"'What is thy body but a swallowing grave...?'": Desire Underground in Titus Andronicus

Abstract

Early modern drama did not stage the rape of men or boys in any explicit sense. What might it mean, then, to speak of male rape on the early modern stage? What definitional shifts are enforced by the application of that phrase to early modern drama? While Bruce Smith has argued that male rape was staged through scenes in which male characters were stabbed or dismembered, this essay suggests that because conceptions of rape were dependent on a notion of violated femininity, male rape was staged through the rape of female characters. In Titus Andronicus, Lavinia's rape is carried out by two brothers, Chiron and Demetrius. During the moments in which that rape is said to occur, however, it is Lavinia's husband, Bassianus, who monopolizes the attention both of another set of brothers and of the audience itself. This essay proposes that the staging of Lavinia's rape enables the expression of sodomitical desire, a homoerotic desire associated with sodomy and therefore experienced as an explicitly sexual social transgression. Implicated in this dramatic displacement of desire is spectacularity itself. The prolonged display of both Lavinia's and Aaron's bodies work to make transgressive homoerotic desire visible as a form of violent miscegenation.