How Titus Andronicus Contests Geographies of State and Academic Discourse

            In her article “New Fields, Conventional Habits, and the Legacy of Atlantic Double-Cross,” Amanda Claybaugh criticizes the bifurcated structure of typical English departments in the United States—that of American versus British literatures, with the occasional exception for a trans-Atlantic literature course here and there.  The main problem lies, she claims, in that trans-Atlanticism became institutionalized as a field, and that, “offering itself up as an alternative to them...implicitly reaffirm[s] their [British and US literary studies’] existence” (445).  Likewise, opposing discourses in academic discussions have seemed to give a space to affective readings of material, as opposed to more traditional (body-excluding) methods of literary analysis, and yet the role of affective readings in critical discourse still remains dubious.  If anything, affect seems to be a somewhat novel branch of psychoanalytic theory, and more “serious” (read: “objective”) critical works remain the dominant force in literary theory.

Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus interrogates the validity of a state-bound identity through confusions of roles and relationships among the characters—Goth and Roman (and Moor) alike.  Tamora, Queen of the Goths at the beginning of the play becomes Roman Empress; the Andronici, a noble family in Rome, resorts to help from Rome’s enemies by the end of the play in order to reestablish power.  And while we learn that such categories as “self” and “other” become complicated through the debasement of geographic and national identity, literary critics have historically reinforced a similarly problematic spatial dichotomy; that between the academy, dedicated to the maintenance of a literary canon that consists of “higher” forms of art, and that of the public, who feed on such sensationalistic and grotesque representations that they must necessarily be banned from the beloved canon.  It is, after all, this sensationalism and unfortunate closeness to ridiculousness that ostracizes this first Shakespeare tragedy from a respected position beside other Shakespeare plays written around the same time.  What happens, then, in dedicating ourselves to the study of such “serious” and transhistorically pertinent works such as Hamlet, King Lear and Romeo and Juliet, is we undermine our own mission by adhering to norms within study of English literature that would consider Titus’s gory sensationalism a relic of crude tastes of the early modern audience, and not worthy of classroom study in the contemporary classroom.  Such a play, though, designed to elicit visceral, emotional responses from the reader/audience, is precisely that which speaks most aptly to modern times.  And yet it still remains one of the least read, and most highly contested Shakespeare plays on the market.  Such academic snobbery effectively reinforces the problematic categories of self and other that both Shakespeare, and Claybaugh speak to. 

Geography marks identity in the play’s opening act; upon hearing that her son is to be sacrificed before the Romans, the captive Tamora, Queen of the Goths, begs Titus to spare him:

Sufficeth not that we are brought to Rome

To beautify thy triumphs and return

Captive to thee and to thy Roman yoke,

But must my sons be slaughtered in the streets

For valiant doings in their country’s cause?

O, if to fight for king and commonweal

Were piety in thine, it is in these! (1.1.109-15)

Titus, fully upholding his Roman duty, explains to the desperate woman, “These are their brethren whom your Goths beheld / Alive and dead, and for their brethren slain / Religiously they ask a sacrifice. / To this your son is marked, and die he must” (1.1.122-25).  Tamora appeals to Titus’s emotions, attempting to bridge the gap caused by differing nationalities through the devastation a parent feels at the death of a child.  Titus, though, privileging the rational rules of military law over the sentimental, personal impulses, catalyzes the cycle of violence that mobilizes the revenge plot.  Soon enough, though, national or geographic loyalties have atrophied in the face of betrayal and deceit; Titus, upon hearing that his two of his three remaining sons are to be executed for a crime they did not commit, discuss their new relationship to Rome, says to his son Lucius, “Why, foolish Lucius, dost thou not perceive / That Rome is but a wilderness of tigers? / Tigers must prey, and Rome affords no prey / But me and mine” (3.1.54-7).  Noble general has been reduced to babbling, crying father, and the scene only intensifies the onslaught of emotional devastation, for father and audience alike.  Just after this exchange between father and son, Titus’s daughter, Lavinia, enters the stage, raped, tongue-less, and hand-less.  This moment signals Titus’s descent into unending anguish and rage; it also (historically) has elicited the most violent of reactions from audiences watching the play, from fainting to sobbing to illness.  It is precisely this violence of emotional response, critic and professor Peter Elbow reminds us, that lends the viewers/readers of the play the power to learn from the work’s subversion of dangerous norms of identity boundaries.   In discussing the benefits of an academic affective discourse, he suggests that “[d]iscourse that renders often yields important new cognitive insights such as helping us to see an exception or contradiction to some principle we thought we believed” (Elbow 137).  Just as Claybaugh insists that trans-Atlantic studies is a remedy for stultified literary scholarship, so too can we see how Titus can, as the play itself disrupts doubtful geographic identities, also show how an affective discourse can disrupt the problematic spaces of high versus low literature and revive the academy. 

Bibliography

Claybaugh, A. “New Fields, Conventional Habits, and the Legacy of Atlantic Double-Cross.”

American Literary History 20.3 (2008): 439–448.

Elbow, Peter. "Reflections on Academic Discourse: How It Relates to Freshman and

Colleagues." College English Feb 53.2 (1991): 135-55. JSTOR.