SOURCE: “Sexuality as a Signifier for Power Relations: Using Lavinia, of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus,” in Criticism, Vol. 38, No. 3, Summer, 1996, pp. 383-407.

In the following essay, Harris focuses on Lavinia’s role as the currency used in the play's political exchanges, observing that the treatment of her body serves as a means of identifying the source of authority in Titus Andronicus.

One of the most gruesome images of a woman on the Elizabethan stage occurs when Lavinia, in Shakespeare's early Roman play, Titus Andronicus, enters the stage, according to stage directions, with “her hands cut off, and her tongue cut out, and ravished” (at the opening of Act II, Scene 4).¹ Of course, the literary canon is strewn with dismembered or ravished women's bodies; Lavinia is one of many. An argument often made to deny that literary representations of a woman's sexual status or death might be motivated or interpreted...