SOURCE: “A Woman of Letters: Lavinia in Titus Andronicus,” in Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender, Indiana University Press, 1996, pp. 54-74.

In the following essay, Eaton suggests that through Lavinia, Shakespeare dramatized contemporary social tensions concerned with the value of humanist education. In particular, Eaton contends, Lavinia embodies the upper-class, humanist-educated woman who is perceived as a societal threat and who must consequently be silenced.

                                                                                          I will learn thy thought; In thy dumb action will I be as perfect As begging hermits in their holy prayers. Thou shalt not sigh, nor hold thy stumps to heaven, Nor wink, nor nod, nor kneel, nor make a sign, But I, of these, will wrest an alphabet, And by still practice learn to know thy meaning. 

—(3.2.39-45)

Titus speaks to Lavinia in my epigraph, and he terms her a “map of woe” whose body must “talk in signs” (3.2.11), since, as Marcus puts it...