ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the nature of a Shakespearean haunting. It is concerned with the lingering effects of the Reformation on a generation of survivors. In what will appear a detour, however, from the trajectory of our discussion of the relationship between John Foxe’s Actes & Monuments and Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy, the chapter begins by looking at a curious, modern editorial stutter in Titus Andronicus that registers the afterlife of a particularly vexing scene. The detour will return us to the question of early modern inheritance better equipped to understand how Shakespeare translates the terms of the religious debates during the Reformation into a secular language involving developments in legal theory that give an afterlife to words by disavowing their efficacy. In act three, scene two, Titus enacts the play’s most extended vow of revenge with a grotesque promising ritual in which violence materializes in the form of bloody bodies and body parts piling up on stage. Titus’s dismembered hand, his sons’ severed heads and Lavinia’s bloody body, remnants of earlier vows in the play, become part of a performance that appears to collapse the distinction that separates word and deed. Once Titus has conceived of revenge for the murder of his sons Quintus and Martius, he gathers his remaining family into a circle in order to vow revenge in their names:

Come, let me see what task I have to do. You heavy people, circle me about, That I may turn me to each one of you And swear unto my soul to right your wrongs. The vow is made …. (3.1.275-79)1

Circulating in the blood and gore of bleeding bodies and body parts, Titus’s vow is gruesomely entangled with reminders of other promises that have been violated. The modern editorial apparatus that attempts to understand this vow is particularly telling. Titus utters the performative, “The vow is made,” which indicates the execution of the vow that has just been enacted in the promising ritual. Despite theexactness in Titus’s own stage direction, twentieth-century editors of the play curiously have tried to clarify the moment of the vow even further.2 The stage

directions of David Bevington’s edition of the play (1980) reads, “They form a circle around Titus, and he pledges each.” Eugene Waith (1984) inserts into the scene the direction, “He pledges them,” and he elaborates in a note that what the scene requires is “A simple ritual, such as handshaking.” Dover-Wilson’s 1948 edition of the play reads, “He (Titus) kneels, with MARCUS, LUCIUS, LAVINIA and the two heads round him; then raises his hand to heaven.” Jonathan Bate elaborates further in his edition of the play (1995), which reads, “[They make a vow.] / The vow is made.” This repetition of the oath in the editorial apparatus suggests a critical dis-ease with the play’s most embodied speech-act. The added stage directions combined with Titus’s own voice create a stutter at the moment of the pledge. The stutter-evidence of the editorial tendency to exert control through repetition and elaboration-reveals, perhaps, an unconscious awareness in the critical heritage that the act of promising in the play is, indeed, dangerous and therefore requires editorial discipline. Such controlling editorial emendations strive to efface the unpredictability implicit in the act of making promises. The force that the play simultaneously longs for and criticizes-specifically the power to fuse intention to effect-is transferred to the editor and specifically to the intrusive stage direction. The modern editors seem interested in collapsing word and deed at a moment in the play where Titus himself most explicitly associates his vow with the remnants of violence that are part of his promising ritual. Titus says, “Come, brother, take a head, / And in this hand the other will I bear. / And, Lavinia, thou shalt be employed: / Bear thou my hand, sweet wench, between thy teeth” (3.1.279-82). Although this order functions as Titus’s command to gather up their belongings and depart, it also implicates the severed body parts in the ritual-act of promising. Just as Titus’s embodied vow reflects his attempt to collapse his promise of revenge and its violent effects, the editorial intrusions demonstrate a desire that words produce predictable and immediate consequences. The stutter produced by the stage directions in many modern editions of the play uncannily registers the expanding temporality of promissory acts in the years after the Reformation in England. In other words, as the stage directions stutterthat is, as they repeat a bit of the immediate past without quite completing it or moving forward-the stage directions record the anxieties of an historical moment in which the act of promising assumes unpredictable force. Violence in the play emerges from the ambivalent effect of these types of performatives: vows, oaths, and promises seek to guarantee intentionality and legitimacy but consistently misfire to produce unintended consequences. The play emphasizes the force of this ambivalence inherent in contractual relations with its depiction of bloody and brutalized bodies that make this one of Shakespeare’s most problematic plays.3 Whether it is Titus’s severed hand, his sons’ dismembered hands, Lavinia’s ravaged body, or modern editors’ insistent emendations, mutilation, according to Freud, is one form of overcoming history-or as Gregg Horowitz observes, of history “appearing at an improper time.”4