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The word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal languagebut rather it exists in
other peoples mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other peoples intentions: it
is from there that one must take the word and make it ones own. (Mikhail Bakhtin)
In the light of this quotation about the reiteration of language, discuss the
relationship between writing and the body in two texts you have studied.
Despite many different types of body featuring in Shakespeares works, such as the
male body, the body of the colonial other, the body of the pregnant female and
subsequently the babies and small children that are the consequence of such bodies, I
am choosing to focus on the female body in particular with close reference to William
Shakespeares narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece (1594) and his play Titus
Andronicus (1588-1593) because I feel that the female body dominates these texts in
which the focus is Lucrece and Lavinia. Although one of the only other prominent
female characters in the works, I am choosing not to focus on the body of Tamora,
Queen of the Goths, as I feel that the parallels between the characters of Lucrece and
Lavinia are much more important in terms of the role played by the body in
Shakespeares texts. Relating to Mikhail Bakhtins theory quoted within the title of
this essay, I continue to quote Bakhtin who believed that womens bodies were
assumed to be naturally grotesque and were therefore subjected to constant
surveillancebecause, as Bakhtin says of the grotesque bodyit is unfinished,
outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits1. I aim to engage with predominantly
feminist criticism when dealing with the ways that female bodies are represented in
these texts. Both may be read within the Revenge Tragedy genre, which to some
extent explains both texts preoccupation with the human body.

Phyllis Rackin, Misogyny is Everywhere in A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, ed. by Dympna

Callaghan, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Inc., 2000), p.43.

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In both Titus and Lucrece there is a fetishisation of bodily emissions2,

especially when Shakespeare deals with the representation of eyes in his works. In
classical medicine, sight was the most valued of the senses and this is made explicit
within Shakespeares works where the importance of voyeurism becomes clear,
especially when the female body is the subject of the male gaze. As Aaron states in
Titus, the palace (is) fullof eyes3 and spectatorship of the body plays a vital role in
Lucrece where Tarquins pursuit of Lucreces body is spurred on by the visual impact
that she seems to have on him, when Beauty itself doth of itself persuade/The eyes of
men without an orator4. It is only when the spectatorship of everyone else around
Tarquin ceases, (When heavy sleep had closed up mortal eyes5), that he is able to
proceed with the ravaging of Lucreces body.
Titus is especially interesting in terms of the body and the relationship it has
with voyeurism because, unlike Lucrece, it takes the form of a dramatic text.
Although Titus depicts the females of the play being objectified under the gaze of the
male characters around them, it is interesting that when acted out on stage during
Shakespeares lifetime, women were prohibited from being actresses and
consequently all female roles were acted out by men. It was not therefore possible for
the female objectification that is depicted within Titus to be carried out on stage. As
Rackin states, the heroines of these plays were sexually enticing transvestised boys,
and the plays encourage the audience to view them as such6 and the theory that

Francis Barker, A Wilderness of Tigers: Titus Andronicus, anthropology and the occlusion of
violence in The Culture of Violence: Essays on Tragedy and History, (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1993), p.144.
3
William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, in The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd edn, ed. by Julia Reidhead,
(London: Oxford University Press, 2008), ii.1.128.
4
Lucrece, 29-30.
5
Ibid, 163.
6
Rackin, p.213.

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women were to be admired of lewd unhallowed eyes7 was to be denied to an

audience during Shakespeares lifetime. Juliet Dusinberre contends this point
however, arguing: Why should the fact of the male body make it impossible to
conceive of a woman on the stage, any more than the fact of the commoners body
might make it impossible to conceive of Richard IIs body? Both are figments of the
actors art8.
The spectatorship that is such a crucial element in the objectification of
women within these two texts is played out on both a private and public level. David
Hillman ascertains that one cannot separate the emergence of new kinds of private
spaces- closets, privies, studies and other sanctuaries for the sequestration of the
self9 and indeed, in Tarquins pursuit of Lucrece, he has to enter her closed bedroom
or chamber in order to gain access to her body: Which with a yielding latch, and
with no more/ Hath barred him from the blessd thing he sought10. Lucreces body is
inextricably linked with her chamber and as Mark Breitenberg states: The parallel
often drawn between Collatines publication of Lucreces chastity and Tarquins
penetration of her chamber and subsequent rape is generated in part by this masculine
need to know, to make public what cannot remain private11. A contradictory view
from Ziegler is that Lucrece is not so much a private chamber to be entered as a
public orifice to be stormed12, which, although I will argue that both Lucrece and
Lavinias bodies are only transformed into the public realm after their rapes, would
seemingly confirm the idea that the period around the turn of the seventeenth-century
7

Lucrece, 392.
Juliet Dusinberre, Women and Boys Playing Shakespeare in A Feminist Companion to
Shakespeare, ed. by Dympna Callaghan, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Inc., 2000), p.251.
9
David Hillman, Shakespeares Entrails, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Publishers, 2007), p.10.
10
Lucrece, 339.
11
Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England, (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), p.116.
12
Georgianna Ziegler, 'My Lady's Chamber: Female Space, Female Chastity in Shakespeare', Textual
Practice 4, (Spring 1990), p.80.
8

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was marked by a heightened stress on the bodys margins and orificesas potential
sites of infiltration13. In either case, it is clear that within Titus and Lucrece, the
corporeal seems to be inextricably linked to both private and public spaces in society
in which the role of the body differs respectively.
When Lavinia is raped and mutilated in Titus and similarly when the rape of
Lucretia occurs in Lucrece, the reader or audience witnesses a move from the private
domain of agonisingly intimate interactions to a more public one where both bodies
become spectacles. Through her suicide, Lucrece is choosing public transformation
of unchastity through death, over the private shame of bodily pollution14. Her body is
paraded around Rome by her family and consequently Lucrece is transformed from a
silent object of male gaze to an iconographic model of feminine subjectivity, the latter
idealized in her death and the use of her lifeless body as a symbol of Roman unity
against the Tarquins15. In Lucrece, Shakespeare seems to create a connection
between the body innocence, and as Hillman points out: The idea of an inherent
connection between truth and entrails is closely related to the practice of haruspicy16.
The character of Lucrece feels that the only way she is able to prove her innocence,
and in turn Tarquins guilt, is to publicly shed her blood for public spectacle.
Katharine Eisaman Maus states in line with this argument that the outrage seems real
to her only insofar as it may be seen- thus she arranges to advertise it, assuming that
the display of her bleeding body will constitute an immediately convincing proof of
her violated innocence17. In her essay Blood in Language, Barbara Antonucci sites
13

Hillman, p.9.
Margo Hendricks, A word, sweet Lucrece: Confession, Feminism and The Rape of Lucrece in A
Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, ed. by Dympna Callaghan, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Inc.,
2000), p.103.
15
Ibid, p.104.
16
Hillman, p.12.
17
Katharine Eisaman Maus, Taking Tropes Seriously: Language and Violence in Shakespeares Rape
of Lucrece, in Shakespeare Quarterly 37, no.1, (Spring 1986), p.72.
14

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Galenic medical theories as vital influences in Shakespeares works. A Galenic

medical justification for Lucreces suicide could be interpreted as a remedial
bloodletting that was supposed to rid the body of disease. If we examine the passage
in Shakespeares poem where Lucrece plunges a knife into her chest, we realise that
Shakespeare does indeed place heavy importance on the role of blood: And bubbling
from her breast it doth divideSome of her blood still pure and red remained/And
some looked black, and that false Tarquin-stained18. This seems to be the ultimate
proof of this womans innocence in which Tarquin could be read as a pathogenic
body that infests and contaminates the pure body of Lucrece. Unlike the bloodletting
of the victim, Lucrece, in Shakespeares poem, in Titus it is the perpetrators of the
crime against Lavinia that undergo this process. Titus Andronicus instructs his
daughter Lavinia: Come. Receive the blood19. In this episode, compared with the
death of Lucrece, there is a very strong element of religious ritualistic practice as
opposed to a scientific process, mirroring events that unfold in the first act of the play
where Tamoras eldest son, Alarbus, is sacrificed as a prisoner of war.
The Elizabethan fear of female rebellion is demonstrated in both texts through
the literal silencing of both heroines. Female speech seemed to be connected to
sexual transgression and the period was fraught with anxiety about rebellious women
and particularly their rebellion through language20. After raping Lavinia, Chiron and
Demetrius cut out her tongue to prevent her telling anyone who it was that abused and
mutilated her. Lucrece is smothered with her own bedclothes during her rape: Till
with her own white fleece her voice controlled/Entombs her outcry in her lips sweet

18

Lucrece, 1738-1743.
Titus v.3.195-96.
20
Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama, (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1991), p.40.
19

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fold21. Both of these acts seem to embody the Elizabethan desire to repress the
female voice and agree with the notion that an obsessive energy was invested in
exerting control over the unruly woman-the woman who was exercising either her
sexuality or her tongue under her own control rather than under the rule of a man22.
In both cases, before theyre respective violations, Lucrece and Lavinia are
characterised as pure and chaste- the very qualities that attract both sets of
perpetrators to them in the first place. If silence, the closed mouth, is made a sign of
chastity23, then through the silencing of their victims after the sexual abuse, the men
in Shakespeares text seem to try and restore, (though unsuccessfully), what it is that
they know they have destroyed forever. Some critics argue, however, that both texts
exemplify societal progress through tragedy due to the fact that after the rapes have
occurred in the two texts, the male families of the victims are very passionate about
finding the perpetrators and seeking revenge for what they had done to their female
loved ones. This could be seen to mirror advances in the law system in Elizabethan
England where laws about rape now relied solely on the accounts of the female
victims. In this line of argument, both Lucrece and Lavinia are the literal embodiment
of Elizabethan fears about female rebellion through speech as they shame the culprits
and adopt the very male desire for revenge, (as does the female character of Tamora
in Titus), revolutionizing female agency within the two texts.
In both Titus and Lucrece, the public spectacles of the dead bodies of the
women activate political change within Rome where old, corrupt rulers are expelled
and new, rightful leaders are elected. As Hendricks argues: What emerges in the
aftermath of Lucreces suicide is the embodiment of the Roman republic and unified
21

Lucrece, 678-679.
Peggy Thompson, Coyness and Crime in Restoration Comedy: Womens Desire, Deception and
Agency, (Plymouth: Bucknell University Press, 2012), p.95.
23
Rackin, p.43.
22

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ethos, and ultimately the Roman empire24. In Titus, Saturninus is killed by Titus
Andronicus and overthrown as the Emperor of Rome by his son Lucius with the
support of both the Roman people and the tribe of the Goths. Essentially what we
witness in the two texts is the emergence of a new type of government, and therefore
a connection between the corporeal and the political. The metaphor of the body
politic is one that Shakespeare evokes throughout many of his works, the definition of
this phrase being: the people of a nation, state, or society considered collectively as
an organized group of citizens25. In literature, and more specifically within the
works of Shakespeare, this idea is used in a metaphor of a literal, physical human
body with the text. This body is seen to represent a state as a whole, encompassing all
of the people that reside within it. Such a metaphor is seen frequently in
Shakespeares history plays, for example in The First Part of Henry VI where the
population is characterised as the bowels of commonwealth and where the bodies of
kings signify those who they reign over but it is also utilised in both Titus and
Lucrece. The deaths of the bad and abnormal characters that feature within the two
texts are like a body being purged of an illness. Even more importantly, the deaths of
Lucrece and Lavinia act as a sort of disinfecting process of Romes political body.
When considering the body politic within Titus, it could be argued that the lopping
off of limbs, in this reading of the play, becomes a powerful metaphor for the
dismembering of the state, the destruction of our moral codes and the disintegration of
our very humanity26. By the end of the play however, we witness Lucius
Andronicuss restorative position as Roman Emperor, promising to be the better head
24

Hendricks, p.115.
the Oxford English Dictionary
26
Gale Edwards, View from the director's chair...Gale Edwards on Titus, Digital Shakespeare:
Shakespeare Theatre Company, (2007),
<http://shakespearetheatrecompany.blogspot.co.uk/2007/03/view-from-directors-chairgaleedwards.html> [accessed 23 November 2013].
25

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(that) her (Romes) glorious body fits27, overseeing the rebuilding of headless
Rome28 and hoping to knit againthese broken limbsinto one body29. Limbs as
a trope in Titus are important, and reverting back to Barkers statement about the
fetishisation of body parts, I here allude to the fascination of the text with human
hands in particular. Of course, Lavinia has both of her hands severed in the second
act of the play, after which Demetrius mocks her disability, stating that If thou hadst
hands to help thee knit the cord30, Lavinias best decision would be to hang herself.
Unlike Lucrece, who is able to end her own life in an act of female agency, Lavinias
agency is taken away from her by the two sons of Tamora. It could be argued
however that although the act of stabbing herself can be read as an expression of her
free will as a female, Lucrece actually inflicts upon herself a second penetration when
she stabs her chest, (a part of her body that Tarquin has previously viewed in a sexual
context), with a shaft- a phallic object. Titus himself cuts off his own hand with the
help of Aaron in act three with the exclamation that they have fought for Rome, and
all in vain31. Katherine Rowe categorises this preoccupation with the image of hands
as an extension of the body politic metaphor where hands, whether severed or still
intact, signify relationships between the individual and the state: The severed hands
of Titus Andronicus display the sufficencies and insufficencies of the metaphor of the
political body as a means of constituting political community32. The use of the word
hands to denote masses of humans in the workplace is particularly interesting in this
context.

27

Titus, i.1.187.
Ibid, i.1.186.
29
Ibid, v.3.70-72.
30
Ibid, ii.4.10.
31
Ibid, iii.1.72.
32
Katherine Rowe, Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern, (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1999), p.53.
28

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Indeed, extravagant violence to the human body is one of the main features of
Shakespeares Titus and due to the depiction of the disintegration of our very
humanity as phrased by, the play is considered arguably the worst of Shakespeares
works by modern critics, too violent for serious academic consideration. During
Shakespeares lifetime however, Titus was one of his most successful plays: Far from
a setback to Shakespeares career, Elizabethan audiences were bloodthirsty(they)
took pleasure in bear baiting, and were accustomed to public executions and heads
rolling at the Tower of London33. It seems to be a general consensus among
twentieth and twenty-first-century critics that the explicit violence featured within
Titus is actually to distract a contemporary audience from the extreme violence that
took place in their every day lives. Barker argues that the play does make
violencethe centre of its, and our attention, but the graphic violence of the drama
serves to direct attention away from, rather than towards, the elimination of huge
numbers of the population. For the barbarisms so spectacularly performed by the play
are nothing like the common violence of the times34. It is reported that during the
two-year span in which Shakespeare wrote both Titus and Lucrece, theatres were
closed down due to an outbreak of the plague that had survivors relishing mayhem
and murder on the stageShakespeare gave them what they wanted35. This does not
mean, however, that Shakespeare himself revelled in the violence of his age. The
literary critic Bate states that while giving the Elizabethan audience what they
wanted in the play in terms of graphic violence, Shakespeare also at the same time
watched as the audiences were gaping ever wider to swallow more as he tossed them

33

Alan A. Stone, Shakespeares Tarantino Play: Julie Taymor Resurrects the Despised Titus
Andronicus, Boston Review: A Political and Literary Forum, (2000), <http://archive.is/zYKik>
[accessed 23 November 2013].
34
Barker, p.190.
35
Stone.

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10

bigger and bigger gobblets of sob-stuff and raw beef stake36. I find this quotation
particularly interesting when considering the human cannibalism that features within
Titus against Barkers theory that it is Titus Andronicus himself who is in fact much
more cannibalistic than Tamora because Titus is aware that he is feeding another
human being human flesh, while Tamora eats the flesh of her sons unknowingly37. In
light of this assertion, the audiences that hungered after such portrayals of graphic
violence and cannibalism could also be seen to contain elements of the cannibalistic
when revelling in watching others eating human flesh when the eater themselves has
no idea of their cannibalism.
Unperformed during the Victorian period due to its extreme violence, I have
already mentioned that Titus is Shakespeares most hated play from the point of view
of modern-day critics. When reviewing Julie Taymors 1999 film Titus, however,
Alan Stone insisted that the director had rescued Shakespeares only despised play
from its academic graveyard, breathed new life into a corpse that had been dead for
centuries38. I found this idea particularly interesting in terms of the connection
between writing and the body in Shakespeares works as, taken literally, we could
read Shakespeares play as a sort of body in itself- one that enjoyed a full existence at
the time of its publication but suffered heavy criticism in the centuries that proceeded
which likened the work to a corpse, only to be resurrected through its translation into
the world of cinema. Although the same cannot necessarily be said of Shakespeares
Lucrece, if we take the theory of text as body to be true then we can see that there is
indeed a sort of process of resurrection that runs through the narrative poem through
the retelling of classical literature- both Ovids Fasti and Livys history of Rome are
36

Jonathan Bate, Lucius, the Severely Flawed Redeemer of Titus Andronicus: A Reply,
Connotations 6.3 (Autumn 1997), p.23.
37
Barker, p.193.
38
Stone.

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11

cited as canonical influences to Shakespeares text. In a similar way, Titus very

frequently references classical literature including ancient Greek mythology, citing
such sources as Plutarch and Senecas play Thyestes. Indeed, Ovid is also cited as it is
in Lucrece, for example when Aaron states that his (Bassiniuss) Philomel must lose
her tongue today39 when speaking of the mutilation that is to be performed on
Lavinia. In this way, Titus could even be said to be a sort of resurrection of the story
that is told in Lucrece, a continuation of a literary bloodline- the idea of bloodlines
and family heritage being something that both texts are preoccupied with throughout.
After examining the ways in which Shakespeare creates a connection between
writing and the body in his two texts The Rape of Lucrece and Titus Andronicus, I
have found that the female body seems to be the primary vehicle for examining the
common metaphor of the body politic in connection with Bakhtins view that the
female body is naturally grotesque. Through engaging with feminist criticism, I
believe that both the characters of Lucrece and Lavinia embody Elizabethan fears of
rebellious women who are both subject to the male gaze and attempted to be silenced
by the male characters that surround them in the two texts. These characters do,
however, adopt male qualities such as the desire for revenge, which, along with
examples of female agency, contradict the common belief that Shakespeare wrote the
women in his work as weak and feeble characters, to be viewed as inferior to the male
ones. The notion that there is a connection between writing about the feminine body
and progression in their equality in an actual society seems to be exemplified by
Queen Elizabeth Is infamous comment: I know I have the body of a weak and
feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England
too. The anatomy of the human body and a preoccupation with its parts in

39

Titus, ii.3.43.

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Elizabethan England seemed to be paramount in the understanding of the mental
spaces of the human mind through both private and public displays of the female
body. Shakespeare uses the bodies of the women he creates in these two texts to
inscribe upon as both Lucrece and Lavinias skin is characterized as alabaster, on to
which Shakespeare carves his stories of rape and revenge.

12

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13

Bibliography
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Rape of Lucrece and Titus Andronicus in Questioning Bodies in Shakespeares
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Barker, Francis, A Wilderness of Tigers: Titus Andronicus, anthropology and the
occlusion of violence in The Culture of Violence: Essays on Tragedy and History,
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993).
Bate, Jonathan, Lucius, the Severely Flawed Redeemer of Titus Andronicus: A
Reply, Connotations 6.3 (Autumn 1997).
Breitenberg, Mark, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England, (Cambridge:
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Newman, Karen, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama, (Chicago:
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14

Shakespeare, William, Titus Andronicus, in The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd edn, ed. by
Julia Reidhead, (London: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp.408-463.
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<http://archive.is/zYKik> [accessed 23 November 2013].
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Shakespeare', Textual Practice 4, (Spring 1990), pp.73-90.