Shakespeare and the other Virgil: Pity andImperiuminTitus Andronicus

Abstract

The influence of Virgil’s Aeneid in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus is more extensive than has been recognized to date, largely because Shakespeare studies, surprisingly, still has not entirely acknowledged or addressed the more ambiguous reading of the Aeneid put forward in recent decades by the so-called ‘Harvard School’ of Virgil criticism. This interpretation of the Aeneid draws attention to Virgil’s sympathy for human suffering, especially his pity for the fallen enemies of Rome. Revisionary critics such as Adam Parry, Wendell Clausen and Michael Putnam argue that the ‘melancholy’ tone of the poem, resigned, mournful and at times finely ironic, arises from a sense of sorrow at the human cost of establishing the Roman Empire, undermining its ostensible purpose as Augustan propaganda. Virgil’s ‘private voice’ of compassion undercuts his ‘public voice’ of praise for Augustus’s pax Romana. Although associated today with criticism that emerged in America in the wake of the Vietnam War, as Craig Kallendorf has shown, this ‘pessimistic’ reading of the Aeneid, what he calls ‘the other Virgil’, was available in England in the Renaissance, and arguably dates back to antiquity.1 As apparent from his allusions to Virgil in Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s reading of the Aeneid is in keeping with this vision. Virgil’s epic is the touchstone and the model for his own critique of Romanitas.