Sans Tongue, Sans Hands, Sans Music? Violence and Musical Bodies in Titus Andronicus

Abstract

ABSTRACTIt is by now a critical commonplace that early modern English theorists and authors used the metaphor of music and musical instruments to describe and understand the body. William Shakespeare, like other Renaissance English authors, makes repeated use of the analogy in his plays. Leontes, for instance, in The Winter’s Tale, witnesses his wife “virginalling” (as he calls it) upon Polixenes’ hand (1.2.127). Hamlet uses another musical metaphor for the body when he tells his mother, “My pulse as yours doth temperately keep time, / And makes as healthful music” (3.4.131–32). Rather than merely recognising the metaphor in Shakespearean drama, this article debates the potential of the early modern music–body correspondence to comprehend or “read” bodies that otherwise cannot speak on stage, considering especially the mute and handless Lavinia in Titus Andronicus. The audience can understand Lavinia’s mutilated body as musical by means of the metaphors of the hand as music, the lute as the body, and the pulse as tempo. Because her body can still be musical, the analogy provides other characters, and the audience, the ability to hear and understand her through her performance of dance, melody, or ballad.