Dismembering and Forgetting in Titus Andronicus

Abstract

H OW SHOULD THE DISMEMBERED BODY PARTS of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus be understood? As part of the world of stage properties or of character? Read as grotesque and abstract, aesthetically engaging and distancing, dramatically pivotal and superfluous, the severed hands, heads, and tongue have always had a profoundly equivocal status in the critical and theatrical reception of the play. A flurry of intense interest in this play has marked the two decades since Albert H. Tricomi's essay Aesthetics of Mutilation in 'Titus Andronicus' established a coherent aesthetic in the sense of dis-ease and anxiety produced by the scenes of dismemberment. More recently, the explosive violence of the play has led to psychoanalytic readings that translate dismemberment as a trope of castration.2 Psychoanalysis illuminates the territory of individual motive, of ethical inquiry, into which the stage mutilation continues to draw its audiences. Yet the symbolic and strategic displacements represented by castration in psychoanalytic theory need their own translations into the rhetoric of the early modern body. To read the play's severed parts as exclusively phallic risks eliding their specific range of reference as hands, tongues, and heads. The severed hand,