ABSTRACT

Robertson Elizabethan legal debates regarding animal law and rape law are crucial to an understanding of Lavinia’s complex hybridized status within Titus Andronicus. Enforcing human law upon animals intended to re-establish narratives about human dominance and order, reinforcing the binary between rational man and irrational beast. In this chapter, the author argues that many of the structures that complicate human-animal categories reappear in debates about the biological and legal definitions of women. He also argues that Lavinia’s position as an Actaeon figure particularly exposes early modern English concerns about how humanism, with its emphases on literacy and rhetorical discourse, hybridized and challenged the traditional status of nonhuman animals and human others. Lavinia’s final appearance in the play constitutes a ritualized, public animal trial in which the Roman men act as jury and executioners. For the Andronici, Lavinia’s rape and dismemberment is a crime against the men in the family—an approach in line with early modern rape statutes.