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  • Stealing Shives: Titus Andronicus as Chaucerian Anti-Romance1
  • Kurt Schreyer (bio)

“The warrior-aristocrat feels that he himself determines value, he doesn’t need anyone’s approval…. From this we can immediately understand why the passion of love (our European specialty) absolutely must be of noble origin: as everyone knows, the Provençal poet-knights invented it.”

—Nietzsche2

“There could be no more pungent criticism in a few words of ‘chivalry’ … than Wiglaf ’s exclamation: oft sceall eorl monig anes willan wraec adreogan, ‘by one man’s will many must woe endure.’”

—J. R. R. Tolkien3

A victorious general returns from war and conquest with the militant queen of his enemies as his prisoner only to become embroiled in a dispute between two sons fighting over their father’s vacant throne. No sooner is this political crisis settled than the kingdom is thrown into turmoil when two kinsmen—former enemies later in favor at court—pursue and rape a noblewoman. Shakespeare scholars might be excused for mistaking this account for a synopsis of Shakespeare’s first tragedy, Titus Andronicus, but it is in fact a précis of The Knight’s Tale from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Having defeated Ypolita, the “hardy queene of Scithia” (882), the army of Theseus, the Duke of Athens, overthrows and kills the Theban tyrant Creon yet spares the wounded princes Palamon and Arcite who later pursue Emelye.4 Shakespeare was certainly familiar with this tale, and he often drew on it for dramatic inspiration: he includes characters from The Knight’s Tale in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for instance, and at the very end of his career he adapts it in a collaboration with John Fletcher on The Two Noble Kinsmen. Titus, or as it was originally [End Page 185] titled in the 1594 quarto, The Most Lamentable Romaine Tragedie of Titus Andronicus, is famous for its bloodthirsty Senecan revenge plot, links with Virgil’s Aeneid, and Ovidian themes. Yet in assuming that the play is exclusively an “improvisation upon classical sources” we have too casually grouped it among Shakespeare’s so-called Roman plays when, in fact, it may be more medieval than we have been led to believe.5 This essay will demonstrate the play’s indebtedness to Chaucer. In the first part, I highlight its linguistic and thematic resonances with The Canterbury Tales, particularly from Fragment I, which includes The Knight’s Tale, The Miller’s Tale, and The Reeve’s Tale.6

Having established Chaucer’s influence on Titus, the second part of the essay considers what it would mean if we understood Q1’s titular adjective “Romaine” more broadly to implicate medieval Romance as well as ancient Rome.7 Unsettling the play’s categorization in this way allows us to recontextualize its depiction of rape by bringing the work of Chaucer scholars to bear on Shakespeare’s representation of sexual violation—“the common effort to master the feminine body for circulation among men”—in what Karma Lochrie describes as the “masquerade of masculine desire” known as the courtly love tradition.8 I show that Chiron and Demetrius’s treatment of Lavinia is not the aberrant attitude of vulgar cultural outsiders (as Titus and his family would have it) but the commonplace and indeed representative behavior of aristocratic men who conduct themselves under the code of chivalry. “Chivalry functioned not simply as a martial ethic but as a form of class consciousness,” as Lee Patterson explains, and it “must be understood as the central form of self-definition by means of which the noble class situated itself within medieval society.”9 In this regard there is little to distinguish Romans and Goths in Titus Andronicus. Lucius and Titus may scapegoat Tamora as a woman and Aaron as a Moor, but their final actions reflect their own studied cruelty.

And “studied” is the correct term. In Titus, classical Latin texts are highly dangerous, both as the means of sending a warning to one’s enemies, as Titus does with a verse of Horace in 4.2, and as the actual inspiration for violence. It is, after all, young Lucius’s copy of the Metamorphoses, “culled…from among...

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