ABSTRACT

In Titus Andronicus sacrifices as feasts or feasts as sacrifices open the play, in a scenario of finis imperii characterized by an anxiety to reaffirm, by means of hostile bodies turned into communal food, a shared imperial sense of identity. The burning limbs and entrails of the eldest son of Tamora, Queen of the Goths, are collectively stirred on a pile to perfume the air in a reasserted rite of imperial belonging. This rite is not inferior to Titus’s revengeful anthropophagous banquet served later to Tamora. Tamora’s own body is first ‘incorporated’ into Rome, as a wife to the emperor Saturninus, and once ascertained as inassimilable, if not infective, is ‘thrown forth’ as food for ‘beasts and birds to prey’ (5.3. 192).1