Romanity and Sparagmos in Titus Andronicus

Titus Andronicus, like Shakespeare’s other Roman plays, broaches questions of national, political and cultural identity, especially focussing upon the disruptive drives of desire, sexuality, as well as rank and racial antagonism. Romanity is here the figure of decadence in the name of the crisis of pietas which connotes the decline of political and state power replaced by a sense of belongingness tied to family bonds and blood feud logic that rekindles archaic outbursts of unlimited violence. Dismemberment (Tricomi 1974; Rowe 1994; Christiansen 2000), announced in the metaphors of hewing and lopping used early on in the play by that same Lucius who will eventually become the restorer of order, literalizes the language of mutilation and self-mutilation at the root of what increasingly appears to be rituals of sparagmos. Within this frame, the essay concentrates on this play’s revision of the Roman intertexts, from Seneca’s Troades and Thiestes (see e.g Miola 1992) to Ovid in the dramatization of the iron age of Romanity (symbolized by Astrea’s absence in the play) as a complex ritual of sparagmos, spanning the notions of self, family, community and Romanity in their dialectic with ‘the (barbarous) other’.