Gestures and the Classical Past in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus

Abstract

ABSTRACTErwin Panofksy famously characterized the Renaissance as a period uniquely preoccupied with its own historical moment and its separation from the classical past it sought to emulate. In the words of Margreta de Grazia, “[l]onging for the past stimulates the desire to imitate it – but always in heartrending view of the millennial abyss that separates the poet from his ancient models”. In this article, I examine how this “millennial abyss” manifests itself through the prism of gesture in William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, a play that exhibits an almost pathological fixation on the manual. Considering both seventeenth-century theories that saw gesture as a potential remedy for the confusion visited on mankind at Babel and contemporary attitudes towards actio – the fifth canon of rhetoric, lauded by both Cicero and Quintilian as the most vital element of successful oratory – this paper interrogates Titus’s conflicted attitudes towards the classical past, suggesting that Titus’s injudicious deployment of classical literary precedent at the play’s close is a corollary of his inability, after severing his hand, to perform actio effectively.