Wooden Subjects

The essay offers a reading of botanical imagery in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, associating trees with the play’s presentation of grief and trauma. I situate the play in relation to Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy and its own linkage between trees and violence, and discuss how these plays highlight the dubiousness of tragic pleasure. Shakespeare’s response to the misgivings invoked by enjoying tragedy is moral and also psychological, presenting both a moral progress in speaking for pain (in Titus himself) and a penetrating and poetically precise image of what grief involves and what responding to it might demand.