Titus Andronicus Trauma

As has already been shown, Shakespeare’s bodies are not simply constrained to the individual but encode the memories of wider groups of people. Throughout Titus Andronicus Shakespeare is interrogating how to understand the trauma that our family experiences; when faced with Lavinia’s mutilation, Titus asks ‘shall we cut away our hands like thine?’ (III.I.131) suggesting that to understand another’s trauma is to inflict the violence on yourself. This is particularly interesting when considering Tamora’s lack of disfigurement although she suffers familial losses throughout Titus Andronicus – but rather than this absence suggesting her lack of emotional trauma, Shakespeare instead uses it in contrast to the Andronicus family to display the specific

physicality of how they experience collective trauma.
Speak, gentle niece, what stern ungentle hands
Hath lopped and hewed and made thy body bare
Of her two branches. (III.I.16-8)

Marcus specifically invokes the presence of the family in the discovery of Lavinia’s trauma through the imagery of ‘lopped and hewed’ branches.

For Lavinia, her suffering is not something which is separate and individual but in fact a blight on the family tree – and this extends further, until her rape does not only signify the beginning of the end for her family but also the end of an uninterrupted Roman history. The amputations and brutalities that the Andronicus family experience can therefore be viewed as symbols of political and cultural loss, as well as the inheritance of trauma which embeds itself in the

body.
[Unveils Lavinia]
Die, die Lavinia, and thy shame with thee,
And with thy shame thy father’s sorrow die.
[He kills her.] (V.III.45-6)

It is significant that Lavinia is veiled at the beginning of the scene and only unveiled right before Titus kills her to cleanse both of them of her ‘shame’.

Without her body on display her identity becomes void; she becomes merely a shadowed figment of the virginal bride she was presented as at the outset (although the bridal veil, or flammeum, did not cloak the face, suggesting Lavinia is entirely separate from the version of herself presented at the opening of the play). It is difficult to extricate Titus’ alleged mercy-killing from the indictment that Lavinia’s death can be seen as a peace-offering in order to purge both the Andronicus family and Rome from the sins of its history – only once all of the dismembered and mutilated bodies are removed from the stage can there be renewal.
Whilst Titus Andronicus uses mutilation as an attempt to hide truth (Chiron and Demetrius disfigure Lavinia so she cannot accuse them of her rape) Richard’s deformity is an emblem of both his own nature and the diseased political state of England. The identity of a community desires a figure to form itself against, and Richard functions as the much-needed scapegoat in history; yet Shakespeare presents an opposing view in the play

itself:
The noble isle doth want her proper limbs,
Her face defac’d with scars of infamy. (III.VII.124-5)

Buckingham uses the image of a disfigured England to justify Richard’s potential kingship. Whilst we can read Buckingham’s statements as a form of propaganda, there is something resonant about him using ‘limbs’ and ‘face defac’d’ as support for Richard considering how explicit and notable his deformity is throughout the play. Shakespeare depicts both man and nation as physically deformed to some extent, and yet England’s deformity is artificial (in need of ‘proper limbs’) whereas Richard’s is inescapable. The play tracks the overall preoccupation with the body as a wider issue:
But I, that am not shap’d for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamped and want love’s majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph. (I.I.14-7)

Richard’s opening soliloquy charts the movement from the exterior to the interior world, beginning in the emphatically masculine world of battle and war and gradually moving through the social sphere of the court to a lady’s bedchamber and finally to the realities of Richard’s body. Physical deformity is here poised in direct opposition to the other demands of Richard’s life, and this in turn presents him as specifically detached from the world. Shakespeare also depicts Richard’s body as being ‘shap’d’ and ‘stamped’ by an external force. Yet the paralleling of Richard and England suggests a dangerous interdependency that cannot last.
Abate the edge of traitors, gracious Lord,
That would reduce these bloody days again,
And make poor England weep in streams of blood. (V.V.35-7)

Just as Lavinia’s death is on some level perceived as necessary in curing the ills of Rome, so too is Richard’s death required to heal England of its ‘bloody days’. Richard’s deformity is thus seen to encompass the deformity of England, and so to kill his corporeal body is to destroy the abstract disease in England’s history as well. Both Titus Andronicus and Richard III therefore present the body (particularly the deformed body) as symbolic of wider cultural and political issues.
Both plays retain a morbid fascination with the body in ruin; this is never more explicitly demonstrated than in the seduction scene between Richard and Anne, with the dead corpse of Henry VI in the backdrop. The entirety of human existence is boiled down in the two plays to the visual signifiers of experience and memory which language can only occasionally access and soften. And yet the bodies are open to appropriation by those around them – Lavinia’s mutilations become one image of the suffering her entire family experiences, whilst Richard’s deformity is discussed in detail by other characters. This seeming antithesis, in which the body is simultaneously inaccessible and public commodity, gestures at the difficulty in presenting internal experience and memory through a theatrical form.
Shakespeare would explore and interrogate the design of the human body in the next decade and a half of his career, continually reinventing the dramatic significance of the maimed body. And yet these representations never achieve the stark brutality of the bodies in Titus Andronicus and Richard III, nor the thematic centrality that they possess.