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Body language in
drama
Dramatic texts - and above
all Shakespeare's plays - may strike us first by their
language: Words are all we see when we read a play, and when
it is performed, we are often carried away by the beauty of
the verse, the melody and the rhythm of the spoken word -
but the use of non-verbal codes is much more essential in
drama, certainly more essential than the mere exchange of
words provided by the text.
Drama is the rendering of a text by actors, the word is made
flesh when a text is acted out and the actors have to
"speak" with their bodies - in their capacity as characters
to the other characters on the stage, and, as actors
representing these characters, they have to "speak" to the
audience in the theatre [1].
What I intend to do in this paper is not the analysis of the
actual communication between performers and audience, but a
semiotic
analysis [2]
of the non-verbal communication between the characters on
the stage, as far as this sort of communication is fixed by
the printed text, as far as it is seen as intentional by at
least some of the characters, and as far as the body or
parts of it are used like words as (in a Saussurean sense)
arbitrary - and therefore symbolic - signs in a code that is
shared by the communicators (the characters in the play) in
such a way that the body or a part of it "stands to somebody
for something in a certain capacity" (Peirce)
Such acts of non-verbal communication can easily be found in
the verbal text, because non-verbal communication in the
form of body language is often combined with verbal
communication, and, vice versa, verbal communication between
speakers in the same room is always and necessarily
accompanied by non-verbal communication.
When we communicate we always use as many codes as possible
in order to prevent ambiguities and misunderstandings.
Redundancy is a semiotic principle, it is necessary to avoid
misinterpretations due to distortions by "noises" in one of
the channels [3].
If the sender of a non-verbal message composed of possibly
arbitrary signs does not use other codes (verbal or
non-verbal) at the same time, the receiver of the message
will probably ask back by changing to another, mostly verbal
code, to make sure that the message has been decoded
properly ("Why do you smile?", "Why do you look away?")
[4].
Both these principles - redundancy (= the use of several
codes at the same time) as well as the switching to other
codes in connection with messages in non-verbal language -
are not only features of the dramatic genre - they are
features of our everyday communicative situations. That they
are also constantly used in Titus Andronicus is
therefore not astonishing. What is special in Titus,
though, is that the interplay between verbal and non-verbal
codes becomes topical, bodily signs are commented in an
obviously metalinguistic way not only in Lavinia's case,
where verbal language is made impossible and other means of
communication and signification have to be used and
discussed by the characters. The body and its parts are used
as a code system in different but always in very deliberate
ways, which then get commented on, explained or interpreted
in verbal language. They are quite clearly signs which
(according to Eco's definition of the sign
[5])
can be - and are in fact - "used to lie".
Act 1: bodies and their parts used as symbolic signs
arms and the man
In Saturninus' opening lines ("Noble patricians,
patrons of my right, defend the justice of my cause with
arms", I.1.1f [6])
the "arms" are weapons, but they are also - if they get used
- an extension of the actual arms and hands of Saturnine's
followers. They are signs with which Saturninus asks his
followers, the patricians, to speak: "Plead my
successive title with your swords". It is by showing (and
eventually using) their arms that his followers should make
him emperor of Rome. This is the first of many occasions in
this play where "arms" (in the meaning of / a person's arm
with a weapon / [7])
are used or referred to as a means of communication. Rome is
a place where "arms" have to speak and plead.
Bassianus, Saturninus's younger brother and contestant for
the title introduces himself by placing his own body as a
token into the game: "If ever Bassianus, Caesar's son, were
gracious in the eyes of royal Rome". His body, the person
Bassianus, is a floating signifier in search of - or playing
for - the signified / Emperor of Rome /.
The third speaker, the tribune Marcus Andronicus, introduces
his body as an already clearly defined sign which "stands"
for / the people of Rome / ("Know that the people of Rome,
for whom we stand A special party" l.20) by applying almost
the very words of Peirce's definition of a sign, namely as
"something which stands to somebody for something in a
certain capacity" - "My body stands to you for 'the
people of Rome' in the context of this election" (Just as
Jeb Bush recently stood for his brother George W. as "the
people of Florida".) By defining his own body in this way as
a representative, as a signifier of national importance,
Marcus also defines all the other characters who are present
on the stage: they "stand" for the other class, for the
nobility of Rome which is obviously split into two factions.
The definition is based on two simple equations: I = common
people; you = nobility. The actor speaking these words
defines those present on the stage as metonymic signs, as
partes pro toto (due, of course, to theatrical
economy, since neither the whole nobility of Rome nor the
whole proletariat of Rome would find room on the stage), and
in some performances these words may also include the
audience into this imaginary situation; the people in the
audience would have to step in for the missing members of
Rome's nobility, as they might already have been addressed
before to vote for Saturninus with their arms.
Arms - both as weapons and as limbs - are again mentioned as
a means of communication, when Marcus introduces Titus, who
has "chastised with arms / Our enemy's pride". Titus returns
"from where he circumscribèd with his sword... the
enemies of Rome" (l.68). Titus is a writer with his weapon,
a geographer and historian. A part of his "written" work is
brought on the stage: His writings manifest themselves as
bodies - as usual, as he has always done till now, he brings
along some of his sons in a coffin, but this time he also
brings along a second document, his enemies under the yoke
for a triumph.
His remaining sons, obviously eager to write as well, ask
for the body of a prisoner "that we may hew his limbs and on
a pile / Ad manes fratrum sacrifice his flesh" (l. 97f) -
the ritually dismembered body of the prisoner is meant as a
prayer, as a message that will appease the shadows of the
dead. Body language in this special form seems to be the
only way to communicate with the numinous.
tears
Titus has come "To re-salute his country with his
tears, / Tears of true joy for his return to Rome"
(l.75f), and tears will be one of the favourite modes of
expression among Titus and his family throughout the play.
They are not just natural signs which indicate pain or
grief, in most cases they are very complex and arbitrary
signs. In such cases, as we soon shall see, they are
homonymous signs, they have more than one meaning and can,
therefore, like words, be intentionally or tragically
misunderstood. Titus' own tears are just meant as a formal
greeting, meaning /Pleased to meet you, Rome!/ - why should
he then read Tamora's tears as an earnest plea
[8]
for her son, "Victorious Titus, rue the tears I shed, / A
mother's tears in passion for her son"? (I.1.105f)
Tears, tears, tears - words, words, words.
His daughter Lavinia enters and speaks with tears which are
clearly meant as a symbol and not as a "natural sign". They
are not an index for her true emotions, they are
intentionally emitted as an arbitrary sign (or rather as two
different but "homonymous" arbitrary signs) which she has to
explain verbally:
Lo at
this tomb my tributary tears
I render for my brethren's obsequies;
And at thy feet I kneel, with tears of joy
Shed on this earth, for thy return to Rome
O bless me here with thy victorious hand
(l.159ff).
The answer to this tearful
utterance is again non-verbal, a gesture, the blessing with
her father's hand. Of course we might overlook such passages
by just taking them for mirror passages (in Rudolf
Stamm's terminology), passages where the actors speak about
things which they are either not able to perform on stage,
or about things the audience might otherwise not be able to
see (e.g.: "Why dost thou blush?"). But this is not the case
here: Even a close-up on a crying face in a film version
would need a verbal explanation of the (arbitrary) meaning
of these salty signs. The tears in this scene are all purely
conventional (in a lingustic sense) - in Tamora's case they
may have come naturally, but she uses them also as symbols
(= as arbitrary signs), they are meant as a plea
[9].
exchange of women
Act I ends with an extended non-verbal conversation where
bodies become commodities, a means of economic exchange:
When Titus gives his prisoners as a present to the new
emperor, Saturnine, the message is of course that he accepts
him as his emperor, and - do ut des - that he expects
his favour in return. By immediately declaring the
prisoners' freedom Saturnine devalues this present and by
marrying Tamora instead of Lavinia he not only misreads
Titus' intentions deliberately but he also breaks the
conventions of "the exchange of women"
[10]
by disregarding the symbolic value of both Tamora and
Lavinia, by misreading their bodies. He shows himself as an
unworthy emperor, a tyrant who breaks the rules of the
society he is meant to represent. Lavinia, who is then
claimed by Bassianus, is now socially devalued in the eyes
of Titus and Saturnine, a "changing piece" (l. 323) - a
worthless coin - that is given to the one who "flourished
for her with his sword".
The ensuing fight between Bassianus, Titus and his sons is
ultimately about the meaning of Lavinia's body. What does
she stand for in the eyes of her respective possessors:
family honour, nobility, romantic love, grace or
disgrace?
Act II: kinesics and proxemics: rape and murder as
signs
In the eyes of Chiron and Demetrius, who also fight for her
possession, Lavinia's body is just seen as a sexual object.
Their actions, their fight for Lavinia, the killing of
Bassianus and finally their mutual rape of Lavinia are
nothing but "natural signs" in terms of body language, they
are signals triggered by their lust, and therefore
non-intentional (in a semiotic, not in a moral or legal way,
of course). But from Tamora's and Aaron's point of view the
murder of Bassianus and the rape of Lavinia (to which they
not only give their consent, but which they also help to
plan) are meant as intentional kinetic signs, they are a
message of Tamora's revenge, addressed to Titus and to Rome.
Tamora now makes full use of the bodily code. She uses other
people's bodies as a means of communication - she uses Aaron
and her own sons as her secretaries to write her revenge,
not with words, but with the dead body of Bassianus, with
the mutilated body of Lavinia, with the shivering bodies of
Titus' sons in the pit.
A sign, according to Eco, is everything that can be used to
tell a lie. The murder of Bassianus is a kinetic sign, the
final arrangement of the bodies a proxemic sign: The fact
that Quintus and Marius are found in the same pit together
with Bassianus' body must lead to some inevitable
conclusions - but their arranged position in this room is an
indexical sign used to tell a lie - it is a sign that seems
to say: /see, they have murdered him/ , but its true meaning
and intention is different: The murder and the positioning
of the bodies have been arranged to form a message to Titus,
a means to destroy him and his family by having his sons
falsely accused and convicted of murder.
Tamora's body is omnipresent in this scene, her vulva is the
stage setting itself [11].
The "detested, dark, blood-drinking pit" which "speaks" the
false accusation, which sucks these three (male) victims in
and destroys them, is ironically described by its
unsuspecting victims as a part of the female body, as a
voracious sexual organ:
What, art
thou fallen? What subtle hole is this,
Whose mouth is covered with rude-growing briers,
Upon whose leaves are drops of new-shed blood
As fresh as morning dew distilled on flowers?
A very fatal place it seems to me." (2.3.198ff)
Scene II.4: gory
semiotics
"How can one 'unsign' a sign?" is the question that
occupies the two sons of Tamora: Not "how can one make
something undone", but "How can one impede someone from
telling something?". They do not want to kill Lavinia, but
they have to prevent her from accusing them of rape and
murder. Lavinia is a married woman. If she is unable to
write or speak, her body alone will not be able to "tell"
that she has been raped, because as a married woman she is
no longer a virgin. Once deflowered, her body can no longer
function as an indexical sign in this respect, "more
water glideth by the mill / Than wots the miller of; and
easy it is / Of a cut loaf to steal a shive"
(II.1.92ff). The solution, therefore, seems simple: Cut off
her tongue, and she will no longer be able to speak, take
her hands off, and she will no longer be able to write or to
make gestures, she will not be able to point her finger at
the culprits:
DEMETRIUS.
So, now go tell, and if thy tongue can speak,
Who 'twas that cut thy tongue and ravished thee.
CHIRON. Write down thy mind, bewray thy meaning so,
And if thy stumps will let thee play the scribe.
DEMETRIUS. See how with signs and tokens she can scrowl.
(II.4.1ff)
The boys are as stupid as
they are cruel. They have had some classical education, and
they know about the story of Philomele and Tereus - Tereus
cut Philomele's tongue off but she could still betray her
ravisher by sewing his name into her embroidery. To prevent
this, Demetrius and Chiron cut off Lavinia's hands. As more
experienced semioticians we know that this will not do: A
body has many more possibilities to speak, and Lavinia is
going to use them, of course. She could use her legs to
write into the sand. She could use a proxemic code and just
walk towards her tormentors in public. Even cutting off her
legs would not help, apart from the fact that this would be
very difficult to perform on stage - Lavinia is going to
tell her story by writing the names into the sand with a
stick that she takes into her mouth. How does one cut off a
mouth? It could be gagged, as Aaron's and the boys' mouth
will be in Act V.1 and V.2, and it could be sewed or glued
or filled with concrete to be shut for ever. But then she
would still be able to use her eyes - Lavinia is a good one
with tears, as we know from Act 1. And if they cut out her
eyes, too? She might breathe in some special way. We know,
and the play is going to show that in a way which is not
less cruel than these suggestions, that bodies as a whole
and any part of them can be used to convey messages. The
only way to be safe is to kill her. But this is not what the
ravishers want - they want to use her living body to write
upon with their bodies and their knives, a multimedia letter
written in a secret code which says: "revenge".
When Marcus, Lavinia's uncle, sees her, he reads and
understands her body immediately: she runs away - a fountain
of blood is rising and falling between her lips - her arms
have been chopped off: this can only mean that she has been
raped, he concludes.
This scene has been rejected by many critics and directors
not only because of the discrepancy between the cruelty of
the visual image combined with the rhetorical beauty of
Marcus' speech, but also because of the obvious absurdity of
the situation[12]:
Why does he not help her? Why does he not get a doctor
[13]?
And yet, in many productions this has proved to be one of
the strongest and most moving scenes in the
play.[14]
To understand and accept this scene we have to see Marcus as
a choric figure at this moment; his words are a translation
(for the sake of the audience) of what Lavinia's body is
trying to tell as an emblem
[15]
- that the "actual" Marcus does not read the signs in the
same correct way as Marcus the semiotician does at this
moment can be seen in the following scenes: When he has
stepped back into the play, he does no longer "know" what he
knows now.
Act III: The exchange of parts of the body; blood and
tears
Act III.1 starts with Titus shedding a semiotic rainbow
of tears. His first tears are pleas, like Tamora's tears in
Act I, and equally ineffective. They should evoke pity for
his sons in the addressees, the senators:
And for
these bitter tears which now you see
Filling the aged wrinkles in my cheeks;
Be pitiful to my condemned sons" (III.1.6f).
His next tears become ink,
and the earth a blotting paper:
For
these, Tribunes, in the dust I write
My heart's deep languor and my soul's sad tears. /
Let my tears staunch the earth's dry appetite; /
My sons's sweet blood will make it shame and blush."
(III.1.12ff)
And finally the personified
tears should "speak" themselves as multiplied clones of
their sender, the crying father: "My tears are now
prevailing orators" (III.1.26).
Lavinia and Marcus then join him in a choir of tears with a
crescendo. "When I did name her brothers, then fresh tears /
Stood on her cheeks" (III.l.112) Lavinia's tear language is
immediately interpreted, although the meaning of her message
is again ambivalent:
Perchance
she weeps because they killed her husband,
Perchance because she knows them innocent" (115f)
Aaron introduces a new
dimension of bodily communication with his offer to save the
lives of Titus' sons if but one of the remaining Andronici
chops off his hand as a ransom. One hand for two bodies, an
incredibly cheap bargain. Six hands are on offer, four of
them are especially valid means of communication, because -
as Marcus says, and as we know - they have been "writing
destruction on the enemy's castle" (173).
Titus "cheats" his family when he feigns agreement to keep
his own hand while the others go off in search of an axe.
But when they return he has already had his hand chopped off
by Aaron: "Lend me thy hand and I will give you mine". This
seems a more realistic price, hand for hand - but one hand
is only lent, the first part of this utterance uses a simple
bodily metaphor, the other hand, Titus' hand, is definitely
given, and it is not a sign, it is the thing itself
[16].
It becomes a sign when it is sent to the emperor, not only
as a ransom in exchange for the lives of Titus' sons, but at
the same time as a gory greeting ("give his Majesty my
hand", 200). Titus has cheated his family with his hand, he
has used his hand for an honourable "lie" - he has given it,
"spoken" with it, to prevent his son and brother to "speak"
with their hands. Aaron now cheats with this same hand - the
"conventionally agreed signified", the "assumed meaning",
the "exchange value", the other "sign" which was supposed to
stand for the sign "hand of Titus" is not / the living
bodies of Titus' sons / but only their heads. Titus'
nonverbal utterance has been infelicitous. Apart from their
honour, and Lavinia's virginity, his family so far has lost
a lot of blood and tears, a tongue, three arms and two heads
- indispensable, not renewable means of communication in
this mostly non-verbal conversation game. Tamora's revenge
has reached its peak.
The flood of tears is renewed and finally the family starts
to read Lavinia's body in a more scientific manner: "Thou
map of woe that dost thus talk in signs" (III.2.12). Her
body is a multi-media map whose signs can be interpreted by
those who are able to read such maps. Titus thinks he is
able, but he can only guess, and his guesses are wrong:
Hark,
Marcus, what she says,
I can interpret all her martyred signs:
She says she drinks no other drink but tears,
Brewed with her sorrow, meshed upon her cheeks."
(III.2.35ff)
Lavinia's tears are, as
usual, multiple homonyms and obviously misunderstood again.
But there are other bodily signs that can be read as
messages. Titus promises to learn the whole kinetic
alphabet:
Speechless
complainer, I will learn thy thought;
In thy dumb action will I be as perfect
As begging hermits in their holy prayers.
Thou shalt not sigh, nor hold thy stumps to Heaven,
Nor wink, nor nod, nor kneel, nor make a sign,
But I of these will wrest an alphabet
And by still practise learn to know thy meaning.
(III.2.39ff)
And it is indeed by other
means than tears that the truth is discovered: Lavinia makes
a kinetic appeal by following and chasing her nephew to
attract attention. She turns over books with her stumps to
indicate that she wants to show something. She points at
Ovid's story of Philomel as a complex sign to tell her own
complex story with a simple gesture, an indexical sign that
becomes thus a symbol - and finally she writes the names of
her ravishers into the sand - and , in Latin, what they are
guilty of: stuprum, rape. Tamora's boys are thus, as
young Lucius says in an aside in the next scene, "both
deciphered... / For villains marked with rape" IV.2.10)
Acts IV, V: Bodies speak / messages of fixed bodily
features
That Aaron is as black in his soul as his skin is
something that he boasts of himself. Yet that his colour
will ultimately betray his dark secrets becomes evident when
the empress is delivered of a boy. Sexual intercourse with
married women, as Aaron has discussed with the two
villainous boys in Act II, cannot be noticed by their
husbands. This is no longer the case if the woman gets
pregnant and the child identifies - and betrays - his father
by his looks and the colour of his skin.
Look how
the black slave smiles upon the father,
As who should say, 'Old lad, I am thine own' (IV.2.133).
Tamora sends the nurse with
the child to Aaron. The child's body is in itself the
message, it is a letter saying: /I am your son/. To make
this message unspoken the child has to die, and so have the
nurse and the midwife:
Go to the
Empress, tell her this I said. He kills her. Weke,
weke! So cries a pig prepared to the spit. (159ff)
Of course the dead nurse can
no longer "go" to "tell" this to the empress, but her dead
body (or her disappearance, as a "zero-sign") can still tell
Aaron's answer, which is of course not "So cries a pig
prepared to the spit", but: /Nobody should know about this/.
Demetrius does not immediately grasp the meaning, he has to
switch to verbal language: "What meanst thou, Aaron?", and
Aaron translates it: "Shall she live to betray this guilt of
ours?". The child will not be killed, though - it will be
exchanged - another exchange of bodies -, and a white baby
will be presented to the Emperor, another body as a "sign"
which is used as a lie: /I am your son/.
Tamora and her two sons visit Titus, claiming to be Revenge
with her followers, Murder and Rape. They believe that Titus
(who has just written down his future plans of revenge with
his own blood) is mad and assume that he will believe these
allegorical figures to be a "reality". According to the
stage direction they use a disguise, but their own bodies
betray them - they are not only recognisable to the
audience, even Titus recognises them for what they "really"
are, the bodies of Tamora and her sons in disguise. A verbal
or non-verbal "play-in-the-play", a masque, pantomime or
short play is a constant feature in revenge tragedies: It is
used either to reveal the culprit (as in Hamlet) or
to lead to the final act of revenge, the show-down, as in
Kyd's Spanish Tragedy. Tamora's mask may be seen in
this light (the names of her followers may indicate that in
her eyes Titus is not only guilty of having murdered her
son, Alarbus, but that he is also guilty of rape) - but she
fails, whereas Titus' final mask (his disguise as a cook)
will be successful.
Thanks to his feigned madness (another common feature of
revenge tragedies) Titus gains possession of Tamora's sons.
Before he kills the two boys, he tells them what they -
their bodies - are going to mean and why:
I will
grind your bones to dust,
And with your blood and it I'll make a paste;
And of the paste a coffin I will rear,
And make two pasties of your shameful heads;
And bid that strumpet, your unhallowed dam,
Like to the Earth, swallow her own increase.
This is the feast that I have bid her to,
And this the banquet she shall surfeit on;
For worse than Philomel you used my daughter.
And worse than Procne I will be revenged.
(V.2.196-205).
Tamora has assumed the role
of sweet [17]
Revenge, but now the tables are turned upon her, and it is
now her turn to taste rape and murder (= the bodies of her
sons).
The killing of Lavinia is another message to Saturnine,
referring to the classical "pattern" of the rape of
Virginia; and the killings of Tamora, Titus and Saturnine
that follow are a grim dialogue of revenge, of "tit for
tat".
The Law of the Old Testament: "Breach for breach, eye
for eye, tooth for tooth: as he hath caused a blemish in a
man, so shall it be done to him again." (Lev.24.20), is
fulfilled to the letter (and to the limb) in this play of
double revenge with due cause on either side - both Tamora
and Titus get their revenge in the end.
The killing and mutilating game ends in a draw for the two
parties involved. The score is 6:6 if we disregard the dead
from earlier killing games: Titus' sons lost in the wars
against the Goths. The major characters who get killed
during the actual time of the play are, in Titus' camp:
Mutius, [an own goal, one might say, as he gets killed
by his father], Bassianus, Quintus, Martius, Lavinia and
Titus himself; on Tamora's side: Alarbus, Demetrius, Chiron,
Saturnine, Tamora herself, and Aaron who is going to die;
without counting some minor figures who do not belong to
either party, such as the clown, the nurse, but whose bodies
have been shamelessly used as letters by both parties
nevertheless.
When Marcus and Lucius offer to hurl their own bodies - hand
in hand - headlong down on the ragged stones to "make a
mutual closure of our house", they offer a different ending
of the play, in which the final score would be a different
one. The other side would have no possibility to get even,
they would lose a gory game of potlatch, in which that party
wins that can sacrifice more bodies. But this is not the
game that is being played: the name of the game was revenge,
and now the scores are even, justice has been done, a
balance has been reached; they can be pardoned and Lucius is
proclaimed emperor by Aemilius, who now stands with his body
for the "common voice", as Marcus did in the first act.
Revenge - the basic principle of communication
Revenge is "the act of doing hurt or harm to another in
return for wrong or injury suffered" (OED). As such it is an
act of non-verbal communication, based on exchange, on
stimulus and response: You did this - I'll do that.
To every action there is a reaction, every change of
balance demands the re-establishing of a new balance.
Let us forget about the plot of Titus Andronicus for
a short moment, and just imagine that the "wrong or injury
suffered" is not so serious, that it is just a very slight
intrusion into one's thoughts by some event or appearance,
e.g. by somebody's utterance, an utterance that for some
reasons demands an answer by the person whose thoughts have
been interrupted, intruded upon or changed: Might we then
not consider this answer as a kind of "revenge"? Does not
every dialogue, every conversation function in that way? Is
the difference between an answer to a statement and an
answer to murder not just a question of code and degree?
Revenge is based on a dialectic principle, or rather: The
dialectic principle is based on revenge, revenge is the
basic principle of communication - only that we have
forgotten it, just as we have forgotten that our smiles and
our courtesies were once (natural) signs of aggression.
Showing our teeth or giving our hand to the opponent have
become arbitrary signs in our body language, signifying
peace and harmony. Peace and harmony is what we long for,
but it is not the situation we are in, and it is not the
situation we have come from. It is certainly not the
situation we want to be entertained with.
polemos panton pater : Conflict is the father of all
things. In every situation which involves two or more people
there is some kind of conflict. At some stage conflicts will
lead to a breach of some kind in the eyes of one party, and
this will lead to some sort of "revenge". Revenge is of an
extremely gory kind in "revenge tragedies", but "softer"
forms of revenge are the basic pattern of every tragic plot,
of every plot, of all drama. There has to be a breach of
some kind at the beginning of a play to provide a momentum
and to create suspense, and the pleasure or disappointment
at the end of a play depends on the amount of justice that
has finally been reached in the eyes of the audience.
Revenge is sweet; without it we would be "left in
bitterness", we would be disappointed.
Revenge in Titus Andronicus is not sweet at all, even
if the final banquet is spicy. Words can be exchanged
easily, but what if they have been made flesh and meat
again? Reduced to its primitive non-verbal basics, human
communication proves to be gory. Titus certainly
surfeits the appetite of a refined audience. The first
"utterance" in the non-verbal dramatic "conversation"
between Tamora and Titus is the sacrifice of a prisoner of
war in front of his own mother. A dramatic communication
that starts at this level can not be for the faint-hearted.
Both parties have soon an equally justified or at least
understandable cause for their private revenge.
Revenge in the form of private revenge is not acceptable
within a civilised system, it is a "kind of wild justice",
which law should weed out (as Bacon puts it in his essay
On
Revenge), so
that life can run on smoothly within the legal garden walls
of society. The more civilised a society, the less scope can
be allowed for private revenge. The progress of culture, of
civilisation, of humanity, demands that such acts be handed
over to some higher authority, to the law, to god - or just
to be safe, to both. But what does our law do? Our legal
system is still based on revenge, although it is a publicly
sanctioned form of revenge. And on what, if not on revenge,
should our religious concepts of heaven and hell be
based?
"And onto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer
also the other" may be an appropriate maxim for life in
an advanced and civilised society, where the maintaining of
law and order is in the hands of an accepted and publicly
(democratically or otherwise) sanctionned authority, but it
will hardly create enough suspense and entertainment for the
plot of a whole play.
Rome - a wilderness of tigers
Tragic drama needs a more primitive society as a setting
for the tragic plot to remain credible, either a more
anarchic society or situation that allows a larger scope for
private revenge, or a tyrannical system that is so obviously
unjust that it calls for public revenge.
Titus Andronicus offers both. Tamora's revenge is
directed against the Roman Empire as well as against Titus
and his sons for their cruelty. Her first moves trigger the
urge for personal revenge in Titus, but very soon his
revenge turns against the Rome of Saturnine as well, against
a society which is not able to maintain law and order.
What kind of society is this? The play is set in imperial
Rome at an uncertain time, it is not historically or
chronologically defined [18].
The invasion of the Goths points towards the end of the
Roman empire, and yet Titus and his family seem
ideologically based in the republic. The plot of this play
is invented, it is not based on any "historical facts".
"Rome" must, therefore, be a deliberate choice of place in
an otherwise very vague setting of persons and time.
Rome is (much more than Greece or Mesopotomia) the
birthplace, the cradle of European culture for the
Elizabethans. Imperial Rome often stands metaphorically for
London and Britain in Elizabethan literature
[19]
- in the context of the translatio imperii, the
(westward) translation of the Empire. Brutus, the son of
Aeneas, is seen as the founding father of "Brutannia", of
Britain, from Layamon's Brute onwards. London is
"Troynovant", a New Troy and New Rome, just as Rome
was a New Troy. But in this play imperial Rome is not in
decline, it is not an "overcivilised" and decadent society
in need of being newly erected in some other country, it is
a very primitive society whose values - even those which are
disregarded by the current regime - are highly questionable.
It is a society in which swords and knives are used instead
of pens, blood and tears instead of ink, human bodies (dead
[20]
or alive) instead of paper, where arms do speak and where
bodies and their parts, heads and limbs, are exchanged like
words or sentences.
The non-verbal code of blood and murder is used throughout
the play, it is the language the Romans and Titus' family
use at the very beginning - and the language they still use
at the end. It is not the "barbarous" Goths, their enemies,
who introduce it, but they offer no alternative, they
"speak" the same language. At the same time this play offers
more classical quotations than any other Shakespearean play
- even the Goths, even Aaron, know and quote Latin authors
as often and as well as the Romans, they recite their
Horace, Seneca and Ovid as if they were Elizabethan
humanists.
The play investigates the extremities of our culture, of
culture in general. Culture is unmasked as an act of
repression and sublimation, more in Nietzsche's sense than
in Freud's:
"... all
these motives, whatever great names we give them, have
grown out of the same roots [...]. Between good
and evil actions there is no difference in type; at most,
a difference in degree. Good actions are sublimated evil
actions..." [21].
Behind a thin layer of
cultural gloss lurks Mr Hyde, or rather, our cultural
achievements are a superstructure which consists of
signifiers heaped upon signifiers of signifiers, but which
is ultimately grounded on a very ugly material base which we
try to hide, to forget, to dispel and ignore. Rome is the
right setting to show this, because this is the place where
our culture started in the eyes of an Elizabethan audience,
and it is the place where it reached its first peak, in
literature, in law, in the building of an empire, in the
pax romana, in Christianity. But Rome was founded on
murder and rape [22]
- and if the cultural achievements of humanity - society,
law, language, literature - are followed back to their
roots, if words are made flesh again, all our cultural
achievements turn out to be based on origins which we now
consider inhuman and beastly: on sacrifices, on rape and
murder, on revenge, on cannibalism: "Rome is but a
wilderness of tigers" (III.1.54).
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