1 00:00:00,090 --> 00:00:07,050 We're talking today about Titus Andronicus case, I like the six lectures which are already on I tunes, 2 00:00:07,050 --> 00:00:12,540 these lectures are each going to be about an individual Shakespeare play. And I'm going to try and approach it by a kind of matter. 3 00:00:12,540 --> 00:00:13,200 Questions. 4 00:00:13,200 --> 00:00:20,810 I'm going to try and distil what criticism has been interested in into one question, often a question which seems ridiculously oversimplified. 5 00:00:20,810 --> 00:00:28,710 Let's try and use that as a way of showing some of the different things we might try and do when we study Shakespeare plays. 6 00:00:28,710 --> 00:00:34,860 So I hope that the question is going to be a starting point for you to think about how 7 00:00:34,860 --> 00:00:38,200 you might approach this play and what you might do with it in relation to other plays. 8 00:00:38,200 --> 00:00:43,470 The first one I want to talk about is Titus Andronicus, a play written probably in fifteen ninety three. 9 00:00:43,470 --> 00:00:48,630 The first play of Shakespeare's to go into print in fifteen ninety four. 10 00:00:48,630 --> 00:00:55,950 The question I've chosen for Titus Andronicus is why doesn't Marcus give Lavinia first aid? 11 00:00:55,950 --> 00:00:59,940 Why doesn't Marcus give Lavinia first aid? And I'm going to back up and talk a bit about the play and why. 12 00:00:59,940 --> 00:01:05,070 That's a question. I'm not expecting you when you come to these lectures, particularly to have read the play. 13 00:01:05,070 --> 00:01:10,920 And I hope that the way I talk about it will give you enough sense of the context to make sense of the points. 14 00:01:10,920 --> 00:01:16,350 So let's back up and talk about what's happening in Titus Andronicus. 15 00:01:16,350 --> 00:01:19,830 So as many of you will know, Titus Andronicus is a Roman play, 16 00:01:19,830 --> 00:01:27,600 which begins with two interwoven plotlines in a tightly packed and unbroken long first act. 17 00:01:27,600 --> 00:01:31,500 So the first of those plotlines is about who rules Rome. 18 00:01:31,500 --> 00:01:41,640 So it's got that Roman play interest in it, in rule, in the qualities of a good ruler and in political succession forms of succession. 19 00:01:41,640 --> 00:01:46,770 You could see those in Julius Caesar or in Coriolanus also. 20 00:01:46,770 --> 00:01:54,450 So saturnine US and Bassi honours, who are the sons of the previous emperor, are vying for the emperor shape of Rome. 21 00:01:54,450 --> 00:02:00,690 They're also vying for the hand of Titus Andronicus, his daughter, Lavinia. 22 00:02:00,690 --> 00:02:06,480 In the end, these two prises are separated out saturnine as becomes emperor and Bassi honours. 23 00:02:06,480 --> 00:02:10,080 Who is Lavinia's chosen husband gets the girl. 24 00:02:10,080 --> 00:02:19,290 And this all takes place against the backdrop of the triumphant return of Titus Andronicus at the head of his victorious and much depleted army. 25 00:02:19,290 --> 00:02:26,970 Titus brings with him to Rome prisoners from the Goths who he's conquered, Tamura, queen of the Goths, 26 00:02:26,970 --> 00:02:36,260 her sons Kyron Demetrius and the Labus and the mysterious more Aaron Saturnine US takes tomorrow for his queen. 27 00:02:36,260 --> 00:02:39,360 Her son, a labus, is sacrificed, 28 00:02:39,360 --> 00:02:48,780 locked to pieces and burned by Titus and his eldest son Lucio's as an offering to the gods tomorrow secretly vows revenge. 29 00:02:48,780 --> 00:02:56,160 And when Lavinia and her husband Bassi Ana see tomorrow having an assignation in the woods with her lover Aaron, 30 00:02:56,160 --> 00:03:05,990 they are attacked by tomorrow's sons, Catherine and Demetrius. The brothers kill Bassi Arnis and they rape Lavinia on the body of her husband. 31 00:03:05,990 --> 00:03:13,570 And then in order that she cannot reveal their names, they cut out her tongue and cut off her hands. 32 00:03:13,570 --> 00:03:17,490 It's in this state that she is found by her uncle, Marcus Andronicus. 33 00:03:17,490 --> 00:03:24,660 And this is the scene that I want to focus on. It's a scene which has caused critics and theatre directors enormous difficulty. 34 00:03:24,660 --> 00:03:29,460 Marcus describes in a long speech a long and highly polite political speech. 35 00:03:29,460 --> 00:03:35,160 Lavinia's bleeding and mutilated body seeming to do nothing other than address 36 00:03:35,160 --> 00:03:41,430 her and to set aside her now because the length of the speech is important. 37 00:03:41,430 --> 00:03:48,570 My arguments here. I'm actually going to read it out in its entirety. 38 00:03:48,570 --> 00:03:52,170 So this is an Act two scene for Act two. 39 00:03:52,170 --> 00:03:57,720 Scene three, if you're using Jonathan Bates Ardern, three additions, active scene four. 40 00:03:57,720 --> 00:04:02,640 More generally, the stage direction reads wind horns. 41 00:04:02,640 --> 00:04:07,320 Enter Marcus from hunting. And then this is Marcus, his speech. 42 00:04:07,320 --> 00:04:11,040 Who is this. My niece that flies away so fast. 43 00:04:11,040 --> 00:04:17,400 Cousin, a word. Where is your husband? If I do dream would all my wealth would wake me. 44 00:04:17,400 --> 00:04:24,270 If I do wake some planet strike me down that I may slumber and eternal sleep speak gentle. 45 00:04:24,270 --> 00:04:30,960 What stern ungentle hands have locked and hued and made thy body bare of her two branches. 46 00:04:30,960 --> 00:04:40,200 Those sweet ornaments who's circling shadows kings have sought to sleep in and might not gain so greater happiness as half thy love. 47 00:04:40,200 --> 00:04:48,660 Why does not speak to me? Alas, a crimson river of warm blood like to a bubbling fountain stirred with wind, 48 00:04:48,660 --> 00:04:53,700 doth rise and fall between thy rosett lips coming and going with thy honey breath. 49 00:04:53,700 --> 00:05:00,040 But sure, some terrier's have deflowered the and lest I should detect him cut by term. 50 00:05:00,040 --> 00:05:05,260 Now, that turns to the way they face for shame and notwithstanding all this loss of blood, Aastrom, 51 00:05:05,260 --> 00:05:13,720 a conduit with three issuing spouts, yet did our cheeks look red as Titan's face blushing to be encountered by a cloud? 52 00:05:13,720 --> 00:05:23,350 Shall I speak for the shall I say it is so. Oh, that I knew my heart and knew the beast that I might rail at him to ease my mind. 53 00:05:23,350 --> 00:05:29,500 Sorrow concealed like an oven stopped doth burn the heart to cinders where it is fair. 54 00:05:29,500 --> 00:05:37,000 Phil Amela why she lost her tongue and in a tedious sampler sewed her mind but lovely knees that 55 00:05:37,000 --> 00:05:44,560 mean is cut from the craftier terrier's cousin has damit and he have cut those pretty fingers off. 56 00:05:44,560 --> 00:05:51,880 That could have better so than Philomel. Oh had the monster seen those lily hands tremble like Aspen leaves upon a lute 57 00:05:51,880 --> 00:05:56,500 and make the single sorry and make the silken strings delight to kiss them. 58 00:05:56,500 --> 00:06:03,370 He would not then have touched them for his life. Or had he heard the heavenly harmony which that sweet tongue has made, 59 00:06:03,370 --> 00:06:09,610 he would have dropped his knife and fell asleep as Cerberus at the Thracians Poet's feet come. 60 00:06:09,610 --> 00:06:15,580 Let us go and make thy father blind for such a sight will blind a father's eye one. 61 00:06:15,580 --> 00:06:26,170 Our storm will drown the fragrant Medes. What will whole months of tears thy father's eyes do not draw back for we will mourn with thee. 62 00:06:26,170 --> 00:06:35,680 Oh, could our morning ease thy misery now we don't really know how quickly plays Bould along in the Elizabethan theatre, 63 00:06:35,680 --> 00:06:43,570 but Greg Doren, contemporary data director at the RNC, cites a figure of eight hundred lines an hour on the modern stage. 64 00:06:43,570 --> 00:06:50,740 So a speech of forty five lines would last between three and four minutes is quite a long static time on stage, 65 00:06:50,740 --> 00:06:56,950 just as it felt quite a long static time in this lecture. And as most state histories of the play will tell you, 66 00:06:56,950 --> 00:07:04,330 this is a speech which has tended to be drastically cut in performance is a speech which slows down the action, 67 00:07:04,330 --> 00:07:11,530 making Lavinia into an object to be contemplated, to be understood or interpreted in some disturbing sense. 68 00:07:11,530 --> 00:07:22,000 The abiding rhetorical figure of Markus's speech is that of phrases like phrases, the verbal description of a visual work of art. 69 00:07:22,000 --> 00:07:25,660 Some of you may have read Laurie McGuire's excellent book, Where There's a Will. 70 00:07:25,660 --> 00:07:29,140 There's a way it's subtitled All I Really Needed to Know. 71 00:07:29,140 --> 00:07:35,860 I learnt from Shakespeare. It's a good premise, but never go to this woman for first aid. 72 00:07:35,860 --> 00:07:41,800 For all Shakespeare's human expansiveness, he would never teachers what to do in a medical emergency. 73 00:07:41,800 --> 00:07:48,820 He doesn't really do paramedics after Gloucester has had the vile jelly of his eyes gouged out in King Lear, 74 00:07:48,820 --> 00:07:54,250 a play which shows that very graphic violence is not confined to his early period of Shakespeare's writing, 75 00:07:54,250 --> 00:07:59,050 but continues as a part of his understanding of tragedy all the way through. 76 00:07:59,050 --> 00:08:06,650 After that awful scene, the quartette text has some servants come to bathe Gloucester's face and to dress his wounds. 77 00:08:06,650 --> 00:08:13,090 But they are not there in the revised folio text. They've been taken out in that revision. 78 00:08:13,090 --> 00:08:19,270 And elsewhere, Shakespearean characters are much more interested in applying poison than applying its antidote. 79 00:08:19,270 --> 00:08:24,120 They're more interested in stabbing than in binding wounds. 80 00:08:24,120 --> 00:08:31,050 So, of course, one immediate problem about Marcus's response to Lavinia is that it is completely unrealistic. 81 00:08:31,050 --> 00:08:35,520 What man coming across a seriously wounded woman, let alone his own niece, 82 00:08:35,520 --> 00:08:39,000 would spend several minutes apostrophes ing the fluorescence of blood issuing 83 00:08:39,000 --> 00:08:44,010 from her body rather than comforting her or beginning to treat her injuries. 84 00:08:44,010 --> 00:08:51,720 This is a time, surely, for tourniquets, not tropes, surgery, not similes. 85 00:08:51,720 --> 00:08:56,700 In some ways, this common sense objection to Markus's behaviour I think rests on a misapprehension. 86 00:08:56,700 --> 00:09:01,650 And that's a widespread misapprehension that Shakespeare is a realist playwright. 87 00:09:01,650 --> 00:09:03,900 I don't think Shakespeare is a realist playwright or he isn't. 88 00:09:03,900 --> 00:09:10,300 Only that if you remember the plays of Christopher Marlowe, a strong influence on Titus Andronicus. 89 00:09:10,300 --> 00:09:14,280 This is this is been very close to Marlos death in 50 93. 90 00:09:14,280 --> 00:09:22,140 We can see the character of Aaron the more who is a kind of Barabas from the Jew of Malta who wants to be Tamburlaine. 91 00:09:22,140 --> 00:09:30,450 If you remember those plays of Mahler's, you remember that people don't go to the theatre in the early fifteen nineties for a slice of life. 92 00:09:30,450 --> 00:09:35,580 Kitchen sink drama like kitchen sinks have yet to be invented. 93 00:09:35,580 --> 00:09:39,960 Thomas Platter, visiting London from Switzerland in fifteen ninety nine, 94 00:09:39,960 --> 00:09:49,320 attended a performance at the Globe and he observed that the English do not travel much and prefer to learn foreign matters at home. 95 00:09:49,320 --> 00:09:58,210 The idea being that the stage brings unfamiliar things into people's lives rather than representing the things that they already know. 96 00:09:58,210 --> 00:10:05,250 Being that's true in terms of the plot and particularly the language of plays of the early fifteen nineties, 97 00:10:05,250 --> 00:10:11,070 so that the theatre was a non realist medium at this point in the fifteen nineties, we might want to modify that. 98 00:10:11,070 --> 00:10:13,770 If we think about city comedy or citizen comedy, 99 00:10:13,770 --> 00:10:20,630 which you may be familiar with from works by Johnson or Decca or Middleton at the beginning of the 17th century, that might modify this at all. 100 00:10:20,630 --> 00:10:24,570 But it think about the early 50s, nineties, which is where we are with Titus. 101 00:10:24,570 --> 00:10:30,780 It's important to remember that the theatre is non realist, particularly given all the subsequent criticism of Shakespeare, 102 00:10:30,780 --> 00:10:37,380 which has found his psychological realism, his most enduring claim on our attention. 103 00:10:37,380 --> 00:10:42,390 I'm not sure that Titus is a psychologically realistic play in this sense, 104 00:10:42,390 --> 00:10:51,120 in the sense that roundly drawn plausible figures act and speak in ways which are coherently linked to an individual personality. 105 00:10:51,120 --> 00:10:58,630 I don't think I think it'll be hard to find that in Titus Andronicus. And another common idea about Shakespeare. 106 00:10:58,630 --> 00:11:05,250 Coleridge's idea that the plays require a suspension of disbelief, a suspension of disbelief, 107 00:11:05,250 --> 00:11:12,330 that would mean we would overlook the absurdity of Markus's speech at this point because we thought that's what the play needed us to do. 108 00:11:12,330 --> 00:11:18,420 That also, I think, is something of a myth. It seems quite perverse to me to argue that plays which, for instance, 109 00:11:18,420 --> 00:11:26,810 consistently show characters in disguise or female characters dressing as men or which allude to the vocabulary of all the world's a stage, 110 00:11:26,810 --> 00:11:35,370 are really requiring us to forget that these are plays that everyone on stage is in disguise and that all female characters are played by men anyway. 111 00:11:35,370 --> 00:11:44,460 It seems to be flagging that up for our attention rather than attempting to erase it. 112 00:11:44,460 --> 00:11:50,160 So maybe then the problem, our problem with what Marcus does here is actually a problem about expectation. 113 00:11:50,160 --> 00:11:56,190 It's a problem about our sense that Shakespeare's character should respond like real human people because that's what they are. 114 00:11:56,190 --> 00:12:01,740 I guess I'm arguing that maybe that's not what they are hearing, Titus, but Shakespeare's characters, 115 00:12:01,740 --> 00:12:10,920 or at least some of them at some moments and in some plays do reach towards more recognisable models of selfhood. 116 00:12:10,920 --> 00:12:17,880 At the time of Titus Andronicus, the theatre is a rapidly developing new representational technology. 117 00:12:17,880 --> 00:12:26,440 It's analogous in its technical advances and in its whirlwind energy to early cinema or television or Internet 2.0. 118 00:12:26,440 --> 00:12:33,810 It's experimenting with different modes of representation and perhaps in Markus's lengthy address to Lavinia. 119 00:12:33,810 --> 00:12:37,470 We can see something of how the experiment works. 120 00:12:37,470 --> 00:12:45,000 Later in his career, Shakespeare is going to use the device of the soliloquy to reveal something of what's inside his characters. 121 00:12:45,000 --> 00:12:50,430 What Hamlet calls that, within which passages show that within which passage, 122 00:12:50,430 --> 00:12:58,470 show and soliloquy comes to be the means in Shakespeare's tragedies that we feel we are given insight into what's inside. 123 00:12:58,470 --> 00:13:08,100 It's not actually particularly a technique which is taken up by other playwrights. It's not the only way the theatre has of showing the inside. 124 00:13:08,100 --> 00:13:13,920 Even Shakespeare, I think experiments with different kinds of representational modes forgetting to what's 125 00:13:13,920 --> 00:13:19,920 interior the technique of separating out a single consciousness across different characters. 126 00:13:19,920 --> 00:13:27,400 We might see a fellow in the argot as a kind of. A divided psyche rather than two separate people. 127 00:13:27,400 --> 00:13:34,960 We might think about the relationship between Macbeth and the witches in a similar way, these later techniques. 128 00:13:34,960 --> 00:13:36,460 The division of characters, 129 00:13:36,460 --> 00:13:45,100 the division of personalities across different characters or the use of soliloquy all implicitly acknowledge that they are fictional. 130 00:13:45,100 --> 00:13:47,500 It's a characteristic of what's inside, 131 00:13:47,500 --> 00:14:00,580 that it cannot be seen or known that externalising or revealing or articulating the inner essence also changes it in some deeply unrealistic ways. 132 00:14:00,580 --> 00:14:08,590 Writing of a landmark production of Titus Andronicus at Stratford, directed by Deborah Warner in 1987, 133 00:14:08,590 --> 00:14:16,000 Stanley Wells described the speech of Marcus as a different kind of psychological portrait. 134 00:14:16,000 --> 00:14:20,290 It's a review you can read in the journal Shakespeare survey. This is Welles. 135 00:14:20,290 --> 00:14:30,220 It became a deeply moving attempt to master the facts and thus to overcome the emotional shock of a previously unimagined horror. 136 00:14:30,220 --> 00:14:39,190 We had the sense of a suspension of time, as if the speech represented an articulation necessarily extended in expression or a sequence of thoughts 137 00:14:39,190 --> 00:14:45,280 and emotions that might have taken no more than a second or two to flush to the character's mind. 138 00:14:45,280 --> 00:14:53,500 So Welles is saying this time was suspended not because this is a realist representation of what Marcus or Marcus figure might do at this point. 139 00:14:53,500 --> 00:15:01,870 But because this is the way that you show a whole lot of whirling impressions and an attempt to come to terms with and to process what's happened. 140 00:15:01,870 --> 00:15:10,020 Once you put that into language, it takes longer than it would do in your mind. So it's an analysis derived from the stage. 141 00:15:10,020 --> 00:15:17,930 And I really would encourage you to read theatre reviews and reflections by actors for their insights into the plays. 142 00:15:17,930 --> 00:15:22,440 Markus's long speech, then, is to be understood as a kind of extended nightmare. 143 00:15:22,440 --> 00:15:29,710 A sequence of images flash across his brain as he encounters Lavinia and he struggles to process them. 144 00:15:29,710 --> 00:15:34,800 So rather than representing real time those minutes of poetic verse, 145 00:15:34,800 --> 00:15:41,350 Markus's speech represents the dramatist attempt to give an impression of inner perceptions. 146 00:15:41,350 --> 00:15:45,040 The exploration of how the inner can be represented might have its nearest analogy, 147 00:15:45,040 --> 00:15:49,780 perhaps in ideas of stream of consciousness from modernist fiction. 148 00:15:49,780 --> 00:15:57,640 Stream of consciousness attempts to show what it's like to think certain things or to receive certain impressions and to begin to process them. 149 00:15:57,640 --> 00:16:07,700 But it does that in a in a in a style which is actually non naturalistic, even though it tries to be representational. 150 00:16:07,700 --> 00:16:14,750 Now that the dimensions of early modern theatrical fiction, both spatial and temporal, 151 00:16:14,750 --> 00:16:23,180 need not be the same as the physical dimensions of the theatre is a really important way in which the early modern stage is not realist. 152 00:16:23,180 --> 00:16:30,920 Shakespeare, as we know, rarely observes the classical unities by which a play represents continuous time because of the unity of time, 153 00:16:30,920 --> 00:16:35,930 as you know, suggests that the time that the play takes is the time of its action. 154 00:16:35,930 --> 00:16:41,750 So the action of a play should be two or three hours. We see that only in the comedy of errors and in The Tempest elsewhere. 155 00:16:41,750 --> 00:16:48,620 Shakespeare's not interested in that at all. Nor is he interested in the unity of place. 156 00:16:48,620 --> 00:16:51,290 Many of Shakespeare's plays are split between two locations. 157 00:16:51,290 --> 00:17:00,180 Aren't they unsubtle toggled between those without regard to the unity of place and the unity of action? 158 00:17:00,180 --> 00:17:06,200 The idea that the theatre should represent one single plotline unschooling itself 159 00:17:06,200 --> 00:17:10,400 in one time in one place is also something which Shakespeare entirely disregards. 160 00:17:10,400 --> 00:17:17,120 We have subplots and and counter plots in just about all of his plays. 161 00:17:17,120 --> 00:17:24,770 So Shakespeare doesn't doesn't stick to the unities. But he also uses stage time in some quite interesting ways. 162 00:17:24,770 --> 00:17:28,070 There's a moment in much remeasure, which I'm not talking about today, 163 00:17:28,070 --> 00:17:35,870 but this moment in measure for measure where the Duke tells Isabella that she must tell a very complicated plot to marry Ana. 164 00:17:35,870 --> 00:17:43,020 And he stands at the front of the stage and says a few lines, while presumably Isabella Marijana walk around and the plot is revealed to her. 165 00:17:43,020 --> 00:17:47,000 It's absolutely inconceivable that it could have taken that amount of time. 166 00:17:47,000 --> 00:17:57,140 So we seem to have on the stage then two different ideas of stage of stage time, not as kind of realist's single spatial dimension. 167 00:17:57,140 --> 00:18:04,020 We could think about that spatially when there are characters on the stage who say things that other characters don't hear. 168 00:18:04,020 --> 00:18:09,470 And so we've tended to think about that as an aside in editorial convention. 169 00:18:09,470 --> 00:18:13,250 But the whole idea of an aside suggests that really everybody on the stage can hear 170 00:18:13,250 --> 00:18:17,770 everybody else in Shakespeare very rarely uses the space at the stage in that way. 171 00:18:17,770 --> 00:18:21,200 So. So sometimes the distance between characters physically on the stage in front 172 00:18:21,200 --> 00:18:25,040 of us is not the distance between them in the in the fiction of the play. 173 00:18:25,040 --> 00:18:31,340 We have to imagine that they're further apart or that the space stands in for something different. 174 00:18:31,340 --> 00:18:38,960 So this is all a long way of saying that perhaps Marcus's speech has been a problem to us because it conflicts with our 175 00:18:38,960 --> 00:18:46,820 assumptions about the level of realism we expect from Shakespeare and our assumption that realism equals naturalism. 176 00:18:46,820 --> 00:18:53,000 So that for things to be realistic and to get to the essence of things, there must also be naturalistic. 177 00:18:53,000 --> 00:19:02,240 There must occur in in real time. Perhaps then we've underestimated this place sophistication by assuming that it needs as 178 00:19:02,240 --> 00:19:08,370 credulously to accept its fictions rather than to understand them just as in the play itself. 179 00:19:08,370 --> 00:19:16,130 To Mora, dressed as revenge in an attempt to torment Titus assumes that he has been entirely taken in by this illusion. 180 00:19:16,130 --> 00:19:24,290 In fact, Titus knows very well that this is tomorrow in disguise. 181 00:19:24,290 --> 00:19:30,920 Part of the problem, as you will have heard with Marcus's speech, is it's incongruous, rhetorical flourish. 182 00:19:30,920 --> 00:19:36,860 I want to try and talk about this under two related headings. The first is the role of women in the play. 183 00:19:36,860 --> 00:19:42,270 And the second is about poetry and the influence of of it. 184 00:19:42,270 --> 00:19:48,540 Let's take the second of these, first of it, so of its metamorphoses. 185 00:19:48,540 --> 00:19:55,710 Translated by Arthur Golding in Fifteen Sixty Seven is a work on which Shakespeare draws repeatedly throughout his career. 186 00:19:55,710 --> 00:20:00,360 It's also a work which, as you all know, generates a whole genre of a video and poetry. 187 00:20:00,360 --> 00:20:06,570 The so-called Papillion, or miniature epic, including Mahler's Hero and Leander Shakespeare's own narrative poem, 188 00:20:06,570 --> 00:20:17,520 Venus and Adonis and Nash's choice of Ballantine's. But of it is often behind Duns, Satie's and Thomsons on its and so on all these works. 189 00:20:17,520 --> 00:20:24,690 As you'll recall, a clever erotic verse is largely targeted at a sort of young buck readership from the London is. 190 00:20:24,690 --> 00:20:36,090 Of course, they play with narrative devices of arousal and delay that are both literally Lintz that are both literary but obviously also sexual. 191 00:20:36,090 --> 00:20:37,660 There are kind of pre pornography, 192 00:20:37,660 --> 00:20:50,050 and Ian Milton has talked about them as a kind of erotic writing before pornography so often provides one of the major sources for Titus Andronicus. 193 00:20:50,050 --> 00:20:54,160 It's interesting in this play that there is no Roman historical source. 194 00:20:54,160 --> 00:20:57,880 Shakespeare seems to have made up this moment of Roman history. 195 00:20:57,880 --> 00:21:04,450 It doesn't come from Plutarch, which is his source for the Roman political system elsewhere in his plays. 196 00:21:04,450 --> 00:21:10,940 Instead, the source is the this this fit the fictional erotic source of it. 197 00:21:10,940 --> 00:21:18,020 So of improvised one of Titus Andronicus, his major sources. But Shakespeare does something unfamiliar with the source here. 198 00:21:18,020 --> 00:21:24,110 He makes the source material into the source for the character's actions. 199 00:21:24,110 --> 00:21:25,920 So Shakespeare has read of it. 200 00:21:25,920 --> 00:21:36,440 But so to have Titus, Lavinia, Aaron Kairouan and Demetrius Young Lucio's is studying of it and brings the book on stage. 201 00:21:36,440 --> 00:21:45,190 The Mute Lavinia uses Lucy ASRS school book to begin to reveal what has happened to her. 202 00:21:45,190 --> 00:21:50,190 Now, the sense of it and the ovidio and pattern is governing what's happening. 203 00:21:50,190 --> 00:21:59,440 Maybe a way of asking an important, tragic question about human agency, how far the humans have the freedom to act or not. 204 00:21:59,440 --> 00:22:05,120 Given that this story has already been written. But it also offers an interesting overlap, 205 00:22:05,120 --> 00:22:12,700 a potentially interesting overlap between the figure of the dramatist and the figure of the villain doing bad things with his sources. 206 00:22:12,700 --> 00:22:17,050 Is something Shakespeare shares with the rapists, Karen and Demetrius. 207 00:22:17,050 --> 00:22:25,900 They're both perverting of it. They're both perverting the story of Philomel, just as the term plot has an obvious dramatic meaning. 208 00:22:25,900 --> 00:22:29,920 But tens in Shakespeare to have negative or criminal connotations. 209 00:22:29,920 --> 00:22:36,930 There is some kind of version of play writing and plotting, which is actually negative in Shakespeare's work. 210 00:22:36,930 --> 00:22:42,740 Think about the Duke in measure for measure. Think about Iago in Othello. 211 00:22:42,740 --> 00:22:51,530 And rather, as the contemporaneous smash hit Doctor Faster shows us that learning is not, in fact, a path to self-improvement. 212 00:22:51,530 --> 00:22:57,320 One of the important ideas of the humanist revolution in education that learning makes people better, 213 00:22:57,320 --> 00:23:05,990 makes them moral doctor faster shows us that, in fact, learning leads to damnation, not salvation, or it doesn't fasters this case here, too. 214 00:23:05,990 --> 00:23:15,200 In Titus Andronicus, the Renaissance project of rediscovering classical texts to build a moral humanist society is distorted. 215 00:23:15,200 --> 00:23:19,940 Reading the classics does not make Karenin Dimitrius better. It makes them worse. 216 00:23:19,940 --> 00:23:24,710 It makes them realise, as Marcus pointed out, that they should cut off Lavinia's hands as well, 217 00:23:24,710 --> 00:23:30,560 so that unlike Philomel, she can't stitch that her accusation into a sampler. 218 00:23:30,560 --> 00:23:43,780 The fact that the young child Lucio's in this play is also reading of it makes that sense of moral and intellectual decay all the more foreboding. 219 00:23:43,780 --> 00:23:55,510 These literary models are engagingly literal in Titus, it's the only play of Shakespeare's to turn the source into a prop and to bring it on stage. 220 00:23:55,510 --> 00:24:01,450 Marcus, as we heard, understands what has happened to Lavinia by means of literary prototypes. 221 00:24:01,450 --> 00:24:10,420 Some terriers have deflowered them, he says, referring to big story of Philomena's rapist and notes that while fair Phil Amala, 222 00:24:10,420 --> 00:24:17,560 while she but lost her tongue, Lavinia's attacker has out terrorist terrier's by cutting those pretty fingers off. 223 00:24:17,560 --> 00:24:23,200 That could have sold better than sorry, could have better sold than Philomel. 224 00:24:23,200 --> 00:24:31,270 Later, Titus asks her work how surprised sweet girl ravished and wronged as Philomel was. 225 00:24:31,270 --> 00:24:38,230 It is as if Lavinia's plight is unthinkable, except within this literary frame. 226 00:24:38,230 --> 00:24:46,030 Prompted by the copy of Of It and by Marcus's example, Lavinia writes in the dirt to reveal the names of Karen and Demetrius. 227 00:24:46,030 --> 00:24:49,030 The Quarto stage direction manages like the play itself. 228 00:24:49,030 --> 00:24:58,480 I think to be both graphic and detached, she takes the staff in her mouth and guides it with her stumps and writes. 229 00:24:58,480 --> 00:25:03,580 She takes the stuff in her mouth and guides it with her stumps and writes. 230 00:25:03,580 --> 00:25:09,130 So of it is the handbook, both the Lavinia's rape and for its revelation. 231 00:25:09,130 --> 00:25:20,050 Just as another literary precedent, this time from Livi, is cited by Titus at the banquet, which ends the play tomorrow helps herself to the PI. 232 00:25:20,050 --> 00:25:24,400 She does not realise contains the meat of her son's. 233 00:25:24,400 --> 00:25:31,820 Cannibalism here might be a useful metaphor for the way the play is ingested, its source material, lots of Renaissance theories of immortality, 234 00:25:31,820 --> 00:25:40,900 of that idea of imitating classical sources, talk about it as a model of eating and digesting and taking nourishment from the sources. 235 00:25:40,900 --> 00:25:46,060 And cannibalism in this play is itself a wonderful perversion of that. 236 00:25:46,060 --> 00:25:49,090 So tomorrow is eating a pie containing Karenin. 237 00:25:49,090 --> 00:25:58,390 Dimitrius is Flesh is a wonderful scene in Julie Tamers film, which I really recommend to film titles with Anthony Hopkins as as Titus, 238 00:25:58,390 --> 00:26:06,940 where this wonderfully jaunty music plays and beautiful steaming pie on the windowsill and this sort of fluttering curtain over it. 239 00:26:06,940 --> 00:26:11,200 So it's a kind of 1950s ideal housewife kind of moment. 240 00:26:11,200 --> 00:26:15,310 Very good at juxtaposing tones in the way that the play does. 241 00:26:15,310 --> 00:26:21,760 So tomorrow has to more eat. Titus asks saturnine us what he should do next. 242 00:26:21,760 --> 00:26:26,200 This request is coded as another piece of classical interpretation. 243 00:26:26,200 --> 00:26:35,650 This time it's from the Roman author, Livi. Was it welldone of Rasht Virginias to slay his daughter with his own right hand because she 244 00:26:35,650 --> 00:26:44,410 was enforced Staind and deflowered Saturnine as his gormless answer it was is elaborated. 245 00:26:44,410 --> 00:26:50,320 The girl should not survive her shame and by her presence still renew her father's sorrows. 246 00:26:50,320 --> 00:26:56,890 Titus takes this as a pattern, precedent and lively warrant and kills his daughter. 247 00:26:56,890 --> 00:27:00,310 Di di Lavinia by shame. With the and with thy shame. 248 00:27:00,310 --> 00:27:03,970 By Father's sorrow. Di. 249 00:27:03,970 --> 00:27:11,470 We can see here that Lavinia's treatment throughout the play is overdetermined, pre written, we might say, by the classical texts. 250 00:27:11,470 --> 00:27:15,700 So Titus Andronicus asks those interesting questions about tragedies, 251 00:27:15,700 --> 00:27:21,490 perennial fascination with the issue of agency or will who are what controls events? 252 00:27:21,490 --> 00:27:29,350 How far can individuals and tragedies be held responsible for their own actions and more importantly, for the consequences of those actions? 253 00:27:29,350 --> 00:27:37,660 That's something I talk about in the lecture on Macbeth. If you're interested in seeing how this question recurs later in Shakespeare's tragedies. 254 00:27:37,660 --> 00:27:44,320 So the literary precedents that are so prominent in titles complicate our response to their autonomy. 255 00:27:44,320 --> 00:27:51,340 When the characters seem to be taking their most decisive actions, they can also see be seen to be populated by a pre-existing narrative. 256 00:27:51,340 --> 00:28:03,430 Can't exist. Titus Andronicus takes place in a universe where of a rules rather than God being the source, the source is God. 257 00:28:03,430 --> 00:28:12,280 Part of the purpose, then, of Marcus's speech to and about Lavinia is to establish this pattern of parallels and precedent. 258 00:28:12,280 --> 00:28:18,580 It becomes a kind of extended marginal note or gloss, a kind of reading list or footnote. 259 00:28:18,580 --> 00:28:24,640 And in that it has its nearest analogies, perhaps in each case, annotations to the Shepard's calendar. 260 00:28:24,640 --> 00:28:29,570 Spencer Shepard's calendar or the annotations to the Geneva Bible, 261 00:28:29,570 --> 00:28:39,100 that is to humanist models of annotation and scholarly explication, not to the dramatic action of the theatre. 262 00:28:39,100 --> 00:28:46,360 Marcus doesn't give Lavinia first aid because he's having a scholarly viddy and moment now 263 00:28:46,360 --> 00:28:50,860 related to the play's inscription of a video and material more commonly used in the narrative. 264 00:28:50,860 --> 00:28:56,320 Poetry of the period is its use of language, as I've already said. 265 00:28:56,320 --> 00:29:03,490 Part of the pleasure of the opinion. There's a video, an erotic poems that are so popular in the early 50s, 90s. 266 00:29:03,490 --> 00:29:07,390 Part of the pleasure of that is an elaborate form of linguistic deferral. 267 00:29:07,390 --> 00:29:15,710 The use of rhetoric to dilate the reading experience and to defer the pleasure of narrative and sexual consummation. 268 00:29:15,710 --> 00:29:21,370 Rhetoric then is deliberately delaying in a video and poetry. It stops us getting to the point. 269 00:29:21,370 --> 00:29:25,690 It thickens response and anticipation while putting off the conclusion. 270 00:29:25,690 --> 00:29:29,200 Maybe that's a way of understanding Markus's speech. 271 00:29:29,200 --> 00:29:35,020 And one way to think about that might be to try and consider how it works in the rhythm of the whole play. 272 00:29:35,020 --> 00:29:39,910 I think the easiest way to do this is to look at the Norten facsimile of the First Folio. 273 00:29:39,910 --> 00:29:44,090 That's pretty widely available in in in Oxford libraries. 274 00:29:44,090 --> 00:29:45,970 So is a facsimile text of the First Folio. 275 00:29:45,970 --> 00:29:53,050 The good thing about it is for each play it has something called through line numbering T.L. and through line numberi. 276 00:29:53,050 --> 00:29:58,360 That just means it numbers the lines from one that the beginning to three thousand at the end. 277 00:29:58,360 --> 00:30:04,750 But it does give you a sense of where you are in the play. If you've got a cumulative total of lines. 278 00:30:04,750 --> 00:30:14,110 So from the Norten First Folio facsimile, the Folio Titus is just over 2700 lines long. 279 00:30:14,110 --> 00:30:22,450 And Marcus finds Lavinia. The bit that we're focussing on this morning, Marcus finds a veneer at line 1082 1082. 280 00:30:22,450 --> 00:30:25,720 So just a little more than a third of the way through the play. 281 00:30:25,720 --> 00:30:33,640 Remember that the way we tend to organise plays in the theatre now as a slightly longer first half an interval and a slightly shorter, 282 00:30:33,640 --> 00:30:40,120 we hope, second half. That's a very 20th century late 19th into 20th century phenomenon. 283 00:30:40,120 --> 00:30:46,210 That's not an early modern phenomenon at all. So these are not slides which we should think of structurally as being into two halves. 284 00:30:46,210 --> 00:30:50,030 It's actually a really great interpretive question about plays where you should put the interval, 285 00:30:50,030 --> 00:30:54,340 where I really suggest as a kind of interesting idea about how you want to divide the place. 286 00:30:54,340 --> 00:30:59,020 But it's not a it's not an early modern idea. It's it's a modern one. 287 00:30:59,020 --> 00:31:04,330 So we're thinking about the play as a whole thing then rather than two two 1/2. 288 00:31:04,330 --> 00:31:12,310 So by line 1082, which is where we are when Marcus comes back from hunting to find Lavinia by this point, what's happened? 289 00:31:12,310 --> 00:31:18,730 Well, we've already seen 21 of Titus's dead sons come back from the war, be buried in the tomb. 290 00:31:18,730 --> 00:31:21,880 We've seen him fatally stabbed his 20 second son. 291 00:31:21,880 --> 00:31:28,300 And the twenty third and twenty fourth sons have been lured into a pit to await their own deaths, of which more in a moment. 292 00:31:28,300 --> 00:31:34,690 By Aaron. We've seen a labus, tomorrow's son sacrificed against the pleas of his mother. 293 00:31:34,690 --> 00:31:41,650 We've seen Bassi Arnis, Lavinia's husband in Bruett, all in a heap like to the slaughtered lamb. 294 00:31:41,650 --> 00:31:49,300 And then Lavinia emerges with her hands cut off, her tongue cut out and ravished as the stage direction puts it. 295 00:31:49,300 --> 00:31:52,900 So it's been an eventful opening. 296 00:31:52,900 --> 00:32:00,250 We might want to compare the placement of violence in Shakespeare's other tragedies as a kind of comparison of how the pace of this play works, 297 00:32:00,250 --> 00:32:06,950 most of which speed up violence and. Body count towards the second half of the play. 298 00:32:06,950 --> 00:32:14,250 Later on in the play, and at least one of which humbler makes this deferral of action into late, trying to play one of its main themes. 299 00:32:14,250 --> 00:32:17,930 Case, a path path. What's going on in Hamlet is saying nothing. 300 00:32:17,930 --> 00:32:25,480 Nothing much is happening. Is it really? And it's only one Polonius dies that things are starting to speed up. 301 00:32:25,480 --> 00:32:31,900 So perhaps in this light, Marcus's speech is intended to slow things down for a minute to establish a moment of perverse, 302 00:32:31,900 --> 00:32:42,520 calm telling rather than doing. And therefore it works not primarily in relation to Lavinia's state, not primarily as a psychological revelation, 303 00:32:42,520 --> 00:32:47,800 but in a structural relation to the speed and rhythm of the play as a whole. 304 00:32:47,800 --> 00:32:56,560 It's good for us to remember that sometimes characters act in Shakespeare plays not because of their inner motives or their inner psychology, 305 00:32:56,560 --> 00:33:02,260 but they act because their play requires them to do this thing at this time. 306 00:33:02,260 --> 00:33:10,610 And so we tend to be in love with a literary model given to us from modern fiction, but also from our sense of our own lives, 307 00:33:10,610 --> 00:33:19,850 which is that characters are pre-eminent characters come first and then they do things depending on their behaviour or their personality. 308 00:33:19,850 --> 00:33:28,310 So that the character is pre-eminent. And there's lots and lots of modern novelists talking about how they invent their characters first. 309 00:33:28,310 --> 00:33:36,640 And then they're kind of like surprised what they go on to do. So that instead of you had Julian Bonds being talked, 310 00:33:36,640 --> 00:33:41,800 talking about the his sense of an ending Booker Prise shortlisted novel on the radio this morning. 311 00:33:41,800 --> 00:33:45,870 You're saying exactly that he didn't plot the whole thing, but he established the character. 312 00:33:45,870 --> 00:33:53,240 So that, of course, plays into a sense that we are the most important people in our story and that we make the story happen because of who we are. 313 00:33:53,240 --> 00:33:58,550 Not sure that that is the case for Shakespeare. Think Shakespeare very often plot comes first. 314 00:33:58,550 --> 00:34:04,310 He has an idea of the plot he wants and the characters emerge only to service that plot. 315 00:34:04,310 --> 00:34:11,540 So one answer to why do they do? What they do is they do it because that's what the plot requires. 316 00:34:11,540 --> 00:34:18,260 So, Marcus, his speech in this kind of analysis might be the equivalent, say, of song in Shakespeare's other plays, 317 00:34:18,260 --> 00:34:23,780 a different pace, a kind of breathing space, a moment of Stacie's, which is is psychological. 318 00:34:23,780 --> 00:34:28,190 It gives us time to catch up and kind of take our bearings. 319 00:34:28,190 --> 00:34:38,150 But also it may be practical. It probably gives time for Titus's captured sons to prepare themselves for their next entrance. 320 00:34:38,150 --> 00:34:43,760 So related to these video and rhetorical models for Markus's description of Lavinia, 321 00:34:43,760 --> 00:34:48,890 I think needs to be a proper unease about what these frameworks do to Lavinia herself. 322 00:34:48,890 --> 00:34:53,030 We've hardly talked about Lavinia so far. 323 00:34:53,030 --> 00:35:01,790 There is, of course, a severe ideological problem in seeing Lavinia merely as the occasion for different kinds of male agency rhetorical, 324 00:35:01,790 --> 00:35:08,030 psychological, theatrical, since that threatens to recapitulate in our criticism of the play. 325 00:35:08,030 --> 00:35:15,230 One of the play's own most disturbing manoeuvres, The Way, objectifies Lavinia and silences her. 326 00:35:15,230 --> 00:35:21,800 Everybody purports to understand and to interpret Lavinia Marcus in the speech that we just heard, 327 00:35:21,800 --> 00:35:26,180 but also Titus in his claim to interpret all her martyred signs. 328 00:35:26,180 --> 00:35:34,070 And many critics purport to do just the same. And it's important for us as readers to be aware of the ways in which we in which our response is 329 00:35:34,070 --> 00:35:39,350 perhaps predetermined by the play and that we need to try and resist recapping some of the plays, 330 00:35:39,350 --> 00:35:50,790 blind spots in the way we talk about it. In describing her wounds, Marcus enacts a perverse kind of blaze on the blaze. 331 00:35:50,790 --> 00:35:54,320 On is a rhetorical cat's catalogue of a woman's beauty, 332 00:35:54,320 --> 00:35:59,570 which should be familiar to us from sonnet writers and from Elizabethan love poetry more generally. 333 00:35:59,570 --> 00:36:10,400 So just to recap, Lavinia has sweet ornaments for hand rosett lips flushed with honey breath, lily hands, pretty fingers. 334 00:36:10,400 --> 00:36:15,230 So these sort of erotic inner zones in the black on tradition. 335 00:36:15,230 --> 00:36:19,790 What are what are the eyes like? What are the lips like to the hands like we see that often. 336 00:36:19,790 --> 00:36:26,450 As I say in sonnets now here as elsewhere in the tradition, it's clear that the blaze on is a device, 337 00:36:26,450 --> 00:36:33,980 as feminist critics have pointed out, which colonises and controls the female body by dividing it into constituent parts. 338 00:36:33,980 --> 00:36:42,920 It denies it human or subjective coherence and instead turns it into a dissected object of desire. 339 00:36:42,920 --> 00:36:49,790 In this IT Marcos's speech itself, the rhetorical structure of Marcus's speech recapitulated the violence done 340 00:36:49,790 --> 00:36:57,050 to Lavinia Off-stage by Karen and Demetrius by recasting it as love poetry. 341 00:36:57,050 --> 00:37:04,640 I think we can see this happening to Lavinia, who becomes a horrid object of the play's voyeuristic gaze in the stage direction I already quoted. 342 00:37:04,640 --> 00:37:10,160 Her hands cut off and her tongue cut out and ravished that stage erection action plays 343 00:37:10,160 --> 00:37:18,320 queasily between what can be shown her stumps and bloodied mouth and what cannot her rape. 344 00:37:18,320 --> 00:37:26,120 And elsewhere, the play jumps around, switches between what can be shown and what cannot. 345 00:37:26,120 --> 00:37:30,440 Immediately, as Lavinia is taken off stage by Carabine and. 346 00:37:30,440 --> 00:37:37,430 We switch to an overly symbolic, loathsome pit in which another pair of brothers are wallowing. 347 00:37:37,430 --> 00:37:44,300 Titus's own sons, Quintus and Martius, have been lured into a pit by Aaron. 348 00:37:44,300 --> 00:37:53,420 Here they stand in for Kaaren and Demetrius, the Unhallowed and Bloodstained Hole, as a quotation from one of the brothers. 349 00:37:53,420 --> 00:38:01,660 The uncap, hallowed and bloodstained hole they found themselves in is a monstrous enact a key for the uncheckable rape. 350 00:38:01,660 --> 00:38:05,280 Very unsettling morally, that type, 351 00:38:05,280 --> 00:38:12,820 that type of his own son's Lavinia's own brother's take on the role of these other brothers in this metaphorical way. 352 00:38:12,820 --> 00:38:18,730 Everyone, therefore, in some way, perhaps including we in the audience, wants to violate Lavinia. 353 00:38:18,730 --> 00:38:24,670 Her own brothers in this scene, Titus, her father makes her carry his own severed hand when we got to that bit. 354 00:38:24,670 --> 00:38:30,760 But believe me, it happens at his own severed hand in her in her mouth. 355 00:38:30,760 --> 00:38:37,870 Lavinia is always running from Saturnine us, the husband she does not seek from Karaman Dimitrius who want to rape her. 356 00:38:37,870 --> 00:38:43,180 From Marcus when he comes across her in the scene we're focussing on the opening of Markus's speech. 357 00:38:43,180 --> 00:38:46,510 Makes it quite clear that she's running away and she's trying to do so again at the end. 358 00:38:46,510 --> 00:38:49,600 Perhaps she even runs away from Titus in the play's final moments. 359 00:38:49,600 --> 00:38:56,710 There's no stage direction, but it will be an interesting there'll be an interesting sort of visual echo. 360 00:38:56,710 --> 00:39:05,750 But she cannot escape the gaze of the audience, which tracks her silent presence across the second two thirds of the play. 361 00:39:05,750 --> 00:39:12,040 The film critic Linda Williams, in a series of interesting articles about modern horror films, 362 00:39:12,040 --> 00:39:17,320 identify some interesting tropes we might try and bring to our analysis of Titus. 363 00:39:17,320 --> 00:39:22,110 First, she says, she suggests that so-called gross genres, 364 00:39:22,110 --> 00:39:29,080 so genres which which repeller us or make us enjoy the kind of grossness of what's 365 00:39:29,080 --> 00:39:34,060 being shown growth genres turn on the appeal of what she calls the sensational body, 366 00:39:34,060 --> 00:39:40,720 the sensational body, the spectacle of a body caught in the grip of intense sensation or emotion, 367 00:39:40,720 --> 00:39:49,540 a body caught in the grip of intense sensation or emotion. It's a great way of thinking about tragedy more generally in the body of the tragic figure. 368 00:39:49,540 --> 00:39:55,030 Williams points out that this body in classic horror films tends to be female. 369 00:39:55,030 --> 00:40:04,470 So she identifies terror terrorised female victims from Fay Wray and King Kong to Janet Leigh in the shower scene in Psycho and on, on and on. 370 00:40:04,470 --> 00:40:05,800 And we might think so far. 371 00:40:05,800 --> 00:40:15,460 So, Lavinia, identification with these female figures, she argues, is part of the roller coaster ride of sadomasochistic thrills. 372 00:40:15,460 --> 00:40:22,430 It's a nice phrase, a roller coaster ride of sadomasochistic thrills in horror and slasher movies. 373 00:40:22,430 --> 00:40:28,240 Now, some reason critics and I come back to ideas of self identification and masochism and sadism in a minute. 374 00:40:28,240 --> 00:40:36,580 Some reason critics have enjoyed the idea that the perverse pleasure of watching Titus has much to do with the aesthetics of excess. 375 00:40:36,580 --> 00:40:43,760 The aesthetics of excess, which are important in the horror genre rather than decorous ideas about tragedy and catharsis. 376 00:40:43,760 --> 00:40:55,340 I talk a bit more about that in my very final remarks. You often find in the criticism of Titus, a director like Tarantino being cited. 377 00:40:55,340 --> 00:40:58,240 And if you're interested, if you're certainly interested in times, I'll be really, 378 00:40:58,240 --> 00:41:08,440 really worth thinking about that kind of model and also how film criticism can help us with the ideas about looking at consumption and pleasure. 379 00:41:08,440 --> 00:41:10,570 That film theory has done a lot with it. 380 00:41:10,570 --> 00:41:20,110 There is a theatre have actually done very little with so Markus's speech in in this framework serves to focus his attention on the spectacular body. 381 00:41:20,110 --> 00:41:29,190 It makes Lavinia's body spectacular and thus makes it an object for the horror static that I am suggesting that we might want to import. 382 00:41:29,190 --> 00:41:39,550 And it's also Marcos's speech here also clarifies the play's negotiation of what can and cannot be shown and what can and cannot be spoken. 383 00:41:39,550 --> 00:41:48,040 There is also a way in which Markus's apparent inhumanity. His refusal is a failure to respond practically or empathetically. 384 00:41:48,040 --> 00:41:54,730 It's part of a pattern in this play which dehumanises Lavinia throughout and turns her into a symbol. 385 00:41:54,730 --> 00:41:59,170 Let's come back for a moment to the description of the opening scene I gave at the beginning of the lecture. 386 00:41:59,170 --> 00:42:04,600 Saturnine as some Bassi Arnis are vying both for the emperor's ship of Rome and for the hand of Titus's daughter, 387 00:42:04,600 --> 00:42:12,220 Lavinia Titus, in this scene as a key broker. He puts his weight behind Saturnine as his claims to become emperor, 388 00:42:12,220 --> 00:42:17,650 and he also agrees initially to Saturnine as his request to take Lavinia as a wife. 389 00:42:17,650 --> 00:42:22,140 So it's quite clear then that Lavinia is in some sense a representation of Rome here. 390 00:42:22,140 --> 00:42:31,060 She is the feminised version or emblem of the polity, almost a kind of statue or a kind of patroness. 391 00:42:31,060 --> 00:42:36,550 Critics who've been interested in the traces of the Catholic past in Shakespeare's works have pointed out that the visible 392 00:42:36,550 --> 00:42:45,400 damage to Lavinia's body around the mouth and hands echoes the focal science of Protestant iconoclasm on religious sculpture. 393 00:42:45,400 --> 00:42:54,160 Now the veneer is less a person in this analysis than an emblem, and thus Markus's speech to her becomes an apostrophe to the state of Rome itself. 394 00:42:54,160 --> 00:43:01,990 It's a political gesture. It's talking about what's gone wrong with the state rather than a physical one. 395 00:43:01,990 --> 00:43:07,600 We can see some support for this reading in Markus's own rhetoric of healing at the play's conclusion. 396 00:43:07,600 --> 00:43:12,990 Let me teach you how to knit again these broken limbs into one body. 397 00:43:12,990 --> 00:43:15,370 So is talking about the body politic, the body of the state. 398 00:43:15,370 --> 00:43:24,610 But in terms which can only recall the literal mutilated body, we've had so much in our sights, the use of the female pronoun is developed. 399 00:43:24,610 --> 00:43:29,380 Let Rome herself be bane unto herself. 400 00:43:29,380 --> 00:43:36,310 Lavinia's rape by the Goths who have been brought into the city is a vision of the sack of the empire. 401 00:43:36,310 --> 00:43:43,780 It's one that's recapitulated when Lucio's returns to deliver Rome at the end of a Gothic army. 402 00:43:43,780 --> 00:43:46,120 Emperor Saturnine as his choice of tomorrow. 403 00:43:46,120 --> 00:43:56,470 The Queen of the Goths as his wife over Lavinia the Roman maiden indicates the ways in which Rome has prostituted itself or diluted itself. 404 00:43:56,470 --> 00:43:59,760 The play has an ongoing interest in miseducation. 405 00:43:59,760 --> 00:44:10,030 Aaron and tomorrow's baby, born towards the end of the play, continues an abiding interest in sex as a metaphor for civil society. 406 00:44:10,030 --> 00:44:15,700 So Marcus then addresses Lavinia perhaps as a kind of lament or elegy for Rome. 407 00:44:15,700 --> 00:44:23,830 And those metaphors or fountains and conduits and rivers become more appropriate in that civic context than the private one. 408 00:44:23,830 --> 00:44:35,020 They are nonhuman rather than inhuman. We might want to see Titus's killing of Lavinia as the final cleansing then of this broken Rome. 409 00:44:35,020 --> 00:44:40,550 Lucio's his final words in the play, stressed tomorrow as the source of Rome's downfall. 410 00:44:40,550 --> 00:44:44,750 As for that ravenous tiger tomorrow, no funeral, right? No man in mourning. 411 00:44:44,750 --> 00:44:51,830 We'd no mournful bell. She'll ring her burial, but throw her forth to birds and beasts to pray. 412 00:44:51,830 --> 00:44:59,390 Her life was beastly and devoid of pity and being dead blackbirds on her take pity. 413 00:44:59,390 --> 00:45:05,570 So the plays politics here are projected onto old binaries of self and other insider and outsider. 414 00:45:05,570 --> 00:45:12,740 Roman and stranger. Good and bad. But they will come down in the end to the oldest primary of all virgin and [INAUDIBLE]. 415 00:45:12,740 --> 00:45:17,690 Something of the inadequacy of that binary, perhaps as sounded in those final two lines of Lucien's. 416 00:45:17,690 --> 00:45:23,090 We always respect that a rhyming couplet will end a play, but a couplet with a self rhyme. 417 00:45:23,090 --> 00:45:27,590 Pity. Pity is an anticlimax. It's bathos. 418 00:45:27,590 --> 00:45:34,730 It's downbeat. It's a collapse of language rather than an assertion of it. 419 00:45:34,730 --> 00:45:39,470 Okay. So so far then I've suggested that asking why Marcus doesn't give Lavinia first 420 00:45:39,470 --> 00:45:44,060 aid when he encounters her in Act two helps us to ask questions about realism, 421 00:45:44,060 --> 00:45:50,750 about the representation of inner states, about the relation of the play to a villa in poetry, about timing and pace in the theatre, 422 00:45:50,750 --> 00:45:56,410 about attitudes to women, are suffering abject human beings or as distant symbols. 423 00:45:56,410 --> 00:46:01,490 And in the last couple of minutes. I'm just gonna try and discuss the significance of Marcus's speech to broader generic 424 00:46:01,490 --> 00:46:10,360 questions about the nature of tragedy and our expectations and assumptions of what is tragic. 425 00:46:10,360 --> 00:46:21,010 Since Aristotle, the function of tragic downfall has been understood to inspire through catharsis, pity and fear in the spectators pity and fear. 426 00:46:21,010 --> 00:46:26,920 That's an empathic relation, pity and a more distanced one fear. 427 00:46:26,920 --> 00:46:33,220 The implication of this generic understanding is that our relation to tragic suffering is empathic. 428 00:46:33,220 --> 00:46:38,290 We engage with we don't just spectate the torments of the characters. 429 00:46:38,290 --> 00:46:38,680 And of course, 430 00:46:38,680 --> 00:46:45,880 that's been one of the ways that tragedy has been culturally ring-fence from other violent childhoods to which we don't give such high status horror. 431 00:46:45,880 --> 00:46:50,590 We've already touched on violent computer games. We might think about slasher pictures. 432 00:46:50,590 --> 00:46:59,170 These latter genres are dangerous because that story goes there might encourage people to see them as they see themselves as the perpetrators, 433 00:46:59,170 --> 00:47:04,090 not the victims of violence. Whereas tragedy is safe because it has a masochistic aspect. 434 00:47:04,090 --> 00:47:10,570 We identify with the person to whom violence is being done rather than the person doing violence. 435 00:47:10,570 --> 00:47:14,920 It's interesting to note in passing that early modern commentators on the theatre did not believe 436 00:47:14,920 --> 00:47:19,930 that violent tragedies were any different in their effects from transgressive films or games. 437 00:47:19,930 --> 00:47:30,190 Now that moral panic about spectatorship leading to emulation is very recognisable in both late 16th and late 20th century context. 438 00:47:30,190 --> 00:47:37,810 Titus Andronicus. That, I think gives us an interesting snapshot of those conflicted and complicated processes of tragedies affect. 439 00:47:37,810 --> 00:47:44,830 Marcus comes across Lavinia as a tragic spectacle. He is an onstage audience to her anguish. 440 00:47:44,830 --> 00:47:52,720 He models. That's to say, a version of the spectators response to the play's numbing violent procedures. 441 00:47:52,720 --> 00:48:00,040 And as we have seen, his response is formal aesthetic sizing, but lacking in human comfort. 442 00:48:00,040 --> 00:48:05,470 Even at the end of his speech, when he tries to suggest the kind of fellow feeling, his words are heavy. 443 00:48:05,470 --> 00:48:11,980 Do not draw back, for we will mourn with the O. Could our morning ease thy misery? 444 00:48:11,980 --> 00:48:19,720 Part of what has been unsettling to critics about the play is its disregard for the reassurances classic theories of tragedies have offered. 445 00:48:19,720 --> 00:48:26,890 That old question Why does tragedy give pleasure? Is a disturbing one in relation to Titus Andronicus. 446 00:48:26,890 --> 00:48:34,450 What kind of people are we that we enjoy? And in some parts of the play, find ourselves laughing at body parts being so severed, 447 00:48:34,450 --> 00:48:40,810 sons being murdered and as a centrepiece, a woman mute and mutilated. 448 00:48:40,810 --> 00:48:44,860 The length of Markus's speech forces us to confront that. 449 00:48:44,860 --> 00:48:50,590 It suggests that the appeal of tragedy or of this tragedy is not that it prompts pity and fear, 450 00:48:50,590 --> 00:48:57,220 but that it gives us permission to suspend our empathy. We don't need to bring out the first date either. 451 00:48:57,220 --> 00:49:01,900 The structure of the play at this point makes it clear we don't or can't. 452 00:49:01,900 --> 00:49:07,210 Markus's speech to Lavinia thus enables us to focus on big questions about the nature of tragic empathy. 453 00:49:07,210 --> 00:49:15,580 The appeal of dramatic violence and our unsettling capacity to be entertained by the suffering of others. 454 00:49:15,580 --> 00:49:22,030 What I've tried to show today, then, is a number of different frames we might use to look at this plan to articulate some wider concerns. 455 00:49:22,030 --> 00:49:25,940 If you've got follow up questions, do feel free to contact me by email next week. 456 00:49:25,940 --> 00:49:32,270 At this time, I'm going gonna be talking about Twelfth Night. And I think the question I want to ask is, what is the point of Antonio? 457 00:49:32,270 --> 00:49:44,107 Because the point of Antonio. I think that's a question which will help us think about questions of desire, sexuality and genre in that place.