SOURCE: Smith, Molly Easo. “Spectacles of Torment in Titus Andronicus.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 36 (spring 1996): 315-31.

In the following essay, Smith offers a theoretical approach to the play's juxtaposition of philosophical categories, particularly the Self-Other dichotomy, and studies the ways in which such oppositions symbolically collapse over the course of Titus Andronicus.

In its reliance on spectacles of death, Shakespeare's early Roman tragedy, Titus Andronicus, resembles The Spanish Tragedy, though unlike Thomas Kyd's play, which exploits the theatrical value of the hanged body as entertainment, Titus also accentuates the value of dismemberment and mutilation even as it undermines the efficacy of physical public punishment.¹ J. Dover Wilson's remarks about the play present an early recognition of its more than Senecan content; his suggestion that the play is “like some broken-down cart, laden with bleeding corpses from an Elizabethan scaffold, and driven by an executioner from Bedlam dressed...