Abstract
On 28 February 2023 news broke that a missing couple, Constance Marten and Mark Gordon, had been found and arrested in the south of England after a manhunt that had begun 53 days earlier when they had abandoned a burning car by the side of a motorway in Lancashire with their newborn baby, which had apparently been born on the back seat of the car. In the weeks since they had fled, the couple had been caught on security cameras from time to time, and at first they had the baby with them; however, when they were arrested there was no sign of it, and 200 police officers immediately began to comb the rough ground where they had apparently been living in a tent, hoping to find the child before it came to harm in unusually cold weather.
At the time of the announcement of the couple's capture, on 26 February 2023,
There were striking latent parallels between the story of the fleeing couple and the play. Constance Marten is a white woman from an extremely wealthy family with royal connections (her father was a pageboy to Queen Elizabeth II); Mark Gordon is a Black man convicted of rape in the United States. The baby was thus biracial and the couple clearly felt it important to conceal it from the authorities, though their reason for wanting to do this was unclear. However, in the light of the Wanamaker production one common factor between the news story and the play particularly stood out, and that is the actual or threatened exposure of the baby. It was the fear that a very young baby was outside in cold weather that got 200 police officers searching through scrubland, because the idea of a baby outside and unprotected is a monstrous and horrifying one. It is not, though, unthinkable or unprecedented: It was the fate of Oedipus in Greek legends and of Romulus and Remus in Roman ones. It is also the fate to which the infant Perdita is subjected in
I want to start by considering some of the uses of stage space in the play. The opening stage direction of
It is clear that whoever wrote this (perhaps George Peele, to whom the first act of the play is now generally credited and who had helped his university friend William Gager prepare two plays for the entertainment of Prince Albertus Alasco in 1583)
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thought that the use of stage space was important and significant: as Maria del Sapio Garbero observes, ‘the possibilities offered by the triple-layered form of the Elizabethan stage in this play's opening scene – gallery or upper stage, main stage, the “cellarage” accessible through a trapdoor – are fully exploited here’.
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As the play develops it becomes clear that it is particularly interested in the difference between inside and outside, which is frequently represented as both a literal and a symbolic distinction. One of the two royal brothers and competitors, Bassianus, exhorts his fellow Romans, If ever Bassianus, Caesar's son, Were gracious in the eyes of royal Rome, Keep then this passage to the Capitol, And suffer not dishonour to approach The imperial seat, to virtue consecrate, To justice, continence and nobility. (1.1.10–15)
‘Dishonour’, ‘virtue’, ‘justice’, ‘continence’ and ‘nobility’ are all abstract nouns, but Bassianus apparently connects them with something very concrete because ‘this passage to the Capitol’ presumably refers to an actual part of the stage (probably one of the two doors at the back which led into the tiring-house), and his injunction to ‘keep’ it implies that he wishes the access to the interior space of power to be policed physically as well as metaphorically, as is indeed underlined when Saturninus has to say ‘Open the gates and let me in’ (1.1.65). This command is presumably obeyed because a stage direction immediately afterwards reads ‘
Matters are not improved when the door Brothers, help to convey her hence away, And with my sword I’ll keep this door safe. (1.1.291–2)
Keeping the door ‘safe’ proves to mean holding it against his father: ‘My lord, you pass not here’ (1.1.294). Mutius’ defence of the door results in both his own death and also the metaphorical ‘death’ of the door, which must now cease to act as the entrance to the Senate House and take on a succession of new identities. This always happens in early modern plays, but it does so in an unusually self-conscious way in
This metatheatricality makes it unsurprising that no sooner has the space behind the stage done duty as the Senate House than it is called into play again, this time to serve as the tomb of the Andronici.
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This is defined by Titus as a pure and hallowed place: Here lurks no treason, here no envy swells, Here grow no damned drugs, here are no storms, No noise, but silence and eternal sleep. (1.1.156–8)
The tomb is free of human vice and sin, but it is also sterile and inorganic: Titus specifies its freedom from bad plants and bad weather, but there are also no good plants and no good weather. This is an inside space which may be safe, but is also a literal dead end. Or is it? Lucius seems to imply that it might not be: Give us the proudest prisoner of the Goths, That we may hew his limbs and on a pile Before this earthly prison of their bones, That so the shadows be not unappeased, Nor we disturbed with prodigies on earth. (1.1.99–104)
Lucius apparently envisages the sacrifice of Alarbus as part of a rite that will prevent the potential breaching of a barrier between this world and the next and prevent supernatural activity by his dead brothers: the tomb may be the ‘earthly prison of their bones’, but it cannot necessarily contain or keep back ‘their shadows’. In Garbero's analysis, it facilitates the uncanny ‘
Lucius’ words figure the tomb as not so much a sealed container as a door into the afterlife, an inside that potentially transports its occupants into a different sort of outside, in the shape of the Elysian fields in which, as Charles King notes, many Romans believed their dead to wander. 8
There might even be a double significance to the stage direction ‘ One ritual that suggests the existence of an underworld was the opening of the mundus. The mundus was a subchamber or pit within an underground chamber, which the Romans opened three times a year in a state-ritual that was probably connected to the agricultural cycle. Varro (quoted by Macrobius,
Peele, who had had a classical education at Oxford, might well have read about doors inside tombs, or growing antiquarian interest in England might even have led to the observation of such a feature: Garbero notes that both Stow and Camden commented on the discovery of a Roman cemetery in the fields outside London.
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There is certainly a suggestion in Titus, unkind and careless of thine own, Why suffer'st thou thy sons unburied yet To hover on the dreadful shore of Styx? (1.1.89–91)
The dead sons are hovering, unable to move forwards or backwards, because Charon cannot bring his boat to take them across the river of death until their bodies have been buried (with coins placed in their mouths to pay his fee). The souls may have left their bodies, but they are still bound to them, and until their living relations physically carry the bodies into the tomb, the dead souls remain literally stranded, an image which must have had particular power in a theatre which was itself built on the strand of the Thames. Thomas Rist observes that ‘Elizabethan and Jacobean Revenge Tragedy … regularly reflects and intervenes in the period's religious controversies over the dead’,
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while J. Y. Michel contends that all revenge plays ‘are so death-oriented that they are bound to reflect, in some way or other, Elizabethan funerary rituals. Actually, late sixteenth-century playgoers, actors and playwrights considered the stage as a set of funerary items and buildings’. What such buildings showed, however, was in Michel's view in the eye of the beholder, because while ‘[t]he Elizabethans who held on to Catholicism still thought that monuments showcased holy relics and symbolized an allegorical vision of death’, for Protestants ‘[m]onuments sheltered dead matter which was useless or even poisonous as long as it was not contained in what may be called a “deathtight” edifice. Only the outward shape of the monument was worthy of worship because it symbolized an idealized social order’.
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But in
There may also be a hint of the connection to the agricultural cycle mentioned by King. Titus apostrophises the tomb: O sacred receptacle of my joys, Sweet cell of virtue and nobility, How many sons of mine hast thou in store That thou wilt never render to me more? (1.1.95–8)
In effect, Titus figures the tomb as a cupboard: both the phrase ‘in store’ and the idea of rendering work to connect the tomb to the idea of harvest produce, which is stored away so that it may be kept fresh and removed later. The idea of harvesting is picked up later in the play when Demetrius says of Lavinia ‘First thrash the corn, then after burn the straw’ (2.2.123), and perhaps too when Lucius queries Aaron's use of ‘trimmed’ with reference to Lavinia and Aaron replies, ‘Why, she was washed and cut and trimmed’ (5.1.95): Lavinia has O let me teach you how to knit again This scattered corn into one mutual sheaf. (5.3.69–70)
Although modern etymologists dismiss any connection between the words ‘threshing’ and ‘threshold’, Shakespeare (and Peele) might well have understood them as related, and it is perhaps suggestive that Emillius compares Lucius to Coriolanus (4.4.67) because when Shakespeare comes to write
There is also another strand of imagery at work here in Titus’ description of the tomb: He calls it a ‘cell’, a term used too for the lodging of monks and nuns. There is evidence that some monks’ cells also offered a window and potentially a door to the afterlife. There are no surviving monks’ cells in England as a result of the Reformation, but the Renowned Lucius, from our troops I strayed To gaze upon a ruinous monastery, And as I earnestly did fix mine eye Upon the wasted building, suddenly I heard a child cry underneath a wall. (5.1.20–4)
As many critics have observed, it is surprising to find a ruined monastery in Rome, but it would not be in the least surprising to find one in Shakespeare's England. It would also not have been surprising to find a child abandoned near a religious house, though it would more probably have been a convent than a monastery: as in
By evoking a ruined monastery, the play takes us from classical Rome to early modern England as well as inviting us to think not only of an imagined landscape but also of a real one. By the time that Shakespeare and Peele wrote I do love these ancient ruins: We never tread upon them but we set Our foot upon some reverend history. And questionless, here in this open court, Which now lies naked to the injuries Of stormy weather, some men lie interr’d Lov’d the church so well, and gave so largely to't, They thought it should have canopy’d their bones Till doomsday; but all things have their end: Churches and cities, which have diseases like to men, Must have like death that we have.
Shakespeare himself would be buried in the chancel of Holy Trinity Stratford, suggesting that he too may have attached some importance to being buried under a roof, and others also mourned the loss of monasteries and convents: As Eamon Duffy notes, William Lambarde's
Any religious houses that were not still ruined had been converted into mansions for Tudor magnates. The Dissolution sparked a lot of building and conversion activity that stimulated a new interest in architecture, reflected in Traitors, away! He rests not in this tomb. This monument five hundred years hath stood, Which I have sumptuously re-edified. (1.1.354–6)
What
Officially, inside is safe and outside is dangerous. Titus pleading for his sons’ lives adduces ‘all the frosty nights that I have watched’ (3.1.5), implying that it is particularly meritorious on his part to have spent nights outside when it is cold, and he has had to remain alert. There is also an inherent distrust of the outside evinced when Titus announces that Alarbus will be sacrificed and Tamora objects not only (understandably) to the proposed act but also, less predictably, to its location: ‘But must my sons be slaughtered in the streets’ (1.1.115). Later she repeats the phrase when she vows vengeance and says she will ‘make them know what ’tis to let a queen / Kneel in the streets and beg for grace in vain’ (1.1.459–60). Saturninus also draws attention to the distinction between inside and outside when he declares, Sith priest and holy water are so near, And tapers burn so bright, and everything In readiness for Hymenaeus stand, I will not resalute the streets of Rome, Or climb my palace, till from forth this place I lead espoused my bride along with me. (1.1.328–33)
Finally, Titus tells Demetrius to ‘Look round about the wicked streets of Rome’ (5.2.98). Outside, it seems, is a dangerous and hostile place, and the streets of Rome particularly so.
If the streets of Rome are wicked, its buildings are prestigious. Saturninus has already said he will marry Lavinia ‘in the sacred Pantheon’ (1.1.246); now he says ‘Ascend, fair queen, Pantheon’ (1.1.338). Since there has already been a stage direction that reads ‘
Soon, though, the distinction between inside and outside starts to fall apart. In her article ‘Illicit privacy and outdoor spaces in early modern England’, Mary Thomas Crane argues that ‘real privacy, especially for illicit activities, was, until well into the seventeenth century, most often represented as readily attainable only outdoors’.
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One manifestation of this is the religious symbolism underlying a garden such as the Lyveden New Bield, of which Andrew Eburne argues that after ‘the 1593 act … had driven recusancy more firmly into the private arena’; faith sometimes found expression in garden design, partly through symbolic shapes and structures and partly through the fact that ‘[p]opular contemporary Catholic culture attached religious significance to a great variety of plant life’.
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In effect, a garden such as that at Lyveden New Bield had become a
I suggest that a systematic, religiously informed ambiguity pervades the landscape in which the hunting episode of
Not least because of the shared idea of horns, anything to do with hunting could also suggest bedroom encounters, particularly illicit ones. Owen Emmerson, Kate McCaffrey, and Alison Palmer note that during his courtship of Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII ‘sent to Hever a buck he had killed himself by his own hand, telling Anne that he hoped when she ate it, she “may think of the hunter”’, 25 and William Cornysh's song ‘Blow thy horn, hunter’, also associated with the court of Henry VIII, blatantly smuggles in bawdy comments about orgasm disguised as a story about a doe who will not die (for anyone who doesn't immediately get the point, one of the lines asks ‘Now the construction of the same – what do you mean or think?’). 26 Nor was the elision between hunting animals and hunting women confined to the reign of Henry VIII: Elizabeth was often figured as Diana, an icon of beauty but also the goddess of the hunt (as for instance in the frieze which adorns the wall of the High Great Chamber at Hardwick Hall). Garbero notes that St Paul's Cathedral was believed to have been built over a temple of Diana, an idea that the antiquarian William Camden considered to have been confirmed by the fact that ‘an incredible number of Ox-heads’ had been dug up there in the reign of Edward I, understood as evidence of sacrifices. 27 The hunt scene takes place outdoors, but it also has the potential to suggest indoor settings as well as reminding audiences of religious and political controversies.
The character who most strikingly undermines the distinction between inside and outside is Aaron. First, he recalls that It did me good before the palace gate To brave the tribune in his brother's hearing. (4.2.35–6)
This is another instance of a location being unexpectedly stressed, as when Tamora objects to having her son slain ‘in the streets’: It seems one thing for Aaron to ‘brave’ Marcus Andronicus and another for him to specify that he did so ‘before the palace gate’, and it creates a sense that this defiance hovers uneasily between a public and a private status. There is a more disturbing sense of liminality when Aaron boasts that Oft have I digged up dead men from their graves And set them upright at their dear friends’ door. (5.1.135–6)
Not only is he violating the taboo against disinterment of human corpses, he is also outraging any sense that the door of a house is a barrier – literally between inside and outside, metaphorically between what we welcome into our homes and what we exclude from them. Although purely coincidental, it is perhaps suggestive that not long before
It is Aaron who introduces the play's most dangerous space, the wood outside Rome which is no green world but rather a place where the city's human tigers may prey freely upon their victims. Alexandra Walsham has shown how ‘the landscape of the British Isles became a battleground in which wars about memory were waged’: Numinous sites in the landscape could provide ‘a focus for conservative resistance to the Reformation’ by means of what Walsham calls a ‘sacred geography’.
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Shakespeare arguably seems to subscribe to this idea in The forest walks are wide and spacious, And many unfrequented plots there are, Fitted by kind for rape and villainy. (1.1.614–6)
In this lawless place, Aaron assures the two Goths, they will be able to isolate Lavinia and ‘strike her home by force, if not by words’ (1.1.619), with the word ‘home’ working with savage irony to underline that what is being proposed is a monstrous violation of a woman's private interior space. The idea of the woods as a problematic home is developed when Aaron goes on to tell the rapists that The emperor's court is like the House of Fame, The palace full of tongues, of eyes and ears; The woods are ruthless, dreadful, deaf and dull. (1.1.626–8)
Court and wood are in a fearful apposition to each other: the court, a built environment, is animate, but alive only with malice, while the wood, which should be organic and populated with animal, bird and insect life, is unfeeling and unhearing.
If exterior spaces are dangerous, so too are interior ones. It was well understood in the early modern period that the city of Rome was environed by walls; Christopher Marlowe, for instance, mentions them in If Lucius live, he will requite your wrongs And make proud Saturnine and his empress Beg at the gates like Tarquin and his queen. (3.1.297–9)
Other interiors are also unsafe. Young Lucius says of Chiron and Demetrius, if I were a man Their mother's bedchamber should not be safe For these base bondmen to the yoke of Rome. (4.1.107–9)
Tamora's oddly phrased warning to Saturninus that ‘[y]ou are but newly planted
The most dangerous interior of all is the pit. First mentioned by Tamora at 2.2.98, the pit is an inside space contained in an outside landscape; its onstage location might reprise the space previously used for the tomb of the Andronici, but if so, there is no suggestion of any potential passage to a better world. The fullest description of it comes from Quintus, who characterises it in profoundly ambiguous terms as he asks his brother Martius, What, art thou fallen? What subtle hole is this, Whose mouth is covered with rude-growing briers Upon whose leaves are drops of new-shed blood As fresh as morning dew distilled on flowers? A very fatal place it seems to me. (2.2.198–202)
Quintus’ summing-up of the pit as ‘A very fatal place’ entirely disregards the oddly pastoral note introduced by the mention of fresh morning dew and flowers, but then the fact that ‘flowers’ was a standard early modern term for menstruation should alert us to the fact that the pit is, as Marion Wynne-Davies observes, a womb as much as a tomb. 32 Unlike the inorganic tomb, the pit does have vegetation, but the dew looks like blood and the briers are ‘rude-growing’, hinting not only at the lack of cultivation but also at the pubic hair that we would expect to find in the vicinity of the entrance to the womb. It is no wonder that Martius calls it an ‘unhallowed and bloodstained hole’ (2.2.210): It is an inside which is more threatening than any outside could be.
An almost equally perilous inside is Titus’ house, about which we have an unusual amount of information. The first thing we learn is that Lavinia has a closet in it: Lavinia, go with me; I’ll to thy closet and go read with thee Sad stories chanced in the times of old. (3.2.82–4)
It also has a kitchen, as we see when Titus orders, ‘So, now bring them in, for I’ll play the cook’ (5.2.204); this is only to be expected, but what may perhaps surprise us is that contains an armoury, as we learn when Titus asks his nephews to accompany him there (4.1.113). Finally, there is a study: when they go to Titus’ house Tamora tells Chiron and Demetrius to ‘Knock at his study, where they say he keeps’ (5.2.5), and a few lines later Titus asks ‘Is it your trick to make me open the door?’ (5.2.10). Garbero suggests that ‘Titus’ library (which as a stage presence materialises in Act 4.1 and Act 5.2) contains ideally all the books that have been written’,
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but neither the knowledge stored in the library nor the weapons stored in the armoury can make the house safe. Titus seems to know this when he says ‘Lavinia, come; Marcus, look to my house’ (4.1.120), but he presumably does not know that Aaron has been able to spy on him in his own home: I pried me through the crevice of a wall When for his hand he had his two sons’ heads (5.1.114–5)
Like the CCTV that helped trace Constance Marten and Mark Gordon, Aaron can spy on what people think is private, and the wall of the house cannot stop him any more than the wall in
Titus’ house lends itself to three further uses. Emillius tells Lucius that Saturninus ‘craves a parley at your father's house’ (5.1.159), implying that there is a large room suitable for what are in effect diplomatic negotiations; Aaron is being kept prisoner there (5.3.122), and Titus hosts a banquet in which he serves up the product of his earlier activities in the kitchen. This monstrous meal is the play's final and grossest violation of the border between inside and outside. When enquiry is made about the whereabouts of Chiron and Demetrius, Titus announces, Why, there they are, both baked in this pie, Whereof their mother daintily hath fed. (5.3.59–60)
This is doubly horrific in that Chiron and Demetrius are inside the pie, violating the taboo against cannibalism in general, but have further been ingested by their mother in a hideous inversion of her role as bringer forth of babies. There is also a ghastly latent parody of the Eucharist in which the sanctified flesh and blood of the son of God is replaced by the cooked human flesh of the sons of the queen of Goths, and it is perhaps conceivable that this might have resonated with contemporary conflicts about transubstantiation (which was a salvific miracle) versus consubstantiation (which might be seen as an act of mere eating).
When he is banished from Rome, Titus Andronicus’ son Lucius speaks of his exile in terms that recall the expulsion from Paradise: ‘The gates shut on me, and turned weeping out’ (5.3.104). That original expulsion was from a garden into a world of buildings and interiors; Lucius and indeed all the play's characters now find themselves in a world where the distinction between built and natural environments has collapsed, and this may indeed have been how Shakespeare and his contemporaries thought of Rome. Huw Griffiths notes that in Inigo Jones' account of Stonehenge, not published until 1655 but prepared well before that, Jones ‘pronounces that the stones are the remnants of a temple to the Roman God Tell us what Sinon hath bewitched our ears, Or who hath brought the fatal engine in That gives our Troy, our Rome, the civil wound. (5.3.84–6)
‘The fatal engine’ was the Trojan horse, which was brought into Troy after the walls, which had kept the city safe throughout the siege, were partially demolished in order to admit it; inside it was a contingent of Greek soldiers who admitted the rest of the army and captured the city. It is an appropriate analogue for the events of the play because by acknowledging and understanding how what should have been kept outside has come to be allowed inside, Rome might finally come to a proper understanding of its own identity and be able to reclaim its historic sense of self.
Two days after the arrest of Constance Marten and Mark Gordon, the remains of their baby were found. They had refused to disclose not only its whereabouts but also its sex, and when the body was discovered, that question could not initially be resolved; however, when they were charged with manslaughter, court documents gave the baby a name – Victoria, the Latin word for victory, which sounds a hideous echo of Lucius’ triumph at the end of the play – and also revealed that the body had not been buried but concealed in a plastic bag. Although various productions, including this one (and the Julie Taymor film), provide closure for the story of Aaron and Tamora's baby, the text offers no certainty that Lucius will honour his guarantee of the child's safety, but the fate of both its parents is spelled out by the play. Lucius gives orders for the burial of Saturninus, Titus, and Lavinia but decrees that Tamora will not be buried (5.3.190–7) and that Aaron is to be placed half in and half out of the earth: ‘Set him breast-deep in earth and famish him’ (5.3.178). Earlier in the play Marcus Andronicus had condemned the failure to bury as a mark of the savage when he exhorted Titus to allow the body of his son Mutius into the family tomb: ‘Thou art a Roman, be not barbarous’ (1.1.383). He goes on to develop the point by reminding his brother that ‘The Greeks upon advice did bury Ajax’ (1.1.384), who had committed suicide. There is something visceral about most people's reaction to the idea of leaving a body unburied: For many commentators it made it worse that Marten and Gordon had not only let the baby die but had hidden the body, and it has also been a persistent trope of reporting of the war waged by Russia against Ukraine (another crucial temporal context for the production at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, which ran from 19 January until 15 April 2023) that the Ukrainians retrieve and bury their dead while the Russians abandon theirs. As we have seen, it was a fundamental tenet of the Roman belief that if the body was left unburied then the soul of its owner could not progress to the afterlife; it may be no coincidence that
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful for the help from Tony Morgan and also for the detailed and thoughtful comments of the two anonymous readers.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
