Titus Andronicus Research Articles

Stage Hands

The article examines the depiction of the disabled body in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus in light of modern productions. Although scholars and critics have discussed the symbolic potential of the severed hands in the play, none has considered the repeated material reconstruction of Titus's and Lavinia's hands by stage properties in performance. Both well-known productions by Peter Brook and Julie Taymor involve a near obsessive replacement of Lavinia's severed hands with ribbons, branches, or wooden hands. In so doing, these stage properties become "stage hands"—or theatrical prostheses—that seek to fulfill the audience's imagination of the body in its previously whole state. While Shakespeare's text presents the handless bodies of Lavinia and Titus as disabled avengers, such disabled capability—and culpability—is obscured in modern performances that "prop" Lavinia and Titus with theatrical prosthetics. The article considers the mutilations of Lavinia and Titus and their subsequent regeneration as disabled avengers, as well as the prosthetic impulses of Brook's and Taymor's productions, in order to more fully understand Shakespeare's complex treatment of disability in his early works.

The Cycle of Revenge : Aaron's Role in Titus Andronicus(Kansai English Studies)

The Cycle of Revenge : Aaron's Role in Titus Andronicus(Kansai English Studies)

The Face of Comic Revenge in Jonson's Alchemist

When one thinks of early modern dramatic examples of revenge, the first titles that spring to mind may include Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, and The Spanish Tragedy. These three and others adhere to a rough template: first, the play begins with social or political unrest; second, the conflict comes to a head through the action of the play; and third, the conflict is resolved by the final act, often with few survivors. You may even be familiar with the phrase: "In the Fourth Act the die is cast. In the Fifth Act the cast dies." These qualities can be anticipated in tragedies, but can also be found as tragic elements encompassed within other genres. Revenge can be found in comedies alongside other stereotypes and expectations: the restoration of social order and a marriage or at least the implication or anticipation of a marriage (Hopkins 16). Dramatic expectations and stereotypes were formed through years of perfecting and use by Renaissance dramatists; however, as soon as they were established, playwrights began to break with dramatic expectations and blur the lines between tragedy and comedy. Shakespeare created plays like The Tempest in which both tragic and comic circumstances fuel the plot and the conclusion includes both a death, as Prospero abandons his magic, and an impending marriage between Ferdinand and Miranda. Ben Jonson, too, contributed to this new genre and engaged tragic themes within comedy.

Metaphor and Shakespearean Drama: Unchaste Signification (review)

Reviewed by: Metaphor and Shakespearean Drama: Unchaste Signification Jay L. Halio (bio) Maria Franziska Fahey. Metaphor and Shakespearean Drama: Unchaste Signification. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pp. xvii + 192. $80.00. Maria Fahey’s book on Metaphor and Shakespearean Drama is part of a series entitled “Early Modern Literature in History,” whose general editors are two British scholars, Cedric C. Brown and Andrew Hadfield. Although it deals in detail with only six of Shakespeare’s plays, it is nonetheless very wide ranging, especially in its conception of metaphor, as the following analysis will attempt to show. In her brief preface, Fahey says that her book explores “the transformative, fruitful, and potentially unruly nature of metaphorical utterances as revealed in Shakespearean drama” (xiv). Indeed it does, and Fahey begins by challenging the traditional view of metaphor as “a merely ornamental substitution of words” (xv). She is concerned, rather, with the way classical and Elizabethan rhetoricians consider “the tension inherent in metaphor between the need for difference, distance, and interchange and the need for likeness, proximity, and containment” (xv). She believes that metaphor’s dual nature “is the very source of the fecundity that generates rhetoricians’ warnings about its potential unruliness” (xv). Hence, she cites Henry Peacham’s warning against “unchaste signification” and the worry that metaphors might beget “illegitimate” meanings. Fahey’s first chapter surveys Aristotle’s writing in Poetics and Rhetoric, and the writings of others, such as Quintilian, particularly to discern metaphor’s tendency to “stealth,” as she calls it, that is, the ways metaphor can circulate without the full awareness of the meanings conveyed by individual speakers. Those interested in theories of metaphor will doubtless find Fahey’s twenty-one-page first chapter useful in and of itself, but I will pass directly to her discussions of metaphor in Shakespeare’s plays. Her second chapter, called “Proving Desdemona Haggard: Marriage and Metaphor in Othello,” is one of the best in the book. As its title indicates, the chapter focuses primarily on the metaphor of falconry, as Othello uses it in 3.3.264–74, which Fahey quotes in full. In this speech Othello figures himself as the falconer and Desdemona as his hawk. Fahey interprets the speech in traditional fashion: Othello’s metaphor transforms the figurative bond of marriage into the literally binding jesses, the leather bands fastened to a hawk’s legs to which a falconer’s leash could be attached. Depicting those jesses as his heart-strings, Othello reveals that he is prepared to cut out a part of himself to be rid of an adulterous wife. To “let” Desdemona “down the wind to prey on fortune,” the heartstrings tying Desdemona to Othello would be excised from Othello’s body and left dangling from her ankles. (23) Fahey goes on to show that Othello is not the first to use the metaphor, nor is it (as one might expect) Iago; rather, it is Desdemona herself. It is she who figures herself [End Page 448] as Othello’s falconer when in her dialogue with Cassio she says she will “watch him tame” (3.2.23). Iago also sees her as a falconer when he says Desdemona could “seel her father’s eyes up” (3.3.213). These metaphors, Fahey argues, take hold of the world of the play and ultimately have “the power to shape the perceptions upon which people act” (24). The implications are significant and can be disturbing. I shall cite only one that Fahey makes explicit: “Indeed, figuring marriage in terms of falconry … suggests that a man needs to tame his wife because she is naturally more powerful than he and naturally averse to subjugating herself to him” (28). Fahey takes her understanding of metaphor further in her next chapter, “‘Martyred Signs’: Sacrifice and Metaphor in Titus Andronicus.” She here depends a good deal upon René Girard’s book Violence and the Sacred, particularly his pronouncement that “the sacrificial process requires not only the complete separation of the sacrificial victim from those beings for whom the victim is a substitute but also a similarity between both parties” (51). Likewise, Fahey says, a metaphor’s vehicle must also be separated from the tenor for which...

Review of Hamlet Forever (adapted and translated by Murat Karahüseyinoğlu), Öteki Tiyatro, Ankara, 15 April 2011

In the last two years a clutch of Shakespeare productions have appeared in the Turkish theatre (Titus Andronicus and Macbeth in Istanbul, Hamlet Forever in Ankara) aimed specifically at 18 to 30 ye...

Violence Against Women in Early Modern Perfomance: Invisible Acts (review)

Reviewed by: Violence Against Women in Early Modern Perfomance: Invisible Acts Catharine Gray Violence Against Women in Early Modern Perfomance: Invisible Acts. By Kim Solga. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009; pp. 248. Kim Solga's stimulating study participates in an innovative trend in scholarship on early modern drama to interweave late-modern performance theory with historically specific representations of embodied violence. In this way, she contributes to recent critical discussion of the shattered selves and violated bodies of the Renaissance stage, but does so by calling attention to a representational and scholarly gap. Solga argues that the embodied suffering caused by violence against women is too often missed by modern scholars' analyses of stage violence and is actively suppressed or displaced by early modern representations of that violence. Her goal is to make acts and effects of violence against women visible, while calling attention to the ways in which their invisibility is actively produced and reproduced, socially and performatively, then and now. Her approach is polemical and experimental: combining analyses of historical non-literary documents, canonical plays, and recent performances, she argues for feminist practices of performance and scholarship that would stand witness to and interrogate this telling absence, rather than simply repeat it. The book focuses on rape and domestic violence in four "iconic" plays (canonical plays that continue to be regularly performed) from the late-sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness, Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, and Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling. Solga's introduction establishes the theoretical grounds and ethical stakes of her analysis of these plays, as she uses performance theory's emphasis on the ephemerality, absences, and alternate ways of knowing embodied in performance to theorize what she calls "the in/visible act" (16). This act is "the performance of violence against women as critical forgetting; it charges its witnesses to come to terms with what we've missed but also with how we've missed—with how we have failed to see the suffering before us, hidden in plain sight" (17). Each main chapter exposes the "latent" potential for this self-consciously critical mode of performing and witnessing in early modern plays, and then analyzes in detail selected modern performances that best "manifest" this potential (3). Solga begins each of her core chapters by revealing how early modern conduct books, legal prescriptions, religious treatises, and architectural discourses script women's public performance of victimization in ways that work to contain female suffering and promote the patriarchal status quo. In fact, her chapters have a neat, tripartite structure: they begin with analysis of the cultural scripts regulating Renaissance representations of violence against women; then proceed to close readings of plays potentially troubling to these regulated depictions; and end with detailed explorations of recent productions that offer ethically engaged forms of feminist spectatorship. Chapter 2, for example, analyzes the way legal discourses construct a socially condoned role for rape victims, one they must adopt when telling their story publicly in order to be taken seriously. According to Solga, Titus Andronicus depicts Lavinia as spectacularly failing to enact this approved social role, indeed failing to "act" in any readily comprehensible way at all. Through this failure, the play reveals the wider, social scripts and theatricalizations shaping public displays of victimhood. Solga argues that the best performances of Shakespeare's play help us to see rape's history as resting on a series of legal and social performances that consistently sanitize and displace women's experience of suffering—a suffering Titus Andronicus refuses to hide. The chapter concludes with an analysis of [End Page 478] modern productions that stress both the elisions and social performances that structure rape's representation, reserving particular praise for Julie Taymor's eclectic and self-reflexive film Titus. In the next two chapters, Solga moves beyond Shakespeare to consider how representations of domestic violence are shaped by the cultural scripts and social performances associated with religious discourse (chapter 3) and engendered by architectural space (chapter 4). Her analysis of The Duchess of Malfi is particularly illuminating for revealing moments when the Duchess resists the sublimation of emotional and bodily pain required...

Referred pain: privileging male emotions in narrative instances of female physical suffering

This article analyses literary patterns of female subordination, and focuses in particular on what the author terms ‘referred pain’. By juxtaposing two early modern texts, William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, with two modern visual texts, John Woo's Mission: impossible 2 and Baz Luhrman's Moulin Rouge, the author discusses the recurring trope of privileging male emotional suffering over female physical suffering, and suggests that one reason for the continuing popularity of this can be sought in the kinship system and its exchange of women. The article argues for the application of a transhistorical perspective when studying literature, as a means of revealing patterns that may otherwise go unnoticed.

Lorna Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance DramaThe Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama. Lorna Hutson. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. x+382.

<i>Lorna Hutson,</i> The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama<i>The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama</i>. Lorna Hutson. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. x+382.

Review of Titus Andronicus: A Five-Act Maganda Disaster, adapted by Sinan Fişek and directed by Işıl Kasapoğlu, at the Semaver Kampanya Theatre, İstanbul, Turkey, 29 May 2010

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. The production was actually in Turkish – translated by Fişek from Shakespeare's text. I am translating back into English for ease of comprehension.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Reading Early Modern Food

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Reading Early Modern Food

Toward a Poetic Minimalism of Violence: On Tang Shu-wing's Titus Andronicus 2.0

A review of six theatre and film versions of Titus Andronicus notes varied approaches to the text: Peter Brook's stylized symbolism, Ninagawa Yukio's victim art, Jane Howell's mimetic realism, Julie Taymor's postmodern absurdism, Wang Chia-ming's playful parody, and Christopher Dunne's Gothic horror. Tang Shu-wing's approach in Titus Andronicus 2.0 (Hong Kong: Tang Shu-wing Theatre Studio, 2009) shows his rejection of sensationalist and consumerist presentations of the violence in the script. Tang's minimalism de-dramatizes violence via the narrative form of tale telling, and then poeticizes it through the performance of the poetic body, creating a profound and thought-provoking production.

Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance (review)

Scot L. Newstok and Ayanna Thompson, eds. 2009. Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance. New York: Palgrave. $90.00 he. $29.00 sc. 308 pp.Neither readers nor audiences tend to align Macbeth with subject of race. When we situate Shakespeare in context of racial or nationalist discourse, we typically focus on four or five plays, from Titus Andronicus at beginning of his career to The Tempest at end. The other, foreign, subaltern seem not to be topics that belong to most of Shakespeare canon, and less still to Macbeth.Yet when it comes to history of performance, Macbeth has a powerful legacy - particularly in America - of engagement with questions of color and ethnicity. Even Shakespeare scholars are apt to know only scraps of this past, so new collection from Scot L. Newstok and Ayanna Thompson is a welcome addition to scholarship on theatrical history and practice. Weyward Macbeth - anomalous spelling of wayward derives from description of witches in First Folio - attempts to cure amnesia (8) that has erased play's rich, raucous theatrical conversation with African-American and other cultures. Or, as Thompson puts it in her introduction, Weyward Macbeth positions 'Scottish Play' in center of American racial constructions (8). In this goal, book meets with mixed success. But most of contributors do show considerable charge that thinking differently, or highlighting and remembering race, can bring to play.The collection comprises 26 short (roughly 3000 to 5000-word) essays on Macbeth in several contexts. There are treatments of early American performances and parodies (including minstrel shows); Federal Theatre Project's productions (Orson Welles and legacy of his 1936 Voodoo Macbeth); and accounts of Macbeths put on by African-, Asian-, Native-, and Latino-American troupes. There are speculations on non-traditional casting in opera, and readings of Macbeth refractions and adaptations on film, television, internet, and in jazz as well as contemporary African-American poetry and drama. Contributors include actors, directors, and academics - Shakespeareans, Africanists, American historians, Cultural Studies specialists. Newstok and Thompson do well to organize this wildly disparate collection into a readable presentation.Many of authors make Macbeth-race connection through compelling historical data and pithy vignettes, showing (for one example) surprising frequency with which both abolitionists and slaveholders deployed references to play: slaveowners and nation as a whole were like Macbeths with their indelible bloodstains; while slaves and freedmen themselves were also like doomed king in his courage, invincibility, and ultimate subjection to larger forces. But most of authors here exhibit some strain in articulating precisely significance of connection of Macbeth to matters of race. The stellar American actor Harry Lennix contributes a lovely essay, A Black Actor's Guide to Scottish Play, or, Why Macbeth Matters (113-20), and his answers to question why Macbeth? represent an honest, distilled version of difficulty most of authors encounter in one way or another. He begins disarmingly: Africans and their descendants are uniquely empowered to bring a deeper resonance to [Macbeth] because of its interest in metaphysical world. I do not know a black person who does not, on some level, believe in ghosts (115). Indeed, many of racially informed productions discussed in volume highlight, along with collection's title, witchy, uncanny weyward-ness of play; specificity of Lennix's response here makes cultural sense, if we believe him. But his subsequent explanations for Macbeth's appropriateness to work of black actors grow broadly unhelpful or contradictory: No course of action in its direct dramatic line depends upon race; then, he says hopefully, play has the deepest parallels with our everyday realities, both tangible and emotional. …

Learning to Scrawl: The Evolutionary Strain in Titus Andronicus

Much has been written on the semiotic obsessions of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, less on their relationship with matters of theme. This paper argues first that the play’s engagement with the mutual relationships between language, labour and society draws on classical and early modern accounts of the symbiotic evolution of language and civilised society. It then suggests that the play’s particular rhetorical and kinesiological focus on hand and tongue anticipates the metonymies deployed in Darwinian accounts of human evolution. Key to this reading is the well-known scrawl/scrowl crux: far from opting for a definitive, exclusive meaning, the paper proposes that the semantic uncertainty unleashed at the crux mimics the play’s representation of Rome’s and, in the last resort, humanity’s hesitation between literate civilization and creeping barbarism. No longer a merely lexical quibble over the competing, variously obsolescent and emergent, notions of crawling, gesticulating and scribbling, the crux becomes the touchstone of an evolutionary reading of the play. Just as scrawl/scrowl debates endlessly between different stages on the human evolutionary scale, so Titus Andronicus leaves its readers and audience in uneasy contemplation of Rome’s¬ – and their own – perpetual teetering on the brink of degradation.

Black Aeneas: Race, English Literary History, and the "Barbarous" Poetics of &lt;i&gt;Titus Andronicus&lt;/i&gt;

Black Aeneas reads Titus Andronicus in relation to early modern historiography on Britain's racial past and the transmission of letters out of Africa and into Europe in order to argue that the play is an aesthetic manifesto of the most effective kind: an assertion of a commitment to a poetics through a practice of theatrical barbarism that recovers a theatrical not tied to Roman letters. In the painted figure of a white actor playing its Moor, a swart Cimmerian linked to the legendary figure of Aeneas, the play finds a figure of immense iconoclastic force, through which it resists the white-liming of literary history and representational forms to recover in performance the idea of the body as a medium from which one may wrest an alphabet. A revenge of form, the play furnishes a more capacious idea of the literary and Shakespeare's relationship with it than other accounts where the literary Shakespeare and the drama are defined purely in relation to the verbal. Against Sidney's subscription to Roman authorities in his Apologie for Poetrie , the play harnesses the power of the nonverbal in a fleshly hieroglyphics to recover for its poesie the barbarous letter of the human body.

A Season in Intercultural Limbo: Ninagawa Yukio’s &lt;i&gt;Doctor Faustus&lt;/i&gt;, Theatre Cocoon, Tokyo

O the handful of non-Western Shakespearean directors whose shadows stretch beyond their home countries, few cast a more formidable shadow than Ninagawa Yukio. His patented style, a flamboyant synthesis of Eastern aesthetics and Western texts, has entranced audiences from Tokyo to Stratford—although perhaps not always, as we shall see, for the same reasons. In his landmark Macbeth (premiered in Tokyo in 1980, performed in Edinburgh in 1985), Ninagawa framed the stage as a giant butsudan—a Buddhist altar for commemorating dead relatives—and metamorphosed Birnam wood into a roving grove of blossom-spangled cherry trees. He relocated The Tempest (1987) from an anonymous Mediterranean isle to the Japanese island of Sado-ga-shima and associated Prospero with Zeami, the thirteenth-century founder of noh drama who was exiled there. In 1994, he uprooted A Midsummer Night’s Dream from the Athenian woods, transplanting it to a Zen rock garden in Kyoto. Critics, especially Western critics, were awed by the visual poetry of his productions and the elegant allusions to traditional Japanese culture. Ninagawa’s work has even been given the radiant imprimatur of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), which invited him to England on two separate occasions to direct productions of King Lear and Titus Andronicus.1

Shakespeare’s Plays and Broadside Ballads

As projects in the digital humanities make early modern broadside ballads more accessible to modern readers, these cheap print songs and poems are becoming an increasingly important tool for literary and cultural criticism. How might our attention to “low” texts, like ballads, change the way that we read and think about Shakespeare’s plays? First, Shakespeare’s references to ballads in As You Like It and A Winter’s Tale show the author’s engagement with the growing sixteenth and seventeenth century ballad market. Second, ballad adaptations of Shakespeare plays like the The Taming of the Shrew and Titus Andronicus show the ways that ballad writers and sellers responded to and adapted the plays. In each of these cases, the street and the theater are closer than they might otherwise seem; Shakespeare’s plays respond to the growth of the Renaissance print market by making ballads a part of performance and script, while ballad street literature interprets theatrical plots through the genre of popular song.

Hands, Power, Masculinity: New Readings of Dismemberment in Titus Andronicus

이 논문은 셰익스피어의 초기 비극 『타이터스 앤드러니커스』에서 나타나는 손이 앤드러니커스 가족과 그 밖의 인물들의 권력과 남성성을 드러내고 있음을 밝히는 연구이다. 이 극에서 여러 차례 나타나는 신체 훼손은 이러한 의미를 더욱 부각 시키고 있으나, 신체로부터의 절단이 이 극에서 손이 전달 하고자 하는 권력과 남성성의 의미에 필수불가결한 것은 아니라는 점 또한 연구를 통해 밝힌다. 이 극에서 손은 절단 여부에 상관없이 정치 권력을 드러내고, 복수를 정당화하며 남성성을 극대화 한다. 그리고 또한 손은 대상화 되어 이동하며 신체에 재배치되면서 신체의 일부로서의 기능 이상을 수행하고 있다. 따라서, 심리학적 접근을 통해 신체 절단을 프로이트적 거세(castration)로 보는 비평은 이 극에서 나타나는 손과 신체 훼손의 의미, 그리고 그 기능에 대한 해석을 축소시킬 가능성이 있으며, 또한 이를 프로이트의 “물신주의”(fetishism)입장에서 절단된 손을 바라보는 시각 또한 심리학적 비평의 범주에서 벗어나지 못하는 해석이라는 점을 연구를 통해 밝힌다. 이러한 신체 절단과 훼손, 윤간, 식인행위(cannibalism)등 수 차례 등장하는 기괴하고 잔혹한 장면들로 인해 과거 많은 비평가들에 의해 저평가 되어온 이 극에서 손은 의아하리만치 여러 차례언급, 등장하고 있는데, 여기서 간과하지 말아야 할 점은, 셰익스피어가 일반적, 물리적으로 기능하는 의미로서의 손을 나타내고 있을 뿐 아니라 여러 수사학적 표현을 통해 손의 함의와 기능을 반복적으로 전달하고 있다는 것이다. 이를 통해 이 극에서 나타나는 손은 권력과 남성성을 상징화하는 동시에 여성을 대상화, 타자화된 이미지로 재현하는 것이다. 이러한 권력과 남성성, 그리고 남성 중심적 가치는 셰익스피어의 로마극에 있어 두드러지게 재현되는 요소로서 이 극 『타이터스 앤드러니커스』는 손과 신체 절단을 통해 이를 부각시키고 있음을 이 논문에서 밝히고자 한다.

Shakespeare on Silent Film: An Excellent Dumb Discourse (review)

Reviewed by: Shakespeare on Silent Film: An Excellent Dumb Discourse Emmie McFadden Judith Buchanan . Shakespeare on Silent Film: An Excellent Dumb Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. xxiii + 316 + 57 b/w illus. $99.00. Shakespeare on Silent Film: An Excellent Dumb Discourse is Judith Buchanan's second monograph on Shakespeare film adaptations. Her previous work, Shakespeare on Film (2005), includes two chapters on silent Shakespeare, and these are radically revised and rewritten for a new delivery in a book dedicated exclusively to Shakespeare films made during the silent era (1899-1927). The book also serves as a companion piece to the British Film Institute Silent Shakespeare DVD [End Page 245] (2004)—a collection of seven silent Shakespeare films with both introduction and commentary provided by Buchanan. There was an audience for silent Shakespeare: Buchanan counts between 250 to 300 films based on Shakespearean material during cinema's silent era, and over the course of seven chapters, she examines why Shakespeare was such an attractive source for silent film. The idea of wordless Shakespeare productions might seem paradoxical on first conception, but as the subtitle of Buchanan's monograph reminds us, character muteness is a phenomenon already explored in Shakespearean drama. It is Alonso's dialogue from The Tempest that Buchanan borrows for her title on silent Shakespeare films, and through the use of a pleasurable incongruity, Shakespeare's words bridge us to the concept of a wordless Shakespeare. Later in the preface, Buchanan seizes another opportunity to recall Lavinia from Titus Andronicus, who, dismembered of her hands and tongue, is unable to communicate through voice, and as a result her "signs, winks, nods and kneelings" replace her verbal discourse (1). Upon remembering that wordlessness is an occurrence already explored in Shakespeare's plays, the feeling that we are being presented with a novel and incongruous idea is dispelled. At the same time, the mere thought of Shakespeare without words has the potential to incite feelings of violation or to evoke sentiments of loss. This is not a book that laments the muting of Shakespeare. There are no expressions of bereavement, only articulations of gain. As foregrounded by Alonso and Lavinia, in the absence of the spoken word a variety of other expressions emerge that are equally Shakespearean in content. The book covers a range of British, American, Italian, and German productions, which are separated chronologically into the pioneering years of cinema (1805-1906), the transitional years of cinema (1907-13), the 1916 tercentenary, and the later silent films of the 1920s, with Buchanan's research offering exhaustive examinations into the marketing, distribution, exhibition, and reception of the films. In an endeavor to press us to rethink the ways in which we experience Shakespeare, Buchanan presents engaging, in-depth and lively analyses of the nonlinguistic dimensions of Shakespeare films of the silent era. Opening with an account of the nineteenth-century legacy of magic lantern productions of Shakespeare plays, Buchanan notes that artistic nuances seemingly unique to silent cinema actually derive from and share many similarities with theater. Drawing on performance conventions associated with the nineteenth-century stage, actors are seen to perform words through stylized gestures and other acting codes that have become familiar through theater. Buchanan then recalls the speech act ban, which monitored the spoken word onstage during the Restoration, and she supplies examples of difficulties surrounding the delivery of dramatic dialogue prior to the arrival of silent film. In order to evade the policing of words during the speech act ban, innovative methods were required, and linen scrolls became an alternate way to supply dialogue. The use of linen scrolls can [End Page 246] be seen to anticipate the cinematic intertitle, and as Buchanan notes, the effect of the dialogue scrolls in each case was remarkably similar: In both instances, words were stripped of vocal inflection and performance emphasis, and became instead part of the visual scheme of the piece. Like the earlier stage scrolls, intertitles were similarly to impose a temporary interruption of the performed action in order to supply dialogue, plot, summary or location report in written form. The alternative suspension of action and dialogue that the intertitles of silent film brought in...

“That bloody mind I think they learned of me”: Aaron as tutor in Titus Andronicus

Titus Andronicus foregrounds hands – the severed limbs of Lavinia and Titus in particular – because, in this play, revenge depends on the written, writing hand. Even as the play seemingly deprives the Andronici of their agency by lopping off their limbs, Shakespeare's earliest Roman tragedy offers up writing as a means to action and revenge. Aaron the Moor, the play's explicit villain and master plotter, relies heavily upon writing and reading to destroy the Andronici. This heavily citational play has several well-read characters, but it is Aaron who emerges as a master of both inscription and interpretation. Aaron's role in Titus Andronicus seems at first straightforward: he manipulates other characters, seemingly for no reason other than a delight in devilry, and is suitably punished at the play's conclusion. Yet the play presents him not only as a villain, but as a criminal so skilled that he may teach others his craft. Aaron teaches revenge, and the Andronici's survival depends on recognizing this. His victims come to recognize that only by employing writing and reading themselves, only by becoming Aaron-esque authors, may they exact some form of vengeance. In this play, only “what is written shall be executed” (5.2.15, emphasis added).

Lavinia as Coauthor of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus

This article stresses the collaborative circumstances of Lavinia's production in order to identify the character's particular disruptive and creative agency within Titus Andronicus . Lavinia functions as a coauthor, intervening in and utilizing Rome's abundant tales. Shakespeare's character does not reiterate the Lucretian stories of suicide and sacrifice that fill the play. Rape does not abject her, but rather forcibly removes her from Titus's tale of purity. Through her survival, Lavinia makes the collapsing narrative strategies of the Andronici and the Goths impossible to ignore. She serves to incorporate others in a collaborative tale that highlights the play's inherently hybrid narratives.