"Arm the minds of infants":Interpreting Childhood in Titus Andronicus Marie Rutkoski Prologue "The history of childhood," writes Lloyd de Mause, "is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken."1 Taking his cue from Philippe Ariès's claim that medieval children were seen merely as miniature versions of adults, and from Lawrence Stone's account of the harsh physical treatment meted out to early modern children, de Mause believes that childhood held no valued place in society until the eighteenth century. Potential investigations into the importance of childhood in Shakespeare's work likely have been hobbled by a pervasive argument made by social historians like de Mause, Stone, and Ariès: childhood did not exist in the Renaissance, they claim, and children were treated as negligible, peripheral, even expendable creatures. Yet for some time now, social historians have reconsidered their discipline's earlier stance on childhood from the medieval period until the end of the seventeenth century, and have questioned the absolute and grim strain of thought crystallized by de Mause.2 With the advent of groundbreaking work on domesticity and the family in early modern England, literary and cultural criticism is beginning to focus on the child, and on what childhood meant in the period's literature and life.3 Many studies in the field of Renaissance drama have offered illuminating analyses of the phenomenon of child actors playing the roles of women.4 Yet an important task remains when considering children on stage, and when informed by social history's current support of the view that this period of life was crucial, widely valued (if not by all), and accorded the status of being discrete from later stages of life. It is now necessary to take child characters on "their" own terms, as children, and to understand better the literary and cultural impact of the inclusion of seemingly minor figures in the period's drama. Titus Andronicus mentions one child, Muliteus's baby, and features two others on stage, Aaron's baby and Young Lucius. These last two play an important role: [End Page 203] they operate as indices to describe Lavinia's suffering and progress after her rape. Textual details nurture a similarity between her state and the two stages of childhood represented by the infant and the schoolboy.5 The semblance cultivated between Lavinia and the two children on stage has three effects. This semblance shows that what Lavinia suffers is not merely a lack of agency that coincides with an inability to express herself. Part of her tragedy is her infantilization. Also, when Lavinia progresses from a second infancy to a second childhood, a shift signaled by a resemblance between her and Young Lucius, the play conveys the power of a humanist education, yet exposes its limitations when it fails to deliver a clear evaluation of another's interior. Throughout this essay, I argue that the most persistent effect of the parallel between Lavinia and the children is how this semblance of character criticizes an appraisal, expressed in Shakespeare's lifetime and developed much earlier, of infants and children as easily known quantities, as creatures whose intention, desires, emotion and thought are transparently understood by adults.6 Though his existence is briefly noted by the play and then never mentioned again, Muliteus's baby may serve to highlight this very point. Speechless Complainers Lavinia initiates a perception of herself as a sort of infant. When she pleads with Tamora for death instead of rape, she presents herself as a baby bird up for adoption by the Goth. This strategy comments on the asymmetry of power between her and Tamora, who, cast as a raven by Lavinia, is truly "raven-ous." Tamora has an appetite for control, cruelty, sexual dalliance, and the cooked corpses of her own sons. Much meaning is afoot in Lavinia's speech, but one important significance is that she describes herself as a kind of infant—a portrayal that the rest of the play will develop. Lavinia proposes, Some say that ravens foster forlorn children The whilst their own birds famish in their nests. O be to me, though thy hard heart say no, Nothing so kind...