The Oxford English Dictionary defines barbarism as ‘rudeness or unpolished condition of language’ as well as the ‘absence of culture’, further defining it as the opposite of civilisation.1 Both definitions of the word have been in use as early as the late sixteenth century. While Europeans during the Age of Discovery often attributed the label of barbarian or savage to cultures outside of Europe especially, texts such as Michele de Montaigne’s ‘Of the Cannibals’(1580), which inverted notions of the barbarian and the civilised by demonstrating respectable aspects of the culture of the Tupinambá cannibals in relation to the French, demonstrate alternative ways of thinking about barbarity and civilisation in this period. By representing the capacity for barbarism in both of the opposing groups of Titus Andronicus and Othello — Goths and Romans, Venetians and Moors — Shakespeare continues the undermining of dominant contemporary conceptualisations of barbarity precedented by writers such as Michel de Montaigne.
In Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare subverts the expected binary of Roman civilisation and Goth barbarity through the extended irony in the first scene of the play. In her discussion of identity in the play, Molly Easo Smith argues that Titus Andronicus begins ‘by asserting polarities, [and] proceeds to undermine them by collapsing boundaries that separate self from Other’.2 This is indeed evident from the outset of the play as Shakespeare collapses the distinction between civilised (Roman) self and barbarous (Goth) Other through the barbarity of Alarbus’ killing, the barbarity of Saturninus and Bassianus’ battle for Lavinia, and more explicitly through Saturninus’ marriage to Tamora which merges Goth and Roman identities. However, what makes this erosion of boundaries and Roman barbarity so noticeable is the irony that Shakespeare creates through the staging.
By beginning the scene in the Senate — emblematic of Roman civilisation — with Tribunes and Senators ‘aloft’ according to the stage directions, which symbolises their moral superiority over the other characters, Shakespeare alerts us to the Romans’ self-perception as civilised ‘Self’, a status which he then undermines through the ensuing brutality. The play’s opening lines ‘Noble patricians, patrons of my right, | defend the justice of my cause with arms’ highlights the frailty of Rome’s civilised status because of the irony of Saturninus’ readiness to appeal to violence as the means by which to defend honour, reinforced by his appeal to the Tribunes to ‘plead… with swords’ rather than with words, which would denote civilisation.3 Through the opposition of the scene beginning this way but ending with Titus having committed filicide and justified it in the name of honour, and sacrificed another parent’s child to the Roman gods, Shakespeare highlights the barbarism latent in Roman civilisation but disguised by its tendency towards ceremony.
David Willbern writes that attack and defence are the two basic impulses which energise the play and that in depicting Saturninus and Bassianus entering from opposite sides, the structure of the play’s opening shows this.4 That the defensiveness which underpins the theme of violence in the play is introduced to us through the Romans rather than the Goths or even Aaron also constructs the Romans as barbaric. This is reinforced by Shakespeare’s constant allusions to Roman mythology as the gods of the Romans were often characterised by their brutality. Demetrius comforting Tamora after Alarbus’ death by saying that ‘the self-same gods that armed the queen of Troy | with opportunity of sharp revenge… May favour Tamora’ (1.1.139-40, 142) portrays vengefulness as a Roman trait. That showing mercy is conceived of as an offence in the eyes of the Romans is made explicit in Lucius’ warning to all at the end of the play regarding Aaron’s punishment of being buried alive: ‘If anyone relieves or pities him, | For the offence he dies’ (5.3.180-81).
Saturninus also likens Tamora to Phoebe, goddess of the hunt who famously turned Actaeon into a stag for accidentally seeing her naked, subjecting him to a violent death wherein he was mauled by his own dogs and relishing the scene. After the seizure of Lavinia by Bassianus, Saturninus turns to Tamora instead and says
lovely Tamora, queen of Goths,
That like the stately Phoebe ‘mongst her nymphs
Dost overshine the gallant’st dames of Rome. (1.1.320-22)
Through Saturninus’ description of Phoebe as ‘stately’, and his regarding her a complimentary figure by which to measure his wife against despite Phoebe’s cruelty, Shakespeare indicates the naturalisation and glorification of barbarity as a model of civilisation in the Roman imagination, highlighting the irony of Marcus’ plea to Titus that ‘Thou art a Roman, be not barbarous’ (1.1.383).
The barbarism of the Goths is figured through the sexual violence that provides the impetus for the play’s reduction of the Roman characters into constituent body parts. Smith writes that ‘Titus more than any other of Shakespeare’s plays dwells on the spectacle of dismemberment and mutilation’.5 While the rape and mutilation of Lavinia serves as a very graphic manifestation of Goth barbarity, the aftermath of it, that is, the dismemberment of the Andronici, also works to expose the true character of Roman civilisation. The first signifier we get of Roman culture in the play is in Young Lucius’ book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Act 4 Scene 1. Yet even in this brief moment of peace from barbarity, Shakespeare complicates the Romans’ claim to a civilised identity as the characters, due to their collective dismemberment, are unable to demonstrate their literacy in the normative way and must instead rely on gestures to communicate with one another, signified by Lucius’ guiding Lavinia to ‘write’ her rapists’ names using her foot. This way of uncovering truth, not through speech or even manual skill but bodily movements and physical aids, can be seen as analogous with the babbling of ‘primitive’ cultures as the Andronici attempt to create sense without the tools usually accessible to them as ‘civilised’ people.
This barbarism is emphasised by Titus’ instruction to Lavinia at the end of the scene to ‘Bear you my hand, sweet wench, between thy teeth’ (3.1.283), which conjures a bestial image that demonstrates the reduction of the Andronici to base animality . Thus, while the scene is symbolic of the degradation of the once-great Romans, it also serves as a display of the Romans’ true barbarous nature in contrast to the appearance of civilisation put forward in the diplomacy of the Senate. This is underscored by the setting of this scene being the house (a private space wherein people are the most ‘themselves’ according to Irving Goffman’s dramaturgical theory) in contrast to the setting of the play’s opening scene, which takes place in the Senate and is therefore very self-consciously civilised.
Although the play’s focus on Tamora’s ascension to prominence —realised through the centrality of Lavinia’s rape and mutilation in the play from Act 2 onwards — appears to support a reading of the play that figures Goths as more barbarous than Romans, the way in which Shakespeare frames Tamora’s actions throughout the play continually undermine this reading. David Sterling Brown writes, for example, that once Tamora ascends to the throne, ‘the drama quickly displaces Roman centrality’ and ‘the margin displaces the expected centre, redefining both the state and the family through cultural integration’.6 This implies that Tamora’s emergence as a central player signifies the marginalisation of Romans in the play. Yet in becoming the Roman Empress through her marriage to Saturninus, Tamora’s identity becomes subsumed into a Roman one, which she herself references by saying ‘I am incorporate in Rome, | A Roman now adopted happily’ (1.1.467-68). Tamora’s cruelty, then, which marks the play from the end of Act 1 onwards can therefore be seen as an embodiment of the full capacity of Roman barbarism, keeping Roman identity at the centre of the play’s events despite it seeming otherwise.
The main way Shakespeare represents Tamora as emblematic of Roman barbarism is through Tamora’s repeated references to Titus’ initial act of barbarism in the first scene of Act 1. Shakespeare continues to evoke Tamora’s desperate pleas for her son’s life (‘…must my sons be slaughtered in the streets | For valiant doings in their country’s cause?’ and ‘Thrice noble Titus, spare my first-born son’) in her speeches justifying her evil deeds (1.1.115-16, 23). For example, in her encouragement to her sons to ‘use her [Lavinia] as you will: | The worse to her, the better loved of me’ (2.2.166-67), Tamora urges her sons to remember how ‘fierce Andronicus would not relent’ (2.2.165) in his decision to sacrifice Alarbus to the gods. By explicitly framing Titus’ lack of mercy as the driving force for Tamora’s call to her sons’ brutality against Lavinia (the implication being that the vigor of their rape of her should correspond with Titus’ brutality in sentencing Alarbus to his death), rather than displacing the Romans from the a position of centrality as Brown asserts, Shakespeare highlights Roman barbarity through Tamora’s own cruelty.
Thus, although other characters assert Tamora’s inherent barbarity by repeatedly animalising her through labels such as ‘ravenous tiger’ (5.3.194) and ‘beastly creature’ (2.2.182), by constantly evoking Alarbus’ memory to show that Tamora’s own barbaric behaviour is in fact a response to Roman mercilessness, Shakespeare explicitly positions the Roman Empire as the seat of barbarism itself, rather than merely showing both Goths and Romans to be capable of barbarism.
In a discussion of the historical interpretation of Othello’s skin colour, Michael Neill writes that the reading of Othello that emerged in the Victorian period and would dominate scholarly thought until the late twentieth century, supported by critics such as A.W. Schlegel and Laurence Lerner, was that Othello was the story of a barbarian playing the part of a civilised man only to relapse into his true barbarian nature by the end of the play.7 Othello’s skin colour, then, was simply ‘a sign of the irreducible barbarity concealed beneath his veneer of Venetian civilization’ (p. 117). However, despite giving Othello the sobriquet ‘The Moor’ which would have indicated barbarity to his contemporary audience, throughout the play Shakespeare uses Othello’s language to constantly undermine theories of Othello as merely an ‘erring barbarian’, even in his moments of barbarism. By contrasting Othello with Iago and highlighting Iago’s role in Othello’s gradual loss of dignity, Shakespeare also shows that barbarity is not limited to the racial Other in the play.
A section of Leo Africanus’ Geographical History of Africa listing the vices attributed to North African Moors illustrates the traits that Elizabethans would have likely ascribed to a character like Othello. Africanus, on whom the character of Othello may have been modelled, wrote that the inhabitants of Barbary were ‘needy and covetous’, ‘wonderfully addicted to wrath’ and ‘a rude people… born and bred to theft, deceit and brutish manners’.8 While Othello begins to embody these traits as the play progresses, Shakespeare emphasises this to be the result of Iago’s poisoning in the same way that he presents Tamora’s barbarity as a consequence of Titus’ own barbarity in Titus Andronicus. Further, by presenting these traits in the Venetian characters, Iago especially, Shakespeare also destabilises categorisations of barbarism and civilisation within the play.
Shakespeare highlights Iago’s role as the instigator of the play’s violence by beginning the play with Iago rousing Brabantio into a racist rage in which he accuses Othello of having enchanted (1.1.63) Desdemona and bound her ‘in chains of magic’ (1.1.65). While Brabantio and Iago portray Othello as a barbarian through their references to sorcery and their hyper-sexualisation of Othello, Shakespeare in turn depicts them as barbaric. In Brabantio’s angered lament that ‘She is stolen from me’ (1.3.61), which figures Desdemona as a possession, he embodies the covetousness and wrath associated with Moors which Shakespeare juxtaposes with Othello’s calmness and his humanisation of Desdemona in allowing her to speak for herself. Similarly, Iago enacts both the deceit and brutish manners Africanus speaks of by utilising the cover of night to shield his duplicity and through his repeated use of blasphemous oaths. Thus, through the Venetian characters’ attempts to categorise Othello as barbaric, Shakespeare locates barbarism not in Othello’s identity as a Moor but in Venetian society itself.
Shakespeare continues to undermine the categorisation of Othello as a mere barbarian by referencing Othello’s Christian identity at the crucial moment of his murdering Desdemona. Before smothering Desdemona, Othello instructs her to repent of any unrepented sin, saying ‘I would not kill thy unprepared spirit’ (5.2.31). This concern for her soul is representative of his civilisation, which is only emphasised by the contrast between his murder of Desdemona and Iago’s murder of Emilia. While Othello’s civilisation is made apparent by his care for Desdemona’s soul and his soliloquy, which has the double function of delaying the murder as well as demonstrating his warm feelings towards his wife, Iago kills Emilia urgently to silence her from exposing his villainy. The callous disregard Iago has for his wife is demonstrated by the brevity of his murder, which is only indicated by the stage directions ‘[Iago kills his wife]’ in contrast to Othello’s soliloquy. It is also not a coincidence that Iago’s choice to kill Emilia for threatening to ‘speak as liberal as the north’ (5.2.219) perpetuates the practice of femicide as a means of silencing women that Shakespeare associates with barbarism in Titus Andronicus.
That it is Iago and not Othello who finds his analogue in the Thracian barbarian of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Titus’ Demetrius and Chiron highlights Shakespeare’s overturning of the expected binaries of civilised Venetian and barbaric Moor. By contrasting the play’s two acts of uxoricide, which can be seen as the play’s central moments of barbarism, Shakespeare complicates our ability to view Iago and Othello’s characters as representative of civilisation and barbarism respectively.
Further, that Othello’s speech returns to its former dignity while killing Desdemona also signifies Othello’s duality. Jennifer Feather writes that ‘To be a barbarian is by definition to be one who is lacking the ability to use language and is hence, bestial’.9 As the play progresses and Iago’s manipulation takes root in Othello’s mind, his language deteriorates from its elevated status to mirror Iago’s own crudeness, shown by the number of times he refers to Desdemona as a ‘whore’ in the final two Acts. This lack of refinement is again reversed, though, in his soliloquy before he kills Desdemona. He begins his speech with the reason for his killing, which cannot be named for its impurity: ‘Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars: | It is the cause’ (5.2.2-3) Through the reversion to iambic pentameter as opposed to the incoherence and repetition such as ‘O monstrous! Monstrous!’ (3.3.428), ‘O, blood, blood, blood!’ (3.3.451), and ‘Pish! Noses, ears, | and lips!’ (4.1.39-40) that his speech from Act 3 onwards is characterised by, Shakespeare again elevates Othello to heroic status, emphasised by his soliloquy’s focus on justice.
If, as summarised by Feather, to be a barbarian is to lack the ability to use language, then Shakespeare’s attribution of elevated poetic language to his ‘barbarian’ Moor in the central moment of his savagery complicates our reading of what is taking place. While the act of smothering his wife itself embodies the barbaric, Shakespeare simultaneously shields this barbarism through Othello’s language and Christian sensibilities in allowing Desdemona to pray for her sins. Proclamations such as ‘I’ll not shed her blood, | Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow’ (5.2.3-4) not only separates Othello from a barbarian identity through his conformity to his host culture’s customs, in this case being the idealisation of whiteness, they also present Othello as chivalrous, evoking the same heroism he displays at the beginning of the play in his public relationship to Desdemona.
Although he depicts Othello descending into a jealousy that culminates in the murder of his own wife, Shakespeare’s portrayal of Othello throughout the play complicates reading Othello himself as simply returning to his natural state of barbarism at the end of the play. While what makes Othello civilised is his conformity to Venetian customs, upholding notions of Western superiority, Shakespeare nevertheless challenges claims of the inherent barbarism of Moors, albeit using racist ideology to do this. On the other hand, in Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare goes further than depicting the Romans and Goths as equally barbarous, instead presenting the Romans as the more barbaric of the two cultures by centering their brutality even in their marginality. By using the backdrop of war for both plays and showing the celebration of Venetian and Roman military achievements by their people (which shows the hypocrisy in valorising state sanctioned violence and vilifying individual acts of violence) Shakespeare, like Montaigne, challenges Eurocentric conceptualisations of civilisation and barbarity.
Bibliography
Africanus, Leo, A Geographical History, trans. by John Pory (1600)
Brown, David Sterling, ‘Remixing the Family: Blackness and Domesticity in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus’ in Titus Andronicus: The State of Play, ed. by Farah Karim-Cooper (United Kingdom: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019) pp. 111-34
Feather, Jennifer, ‘“O blood, blood, blood”: Violence and Identity in Shakespeare’s “Othello”’, Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, 26 (2013), 240-63
Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. ‘barbarism, n.’ 1.a; 2.a. <https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/15389?redirectedFrom=barbarism#eid> [accessed 10 May 2023]
Shakespeare, William, Othello: The Moor of Venice, ed. by Michael Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)
Shakespeare, William, Titus Andronicus, ed. by Jonathan Bate (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018)
Smith, Molly Easo, ‘Spectacles of Torment in Titus Andronicus’, Studies in English Literature, 36 (1996), 315-31
Willbern, David, ‘Rape and Revenge in Titus Andronicus’, English Literary Renaissance, 8 (1978), 159-82
- Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. ‘barbarism, n.’ 1.a; 2.a. [accessed 10 May 2023].
↩︎ - Molly Easo Smith, ‘Spectacles of Torment in Titus Andronicus’, Studies in English Literature, 36 (1996), 315-31 (317).
↩︎ - William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. by Jonathan Bate (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018), 1.1.1-4. Subsequent references to this edition to be made in-text.
↩︎ - David Willbern, ‘Rape and Revenge in Titus Andronicus’, English Literary Renaissance, 8 (1978), 159-82 (161).
↩︎ - Smith, ‘Spectacles of Torment’, 318.
↩︎ - David Sterling Brown, ‘Remixing the Family: Blackness and Domesticity in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus’ in Titus Andronicus: The State of Play, ed. by Farah Karim-Cooper (United Kingdom: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019) pp. 111-34 (p. 112).
↩︎ - Michael Neill, ‘Introduction’ in William Shakespeare, Othello: The Moor of Venice, ed. by Michael Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 117. Subsequent references to this edition to be made in- text.
↩︎ - Leo Africanus, A Geographical History, trans. by John Pory, (1600).
↩︎ - Jennifer Feather, ‘“O blood, blood, blood”: Violence and Identity in Shakespeare’s “Othello”’, Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, 26 (2013), 240-63 (241).
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