Critical examinations of William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus almost always occlude questions of the domestic. Yet, a major portion of the play’s action takes place in a house and the methods of the characters’ revenge can be construed as domestic. More simply, in Titus, household properties and domestic rituals are transformed into instruments of vengeance. With a particular focus on the cultural and historical conditions governing literary production in early modern England, this thesis draws on previous scholarly work and examines the intersection of domesticity and revenge in Titus. The thesis is divided into two sections, each of which addresses different, though overlapping, ways in which domesticity – broadly speaking – operates in the play. The first section examines the play’s two competing revenge plots, demonstrating that not only are they domestic in nature, but also that many of the play’s features align closely with generic traits and devices integral to plays classified as “Domestic Tragedies.” The second section focuses on Titus Andronicus’ Senecan roots and examines carefully the function(s) of the domestic setting in Titus as well as Seneca’s Thyestes, one of Shakespeare’s sources. I explore the ways in which the play’s domestic setting is distinctly Senecan and discuss Shakespeare’s alterations to his Latin source. While the house becomes a site of domestic and dynastic anxiety in both Seneca’s Thyestes and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s play evinces a concern with domestic privacy that Seneca’s does not.

For my MFA internship requirement, I currently serve as an acting intern at the Orlando Shakespeare Theater in Partnership with UCF. I was cast as Lavinia in OST’s spring production of Titus Andronicus, and I will use this as my thesis role. It will be the very last show of my MFA career, and it will provide an exceptional opportunity for me to utilize all the skills learned during my three years of MFA classes and training. Jim Helsinger, Artistic Director at the Orlando Shakespeare Theater and Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Central Florida, will direct the production. I intend to approach this role in a manner very similar to my MFA coursework: through vocal work, physical work, and research. Lavinia is a Shakespearean character; Shakespeare is immediately associated with language. However, Lavinia is interesting because the role’s vocal work will require both verbal and non-verbal experimentation. I will be able to utilize the various language tools and techniques I have learned in my MFA voice classes to approach Shakespeare’s text; but Lavinia has her tongue cut off halfway through the show, so I anticipate additional vocal, non-verbal contributions to make the role unique. Physicality will also play a large part of my acting work in this particular role, more so, perhaps, than in a typical Shakespearean ingénue. Because Lavinia is verbally silenced, her body must also speak. No approach to a Shakespeare role would be complete without character work, and research will play a large part of this role in particular. Mr. Helsinger encourages his interns to watch other productions of the same character and to perform visual research from which to pick iv and choose. I also plan to do research on violence against women and its significance in both the play and real life in order to better inform my vocal and physical choices. By delving into this role, I plan to explore several questions. What exactly makes up the voice, as heard or interpreted by an audience, of a Shakespearean character? How has my graduate study prepared me for this role? What techniques work for my own personal process as an actor? How do the voice, mind, and body combine to inform a character’s arc, and which of these will prove most powerful to an audience’s understanding of that character’s journey? Is it possible to retain the audience’s attention in a Shakespearean, text-oriented, production without using words? I hope to answer these questions through the process of combining, in one character, all of the aspects of my MFA journey.

In offering readings of Shakespeare’s tragic women on film, this thesis explores bodies that are caught between signifiers of absence and presence: the woman’s body that is present with absent body parts; the woman’s body that is spoken about or alluded to when absent from view; the woman’s living body that appears as a corpse; the woman’s body that must be exposed and concealed from sight. These are bodies that appear on the borderline of meaning, that open up a marginal or liminal space of investigation. In concentrating on a state of ‘betweenness’, I am seeking to offer new interpretive possibilities for bodies that have become the site of much critical anxiety, and bodies that, due to their own peculiar liminality, have so far been critically ignored. In reading Shakespeare’s tragic women on film, I am interested specifically in screen representations of Gertrude’s sexualised body that is both absent and present in Shakespeare’s Hamlet; Desdemona’s (un)chaste body that is both exposed and concealed in film adaptations of Othello; Juliet’s ‘living corpse’ that represents life and death in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet; the woman’s naked body in Roman Polanski’s Macbeth (1971) that is absent from Shakespeare’s play-text; and Lavinia’s violated, dismembered body in Julie Taymor’s (Titus, 1999) and Titus Andronicus, which, in signifying both life and death, wholeness and fragmentation, absence and presence, something and nothing, embodies many of the paradoxes explored within this thesis. Through readings that demonstrate a combined interest in Shakespeare’s plays, Shakespeare films, and Shakespeare criticism, this thesis brings these liminal bodies into focus, revealing how an understanding of their ‘absent presence’ can affect our responses as spectators of Shakespeare’s tragedies on film.

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Titus Andronicus is infamously Shakespeare’s first, and bloodiest, tragedy, but only a few scholars link this violence with the Renaissance culture of anatomy and dissection. Although scholars mention the anatomical language in Titus Andronicus, their analyses stop short of more fully developing the rich relationship between dissection and Shakespeare’s play. To remedy this oversight, this paper explores the debt that Titus Andronicus owes to contemporary anatomy and dissection culture by comparing Titus Andronicus (est. 1590) with Andreas Vesalius’s revolutionary anatomy textbook, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543). Specifically, this paper will identify four major intents of the Fabrica: 1) to display, 2) to instruct, 3) to interpret, and 4) to aestheticize the interior of the human body, and illustrate how these four traits figure in the representation of Lavinia’s body in the play. By mirroring the Fabrica’s four intents in both anatomy text and play, as well as examining the Fabrica’s images and text itself, this analysis reveals a pertinent difference. While in many ways Titus Andronicus celebrates the De Humani Corporis Fabrica, the play applies a heavy dose of skepticism to Vesalius’s underlying epistemological assumption that the body is knowable.

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Shakespeare references humoral medical theory and social definitions of gender throughout much of his work. His references to medical practices like purging, the siphoning of excessive emotional fluids to bring the body into balance, are more than allusions to medical theories. Shakespeare's works unveil and challenge early modern approaches to emotional experience, most particularly when it comes to traumatic experiences that overwhelm comprehension. In Titus Andronicus (1592), The Rape of Lucrece (1593), Hamlet (1603), King Lear (1608), and Macbeth (1606), Shakespeare invokes humoral theory to articulate the early modern traumatic experience and to criticize the efficacy of purging in representations of trauma. For Shakespeare, the siphoning of destabilized emotions, through metaphorical and rhetorical practices, has dangerous consequences for bodies coded as feminine.

[pt] O objetivo desta dissertação é analisar o tratamento dado pelas traduções brasileiras aos personagens negros na obra de William Shakespeare: o Príncipe de Marrocos em O mercador de Veneza, Aarão em Tito Andrônico e Otelo na tragédia homônima. O estudo parte dos pressupostos de que o preconceito racial é uma construção ideológica que se dá pela via do discurso e de que a tradução, como uma modalidade discursiva, pode desempenhar um papel na reprodução de ideologias. O estudo desenvolveu-se em três etapas: (i) identificação de ocorrências de discurso racista no texto-fonte; (ii) localização, nos textos-alvo, das traduções de cada possível afirmação racista previamente identificada; (iii) análise das soluções tradutórias observadas e os efeitos gerais que estas provocaram nos diferentes produtos finais, a fim de verificar em que medida as versões acabam por reconstruir, intensificar ou atenuar o preconceito percebido na obra original. O corpus de análise é constituído por The Merchant of Venice, juntamente com três traduções brasileiras, feitas por Carlos Alberto Nunes, Cunha Medeiros/Oscar Mendes, e Barbara Heliodora; Titus Andronicus, e as versões brasileiras realizadas pelos mesmos tradutores; e Othello, nas traduções de Onestaldo de Pennafort, Carlos Alberto Nunes, Cunha Medeiros/Oscar Mendes, Péricles Eugênio da Silva Ramos, Barbara Heliodora, Beatriz Viegas-Faria e Jean Melville. / [en] The purpose of this thesis is to examine how Brazilian translations deal with Shakespeare`s black male characters: The Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice, Aaron in Titus Andronicus and Othello. The study is based on the assumption that racial prejudice is an ideological construct, mediated by language, and that translation as a discursive mode may play an important role in the reproduction of ideology. The research was conducted in three steps: (i) identification of instances of racist discourse in the source text; (ii) identification in the target text of the translated instances of such racist discourse; (iii) analysis of these translations and the general effect they may have on the different end products, so as to verify whether the Brazilian versions reconstruct, intensify or mitigate the prejudice identified in the original work. The plays examined were The Merchant of Venice, and three Brazilian translations by Carlos Alberto Nunes, Cunha Medeiros/Oscar Mendes, and Barbara Heliodora; Titus Andronicus, in renderings by these same translators; and Othello, as translated by Onestaldo de Pennafort, Carlos Alberto Nunes, Cunha Medeiros/Oscar Mendes, Péricles Eugênio da Silva Ramos, Barbara Heliodora, Beatriz Viegas- Faria, and Jean Melville.

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Thesis (MPhil)--Stellenbosch University, 2012. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Breyten Breytenbach's Afrikaans translation of William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus is a little known member of the corpus of Afrikaans Shakespeare plays. Published without annotations in South Africa in 1970 and performed in Cape Town in the same year, it has never been performed again and the text has attracted no academic review or led to any subsequent editions. However, situated in 1970 in the heyday of the Apartheid regime, the play's production broke attendance records in Cape Town and was accompanied by substantial public controversy. In this thesis, the author analyses Breytenbach's translation in order to determine whether the translator had an ideological agenda in performing the translation. The analysis is based on a preliminary discussion of culture and ideology in translation, and then uses the Skopostheorie methodology of Hans J. Vermeer (as developed by Christiane Nord) to assess the translation situation and the target text. The target text has been analysed on both a socio-political and microstructural level. The summary outcome of the analysis is that the translator may possibly have tried to promote an anti-Apartheid ideology by translating the play. The outcome is based on several contextual factors such as the socio-political situation in South Africa in which the translated play was published and performed, the translator's stated opposition to the Apartheid system, the choice of Titus Andronicus for translation and production, and to a lesser extent the level of public controversy that accompanied the target text's production in the theatre. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Breyten Breytenbach se Afrikaanse vertaling van William Shakespeare se Titus Andronicus is 'n min bekende eksemplaar van die versameling Shakespeare toneelstukke in Afrikaans. Dit is sonder enige annotasies in 1970 in Suid-Afrika uitgegee, en is dieselfde jaar in Kaapstad opgevoer. Sedertdien is dit nooit weer opgevoer nie, en die teks het geen akademiese kritiek ontlok nie. Die teks is ook nooit weer herdruk nie. Maar in 1970, tydens die toppunt van die Apartheidregime, het hierdie toneelstuk se opvoering bywoningsrekords oortref en dit is deur aansienlike openbare omstredenheid gekenmerk. In dié tesis ontleed die skrywer Breytenbach se vertaling om te bepaal of die vertaler 'n ideologiese agenda in die vertaling van die toneelstuk gehad het. Die ontleding word op 'n voorlopige bespreking van kultuur en ideologie in die vertaalproses gegrond, en maak dan gebruik van die Skopostheorie van Hans J. Vermeer (soos verwerk deur Christiane Nord) om die omstandighede ten tyde van die vertaalproses sowel as die doelteks self te ontleed. Die doelteks is op sowel sosiaalpolitiese as mikrostrukturele vlak ontleed. Die samevattende uitkoms van die ontleding is dat die vertaler moontlik 'n anti-Apartheid ideologie probeer bevorder het deur hierdie toneelstuk te vertaal. Hierdie uitkoms is gegrond op verskeie samehangende faktore, soos die sosiaalpolitiese omstandighede in Suid-Afrika waarin die toneelstuk uitgegee en opgevoer is, die vertaler se vermelde teenkanting teen die Apartheidstelsel, die keuse van Titus Andronicus vir vertaling en opvoering, en tot 'n mindere mate die vlak van openbare omstredenheid wat gepaard gegaan het met die doelteks se opvoering in die teater.