Abstract
Shakespeare’s plays and poems in their own time reflect a fractious, often violent, and uncertain moment in the shift from feudalism to modernity, a moment that continues to resonate in our own, often violent and precarious moment in late modernity.1 In the early, extremely violent play Titus Andronicus, this convergence is particularly apparent, and it has become even more so in the wake of the attack on the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001. We want to make use of this convergence to exemplify one version of the Presentist criticism discussed in the Foreword by Terence Hawkes and in our Introduction. As we noted, there is no one single kind of Presentism, but rather a multiplicity of possible approaches. In this essay, we offer one example of a specific kind of Presentism, one that acknowledges the importance of scholarly attempts to understand the contexts of the texts that come down to us—while also acknowledging that such historicist efforts nevertheless are always already implicated in the assumptions and values of the “now” within which they are created. The “timelessness” of literature, we have learned, is a façade for our reconstructions of the past at our specific historical moment—and all too often a façade concealing unspoken assumptions from our own time.
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Notes
Richard Halpern, Shakespeare Among the Moderns (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 1–14.
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1999), p. 331.
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1977), pp. 177–8.
Ibid., p. 178.
See Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1981); and Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998, corr. ed.).
Jonathan Bate addresses the tradition of allegorical reading in his Arden Introduction by quoting T. J. B. Spencer in “Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Romans”: “The play does not assume a political situation known to Roman history; it is, rather, a summary of Roman politics. It is not so much that any particular set of political institutions is assumed in Titus, but rather that it includes all the political institutions that Rome ever had,” in William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate (London: Cengage Learning, 1995), pp. 16–17. See also Naomi Conn Liebler, “Getting It All Right: Titus Andronicus and Roman History” Shakespeare Quarterly, 45/3 (1994): 263–78. For a fully developed allegorical reading of the play’s use of Rome, see Heather James, Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics and the Translation ofEmpire (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Julie Taymor’s 1999 film Titus has been the stimulus for several reconsiderations of the play; for an overview of the critical fortunes of the play before and since Taymor’s film, see Jane Kingsley-Smith, “Titus Andronicus: A Violent Change of Fortunes,” Literature Compass, 5.1 (2008): 106–21. Among the many notable critical discussions of the film are Thomas Cartelli, “Taymor’s Titus in Time and Space: Surrogation and Interpolation,” Renaissance Drama, 34 (2005): 163–84; Courtney Lehmann, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Agenda: How Shakespeare and the Renaissance Are Taking the Rage Out of Feminism,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 53.2 (2002): 260–80; Courtney Lehmann, Bryan Reynolds, and Lisa Starks, ‘“For Such a Sight Will Blind a Father’s Eye’: The Spectacle of Suffering in Taymor’s Titus,” in Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future, ed. Bryan Reynolds, Janelle Reinelt, and Jonathan Gil Harris (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 215–243; and Carol Chillington Rutter, “Looking Like a Child — Or — ‘Titus’: The Comedy,” Shakespeare Survey 56 (2003): 1–26.
There is of course another range of contemporary contexts highly relevant to our understanding of this play, those involving the important issue of violence against women. For reasons of focus we limit ourselves to a different constellation of issues here. For an informative summation and discussion of the relevance of feminist connections of the play to Presentism, see Evelyn Gajowski, “Lavinia as ‘Blank Page’ and the Presence of Feminist Critical Perspectives,” in Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes, Presentist Shakespeares (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 121–40. There are too many feminist assessments of the play to cite them comprehensively here. Of particular note, however, are Sara Eaton, “A Woman of Letters: Lavinia in Titus Andronicus,” in Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender, ed. Shirley Nelson Garner and Madelon Sprengnether (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 54–74; Douglas E. Green, “Interpreting ‘her martyr’d signs’: Gender and Tragedy in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 40 (1989): 317–26; Bernice Harris, “Sexuality as a Signifier for Power Relations: Using Lavinia, of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus,” Criticism, 38 (1996): 383–406; and Cynthia Marshall, ‘“I can interpret all her martyr’d signs’: Titus Andronicus, Feminism, and the Limits of Interpretation,” in Sexuality and Politics in Renaissance Drama, ed. Carole Levin and Karen Robertson (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991), pp. 193–213. These sources are noted, among others, by Deborah Willis in ‘“The Gnawing Vulture: Revenge, Trauma Theory, and Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 53 (Spring 2002): 21–51 (n. 2).
Derrida opens Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (London: Routledge, 1994) with a quotation from Act 1 of Hamlet, and the “time is out of joint” trope is developed throughout.
Jacques Derrida, “This Strange Institution Called Literature, An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in Acts ofLiterature, ed. Derek Attridge and Jacques Derrida (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 33–75; pp. 63–4.
Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” in Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 320. Mark Robson uses this example in his critique of Presentism in “Shakespeare’s Words of the Future: Promising Richard III,” Textual Practice, 19.1 (2005): 13–30. We agree with Robson’s use of Derrida to help conceptualize the radical temporality of readers negotiating centuries-old texts. However, Robson does not develop the possible connection to the case of Presentism, a term that he understands to mean a kind of “pure” anachronism—not only an admission “of the ineradicability of reading one’s own contextual determination,” but a thoroughgoing disavowal of the text’s historical determination (13). But this critique, we believe, is based on a one-sided understanding of Presentism that ignores its “moment” of negotiating with a text’s past; and in its encounter with the text, defining not only the text’s congruence with our present ideologies, but also its resistances to them, its status as art in relation to an ideology that cannot capture it.
Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, 2nd edn. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 278–99; p. 287.
Ewan Fernie has defined this aspect of Presentism succinctly. Presentists, he writes, “mustn’t merely cater to and confirm present values. But any really responsive engagement with Shakespeare’s inimitable and even alien presence in the present will in fact creatively confront, unsettle and transcend routine modes of thinking.” Ewan Fernie, “Action! Henry V,” in Grady and Hawkes, Presentist Shakespeares, pp. 96–120; p. 97. For Fernie, the irreducibility of the literary work’s presence to antiquarian interests is the condition that ultimately distinguishes us as literary critics from mere historians, and so the need to revalue the presence of the text in the present is, as we have been arguing, a matter of disciplinary urgency.
Some historians have suggested that Peacham recalled the episode from memory many years after performance, that he confused his memory of performance with a reading of the subsequent first Quarto edition (1594) or a ballad version of the story, or even that Peacham had another dramatic version of the play in mind. For the latter argument, see June Schlueter, “Rereading the Peacham Drawing,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 50.2 (Summer, 1999): 171–84.
See, for example, J. M. Robertson, who answers earlier nineteenth-century detractors of anachronism, in Did Shakespeare Write Titus Andronicus (London: Watts & Co., 1905), especially pp. 211–12.
George Puttenham, The arte of English poesie Contriued into three bookes: The first of poets and poesie, the second of proportion, the third of ornament (London: Printed by Richard Field, dwelling in the black-Friers, neere Ludgate, 1589), p. 3; from the Huntington Library Copy, Early English Books Online. Online.
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 2003).
Daniel Vitkus explores the viability of reading Orientalism back to early modern Europe in “Early Modern Orientalism: Representations of Islam in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe,” in Western Views of Islam in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. David R. Blanks and Michael Frasetto (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), esp. p. 209. Jonathan Burton has offered a more pluralistic model of transcultural encounter between Europe and North Africa under the rubric of “trafficking,” in Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579–1624 (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2005). More recently, Burton has suggested that “it is an old saw to argue against Edward Said’s contention that Orientalism can be traced back as far as the European Renaissance. A virtual army of critics indicates instead that not only were relations between ‘the East’ and ‘the West’ often characterized by European compromise, deference, and a desire for exchange, nothing resembling discursive coherence in regard to ‘the Orient’ was even possible before the eighteenth century,” “Emplotting the Early Modern Mediterranean,” in Goran Stanivukovic, ed., Remapping the Mediterranean World in Early Modern English Writings (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 21–40; pp. 22–3. In his discussion of this point, Burton cites a number of the sources we cite here below. Several of the essays in the earlier Post-Colonial Shakespeares, ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (London: Routledge, 1998), also anticipate more recent objections in the vein of Burton’s.
Edward W. Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” Cultural Critique, 1 (Autumn 1985), 89–107; 92.
Ibid., 92.
Much recent scholarship has turned to the question of England’s place within and against the Mediterranean, particularly as represented in early modern drama; see, in particular, Jerry Brotton, ‘“This Tunis, sir, was Carthage’: Contesting colonialism in The Tempest,” in Loomba and Orkins, Post-Colonial Shakespeares, pp. 23–42; Richard Wilson, “Voyage to Tunis: New History and the Old World of The Tempest,” ELH, 64: 2 (1997): 333–57; and, most recently, Stanivukovic, Remapping the Mediterranean World in Early Modem English Writings.
Richmond Barbour, Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of “the East”, 1576–1626 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), considers England’s encounters with the East Indies, the establishment of the Charter for the East India Company in 1600, and representations of the East on the English stage.
A small but significant sampling of those who address Titus Andronicus specifically includes Jack D’Amico, The Moor in English Renaissance Drama (Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1991), pp. 135–47; and, earlier, Anthony Gerard Barthelemy, Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987); Emily C. Bartels, “Making More of the Moor: Aaron, Othello and Renaissance Refashionings of Race,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 41:4 (Winter 1990): 433–54; and Ian Smith, “Those ‘Slippery Customers’: Rethinking Race in Titus Andronicus,” JTD, 3 (November 1997): 45–58. Other significant discussions of race in early modern England include Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Arthur L. Little, Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-Imperial Re-visions of Race, Rape, and Sacrifice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); and Ania Loomba, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Francesca T. Royster emphasizes the complexity of racial constructions in Titus Andronicus by focusing on its characterizations of the Goths and Tamora in particular in terms of “hyper-whiteness”; in “White-Limed Walls: Whiteness and Gothic Extremism in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 51. 4 (Winter 2000): 432–55.
Ian Smith, “Barbarian Errors: Performing Race in Early Modern England,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 49.2 (Summer 1998): 168–86, argues that “speech acts” in early modern plays such as Othello are performative markers of racial identity, and, more specifically, that rhetorical “barbarisms” are the linguistic markers of outsiders whose presence represents a transgression of the normal social order. He also provides a critical etymology of the terms “barbarian” and “barbarism.”
George Peele, The Battle of Alcazar, ed. Khalid Bekkaoui (Casablanca: Moroccan Cultural Studies Centre, 2001), p. 43. For discussion of these competing characterizations of the Moor in this play, see Bartels, “The Battle of Alcazar, the Mediterranean, and the Moor,” esp. p. 107. See also her more recent book, Speaking of the Moor.
There are also a number of captivity narratives from the period, the majority occurring from the turn of the seventeenth century. These are chronicled by Matar in “English Accounts of Captivity in North Africa and the Middle East, 1577–1625,” Renaissance Quarterly, 54:2 (Summer 2001): 553–72.
See Grady, Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf Studies in Early Modern Reification (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), pp. 109–30; and more recently Christopher Pye, ‘“To throw out our eyes for brave Othello’: Shakespeare and Aesthetic Ideology,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 60: 4 (Winter 2009), 425–47.
This reference to Muly may come, in fact, directly from Peele himself, whom Brian Vickers recently claimed to be Shakespeare’s co-author in Titus; though this has not been accepted in all quarters. See Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 449–73. In his Introduction to the Arden edition, however, Bate explores the possibility of collaborative authorship, though he finally dismisses it (82).
Among the many notable discussions of violence and orality in the play, the best remains Marion Wynne-Davies’s ‘“The Swallowing Womb’: Consumed and Consuming Women in Titus Andronicus” in The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Valerie Wayne (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 129–51. See also the many exemplary essays in Philip C. Kolin, ed., Titus Andronicus: Critical Essays (New York: Garland, 1995), especially David Wilburn’s “Rape and Revenge in Titus Andronicus,” pp. 171–94; and Dorothea Kehler, ‘“That Ravenous Tiger Tamora’: Titus Andronicus’s Lusty Widow, Wife, and M/other,” pp. 317–32.
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DiPietro, C., Grady, H. (2013). Presentism, Anachronism, and Titus Andronicus . In: DiPietro, C., Grady, H. (eds) Shakespeare and the Urgency of Now. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137017314_2
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