The Sacrificial Crisis in Titus Andronicus

WILLIAM W.E. SL I GHTS The Sacrificial Crisis in Titus Andronicus In the first scene of Titus Androllicus one of Titus's sons - only four of twenty-five remain alive after ten years of Gotho-Roman wars - piously proposes to sacrifice the eldest son of the captured Gothic queen: 'Let's hew his limbs till they be clean consum'd' (1.i.129).1 The Andronicus boys exit with their victim and return shortly with bloody swords, their hewing done. Such acts of violence spread like a blot through Shakespeare 's first tragedy, and their dramatic function has been debated by generations of critics. Was Shakespeare competing for spectators in a bloody entertainment market that featured bear and dog dismemberment as well as public executions? Was he imitating classical models Seneca 's reworkings of Greek cyclical revenge stories or Ovid's tales of sudden transformations precipitated by violent emotional attacks? And if these are all partial explanations, what resonant chord in the nature of civilized human beings is sounded by an art form that dwells so insistently on cruelty, physical pain, and consequent mental anguish? Explanations of emotional response to tragic art are plentiful, sometimes doctrinaire, and often mutually contradictory. Literary critics frequently rely on Aristotle's notion of catharsis, but the term seems at times to require more explanation than it affords. The search for a satisfactory account of the origins of a particular tragedy, its fascination, and its final effects on an audience has seen diSciplines as varied as religion, psychology , and aesthetic philosophy hastening to remedy or, inadvertently, to compound the confusions surrounding tragic literature. An especially rich source of illumination has been the work of cultural anthropologists, some of whose theories have recently made considerable strides beyond the early speculations of Fraser and the Cambridge ritualists. A key figure in this revisionist attempt to clarify connections between social ritual and tragedy is Rene Girard. His recently translated Violence and the Sacred gives a lucid account of the initiation and conclusion of violence that may, I believe, shed new light on Shakespeare's tragedies. Combining Girard's explanation of societies in the throes of sacrificial crisis with more familiar notions of the tragic hero's purposeful movement towards calamity can sharpen our understanding of Shakespeare's achievement as he fuses, even in a tragedy as early as Titus Andronicus, two very different emotional responses to tragic crisis and closure. UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY , VOLUME XLIX, NUMBER I , FALL 197 9 0042~0247179hooo-OO18$o1 . 50/o © UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Titus Andronicus 19 Though this dual sense of an ending is present as well in later tragedies such as Hamlet and King Lear, I have chosen Titus Andronicus as a more streamlined paradigm of a tragedy forged from sacred violence. If we flip the generic coin to its other side for just a moment, we see that much of Shakespearean comedy deals with the execution of justice. Meting out measure for measure, punishing a usurer, or forgiving a wicked brother provide comic reversals, liberation from ritual bondage, and a hopeful communal future. Smooth-running judicial machinery implies a continuing potential for the fair play and the redress of wrongs that appeal to the audience of comedy. Tragedy, however, turns less on justice than on violence; the 'promis'd end' of tragedy is violentdeath. Its beginning too is rooted in violence, actually in a failed attempt to prevent or contain violence in a fictional community whose leaders have been charged with the safety of their people. Once 'impure' violence of a kind unsanctioned by those duly appointed keepers of the peace breaks out, there will begin a circle of revenge that can wipe out whole families or tribes and radically deplete a larger community. To preclude such regressive and self-consuming acts of vengeance, according to Rene Girard, the community requires clearly distinguishable acts of 'pure: sacrificial violence. 'Only by opting for a sanctioned, legitimate form of violence and preventing it from becoming an object of disputes and recriminations ,' Girard writes, 'can the system save itself from a vicious circle of revenge' (p 24).2 But in the sacrificial rite of purification itself something may go wrong...