Scattering

Abstract

This chapter dwells on the enchainments of Orphic song, which operate as a force that, although it may be aestheticized and eroticized, remains violent in its dominations. The conclusion of Ovid's Orpheus myth—the dismemberment of the poet, the scattering of his body, and the fettering of the Bacchantes—make this violence abundantly clear. The chapter then presents the fragmented pieces of the Orpheus myth in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (1594) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594) which designate the scattering of Ovid's Orpheus as the transmission of poetry but at the price of dismemberment and rape. With the backward-turning force of the meander as well as the works of Titus and Lucrece, the chapter helps us see that Ovid's Orpheus myth has redefined the position of the eloquent poet, such that he is carried away by his own song, rendered a victim of its binding and scattering force. The chapter assesses how Shakespeare's trials of Orpheus expose the instability of the assumptions so often used to identify barbarous racial outsiders in the classical and early modern periods.