Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Editor's note
- 1 Shakespeare and language: an introduction
- 2 Shakespeare's language and the language of Shakespeare's time
- 3 The foundations of Elizabethan language
- 4 Shakespeare's talking animals
- 5 Some functions of Shakespearian word-formation
- 6 Shakespeare and the tune of the time
- 7 Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet: the places of invention
- 8 Shakespeare's thematic modes of speech: Richard II to Henry V
- 9 Hamlet and the power of words
- 10 The art of the comic duologue in three plays by Shakespeare
- 11 Hamlet's ear
- 12 ‘Voice potential’: language and symbolic capital in Othello
- 13 The aesthetics of mutilation in Titus Andronicus
- 14 ‘Time for such a word’: verbal echoing in Macbeth
- 15 Household words: Macbeth and the failure of spectacle
- 16 Late Shakespeare: style and the sexes
- Index
13 - The aesthetics of mutilation in Titus Andronicus
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Editor's note
- 1 Shakespeare and language: an introduction
- 2 Shakespeare's language and the language of Shakespeare's time
- 3 The foundations of Elizabethan language
- 4 Shakespeare's talking animals
- 5 Some functions of Shakespearian word-formation
- 6 Shakespeare and the tune of the time
- 7 Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet: the places of invention
- 8 Shakespeare's thematic modes of speech: Richard II to Henry V
- 9 Hamlet and the power of words
- 10 The art of the comic duologue in three plays by Shakespeare
- 11 Hamlet's ear
- 12 ‘Voice potential’: language and symbolic capital in Othello
- 13 The aesthetics of mutilation in Titus Andronicus
- 14 ‘Time for such a word’: verbal echoing in Macbeth
- 15 Household words: Macbeth and the failure of spectacle
- 16 Late Shakespeare: style and the sexes
- Index
Summary
When T. S. Eliot so flamboyantly denounced Titus Andronicus as ‘one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written’, he naturally invited rebuttal. But while an apology forTitus can certainly be erected, the fact is that the imputed stupidities of the tragedy attract far more interest than any of its mediocre achievements. Indeed, if we would only persist in the study of those very ‘stupidities’ that many critics would rather forget, we would discover that the ways in which the figurative language imitates the literal events of plot makes The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus a significant dramatic experiment. In the play's spectacularly self-conscious images that keep pointing at the inventive horrors in the plotting, in its wittily obsessive allusions to dismembered hands and heads, and in the prophetic literalness of its metaphors, Titus reveals its peculiar literary importance.
The peculiar language of Titus Andronicus is particularly apparent in the literalness of its central metaphors. In a play preeminently concerned with the mutilation of the human body, Titus makes nearly sixty references, figurative as well as literal, to the word ‘hands’ and eighteen more to the word ‘head’, or to one of its derivative forms. Far from being divorced from the action as many critics claim, the figurative language points continually toward the lurid events that govern the tragedy. The figurative language, in fact, imitates the gruesome circumstances of the plot, thus revealing that Shakespeare subordinates everything in Titus, including metaphor, to that single task of conveying forcefully the Senecan and Ovidian horrors that he has committed himself to portraying.
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- Shakespeare and Language , pp. 226 - 239Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
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