Chapter 2

Reading Martyred History

in Titus Andronic.us

This chapter explores lhc nature of a Shakespearean haunting. It is concerned with

the lingering effects of the Reformation on a generation of survivors. In what will
appear a detour, however, from the trajectory of our discussion of the relationship
between John Foxe's Acres & Monuments and Shakespeare's earliest tragedy, the
chapter begins by looking at a curious, modern editorial stutter in Titus Andronicus
that registers the afterlife of a particularly vexing scene. The detour will return us
to the question of early modern inheritance better equipped to understand how
Shakespeare translates the terms of the religious debates during the Reformation
into a secular language involving developments in legal theory that give an
afterlife to words by disavowing their efficacy.
In act three, scene two, Titus enacts the play' s most extended vow of revenge
with a grotesque promising ritual in which violence materializes in the form of
bloody bodies and body parts piling up on stage. Titus's dismembered hand, his
sons' severed heads and Lavinia's bloody body, remnants of earlier vows in the
play, become part of a performance that appears to collapse the distinction that
separates word and deed. Once Titus has conceived of revenge for the murder of
his sons Quintus and Martius, he gathers his remaining family into a circle in order
to vow revenge in their names:

Come, let me see what task I have to do.

You heavy people, circle me about,
That I may tum me to each one of you
And swear unto my soul to right your wrongs.
The vow is made ..
(3.1.275-79)'

Circulating in the blood and gore of bleeding bodies and body parts, Titus's vow is
gruesomely entangled with reminders of other promises that have been violated.
The modern editorial apparatus that attempts to understand this vow is particularly
telling. Titus utters the performative, ''The vow is made," which indicates the
execution of the vow that has just been enacted in the promising ritual. Despite
theexactness in Titus's own stage direction, twentieth~century editors of the play
curiously have tried to clarify the moment of the vow even further. 2 The stage
20 Peifonning Ear(v Modem Trauma
directions of David Bevington', edition of the play (1980) reads, '·Th,y form a
circle around Titus, a11dhe pltdgeJ each" Eugene W11ith( 1984) inserts into the
scene the direction, "He p!edgr:r them." and he elaborates in a note that what the
scene requires is "'A simple ritual. such as handi.hak.ing." Dover-Wilson's 1948
edition of ,he play reads. "fl< (Titus) kneeh. wi1h MARCUS, LUCIUS, L4 VIN/A
and !he rwo heads round him,· then raises his hand ro heaven." Jonathan Bate
elaborates further in his edition of the play (1995), which reads. "[They make a
vow.] I The vow i~ made:· Thi~ rep::tition of the oath i.n the editonal apparatus
suggests a critical dis-ease with the play'~ most embodied speech-act. The added
stage directions combined with Titus's own voice create a stutter at the moment of
the pledge, The slulter-cvidence of the editorial tendency to exert control through
repetition and elaboration-reveals, perhap5, an unconscious aVv-arenessin the
cri,lcal heritage that the act of promising in the play ii, indeed, dangerous and
lherefore requires editorial discipline.
Such controlling editorial emendations strive to efface the unpredictability
implicit in the act of mak:ing promise~. The force that the play ~imultancously
long& for and criticizes--specifically the power to fuse intention to effect-is
transferred to the editor and specificatly to the- intrusive stage direction. "Ibe
modem editms seem interested in collapsin,a:word and deed at a moment in the
play where Titus himself most explicitly associates his vow with the remnants of
violence that arc part of his promigrn~ riluaL Titus 1'ay~."Come, brother, take a
head, I And in this hand lhe other will I bear. / And. Lavinia, thou shalt be
employed: / Bear thou my hand, sweet wench, belweer. thy teeth" (3.1.279-82).
Although this order functions as Titm.'s command to gather up their belongings
and depart, it also implicates the severed body parts in tbi! ritual-act of promi~ina.
Just as Titus's embodied vow reflects his attempt to collapse his promise of
revenge and its violent effects. the editorial intrusions demonstrate a desire that
words produce predictable and immediate consequences.
The stutter produced by the stage directions in many modern editions of the
play uncannlly registers the e~panding ternporaiity of promi5s.ory acts in the years
after the Reformation in England. In ether words, a~ the stage directions stutter-
that is, as they repeat a bit of the immediate past without quite completing it or
moving forward-the stage directions record the anxieties of an hiitorical moment
in which the act of promisin~ assumes unpredictable force. Violence in the pli.y
emerges from the ambivalent effect of these types of performutives: vo>w'S, oaths.,
and promises seek to guaramee intentionality and legitimncy bm consistently
misfire to produce unintended consequencc:hThe play emphasize, the force of this
ambivalence inherent in contractual relations 'With it, depiction of bloody and
brutalized bodies that make thi::.one of Shakespeare·~ most problematic play:i.;1
\\'hether it is Titus's severed hand, his sons' dis.membered hands. Lavinia's.
ravaged body. or modern editors' insistent emendations, mutilation, according to
Freud, is one form of overcomin,a: hiMory--or as Gregg Horowitz oh...erves, of
history ''appearing at an improper time:..:.
Reading Martyred History in Titus A.ndronicus 21
The Afterlife of Disembodied Words
The year~ t:etween 158? ~d 1606 mark the maturation of the first ge.neration in
England to develop rehgmusly and sodolJy within a po,t-Rcformation culture.
Anthony Kemp !~ates t~e impact of this cultural shifl \.vithjn the generation of
peopJe w?o expc~ienc~ H. He bas described a Reformation character,ized by its
compresswn and mtens1tyin the middle of the sixteenth century:
The ~enais.sa~ce and _the Reformationprccipit:.led a histoncal revolution (and it ·s
..::ucnttally -~ ~ingl~-revolution) ~o profound that it reversed the Western perception~f
t~e PMt w1,hm a s1~gle generation, .from a perception of unity to one of di vii.ion and
difkrenc~. from a sulln~~ to ?ynnmic motion. New ide•~ h~d superseded old, and with
1o;operi;es5ion cnmetbe perceplJOn of motioo:'
Because Kemp suggest,. that the cultural schism produced by the Reformation was
most prono,mced within a sing!~ geoeration, hi! assessment too neatly contains the
e~fect~_ofthe Reform~hon ,withm the immediate years of transition: the years that
witne~!)edHenry YIU s spht from Rome, the emergence of the Book of Prayer and
the Elizabethan Setllemem of 1559, Although Kemp's description of a "profound"
epi stemic sh1tt as the central. effect of the Reformation is too narrow, 6 it does
~esturc, ~~;ever, }oward David Cre55y's characterization of the Reformation as a
trau~attc event -one that would hnve an afterlife beyond the generation who
cxpenc:ncedthe frcquenUy violent cultural transformation.
The c~isis over th~ meaning and fo.tention.of language was at the cenler of
Reformation debates, and Foxe· s vrnlent unages in Acres & Monuments
r:p~atedly embody this controversy: that is, the representations of tortured
di~tJgu~e~Protc.-;tant,macr~_sgive flesh to the controversy over language. Withi~
this rehg10usand social m1heu. S~ak~~p~aremaintains a vitil for th~ past. As our
~etour throt.~hSli~S of mo::lernedJtonal mheritance makes clear, Titus Andronicus
1, preo~cup1cd_with the. tempttality of vows, oaths, and promises. Titus's
c?mpu.ls1vedesire to con tam the promise within the inim~iacy of its utterance-to
give his speech a corporeal force by collapsini: word and deed-is fraughl with
~loody consequences. Appearing as a moment of prote11tagainst a Roman le_gacy
un~os~ on her by ~er fother. Lavinia's act of miting the names of her rapists in
?
L_ann1 the 5 Md-"S!rup1,1m.-Chiron--De,nt!tri.1.d' (4.J.78)-bears the traces of
history s. demand on the pr_e5ent.ln pre9Cnting the figure of Lavinia as memory's
~rost~ew1, Shakespea~c bmts at the effects of what I describe as a double
mhcn~ance. Th~ play itself is a martyr to history in that with Lavinia's tortured
~ody lt bears W1tn~ss to the continuing impact of tbe traumatic events depicted in
Fo~e, but the play 1salso a monument that memorializes the effects of the cultural
?esir~ for Roman legacy. In its interrogatioo of the cultural desire for a Roman
mhentanc:, the pl.ay suggests h?w_desire in the directioo of Rome disavows the
demand 01 a Protestant past that insist&on transmh;~ion.;;
22 Performing Early Modern Trauma
One might read the interval between word and deed that enters legal discourse
in the l 590s as a secular evocation of the intense religious debate over the meaning
of signs and symbols in church ritual practices during the Reformation. Lavinia's
"signs" (2.3.5; 3.1.143; 3.2.12, 36; 4.1.8) and "tokens" (2.3.5) are a constant source
of speculation in the play. Attempts to make sense of her signs and tokens echo the
debates represented in Reformation historiography, especially Foxe's Actes &
Monuments, which argues over the status of sacramental bread as a "sign,"
"figure," "token," "trope," and a "symbol." 10
The recorded exchange between the martyr John Newman and his examiner,
Dr. Thornton, is characteristic of the debate over the status of the sacrament in
Foxe's Actes & Monuments:
Doctor:-"How say you to this? 'This is my body, which is given fr)fyou."'
Newman:-"lt is a figuraLivespeech; one thing spoken, and another meant; as Christ
saith, 'Tam a vine, I am a door, I am a stone,' etc. Is he theretixc a materinl stone, a vine
or a door? ,.. wheresoever one thing is spoken and another meant, it is a figurative
speech." (8:244)
In Titus, Marcus uses similar language to describe his father after the assault on
Lavinia. Marcus describes Titus as so upset by the rape and mutilation of Lavinia
that "[hle takes false shadows for true substances" (3.2.80). The reformer's
explanation of figurative speech in Foxe-"one thing spoken, and another
meant''-and Marcus's description of Titus as unable to discern the metaphoric
nature of representation connects the two works: in both cases, the interval
between signifier and signified appears critical in the production of meaning.
During roughly the same period as Foxe was writing his history, John Calvin also
insisted that figurative language was critical to the production of meaning:
Again I repeat: since the Supper is nothing but the visible witnessing of that promise .
that Christ is the bread of life come down from heaven, visible bread must serve as an
intermediary to represent that spiritual bread-unless we arc willing to lose all the
benefit which God, to sustain our weakness, L'Onfersupon us. (4.17.14)
Calvin's insistence on the figurative logic of the sacrament-"an intermediary to
represent"- captures the possibility that comes with the interval between sign and
signifier. If the visible sign is mistaken for what it represents-just as if a
promissory speech act is completed upon its utterance-the sacrament and the
promise lose the sense of temporality that extends their significance into the future.
11
Both the speech act and the sacrament become a fetish, subject to adoration.
According to this logic, Marcus's description of Titus's love for his children
reminds us of the power of the fetishized vow: "He loves his pledges dearer than
his life" (3.1.291).
A closer look at Foxe's historiographic project and of several of his narratives
gives us some indication of the intensity and cost of the debate over signs and
Reading Martyred History in Titus Andronicus 23
meaning that took place during the Reformation in England. Foxe's Actes &
Monuments has been described as second only to the Bible for its influence on
12
Protestant England, and Richard Helgerson describes it as enormously successful
in "shaping England's religious self-understanding. " 13 As one of the few books,
along with the Bible and Pilgrim's Progress, whose audience included the
illiterate, semi-literate, and literate populations, Foxe's martyrology waS able to
ente: the_ po_pular imagination of a broad range of English people. 14 The
prohferat10n m the popular culture of excerpts and images from Foxe indicates,
according to Tessa Watt, the emergence of a new type of image not prohibited by
the ''inward looking iconoclasm" of English Protestantism. 15 Often taken from the
most violent scenes from Foxe, these images, suggests Watt, show that there was a
"~ontinuing process of substituting acceptable images for unacceptable, albeit
within increasingly constrictive boundaries.'' 16
The title page of the 1563 English edition of Foxe makes this strateoy of
~ubstitu~ion clear (fig. 1). Read from the bottom of the page to the to;, the
11lustrat1on presents multiple scenes of acceptable and unacceptable religious
practices. On the right, Foxe provides four episodes of unreformed worship, and he
bal~nces these images with counter-episodes on the left side of the page, which
depict reformed and acceptable scenes of worship. The first reformed set of
juxtaposed images depicts communal religious services. The unreformed episode
sh~~s a congr~gation receiving the sacred word from a priest, wearing his ornate
rehg10us regaha. Worshipers in the crowd handle rosary beads as they direct their
gaze toward the priest for instruction. In the opposite scene, the rosary beads have
been replaced by scripture, and instead of a gaze uniformly directed toward the
pr~est, the image presents many gazes directed at many things. Some look to the
pnest who is dressed in an adorned robe. Others look to each other over a bible
and still others l~ok toward the word of God in Hebrew depicted in the upper righ~
corner of the episode. The priest-figure in the episode shares the scene with the
word-something noticeably absent from the unreformed episode. A cross on a
banner, which leads a ritual procession, occupies the space of the word of God in
the counter-episode. The many differences in the two episodes suggest that
reformed practices privilege direct access to the word of God rather than ritualistic
?1ediations ~ommon to Catholic practices. Ritualistic mediations, in fact, appear
madequate given the plot of the next series of images in the title page.
In the next episode of the illustration, unreformed practitioners, some dressed
in popish hats and robes, direct their gaze toward the altar and toward the
sacramen~al practi~e of displaying the Presence of Christ before communion. They
focus their worship on the wafer framed between two candles, while the priest
looks away from the congregation. Several assistants appear to burn incense and
24 Pnforming Early Modern Trauma Reading Martyred History in Titus Andronicus 25

hold bells as tl1e sacrament unfolds. The counter-episode shows reformers being
burned, praying directly to Heaven themselves, without a priest or any of the
sacramental rituaL The final episodes reveal the effects of the different modes of
worshlp. Images of devils are shown preventing the unreformed congregation's
passage to Heaven, while the reformed manyrs ast:end to Heaven, wearing crowns
as they enter the kingdom of Theangels. 17
The resolutions of the two different episodes demonstrate what is at stake in the
religious practices during the period. Martyrdom and damnation are both
uncomfortable options, even if the reformed narrative offers a place above the
clouds with the angels. More important, however, is how the juxtaposed episodes
suggest that the Reformation was a battle over acceptable signifying practices and
viable interpretive possibilittes.
Foxe's text appears to participate in the resldual form of signification against
which it struggles. The popular reception suggests that the horizon of expectations
for and about images had not changed as much as the religious debate would
suggest The popularity of the violent images indicates the degree to which his text,
like papist rituals, had be.come a fetish, The penetration of Foxe's narratives and
illustrations into the popular imagination and the many ways that they were
reprinted in other media are indications that the central conflict between reformers
and conservatives was not necessarily 1.Jetween iconophilia and iconoclasm. The
primary conflict instead was over how to ir:terprct images, signs, tokens, tropes,
and figures, Reading the iconoclasm in Foxe in this way highlights the less explicit
epistemological impact of the cultural shift over the more obvious alterations in
material practices, 18 Significantly, lhe radical dimension of Foxe's book is its
insistence on challenging not the sacred image per se, but the efficacious or
sovereign dimension ascribed to the image, which lacks the interval between the
sign and what it signifies.
With an image on its title jJage that uses the power of the specular to reject the
Catholic insistence on visible presence, Foxe's text deconstructs a fundamental
Catholic doctrine, Exposed ironically with Foxe's own powerful image, the
interval between sign and sig,1ified is critical to the coHective process of
understanding the often-times violent integration between new Prote::iatunt
ideologies and conservative beliefs. "The Fourth QuesLion" in Foxe' s extended
introduction makes this issue one of the primary points of inquiry in Actes &
Monwnenls,

Figure 1: Title Page, vol 3, John Foxe, Act es & Monuments, 1563, reprinted 1965.
... I tum my questio:1 to ask this of you: \\'hether the religion of Christ be mere spiritual,
or else corporal? If ye affirm it to be corporal.,, consisting in outward rites, sacrifices.
and ceremonies of the law; then shew. if ye can, what any one outward action or
observation is required in Christian religion by the Scriptu:e, as necessary in a Christian
man for the remission of xins and salvation, save only fviO sacramental ceremonies of
outward baptism, and of lhe Lord's supper? Howbeit, neither these also as t,1ey are
corporal; that ii- to say, neither the outward action of the one. nor of the other, conferreth
26 Peiforming Early Modern Trauma
remission of sins, nor salvation, but only are visible shews of invisible and spiritual
benefits.
(1: xxxii)
Recounting the disputation of Archbishop Cranmer recorded in Foxe, Judith
Anderson succinctly summarizes the nature of the debate:
Conservative disputants argue that if these words are figurative, they have no efficacy;
the speech they comtitute 'worketh nothing'; in contras;t, 'the leucharislic] speech of
Christ is a working thing' and therefore it cannot be figurative. In rebuttal, Cranmer
replies, 'I said not, that the words of Chri.~t do work. but Christ himself; and he worketh
by figurative sPi~ech.. The spcec,h doth not work, but Christ, by the speech, doth work
the sacrament.
In order to illustrate in more detail how Foxe's historiography concerns itself with
the relationship between image and meaning, 1 reproduce parts of three narratives
from Actes & Monuments. The selections are typical representations of the battle
over signification, and the anecdotes are relevant to the way that early modern
subjects came to understand their religious and, ultimately, national identity. The
three narratives demystify sacred images by arguing for an interval between image
and meaning without which ritual ceases to function. Shakespeare will take up the
debates over signification staged in Foxe-which often end in visible, iconic
violence.
"What is within I cannot see": The Burning of Thomas Moor
... Thomas Moor ... who, for speaking certain words, that his Maker was in heaven, and
not in the pyx, was thereupon apprehended in the country, being with his friends, who
coming before his ordinary, fin;t was asked, whether he did not believe his Maker there
to be (pointing to the high altar): which he denied.
Then asked the bishop, "How then," said he, "dost thou believe?"
The young man answered again: As his creed did teach him.
To whom the bishop said, "And what is yonder that thou seest above the altar?" He
answering said, "Forsooth I cannot tell what you would have me to see. I see there fine
clothes, with golden tassels, and other gay gear hanging about the pix: what is within I
cannot see."
"Why, dost thou not believe,'' said the bishop, "Christ to be there, flesh, blood, and
bone?" "No, that I do not," said he.
Whereupon the ordinary ... read the sentence, and so condemned the true and faithful
servant of Christ to death who was burnt, and suffered a joyous and glorious
martyrdom ..
(8:242)
This brief exchange demonstrates that the debate during the Reformation was not
only about what constituted acceptable iconophilia in religious practices, but it was
Reading Martyred History in Titus Andronicus 27
also concerned with the nature of representation-specifically how the image
works in ritual practice. The bishop and ordinary are convinced in the embodiment
of Christ in the pyx at the altar. The image achieves its effect, according to the
logic of the bishop, much the same way that Titus understands the force of his
promises. That is, they both are seen to operate as sovereign performatives,
20
completed in the moment of their execution with no possibility of, misfire.
Moor's inability to see "what is within" acknowledges a blind spot in ritual
performance. This blind spot is where Titus misrecognizes "shadows for true
substances'' (3.2.80). This zone-the space that escapes immediate recognition
during the ritual performance in Moor's story and made apparent in Foxe's
appropriation of cultural iconography-suggests the possibility for figurative
modes of representation to enter into ritual practices. It is a zone of uncertainty in
which the performative effect fails to prevent competing desires from intruding on
effectual discourse.
The Declaration of Stephen Gratwick: The Bread's Two Bodies
... Then spake the counterfoit ordinary again, and said, ·'My lord, ask him what he saith
to the sacrament of the altar." Then the bishop asked me, as my counterfeit ordinary
required him.
Gratwick:~"My lord, I do believe that in the sacrament of the Supper of the Lord, truly
ministered in both kinds, according to the institution of Christ. unto the worthy receiver,
he eatcth mystically by faith the body cmd blood of Christ." Then l asked him if it were
not the truth. And he said, "Yes." Then said I, "Bear witness to the truth .
Winchester:-"Why, then what sayest thou to these word<;,'Take. eat; this is my body.'
These are the words of Christ. Wilt thou deny them?"
Gratwick:-"My lord, they are the words of Scripture, I affirm them, and not deny
them."
Winchester:-"Why, then thou dost confess in the sacrament of the altar to be real
presence, the selfsame body that was horn of the Virgin Mary, and is ascended up into
heaven."
Gratwick:-"My lord, what do you now mean? Do you not also mean a visible body?
For it cannot be but of necessity - if it be a real presence, and a material body, it must
be a visible body also."
Winchester:-"Nay, I say unto thee, it is a real presence, and a material body, and an
invisible body too."
Gratwick:-"My lord, then it must needs be a fantastical body: for if it should be
material and invisible, as you affirm, then it must needs be a fantastical body: for it is
apparent, that Christ's human body was visible and seen."
(8:317-18)
Throughout the exchange between Gratwick and Winchester, the status of the
sacrament of the altar and of the Supper of the Lord is in question. Gratwick claims
that both sacramental rituals lack a sovereign force. That is, the taking of the bread
and wine "mystically by faith" becomes the sacred act of ingestj,ng Christ's body
28 Performing Early Modern Trauma
and blood. This qualifier indicates the tenuous status of the ritual as an act that can
misfire. Gratwick's insistence that the ritual achieves a mystical effect is
predicated on the condition that it be "truly ministered in both kinds." This
requirement for a successful sacrament suggests that intentional effect depends on
the condition of the performers in the ritual act. Both the giver and the receiver of
the rite must be "worthy" of the holy sacrament. But if both conditions are not met,
then the performative rite fails and the bread and wine cease to embody Christ's
flesh and blood. Gratwick's argument suggests instability in the ritual-an
instability that Winchester explicitly rejects. In his response to Gratwick, he
pinpoints what he perceives to be the logical problem in the reformer's
understanding of the sacrament. According to the Bishop, Gratwick "condemneth
our ministration in one kind" by 'suggesting that an unworthy participant in the
ritual desacralizes the act. The implication of Gratwick's claim is that the
sacrament is not a sovereign rite with an illocutionary force immanent in the
immediacy of performance. It more closely resembles instead a performative that
can fail because of its "fantastical" status-an equivocating reference to its
figurative nature. With less equivocation, Gratwick also rejects the sacrament of
the altar. He insists that any claim of "real presence" is "fantastical." Winchester's
claim that the sacrament contains a "'real presence," a "material body," and an
"invisible body" articulates his desire that intention and efficacy govern all aspects
of the ritual, including the imagination of the participant who translates the
invisible body into a corporeal presence. For his insistence on the instability of the
ritual, Gratwiek "was burned ... in St. George's-fields" (8:320).
The Catechism of Edmund Allin
[Edmund Allin] was brought again before sir John Baker, who asked why he did
refuse to worship the blessed sacrament of the altar.
Allin:- It is an idol."
Collins:-"lt is God's body."
Allin:-"It is not."
Collins:-"By the mass it is."
Allin:-''It is bread."
Co!lins:-''How provest that?"
Al/in:-"When Christ sat at his supper. and gave them bread to eat."
Collins:-"Bread, knave?"
A/lin:-"Yea, bread, which you call Christ's body. Sat he still at the table, or was he
both in their mouths, and at the table? If he were in their mouths, and at the table, then
had he two bodies, or else had a phantastical body; which is an absurdityto say it."
Baker:-"Christ's body was glorified, and might be in more places than one."
A/lin:-"Then had he more bodies than one, by your own placing of him."
Collins:-'·Thou ignorant ass! the schoolrnen say, that a glorified body may be
everywhere."
Al/in:-"lf his body was not glorified till it rose again, then was it not glorified at his
last supper; and therefore was not al the table, and in their mouths by your own reason."
Reading Martyred History in Titus Andronicus 29
Co/lim:-"A glorified body occupieth no place."
Al/in:-'That which occupieth no place, is neither God, nor any thing else. But Christ's
hody, say you, occupieth no place; therefore it is neither God, nor any thing else. If it be
nothing, then is your religion nothing. If it be God, then have we four in one Trinity,
which is the person of the Father, the person orthe Son, the person of the Holy Ghost,
the human nature of Christ. If Christ be nothing, which you must needs cc~nfess,if he
oceupieth no place, then is our study in vain. " ,
(8:324)
The narrative of Allin's inquisition highlights the difference between "a little cake"
and the material body of Christ in the sacramental ritual. Instead of a summary
rejection of the sacrament, however, Allin earlier in the episode expresses the
possibility that the ritual may "have another meaning" (8:324), which is an explicit
challenge to the sovereignty of the sacrament. The bread was not "'the material
body sinews, bones, flesh, legs, head, arms" (8:324) of Christ. Allin intuits
instead that the "little cake between the priest's fingers" (8:324) represents the idea
of Christ, which is to deny the sacrament an ontological force enacted with the
ritual performance. Like Gratwick, Allin calls Christ's body "phantastical" if it
were in two places at once. In his rejection of Christ's ·'two bodies," Allin also
denies the possibility of the fantastic or magical that is necessary to give the
sacramental ritual its sovereign force. It is this denial that most infuriates his
inquisitor, who insists that the glorified Christ "may be everywhere." Granting
Christ's body ubiquity eliminates the possibility of misfire in the ritual
performance of the sacrament and eliminates the need to understand the meaning
of the ritual because meaning resides in the enactment of the rite. Allin's
protestations, which try to remove the fantasy of corporeal presence in the
sacrament, paradoxically insist on the materiality of Christ's body in a specific
time and place-"at his last supper and not in their mouths." To Allin, the
materiality of Christ's body in time and place enables metaphor that gives meaning
to ritual-meaning that must be negotiated and not simply experienced through
ritual enactment. 21 For his defense of a figurative sacrament, Allin was "carried to
prison, and afterward burned" (8:325).
The battle over representation in these narratives exemplifies the larger debate
in Foxe over the emergence of figurative language as a permissible, indeed
preferable mode of religious expression. 22 The fates of the martyrs' bodies
themselves speak to the power of metaphor over presence. Writing about the
shifting status of purgatory in the period, Peter Marshall's most critical insight,
with implications for ways of thinking about other early modern developments in
law, aesthetics, and historical identity, is that this shift in imagination "both
effected and reflected the beginnings of a fundamental reconceptualization, a
tectonic shift in accepted and permissible modes of rcpresentation." 23
Debates about the Catechism during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
provide evidence for this often unresolved conflict over what ~ere permissible
30 Pe,:fonning Early Modern Trauma
modes of representation after the Reformation. Changes in the catechism reveal the
extent to which traditional religious practices lingered even as there emerged
fundamental changes to church services. According to Ian Green, tensions over
how to explain the sacraments to catechumens were common even before the
Reformation. Performing the sacraments using commonplace materials such as
bread, water and wine and using everyday terms such as "sign,'' "token," and
"seal" to describe their meaning belied the mystery that remained at the heart of
sacramental ritual. This tension was intensified by Reformation theology that
worked to distance its followers from popish sacraments and from the mistaken
view that the sacraments were efficacious rituals that immediately produced
desired effects.
The authors of popular catechisms defined a sacrament in contradictory ways.
Most of them agreed on the Augustinian dichotomy between visible and invisible
in the sacraments that made its way through the reformation doctrine of Luther or
24
Calvin. According to Green, English catechists were in general agreement that a
sacrament was an outward representation-a token, badge, mark, witness or
sensible sign-of something otherwise invisible to human perception. This sense
of the sacrament followed Calvin's explanation in the catechism of 1541 that
defined a sacrament as an "outward token of God's favour which by a visible sign
represented spiritual things to us." 25 But sacraments were also described in ways
that complicated the belief in their purely representational status. The term "seal,"
for example, was used often to describe a sacrament that imprints the Lord's
promise on the heart?' The Oxford English Dictionary defines this sense of the
word during the period as a mark serving as visible evidence of some event. "Seal"
also has a legal connotation in that it confirms the authenticity of a claim in a legal
document. It was a stamp or device that authenticated in the moment of its
pressing. To some, this meant that the seal effectually and immediately applied the
Lord and his positive effects to the participant. In this sense, a "seal" is related to
terms like "pledge" or "assurance," which make similar points in both religious
and legal contexts.
More authors by the early seventeenth century began to use this legal sense of
the term "seal"-as in a guarantee of a legal promise. Both William Bradshaw and
John Ball used "seal" as a promise or covenant in their popular short catechisms;
the authors of the Westminster Larger Catechism also exercised the legal
connotation to describe the Lord's Supper and baptism as "seals of the same
covenant." 27 While providing an example of the shifting definition or sacramental
terms, the myriad usages of ''seal" also indicate how legal and religious discourse
blended together during the period, suggesting that the changing temporality of
legal obligation is directly relevant to our discussion of the evolving nature of
sacramental ritual. Although it might appear that the blending of the concept of the
seal with the sign occurred rather innocuously over time, such an understanding of
the evolution of sacramental and legal discourse is too sanguine. As Foxe
Reading Martyred Histo,y in Titus Andronicus 31
demonstrates, the language, in fact, ~as contested and the source of potentially
violent consequences.
The complexities of defining a sacrament were compounded by the fact that in
England the rituals were perceived by many to have the power immediately to
transmit positive effects to the participants. An effectual sacrament nourished faith,
and ''benefits" or "graces" were bestowed upon the faithful rcceivers. 28 The
evolution in Alexander Nowell's writing about religious practices highlights the
fluid understanding or the power and purpose of the sacrament. Nowell's
supplement to the 1604 Prayer Book defines a sacrament as "an outward and
visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace." 29 This explanation of the sacrament
retains its promissory connotation-the rituals make visible the grace that has been
promised to the faithful for their belief. In the same text, however, Nowell
transforms grace from a promise to something that has been actually received in
the performance of the ritual. Ian Green quotes Nowell's explanation of the Lord's
Supper: "Christ himself, with whom our souls, as with their proper food, are
30
inwardly nourished." Nowell would have certainly been influenced by Calvin,
whose own understanding of sacramental efficacy would have been closer to
Luther's than to the more radical claims of Ulrich Zwingli.
Where Zwingli rejects out of hand the possibility of sacramental efficacy,
Luther and Calvin saw the sacraments as both meaning something and doing
1
something in their enactment:' Calvin describes the sacrament of the Lord's
Supper as a ritual that "docs not feed our eyes with a mere appearance only, but
leads us to the present reality and effectively performs what it symbolizes"
(4.15.14). Nowell's explanation also describes the sacraments as ''sure witnesses"
and "signs" of grace; those same signs, however, were effectual in that their
32
performance increased faith. Green understands the significance of this
complicated, if not contradictory, explanation of a sacrament in terms of its
relation to temporality: "these statements can be taken to refer either to a state of
assurance being achieved in the future, or to a further state of salvation being
33
attained in the present." Writing specifically about the Lord's Supper, Calvin and
other authors reconciled their considerable anxiety about the sacrament's efficacy
by admitting that at the heart of the ritual was a ''dreadful mystery." 34 Christ
imparts himself in the practice "though mystically, yet ... truly; though invisibly,
35
yet ... really done. " Instead of eliminating the impact and mystery of a sacrament
such as the Lord's Supper, figurative interpretation, according to the reformers,
restores to the ritual its spiritual power. As reformers insisted that "[t]he analogy
and resemblance between the sacrament, and the thing signified, must ever be kept
in all sacraments" (Actes & Monuments 6:300), the faith of the participant became
the important factor in gauging the efficacy of the sacramental rite. This
unpredictable factor marks the inherent and often unacknowledged instability in
36
the ritual itself. The language of popular catechisms and of their authors' efforts
to explain the logic of sacraments highlights the debate over religious practices that
continued even after the Reformation in the middle of the sixt~enth century in
32 Peiforming Early Modem Trauma
England. And this prolonged debate~which Green argues continued well lnto the
eighteenth ccntury-~omplicates Foxe's version of the shift in representational
strategies that are the subject of many of the martyrs' narratives in Actes &
Monuments.
'The representations in Foxe of active reformers chailenging Catholic
oppression create the impre;-;sionthat the break from traditional religious practices
was clear and unambiguous.J 7 The "fundamental reconceptualization"in accepted
18
and "pern1issible modc'--Sof representation" that occurs in Foxe -whal some
historians have described as a tectonic shift, a traumatic change, or radical break
from the past39-of course, was far from an unambiguous epistemic shift. Just as
Foxc's historiography appears to reject a common history that has an afterlife in
the present, Titus enacts the rejection of a cultural past., even as it reproduces
precedent narratives from anorher history that seem to justify the viotent action for
which the play is famous. The bloody battle over signifying practices was an
encounter with crisJs for a generation not able to process completely the drastic
social and religious alterations as they occurred. The battle over signification that
is repeated again and again in A.ctes & Monuments appears a generation later on
the early modern stage. In the play's concern wlth vows, promises, and oaths. Tims
Andronicu.sis haunted by the residue of what Foxe hoped to present as a tectonic
shift.
By looking at the complexities of prrnnissory language in the play-its
relationship with early modern legal theory and England's literary past-the rest of
the chapter aims to show that Shakespeare•s most violent play is concerned with
the same issues of language and representation that structured Foxe' s
historiography. The space between word and deed that emerges in Foxe, when
efficacious rituals no longer act as sovereign events, produces unintended effects
that bear 'Witnessto past's revenge-the return of the unruly history described by
Foxe that had been inscrlbed in the cultural imagination.
Surly Bonds and Scandalous Contracts
Titus Andronicus stages the ambivalence of the promise as a form of violation, and
oaths, therefore, are virtually ldentified with the acts of violence that accompany
them. In the coniext of the play's appeal tO precedent classjcal intertexts (most
obviously, Ovid's Metam,017Jhoses),the muhipie promises produce the play's
characters as subjects insofar as they are subjects of a fragile historicai
consciousness. Extending recent discussions of intentionality in the shifting
notions of contract law after the Reformation, this section argues that Titus
Andmnicm deconstructs notions of intention with repeated representations of the
vow's integration with shocking violence. This approach to the play allows us to
recognize that when Tirus A.ndronicus exposes and expiores a variety of
promissory speech acts,40 the play reveals the cost-often excessive-of this
Readmg Martyred History in Titus Andronicus
contractual su~jcctivity and historical awareness. A shift in how early modern legal
theorists understood just what was at stake in the act of making a contractual
obligation allows Shakespeare to recast how the period made sense of its
obligation to its historics--both the Roman and Foxean legacies. Such a reading
offers new insight into the p1ay's critique of Roman ideology and therefore into
Elizaberhan England's relation to the literary and J)Olitical legacies of Rome
promised by the "lively warrant" (5.3.43) of cuitural transmission--a warran! that
relegates to oblivion the violenci;; of the Reformation depicted in Foxe. b
Shakespeare's hands, that is, Roman inheritance is not a rhing already passed on lo
England and possessed by its citizens, Instead, the inheritance resembles a promise
stiil to be completed, a transaction that can, therefore, go violently and
unpredictably awry.41
As early as t11eplay's first scene, Shakespeare links promissory language to
violence, The violence of the promise emerges as the language of the contract
splits, and the apparent feiicitous completion of the terms of an oath can produce
unintended effccts. 42 In the play's chaotic opening scene, the contest for power
among the Romans is suspended when Satuminus and Bassianus promise to abide
by another's word, Marcus's "fair" speech convinces Bassianm, to "[cJ01nn1it my
cause in balance to be weighed" ( 1,1.58), and Saturniou~ promises in a similar
exchange to be governed by Titus·s decision: "And to the love and favour of my
country f Commit myself, my person and the cause" (Ll.61-62). The play
immediately challenges the wisdom of committing to Titus's judgment, as the war
hero exacts revenge on Alarbus by "hew[ingj i1is limbs till they be dean
consumed" ( l. l .133). The violence that follows the promise from the competing
leaders of Rome, even before Titus can sett~e the dispute, suggests the extent to
which the promise participates in the play's violent culture. Lucjus expresses the
cultural oath that mandates revenge and the oath's bloody effects·.
See, Lord and father, how \Ve hove performed
Our Roman rite-.: Alarbns · limbs are lopped
And entrails feed the sacrificing Ore.
Whose smoke like incensedoth perfume the ;:;ky."
(LI.145-48)
His use of the word "rite'' to describe the dismemberment of Alarbus' s body
associates the vnw of revenge with cultural convention and ritual, It is this implicit
promise of revenge combined \Vitli. the significant cultural authority of ritual that
requires Titus to kili Alarbus and turns the act of promising into a performative
that contributes to the play's violent economy. 43
Other promise,; in the opening act further implicate Tims as a play "about"
promising. Afler the Romans ritualistically promise their loyalty to Saturninus with
the twice-articulated cry, '"Long live our emperor!"' (Ll.230), the oath of
marriage becomes centraL The ritual promise of allegiance quickly surrenders to
34 Performing Earf.v Modem Trauma
the ritual promise of love. Saturninus's words echo the marriage vow that enacts
the ritual union: "Lavinia will I make my empress, / Rome's royal mistress,
mistress of my heart, / And in the sacred Pantheon her espouse" (1. l.244-46).
Lavinia accepts because Saturninus "[w}arrants these words in princely courtesy"
(1.1.276). Her emphasis on the words of the warrant locates the force of the
promise in the language, directing attention to the power of Saturninus's promise
to produce effects and not to represent them. Titus follows Saturninus's promise
with an oath of his own: " ... to Saturnine/ ... do I consecrate/ My sword, my
chariot and my prisoners" ( l.1.250-53). Titus's sword, an instrument that executed
bruta1ity with celerity and success, becomes part of the promise securing the
arranged marriage. In the process,_it serves as a material reminder of the cleavage
and potential violence that operate in every significant promise in this play.
Saturninus's promise of marriage produces a competing promise, though less
elegantly stated. In response to Titus's offer of Lavinia to Saturninus, Bassianus
asserts, "this maid is mine" ( 1.1.280). More than an assertion from a lover about to
lose the object of his desire, Bassianus's challenge to Saturninus reminds us that
every promise is threatened by its failure.
As Bassianus's vow threatens the earlier marriage vow, it also produces
violence when Titus fights to secure the former vow between Lavinia and the
emperor. His "wrongful quarrel" (l.1.298) with his son is a product of the network
of promises that structure the scene and an indication of the violence that inheres in
the promising language that is fundamental to the play. Satuminus's final order of
marriage with Tamara ("Behold, I choose thee, Tamara, for my bride" ll.1.3241)
seems to ameliorate the aggression that threatens to erupt-but with this
commitment comes the brutality of revenge that structures the rest of the play.
Tamara's vow, "I'll find a day to massacre them all,/ And raze their faction and
their family" ( 1.1.456), extends the previous promises verbalized in the scene. Her
motivating oath of revenge is hidden behind her verbalized commitment to Titus:
"But on mine honour dare I undertake/ For good Lord Titus's innocence in all"
( 1.1.441--42), as Tamara promises to "look graciously on" (L 1.444) Titus. The two
vows spoken in a single speech and delivered within ten lines of each other are
emblematic of the nature of the promise in the play. Her conflicting oaths-one
spoken for an intended audience (Titus and his family), the other spoken in an
aside to Saturninus but directed at Titus-function as components of a single
promise. The oath performed for an intended audience and with a clearly intended
purpose has within it the possibility of other effects not realized in the original
promissory act. Simultaneously violent and pacific in content, both of Tamara's
promises function together as a single promise and represent at the linguistic level
the brutality and violence of betrayal that the play repeatedly enacts. 44
The proliferation of promises in the first act of Titus Andronicus suggests the
play's concern with the effects of language beyond its representational power. Each
promise has within its utterance its own potentially bloody violation that not only
associates violence with the vow but, more importantly, reveals how obligatory
Reading Martyred History in Titus An<lronicus 35
language fails in the end to legitim8.te desire and guarantee intention. Ironically,
Titus's desire to gain revenge by bringing literary tales to life later in the play
exposes most explicitly the excessive cost to maintain the fiction of intentionality.
His promise of revenge that links obligatory language to cultural transmission is
inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses, which literally appears on stage in act four.
As we tum our attention to Ovid's animus-the spirit of rhetoric that literally and
figuratively moves interlocutors and that consistently escapes any one speaker's
desire or intentions-we can begin to see how Shake.-;peare's representation of the
violence inherent in the act of promising enables a critique of Elizabethan ideology
built on the promise of an inheritance from Rome.
In an epic that, as Lynn Enterline points out, consistently explores the limits
45
and excesses of language, the potential violence in the act of promising emerges
as one of Ovid's central concerns. Characters in Ovid and Shakespeare express the
desire for language and action to coincide. Yet the desire is accompanied by the
subsequent knowledge that language always fails to accomplish this; Enterline
describes the significance of this insight:
. .. the moment when the voice either fades or speaks out of the .speaker' s control is also
the moment that speech is revealed at its most material ... As many characters discover
to their peril, the performative dimension or Ovidian rhetoric is in excess of, or to the
side of, thought. 46
Shakespeare presents Ovid's epic poem as the key to deciphering Lavinia's cryptic
signs after her rape. The "tragic talc of Philomel" (4.1.47) serves as a pattern
narrative to events in the play, as Titus, the "first critic" to interpret Ovid's
intertext, suggests: "Patterned by that poet here describes, / By nature made for
murders and for rapes" (4. l.57-8). But more than providing a pattern to events in
the play, Ovid's language in the tale of Philomela and Procne is a language of
promises, vow.s and oaths. Ovid frames the tale with the language or oaths and
promises.. Procne instructs Tereus to make a promise to her father. She says, "You
will promise my father that after a brief stay she shall return" (6.441-2). 47 Ovid
uses the words promittes, mandata, and pignus to suggest the language of the
promise or oath. In the scene of Philomela and Tereus's departure, the rhetoric of
the promise is central. Miller's translation of the departure scene reads:
and by your honour and the ties that bind us, by the gods. I pray you guard her with a
father's love, and as soon as possible ... send back to me this sweet solace of my tedious
years. And do you, my Philomcla, if you love me, come back to me as soon as
possible ... he asked both their right hands as pled1-:eof their promise, and joined them
together ..
(6.499-506, emphasis mine)
The violent rape follows soon after Tereus's pledge of protection, and Philomela's
threat/ promise to "proclaim what [Tereus has1 done" (6.543)_provokes the rapist
36 Pe1fonning Early Modern Trauma
to sever her tongue. In each instance of violence, the promise that precedes it
seems a component in the act of violence itself. In the episode, violent acts
committed on the subjects interpellated by the promise immediately challenge the
authority of the promise to bring into social existence those involved in the speech
act.48
Ovid explores the danger that inheres in the foreclosure of the promise
elsewhere in the Metamorphoses. Phoebus's oath to Phaethon contains within its
own linguistic structure a violent end. Phoebus swears by "the Stygian pool
whereby gods swear" (2.45) but immediately understands the dangerous effect that
his act of promising produces: "Would that 1 might retract my promise!"(2.5 l). As
the oath helps to produce the subjects in the episodc-Phoebus proves his
fatherhood at the same moment that his son qua son is called into existence by the
father's promise-it also produces accidental violence, which Ovid's epic and
Shakespeare's play seem to associate with the act of interpellation.
Shakespeare uses the image of the Stygian oath in Titus Andronicus in order to
explore similar Ovidian concerns about the effects of swearing or promising.
Reference to the classic oath-taking ritual appears in conjunction with Aaron's
rhetoric against Lavinia. Aaron introduces rape into the language of the play
through the rhetoric of an imperative-a call for resolution that operates like the
language of a vow or oath. Aaron implores the conspirators to "join for that you
jar" ( l. l.603), to form a pact to conquer Lavinia. Aaron's injunction to join forces
operates as a call to promise. His repetition of the imperative verb form "must"
makes his speech a form of command or a call to action. After repeating the
imperative four times in eight lines ("must do," "must ... resolve," "must perforce,"
"f m]ust ... pursue" [ 1.1.604-l lJ), Aaron finally orders the future rapists, Chiron
and Demetrius, to "[s]ingle you thither then this dainty doe, / And strike her home
by force, if not by words" (1.1.617-8). Aaron's rhetoric suggests that there is a
separation between word and action ("strike her home by force, if not by words").
But the structure of his command implies a parity between "force" and "words"-
they both have the ability to produce desired effects.
Aaron's suggestion that word and action are separate belies his understanding
of the power of his own rhetoric to act upon Demetrius and Chiron. The imperative
force of his language convinces the two future rapists, whose words indicate their
resolve to perform the "stratcgem" that Aaron's imperative language demands.
Demetrius elaborates on Chiron's remark that "[t]hy counsel smells of no
cowardice" (1.1.632) with a reference to the Styx: "Sit fas aut nefas, till I find the
stream / To cool this heat, a charm to calm these fits, / Per Stygia per manes
veho1" (l.l.633-5). Chiron's vow of revenge answers Aaron's imploring rhetoric,
as the vow to act fuses with a classical oath-taking ritual. Jonathan Bate points out
the similarity of Demetrius's words to Procne's language that confounds right and
wrong as she contemplates revenge. She says, "fasque nefasque I confusura ruit
poenaeque in imagine tota est" (6.586-87). 49 Her language locales in the promise
of revenge both a crime and a punishment, a wrong and a right. Moreover,
Reading Martyred History in Titus Andronicus 37
Demetrius's veiled allusion to Procne 'in the same speech that references "Stygia,"
an allusion to the promising ritual necessary for the execution of epic oaths, further
implicates the act of promising in the violence that both Ovid's tale and
Shakespeare's drama describe.
Like his reference to the Philomela episodes in Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare
uses the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice as another pattern narrative that
demonstrates the volatility immanent in the act of pr'omising. The Stygian oath in
book two that ensures Phaethon's destruction appears in book ten as a condition
attached to Eurydice's return from the underworld. Miller translates the contract
that governs the exchange: "Thus then the Thracian hero received his wife and
with her this condition, that he must not turn his eyes backward until he had gone
forth from the valley of Avernus, or else the gift would be in vain" (10.51-2). By
accepting the terms of the contract, Orpheus makes a promise, and though he has
been warned that "the gift would be in vain" (10.52) ifhe violates his oath, the loss
that has already been inscribed in the terms of the contract as contract makes
possible Orpheus's eventual failure.
The potential for misfire that inheres in the terms (legem [ 10.50]) of his
contract appears in the language of repetition that characterizes the episode.
Orpheus's vow not to look back at Eurydice or lose her again to the underworld is
framed by the language of failure. Orpheus follows Eurydice into the underworld,
and in his effort to retrieve his wife, he reiterates their debt (onmic1debemur vohis)
to the gods. Arthur Golding's 1564 translation of Orpheus's rhetoric reads, "All
things to you belong" (10.33).so Golding captures the sense of debt implied by the
Latin original; the word "debt" can also be translated as "pledged" (10.31),
designed to convince the gods to allow Orpheus "the enjoyment of [Eurydice] as a
boon" (10.31). The sense of the pledge as debt implied by both translations
suggests that the vow or promise is predicated on a loss already inscribed in the
speech act.
1n addition to the relationship between the pledge and debt suggested in
Orpheus's rhetoric, Orpheus vows not to return to earth if he cannot enjoy his wife
again, telling the gods: "leto gaudete duorwn (10.39) [Rejoice in the death of
two]"; his command emphasizes his own commitment to Eurydice by doubling her
death with his own. This language of repetition begins the image of double death
generated by the contract in the episode and crucial to Lavinia's condition in Titus
Andronicus. Eurydice dies "a second time" (10.59) before she can reach the earth.
The poet describes her fall back to the underworld as an "iterwn moriens" (10.60)
and uses the word gemina to stress the doubling that occurs in the scene. Golding
translates this doubling as Eurydice's ''double dying" (10.69) and underscores this
repetition by describing Orpheus's desire to cross the Styx a second time (iterum
transire). Framed by the language of failure ("Rejoice in the death of two") and
containing language of failure within its own terms ("the gift would he in vain"),
the contract repeats, indeed reproduces, the loss that it was intended to mitigate.
38 Performing Early Modern Trauma
Eurydice's nearly inaudible farewell as she dies a second time is all that remains
for her lover to take back with him to earth.
The contractual nature of Eurydice's "double death" (10.63) has its analogue in
Shakespeare's play. Eurydice's double death that the contract (both broken and
fulfilled) makes possible in Ovid appears in Shakespeare as the double death of the
vow of revenge. Lavinia experiences a double death-first at the hands of her
rapists and second at the hands of her father. Lavinia endures her encounter with
Chiron, Demetrius, and Tamara in act two as a fate worse than death. Her pleas to
Tamara for protection from her sons' "worse-than-killing lust" (2.2.175) and her
cry for Tamora to be a "charitable murderer" (2.2.178) establish her rape as an
encounter with death. Like Eurydice whose death is answered by Orpheus,
Lavinia's fate is answered by Titus, and in both attempts to remedy the loss, the
men vow compensatory action that simultaneously inscribes both loss and
compensation.
The banquet scene in act five transforms the promise to remedy a loss into a
repetition of death. Although Titus claims that Virginius functions as the pattern
narrative that sanctions Lavinia's murder, his comments after he stabs his daughter
reveal his indebtedness to Ovid. In Titus's explanation of the murder, he repeats
Lavinia's double death by providing mulliple versions of the traumatic event. Titus
first explains his violence toward his daughter by saying that he has "[k]illed her
for whom my tears have made me blind" (5.3.49). This first reference to murder is
followed by a second. In response to Tamara's question, "Why hast thou slain
thine only daughter thus?" (5.3.55), Titus repeats the murder of his daughter-this
time under different circumstances. He says, "Not I, 'twas Chiron and Demetrius:/
They ravished her and cut away her tongue, / And tl1ey, 'twas they, that did her all
this wrong" (5.3.56-8). Titus claims her death in his first articulation of murder,
and in the second, he attributes the crime to her two rapists. Lavinia's first ''death"
in terms of the play' s chronology, her rape, is part of Tamara's promise of revenge.
Her second death, the stabbing, is central to Titus's oath to "prosecute by good
advice I Mortal revenge upon these traitorous Goths" (4.1.92-3). By linking
Lavinia's double death to vows of revenge, Shakespeare's play, once again, shows
how the excesses of the Ovidian promise are violent and brutal. Framed by Titus's
and Tamara's vows, Lavinia's silenced and maimed image on the stage in between
her two deaths embodies the interval in the play between the act of promising and
its unintended and excessive effects.
Though the play repeatedly embodies linguistic misfiring as violence against
bodies, it most vividly stages the violence of the promise in act three. The violent
momentum produced by oaths earlier in the scene results in the staging of severed
hands and heads. Titus's plea to "unbind my sons, reverse the doom of death" (3.1.
24) employs the language of the bond or promise. The literal chains of the prison
and the figurative chains of the promise merge in Titus's language. In both the
literal and figurative conception of the word "bind," "the doom of death" is a
potential consequence. The possibility of freedom for Titus's sons is foreclosed as
Reading Martyred History in Titus Andronicus 39
long as the binds that hold them ca!)tive arc in place. Ironically, however, Titus's
bind, the vulnerability produced by promissory language, also marks his continued
agency. Titus participates in a contract to ensure the safe return of his sons, but his
severed hand that binds the agreement-or functions as compensation-returns
only further violence later in the scene. Aaron tells Titus to "chop off your hand/
And send it to the king, he for the same / Will send thee hither both thy sons
alive-/ And that shall be the ransom for their fault" (3.1.153-6) to which Titus
promises, "With all my heart I'll send the emperor my hand" (3.l.160). The
violence inherent in the captivating promise becomes clear once Titus sees what
remains of his sons' unbound bodies later in the scene. Though Aaron cuts off
Titus's hand as payment for Quintus and Martius's release ("I account of them/ As
jewels purchased at an easy price" [3.1.197-981), his sons' severed heads and his
own freshly dismembered appendage are returned instead. Titus's resolution to
purchase "at an easy price" (3.1.198) his sons' freedom combined with his oath
that "what shall be is dispatched" (3.1.192) inspires payment whose currency is the
product (hands, heads, tongues) of violent actions.
Despite his own experience of the unpredictable and bloody violation that
characterizes his vows and promises, Titus's elaborate ritual after the exchange of
body parts suggests his blindness to the violence that inheres in the contractual
language in the play. With his family and its fragmented body parts surrounding
Titus, the play links his oath with the bloody bodies on stage. Titus's vow of
revenge seems to collapse word and deed. Thus, promissory language appears to
lose the possibility of misfiring or of generating unintended effects. Without the
tenuous gap between word and deed, the story of the unintended effects produced
by utterances in the play would go untold. The consequences of silencing those
stories is to participate in the fetishization of the speech act as sovereign action-a
fetishization that I associate with the imagined force of sovereign state power. 51
Given the infelicitous effects of other utterances in the play, Titus's vow during
this extended ritual does not act as directly or causatively as he (or his future
editors) thinks it does. And in this space, where unintended effects circulate, the
memory of the violence of the Reformation presses its claim on the narrative of a
Roman legacy that informs the structure of power in Elizabethan culture.
Titus's response to a mysterious knock on his study door in act four points to
this commitment to the past that seems to determine his future action. Alone in his
chamber, Titus indicates that he is studying past tales on which to model his plan
for revenge. Read as a moment in the play that examines the authority of context
and convention that govern oath-taking, the scene explores both the limits and
excesses of the act of promising. Titus announces the completion of a scripted plan
of revenge for the rape and mutilation of his daughter: "You are deceived, for what
I mean to do/ See here in bloody lines I have set down,/ And what is written shall
be executed" (5.2.13-15). The "bloody lines" of the vow to a past that he studies
are reminders of how the play repeatedly integrates contractual language with
brutalized bodies. The "bloody lines" that graphically represe~.t his oath and that
40 Performing Early Modern Trauma
inspire his vow are the product of antecedent passages from the precedent texts that
the spectator can imagine lining the shelves of his study; the script written in
Titus's blood that promises future revenge is an intertext of past narratives of
violence and brutality. Seneca's Thyestes and Hippolytus, Ovid's Fasti and
Metamorphoses, and the tale of Virginia and Appius are a few of the narratives that
contribute to Titus's bloody script. Those narratives from the past, rewritten with
Titus's blood and born from his desire for historical continuity, enable his promise
of revenge. His oath of revenge becomes a surrender to those literary promises that
the pattern narratives suggest.
Heather James demonstrates that Vergil's Troy is systematically dismantled in
the play, and Titus's reading of Ovid's tale of Philomela provides him with an
authoritative text that replaces the obsolete Vergil. Her description of Titus's
"faithful act of literary digestion," 52 as he inherits his cultural patrimony is
evidence of the level of commitment Titus has to the precedent texts which
authorize his revenge. As Titus encounters Tamora in disguise outside the stage-
space that represents his study, he literally appears on a cultural threshold.With the
culture and history suggested by the physical space of the study (The Quarto stage
directions indicate that he "opens his study door") and with the culture and history
that Titus himself imagines in his study, his intended vow to the past draws on
precedent texts in order to gather authority in the present.
Suggesting that intention governs his vow to the past, Titus directs the
performance of his violent script, which results in the bloody banquet scene at the
end of act five. However, Titus's bloody script born from the traditional precedent
texts-one of which, Ovid's Metamorphoses, has already appeared on stage in act
four-reflects a commitment to the past that suggests violent, unpredictable
rupture as much as intended continuity. Titus's commitment to precedent texts that
situates him within history seems to enable intentional action. He says before
murdering Lavinia: "A reason mighty, strong, and effectual;/ A pattern, precedent,
and lively warrant/ For me, most wretched, to perform the like" (5.3.42-4). Titus's
use of the adjective "lively" to describe the warrant that motivates him returns us
again to the corporeal effects that come from the bind of those past tales.
Moreover, his promise is "effectual" in that it corresponds with his own intentions.
In Titus's insistence on the embodied and efficacious promise, the play bears
witness to his blindness that language has the possibility to exceed any one
speaker's intention. In this excess, fragile space emerges for the play's other
inheritance from Foxe.
Entering this moment in the play as a "warrant" (a type of promissory note that
guarantees future obligations), the literary precedent texts on which Titus draws his
inspiration participate in the contractual language that structures the play. In work
that examines the nature of the legal contract and its relationship to the Elizabethan
theater, Luke Wilson argues that the late sixteenth century marks the
Reading Martyred History in Titus Andronicus 41
shift frot~ a customary culture in which social actors operate in habitual ways without
formulatmg accounts of their intentions and reason for acting, to [a] ... contract culture
in which social actors are required, at their peril, Lo be able to provide an account of the
motives and intentions according to which they are supposed to have acted. 53
Wilson argues that legal development in the period "distracts or distends the
structure of the contract into a futurity." 54 This futurity emerges in discourse in the
form of ~romises, oaths, and vows, all of which generate a fantasy of intentionality
and predictable outcome. John Slade's case against Humphrey Morley from I 597
to 1.602 redefined contract law from a debt-based to an assumpsit-hased system
(':"~1ch. extends legal obligation beyond the moment of contractual agreement,
g1vmg 1t a new temporal dimension). The distinction between the two forms of
legal reasoning, as this chapter has suggested in the play's attention to the intended
and unintended consequences of obligatory language, helps to make sense of the
com~lex relationship between the promissory speech act and the staged violence.
A bnef look at what was at stake in the legal debate surrounding Slade's Case will
help make clear its relationship to the promissory language in the play.
Debt-based contracts proceed as if everything happens at the moment of the
bargain. Any failure of items to pass from one person to another in the debt
agreement is a moot point. More important, however, because the transaction in a
debt-based contract occurs in an instant, there is no temporal component to the
legal promise. Wilson is clear about the significance of the atemporality of debt-
based contract: "no interval can insert itself between promise and performance or
open a space for agency there; and there can be no articulation of intentions, states
55
of mind, and so on." Failure is not a condition of debt-based contract law. But
with the shift to assumpsit, contracts are "necessarily ... incompleted at the time of
the bargain a.nd only completed upon bilateral perfonnancc." 5(, The promissory act
assumes an mterval that divides it from the performance which would make the
contract whole. The incomplete condition that is constitutive of this new type of
contract means that for the first time in English legal discourse the promissory
sp~cch ~ct can be what J.L. Austin might call infelicitous. Assumpsit makes
evident m a legal context the constitutive failure implicit in speech acts-a failure
~end~red a.s blo.ody violation in Titus. Contrnctual structures were beginning to be
1magrned m this penod as attempts "to write the future, to manage the risks that
come V.:ithimmersion in the social world." 57 Titus Andronicus stages the temporal
uncertamty of assumpsit in the unintended effects of promissory speech acts at the
~ame time _thatit articulates a desire for the felicitous contract in which everything
1s accomplished during the moment of obligation. 58 Significantly, the argument in
Slade's_ Case makes it clear that the legal development of assumpsit has the
retroactive effect to redefine past debt-based obligations as well. In theory, with
the advent of assumpsit logic, debt-based obligation-or what legal theorists called
a "nude" contract-was already subject to collateral matter and unusual
59
intentions.
42 Pe,forming Early Modern Trauma
Rome's relationship to Titus can be characterized by a promissory temporality
subject to this type of collateral matter and unusual intentions. The bloody lines
composed in his study function as the script for a future performance. Titus's oath
that "what is written shall be executed" (5.2.15) is a promise or contract to
perform. However, the nude contract implied by the rhetoric of the stage is a failed
warrant: those on-stage spectators to Titus's drama have not entered the contract.
Saturninus's exclamation, "What hast thou done, unnatural and unkind?" (5.3.47),
after Lavinia's murder indicates the level to which he and others fail to
comprehend the act as a fulfillment of a promissory obligation embedded in
performance. Tilus misrecognizes the temporal dimension of his scripted oath. He
appears torn between an assumpsit promise, which has the effect of opening a
space for collateral intentions, and the older debt-based model that closes down
any temporal interval between promise and deed. The "lively warrant" of
precedent texts produces Titus as an historical agent, but the way he performs the
script-combined with the celerity with which he kills Lavinia ("Die, die, Lavinia"
[SJ.451) immediately after he unveils his imperative to "perform the like"
(5.3.44)-suggests his desire to collapse the saying and the subsequent doing. At
this moment in the play, the vow to precedent and the performance that completes
the promise are fused "in a kind of simultaneity that elides without extinguishing
precisely the temporal gap" that comes to characterize contractual obligation by the
60
end of the sixteenth century. This fusion effaces the insistent memory of another,
more pressing history described by Foxe and embodied on stage in Lavinia's
disfigured presence. Titus acts as if a vow could have immediate efficacy in an
effort, it seems, to erase the possibility of the uncertainty that is part of the
temporal interval in assumpsit obligation. Titus's desire for simultaneity suggests a
link between past and present characterized by an obsessive longing for
61
continuity.
Lavinia's desire, then, becomes the play's challenge to Roman inheritance.
Like Foxe's own appropriation of Catholic iconography, the play demystifies such
a notion of continuity in its appeal to some of those same precedent texts in
different contexts, as Lavinia's own citing of Ovid and her subsequent writing in
Latin demonstrate. With her participation in the promise of revenge, the
commitment to the past that Titus so efficiently seeks to execute assumes other
meanings and possesses the potential for misfire. Yet for Titus, the warrant of the
precedent texts-Ovid's, Vergil's, and Livy's-interpellates him as a subject of
(and as subject to) history once he participates in the oath. The immediacy of his
execution of the oath exposes his own desire for the sovereignty of the promissory
speech act, and at the same time it reveals his denial that his relation to the past is
in process and subject to unpredictable misfire.
By linking historical continuity lo the violence within the precedent texts,
Shakespeare's play challenges the imperialism of classical models in an era of
translatio imperii. Heather James's convincing reading of Titus demonstrates that
the play's "aggressive imitations" of precedent texts from classical Rome "do
Reading Martyred History in Titus Andronicus 43
nothing less than perform a critique of imperial Rome on the eve of its collapse
and, in doing so, glance proleptically at Elizabethan England as an emergent
62
nation." While James's work brilliantly investigates the relationship between
Roman and Elizabethan cultural iconography, it refuses to grant Lavinia any voice
in the play's critique. She writes that "the play retains Lavinia's body as a stage
prop bearing witness to her victimization [I]t formally seals us off·from her
intcriority and diagnoses the loss as symptomatic of petrarchan description." 63 Yet
as a subject called into existence by the force of Titus's appeal to literary
precedent, Lavinia does participate in the promissory act. She occupies space in the
temporal interval characteristic of the new early modern contract in which
intentions can go unpredictably awry. With her own Latin inscription, Lavinia
participates in and, indeed, functions as the most forceful spokesperson in the
critique of historical continuity. 64
It is at this moment that the play makes us most aware of the limitations of
concepts such as "agency" or ''intention." 65 In its representation of Lavinia's most
willful act of intention, the play, in fact, bears witness to a site of lost agency and
to the power of cultural patrimony. Lavinia's Latin inscription serves as the play's
most explicit indictment of Elizabethan historical tradition. The fact that Lavinia
writes of the crime in Lalin, ''Stuprum-Chiron-Demetriu.s" (4.1.78),
demonstrates the extent to which her traumatic memory of rape is connected to a
latent, perhaps unconscious discomfort with the very language of patriarchy and
authority. Thi.\ authority-enfranchised by the historical patterns of classical
influence in Renaissance England's self-identity-is under siege from all
directions in the play. Yet within the world of the play, Lavinia's script fails in the
66
end to register its intended protest. She dies an actor in Titus's performance,
subject to the designs of more powerful men. This breakdown of intention or
agency, however, gives rise to collateral matter. If Titus were to read differently
the Latin inscription that Lavinia writes in the sand, he perhaps would interpret a
powerful criticism of his commitment lo the past in what she scrawls. 67 The effects
of her criticism are profound. Not only does her writing inspire the revenge
narrative that results in the destruction of Titus, Marcus, Tamora, Chiron and
Demetrius, but as the literal reminder of a classical Roman heritage built, as
Stephanie Jed argues, on the legend of Lucretia's rape, 68 her inscription implicates
Titus, as a student of precedent texts, in the traumatic event of her rape. 69
In Titus's response to Lavinia's writing that criticizes the coercive ideology of
past narratives, we see how the unintended effects of speech acts can subsume
moments of protest or resistance. More important, however, Titus's blindness to
what critics have tended to understand as Lavinia• s expression of agency serves as
the play's critique of the structures that he believes give him a place within history
70
and culture. What appears as an agentive act coincident with Lavinia's desire to
resist, her expression of agency in writing is more accurately an instance of
England's past attempting to overcome its Roman interloper-an interloper whose
legacy in both the Roman and English inheritance is the desire fur efficacy that
44 Performing Early Modern Trauma
leaves no space for history. Since Titus is unable to answer her script from any
position except from within his own oppressive ideological system, his complicity
in the tyranny of those past narratives becomes evident in the assault that his
interpretation of Lavinia's writing (re)enacts. In response to Lavinia's call, he
responds in Latin: "Magni dominator poli, I Tam lentus midis see/era, tam lentus
vides?" (4.1.81-2). Titus echoes Demetrius, who announces Lavinia's certain rape
in act one: "Sit fas aut nefas till I find the stream / To cool this heat, a charm to
calm these fits, I Per Stygia per manes vehor" (1.1.634-6). Seneca's Hippolytus
becomes the intertext that lurns the two antagonists into co-conspirators. 71
By echoing Demetrius through Seneca, Titus indicates his failure to recognize
the cultural criticism implicit in Lavinia's language of trauma-a criticism that
might imagine a way out of What Denise Albanese calls, "the canonical
reconstruction of history, which demands a seamless interpellation, an identity
between past and present." 72 Instead, Titus reads Lavinia as part of a seamless
story that, in its attempt to make sense of the traumatic scene, occludes a greater
concern. At the expense of historical difference and as a product of historical
transmission that promises seamless cultural meaning, the political structure and
social hierarchy of the play guarantee their legitimacy through the (re)production
of this continuity with classical Rome. Echoing Demetrius, Titus reads
traditionally, ignoring the alternative narratives-what assumpsit logic terms
collateral matter-made available in Lavinia's act of ventriloquism of the very
masculine, humanist language of the Latin precedent text that inspired her
violation.
Lavinia's act of writing indeed appears a hopeful moment that promises to
restore justice in an otherwise bleak play. Associating her act of writing to one of
the many emblems of gruesome violence, Katherine Rowe has suggested that her
inscription must be read in relation to her taking up Titus's severed hand: "She
assumes the iconography of agency to herself." 73 Yet, as the carnage of the play's
final act suggests, expressions of agency, no matter how limited, may come with
extreme and unanticipated costs that, in fact, render them sites of loss-the
evacuation of intention or control. And the cost of this ambivalence is registered in
the many violated promises that structure Titus.
In Lacanian terms, Lavinia's Latin inscription is the thought that is heard in the
74
abyss, the temporal space separating word and deed in the play. But in Titus's
hegemonic reading, the Latin inscription becomes a "lively warrant" or promise
that sutures the present to the authority of tradition and cultural memory. In this
moment, Titus speaks most forcefully for Lavnia and in the process disavows the
memory of history that her martyred, distorted, and haunting figure embodies.
With this promise comes the violence of the banquet scene where Lavinia and
Titus both die their bloody deaths. Like the other promises in the play, Titus's nude
contract of allegiance to the past, which symbolically brings into existence an
Elizabethan culture defined by the royal power in the court, possesses the seeds of
its own violent, unintended destruction.
Reading Martyred History in Titus Andronicus 45
I want to conclude this extended foray into the exaggerated violence in Titus
Andronicus with an observation about a curiously 11011-violentscene in the middle
of the play. The placid departure of the Clown in act four, after his execution has
been ordered, and the play's un-violent stage direction, "Exit funder guard},"
(4.4.s.d) are anomalies in a play rife with unapologetic descriptions of brutality.
We need only recall the stage directions describing Lavinia's first appearance after
her rape to recognize the understated account of the Clown's fate. The
parenthetical elaboration, "funder guard]," in the editorial apparatus describing the
Clown's departure, however, begins lo make sense as the bind of the promise
unravels itself to reveal its bloody and, at times, grotesque possibilities. The chains
that bind the condemned Clown are the same binds that Publius calls for in order to
control Chiron and Demetrius, as he brings them to justice for Lavinia's rape, and
certainly by act five, the playful language of the drama challenges the literal
function in Publius's order: "Stop close their mouths; let them not speak a word./
ls he sure bound? Look that you bind them fast" (5.2.164-5). Titus's response
indicates that he understands the power of the bind: "Come, come, Lavinia: look,
thy foes are bound. / Sirs, stop their mouths; let them not speak to me, / But let
them hear what fearful words I utter" (5.2.166-8). Although he seems to
understand the value of silence in a culture where speech acts can result in
unimaginable violence, Titus still vows to "grind ... bones to dust" (5.2.186).
Titus's right to make promises is not without effects that exceed the terms of
the speech act, just as his desire to pattern his culture afler the "precedent, and
lively warrant" of past narratives is not without unpredictable effects.
Shakespeare's criticism of the precedent narratives foundalional to the Elizabethan
culture shows us that the same instance of cultural obligation that resides in this
moment of promising can also result in a material violence that constitutes history.
In the stage direction after her rape in act two, "Emer . . LA VIN/A, her hands cut
off, and her tongue cut out, and ravished' (2.2.s.d), Shakespeare presents his
audience with an image of the promise, as the debt of cultural transmission is made
flesh in Lavinia's tortured body; and it is Lavinia's bloody, disfigured mouth with
Titus's severed hand in tow that serves as a reminder of the fragility of the cultural
fantasy that our own sovereign criticism, written in sand and subject to the assault
of others, has the effect that we so earnestly desire.
To Talk of Hands: The Cost of Bearing False Witness
Lavinia's martyred body returns us to Foxe's violent imagery. The battle over the
meaning of signs, tokens, figures and seals was at the center of the Reformation
controversy during the middle of the sixteenth century, and Foxc's Actes &
Monuments repeatedly stages what was at stake in this battle over representation-
the lives of ''everyday" believers transformed into martyrs in Foxe's memorial.
The naITatives of persecution and torture equate the unreformed desire for
46 Pet.forming Earl}' Modern Trauma Reading Martyred Hi.\·tory in Titus Andronicus 47

efficacious ritual with brutalized bodies in a way reminiscent of Shakespeare's
integration of sovereign promises and grotesque bodies in Titus, One religious, the
other secular-both texts register an anxiety about the interval between word and
deed that simultaneously enables meaning and makes possible unpredictable
effects. With distorted vision in a direclion orthogonal to desire, Titus bears false
witness to what his martyred daughter signifies.
Reading the relationship between the two works through a traumatological lens
as this chapter has done enables us to draw a link between generations that is
effaced by the play's commitment to a classical past. This lens enables us to read
the obsession with severed hands in Titus Andronicus as an echo of Archbishop
Cranmer's scene of perjury and torture in Foxe. Cranmer's Recantation confesses
his betrayal of the Catholic faith:
I, Thomas Cranmer ... do renounce, abhor, and detest all manner of heresies and errors
of Luther .. I believe and worship in the sacrament of the altar the very body and blood
of Ch1·ist,being contained most truly under the forms of bread and wine.
(4:82)
Cranmer's pledge was "imprinted. and set abroad in all men's hands" (4:82). Foxe
returns to Cranmer's act of writing later in the narrative-as the Archbishop's
imprint, his signature ("solemn subscription" l4:82]) that enacts his new oath of
allegiance to the Catholic church, is embodied in tl1e flesh of his actual hand. The
dramatic scene of Cranmer's disavowal of his recantation establishes the hand as
an agent, capable of making "offensive" (4:88) vows (and disavowals). Foxe
records Cranmer's exact words:
awry. Cranmer places his own hand in the flames that eventually consume him:
''he put his right hand into the flame .. that all men might see his hand burned
before his body was touched ... his eyes were lifted up into heaven, and oftentimes
he repeated 'his unworthy right hand"' (4:90). The illustration of the episode
captures the moment when Cranmer puts his hand in the flames (fig. 2).
Cranmer's hand is detached from his body by flames that wrap around his
forearm. One effect of the dismembered hand in the illustration is to suggest its
independent relationship with the rest of Cranmer's body. The hand-Cranmer's
"solemn signature" or "imprint"-is embodied in scandalized flesh (the "unworthy
right hand"). The iconographic image of presence ("solemn signature" or seal) so
critical to Catholic doctrine is exposed in this moment as especially ineffectual.
Shakespeare's play repeats Foxe's obsession with hands in Cranmer's narrative.
Titus's hand, too, is considered unworthy. His severed hand offered as a pledge to
secure the safe return of his sons is "in scorn to thee sent back" (3.1.237). In both
cases, the unworthy hand fails to ensure the execution of an efficacious promise.
Titus's infamous pun about hands suggests regret over the loss of control of his
vows: "O handle not the theme, to talk of hands,/ Lest we remember still that we
have none" (3.2.29-30). To Titus, memory of his dismembered hand serves as a
reminder of an ineffectual contract-a loss that he needs to forget in order to
maintain the fantasy of the authority of precedent narratives that link him to Rome.
To Cranmer, the dismembered hand is a necessary casualty, and the act of burning
it indicates an awareness that his (Titus's and the critic's own) unworthy hand-
the "solemn signature" or "imprint" that secures the commitment to history-at
times, performs a mediation that mutilates in its transmission of the past.

· And now I come to the great thing, which so much troubleth my conscience, more than
any thing that ever I did or said my whole life, and that is the settling abroad ofa writing
contrury to the truth; which now here I renounce and refuse, as lhings writlen with my
hand. contrary lo the truth which I thought in my heart, and written for fear of death,
and to save my life if it might be; and that is, all such bills and papers which I have
written or signed with my hand since my degradation; wherein I have wrilten many
things untrue. And forasmuch as my hand offended, writing contrary to my heart, my
hand shall first be punished there-for; for, may I come to the fire, it shall be first
burned.'
(4:88, emphasis mine)

Cranmer's language connects his oath to the Catholic faith with the flesh of his
hand that "subscribeth the articles" (4:83). Insisting that his hand offends and not
his heart, Cranmer seems to distinguish one type of promise from another, and by
invalidating his sovereign promise to the Catholic church, he rejects the vow (his
Recantation) that appeared complete at the moment of its execution. Indeed, the
separation between hand and heart suggests the interval between word and deed
that comes to characterize promises that have the potential to go unpredictably
 Reading Martyred History in Titus Andronicus 49

Notes

Herc, and throughout the chapter, citations from the play refer to the version in Jonathan
Bate, ed., Tit11sAndmnicus (New York, 1995).
2 The Quarto version and Folio version of Titw, Andronicus indicate no stage direction at
this moment. Ten subsequent editions of the play, including major editorial projects
from Ravenscroft (l 687), Rowe ( 1709), Cape!\ (I 768), Malone-Boswell ( 1821) and
Clark-Glover-Wright (1865) reproduce the scene without any editorial emendation
except a series of notes beginning with Capell's edition in 1768 to explain textual
variants and other past editorial glosses.
I refer here to the well-documented history of the play' s critical reception, which reflects
attempts of scholars to deny that Shakespeare wrote any of the violent play or that his
contribution was merely to make improvements on an otherwise urnmphisticated script.
For T.S. Eliot's dismissal, see "Seneca in Elizabethan Translation," in Selected Essays
/917-1932 (New York, 1932), pp. 65-105. For important criticism that first examined
the effect of language in the play, see Albert Tricomi, "The Aesthetics of Mutilation in
'Titus Andronicus,"' Shakespeare Survey 27 ( 1974), p. 11; Gillian Murray Kendall,
'"Lend me thy hand': Metaphor and Mayhem in Titus Andronicus," Shake.!:.peare
Quarterly 40 (1989), pp. 299-3!6; Mary Fawcett, "Arrns/Wordsffears: Language and
the Body in Titus Andronirns," English Literary HisT01}· 50 ( 1983), pp. 262-77.
4 It is important to our discussion of surviving history that l elaborate on Horowitz's use
of Freud. Horowitz takes seriously Freud's "mordant pleasure" (p. 97) in encountering
the relics of the best models from past analyses. Horowitz points out that Freud
compares himself to an archaeologist who conscientiously notes where authentic history
ends and his own construction begins. The archaeologist "disinter[s] the survivors of a
vanished antiquity that have been twice mutilated by the mere process of surviving-
first by being buried so that they may outlast the death of the culture that was their
proper home, and then by being excavated so that they may re-enter the light of the
wrong day" (p. 97). Like Titus's sense of triumphalism expressed in his devout
allegiance to Roman history, the psychoanalyst, the historian, and the literary critic
transmit "the revenge of the dejected against triumphal culture" (p. 98).
Anthony Kemp, The Estrangement of the Past: A Study in the Origins of Modern
Historical Consciousness (New York, 1992), p. 104.
6 Sec Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors
(New York, 1993), p. 993. Haigh's thesis is that there was no single Reformation, as
Kemp's description suggests. Instead of the single, continuous progression from
traditional Catholic belief and practice to a true Protestant form of faith, he argues that
there were at least three reformations, several relapses, and confusion and conflict
throughout. Collinson explores similar revisionist ground in The Birthpangs of
Prote~·tant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries (New York, 1988). He contends that the Reformation arrived fully in England
by the 1570s, only after the ascension of Elizabeth I. He interprets the era as one of pain
and change that was not in itself developed Protestantism. For a collection of essays that
explores similar terrain by looking at the effect of the Reformation in local
communities, see Patrick Collinson and John Craig, The Reformation i,~_Eng!i~·hTowns,
52 Perfonning Early Modern Trauma Reading Martyred History in Tilus Andronicus 53

contemporary critical accounts of important discourses in the early modern period, sec 42 See Shoshana Felman, The Literar_.,:Speech Act: Don Juan with J.L Austin,
p. 570. Seduction in Two Languages, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, 1983). Felman discusses
25 Cited in Green, p. 510. the untenable nature of the promise and the consl:itutive split that makes contractual
26 Green, p. 510. language inherently unstable (pp. 12, 26).
27 Green, p. 511. 43 Austin links the efficacy of a performativc to "an accepted conventional procedure ... by
28 Green,p.511. certain persons in certain circumstances" (p. 14); See Derrida, "Signature Event
29 Green, p. 514. Context," for a frequently cited critique and extension of Austin's argument that
30 Green, p. 5 I 3. precludes "parasitic forms" of utterances such as those that occur on a stage. Derrida's
31 See also B. A. Gerrish, Grace and Gratitude: The Eucharist in John Calvin's Theology theory challenges Austin's understanding of convention and demonstrates the instability
(Minneapolis, 1993), pp. 105-08, 137-40, 162-7. of the procedure and context of a speech act. He argues that "the category of intention"
32 Cited in Green, p. 5 I 3. generated by convention does not completely govern "the entire scene and system of
33 Green, p. 514. Calvin's ex.pressed views on the sacrament of baptism provide clear utterance" ("Signature Event," p. 18). Especially relevant to the argument about the
evidence of the obsignatory and promissory nature of the ritual. Baptism was more than instability of contractual language in Titus, Derrida claims that the intended effects of
a simple token or sign for Calvin. It effectually performed what it symbolized, as a speech acts do not "exclude what is generally opposed to them .... on the contrary. they
divine gift incorporating an infant into the church. Yet, Calvin also stressed the future presuppose it, in an asymmetrical way, as the general space of their possibility"
benefits of the promissory gesture: "children are baptized for future repentance and ("Signature Event," p. 19).
faith" (4.16.20). The certainty of this future, of course, was an open question, given 44 The argument that the play entangles promissory language with violence is different
Calvin's belief in the Elect. He defended the practice of baptizing all infants even from the suggestion that violence appears in the play as a product of oaths and vows.
though events in their life may make the baptized participant unworthy of the promise My contention throughout the chapter is that performatives such as promises, vows and
implied by the ritual. Failure appears a possible, unpredictable condition of the oaths have within them the possibility of violence. Although it appears to cast the
sacrament. violence as a product of promises. the revenge motif that structures Titu.1·Andronirns,
34 Edward Boughen, A Short Erposition of the Catechism r4 the Church (London, 1668), this chapter suggests, is the playwright's attempt to represent 1he ambivalent force of the
pp. 75-6; p. 77. performative-at once a guarantee of intention and a deconstruction of this intention at
35 Nicholson, p. 179. the moment of utterance.
36 Green, p. 549. 45 See Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Bod_v,esp. pp. 11-12 for an argument that identifies
37 Kemp's description of Foxe's strategy bears the trace or Luce Irigaray's notion of the constitutive instability in language as it appears in Ovid and, by extension, in the
mimesis. She argues that in order to confront the fantasies of phallocentrism, "one must early modern poetry that his work inspired.
assume the feminine role deliberately" (The lrigaray Reader, ed. Margaret Whitford 46 Enterline, pp. 11-12.
(Cambridge, 1991], p. 8). This form or imitation avoids adopting uncritically the object 47 Quotations of the Metamorphoses follow the text translated and edited by Frank Justus
position dictated hy the male subject. This concept will he important later in this chapter Miller (Cambridge, 1994).
as a way to understand Lavinia's writing in Latin as appropriation in Titu.\". 48 Judith Butler has demonstrated the importance of the inherent volatility in the promise.
38 Marshall, p. 130. The speech act that intcrpellates through promising produces unintended violence as
39 Kemp, p. 130; Cressy, p. 477; Duffy, p. 5. well ''if only to guarantee that no name claims finally to exhaust the meuning of what we
40 For a seminal discussion of the nature ofperformative language, see Austin, How To Do are and what we do, an event that would foreclose the possibility of becoming more and
Things With Wrmh, pp. 12-24, esp. p. 14. For an argument that challenges Austin's different than what we have already become, in short, to foreclose the future of our life
understanding of convention and demonstrates the instability of the procedure and within language, a future in which the signifier remains a site of contest .... " [Excitable
context of a speech act, see Jacques Derrida, "Signature Event Context" in Limited Inc Speech: A Politics of the Petformative (New York, 1997)], p. 125.
{Evanston, IL, 1997), pp. 1-23. 49 Miller translates the lines as "she hurries on to confound right and wrong, her whole
41 Although the two sources of concern in this chapter-one contemporary legal soul bent on the thought of vengeance" (6.585-6). See also, Bate, Titu.v, pp. l 65-6n. He
developments, the other ancient literary history-may appear incompatible as a cause writes, "Also close to Procne' s confounding right and wrong in the Philomela story." He
for the hmTific entanglement of the promise and violence, I hope to reconcile the does not posit those two terms, however, as operating coterminously within the same
apparent contradiction by suggesting that developments in contract law in the !ate speech act.
sixteenth century enable Shakespeare and his contemporaries to reconsider tbe force of 50 Arthur Golding, Shakespeare's Ovid Being Arthur Golding's Translation uf The
cultural transmission from Rome to England. Developments in contract law, as this Metamorphoses, ed. W.H.D. Rouse (London, 1961 ).
chapter demonstrates. suggest that the nssumcd integrity of powerful oaths and contracts 5 l Butler, Excitable Speech, p. 82.
that characterizes the debt to the Roman past arc already violated in their execution. 52 Heather James, Shakespeare's Troy (Cambridge, 1997), p. 77.
54 Performing Early Modern Trauma
53 See Luke Wilson, Theater.1·of lnte11rio11: Drama and Lal\' in Early Modem England
(Stanford, 2000). p. 78 and especially chapter 2 (pp. 68--113} mid chapter 4 (pp. 165-
85). See also Charles Spinosa, ''The Transformation of Intentionality: Debt and
Contract in The Merchanr of Venice," Enf{li.1·hLiterary Renai,1·sanct'24.3 ( 1994), pp.
370-409. The anxiety that existed during this period is also suggested hy Don Wayne,
who describes the "feigned necessity of a contract mediating the relationship between
independent panic.~ to a literary or theatrical communication which focuses, at the plane
of the aesthetic, what is becoming a fundamental problem in all aspects of social life"
( 115). For an extended discussion of these legal developments and their relationship to
early modern theater, sec Wayne, "Drama and Society in the Age of Jonrnn: An
Alternative View," Renaissance Drama 13 (1982), pp. ]03-129. For a detailed study of
assumpsit and deht-based law, see AW.B. Simpson, A History of the Common LL1wof
Contract: The Rise tf the Action of As.rnmpsit (Oxford, I 975). Simpson puts Slade's
Case in a larger historical context and dates the action of assumpsit as far back as 1348.
54 Wilson, p. 80.
55 Wilson, p. 79.
56 Wilson. p. 79.
57 Wilson, p. 95.
58 I realize the irony in using J.L Austin's language of the "felicitous" promise. In a play
where promissory speech acts regularly result in dismemberment and violent death, a
successful promise is hardly "felicitous" in any ordinary sense of the word.
59 Spinosa, p. 404.
60 Wilson, p. J 13.
6 I Wils.on, p. 113.
62 James, p. 42.
63 James, p. 62.
64 A number of critics have offered cogent analyses of Lavinia's scene of writing. See
Copp6lia Kahn, Roman Shakespeare: Warrior.1·. Wounds, and Women (New York,
1997), pp. 46--76, e1,p. p. 48; Douglas Green, "Interpreting 'her manyr'd signs·: Gender
and Tragedy in Titus Andronicus," Shake.1peore Quarterly 40 (1989), pp. 317-26; Clark
Hulse, "Wresting the Alphabet: Ora!ity and Action in Tints Andronirn.1·." Criticism 21
(1979), pp. 106-!8. These interpretations of Lavinia's inscription have influenced my
own reading of the moment in the play; however, my argument identifies in Lavinia's
"voice" significant force beyond the parameters provided by critical terms such as
"agency" and "intention." Moreover, while the repetition that Hulse recognizes in the
scene of writing is important to my understanding of the traumatic violence done to
L1.vinia, the act of writing-if it is repetition-also captures the force of Lavinia's curse
in Iler final spoken words ("Confusion fall-" [2.2.1831). No critic, to my knowledge,
has read Lavinia's final utterance as a curse. vow or oath that gives her language the
force, even at her most vulnerable moment, to produce violent and unpredictable effects.
65 Sec Butler, Excitable Speech, p. 24, pp. 26-7. Although here I am indebted to Butler's
articulation of the relation between language and agency, her use of the term "radical
autonomy'' is problematic. I do not intend to suggest that "agency" and "radical
autonomy," as Butler understands the concept, are synonymous, nor am I claiming that a
sense of agency can be resuscitated from the play's unpredictable violence. Butler's
sense of "radical autonomy" is a not a subject position available in Titus Andronicu.c
Radical autonomy, although imagined by Butler as state of being in a utopic
Reading Martyred Histo,y in Titus Andronicus 55
environment outside of interpellation, is never a viable form of agency in the play.
Agency in Titu.1·-if such a term is applicable to Lhc play at a!l-is both a product of and
limited by promissory acts of interpellation. Lavinia's fate after her willful acl of writing
testifies both to the presence of Ii mited autonomy and to the profound social and
personal costs concomitam with expressions of "agency.··
66 Butler suggests in Gender Trouh!e that "[d)iscoursc hecomes oppre:-.sivc when it
requires that the speaking subject, in order Lospeak, participate in the very Lernis of that
oppression-that is, take for granted the speaking subject's own impossibility or
unintelligibility." Sec Gender Tro11h!e: FeminiJm and the Suf)l'ersion of Jdentitv (New
York, I 990), p. J 16. Suggesting the power of unintended effects in Titus that this
chapter traces, Butler goes on to say that u compulsory system does operate with "force
and violence" but that "this is nol the only way il operates'' (Gender Trouble, p. 122).
67 I present this point as speculation fully aware that in an argument that deconstructs che
relation between speech act and the subject, it is impossible to predict how a charncter
might have reacted to alternative understanding,.; of Lwinia's writing.
68 See Stephanie Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape Qf lucreria and rheBirth of Humanism
(Bloomington, 1989). My argument is indebted to Jed's account of the dangers of a
humanist tradition with an etiology in a narrative of rape and violence.
69 Sec Enterline, pp. 33-5 for a reading of Arachnc in Ovid that helps us to understand the
effects of Lavinia's writing in ways not dependent on terms such as ''agency" or
"intention." Reading Arachne as a figure who becomes a surrogate for Ovid's narrator,
Enterline suggests that "[tJhrough her tapestry, he may speak about rape through the 'as
if of metaphor: Arachne's art allows the nairntor to speak. momentarily, 'as if a
woman" (p. 35). The representations of rape in her tapestry-that interpellate the female
subject as "fcmina"-suggest, according to Enterline, that "Ovid's text, like many of
Freud's, is more a critique of the systematic violence and subordination embedded in
patriarchal culture than mere repetition or perpetuation of it" (p. 33). This understanding
of Arachnc's art helps us to understand Lavinia's own wiiLing. Her writing narrates rape
as a critique of her own culture that accommodates such violence. and it has the power
to produce unintentional effects (her own death), because, as Entcrline's work makes
clear: "ownership of one's 'own' words and control over their effect are endlc:-.sly
uncertain" (p. 35).
70 See Katherine Rowe, "Dismembering and Forgetting in Titus Andronicus," Shakespeare
Quarterly 45 (1994), p. 303. She describes the severed hands in the play as a reminder
of "the horror of the lost fiction of a continuous history" (p. 303). Her empha::;is on
manual bonds suggests an embodiment of tile legal contracts and linguistic bonds that
this chapter amplifies. See also Rowe, Dead Hand~·: Fictions of Aie11cr, Renai.l'sanceto
Modem (Stanford: 1999), pp. 52-85 for a version of the argument th;t makes the case
for Lavinia's agency in explicit terms: "Tile normative conditions for agency defined by
this legacy are possession of our bodies and the consequent possession of their actions.
Moral and legal responsibility derives from such principles of propriety, and our notions
of subjectivity likewise presume it-or the prospect that a character like Lavinia might
be defined as a powerful agent would not seem so peculiar" (p. 84).
71 Bate, p. 30.
72 Denise Albanese, "Making It New: Humanism, Colonialism, and the Gendered Body in
Early Modern Culture," in Feminist Readings of Early Modem Culture: Emerging
Subjects, eds Valerie Truub, et al. (New York, 1996), p. 21.
56 PetformingEarly ModernTrauma

73 Rowe, "Dismembering and Forgetting,'' p. 301. Spinosa offers another way to

understand the play's fetish of the hand and other body parts. He points out that nude
contracts focus on things and not intentions. The debt-based obligation "put things back
where they belonged" (p. 374). The play's representation of brutalized body parts-
hcads, hands, and a tongue-speaks to the legal emphasis on the things of a contract and
the violence inherent in the fantasy that things are all that are at stake in contractual
language.
74 Jacques L1can, Ecrit: A Selection (New York, 1977), p. 170.