“Unlawfully published”: Libels and the Public Sphere in Titus Andronicus

This essay interprets the scraps of writing that proliferate in Titus Andronicus in the context of early modern libels. Shakespeare’s play, I argue, dramatizes the transformation of rhetoric from the classical period to the Renaissance, from a republican to a monarchical setting, as a shift from oral to written media. When the emperor’s tyrannical government silences public speech, rhetoric goes underground: political persuasion depends not on formal speeches but on subversive, handwritten notes scattered about the streets. The play, I argue, offers an origin myth of the early modern public sphere, showing how writing can reconstitute a popular audience for political speech. But this public sphere, like the public sphere of early modern England, is characterized by a tension between what scholars have called the politics of “popularity” and genuinely popular political agency. While libels were strongly associated with public opinion and popular unrest, the Andronici are an elite faction of nobles who appeal to, and even manipulate, the people in order to further their own interests. Still, libeling in Titus Andronicus, as in early modern England, makes an impact by reaching a wide audience; the Andronici conjure a public by calling on the people to judge and even to intervene violently in their political dispute. The socially heterogeneous audience in the theater would thus have seen how elites create a public sphere—and they would have learned how they themselves could participate in, and even appropriate, this discursive space, whether by writing or reading, acting or judging.