Rape and Civilization in Shakespeare

No offense threatens the fabric of civilization as profoundly as rape because no offense threatens as profoundly the equality of citizens. Under the old understanding of sex in the city, rape attacked the equality of men as possessors of their wives’ and daughters’ chastity. For us today, rape contradicts the aspiration to the equality of the sexes in citizenship. If women cannot be secured by law and police from sexual assault, they cannot exercise their putative public rights, a point shared by the liberal revolutionaries and their Islamist enemies in the 2011 Egyptian revolution. Public order without despotism, and the mingling of the sexes in civil society, appear to rest on the Roman heritage: in 2023, civil government and civil society independent of civil government exist only in the West or where Western “colonial empires” forcibly imposed them.

Shakespeare presents his understanding of civilization in his accounts of rape and the beginning and the end of civil life in Rome. In Shakespeare’s poem The Rape of Lucrece, the rape leads to the abolition of kingship and the founding of the Roman Republic. Here we concentrate on Titus Andronicus, in which the rape of Lavinia produces the triumph of barbarism at Rome under the guise of romanitas or “Romanness.”  The question is: what can we salvage for civilization by the encounter with Romanness as presented in Titus Andronicus?

For Shakespeare’s English contemporaries, Rome carried two ominous resonances:  First, Rome meant the Romish religion, the papal yoke so lately overthrown. Shakespeare himself, as well as Southampton, the dedicatee of Lucrece, came from families notorious for recusancy, for preferring the Romish religion to the rites of the Church of England by law established.

Second, Rome also meant republicanism. To quote Jefferson, today “we are all republicans.” Yet in Shakespeare’s time republican notions would have been inherently subversive of the Tudor state. Hobbes, who was 28 when Shakespeare died, would claim in chapter 21 of Leviathan that nothing was as dearly bought as the knowledge of the Greek and Latin tongues that had fostered republican ideas and thus antimonarchical civil wars. As Shakespeare himself dramatizes in Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, the Roman republic had come to a catastrophic end in the blood and squalor of the civil wars. Insofar as the Roman heritage meant republicanism, an Englishman of the 1590’s would be justified in seeing it as something both subversive and intrinsically pernicious.

There must be something of weight in romanitas that outweighs the potential dangers of Rome’s republican legacy. Yet in Titus Andronicus Shakespeare shows how the very transmission of romanitas undermines civility.

Titus Andronicus was Shakespeare’s first play performed and first published. Titus is set in very late Rome. plot summary here?It ends, in act V, with Titus’s sole surviving son Lucius leading a Gothic barbarian army to occupy Rome. Titus is the most violent of Shakespeare’s plays – in the first act alone Shakespeare shows us twenty-one Roman corpses and a human sacrifice, and it only degenerates from there into rape, mutilation, and murder.

The first new killing of the play is the sacrifice of the Gothic Queen Tamora’s son to the spirits of the sons of Titus slain fighting against the Goths. In Shakespeare’s late play, Cymbeline, about the encounter between Romans and British barbarians during the Roman conquest of Britain, the British defeat the Romans and propose to execute their prisoners to appease the souls of their own slain (Cymbeline 5.4.70 ff.)  Lucius, Cymbeline’s Roman general – who has the same name as the last, victorious son of Titus Andronicus – pleads:

We should not, when the blood was cool,

have threatened our prisoners with the sword (5.4.77‑8)

In Cymbeline the British barbarians relent and execute no one – in Titus Andronicus, the Romans Titus, Lucius, and his brothers carry out their sacrifice. “Was never Scythia half so barbarous,” pronounces Tamora’s son Chiron (Titus Andronicus 1.1.131).

Having buried his twenty‑one dead sons with (in)appropriate rites, and chosen emperor for his “Roman” virtues, Titus refuses to rule but agrees to choose who will rule. As John Alvis has pointed out in Shakespeare’s Understanding of Honor, Titus then turns his back on the virtues and chooses between the emperor’s sons, Saturninus and Bassianus, based on the un‑Roman criterion of primogeniture.

Saturninus wishes to mark his ascension by marrying Titus’s only daughter, Lavinia. Saturninus chooses Lavinia despite, or rather because, she is affianced to his brother and rival Bassianus. Bassianus calls her “Rome’s rich ornament.”  The beautiful daughter of that exemplary Roman Titus Andronicus, Lavinia is worthy to be the mistress of the master of Rome, the brother-rivals agree.

In The Rape of Lucrece, which tells the incident that precipitated Rome’s transformation from barbarous tyranny to Roman republican civil government, Collatine’s boasting of his wife’s beauty and chastity give the King’s son Sextus Tarquin the rationalization that it would be condoning lèse-majesté to forgo attempting her (15-21, 36-42). Titus, proud Roman though he be, endorses Saturninus’s proposed Rape of Lavinia, his taking her from her affianced, Bassianus – notwithstanding the counsel of Titus’s brother Marcus that Bassianus “in justice seizes but his own” (1.1.281).

Titus’s son Mutius draws his sword to allow the eloping Bassianus and Lavinia to escape the will of the newly crowned Emperor and Lavinia’s father. Titus kills Mutius, but aided by Titus’s three surviving sons Quintus, Martius, and Lucius, Bassianus and Lavinia make their escape. Saturninus will call what Bassianus did a rape (1.1.405). Neither he nor Titus Andronicus recognize the difference between Tarquinian right – the best belongs to the prince – and civilized right – to each his own. Neither recognizes that civil order is only possible if the prince refrains from raping the women of his subjects.

The remainder of the plot is determined by the fact that the characters, Roman, Moor, and Goth alike, know Latin and Greek literature. They all know the history of Philomela, in Ovid’s version (Metamorphoses 6.424-674), Seneca’s version of the cannibal tragedy of Thyestes, the tale of Lucretia, and Livy’s story of Virginia (Livy 3.44 ff.).

In the tale of Philomela, Tereus, barbarian king of Thrace, is prevailed upon by his Athenian wife Procne to journey to Athens to invite her virgin sister Philomela. When the two arrive in Thrace, Tereus imprisons Philomela, rapes her repeatedly, and cuts out her tongue. Philomela gets the message of what happens to Procne in the form of a weaving. Procne decides to avenge herself and her sister on Tereus by killing their son Itys and feeding the flesh to Tereus. Once Tereus has eaten, Procne throws Itys’s head in his father’s face. Tereus chases Procne and Philomela out of the hall, and all are turned into birds.

From act II through V, the characters in Titus Andronicus are controlled by this text. Tamora’s Moor lover Aaron gets the idea of what to do to Lavinia from Ovid (2.3.43‑44). The mutilated Lavinia uses the text of the story in Ovid to send her message. The characters all know the story of Lucretia. In joining with Titus to avenge the rape, Titus’s brother Marcus takes inspiration from the vengeance upon the Tarquinii of Lucretia’s husband, her father, and their kinsman Lucius Junius Brutus (4.1.87-94). Before the rape, Aaron inspires Chiron and Demetrius with confidence to perpetrate the rape of Lavinia with the same story, as Aaron says “Lucrece was not more chaste/ than this Lavinia” (2.1.108-109).

Titus and Saturninus know the story of Virginia, the parallel to the tale of Lucretia in which the patrician despotism over the plebs is bridled, thanks to the untimely lust of Appius Claudius for the plebian maiden Virginia (3.44 ff.). Yet in Livy’s version Virginius kills his daughter to prevent her rape, but according to Titus and Saturninus, Virginius kills his daughter after the rape, not to prevent it, but as Saturninus puts it:

Because the girl should not survive her shame,

And by her presence still renew his sorrows (5.3.41-42).

The presence of the victim shames and sorrows those who were supposed to protect her with the living memorial of their own incapacity.

Almost all the characters in Titus Andronicus, Roman or barbarian, know Roman literature and history. The man Titus Andronicus is the epitome of Roman virtue for the Romans of his time. Returning victorious from the Gothic Wars with four living sons and twenty-one heroically dead ones, he is chosen emperor:

The People of Rome… have by common voice
In election for the Roman Empery
Chosen Andronicus, surnamed Pius
For many good and great deserts to Rome.
A nobler man, a braver warrior
Lives not this day within the city walls (1.1.20-26)

Titus is distinguished from the other Romans of his time in his willingness to act on what he understands romanitas to require.

Yet Titus’s very conception of romanitas and what distinguishes Romans from barbarians are quickly shown to be confused. Titus identifies being Roman with keeping ancestral customs, but he goes back instead to pre-Roman barbarism in carrying out human sacrifice and imitating the revenge of Procne. Wanting to be Roman is not enough.

Romans, or at least old time Romans like Titus, his brother Marcus, and his sole surviving son Lucius, are men of their word. Titus kills his son Mutius because Mutius resists Titus’s command that Lavinia be granted to the newly elected emperor Saturninus. Aaron, Tamora’s black paramour, is the only one who expresses natural un-perverted parental feeling. Aaron will literally do anything to protect his son fathered on Tamora, Saturninus’s gothic Empress. In the end Aaron’s son survives, if he does survive, because Lucius, Titus’s son, is also a man of his word. In Julie Taymor’s 1999 film version, Lucius’s son, also named Lucius, carries Aaron and Tamora’s baby into the dawn to the sound of church bells, as if it is the moral universalism of the new, Christian Rome that is the only worthy heir of the old one.

Shakespeare is not so certain either of the failings of Rome, or of the virtues of Roman Christianity. Even the corrupt Rome of Titus’s day, for all its monstrosities, has nothing native that can compete in wickedness with Aaron the Moor. Inhuman himself, he treats all others as beasts:  to escape with the infant, he kills the nurse as if she were “a pig prepared to the spit” (4.2.147). Yet Aaron’s evil requires a transcendent devil to emulate: “If there be devils would I were a devil” (5.1.147), and he invites Tamora’s sons Chiron and Demetrius to “pray to the devils; the gods have given us over” (4.2.48). To emulate the devil would seem, as John Alvis has commented, to require a transcendent god – against whom the transcendent devil rebels.

Whatever may be the virtues of raw nature, study makes the heritage of past civilizations present to pervert us, in the way that the story of Philomela perverts Tamora’s sons from simple rape to gang rape and mutilation. One can always learn from the crimes of the past how not to imitate them – and devise, with Saturninus, “Some never heard of torturing pain” (2.3.285). Lucius, Rome’s new emperor, is an even better Roman than his father, but that very Lucius proposes to hang Aaron’s child in the sight of his father in order “to vex the father’s soul withal” (5.1.51-52). Moreover, it is Lucius who insists on the barbarous sacrifice of Tamora’s son that launches the Andronici on their tragic course.

One might think that perversion by learning must be fought with better learning. Yet knowledge of Roman texts provides only ambiguous knowledge of what is to be Roman in the first place. The texts transmit what is Roman and what is barbarian in order that we may understand the difference between Romans and barbarians. Yet the reader of those texts, whether himself or herself Greek, Roman or barbarian, can choose to imitate Romans or barbarians.

Print