Killing Time in Titus Andronicus: Timing, Rhetoric, and the Art of Defense

Abstract

As you can see, this discipline relies in great part on the ability to subtly deceive your opponent.-Salvator Fabris, Lo Schermo, overo Scienza d'ArmeNow is a time to storm. Why thou still?-Shakespeare, Titus AndronicusStorming and stillness, movement and suspension, action and empty word: Marcus Andronicus, the politician and rhetorician, understands these activities as opposites in Titus Andronicus.1 He urges his brother toward immediate and public mourning and revenge. In contrast, Titus, a military leader and expert at hand-to-hand combat, understands that stillness is an integral part storming. Modern literary scholarship has a stronger inheritance from the pedagogy rhetoric than from the pedagogy combat, and so it has become something a critical commonplace to see waiting as the opposite acting in Shakespearean revenge dramas like Hamlet and Titus Andronicus. In fact, suspension in these plays can function to prompt mistakes in timing on the part the revenger. A consideration how timing is informed by the art and science defense, or fencing, will shed light on the tactics inaction. Further, the ways in which early modern fencing masters taught timing provokes us to reconsider the role time in the genre revenge drama as a whole.In Shakespeare's oeuvre, the timing combat and its relationship to the timing rhetoric is explored most deeply in Titus Andronicus. While Hamlet prominently features a fixed fencing match and Romeo and Juliet turns from comedy to tragedy through a duel, Titus Andronicus explicitly associates rhetoric with swordplay, articulating the two on a structural as well as a thematic level. Further, while it is certainly possible to find other plays in which duels feature more prominently, the representation a duel does not teach us as much about how timing was understood and practiced as does the pedagogy that the duel is founded upon. Rather than scouring scanty stage directions to reconstruct the temporal logic combat, look to the underlying theory described in fencing texts-a theory that is then explored and enacted in the tragedy.Titus Andronicus is famous for its rich interweaving the thematic strands writing and wounding, and this pattern participates in the conventional debate between sword and pen. The rhythms timing taught in fencing illuminate the complex pacing the plot. Rhetoric and armed combat a long history competition.2 This rivalry is due, in part, to their claims to the same domain knowledge: the recognition and seizure the opportune moment, or kairos.3 Writing and fencing masters alike weigh in on the comparison. The Spanish writing master Juan Luis Vives urges his students to replace weapons with writing implements. In Vives's Latin dialogue, the master asks the students, have you come here armed? and then clarifies that he speaks not of the arms blood-shedding, but writing-weapons, which are necessary for our purpose (70).4 Pens trump arms in the humanist educational program writing masters, but fencing masters tell a different story.On the Continent, the Italian fencing master Angelo Viggiani sees the competition between arms and letters as important enough to treat first (and at great length) in his three-volume Lo Schermo (1575). Disarming many common lines reasoning used to denigrate his occupation, Viggiani argues that the science defense is devoted to the most important kinds knowledge, movement and time, which are fundamental to all natural things. War, more than any other or faculty, requires skill in movement and time.5 Viggiani capaciously classifies manipulations time and motion, along with any other sort deceit, under the purview arms: I do not call war only that which one does with weapon in hand, but also that which is waged with cunning [ingegno] (13r). Viggiani's use ingegno in this context is grounded in a larger cultural movement. …