“Martyred Signs”: Titus Andronicus and the Production of Musical Sympathy

Abstract

Shakespeare's allusions to Ovid in Titus Andronicus repeatedly evoke the possibility of non-verbal communication, often with reference to early modern notions of musical sympathy. However, rather than promoting music as a bridge between inarticulate experience and understanding, Shakespeare's use of Ovidian voicelessness raises serious doubts about music's ability to mean anything at all. By figuring the mutilated Lavinia as a second Philomela (and a second Io, Actaeon, Hecuba), the play imagines a musician who has utterly lost her ability to connect sound to language. The subsequent attempts to interpret Lavinia suggest an analogy to how music is made to signify, in contemporary writing about music and in Shakespeare's own theatre. In this way, Titus Andronicus participates in a larger debate about the relationship between language and music taking place in Renaissance England.