ABSTRACT
In Edward Ravenscroft’s adaptation of Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus or the Rape of Lavinia (1678, published in 1687),1 Lavinia’s violent rape is highlighted as a special attraction by the addition of the subtitle. Stephen Greenblatt explains that, within the context of Elizabethan England, “Lavinia’s ghastly fate in Titus Andronicus – her hands lopped off, her tongue cut out – would have been easy for Elizabethan actors to represent in graphic, realistic detail, for they had seen such things performed in the flesh on scaffolds in the suburbs, near the playhouse” (Will 179). In Ravenscroft’s version, Lavinia’s rape transforms from a gruesome spectacle of Elizabethan violence into a Restoration vehicle for exposing actresses’ bodies onstage. Once actresses entered the English professional theatre in 1660, honorable women – often heroines in tragedy – were expected to expose their naked flesh through the vehicle of rape. Elizabeth Howe discusses the proliferation of rape on the Restoration stage: “rape became a way of giving the purest most virginal heroine, a sexual quality” (E. Howe 19).2 The violation of chastity was eroticized, providing spectators with the titillating experience of seeing a virtuous woman exposed. Once the advent of the female body site occurs onstage, rape
becomes standard stage business fueling spectators’ desire for sight, or scopophilia, meaning pleasure in looking. But cite also plays a strong part in reading Restoration actresses in theatre historiography, for it is the repeated citation of actresses’ sexuality that predominates throughout Restoration writings. Through the framing device of site/sight/cite, I hope to reveal the complexity involved in reading the Restoration actress’s body in pain. For the rape of Lavinia is not only motivated by violence; it is also driven by issues of sexuality, gender, and embodiment (site); visual culture and scopophilia (sight); and textual citations, repetitions, and reiterations of actresses and their sexual behavior (cite). It is through site/sight/cite that these Restoration working women are remembered by theatre history. This legacy is painful for feminist theatre historians who are caught between celebrating the actress as an emerging professional, and recapitulating various citations of actresses as sexual objects with no agency. The actresses’ body site/sight/cite is a lens through which to examine more closely the pain of representation through both the slippery sign systems of language and on the historical stage.
