The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts

4. The Pornographic Economy of Titus Andronicus

t q chapter four he ornographic conomy of Titus Andronicus [P]erhaps we may say in terms recalling the prophecy made by the Three Witches to Banquo: “Not clearly sexual, not in itself sadistic, but yet the stuff from which both will later come.” —Freud, “A Child Is Being Beaten” fter several centuries of critical condescension, Titus Andronicus has been reassessed in the last fifty years, mostly on the evidence of several successful theatrical productions. The two most notable were strikingly different in style—Peter Brook’s in 1955 was highly ritualized, with crimson streamers suggestingblood,andDeborahWarner’sin1987wasintimatelyrealistic—yet both provoked extremely emotional responses from audiences. A theater official reported laconically of the Brook production, “At least three people pass out nightly. Twenty fainted at one performance. Ten swooned on Friday .”1 Warner’s production had a similar casualty rate; I saw four people faint during a Saturday matinee. Theatrical productions are frequently instructive for revealing the formal cohesion of a play or demonstrating its appropriateness to a particular historical or cultural context. But the extreme audience response to Titus tells us something else as well, something about spectacle, about identification, about what viewers can and cannot bear to witness. Certainly, the violence in Titus is horrific, and, as D. J. Palmer observes, “the horrific of its very nature is that from which the mind shrinks, that which repels the senses, feelings and understandings.”2 It is easy to assume, with Palmer, that certain actions are inherently repellant—too easy, in fact, since Titus features most of the acts likely to appear on such a list (cannibalism , dismemberment, sexual violence), yet its early popularity has been well documented as well as recently repeated. So while it is an interesting sociological point that the Elizabethans had, like us, a penchant for gory entertainments , the correspondence of tastes is merely tautological when it comes to explaining the problematic appeal of this play’s violence. Moreover, to subordinate the intensity of theatrical effect to the play’s narrative or thematic lessons may produce a structure of meaning but does so without fully acknowledging the theatrical dynamic.3 To see the play as demonstrating the destructive cycles of revenge, for instance, or offering the recuperative comfort of fantasy, or training its audience in acceptable responses to unimaginable grief—each of these approaches leaves the most basic question unanswered : why would an audience, any audience, enjoy Titus’s reiteration of violence against the human body? “Enjoy” may seem an odd verb to use here, since most viewers today will claim to appreciate the play in spite of its violence or alternatively to reject it because of the effects Palmer calls horrific. Yet enjoyment or pleasure of some form is the goal of any paying theatrical audience, as Shakespeare was well aware. The brilliance of Titus Andronicus lies in the way it allows viewers to be scandalized and morally outraged by events portrayed on stage but also and at the same time to identify with characters who suffer and commit acts of horrific violence. This accomplishment depends upon a shifting dynamic of sympathetic identification, Shakespeare’s exploitation of drama’s capacity to fracture its audience in several ways. Individual viewers respond differently to the unfolding events on stage; individual characters make changing, competing claims on viewers’ sympathies. The effect is to break down established viewer subjectivity, to undermine supposedly firm positions from which to watch and make sense of the play. Diagnosing this situation in the abstract is, however, a far simpler matter than intervening at any particular point to expose the meanings pressuring a response. Because of the play’s unsettling features, locating points of pleasurable interaction is extremely difficult, for Titus Andronicus effectively negates the viewing subject. The disappearing position of the viewer of Titus Andronicus can be traced to two factors, one having to do with codes of bodily integrity and the other an effect of gender. t 107 q The Pornographic Economy of Titus Andronicus In a recent overview of critical explorations of bodies or “the body,” Keir Elam notes how such work often misses its mark. The Lacanian paradigm I have used in preceding chapters helps to explain why: the body as Real remains foreclosed from the symbolic language of academic criticism. For the semiotician Elam, performance offers a way beyond this impasse...