• 1 William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate, The Arden Shakespeare Third Series, New Y (...)

1In act iv of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Lavinia, daughter to the titular Roman general and now widow to the recently dispatched Bassianus, attempts to communicate to her father and uncle a crime of which she has been made victim. The crime – Lavinia’s violation and mutilation – has been perpetrated by the sons of the Goth queen Tamora, who were first prisoners to Andronicus and are now “incorporate” (i.i.467) in Rome through Tamora’s marriage to the newly ascended emperor Saturninus.1 Her hands cut off and her tongue cut out, Lavinia must find some way to testify to the guilt of her assaulters in order for the revenge plot to advance. She haunts her nephew, young Lucius, like a spectre; unlike the outraged paternal ghost common to the revenge tragedy, however, Lavinia pronounces neither exposition nor instruction, and is capable only of indirect address. In addition to being deprived of speech, gesture, and the ability to end her own life, Lavinia has been stripped of her symbolic chastity, bound up at the start of the play with the competition for Roman rulership. She is trapped in an alienated body, obscure and frightening to her young nephew in a way that Titus’ corpse, viewed near the close of the play, is not.

• 2 When I selected this scene for an early collaborative work session in Montpellier in October 2017, (...)

5At the heart of public discussions of inequality, violence, and rape, is an overreliance on intrusive, interpretive deductions about the mental state and general character of the victim. The body becomes a text that is read as evidence. These circumstances threaten a kind of depersonalisation within publicly mediated discourse – the act of rape is replaced by a series of predetermined conditions and ambiguous abstractions. In writing this article I wish to avoid the pitfall of merely replicating the interpretive problems this play foregrounds, and also to address the problematic of adding another male voice to a concord that threatens to speak for, to overwrite and silence, female testimony.2 Instead of interpreting Lavinia, I suggest that Shakespeare’s play demonstrates how precedent and education offer both a vocabulary for broaching trauma but also a translation of experience into testimony that then enters the public sphere in regulated, manipulatable form.

• 3 For identification, consubstantiality, and social cohesion in the rhetorical domain, see Kenneth Bu (...)

6Influence and citation, critical and rhetorical frames that provide linkage but threaten individuality, lend themselves to – are constituents of – a larger conversation about artistic and testimonial legitimacy. The way a student of rhetoric resolves a personal style out of a corpus of imitated texts; the way a speaker achieves consubstantiality with an audience; the filtered, mediated discussions about sexual assault and trauma that circulate in the public sphere: these activities hinge on processes of identification and interpretative intervention.3 Lavinia is only capable of communicating her trauma using a set of preestablished testimonials. Titus Andronicus offers spaces where the language of education and violence mesh, and I argue that it has something to say about the relation between the two.

• 4 Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, p. 21: “A doctrine of consubstantiality, either explicit or i (...)

7If Lavinia is mediated by her male spectator-interpreters, her selection of communicative props contributes to the over-determination of her testimony, an effacement of identity in lieu of identification. Lavinia’s loss of voice and gesture, and her reliance on props and antecedent discourse, literalises Kenneth Burke’s conception of “consubstantiality” between those whose interests are joined or linked via rhetorical acts of identification.4 Lavinia identifies herself with Ovid’s Philomela myth; the text replaces her voice; she shares her plight with Philomela as she elaborates her own mutilated transformation with the details of someone else’s. Philomela escapes captivity through artistic expression and eventually transforms from a silenced woman into the nightingale. The gesture toward the Philomela myth thus connects Lavinia to the nightingale and its symbolic artist transcendence.

• 5 Wynne Davies, “‘The Swallowing Womb’: Consumed and Consuming Women in Titus Andronicus”, The Matter (...)

9Whether Shakespeare is interested in this threat of depersonalisation specifically as it relates to violence against women, his interest in the depersonalising outcomes of what we might call prescriptive testimony is still analogous or applicable to our current interests.5 Shakespeare’s play is concerned with how literary and legal precedent is inscribed on the bodies and behaviour of latter generations, how the antecedent both enables and compromises. Allusion, whether literary or legal, enmeshes one figure within a multitude; it offers entry into a shared yet predetermined discourse. Lavinia’s gestural attempts to communicate thus suggest the process by which antecedent texts exert control over their inheritors.

• 6 Davies, “‘The Swallowing Womb’”, discusses castration and gender conventions. For silence as a form (...)
• 7 “Titus Andronicus”, Approaching Shakespeare from University of Oxford Podcasts, 19 October 2011, ht (...)
• 8 On sources and imitation: begin with Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespea (...)
• 9 For the play’s articulation of the unutterable and intolerable, see D.J. Palmer, “The Unspeakable i (...)

10If the play foregrounds problems of interpretation, of reading Lavinia, the critical history attending to Lavinia proliferates such problems. She has been read at turns as silenced and empowered, as subjected to the patriarchy and as an agent of emasculation, as representative of the damaged body politic, as an embedded coauthor to Shakespeare, as the play’s true tragic hero, as a prop for her father’s revenge.6 Emma Smith, in her podcast series Approaching Shakespeare, calls attention to the slipperiness of reading Lavinia as an interiorised subject rather than part of a divided dramatic psyche, even as she establishes a troubling link between Shakespeare’s use of his source material and his character’s own use of Ovid’s stories: “Doing bad things with his sources”, Smith states, “is something Shakespeare shares with the rapists Chiron and Demetrius: they are both perverted Ovid”.7 The play, with its interest in filial bonds, imitation, and finally consumption of both the prior text and the issuing child, seems simultaneously to dramatise problems of literary and literal identity self-consciously.8 The stage of the 1590s, as a space of unfamiliarity, becomes a place to confront and embody the unspeakable, a platform on which to deploy the art and words of the other.9

• 10 For transmission, translation, and emulation, see Liz Oakley-Brown. “‘Titus Andronicus’ and the Cul (...)
• 11 Arthur L. Little Jr., Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-Imperial Re-Visions of Race, Rape, and Sac (...)

11Scholarship has noted the play’s anxious treatment of Renaissance humanistic education, the rhetorical and artistic imitatio that made use of the works of antiquity in the service of aesthetics and statecraft.10 We can identify Chiron and Demetrius’ self-aware cribbing of Ovid in their assault on Lavinia as a kind of perverted appropriation of Roman discourse. In this sense, her violation may function, as Arthur Little suggests, as “the mechanism through which the Roman world defines and celebrates its racial and masculine wholeness and clarity”.11 Considering Ovid’s relation to the Latin grammar school education and the reality of Lavinia’s performance by a young man on the Elizabethan stage, Lavinia’s violation also, may additionally indicate a critique of pedagogic pederasty.

• 12 Serena S. Witzke, “Violence Against Women in Ancient Rome: Ideology Versus Reality”, The Topography (...)
• 13 Erasmus, On Copia of Words and Ideas, trans. Donald B. King and H. David Rix, Milwaukee, Marquette (...)
• 14 Oakley Brown, Ovid and the Cultural Politics of Translation, p. 30: On Lavinia going to read in the (...)

12Lavinia’s violation also connects her to Daphne, Callisto, and Lucrece: women whose rapes serve a kind of symbolic or ideological order by providing a narrative of origin or the impetus for political reformation.12 Ovid, among other Latin poets, was prominent in the Latin curriculum of the grammar school; his writing would have contributed greatly to the store of words, often figured as either a treasure-trove or the physical body of the student rhetor, that Erasmus, outlining a process of imitative repetition and differentiation for use in humanistic education, referred to as copia.13 Copia figures as the collection and development of an arsenal of rhetorical and performative moves. Shakespeare’s play envisions copia as the digestion and interiorisation of studied texts and also, in Lavinia’s case, as a process of dismemberment in which body parts are replaced with textual counterparts that offer access to preexisting discourse but limit invention in favour of repetition. Lavinia’s female education, which would have taken place in the sequestered domestic sphere, only complicates the matter of “going public” about what has happened to her: her private life has merely prepared her for public sacrifice. She makes the transition from a kind of marital commodity to a public spectacle upon which Rome, through her sacrifice and the dispatching of those who have wronged her, enacts its ritual of purification and rebirth.14 If the play begins with the question of how a society incorporates the Other, Lavinia’s scene perhaps demonstrates how the text of the Other – here figured as Shakespeare’s Roman inheritance – speaks through and for its inheritors.

• 15 On Latin as the language of revenge, see in this volume Janice Valls-Russell, “‘Dammi un bacio’ and (...)

15Titus later proclaims to Chiron and Demetrius: “For worse than Philomel you used my daughter, / And worse than Progne I will be revenged” (v.ii.194–195), staging his revenge in a like form to Procne’s revenge: surpassing the original myth in degree yet still binding himself to its precedent and modelling his revenge on Ovid’s story.15 After inhibiting the men’s ability to speak, Titus murders them and inters their dead flesh in a feast for their Goth mother.

• 16 Elisabeth Krimmer, “Philomela’s Legacy: Rape, the Second World War, and the Ethics of Reading”, The (...)
• 17 Arthur Golding, Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation, 1567, ed. John Frederick Nims (...)
• 18 Ovid, Metamorphoses, vi.829–830, trans. Charles Martin, New York, Norton, p. 201.

16The Philomela myth here acts both as source and salvation for Lavinia’s assault: it creates a feedback loop that echoes itself into indistinction. Another story concerned with expression, with compromised communication and the dissolution of social categories and conduct, the story of Philomela engages with transformative trauma even as it provides Chiron and Demetrius with a schoolbook model for sexual violence. After the adulterous Tereus removes his sister-in-law Philomela’s tongue, the young woman turns to art to express herself, weaving a tapestry which is then sent to her sister Procne as a coded communication of the crimes of her husband. Elisabeth Krimmer, discussing the dilemma of Philomela’s narrative and legacy, explains that “narratives of rape are often suspended halfway between silence and discourse”, as both victims and spectators are unsure of how to achieve a therapeutic release but not a “reinscription of the original trauma”.16 Philomela’s tapestry bridges the silence to the therapeutic release in the re-inscription of her assault in the form of artistic salvation. Arthur Golding’s 1567 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses describes Philomela’s expressive discovery: “Great is the wit of pensivenesse, and when the head is rakt / With hard misfortune, sharpe forecast of practise entereth in.” (vi.734–735).17 Charles Martin’s modern translation of Ovid conveys the message more explicitly: “from suffering / comes native wit”.18 The suffering of this young woman naturalises her to an as yet unrealised expressive potential. Philomela’s movement from trauma, to mutilation, to artistic expression and the ensuing violence of revenge informs a prototypical narrative of the sublimation of trauma into inspiration.

• 19 This is a reference to Frances Ferguson. “Rape and the Rise of the Novel”, Representations, 20, 198 (...)
• 20 Patricia Klindienst, “The Voice of the Shuttle is Ours”, Sexuality and Gender in the Classical Worl (...)

17Philomela assists in the murder and subsequent meal-preparation of Procne and Tereus’ son – yet another example of the incorporation of progeny, the absorption of issue back into ancestor. Just as Tamora and her sons have become incorporate – consubstantial – with Rome, Tereus digests and incorporates his only child. Titus models his behaviour on Procne and Philomela: the child, interred and ingested in the domestic sphere, becomes food for an unwitting parent. Unlike Tamora, Tereus does not die, but rather pursues the sisters and transforms into a hoopoe mid-chase. Philomela then becomes the nightingale, and is transformed into a symbol deployed throughout lyric poetry as a sort of unseen, inaccessible emitter of pure expression. Inspiring and identifiable, the symbolic system, as Ferguson explains, eliminates ambiguity by eliminating personality.19 All nightingales are the same nightingale. The nightingale functions in its poetic legacy as a symbol against which the generally male speaker crystallises his own subjectivity as he measures his individual, particularised expressive abilities against a song that poetry can never encapsulate or translate.20

• 21 Erasmus, On Copia of Words and Ideas, p. 11.

19Marcus’ extended description of Lavinia’s bleeding mouth contrasts his issuing expression – the expressive ability Erasmus referred to as a “golden stream” – to her “crimson river”.21 Marcus speaks for Lavinia in part to apprehend the image that has appeared before him, and in part to expel his sorrow. He explains: “Sorrow concealed, like an oven stopped, / Doth burn the heart to cinders where it is” (ii.iii.36–37). Marcus’ relation to this newly mutilated nightingale figure is still predicated on absence, as his ensuing descriptions of Lavinia’s body address her “lily hands” (ii.iii.44) and “sweet tongue” (ii.iii.49), her own expressive vehicles that have been removed.

• 22 Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, New York, Riverhead Books, 1998, xix.
• 23 Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 86.
• 24 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1973, p. 54.

20Lavinia cannot overhear herself, cannot become one of Harold Bloom’s daemonic poets defining themselves against a misread father figure, can only be misread by the males who surround her. Bloom wrote of Shakespeare’s characters, in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, that “Self-overhearing is their royal road to individuation”.22 Bloom’s claim forecloses Lavinia’s possibility for development: trapped in stasis, she can only occasion the development of those who transform her into their own discourse. Bloom frames his discussion of personality in Shakespeare’s play with this concept of an overheard self, along with an argument for Shakespeare’s universalism. His study touches on Titus Andronicus for its alienating power. Despite the importance of misprision/misreading to Bloom’s earlier work The Anxiety of Influence, the brief section detailing Titus Andronicus makes no reference to the play’s problems of reading and interpretation. Bloom does not examine Titus or Marcus’ attempts to interpret Lavinia. Instead, he dismisses the play, suggesting that it possesses “no intrinsic value”.23 Lavinia becomes a generalisation, moving in the opposite direction from Bloom’s individuating Shakespearean speakers, always in process, always reacting to themselves. Bloom wrote that, in poetic influence, anxiety makes “misprision inevitable”: Shakespeare’s erasure of Lavinia’s personality illustrates and seems to critique this inevitable misplacement.24 If misprision and substitution are inevitable, then Lavinia’s violent fate is both predetermined and doomed to repeat.

• 26 Perseus Digital Library, ed. Gregory R. Crane, Tufts University, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu. Acce (...)

24Generally glossed as “rape,” “stuprum” is both dense and reductive in meaning and history. It appears only once in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, though it is also used in Quintilian, Cicero, Apuleius.26 In classical sources the word emerges as a legal term during late republic Rome and during Augustus’ reign. The term simultaneously abolishes the distinction between genders, between forms of consent: it is a move toward a prescriptive generalisation of sexual control that in Shakespeare scholarship has received attention but has yet to be fully explored.

• 27 Elaine Fantham, “Stuprum: Public Attitudes and Penalties for Sexual Offences in Republican Rome,” É (...)

25“Stuprum” blurs the line between the moral and the political in its specific designation as a crime that corrupts and violates the passive partner. Amidst Shakespeare’s translations and transferals of Roman poetry, it remains in the Other’s language. Elaine Fantham explains that “stuprum” “disregards the reality of consent”; as it can involve either the rape of a virgin or an ongoing seduction of a widow, it could be either voluntary or involuntary.27 In “stuprum”, the victim is not the violated personage at all, but rather the father: male or female, consenting or not, the object of unsanctioned sexual penetration is treated as property. Fantham writes:

• 29 Craig A. Williams, Roman Homosexuality, 2^nd edition, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 124.
• 30 See Francesca Royster, “White-Limed Walls: Whiteness and Gothic Extremism in Shakespeare’s Titus An (...)

27Under Augustan Law, only a father can execute his child for her disgrace, but that same law abolishes Lavinia’s gender, marital status, her very ability to consent. Craig Williams, discussing “stuprum”’s relation between adultery and pederasty, makes the crucial point that as a crime “stuprum” is revelatory of patriarchal anxieties: if Romans were quick to morally and legally lump together all manner of sexual activity involving citizens, this designation indicates “questions of paternity”, a fear of not knowing how to trace one’s bloodline, a loss of certainty as to who one is.29 If sexuality is not policed, then borders and identities may become confused. In this sense, “stuprum” represents and resists a loss of clarity, an uncertainty about precedent. The admission of “stuprum” threatens to destabilise or dissolve society and identity, and it is especially notable that Lavinia invokes this patriarchal anxiety when accusing two assailants who may be viewed by the Roman characters in the play as racial Others despite their recent entry into Rome’s royal family.30

• 31 Jim Ellis, Sexuality and Citizenship: Metamorphosis in Elizabethan Erotic Verse, Toronto, Universit (...)

28Thus far Lavinia has appealed to her body as evidence, a prior text as testimony, and an untranslated Latin word dropped into the English play-text like a depth-charge. Her final execution relies, yet again, on precedent, albeit the transfer of precedent from the sterile space of education into the embodied fiction of the stage. Titus invokes Livy’s account of Virginius as “A pattern, precedent, and lively warrant” (v.iii.43) for Lavinia’s execution. Virginius slew his daughter Virginia to prevent the lustful and corrupt decemvir Appius from changing her status to that of a slave. Virginia’s death leads to the dismissal of the decemvirs and the reassertion of political order in Rome with more power for the plebeian people. Like the rape of Lucrece, which led to the dissolution of monarchy in Rome, Virginia’s rape is part of a Roman mythohistory: rhetorical signposts in a chronicle of political change.31 Virginia, Lucrece, and now Lavinia, become metaphors for change. Titus states: