The Affective Appeal of Violence and the Violent Appeal of Affect: Titus Andronicus, Lucy Bailey, and Shakespeare’s Globe

In Lucy Bailey’s production of Titus Andronicus at Shakespeare’s Globe (2006; revived 2014), the graphic violence was so unsettling that it caused several spectators to pass out, according to newspaper reports. The prominent gore placed Lavinia at the affective center of the provocative staging, and critics observing the performance consistently mentioned the power of her appearance. The actor thus became a distillation of the ideas of affect theorists such as Brian Massumi who describe the body’s capacity for affecting and being affected. Through a close reading of the recorded Globe performance informed by affect theory, together with actor interviews and eyewitness accounts from daily newspapers, this essay assesses the affective processes at play in one of the most infamous productions of the last two decades. Exploiting the unique possibilities for entrainment presented by the reconstructed Globe’s audience configuration and the affective power of intense violent stage actions (including repeated violation of skin), Bailey’s Titus is an example of what Eugenie Brinkema describes as the “the visceral, immediate, sensed, embodied, excessive.” What Massumi terms the “affective hit,” however, is not merely done for the sake of sensation. Bailey harnessed the power of affect in her production to stage the violence done to Lavinia in ways that avoided the usual pitfalls associated with staging Lavinia as victim—and with addressing rape in general. Thus, Lucy Bailey’s Titus Andronicus is a useful case study for the application of affect theory to performance studies.

When the actor Flora Spencer-Longhurst made her act one, scene four re-entrance in Lucy Bailey’s 2014 staging of Titus Andronicus, the effect was immediate and palpable. Spencer-Longhurst’s Lavinia bore little resemblance to her former self: she was covered from head to toe in dried, caked-on stage blood; her arms were raggedly bandaged to suggest the violent removal of her hands; and she stood mutely jerking about in a spasmodic series of movements, depicting her character’s experience of trauma after rape and mutilation. Such an image served as stark contrast to the happy, animated young woman from earlier scenes. The ultimate coup de théâtre, however, came when she opened her mouth and globs of red viscous liquid gushed forth, indicating the character’s tonguelessness. It was during this scene that most of the faintings for which this production remains notorious occurred, according to journalists from the daily newspapers, some of whom seemed as overwhelmed as any audience member (Spencer, “Titus Andronicus”). Even though Bailey’s production had first been staged in 2006, both audiences and reviewers flocked to Shakespeare’s Globe in London during the summer of 2014 to marvel at—or recoil from—the novelty of the revival’s bloodshed. One reviewer witnessed “more than a dozen distressed theatregoers” leave the theater, assisted by venue staff (Spencer, “Titus Andronicus”). Another found that during the run “more than 100 people either fainted or left the theatre after being overcome by on-stage gore”; he reported a Globe spokes-woman’s statistic that an average of “two to four people per performance either fainted or left feeling queasy” (Clark). This should not have come as a surprise, as the original 2006 run had been greeted by much the same: the “Grand Guignol staging” (Brantley) caused audience members to drop “like flies at the sheer shock-horror of it all” (Spencer, “Good-Taste Gorefest”). Bailey evidently relished the infamy her production had achieved. Interviewed for the revival, she said, “I find it all rather wonderful. That people can connect so much to the characters and emotion that they have such a visceral effect [. . .]. I used to get disappointed if only three people passed out” (qtd. in Clark).

This quote from the director may strike some readers as puerile, but I propose that Bailey’s Titus Andronicus should be taken very seriously. I intend to analyze this production using affect theory and show that these violent stage effects were used to invite prolonged engagement with and meaningful consideration of Lavinia. From The Trojan Women to Game of Thrones, depictions of rape in popular culture have rightfully been criticized for taking advantage of women’s pain for narrative purposes; certainly, a production of Titus Andronicus has the potential to fall into this trap. Understanding Bailey’s Titus affectively, however, can offer new interpretations grounded in theories of the body’s ability to affect and be affected. Reading the headlines, one could come to the conclusion that the production was sensational, especially when contrasted to how Frank Kermode describes the same scene in his introduction to the play in the Riverside Shakespeare: “An exhibition of horror—rape, murder, severed hands—of the kind usually conveyed by the word ‘Senecan’ is a prime motive of Titus Andronicus. But [. . .] there is a distancing of horror, which is treated with a kind of formality [. . .] to make Lavinia’s suffering ‘an object of contemplation’” (Shakespeare 1067). Such a description is clearly at odds with Bailey’s intentions; a distanced, contemplative mood surely was not the goal of a production that one critic described as “speedily urgent” (Williams). “Speedily urgent” does not mean shallow, however. Affect theory allows us to see Lavinia without merely sensationalizing her. Instead, Bailey’s staging deliberately provoked an affective response in the audience, utilizing the autonomic responses of those spectators’ bodies in multifaceted ways that go beyond any headlines about faintings.

The contemporary use of the term affect as noun has a large, diverse, and often contradictory body of theory associated with it. My limited space here prevents a thorough literature review, but affect has provided many avenues of pursuit for queer theory scholars (e.g. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick), Latinx theorists (e.g. José Esteban Muñoz, also a queer theorist), and a multitude of film critics and theorists (e.g. Eugenie Brinkema); there is far from any single unified approach. One summary of the diversity of approaches distinguishes the “theories that relate affects to inner psychic realities, to structures or affects anchored in our physical bodies, which are installed like hardware,” from the theories that “locate the production of emotions in interactive relationships, in chains of interaction, that take on a life of their own and can also carry individuals away in the sense of a mutual entrainment” (Behnke et. al. 48). Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg describe the sheer magnitude of affect’s power, referring to the “visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing” that can, among other things “leave us overwhelmed by the world’s apparent intractability” (1). Any of these descriptions and definitions are useful in assessing the reactions of audience members attending Titus Andronicus; the key is the human body, and the “intensities that pass body to body” (Seigworth and Gregg 1).

Affect theory has for some time now influenced a variety of scholarly fields, but perhaps theater and performance studies, with its emphasis on embodied behavior and action, holds the greatest potential for fruitful scholarship based in affect. Several articles on the topic have recently appeared in leading journals (Rowen; Wright). This affective turn in theory, however, is not without its critics. Stephen Ahern has been skeptical, finding that “the turn to affect as master category” may be problematic in its privileging of the pre-personal and its resisting “capture in discourse”; for him, recent work on affect offers “aspiration stand[ing] in place of evidence” (289–90). Ahern offers provocative doubts, wondering how useful affect theory is, if its assumptions about the primacy of affect itself might be “at best hopeful, and at worst naïve, perhaps at root no less conservative than progressive” (291). He reminds the reader that many fascist movements in the twentieth century used emotional appeal to great effect and that sentimental attention to the suffering of slaves rarely resulted in political action (290). In a way, Ahern’s concerns about affect can serve as parallel to Titus Andronicus itself. The question of why stage Titus at all, let alone why stage it in such an affectively powerful, sensationalistic manner, is a perennial one. The rape of Lavinia especially has attracted scholarly commentary for decades. With much of this production’s appeal to affect appearing in the form of Lavinia’s violated body, the potential exists for this scene to go horribly wrong, indulging in regressive sensationalist representations of rape that have plagued theatrical storytelling for almost as long as it has existed. This could be the kind of violence that is structured solely to spur on, arouse, or impact men. Alternatively, it could disappear into metaphor or become reduced to trope. Kim Solga asks us to come to terms not only with the violence we have traditionally missed, “but also how we’ve missed—with how we have failed to see the suffering before us, hidden in plain sight” (17), as she cautions against “the elision of the suffering female body [. . .] at which eyes always fail” (25).

This critical conversation leads to my analysis of Bailey’s Titus. To say that the Globe spectators who fainted upon witnessing Lavinia’s appearance were responding in an affective way would seem obvious, but, like many obvious-seeming statements, it bears investigation. Attempting to assess the conditions of theatrical affect retrospectively is, of course, complex. The production has been recorded and archived by the Globe, but does this produce the same affective results as being there in person? Debates over the slippery term “liveness” have raged for years, but as Pascale Aebischer has argued, broadcasts from the National Theatre, Royal Shakespeare Company, and the Globe do have the potential to create “a sense of virtual participation in the theatrical event” (Shakespeare, Spectatorship 196). I was not physically present at the Globe for this Titus; I experienced the production years later, via video of the 2014 revival, which is publicly available through the Globe Player website or via the database Drama Online. I must confess, however, that my attention was first captured by that moment of Lavinia’s re-entrance and the sensationalism that followed. Photographs of Spencer-Longhurst accompanied almost every news story about the production that summer; these images were seared into my brain, rendering me curious. I was delighted to find the recording of the production, yet was left with questions as to how much of the experience I truly shared with those who were there. At a remove of several years and thousands of miles, in addition to the mediated nature of my viewing, the scene did not cause me to pass out or retch, but it still affected me in profound ways. Even typing the first lines of this article created an affective response in me: a frisson of disgust coupled with enjoyment of the sensory aspects of the scene, the video of which I had watched (and re-watched) shortly before. I was left wondering: what does the large amount of emphasis placed on Spencer-Longhurst’s/Lavinia’s body mean? The newspaper reviewers tell one story, but behind the headlines focused on the faintings, there is a deeper meaning to this Titus: within the audience-pleasing violence, I argue that a complicated phenomenon emerges. Bailey’s production, far from being mere titillation, utilized a deliberately constructed appeal to affect in order to stage Lavinia’s pain in a nuanced way that refused to be yet another indulgent staging of violence and rape in another unthinking Shakespeare revival. This production may well have implications for our understanding of Titus Andronicus and of affect theory itself.

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William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus possessed a rather poor reputation for much of its history, with some critics considering it so distasteful as to doubt that it belonged in the Shakespearean canon at all. It is not hard to see why. As S. Clarke Hulse puts it, Titus Andronicus is a play with “14 killings, 9 of them on stage, 6 severed members, 1 rape (or 2 or 3, depending on how you count), 1 live burial, 1 case of insanity and 1 of cannibalism—an average of 5.2 atrocities per act, or one for every 97 lines” (106). Since the second half of the twentieth century, however, the play has undergone a revitalization, due in large part to productions staged by significant directors such as Peter Brook, Yukio Ninagawa, Deborah Warner, and Julie Taymor. While the play does feature an abundance of gruesome moments, including a Thyestean feast of unwitting cannibalism, perhaps the most iconic scene is that of Lavinia’s re-entrance after her offstage sexual assault by Demetrius and Chiron. The moment has become a kind of shorthand for the play, with images of the scene used to great effect for promotional purposes; a Restoration adaptation of the play even bore the subtitle The Rape of Lavinia (Barnden 564–70). This recurring emphasis on the image of the raped Lavinia, however, suggests that productions may already be risking the pitfalls of aestheticizing victims of sexual violence that Kim Solga warns against. Solga summarizes several ways in which Lavinia’s rape could be understood primarily from the male perspective and the historical effacement of rape; additionally, she raises the perhaps even greater problem that Lavinia’s reappearance acts merely to make us “feel better” about “our power as eyewitnesses at the expense of our obligation” (45).

Lucy Bailey’s version, despite the media clamor surrounding both its 2006 premiere and 2014 revival, has garnered respect from some academics for avoiding such pitfalls, with scholarly reviews illuminating and appreciating the production in ways that the aforementioned daily newspapers did not. Emma Whipday claims that Bailey’s Titus is emblematic of recent productions that “stage Shakespeare’s exploration of sexual violence as at once speakable and unsayable, visible and unperformed” (166). For Whipday, it forces audiences “to engage with the traumatic aftermath of rape, as situated in Lavinia’s mutilated body, rather than with rape as spectacle” (174); the actor’s physicality is indicative of the ways in which “her body (and thus, perhaps, Lavinia herself) resists” (170). Farah Karim-Cooper also approves of Bailey’s production, highlighting its “radical potential” (63) and discovering “a profound recognition of the pain of rape—which does not emerge from the text alone” (69). Presenting the violence in a way that went beyond mere shock and exploitation, the production caused diverse reactions in the audience, such as “weeping, horrified expressions, embarrassed laughter, gasps of fear, and the most profoundly affecting, silence. This audience was not desensitized by any stretch of the imagination, but instead reacted strongly, physically, and painfully” (66). Such descriptions of the Globe patrons confirm and perhaps complicate those of the dailies and offer a way to assess the production’s success. While neither Whipday nor Karim-Cooper use affect theory in their reviews of Bailey’s Titus Andronicus, I suggest that their conclusions indeed derive from the production’s affective power.

A particularly salient quotation from Erin Hurley’s Theatre & Feeling finds affect to be an “organism’s autonomic reaction to an environmental change”; this “uncontrollable, embodied, individual experience may result in an emotional expression” which “displays the subjective affective response in a socially readable way” (17). The fainting of the groundlings was socially readable; in the newspaper accounts, the physical action of falling becomes external evidence of the embodied experiences of these individuals. To further refine my usage of the term affect, I will turn to the theories of Brian Massumi, whose work follows in the centuries-old tradition of Baruch Spinoza by focusing on the body’s capacity for affecting and being affected. In Massumi’s words, affect is “irreducibly bodily and autonomic,” and his view of affect is immediate and pre-cognitive (“Autonomy of Affect” 89). While Massumi’s work is not without its critics—Ruth Leys, for example, argues against the clear-cut separation of pre-cognitive affect from cognitive emotion (464–72)—one can find compelling substance in the affective appeal he describes. For example, one source of evidence Massumi interprets affectively is an experiment involving three groups of children watching television: those viewing a wordless film; those viewing the film with factual narration; and those viewing the film with narration that expressed the emotional content of the scene at key points. Measuring galvanic skin response showed that the wordless version provoked an intense autonomic response; the matter-of-fact narration’s redundancy interfered with the images’ affect, and the emotional narration enhanced it, functioning to “re-register an already felt state” (“Autonomy of Affect” 86). With this experiment in mind, the Marcus and Lavinia scene serves as an example of how affect theory could be applied to Shakespeare’s play. Marcus’s speech upon seeing Lavinia is complex and lengthy, but there is little that is matter-of-fact or redundant. Instead, its poetic language contains multiple classical allusions, including the story of Orpheus and Cerberus, that of Titan, and, in the most obvious comparison, a reference to the plight of Philomel, ravished by Tereus (2.4.11–57). When he does reference his niece’s state, Marcus uses similes and metaphors: her blood is a “crimson river” and “bubbling fountain” (22–3); her missing hands are “two branches” (18). Ultimately, though, the mere presence of Lavinia’s “ravish’d” (1.SD) body instigates the affective appeal of the scene and the “already felt state.” Perhaps, then, Kermode’s categorization of the scene as contemplative and distancing should be modified to incorporate Massumi’s findings, as the words enhance the body’s effect and resonate with its level of intensity.

Another influential theorist of affect, Teresa Brennan, further emphasizes the material nature of the body, calling affects “material, physiological things” (6) and highlighting affect’s “physiological shift” (5). Brennan touches on a number of applications of these ideas, one of which is that the “aggressive response spreads through the transmission of affect” (67). Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, affect theory’s attention toward the body has led some scholars to pursue its relationship to physical violence. Michael Richardson, for one, uses affect to analyze torture in various media, pointing to “specific affective relations that flow between” the bodies of the victim and the torturer/witness (37). While one should not go too far in comparing a torture victim in real life to an actor performing a simulation of violence that is obviously fictional, it is possible that, after a mimetic performance, a shadow of affect remains within the body of the actor; this affect can then be transmitted to observers. Despite the fictionality, I suggest that such violent action can still have real affective consequences, opening avenues of investigation into performance, including theatrical productions such as Bailey’s Titus. I shall return to the spectator shortly, but this is borne out from the perspective of the actor at least. Laura Rees, who played Lavinia in the original 2006 staging, spoke about her experience with this problem: “On some level, every night being taken off stage and being raped and being mutilated, and then walking forward downstage, especially in the Globe space, you get a sense of the reality of it. You can’t push it away, which I try to do a lot” (“Production Notes 1”). A fictional traumatic experience took up real residence in her body, despite her full awareness that she was not mutilated in actuality. The affective bodily event began to overcome the actor’s intellectual resistance.

Moving from actor to spectator, then, we reach the heart of this essay’s concerns, as I investigate the possibilities for affective transmission in watching theatrical performance. Any such mechanisms are difficult to pin down, but much has changed since Brennan wrote that “the transmission of affect is not understood or studied because of the distance between the concept of transmission and the reigning modes of biological explanation. No one really knows how it happens” (2). Oft-cited work in the field of cognitive science has offered several possible explanations for how affect is transmitted; while too extensive to summarize in full, Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia offer helpful background to many concepts, including mirror neurons that have caused some to conclude that visual observation alone can trigger complex sharing of emotive states (190–1); somatosensory neurons that can be activated by tactile stimuli (54); and bimodal neurons that respond to visual stimuli only when they appear in the vicinity of the tactile receptive field: “It is almost as if the personal (i.e. cutaneous) space of your cheek reaches out to embrace the visual space that surrounds it” (55). The field of literary theory that embraces cognitive science contains many references to laboratory experiments and fMRI machines, but many results remain unsettled. Rhonda Blair and Amy Cook caution, “The degree to which humans have mirror neurons may still be under investigation, but the fact of our motor resonances is clear” (8). Recent activity has shown theater and performance studies to be a fruitful avenue for exploring complicated concepts behind embodied cognition: “When we witness an actor make an intentional action—grab the gun, cock his fist, lean forward to kiss her son—neurons fire in us that also fire when we do that action” (Blair and Cook 8). This cognitive sympathy between actors and audiences is particularly acute in a venue such as Shakespeare’s Globe, with its unusual intimacy and shared visibility, as the actors themselves noted. As part of a series of actors’ “Notes” posted to the Globe’s website, Rees draws attention to the nature both of Bailey’s production and of the Globe building itself. She indicates that the production team had anticipated intense audience reactions, praises the “feedback” and “special moments” that the audience shared, and admits it could get awkward: “You always notice the people who faint and you have to decide whether to acknowledge it or just to carry on and leave the stewards doing their job” (“Rehearsal Notes 1”). Both she and David Sturzaker, the original Lucius, pinpoint 2.4 as the major moment. Sturzaker recalls in his entries, “People very specifically react to the action on stage when fainting. They faint as a reaction to something that happens on stage.” He goes on to cite a specific example involving the Lavinia scene and a spectator who “had gone quite an extraordinary colour” (“Production Notes 1”). These anecdotes acknowledge the affective power of the violence, experienced both by the individual performer and together by the collective audience, even when that harm is fictional. In the minds of these actors, at least, the affective flow between the body of the actor and the body of the spectator led to very real effects, such as groundlings being carried out during the interval.

It is necessary to pause here, because my use of the term “groundlings” is not incidental; Rees’s notes specifically mention the power of the Globe space. The ability to stand at the foot of the stage is one of the selling points of a production at Shakespeare’s Globe, attracting multitudes of tourists, playgoers, and the historically curious to its South Bank location every season. It was also a vital component of this particular production of Titus Andronicus. While Bailey and designer William Dudley took several liberties with the Globe, making the unusual choice to wrap the tiring house with black material and darken the space with hanging drapes, they certainly took advantage of the proximity of actor to audience that the space provides. Reviewers noticed: “Groundlings, barraged by testosterone-pumped warriors and grandstanding politicians, are still swept up in the action—just don’t stand too close if you’re feeling light-headed” (Williams). In his comparative analysis of several major productions of the play, Michael D. Friedman points out that “Although Bailey’s rendition did not use Shakespeare’s Globe to investigate Elizabethan staging practices, the production did exploit the intense actor-audience relationship that the reconstructed theatre was also built to explore” (273). By most accounts, this Titus Andronicus was a highly effective use of the Globe’s audience configuration, but it is by no means an isolated example; the building is tailor-made for the phenomenon of entrainment.

Brennan describes entrainment in this way: “The form of transmission whereby people become alike is a process whereby one person’s or one group’s nervous and hormonal systems are brought into alignment with another’s” (9). She utilizes psychological case studies to highlight several different mechanisms for entrainment: images; mimesis; olfactory and auditory sources; touch; and “body movements and gestures, particularly through the imitation of rhythms (effected by sight, touch, and hearing)” (68–70). Alongside Shakespeare scholars who utilize affect theory to try to understand the historical Elizabethan playhouse, Robert Shaughnessy has used the concept of entrainment to analyze the modern Globe building (which opened to the public in 1997) and its contemporary audiences. According to Shaughnessy, the audience members standing in the pit for the duration of the performance particularly demonstrate a behavior “characterized by a degree of synchrony that is both exceptional and, importantly, not readily explicable,” even “uncanny” (299). Perhaps most intriguingly, Shaughnessy cites David Roland and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on the idea of “flow,” which he applies to the way that actors describe the audience as a “sea” of faces, formulating a uniquely affective approach to audience studies: actions on stage “converge with or diverge from the demonstrative rhythmic actions of the audience, its waves of laughter and applause, cycles of swaying and fidgeting, and patterns of movement around and in and out of the space” (301). No wonder that an actor is quoted as appreciating his ability to “be part of something” (301); the power that unites, connects, and entrains every body present in the Globe is palpable. Such mirroring “can rapidly become a self-sustaining spiral of escalation” (Shaughnessy 305). While this phenomenon of entrainment does not necessarily lead to the fainting experienced by Titus spectators, this spiral of escalation does create opportunities for audience behavior that would be virtually unthinkable in a darkened space with a proscenium arch neatly dividing the audience from the actors. In Shakespeare’s Globe, audience members who are carried away by the action feel free to act in raucous and intense ways and to react in raucous and intense ways; they are more susceptible to the body’s power to affect and be affected. Most tourists who have stood as groundlings in Shakespeare’s Globe have experienced some level of pleasure from the theater’s novelty (although admittedly it is odd to use the word novelty to describe a situation meant to replicate a 400-year-old practice); the actors’ descriptions and Shaughnessy’s analysis help to explain, catalog, and theorize the reasons behind those feelings. In a post from later in the run, Rees expresses tedium with the infamous faintings and the resulting myriad press interviews, but she reaches a conclusion that illuminates the power of the space: “Sometimes I think people can be affected by seeing somebody else faint as well” (“Production Notes 1”).

Lavinia’s appearance on that stage was undoubtedly powerful, but the faintings could have been the product of any number of forces, including summer’s heat, the strain of standing at the foot of the stage for extended periods of time, the decreased airflow from the fabric wrapping the space, or the squeamishness at seeing a fellow groundling struggle. The reports from the newspapers also may have caused a self-fulfilling prophecy of public relations-induced overexcitement, as Rees’s Notes imply. My experience of Bailey’s Titus, however, was not affected by any of that. I viewed it at a remove of time and space, watching the video several years after the recording was made in 2014. I was not influenced by the heat, the press of bodies at the foot of the stage, or the liveness of it all. To attempt to assess the production, then, I necessarily had to view it under remarkably different circumstances from the patrons who passed out. I found, however, plenty to remark upon concerning the production’s affective power. The recording, and broadcasting of theater extends the potential affective power of a production to an audience that far exceeds those who could be present in the same time and space as the performers, with Pascale Aebischer writing, “Affective responses potentially enable the viewer [to] be present simultaneously in two temporalities via a shared space, irrespective of whether the broadcast is watched ‘live’ or asynchronously” (“South Bank” 117). It was certainly my experience in viewing Titus Andronicus that, while I never thought that I was anywhere other than in front of my computer screen, I felt connected to the groundlings at several points. Unsurprisingly, affectively powerful scenes accomplish this, as Aebischer points to the strength that both laughter and disgust possess in creating such a “visceral bridge” (“South Bank” 117, 122). For me, I can unhesitatingly say that one of those points was Lavinia’s bloody entrance. Bailey’s staging of the scene defied any distancing and formality by focusing the spectator on the undeniable physicality of Lavinia’s body. Not self-consciously aestheticized as in famous versions directed by Brook, Ninagawa, and Taymor, this Lavinia was wretchedly naturalistic. The violence was not stylized; Lavinia’s was a body that bleeds like a real body, spasms like a real body, and is messy like a real body. I felt Massumi’s “affective hit,” to which the body is central, possessing a quality which “is all there is to the world in that instant. It takes over life, fills the world, for an immeasurable instant of shock [. . .]. There is no fright, or any affect for that matter, without an accompanying movement in or of the body” (Politics of Affect 54). I did not faint, but I certainly shifted around in my chair. This may be a function of the bimodal neurons (Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 55) mentioned above, which possibly explain why a groundling’s affective response would be more intense than mine; that does not mean, however, that I did not have one. Even for me feeling a particular kind of discomfort sitting at my office computer screen, affect’s immediacy took precedent over the contemplative; that immediacy operates in the realm of the body faster than the mind can think.

One thing that struck me again and again during my viewing, and perhaps one reason for the extreme reactions to Bailey’s Titus, was the extreme and conspicuous emphasis that the production placed on skin. Human skin was tainted, sullied, and violated in multiple ways; as such, the audience was repeatedly invited to have an affective response to skin. Skin merits special attention in Massumi’s study of affect, as his association of affective intensity with cutaneous surfaces derives from the aforementioned experiment involving children and television. The neuro-scientific evidence behind Massumi’s claims lay in the children’s galvanic skin response as recorded by the scientists: measurements were made of the children’s heartbeat, breathing, and skin resistance, with the greatest response coming from the skin. For Massumi, image reception is “immediately embodied. Intensity is embodied in purely autonomic reactions most directly manifested in the skin—at the surface of the body, at its interface with things” (“Autonomy of Affect” 85). This observation leads him to the pithy conclusion that “the skin is faster than the word” (86). Patricia Cahill has applied Massumi’s thoughts to Elizabethan theater in her analysis of Christopher Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris, arguing for the affective power of the cutaneous in the play: “Massacre catapults play-goers into an awareness of their porous and respirating humoral bodies” with the result of “literally feeling menace in and through one’s skin” (161) and “the vulnerability of their open bodily surfaces” (164). While Cahill does not overly concern herself with the structure of the early modern playhouse, it is easy to see how these feelings pass even more readily in the entrained environment of the Globe.

Appeals to this cutaneous level of affect were repeatedly deployed in Bailey’s Titus. The most obvious example was the already-discussed appearance of Lavinia: the blood gushing forth; the spectacle of unnaturally rounded-off stumps; the raggedness; the mess. Violation of the skin’s integrity packs an affectively powerful, theatrical punch. Yet even before Lavinia’s flesh was opened, audience attention was drawn to her skin when the captors trapped her in a giant net. The clinging nature of the fabric immediately hampered her ability to move, incapacitating her and powerfully invoking in me a sensation of pressure on the skin; I remarked upon her vulnerability as the threat level increased. This entangling was inextricably linked to the sight of the net as a clinging, chafing force. This sense of clinging and chafing was emphasized later, with the added visual elements of the fabric interacting with her blood-soaked body, the netting mangled in her bloody stumps. When Marcus (played by Ian Gelder) entered and discovered Lavinia, he placed a blanket over her skin, and the blood caused this to cling to her as well. Further, Marcus’s impassioned response was accompanied by noticeable tears and flowing mucus, the undeniably physical reminders of the actor’s body juxtaposed in close proximity to his scene partner’s sweating, (stage) blood-stained skin. The interplay of the two bodies’ integumentary systems provided an affective hit and worked against any contemplative mood provided by the verse, inviting viewers to (in a paraphrase of Cahill) feel through their skins. This sensation moved me affectively, laying the groundwork for further explorations of the body’s capacity to move and be moved.

Lavinia was not the only character whose skin was highlighted in Bailey’s production; that of Chiron and Demetrius (actors Brian Martin and Samuel Edward-Cook) was also noteworthy. Like many of the Goths, these two were often shirtless, displaying their elaborately tattooed physiques. In addition to these inked images, the actors’ bodies soon acquired a glistening sheen of sweat and a layer of grime. In act two, scene four, they returned with the violated Lavinia, their skin also caked in the stage blood. All this tactile imagery drew attention to the skin of the actors, a highly sensory experience for the audience. As film scholar Vivian Sobchack describes of a moviegoing experience: “suddenly my skin is both mine and not my own: that is, the ‘immediate tactile shock’ opens me to the general erotic mattering and diffusion of my flesh, and I feel not only ‘my own’ body but also” that of the character (66). This affective sensation heightened the effect, then, when Chiron and Demetrius finally suffered their punishment from the vengeful Titus: their skin was punctured in an elaborate ritual, their bodies hung upside down and sliced open. As the blood dripped from their slashed necks, it stained their skin even more before it pooled and was collected in a bowl by Titus and Lavinia. Further emphasizing the bodily sensations at play in the scene was the simultaneously comic and grotesque picture that father and daughter created, possessing only one hand between the two of them as they fumbled with the bowl and the blood.

As these examples show, the constant attention to skin—the foregrounding and repeated violation of it—was intentionally provocative, and the shared affective potential it produced may account for the experience of those who fainted. However, the power of skin, profound as it was, only goes so far to express the meaning behind Bailey’s staging; other aspects of the embodied performances combined to play a role in the affective sharing. The face, a key asset to any actor, has long been considered a primary site for reading affect, and psychologists such as Silvan Tomkins have analyzed its prominence in human interaction. Spencer-Longhurst’s face, with its expressive large brown eyes, was even further highlighted by the way her later costuming framed it. In the second half of the production, every inch of her body was covered by white fabric, save for a small circle for her face, leaving her, as Karim-Cooper describes it, “wrapped from head to toe in what appeared to be a large bandage” (69). Lavinia’s face, which had been fairly expressive in earlier scenes, had become the sole outlet for her expressivity, as the character’s lack of hands had removed any potential for gestural vocabulary. The costuming needed to accentuate the physical limitations of the character, as the actor clearly had not lost her real hands. Audience attention was drawn to this by the way the costume covered the entire length of her arms, down to the stumps; we by default were required to focus on her face. This costume served as a stark contrast to many of the other characters, notably the Goths, who displayed a great amount of skin, as mentioned above. Lavinia’s dress effectively rendered her all face. While all actors use their faces as primary tools in their aesthetic arsenal, Bailey and designer William Dudley forced the audience to focus on Lavinia’s, thereby drastically increasing the affective hit that Spencer-Longhurst’s face provided.

Naturally, Lavinia’s face is significant to the earlier scene of her entrance following her assault. Marcus’s words draw our attention to her face’s affective capacity: “thou turn’st away thy face for shame” (2.4.28). Tomkins, a foundational thinker influencing strands of affect theory, describes the face’s prominence in communicating shame: an “awareness of the face by the self is an integral part of the experience of shame [. . .]. [B]oth the face and the self unwittingly become more visible” through such observable actions as hanging one’s head or averting one’s gaze (Tomkins 136–7). Shame is repeatedly cited as one of the more powerful affects by contemporary scholars (e.g. Robin Bernstein, Michael Richardson, and Ruth Leys); when Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank assembled an edition of Tomkins’s work, they called it Shame and Its Sisters. The idea that Lavinia is experiencing a profound shame accompanying victimhood is certainly one option a director could choose to pursue. Yet, on the contrary, I would not interpret Spencer-Longhurst’s Lavinia as filled with shame; her affective behavior does not match Tomkins’s description. Therein lies the power of this interpretation. Despite Marcus’s line, which necessitates the director blocking the actor so that she turns away, the affective impression I received was not one of humiliation or embarrassment. Spencer-Longhurst’s face conveyed much, including the frustration at the inability to speak, but the affect that came through most was one of suffering. After briefly averting her gaze, she returned it powerfully back on Marcus, eyes bulging in a display of agony. Lavinia feels the bodily impact of the violence; the body’s response to this pain is to go into shock. That is what I felt in her turning away, not shame.

As the scholarly reviews by Whipday and Karim-Cooper mentioned above point out, it is the concern for Lavinia that set Bailey’s Titus above mere sensationalism, and I hold that this scene is one of the strongest ways we can use affect theory to understand Bailey’s staging of rape as avoiding the problems of both the male-centric readings and the empty eyewitnessing that Solga delineates (44–5). The trauma of the experience, as embodied by an actor and witnessed by an entrained audience, cannot merely be dismissed, as Rees’s journals show. In the post-assault return, Bailey staged an interrelation between the forces of trauma and affect: more than simply relying on the skin and face, the actor’s entire body was involved in conveying the affect, as Lavinia’s body provided the site for multiple complex appeals to affective power. The character’s silence was accompanied by a series of spasmodic jerks, which served as one indicator of this enacted affective trauma. In Spencer-Longhurst’s performance, Lavinia’s physicality was reminiscent of a bird; the shifting of her head and the instability of the support provided by her neck suggested the helpless thrusts of a hatchling. Recalling Lavinia’s final words before being dragged offstage—“Some say that ravens foster forlorn children/The whilst their own birds famish in their nests” (2.3.153–4)—Spencer-Longhurst’s gestures affectively conjured helplessness, fear, and an unnatural silence. The way that Lavinia had been othered by her attackers was made physically present. She was not inactive, however; further distancing herself from any hint of shame, I saw a Lavinia desperate to take some kind of action. Her bodily movements were strikingly similar to those of the mime, who, in Massumi’s analysis, “decomposes movement” into a series of jerks, where “the potential is there for the movement to veer off in another direction, to become a different movement” (“Autonomy of Affect” 102). Lavinia had been rendered mime-like in her inability to speak; the series of spasms she performed invited a complicated affective response. In Massumi’s words, every jerk was a critical point at which she could veer. Marcus awaited a verbal explanation that never came; the knowing audience awaited a cathartic moment that finally arrived in the horror of the blood spewing from her mouth. In those jerks, though, the potential for infinite outcomes was always present, throwing her interlocutor and the spectators off balance. In her desperation to take some kind of action, but deprived of her normal tools of communication, this overabundance of movements, trying to achieve multiple different objectives, could seemingly accomplish none of them. Her physicalization invited the audience to notice this; there was little chance of ignoring her, nor was there any easy way to move past this moment and the character’s trauma.

Finally, I would be remiss not to mention—albeit briefly—the ways in which Bailey utilized non-visual means to provide the affective hit as well, including a prominent use of sound. Many of the martial scenes depicting the tensions between the Romans and the warlike Goths were accompanied by rousing drumbeats and shudder-inducing scraping of metal. The high-pitched screeches especially complemented the power of Bailey’s visuals, creating the kind of eerie sensation that one associates with shivers and tingling of spines. Composer Django Bates deliberately eschewed traditional English period instrumentation, which complemented Bailey and Dudley’s aesthetic. Deanna Smid describes this music as “dissonant noise created by horns with stylized teeth” (399). More tellingly, however, Smid is highly aware of the affective power of sound (even though her concern is with music in Titus Andronicus generally, only briefly mentioning Bailey’s production): “An affective relationship—in which audience members experience their pulse as Lavinia’s or vice versa—has been borne out [. . .]. The physical and affective involvement of the audience in the ‘pulse’ of the play and of Lavinia can, I posit, be encouraged and evoked” (405). Perhaps the most striking use of music came with the dissonant tones played while Titus strangled Lavinia at the end of the play. The end of Lavinia’s story was rendered in a way that made it impossible for the audience to “feel better” (Solga 45): the unnatural act of filicide was underlined by unnatural sounds that possessed great potential to impact the audience affectively. In a movement that was—again—not one of shame, Spencer-Longhurst’s Lavinia turned her face away from the audience. She embraced her father with a tragic recognition that marked her impending death. In Whipday’s analysis, “patriarchal societal structure renders even affection violent if it silences rather than aids communication” (174). While Lavinia can speak no words, the affective hit of the music drove home Whipday’s point about “the tragedy of female silence” (174). The eerie sound that accompanied her silence had the power to send chills down spines, leaving a distinct affective trace that decried Lavinia’s suffering and death, while sealing the impact of Bailey’s staging as one unlikely to be misinterpreted.

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As I conclude this assessment of Lucy Bailey’s use of affect in her Titus Andronicus, I should dwell on one regret I have, having only watched this production on video: I have entirely missed out on the affective power of smell. Olfactory appeal is significant to many affect theorists, such as Brennan. Watching the video, however, and seeing the visibly sweating actors in close proximity to the audience, in addition to large amount of smoke and incense, suggests to me the affective potential of smell. This could only have been multiplied by the presence of other affected bodies in the Globe space and their own individual smells compounding the entrainment conjured by the theater event. I can rely on critics such as Lyn Gardner who utilized affectively laden descriptions, discussing “the incense whiff of the charnel house.” This caveat aside, Bailey’s affectively powerful production, which staged Titus in a way that avoided the usual pitfalls associated with staging Lavinia as victim—and with addressing rape in general—is a useful case study for the application of affect theory to performance studies. The visual (and aural and olfactory) presentation serves as a useful example for the application of affect theory, counter to the pessimism of Ahern: while the potential for titillation and overemotionalism necessitates a certain vigilance, deploying affect by no means predetermines reactionary outcomes, many of which have been catalogued by feminist scholars such as Solga. An understanding of affect’s power can show us that Bailey’s Lavinia was not merely a rape victim whose function was defined by men. Her rape was not effaced, and her subsequent appearances did not serve merely to make the audience “feel better.” Bailey’s Lavinia endured physical trauma that was not easily contained or swept aside, and the production repeatedly invited the audience to consider this in complex ways. The entrainment of performer to spectator and of spectator to spectator worked to deny sensationalism and aestheticization. Lavinia’s loss of limbs and tongue created a visceral impact, and it was the unsparing glimpse of her experience as affectively inscribed on her body that made her humanity abundantly clear. Her actions were not passive, nor were they triumphant over her pain; they were those of an active woman who had survived trauma. In the end, no matter which version—2006 or 2014, live or via video recording—Lucy Bailey’s Titus Andronicus successfully demonstrated the power of affect in performance. It achieved what Eugenie Brinkema says of affect’s ability to “disrupt, interrupt, reinsert, demand, provoke, insist on, remind of, agitate for: the body, sensation, movement, flesh and skin and nerves, the visceral, stressing pains, feral frenzies, always rubbing against: what undoes, what unsettles, that thing I cannot name” (xii). Any one of Brinkema’s colorful descriptions applies to my viewing experience; from the evidence I have amassed here, it is clear that the same could be said for any number of audience members and critics. The production’s power lies not merely in the faintings or in the headlines; it lies in its ability to continue to produce affective responses not only in a revival years later, but also through its remediation through screen, enabling scholars like myself to continue theorizing the workings of affect and embodied response as part of this production’s meanings.