THE GENESIS OF SHAKESPEARE'S TITUS ANDRONICUS

Abstract

This article suggests that Genesis foregrounds much of the ritual action of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. Many atrocities occur in Titus Andronicus, and its ritualised brutality has brought centuries of critical denigration. Recently, scholars have attempted to locate Titus's rituals in myth or in anthropological paradigms of primitive culture. Extending these attempts, this article traces connections between the ritual action of Titus and Genesis, establishing Genesis as a possible source for the play. From its first human sacrifice, Alarbus, to its last, Lavinia, Titus Andronicus's action is explicitly pagan. Non-Christian, over-determined rituals have sub jected the play to centuries of critical denigration. Recently, however, less condemnatory critical inquiry focuses on them.1 Some critics even suggest specific origins for the rituals of Titus. William W. E. Slights puts forward Rene Girard's theory of sacrificial purification.2 Also from an Girardian perspective, Stephen X. Mead sees in Titus 'a crisis of community-binding ritual.'3 William H. Desmonde argues for a ritual origin in 'the ancient Greek myths of Pelops and the Rape of Persephone,' and 'ultimately from tribal puberty rites.' 4 Francis Barker notes that 'Judging from the early incidence of human sacrifice or from the prominence that it gives to an act of cannibal ism, it could be argued that Titus Andronicus represents Rome as a primitive society.'5 Taking Barker's analyses of the primitivism of Titus Andronicus further, I will suggest that the play's rituals may reflect the early post-lapsarian world of Genesis. This interpretation links 'the primitive' in Titus to a mythology of early man that we know Shakespeare consulted. The main contender for the source of Titus Andronicus is the History of Titus Andronicus. This prose narrative survives in an eighteenth-century ver sion, whose links to the sixteenth-century are unverifiable. Although I am unwilling to nullify its place as a possible source, the arguments of several critics demonstrate its tenuous position. Titus' s most recent editor, Jonathan