Chapter 2 turns to the important idea in Kyd’s design of rhetorical hyperbole and dramatic excess by comparing the emerging ethical effects engendered by the moral void of Kyd’s play to similar but crucially different devices involving abused emblems of writing in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. These early, near-contemporary responses to Kyd weigh through performance the consequences of violent action when neither the circumstances of plot nor the demands of justice can help explain or assign meaning to such action within any conceivable moral calculus. In the process, the moral-tragic weight of such plays sinks under the irruption of farce and burlesque, thereby forcing the audience to re-evaluate their voyeuristic complicity in the unfolding onstage representation of ritualised, and highly aestheticised retaliatory acts of violence.

Shakespeare and George Peele’s Titus Andronicus (1591–94) stages both the proliferating texts and the religious violence of the early 1590s. These years saw a spate of sectarian libels from persecuted Puritans and Catholics alike. In Titus, the marginalized Andronici likewise launch ephemeral scraps of writing into the sky, texts that join appeals for redress with violent threats. These libels bear an especially close resemblance to those scattered in the streets by the Puritan extremist William Hacket and his accomplices in 1591. But the echoes are also cross-confessional, indicating a broader interest in the “manner” of religiopolitical speech. The play folds its topical allegory into a Tacitean-humanist history of political communication: the rise of the emperor, Saturninus, brings about the end of public oratory. Their speech silenced, the Andronici unleash a flurry of texts that takes the Tacitean story of rhetorical decline into its early modern future. By yoking libels not just to the pursuit of justice but also to factionalism and violence, Titus takes a hard look at the viral and virulent media of the late Elizabethan public sphere.

“Somatic Similarity: The White Other in Titus Andronicus,” uses Shakespeare’s first tragedy to expose the presence of the intraracial color-line. My book begins with this tragedy because it is the Shakespeare play that most efficiently showcases the white/white other binary produced by the intraracial color-line. This particular iteration of the color-line aligns and separates the play’s white characters along spiritual and moral lines. I use Titus pedagogically to guide the reader’s understanding of my book’s driving theoretical apparatus—the intraracial color-line—so they can then apply that concept in subsequent chapters and beyond the plays analyzed in my book. Shakespeare’s oeuvre is replete with appearances of the white other, as I suggest in the Introduction and at other moments. This gateway chapter challenges the easy assumption that one needs somatic Blackness in order to discuss race, or in order for race to be happening.

This chapter explores how early modern dramatists were often preoccupied with ideas of pity and compassion, and sought out new words and metaphors for articulating such feelings. It begins by considering Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage (c. 1585-6) and Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1587), arguing that these plays centralize ideas of emotional comparability, receptivity, and resistance that fed into the subsequent emergence of the term sympathy. It goes on to examine Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (c. 1594), which contains an important early example of the word sympathy being used to describe a harmony of woe. The chapter then explores the emergence of the verbal form sympathize in several plays from the late 1590s, including The Comedy of Errors and Troilus and Cressida. It concludes with a discussion of Samuel Brandon’s 1598 closet drama The Vertuous Octavia, in which the protagonist invokes the possibility that she might ‘simpathize’ with her husband, while simultaneously suggesting that she is capable of resisting such emotional forces. This new word reflected and enabled a more active conception of sympathy as a practice of individual choice and agency.

Chapter 9 discusses the use of Plutarch in drama understood as a mode of political reflection. I provide a brief analysis of the political implications of Shakespeare’s (1564–1616) famous use of Plutarch in a series of plays devoted to key figures of the classical era. I explore how Shakespeare’s depiction of public life shifted between his first Roman play Titus Andronicus, deemed to have been written before his close study of North’s translations of Plutarch, and his latter plays focused on key Greek and Roman historical figures (Timon of Athens, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra) for which his use of North is heavily documented and discussed. I then explore political themes and argument stemming from Plutarch and as relayed through Pierre Corneille’s (1606–1684) Pompée and Jean Racine’s (1639–1699) Mithridate.

Two temporary sites of performance for the Chamberlain’s Men (Newington Butts and the Curtain) provide me with the opportunity to reconsider the theatrical context in which Shakespeare was operating in the early part of his career. Attending to lost plays and performance details from this period helps adjust our view of the company’s theatrical activity and enriches our understanding of the company’s formative years. It is the lost plays – ‘Hester and Ahasuerus’ in particular – that give a meaningful shape to the Newington repertory and help make sense of the dramatic offerings at that venue. An equally important ‘formative moment’ for Shakespeare’s company is its eviction from what had become its regular venue – the Theatre – and the period of transition encompassing its tenancy of the Curtain and eventual move to the Globe. I argue that reconsideration of the physical and economic constraints faced by the Chamberlain’s Men in this period, and attention to lost plays in the Chamberlain’s and in the Admiral’s repertories for additional context, stand to significantly revise scholarly opinion on the conditions under which Shakespeare operated prior to his company’s move to the Globe.

This essay unpacks the strategic role of race in Titus Andronicus and brings to light the play’s earnest representation of racism’s entanglement in the demands of the global capitalist project born in Shakespeare’s time. Titus Andronicus dreams of London as a cosmopolitan capital with imperial aspirations in a proto-colonial world-economy. In the possible futures that the play dreams up for England, prescribing the most profitable forms of intercultural trafficking is a priority. The smart device used for establishing such prescriptions is called race. The racial regime ushered in by early modern globalization, triggered by colonization, and forged in the furnace of early capitalism, was predicated not upon the elimination of racialized others, but on their strategic and contingent inclusion at inferior ranks in a hierarchical multicultural society. Titus Andronicus dramatizes the push and pull between the exclusion and inclusion of racialized Others necessary to the growth of early modern world-economies.

In Chapter 4, I argue that prosthetic arms and legs were ideally imagined as articulate and mobile. They were strongly linked to a narrative of rehabilitation in which the amputee regained the ability to walk, ride, and in general to ‘perform’ able-bodiedness. This trend at once indexed a person’s character to their bodily abilities and suggested similarities between the prostheticised human body and a machine or automaton. This reading of prosthetics informs a detailed analysis of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Focussing on Lavinia’s plight after her hands and tongue are amputated, I argue that her use of a staff to write the names of her attackers is, pragmatically speaking, unnecessary. What is necessary, however, is that Lavinia utilises objects in order to resist her own objectification. By making signs, she resists others’ reading of her mutilated body as a passive sign, and regains a degree of agency. As ever, however, objects have meaning as well as people. Lavinia’s staff may allow her to reclaim her subjectivity, but it can as easily recast her as the perpetual rape victim or freakish supercrip.

In Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Shakespeare and Middleton’s Timon of Athens the title characters express intense anger and desire for revenge, but nonetheless retain their masculinity and do not degenerate into weakness or effeminacy. This essay identifies ways that these plays use gender to influence how audiences distinguish between extreme and excessive anger. In Titus Tamora’s failure as an effective avenger keeps revenge a masculine pursuit. Moreover, the play maps an emotional register onto the Goth-Roman-Moor racial and moral spectrum. Whereas Aaron’s and Tamora’s anger appears excessive, Titus’ appears moderately and appropriately Roman – despite the violence it entails. In Timon, female characters are virtually absent, and the play clears a place for considering men’s anger and revenge that brackets off effeminacy. The grounds for Timon’s misanthropic, vengeful tirades, rather than gender, determine whether his emotions are excessive. The questions raised in both plays about the line between extreme and excessive anger, and the revenge that ensues, thus have political implications. What reasons and circumstances make anger and revenge a legitimate response to being wronged? Who decides, and what role does gender play in that determination?

This chapter asks where and how Rome (and, by extension, polemics self-consciously characterized as reactions against Rome) figures in efforts to determine what the living owe to the dead, and what the dead can do for the living. Latin occupies a controlling position within this inquiry; so, too, do texts that cast the world of the living as the home of the dead; so, finally, do Reformation-era debates about the soteriological stakes of praying for the dead. These topics span a period of time in which Rome is the gravitational centre of a sequence of massive upheavals in vernacular piety and attendant debates about the relationship between the living and the dead. The chapter argues that interpreting these debates as facets of the fact of Rome alerts us to the role that the human voice plays in probing the limits of mortality and the nature of the human as such.

Recent scholarship has shown the increasing likelihood that Shakespeare’s very first work was collaborative, or at least that collaboration as a practice dominates his pre-1594 writing in ways that we are finally beginning to understand, something many chronologies of Shakespeare have failed to acknowledge satisfactorily. While the matter of firm dates for Shakespeare’s early work remains elusive, its collaborative nature must change both our conception of Shakespeare’s working practices in his early career as well as our sense of how collaborative writing may be better understood as part of his development as a literary and dramaturgical craftsman. This essay charts the various arguments for collaboration, canon, and chronology in Shakespeare’s early career, and proposes some ways of understanding how they map onto possible company affiliations in Shakespeare’s beginnings as a dramatist.