, what's happened? Well, we've already seen 21 of Titus's dead sons come back from the war, be buried in the tomb. We've seen him fatally stabbed his 20 second son. And the twenty third and twenty fourth sons have been lured into a pit to await their own deaths, of which more in a moment. By Aaron. We've seen a labus, tomorrow's son sacrificed against the pleas of his mother.
We've seen Bassi Arnis, Lavinia's husband in Bruett, all in a heap like to the slaughtered lamb. And then Lavinia emerges with her hands cut off, her tongue cut out and ravished as the stage direction puts it. So it's been an eventful opening. We might want to compare the placement of violence in Shakespeare's other tragedies as a kind of comparison of how the pace of this play works, most of which speed up violence and. Body count towards the second half of the play.
Later on in the play, and at least one of which humbler makes this deferral of action into late, trying to play one of its main themes. Case, a path path. What's going on in Hamlet is saying nothing. Nothing much is happening. Is it really? And it's only one Polonius dies that things are starting to speed up. So perhaps in this light, Marcus's speech is intended to slow things down for a minute to establish a moment of perverse,
calm telling rather than doing. And therefore it works not primarily in relation to Lavinia's state, not primarily as a psychological revelation, but in a structural relation to the speed and rhythm of the play as a whole. It's good for us to remember that sometimes characters act in Shakespeare plays not because of their inner motives or their inner psychology, but they act because their play requires them to do this thing at this time.
And so we tend to be in love with a literary model given to us from modern fiction, but also from our sense of our own lives, which is that characters are pre-eminent characters come first and then they do things depending on their behaviour or their personality. So that the character is pre-eminent. And there's lots and lots of modern novelists talking about how they invent their characters first.
And then they're kind of like surprised what they go on to do. So that instead of you had Julian Bonds being talked, talking about the his sense of an ending Booker Prise shortlisted novel on the radio this morning. You're saying exactly that he didn't plot the whole thing, but he established the character. So that, of course, plays into a sense that we are the most important people in our story and that we make the story happen because of who we are.
Not sure that that is the case for Shakespeare. Think Shakespeare very often plot comes first. He has an idea of the plot he wants and the characters emerge only to service that plot. So one answer to why do they do? What they do is they do it because that's what the plot requires. So, Marcus, his speech in this kind of analysis might be the equivalent, say, of song in Shakespeare's other plays, a different pace, a kind of breathing space, a moment of Stacie's, which is is psychological.
It gives us time to catch up and kind of take our bearings. But also it may be practical. It probably gives time for Titus's captured sons to prepare themselves for their next entrance. So related to these video and rhetorical models for Markus's description of Lavinia, I think needs to be a proper unease about what these frameworks do to Lavinia herself. We've hardly talked about Lavinia so far.
There is, of course, a severe ideological problem in seeing Lavinia merely as the occasion for different kinds of male agency rhetorical, psychological, theatrical, since that threatens to recapitulate in our criticism of the play. One of the play's own most disturbing manoeuvres, The Way, objectifies Lavinia and silences her. Everybody purports to understand and to interpret Lavinia Marcus in the speech that we just heard, but also Titus in his claim to interpret all her martyred signs.
And many critics purport to do just the same. And it's important for us as readers to be aware of the ways in which we in which our response is perhaps predetermined by the play and that we need to try and resist recapping some of the plays, blind spots in the way we talk about it. In describing her wounds, Marcus enacts a perverse kind of blaze on the blaze.
On is a rhetorical cat's catalogue of a woman's beauty, which should be familiar to us from sonnet writers and from Elizabethan love poetry more generally. So just to recap, Lavinia has sweet ornaments for hand rosett lips flushed with honey breath, lily hands, pretty fingers. So these sort of erotic inner zones in the black on tradition. What are what are the eyes like? What are the lips like to the hands like we see that often.
As I say in sonnets now here as elsewhere in the tradition, it's clear that the blaze on is a device, as feminist critics have pointed out, which colonises and controls the female body by dividing it into constituent parts. It denies it human or subjective coherence and instead turns it into a dissected object of desire.
In this IT Marcos's speech itself, the rhetorical structure of Marcus's speech recapitulated the violence done to Lavinia Off-stage by Karen and Demetrius by recasting it as love poetry. I think we can see this happening to Lavinia, who becomes a horrid object of the play's voyeuristic gaze in the stage direction I already quoted.
Her hands cut off and her tongue cut out and ravished that stage erection action plays queasily between what can be shown her stumps and bloodied mouth and what cannot her rape. And elsewhere, the play jumps around, switches between what can be shown and what cannot. Immediately, as Lavinia is taken off stage by Carabine and. We switch to an overly symbolic, loathsome pit in which another pair of brothers are wallowing. Titus's own sons, Quintus and Martius, have been lured into a pit by Aaron.
Here they stand in for Kaaren and Demetrius, the Unhallowed and Bloodstained Hole, as a quotation from one of the brothers. The uncap, hallowed and bloodstained hole they found themselves in is a monstrous enact a key for the uncheckable rape. Very unsettling morally, that type, that type of his own son's Lavinia's own brother's take on the role of these other brothers in this metaphorical way. Everyone, therefore, in some way, perhaps including we in the audience, wants to violate Lavinia.
Her own brothers in this scene, Titus, her father makes her carry his own severed hand when we got to that bit. But believe me, it happens at his own severed hand in her in her mouth. Lavinia is always running from Saturnine us, the husband she does not seek from Karaman Dimitrius who want to rape her. From Marcus when he comes across her in the scene we're focussing on the opening of Markus's speech. Makes it quite clear that she's running away and she's trying to do so again at the end.
Perhaps she even runs away from Titus in the play's final moments. There's no stage direction, but it will be an interesting there'll be an interesting sort of visual echo. But she cannot escape the gaze of the audience, which tracks her silent presence across the second two thirds of the play. The film critic Linda Williams, in a series of interesting articles about modern horror films, identify some interesting tropes we might try and bring to our analysis of Titus.
First, she says, she suggests that so-called gross genres, so genres which which repeller us or make us enjoy the kind of grossness of what's being shown growth genres turn on the appeal of what she calls the sensational body, the sensational body, the spectacle of a body caught in the grip of intense sensation or emotion, a body caught in the grip of intense sensation or emotion. It's a great way of thinking about tragedy more generally in the body of the tragic figure.
Williams points out that this body in classic horror films tends to be female. So she identifies terror terrorised female victims from Fay Wray and King Kong to Janet Leigh in the shower scene in Psycho and on, on and on. And we might think so far. So, Lavinia, identification with these female figures, she argues, is part of the roller coaster ride of sadomasochistic thrills. It's a nice phrase, a roller coaster ride of sadomasochistic thrills in horror and slasher movies.
Now, some reason critics and I come back to ideas of self identification and masochism and sadism in a minute. Some reason critics have enjoyed the idea that the perverse pleasure of watching Titus has much to do with the aesthetics of excess. The aesthetics of excess, which are important in the horror genre rather than decorous ideas about tragedy and catharsis.
I talk a bit more about that in my very final remarks. You often find in the criticism of Titus, a director like Tarantino being cited. And if you're interested, if you're certainly interested in times, I'll be really, really worth thinking about that kind of model and also how film criticism can help us with the ideas about looking at consumption and pleasure. That film theory has done a lot with it.
There is a theatre have actually done very little with so Markus's speech in in this framework serves to focus his attention on the spectacular body. It makes Lavinia's body spectacular and thus makes it an object for the horror static that I am suggesting that we might want to import. And it's also Marcos's speech here also clarifies the play's negotiation of what can and cannot be shown and what can and cannot be spoken.
There is also a way in which Markus's apparent inhumanity. His refusal is a failure to respond practically or empathetically. It's part of a pattern in this play which dehumanises Lavinia throughout and turns her into a symbol. Let's come back for a moment to the description of the opening scene I gave at the beginning of the lecture. Saturnine as some Bassi Arnis are vying both for the emperor's ship of Rome and for the hand of Titus's daughter,
Lavinia Titus, in this scene as a key broker. He puts his weight behind Saturnine as his claims to become emperor, and he also agrees initially to Saturnine as his request to take Lavinia as a wife. So it's quite clear then that Lavinia is in some sense a representation of Rome here. She is the feminised version or emblem of the polity, almost a kind of statue or a kind of patroness.
Critics who've been interested in the traces of the Catholic past in Shakespeare's works have pointed out that the visible damage to Lavinia's body around the mouth and hands echoes the focal science of Protestant iconoclasm on religious sculpture. Now the veneer is less a person in this analysis than an emblem, and thus Markus's speech to her becomes an apostrophe to the state of Rome itself.
It's a political gesture. It's talking about what's gone wrong with the state rather than a physical one. We can see some support for this reading in Markus's own rhetoric of healing at the play's conclusion. Let me teach you how to knit again these broken limbs into one body. So is talking about the body politic, the body of the state. But in terms which can only recall the literal mutilated body, we've had so much in our sights, the use of the female pronoun is developed.
Let Rome herself be bane unto herself. Lavinia's rape by the Goths who have been brought into the city is a vision of the sack of the empire. It's one that's recapitulated when Lucio's returns to deliver Rome at the end of a Gothic army. Emperor Saturnine as his choice of tomorrow. The Queen of the Goths as his wife over Lavinia the Roman maiden indicates the ways in which Rome has prostituted itself or diluted itself. The play has an ongoing interest in miseducation.
Aaron and tomorrow's baby, born towards the end of the play, continues an abiding interest in sex as a metaphor for civil society. So Marcus then addresses Lavinia perhaps as a kind of lament or elegy for Rome. And those metaphors or fountains and conduits and rivers become more appropriate in that civic context than the private one. They are nonhuman rather than inhuman. We might want to see Titus's killing of Lavinia as the final cleansing then of this broken Rome.
Lucio's his final words in the play, stressed tomorrow as the source of Rome's downfall. As for that ravenous tiger tomorrow, no funeral, right? No man in mourning. We'd no mournful bell. She'll ring her burial, but throw her forth to birds and beasts to pray. Her life was beastly and devoid of pity and being dead blackbirds on her take pity. So the plays politics here are projected onto old binaries of self and other insider and outsider.
Roman and stranger. Good and bad. But they will come down in the end to the oldest primary of all virgin and [INAUDIBLE]. Something of the inadequacy of that binary, perhaps as sounded in those final two lines of Lucien's. We always respect that a rhyming couplet will end a play, but a couplet with a self rhyme. Pity. Pity is an anticlimax. It's bathos. It's downbeat. It's a collapse of language rather than an assertion of it.
Okay. So so far then I've suggested that asking why Marcus doesn't give Lavinia first aid when he encounters her in Act two helps us to ask questions about realism, about the representation of inner states, about the relation of the play to a villa in poetry, about timing and pace in the theatre, about attitudes to women, are suffering abject human beings or as distant symbols.
And in the last couple of minutes. I'm just gonna try and discuss the significance of Marcus's speech to broader generic questions about the nature of tragedy and our expectations and assumptions of what is tragic. Since Aristotle, the function of tragic downfall has been understood to inspire through catharsis, pity and fear in the spectators pity and fear. That's an empathic relation, pity and a more distanced one fear.
The implication of this generic understanding is that our relation to tragic suffering is empathic. We engage with we don't just spectate the torments of the characters. And of course, that's been one of the ways that tragedy has been culturally ring-fence from other violent childhoods to which we don't give such high status horror. We've already touched on violent computer games. We might think about slasher pictures.
These latter genres are dangerous because that story goes there might encourage people to see them as they see themselves as the perpetrators, not the victims of violence. Whereas tragedy is safe because it has a masochistic aspect. We identify with the person to whom violence is being done rather than the person doing violence.
It's interesting to note in passing that early modern commentators on the theatre did not believe that violent tragedies were any different in their effects from transgressive films or games. Now that moral panic about spectatorship leading to emulation is very recognisable in both late 16th and late 20th century context. Titus Andronicus. That, I think gives us an interesting snapshot of those conflicted and complicated processes of tragedies affect.
Marcus comes across Lavinia as a tragic spectacle. He is an onstage audience to her anguish. He models. That's to say, a version of the spectators response to the play's numbing violent procedures. And as we have seen, his response is formal aesthetic sizing, but lacking in human comfort. Even at the end of his speech, when he tries to suggest the kind of fellow feeling, his words are heavy. Do not draw back, for we will mourn with the O. Could our morning ease thy misery?
Part of what has been unsettling to critics about the play is its disregard for the reassurances classic theories of tragedies have offered. That old question Why does tragedy give pleasure? Is a disturbing one in relation to Titus Andronicus. What kind of people are we that we enjoy? And in some parts of the play, find ourselves laughing at body parts being so severed, sons being murdered and as a centrepiece, a woman mute and mutilated. The length of Markus's speech forces us to confront that.
It suggests that the appeal of tragedy or of this tragedy is not that it prompts pity and fear, but that it gives us permission to suspend our empathy. We don't need to bring out the first date either. The structure of the play at this point makes it clear we don't or can't. Markus's speech to Lavinia thus enables us to focus on big questions about the nature of tragic empathy. The appeal of dramatic violence and our unsettling capacity to be entertained by the suffering of others.
What I've tried to show today, then, is a number of different frames we might use to look at this plan to articulate some wider concerns. If you've got follow up questions, do feel free to contact me by email next week. At this time, I'm going gonna be talking about Twelfth Night. And I think the question I want to ask is, what is the point of Antonio? Because the point of Antonio. I think that's a question which will help us think about questions of desire, sexuality and genre in that place.