Mutius: An obstacle removed in Titus Andronicus

Review of English Studies

Volumn 55, Issue 219, 2004, Pages 196-209

  Boyd, Brian ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND   (New Zealand)

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EID: 62949185198     PISSN: 00346551     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/res/55.219.196     Document Type: Article

References (44)

1. 'The apparently late addition of the Mutius material, for instance, contributes strongly to the structural patterning which critics have praised as characteristically Shakespearian': G. Taylor, 'The Canon and Chronology of Shakespeare's Plays', in S. Wells and G. Taylor with J. Jowett and W. Montgomery, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford, 1987), 115. For the 'apparently late addition', see below.
2. Within twenty lines of killing Mutius, and with his body still on stage, Titus winces at Saturninus's reproach (not for the killing, which Saturninus somehow has not seen, but for the abduction of Lavinia, effected by Bassianus with the help of Titus's brother and sons): 'O monstrous! What reproachful words are these?... These words are razors to my wounded heart' (I. i. 308, 314), then sulks that he has not been allowed to wait upon Tamora at her wedding ceremony and has been 'dishonoured thus' (I. i. 338-40) - all of this with no thought of the Mutius he has just killed. Citations are from Titus Andronicus, ed. E. Waith (Oxford, 1984).
3. Tilus Anäronicus, ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge, 1948), p. xxxvi;
4. S. Wells, Re-editing Shakespeare for the Modern Reader (Oxford, 1984), 99-100;
5. Gary Taylor, cited in Titus Andronicus, ed. Waith, 96 n.;
6. Titus Andronicus, ed. J. Bate, Arden 3 (London, 1995), 104-7.
7. M. Mincoff, Shakespeare: The First Steps (Sofia, 1976), 213, has argued - for him, very mildly - against construing Mutius as an afterthought.
8. As observed in Taylor, 'The Canon and Chronology of Shakespeare's Plays', 114.
9. Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (Oxford, 2002).
10. B. Boyd, 'Common Words in Titus Andronicus: The Presence of Peele', Notes and Queries, 240 (1995), 300-7;
11. MacD. P. Jackson, 'Shakespeare's Brothers and Peele's Brethren: Titus Andronicus Again', Notes and Queries, 242 (1997), 494-5.
12. H. T. Price, 'The Authorship of Titus Andronicus', JEGP 42 (1943), 55-81,
13. and id., Construction in Shakespeare, University of Michigan Contributions in Modern Philology 17 (Michigan, 1951), argued that 'palliament' is wrongly used in Titus, and that the mistake must have Shakespeare's confused borrowing from Peele's poem;
14. T. W. Baldwin, however, showed in 1959 that the word is not mistaken in its Titus context, and that Peele, 'as the inventor and only known purveyor of the word must remain grievously suspect' as co-author; 'The Work of Peele and Shakespere on Titus Andronicus'', in On the Literary Genetics of Shakspere's Plays, 1592-1594 (Urbana, 111., 412); see also Vickers 2002.
15. MacD. P. Jackson, 'Stage Directions and Speech Headings in Act 1 of Titus Andronicus Q- (1594): Shakespeare or Peele?', Studies in Bibliography, 49 (1996), 134-48, p. 136. Jackson adduces other decidedly un-Shakespearian and demonstrably Peelean features in the staging implications, the typographical format, and the wording of stage directions and speech headings.
16. 'The Canon and Chronology of Shakespeare's Plays', 115.
17. Shakespeare: Co-Author, 192.
18. See e.g. M. Rose, Shakespearean Design (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), 135: 'The opening scene ... is a tour de force. .. . Dramatic effect is piled on dramatic effect with extraordinary profligacy, yet the artist's shaping hand is firmly in control. Nothing quite like this scene had been written for the Elizabethan stage before.'
19. See also N. Brooke, Shakespeare's Early Tragedies (London, 1968), 27,
20. and B. Boyd, 'Kind and Unkindness: Aaron in Titus Andronicus' in Words that Count: Essays on Early Modern Authorship in Honor of MacDonald P. Jackson (Wilmington, Del., 2004).
21. See Shakespeare: Co-Author, ch. 1 ('Sir Thomas More') and ch. 7 passim.
22. Rose, Shakespearean Design, 137.
23. The Life and Minor Works of George Peele, ed. D. H. Home (New Haven, 1952), 173.
24. For an even more striking example, see Peek's Battle of Alcazar, 11. 337-51: 'To pay thy due anaI duties thou dost owe, | heaven and earth, to Gods and Amurath. | ... heaven and earth give ear | Give ear and record heaven and earth ... | . . . hearken and attend, | Heart... | ... The true succession . . . | . . . to succeed... | ... Gods of heaven . . . | That men on earth ... | ... my due and duty is done, I pay | To heaven and earth, to Gods and Amurath'. I have modernized the text in vol. ii of the Yale Peek (New Haven, 1961), in which The Battle of Alcazar is edited by John Yoklavich.
25. 'Plot Structure in Peele's Plays as a Test of Authorship', PMLA 51 (1936), 689-701: 694.
26. Serin, Studies in the Dramatic Construction of Robert Greene and George Peele (Berne, 1973), 208,
27. and cf. 92 ('the two main opponents in parallel situations', in The Battle of Alcazar), 104 ('repetition of a similar situation', in David and Belhsabe),
28. Works of Peele, ed. Home, 42-4.
29. See Boyd, 'Common Words',
30. Titus, ed. Dover Wilson, p, xxx.
31. See M. Charney, Titus Andronicus (London, 1990), 118: 'Titus's killing of his daughter ... is completely within the value system of The Rape of'Lucrece. The murder is shown as an act of love to which Lavinia gives her tacit consent,'
32. The Third Part of King Henry VI, ed. M, Hattaway (Cambridge, 1993).
33. If he added the killing of Mutius after reaching Bassianus's speech beginning at I. i. 411, he would also have had to insert the reference to the killing that now occupies I. i, 418, perhaps in a manner such as Wells suggests (Re-editing Shakespeare, 114).
34. Titus Andronicus, ed. J. C. Maxwell (1953; 2nd edn. London, 1961), 5 n.;
35. Titus, ed. Waith, 85 n., 88 n.;
36. Wells, Re-editing Shakespeare, 99;
37. Titus, ed. Alan Hughes (Cambridge, 1994), 146-7;
38. and Titus, ed. Bate, 103-4, 134 n.
39. Against: H. F. Brooks in Titus, ed. Maxwell (1961 edn.), 5 n.;
40. Mincoff, The First Steps, 213;
41. and MacD. P. Jackson, 'The Year's Contribution to Shakespearian Study, 3. Editions and Textual Studies', Shakespeare Survey, 38 (1985), 247-8. The sacrifice of Alarbus is of course essential to the structure of the play, to the vengeful hostility Tamora and her family feel towards the Andronici. But in support of the argument that the onstage representation, rather than the mere reporting, of the sacrifice of one of Tamora's sons, is an insertion, I would make three additional points.
42. v
43. Peele often relies on narrative where someone more naturally a dramatist would eschew it (in David and Bethsahe throughout, in The Battle of Alcazar, especially Stukley's bizarre deathbed autobiography, in Edward I, and in The Old Wives' Tale), and, as Arthur M. Sampley noted, Peele has 'not learned the secret of placing emphasis where it is due' ('Plot Structure in Peele's Plays', 696). In view of his practice elsewhere, therefore, Peele may well - again, pace Mincoff - at first have thought this merely narrated reference to the death of Tamora's eldest son sufficient.
44. Not only, as Ruth Nevo notes, are 'the bodies of Titus' sons, killed in the war . . . left suspended in mid-air awaiting the burial' that has been interrupted by the sacrifice of Alarbus ('Tragic Form in Titus Andronicus', in A. A. Mendilow (ed.), Further Studies in English Language and Literature (Jerusalem, 1973), 9), but after the sacrifice is over, and Titus blesses the bodies of his sons, he also dwells on the security of their state (I. i. 150-6) yet does not attribute it to the sacrifice which was supposed to guarantee that security, a lapse barely explicable if the sacrifice has just taken place.