"Justice has left the Earth": On the Other Side of the Law in "Titus Andronicus"

1 “Justice has Left the Earth”: The Other side of the Law Law in Titus Andronicus. Ladies and gentleman, [Good afternoon. Thank you for allowing me to appear before you today. I’d like to begin by warmly thanking the committee of the Melbourne Shakespeare Society for the invitation, and in particular, my friend, Mr. Jason Freddi -- without whom a certain roguish je ne sais quoi would vanish utterly from the earth. Also, I would, presumably not have the honour of addressing you today. It is at Mr. Freddi’s behest that I have been handed control over the next hour of your lives, and it is his -- too quickly given trust that I plan to abuse with my flirtations with the abstruse. My talk today is (or rather should have been) registered under the slightly pretentious title of the ‘visibility of the law in Titus Andronicus.’ I would like to quell from the outset any suggestion that this title is in anyway unrepresentative. This is a greater exaggeration than the one with which I am about to refute this suggestion: it is the least true thing that ever was. But, despite the soon-to-be proverbial aptness of my current title, some of you are, I am sure aware that it is a new-fangled one. The original title of my talk, i.e. the title that has been advertised for the last 10 months was “The Nature of Shakespeare’s Nature’. I deny the paternity of this coinage. It is entirely and I would say, unmistakably the work of Mr. Freddi, although the more outré amongst you have had the unrestrained temerity to suggest joint-authorship. May it do you well in the less august aspects of the lecture circuit. But although I have so recently disavowed this title, I would like to begin by saying 2 that it still in part indicative of the principle inspiration, if not the content of today’s talk. The reason that this title remains relevant, is that Titus Andronicus, the play whose reading I will direct in a few weeks, serves as a perfect introduction to the concept of nature in Shakespeare because it is, in my opinion, a play whose action consists in, and in another sense is rendered possible by one vast abstraction from the idea of nature. What do I mean by this? To abstract from something is to step back from it. An abstraction is, literally, a stepping back. In everyday language, we conventionally oppose the ‘abstract’ to the ‘concrete’. Thus when people mention, often disapprovingly that something is “”abstract” they often mean that it is bad, because abstruse, obscure, and above all pointless insofar as it has departed from, and consequently failed to encapsulate the concrete. “Abstract” is then associated with an amorphous, soap-bubble quality, which may be all very nice, but that suffers from the fact that it has left behind those palpable -- the concrete is inextricably connected with the tactile -- aspects of life and the world that constitutes what is putatively most real about reality. But what, we may ask, is meant by concrete? At the risk, of parodying or traducing the Socratic philosophy, we look for a definition: what is concrete? Presumably, the paradigm instance of the concrete is the substance of the same name that is used to make footpaths. And this substance is a paragon of “concretion” – that which ‘abstraction’ has moved too far away from because if one hits one’s head on it the results are perceived to be as concrete as anything can be – a veritable paradigm of ‘concretion’. But, it is precisely the concreteness of the concrete, that sometimes (its very ‘blow on the head’ quality) that sometimes it is the goal of abstraction to both 3 depart from, and to return. Abstraction, for the most part, is undertaken, for the most part, with a view to the concrete. If we want to see something, or understand something, in a very concrete sense, there are times, where what is indeed appropriate is that we bash our head on it. There is a famous incident involving Michel de Montaigne in which the great, and inauguaral essayist has an unusual, disoriented epiphany of numbness after falling off his horse of which -- the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben deduces no less than the essence of the concept of ‘life’ from this incident -- but we would not from such incidents ever say that such events are our only form of access to (whatever it is) that we think of as the concrete. In fact, it is important, I think, for us to notice, important to understand Shakespeare as much as any thinker, or any artist that it is precisely the goal of abstraction, to reach the concrete. There is a reason that the metaphor of the ‘odyssey’ is one of the most ineliminable in Western culture. Along with the metaphor of light it is a condition sine qua non, an indispensable condition of our thought. And the odyssey, best represents what in phenomenology is called the desire, to at once depart from something (from the world, from the city, from home) in order to see it better, in order to return to it with the observer changed and the world with it, but where the intention is often, not to lose, that from which we abstracted but to regain it. All art, all thought is an abstraction, but it is done in the name of the concrete, to make a restitution of it, to redeem it by seeing it in terms of the whole –we step back (abstract) from a square of colour to see the landscape of which it is a part. To abstract is therefore, to step back from the concrete, with the intention of seeing more clearly, more concretely, that which is so eminently and concretely capable of hitting us hard on the head. 4 On this note, I would mention that I subscribe to a reading of Plato that sees each of the dialogues as an abstraction from one part of the whole. This position holds that each dialogue, deliberately omits something of the total vision of the human soul, of the political, or moral lives of men and women of the Platonic universe – or rather, what would be more accurately termed, the Platonic kosmos. I do not know, but think it is implausible) that we could apply such a schema to Shakespeare’s plays. It smacks of a level of deliberation that is perhaps implausible for the busy actor, and man of the world with which (in particularly, a modern, democratic) tradition envisages Shakespeare. However, I do want to argue today that Titus Andronicus is precisely an abstraction in this “Platonic” mould. Specifically, it is an abstraction from nature, from what may well have been the seeds of a Shakespearean conception of nature that is at once revealed and concealed (the Greek word for truth ‘aletheia’ has these dimensions) in the totality of Shakespeare’s corpus. As with all abstractions, this abstraction serves, as I have argued, a purpose that is eminently concrete – that risks the loss of its goal in stepping back from it, but tries to make the possession permanent through being deeper; richer. The purpose of the abstraction that is Titus, this early, much maligned, recently restored play of Shakespeare’s is to consider the very concrete problem of the law. I use the definite article here advisedly, although with some caution. The caution comes from the fact that when I speak here of law, I am thinking of problems of the one and the many, of unity and (as well as “in”) diversity, classical problems from out of the oldest metaphysics. But, I mean something terribly concrete by this: Titus is concerned with the law, insofar as the problem of “the” law (and I use the definite article advisedly) is a problem that arises because of the multiplicity of laws. The problem of the multiplicity of laws is the problem of what to do about the multiplicity of conventions, of opinions, of 5 attitudes, of the varieties of human temperament, ambition, character. In particular, the problem of the law, is the problem of the need, for people to try and instantiate something like justice, amidst a multiplicity of ways of life. The quest for the law, is often therefore, an inquiry into the possibility of a law of laws -- a law that could rule over, bind, transcend and preserve the other laws. A prominent example of a candidate for such a law, would be what the political philosophy of the Middle Ages would refer to as ‘natural law’, whose contemporary equivalent (but not avatar) can be found in the idea – as opposed to the actual reality of ‘international law’. In order to help explain my meaning, I would like to briefly gloss to two Greek terms I am aware that this is an odd gesture for a play whose obvious references are (apart from a late Medieval pseudo-history), are the story of Tereus and Philomela from Ovid’s Metamorphosis and Seneca’s Thyestes. Subordinating Latin sources to Greek ones is a vice of late 19th century German philosophy, in which I shall only briefly indulge here. But I hope you will bear with me. The word for ‘law’ in Greek is nomos. It is more useful, for understanding Titus than the subtle Latin distinction between lex and jus which is why I will discuss it here. Different philosophers, in different contexts this word, have translated this word as ‘custom’, ‘convention’, ‘institution’. A twentieth century philosopher has argued that nomos, when it does not mean exactly what we mean by a ‘law’ (in the sense of positive law – a written injunction, prohibitions, statutes et cetera) means the ‘way something is most of the time’. But this definition, the same author argues, is also an excellent way of defining what in many languages could also serve as an apt 6 definition for ‘phusis’, the Greek word for ‘nature’. (Latin natura.) Both words, can be used to mean ‘the way something is most of the time’. Thus, it is the way of drunkards to drink, dogs to bark at strangers, and for the Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus to say things in fragments of proverbial obscurity. These things are customary. They emerge upon the way of things, “natural.” But, the two words, nomos and phusis receive their emphatic, determinate, and most importantly infinitely contestable meaning when they form part of a conceptual opposition. The best way to comprehend this opposition is to understand a fragment of the same Heraclitus of Ephesus who I just mentioned. The fragment runs thus: and I promise you that it will be short: Nature (phusis) loves to hide. But where – asks the reader -- where does it (nature) hide? The fragment presupposes an answer to its implicit question. Nature, phusis, in the relationship between nomos and phusis hides in the nomoi, understood here as in the way things are (or appears most of the time.): in custom, convention, law. The idea here (which may or may not be attributed to Heraclitus, but is definitely a concept for Sophists, for Plato and Aristotle) is that there is a nature of things that is at once hidden, but also—and this is crucial – at the same time revealed in the way things are. You may think that this is trivial: of course, the nature of things is both obscured and revealed by the way things are! Nothing could be simpler! If you do, this is testimony to the curious survival of ideas long after their official death and disavowal: a phenomenon without which nothing about the modern world, about ‘modernity’ can be understood. Itself, this is a vast topic worthy of much study, which is why I shall say no more about it here. But, the reason I want to stress what may be obvious to you, is to note a contrast, between this idea of nature (and its relationship to convention) and a two-fold modern concept of nature, which does not accord with the definition I have given. Of these two modern understandings of 7 nature, one is very broad and the other is very narrow. And yet they are sister concepts. Explaining: the very narrow concept of nature would say that the “natural” is that which is not artificial. Trees are natural, where bicycles, attitudes towards spitting, poetry, sex or constitutions are not, because all of the above (says this concept of nature) are the product of a human artificer – human creativity as the source for the irrefutable diversity of ‘culture’. The very broad concept of nature, is then one that emerges from the same thinking that produced this last concept extended to a different, in a sense, opposite conclusion. The idea here is that the natural is anything that is not ‘artificial’, but that human beings, are ‘natural beings’ products of evolution -- or whatever -- and thus all of humanity’s creations – anything that follows from the human capacity to create universes of meaning, art, ethics, is ‘natural’ because its very artifice is in accordance with the ‘way’ of things, the nature of human beings, who are themselves natural. Both concepts render the concept of ‘nature’ in a complex way irrelevant for thinking about moral or political issues. The paradigm instance of this is what Hume calls the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ – we cannot make an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ – and thus is why the way things are – nature – has no bearing on questions such as ‘what is the good life?’ Now, this concept of nature stands in contrast to the e nomos/phusis concept I am speaking of here, the broadly speaking “classical” concept of nature. This concept contains aspects similar to these ‘modern’ definitions, the major point of the nomos/phusis opposition is an idea of nature that is different from custom and convention – but by no means opposed to it. The idea that nature is something that hides in convention is the idea that nature is on the one hand, different from convention, but also something that we only ever get a glimpse of in the ‘conventional’ because of the ‘way things are most of the time’. This is why nomos is the hiding place of nature. 8 According to this conception, if we want to find out about the nature of things, about phusis, we have to look to the nomoi, we have to look to what is customary, to the way things are most of the time (which may be different at different places times, amongst different peoples) and from here, set out on the quest to find the natural – the nature of things, hidden in the way of things, that is obscured by the way of things, as well as revealed. This quest is set in motion by ancient Greek (and into Roman philosophy). If it were not for the element of revelation the quest would be impossible, were it not for the obscurity, it would be easy. The idea of nature, as something that is behind, or within customs and conventions, is the object of a philosophical quest, because this idea of nature is, in the Greek philosophical tradition from which it emerges serves a potentially basis – the basis for trying to differentiate between manifestly different customs, perspectives, attitudes, and institutions all of which might make a claim to be true, right, good, beautiful, or divine. In other words, nature is seen as something that in its odd status, as something that obfuscates itself, and yet is known to us, has a pre-eminently moral (and by extension political) significance. Thus, if the people over the mountains eat of the meat of the bison, but those on the plains do not, these are two different customs, two different laws of a people, two distinct nomoi. But the idea of a phusis, hiding in nomos, is a testimony and an expression of the idea that there might be a ‘proper’ way, or a right way. It is very important to note that it is quite possible that the right ‘natural’ way of doing things is not identical with either the practices of the people or the plains and those of the mountains. It may be absent from each. As the object of a quest, it is something that may be far away (in practices, or institutions that we have never seen), or right in front of us (in the way, the wise or the good, have conducted themselves since time 9 immemorial.) It is usually, in both, neither: a set of combinations that creates philosophy. But the point is that ‘nature’ is not something that is seen easily, or obviously or at the outset. It is contentious whether one has ever found nature. There may be something ‘natural’ about both or neither institutions of all or none of the institutions or customs that we come into contact with. They may be also all be distortions of nature. What is hard to grasp here, when I speak of a concept of nature with a moral significance is for very complex (good and bad) reasons, the idea of nature as suffused with a fundamental ethical significance has been unfashionable for centuries. There are various reasons for this, but one of the principles ones is that we associate the idea of speaking of one thing being ‘natural’ and something else being ‘unnatural’ with the kind of chauvanism that always seeks for some ground (god, nature and the like) for claiming that a perceived superiority of ‘our’ way to ‘theirs’ is in fact absolute, real, something that is ‘more than a feeling’. [cue Gurge providing soundtrack.] And we are right to be suspicious of such things – i.e. of letting someone get away, with naturalising, i.e. absolutising their point of view. In addition, such talk of nature, or of the good as the ‘natural’ also risks, many people have thought for a long time incoherence on a number of levels. The thinking that perceives this incoherence, runs as follows: customs, laws, habits, even people may be good or bad. However, insofar as they are all the product of human culture as human “creativity” (a concept, in some ways unknown to the ancient world poiesis, is not, ‘creation’ in the sense it means after the intersection of the Hebraic and Hellenic traditions) they are all equally natural. We may well want, and have good reason to distinguish between the good or evil of different practise, but nature will not help us, make these distincitons as it is neutral, blind, indifferent to moral values. From a one perspective, including that of most Whiggish histories of science, the beginnings of 10 the scientific worldview, begin precisely in the rejection of the idea that nature can be a source of values. “Finding” values in nature, has been, and will always be (says this way of thinking) a matter of projection: of (falsely) making the world into an image of ourselves. In particular, there is also a moral objection, in this turn against nature. It is a modern objection to a particular kind of chauvinistic stupidity, an example of which, for many modern moralists is in the first book of Aristotle’s Politics. I am talking about a famous section where Aristotle speaks of certain people being slaves by nature – and justifying this description with a reference to the way such people look, to their bodies. The ‘look of such people’, Aristotle says, which is presumably in some way slavish, reveals that they have a slavish nature, and thus that they deserve to be, i.e. that it is “sweet and fitting” that they should be salves. Such an argument, to the ears of a modern rational audience, is not only repulsive, it is also a sin against logic and reason. It is, in fact, guilty of committing a basic, everpernicious fallacy. This fallacy, is expressed by David Hume, as the ‘naturalistic fallacy’, and consists of deriving an ‘ought from an is’. Explaining: what Aristotle is doing, in Hume’s view, by inferring from a slavish appearance to the fact that people deserve to be slaves is looking at people who have been degraded and humiliated by being kept as slaves and then -- absurdly and illegitimately assuming that because they are slaves it is right for them to be slaves. And this form of argument, Hume would say, and we would I think agree, is in all cases monstrous. We obliterate morality, if we take as the only reason for accepting something, the fact that it simply is, otherwise how else would we object to, or protest a tyrannical institution, edict, law, or custom? We would be slaves of that which existed, of conventions that would be impossible to change: we would sacrifice of human spontaneity, inquiry, intellect, autonomy. But, it is to be noted, in terms of understanding the significance of nomos 11 and phusis, that while, on the one hand, many of the arguments of the 19th century concerning the slave-trade, did indeed speak of things of beings fitted by nature for being slaves, and derived ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ in exactly the way Hume forbids and that we find repulsive: many of the counter- arguments the arguments against the slave trade, made use of the distinction between nomos nad phusis, or appealed to the difference between what was conventional and what was natural to argue precisely against slavery. Thus, we find in the writings of 19th century Abolitionists arguments like the following: the arguments of slave-owners are not only pernicious, but false because the partisans of slavery mistake the misery and degradation to which a group of human beings has been subject for the nature of those human beings. They thus accept an unjust convention for nature, mistake nomos for phusis. But that, in fact, in the case of the slaves, nature is hidden by a brutal and unjust convention, the actual nature of the people brought from Africa to be slaves is to be free-men under God, the bearers, and the repositories of an inalienable dignity, to which institutions that would imitate the divine, should recognise. But a convention has broken that nature, obscured it, and that institution (slavery) is precisely against nature, an abomination. The question of nomos and phusis, is therefore, at least for the pre-modern, preGalilean universe, he question of the origin of any moral inquiry that wants to go beyond, simply saying what ‘do we normally mean’ or ‘what can we agree upon’ when we say that x is good, just, or beautiful and actually wants to find what is really good, just, beautiful in itself, i.e according to nature. It is a pillar of a certain “ classical” understanding of classical philosophy and in fact, the basis for asking the question about, faced with many possibilities, many ways of doing things, or of being human habits, which is the right one – the one ‘according to nature’ where this means, 12 the way things should be as potentially (but not necessarily) opposed to the way things are. Note the idea of nature and convention does not presume that there is an easy answer to such questions, it only suggests that the quest, i.e. the questions make sense. For the centuries before Hume, including the Elizabethan age, there is a connection between an ought and an is. The point is not that anything that is, is necessarily by virtue of being, right. On the contrary, the idea of the distinction involves precisely the idea that what ‘is’, what truly is, i.e. the nature of things is ambiguous. What is right is what is natural but natural does not mean, that which is beyond all laws, customs and habits. To give a kind of example of this: of the three great philosophical schools the Cynics, Stoics and epicureans, all argue that a good life is according to nature. But only the Cynics have an idea (approaching a modern view) that ‘nature’ is that which we have when we take all custom and convention away. The rival schools believe, that this (cynical) idea precisely because if one looks to the kath’olou to the universal, we find that custom itself, the presence of some institutions, codes et cetera is natural. It is possible, in this framework, to believe that the natural is the right, and not be a slave of convention, because the natural is that unknown – which may or may not have been brought out (cultivated) in a given set of institutions, customs or laws. Thus, “Natural law” in the Thomist sense is supposed to be those universal principles, which may be immanent to given conventions, or transcendent to them, but are never simply identical with them. 13 Shakespeare, who knew Florio’s Montaigne and generally assimilated a great deal of classical culture, certainly knew this. But more broadly, I would argue, we can see in Shakespeare’s plays, a source of pathos, dramatic tension, in the conflicts between, the different perspectives of different characters about what constitutes the natural. Edmund in King Lear finds his own nature, in what is manifest to him, in the persistent pulse of his desires, ambitions that never sleep or die. He scorns the idea that it is in anyway dictated by signs and portents, but believing what he feels. Contrast this to what Rosalind or Horatio or Cordelia would conceive as natural, what Lady Macbeth still sees as the protest of her nature that she is, perhaps quixotically trying to silence in herself. We can always argue, in Shakespeare’s universe, as Shakespeare’s characters do, frequently, that what someone thinks is natural is actually merely a convention, a law that hides our true nature from ourselves out of cowardice or hypocrisy. Conversely, we can always argue that the person who disdains a given set of morals, arguing that her own nature lies elsewhere is herself mistaking a distortion, a falling away from our true purpose, the true image of humanity for its nature: a tragic mistake. And there is no certainty about such things (especially when dogmas are not invoked.) as in Shakespeare they are not. I have spent all this time on this definition because it is crucial to Titus Andronicus, albeit in an oblique, I am sorry to say, negative way. Titus Andronicus is a play in which the question of nature, in the sense I have been describing, disappears because nature herself disappears. 14 Nature does not hide, as it does at the best of times. Instead, it is raw and red, when it is not a black light, like the flames of hell in Dante that are familiar to us from Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist It is, rather, something that is conspicuous for its absence. However, as with the ‘absence’ that we invoke when we toast ‘absent friends’ it is an absence that is felt, i.e. present, like the zero, that, absent from Aristotle’s mathematics would have caused his conception of the universe to tremble. Instead, nature is manifest in Titus as a a palpable absence, a shadow behind the law, that is cast by the law. A vacuum in the place where nature should be (where for Shakespeare or any Elizabethan) where it must be. It is, present, in Titus, as a darkness cast by a light that has no source. If we turn then, at last, to Titus, something of this can be seen from its very first scene. Early in the play, we can see that, unusually, for a Shakespearean “Roman play” (which Titus is, incidentally, rarely considered to be) that the play is set during the time of the Empire and not the Roman Republic, which, the “Renaissance” of political philosophy in Italy had been making (as in Machiavelli’s Discorsi the source of a paradigm for good government, and for an art of governance that has, according to Machiavelli and various contemporaries in Venice as well as Florence, been lost in ‘modern times’. The Imperial setting of Titus is made obvious in the play’s first scene. There, the audience witnesses, a few minutes into the actions, the demonstration of a rivalry between the two son of a recently deceased Emperor. The shadow of civil war thus 15 hangs over these opening moments of the play. This setting is unique within the Shakespearean canon. Thus, Corolianus is set during the time of the Roman Republic, which provided Shakespeare’s age, with a cavalcade of statesman, poets, philosophers, who constituted a Renaissance portrait (one might say, with J.G.A Pockock ‘civic humanisms’) portrait of the good, the bad and ugly of antiquity. Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra both contend with each other for being plays of the last-days of the Republic. Of course, it is an historian’s quarrel whether the Republic ends the moment Julius Caesar becomes Consul-for-life, after Pharsalia, or when Antony is defeated at Philippi and the title of Caesar (to take an idea from the german philosopher Hegel) is first shown to survive the death of the particular man for whom it is named, and become instead something universal -- a title that will survive into places and times where actual Roman legions would never have set foot: Julius dies, but 18 centuries later there will still be a German Kaiser and a Russian Tsar. For Hegel, the survival of the name beyond the death of the object it refers to, is in general an important concept. (C.f. his reading of Adam naming the animals, and thus introducing the possibility of death into the world.) But there is another Shakespearean work connected with Rome, and it is the only such play that is a predecessor to Titus. This is the Rape of Lucrece. And the contrast with Titus is instructive. Lucrece deals with a crime whose memory serves as the basis of the legitimating story or founding myth – the founding legitimation narrative (to put it in an ugly sociologese) of the Roman Republic. 16 It embodies as well as serves as a basis for, a kind of mnemonic for the fundamental political belief of the Republic, the necessity of Republican government as a government of citizens and not having Kings (let alone Emperors). In the story, that Shakespeare retells in his poem, Tarquin Superbus (the epithet means ‘the proud) commits a terrible crime which is abhorred not only for its own abominable nature but also insofar as it is a crime against (what Miola is right to call) pietas, against an idea of nature, family, gods, and city. The goddess who rules over this is Astraea who Titus will say, in his despair ‘has left the earth’. So, we have at the origins of the Roman Republic as a form of government whose necessity is connected to the memory of a crime – a rape, no less. It is a crime whose first victim is a woman, who, like Lavinia in Titus, will die horribly and amidst shame of something of which she is entirely innocent. In Shakespeare’s poem, Lucrece kills herself. The Republic is founded on the memory of such a crime, and on a belief that if such things are to be prevented, there must be institutions and laws, nomoi that help to prevent the perpetuation of such crimes against nature, family, the city and the gods. Tyranny, for the Republic, is an unnatural, monstrous institution, as for all people at all times, but the never-forgotten story of Tarquin and Lucrece, also provides the belief of the Republic that Kingship is itself unnatural – that for the laws of the Romans to be just laws, the Romans must be a people without Kings. The belief is that Tarquin proves not only his own depravity but that kingship itself is unnatural, unjust: a perversion of a perversion. There is an immediate continuity with the setting of Titus. Because from the first scene of Titus, by virtue of its imperial sitting, the memory of a crime (the rape of Lucrece) has been demonstrably consigned to oblivion, by the very fact of the political situation, the 17 nomos of the politeia, i.e. the constitutional arrangement. The product of this forgetting, this abandonment of the laws of the Republic is Empire. The Empire is the sequel to the Republic,which as that which follows it is predicated on “forgetting” – i.e. having moved beyond the latter. And we find ourselves, despite this forgetting amidst the theme of pietas (and a possible violation against pietas because the opening scene of Titus is set beside the tomb of the Andronicii which is itself next to the Capitol building: between politics and the family. This aspect of the dramatic setting, which has been considered the dramatic equivalent of a malapropism sets the stage for the scene of further crimes committed against pietas, when an original crime, that was the basis of laws has been consigned to the shadows along with the laws, the form of government designed to prevent it. On the issue of a link between family and civic life (the soul of pietas which the Rape of Lucrece violates) the very family name ‘andronicus’ refers to ‘courage’, or ‘manliness’, in particular courage in war, which is the ultimate civic virtue. This courage, civic courage, is best tested in the need to defend the city in a time of war, is related to pietas, because it can be considered an extension of the ‘natural’, innate tendency to defend one’s family, extended to an institution, extending the totality of families that make constitute the political community – the Roman city. When Titus enters, his opening speeches are a salute to the city, and to the political order of the city, which is also the capital of an Empire. He is revealed as a defender of the city (and Empire) from a noble family line of such defenders. But he does not mention his family, as his brother Marcus does, he shows himself, instead, from his first speech a defender, and not only a defender of the law. What is meant by law 18 here? I have spoken to you at length of nomos and phusis. I would like to now take another fragment of Heralcitus that reads “the people should defend their laws [nomoi] like walls” . What does this mean? An analogy is drawn in this fragment between laws and walls. What Heraclitus means is that the law of the city is like the walls because, like the walls, the laws trace the limits of the city, set its boundaries. That which delimits something is the same as that which gives it form. That without form or limit is, in Greek, apeiron (the word in Greek mathematics for infinite, which means, literally without ‘limit’. To be without ‘limit’ or peras is also to be, indeterminate in the sense of lacking the boundaries that would allow anything to be a particular entity. It is to lack ‘ontological’ boundaries, and in doing so to lack ontological status. As Spinoza says: omnis determination est negation: every determination is a negation, and, ergo, for something to be something it must also be, as Leibniz,, puts it “a” something, i.e. a (particular) entity, that can be contrasted with others. Insofar as they have a determinate character the laws of the city do not only protect it (as its walls do), but through determining its character they constitute it. In this sense, a city is not only the literal arcades, streets and plazes, but also the character that is manifest in the people of whom a city is composed. Now, it should be noted that in modern times, what we call the laws’ are in no way necessarily identical to the character, habits or ‘customs’ of the people of a city as we might seem. And we would often thank god for this, especially when faced with legislation, that from on-high that seems to go everything that the ethos of a city, or a nation stands for. Modern sociologists make a distinction between (positive) law – 19 that which the legal profession deals with, which jurists study, one of the three branches of government; and laws that constitute norms, habits, and “culture” in the broad sense. The importance of this distinction can be seen, if we consider that the laws of Paris (in terms of statutes and legislation) are quite similar to those of Venice Buenos Aires, or New Orleans, but that, at the same time, the customs, the habits, the ways of those cities are unlike each other. But this is mainly a consequence of the fact that we live in societies with a ‘liberal’ conception of the law – where law is conceived as precisely that which should only minimally, if at all play a role in constituting the character of the citizens, -- these should (according to the dominant liberal political philosophy) be spontaneous, free, left alone by the law, that is only to circumscribe the space in which free developments can occur – the law does not dictate but only sets bounds intended to make common life possible, or bearable or humane. Now, while we could argue that Shakespeare lives in a society with many liberties, it obviously not a society run by a liberal political philosophy, let alone by a ‘a liberal’ character to its institutions. At the same time, it is obviously not the kind of society, that lives at the aphelion of the ideal of modern liberalism, i.e. a society in which there is no distinction between the law and what we would call norms. The classically ‘illiberal’ society, or society where norms and laws are completely non-distinct is the Sparta of Leonidas. And the Spartans are known for not having walls, because every Spartan warrior (and every citizen man and woman is a warrior) is supposed to be an incarnation of the 20 law, of the city of Sparta. Thus the walls are conceived as not only unnecessary, but dangerous? Why? Because, for a Spartan, to have a wall made of stone as opposed to the resolve of the massed Spartan hoplites would be to have what Jacques Derrida calls a “dangerous supplement”, something supererogatory that actually subtracts, rather than adds to what it supplements. From this ideal-typical “Spartan” perspective, a wall would, obviously in one sense, add to the strength of the city, but would, at the same time, ultimately weaken it by making the Spartans rely on a strength that is not their own. Now, why all this talk of Spartans? While we do not know exactly the nature of its institution’s (being fictional) Titus’s Imperial Rome, is no doubt more like Shakespeare’s London than ancient Sparta in that it has some norms that coincide with its laws and those that are not assimilable to them - -but to spontaneous, organic aspects irreducible to the decrees of the Privy Council. However, Titus is a soldier, who reveals himself from the whole of the first Act to be someone who is not only seen but who sees himself as a defender of the law of Rome – he is an agent of the law, someone who doesn’t just obey it, but who spreads it to the corners of the Empire, defends it, incarnates it. In the first scene, Titus, sacrifices Tamora’s son Alarbus. Tamora pleas for mercy and Titus ignores her, speaking instead with the callousness of someone who considers the Roman customs, analogous to the laws of nature of the necessity of Alarbus’ death: 21 Titus’ refusal of Tamora, does not reveal any particular malice, or cruelty, or joy in his actions. There is only a dedication to duty. He sacrifices Alarbus according to the demands of the law, the demands of which are not to be refused. He does not appear vengeful or callous and as an adumbration of the coming reading, I think he comes across primarily, in much of the first Act as tired. I do not want to over-exaggerate this aspect of Titus’ character. It could be easily over-emphasised to suggest that Titus is already weakening in his position, (in the first Act) or that he has doubts about his dedication to upholding, spreading, defending the law of Rome. I think that it is important that we refuse this interpretation because such a reading would undermine the pattern of the tragedy. No, instead Titus, enters with fanfare, and gives a speech whose ringing diction is that of the believer. But I can nonetheless, hear a weariness in Titus’ opening speeches, in a certain dropping away of force and passion, which precedes its regular wave-like rise. I would like Ross Williams, my Titus in the forthcoming reading, to read the part of Titus in Act One as if his speeches constitute the recital of a catechism that he has known all his life. Something to which he has always been devoted, although he now finds himself repeating the oft-repeated, once treasured words, in a quiet, tired manner. I think, that when one reads the text, we can see him, rise into a pitch of zeal, and then drop back before picking himself up from his fatigue, shaking himself, as a pious doubter, pulls herself back into the heart of her faith. The scene of Alarbus’ sacrifice encapsulates the play as a whole. Titus, in the quite literal shadow of his family tomb, ignores the pleas of Tamora. This is shocking, especially when we remember this setting: the juxtaposition of family tomb and Capitol -- the implications about the links between family, law, city and the way they 22 are bound together, under the auspices of the goddess Astraea, and the Roman virtue, I have mentioned of pietas: which should be understood as a virtue placed at the intersection of piety, civic duty, courage. Titus, in refusing Tamora, acts as someone who lacks a belief in a nature outside, or beyond the law (of the love of a mother for her children) that would make him doubt the law. And this is significant, for the fact that the play is set in the time of the Empire, and that Titus, as an agent of the law is an agent of the Empire. The problem here, the problem of Empire, is one aspect, of the very difficult question of what I will only slightly facetiously call the plays staging of the problems of ‘international law. ‘ The Goths, the ‘barbarians’, are ‘outside of Roman law’ – in that they are different people with their own laws, customs nomoi. So, what do the Romans do, faced with these competing nomoi? One solution is to bind them all to a larger law, to a law of laws. Such a law, would be a cosmopolitan law, which would be the law of the world – the cosmopolis as opposed to the individual city or polis. The law of the Roman Empire attempts to do this. But the problem here is obvious, and for our epoch, as for Shakespeare’s acute. The imposition of the law by civilised Rome, the civilising mission, to bring about a cosmopolitan law, is felt by the Goths, as not only an imposition, but as a particularistic law, hypocritically disguised as universal. For Tamora and her sons, the law that is supposed to be the law of laws, that which will create a unity that preserves plurality, is felt precisely to be a barbarous. Tamora thus knows, or rather feels something, that we know from the history of 23 modern Imperialism, namely that that which attempts to put an end to barbarism, (whose mission is civilisation) has a capacity to turn itself into a barbarism worse than that which it attempts to stop through ‘humantiarian intervention’. This perception of the barbarity of civilisation, of the injustice of the law that is supposed to bring justice over and above the clash of particular laws, raises an issue that goes right to the heart of the question of law and nature. The people over there, across the Rhein, over the mountains do things differently from ‘us’, say the Romans. Perhaps they are right to do so, perhaps they are wrong. Perhaps neither. Perhaps we are wrong, and they are right, perhaps we are (as awful, pious contemporary platitudes would tell us) “both right” but from different perspectives. The idea of something like international law (as an outgrowth of what used to be called hopes for natural law) is to try to make laws out of agreements, that arise from certain fundamental principles or what in a rather debased contemporary political language we would call ‘shared values’ that beyond and despite different customs, practices, ways of life, can be agreed upon by all as binding for different nations, peoples, cultures. One of the first principles that again, once upon a time would have been called aspects of ‘natural law’ is the illegitimacy of murder and of rape. But the question is always, how are these super-laws, or meta-laws, laws supposed to govern, and in a sense trump the particular laws (the laws of this tribe, this village this nation) to be enforced, or even to hold sovereign sway over customs and habits, and tendencies that may not agree with them. 24 There is a terrible, political question here as well as a moral one? And one obvious solution to the problem, for the ancient world, is given by the existence of an Empire, in the full-blooded Roman sense: the attempt to bring all of the world under one law. When modern audiences here of such concepts, we shudder, with good reasons arising from often vividly remembered histories. We hear in the idea of Empire, a hubris that underlines so many of the attempts to bring justice, and peace, and order, to the world, irrespective of the world’s desire to receive justice in a manner chosen by others. We have seen good intentions transmuted into tyranny, and even acting as a mask for tyranny and exploitation. But, at any rate, the paradox of this meta, i.e. Imperial law is, in the case of the Empire that Titus serves, is that it is imposed, and maintained through the violence that it wishes to put an end to. This means, as Titus shows, that it also potentially begets the violence that it is its express purpose to end. In the building of an Empire, we turn what would have been the police force for the city into a world police, but in doing so, the police force has the potential to become an expanding, invading, conquering army, serving, not the interest of the whole, but of the few, the privileged, the Romans. We shudder at this, for reasons not too distinct for those that Tamora’s appalling sons appeal, when they comment that Titus’ murder of Alarbus (his ‘sacrifice) is more 25 barbaric than the Scythians (1.1). And the concern here is not only that the attempt to bring universal imperial law, will potentially involve bloodshed, chaos, but also that the self-nominated agents of the universal law may actually just be the particular agents of their own interests: that Roman law, meant to be a universal law, a law that can transcend and unite diverse peoples is in fact, simply that which (to use an idiom of the late 19th century) ‘serves the interest’ of the particular, narrow interests of Rome, with no regard as to the cost for those ‘saved’, or ‘civilised’ by it. What makes this a terrible political question, however, is the fact, that this is obviously only one side of the story. There would not be a desire for a law that would bind universally, across different customs, if we were not also aware, that first of all some of the prospect of mad visionaries attempting to bring about a new world order, have been tyrants perfectly happy to scorn claims to ‘universality’ and would happily have abandoned any apparently hypocritical “universality” in expressing their honest dedication to the triumph of one people, nation, race at the expense of all others. We are also aware, that there is potentially, in the absence of universal principles the possibility of a war of all against all – of universal murder, rape, genocide. Anywhere, where principles like tolerance or understanding do not hold as universals, differences have a potential to become the basis for bloodshed. And, in saying this, we assume of course, in invoking bloodshed as abhorrent that bloodshed is (or at least should be) something to be universally abhorred. A problem then arises 1) where the person who deplores bloodshed as the worst of all evils is dealing with someone who does not agree with this and 2) when the imperative to prevent 26 bloodshed, is used, politically, as a defense for all kinds of (ironically sanguinary) crimes. To take the first point: A knowledge of history and particularly of the twentieth century reveals to us that bloodshed is by no means universally abhorred as well as that incredible mounts of blood has been shed out of an apparent abhorrence for bloodshed. So what is to be done? One suggestion is that, if we would prevent bloodshed, (“we who abhor violence) , its prevention requires a law (and the enforcement of the law) that allowed for no exceptions. But this leads to an irksome, perennially difficult political problem: namely, how could a law that would oppose murder, tyranny et cetera, be imposed without violence? In understanding this problem, we do not by any means, have to agree with the character of Titus in the play’s first act. Nonetheless, we recognise his hubris, whose tragedy comes about precisely because it is an insolence accompanied by a certain nobility rather than straight-forwardly vile. To understand, may not, as Flaubert said necessarily be to forgive, but it is a necessary, if not sufficient condition. 27 So, Titus ignores Tamora’s pleas because he is, it would appear, an agent of the law. He has a near Spartan identification with the law. But he is not a fool, and there is no evidence in the play, of him having anything like the mad pride or selfish ambition of a Richard III. Nor is he a drone, blindly following orders like Eichmann. But, he is, I think, rather, someone swayed (even if he has given it little reflection) by the Imperial argument: that if unpleasant things must be done in the name of bringing Roman law to the world: so be it, for what other hope does justice have – in this world, if not for the Empire that prevents warring particularisms? To see further into this theme, I would like to look briefly at the character in the play, who, with Titus help will eventually become Emperor. Saturninus’ very name is significant if we know anything of the source materials of Titus. First, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, whose Philomela section is one of the sources for Titus, begins with a description of the 4 ages from Hesiod’s Theogony. The ‘golden age’ according to Ovid is the age of Saturn (Chronos in Hesiod). But the rule of Saturninus, if we know Titus, is hardly a golden age. It is far more like Ovid’s description of the age of iron: (here I read from Mary Innes‘s Penguin translation): War made its appearance…shaking clashing weapons in bloodstained hands. Men lived on what they could plunder: friend was not safe from friend, nor father-in-law from son-in-law, and even between brothers affection was rare. Husbands waited eagerly for the death of their wives, and wives for that of their husbands. Ruthless mothers mixed brews of deadly aconite, and sons 28 pried into their fathers’ horoscopes, impatient for them to die. All proper affection lay vanquished and last of all the immortals, the maiden Justice left the blood-soaked earth. Now, it is important that Ovid is quoted twice in Latin, and one of the quotes comes from the very passage that I read above. “Terras Astraea reliquit.” Astraea (maiden justice) has left the earth. Saturninus’ reign will be a reign where justice personified abandons the earth. Here, the maidenhood (youthful femininity) of justice is notable, because the personification gives us the sense that justice is raped during the age of Iron. Like Lavinia, justice will be reduced to silence and powerlessness. Saturninus’ reign will be far more like the Age of Iron than the Age of Gold ruled over by his near- name sake. But, precisely insofar as he is a ruler of an age of iron, he can also be seen as the harbinger of a golden age. In Hesiod’s cosmogony, the ages of the world are a cycle – rather than something with an end (or eschaton) as in the Christian philosophy of history which takes its departure from St. Augustine. And there is a suggestion, noted by numerous commentators, that, Lucius, at the end of Titus may be ushering in a golden age, which would put him in a position much like that of Richmond in Richard III, as (in the famous Tillyard interpretation) an agent of destiny who puts an end to the cycle of violence and bloodshed and brings 29 about a new order of justice with just a trace of resemblance to a certain Tudor dynasty, of a certain sceptred isle. At any rate, after the scene with Alarbus we see that Titus (who is beloved of the people as their defender) is instrumental in helping to get Saturninus appointed Emperor and offering Lavinia to him for marriage. Bassianus then enters to spirit her away. Bassianus I believe represents another element that is absent from (i.e. abstracted from) in Titus. This is the element of play, of lightness of wit, of gaiety. It is fitting that he dies both so early and horribly in Titus, given what I am suggesting is its fundamental philosophical theme. Titus, defender of law, and custom, of Roman law and custom chooses (again with the perfect consistency of his actions in the first act) Saturninus over the considerably better (nobler, kinder) seeming Bassianus – he (predictably) makes obeisance to custom, specifically to the ancient custom of inheritance by the eldest son. Titus could, of course, from an existentialist perspective done otherwise, but then from the perspective of radical freedom without a focus on the determinants of character, he could have spared Alarbus, but if he did either of things Titus would not be Titus Andronicus: the centre, cause and victim of a tragedy. The scene in which Bassianus steals Lavinia away from Saturninus is extremely important for setting up another crucial moment of the first Act of Titus. This is the scene in which Titus kills Mutius. This scene is potentially absurd, especially if one encounters it through reading the script. I am sure it is a nightmare for directors: 30 In the text, we have Mutius saying (seemingly a propos of nothing) “My lord you’ll not pass here.” We must assume he is barring his father’s way, who is about to pursue Bassianus/Lavinia Then: Titus: “What villain boy, barrst my way in Rome?” [strikes him] Mutius: Help, Lucius, help! [Dies.] Now, what just happened?!? Bassianus has audaciously run away with Lavinia. Mutius is Ttius’ son, and gets in the way, presumably out of a prior friendship/arrangement/sympathy for Bassianus. Ergo, Titus kills him. Who is this Titus, who kills sons when they block his way? This is obviously an extraordinary as well as an egregious act for Titus, otherwise he would not, presumably be so ostentatiously surrounded by sons at the beginning of the play. (I interpret this event, by the way, dramatically, by saying that Titus strikes at Mutius angrily with the flat of his sword, i.e. without the intention to kill.) But, if Titus does not intend, as I think he does not, to kill Mutius he is unquestionably angry, accusing his son, even as he dies by his father’s hand, of dishonouring their house and family name. 31 This once again, serves to establish Titus as the man of the Empire, of the city, of law and duty above all else. In this he resemble s Brutus, or Cassius, or Corolianus, but there is something (as this act makes clear) febrile, almost mad in Titus devotion, which for all his extremity, even the lean hungry, Cassius (a man who seems to sup principally on republican virtue) lacks. The contrast is that Titus has something of the frenzy of the believer who is constantly attempting to ward off a crisis of faith. If I can use an image from Walter Benjmain, I would say he has the position of a man attempting to climb a crumbling mast in the midst of a storm. The other Romans in the play see duty, law, the city, because of a confidence (almost preternatural) that these things are right. The may have some anxiety around the edge of this faith, but it is a vague one. In contrast, Titus devotes himself to law and duty, like someone who thinks that there is nothing else, that if he did not serve these things with all the devotion of which he is capable, such things might slip away or vanish utterly from the earth. We see here the outlines of an important difference: namely, that between the potentially dogmatic faith of a religious or superstitious age (a faith that may be instinctive and unthinking, firm,) and a fundamentalist faith, which asserts religion, faith, in the face of all evidence, knowing that there is an emptiness to be faced, if we do not quickly (and sometimes violently) act to cover over the abyss with which we are threatened. The killing of Mutius leads to one of the most significant, for my argument discussions of the entire play. Titus surviving sons (those with the good wit not to put 32 their bodies in front of their father) appeal to Titus, through one of only two mentions of nature in the entire play: “Brother, for in that name doth nature plead” (1.1. 37 “Father, and in that name nature doth speak…” [italics mine] The plea is angrily denied (which is useful, or my argument would require some kind of comprehensive revision!) But Titus does, here, accede to the request being made of him. But, note, he does not listen to the ‘name of nature’, but rather to a further statement by Marcus in which he appeals not to nature, but rather to tradition. (1. ) So, to come back to the main argument: why is nature excluded from Titus’ vision (the basis of my argument today?) Earlier I suggested that one of the ways that one can see nature, in a ‘classical’ understanding that I think we see frequently in Shakespeare is something that is at once ‘inside’ and ‘outside of the law, i.e. something which could poetentially serve as the ground the law. In other words, nature is, or at least can be seen as a, reference point for adjudicating between laws, the grail of a potentially endless philosophical quest. It can also, as we have seen, be the basis for leading people with different laws in the direction of an over-arching, or universal law to which they could all be bound. But Titus does not believe in this. 33 Titus the character, like Titus the play is concerned with the absence of nature as a moral guide. This is one of the reasons it can seem so ‘modern’, at the same time as it can seem so ‘un-Shakespearean’. Without nature, Shakespeare shows us, there is only a super-law, which without nature in the Aristotelian sense behind it – becomes a law that can only be imposed by force. We touch here on a subject, that became extremely fashionable in recent European philosophy (through the work, I could say facetiously, of Italian anarchists reading German fascists) on the extra-legal origins of the law. Put in closer proximity to these discussions it is a problem of ‘sovereign violence’. To explain, maybe we think, that it is okay for the law to reserve in the last instance force for non-compliance (even if we abhor the vindictiveness of capital or corporal punishment), but what of the question, of the violence that may have been necessary to impose the law on a territory, or an intransigent people in the first place? Generally speaking this has not happened in the lifetimes of any of us Antipodeans, but it is a disquieting question, how do a people (any people) become subject to the law? One of the obvious (if very unsatisfactory) answers to this question is, through violence, through the exercise of power even to the extent of terror and mass-murder. This question, of the origins of the law, is also, rightly connected, in contemporary philosophy on this subject with the question of what happens to who have (like 34 refugees) a status whereby they are, paradoxically, denied access to the law by a legal operation – people who are legally stripped of legal rights like the prisoners in Guantanamo bay. Here, we witness a violence that is comparable with, and maybe even greater than that of the “ imposition” of law. It is this obscene, terrifying extra-legal aspect of the law, which we can see (according to Giorgio Agamben) manifest in legally declared ‘zones of exception’ such as the infamous Nazi concentration and extermination camps, their predecessors in South Africa during the Boer War, and their successors in many a dark corner of the contemporary world. In Titus, the “originary” [sic] violence of the law is depicted as a spectral partner of the law: as a shadow behind, above, and cast by the law. For Tamora and her sons, with a bitter, tragic irony, this is in fact exactly what the law (Roman, Imperial law) is, -- it is something that has its essence, not in its universality, or in its emancipator potentials, but in the nature of its violent imposition. The law is the product of a coercion – a blind force, poorly concealed by some hollow rhetoric about universal justice. Now, one way to think of the extra-legal origins of the law (or at least our concerns would be abetted) is to think of it in terms of nature (conceived as benevolent, and ‘purposive’ as in Aristotle, or as ‘red in tooth and claw’ (Hobbes). Also, the extralegal origin of the law may be thought of as in the tradition of so-called ‘political theology’ as stemming from God, or the gods, from revealed law correctly 35 interpreted, or from the will of the deity, however inscrutable or intelligible that is considered to be. Here, the notion is that the origins of the law are in some kind of natural, cosmic, rationally intelligible and ultimately divine justice, and therefore, not simply a consequence of the violence of the law’s imposition. The question of what Shakespeare believed in such matters is complex (and of course, in one sense, impossible to determine without the scholarly vice of pretending to be able to read the mind of the dead), but it is true, nonetheless, I would suggest, that unlike many modern authors, the plays do show a belief in something genuinely above the law, that is its (ultimate) if difficult to grasp source. Surely, we would not expect any Elizabethan to think otherwise. It is at any rate, therefore, safe to believe, that Shakesepare would not have subscribed to the principle first articulated by Machiavelli (who articulates this in his statement about the founding of Rome is a fratricide) that the law must “always” have its origins in crime. Shakespeare is aware that crimes can be committed in the name of the law, but he would not, I think, connect this to the (cynical) modern notion that the law must of necessity contain criminal origins. At the beginning of this paper, I argued that Titus is an abstraction from nature. As such, I believe, that it is written with a purpose analogous to that of a carnival, by which I mean, it is a play whose purpose (like that of putting words of wisdom in the mouth of a fool) is to allow the viewer to see the ordinary moral-political-religious 36 order, (the world of Elizabethan nature, of a cosmos) as a kind of everyday miracle (Chesterton), by seeing this world, in which God reigns (and is connected to the ‘justice’ of the Elizabethan age) contrasted with a vision where law, has no guarantor in reason, nature or god, and thus is only the result of a temporary truce in a perpetual Hobbesian war of all against all. But on the other hand, it would be too smug, too homely, Chestertonian and unShakespearean to suggest that this was simply Shakespare’s view. Instead, I think, that although Titus, is ultimately intended as a horror story (something designed to reassure, Englishman and women, living amidst “natural justice”) at the same time, comes out of a meditation on a periodically experienced moral, political and, in a sense, metaphysical anxiety. Specifically, it is an anxiety that comes out of periods of civic dissension (whether it is religious strife – Catholic vs. Protestant, or, most typically, war between nations). The question behind something like Titus, is thus, a question ask when the faith in reason, nature or god, is shaken by war, chaos, and a descent into the Hobbesian jungle? The question is this: how will peace come about, how will the cycle of revenge end? -- how will order be achieved? Titus provides a vision of a world (in the eyes of the character Titus) where order is established only by the forces of Order gripping on with both hands to what they have conquered by force. In reading or seeing the play performed, we get the sense of legions spread (thin) by being sent to the endless corners of the Empire. But this way of maintaining order, is shown to be something that, far from breaking the cycle of 37 violence, perpetuates it. In the name of ending violence, the forces of the Empire find themselves perpetually at war. And the only outcome of this war, is more war, more death, more rapine, i.e. more of the sort of thing that the war was (at least in the minds of ideologists like Titus) started in order to stop. As the play progresses, what I am calling the ‘extra-legal’ origin of the law, or the fact of a nothingness behind the law is actually given an image. I am thinking here of the description of the pit. The pit, which tamora (2.3) calls ‘a barren detested…[find quote./..] represents, I want to argue, the space behind the law, the space of lawlessness as a depiction of nature as something that has no morally revelatory capacity, nature as chaos, bounded only by law – where it is not held by law, chaos : Tamora goes on to describe it as a place where ‘here never shines the sun, here nothing breeds…a thousand fiends, a thousand hissing snakes, ten thousand swelling toads, as many urchins,/would make such fearful and confused cries/as any mortal body hearing it/ The pit is the scene of the terrible rape and mutilation of Lavinia which occurs in the aftermath of Bassianus murder. It is also where Bassianus’s body is dropped, and into which Martius and Quintus will both fall as an adumbration, but also an allegory of their abandonment by justice. But Lavinia is violated and tortured by the pit. 38 The most horrendous scene in Titus, which of course provides many competitors for such a title, is I think, unquestionably the one where we Tamora commends her sons to the deed. It is horrible because of the extent to which it parodies and perverts the homely, everyday vision of a mother giving a chore to her dutiful sons. In this it recalls the overturning of justice that we see prophecised in the opening of Seneca’s Thyestes, which is one of the acknowledged sources for Titus. This play begins, for those who do not know it, with the shade of Tantalus (responsible for the curse on the House of Pelops) saying: “Vengeance shall think no way forbidden her…All hounour shall be dead…” The ghost of Tantalus goes on to say, prophecising the rest of the action of Thyestes, but also as if in adumbration of Titus “let night be black, let there be no more day, let havoc rule this house; call blood and strife and death; let very corner of this place be filled with the revenge..Draw up and serve the banquet…” But before we look at Thyestes, I would like to make a point about the about the place in whose shadow Lavinia’s rape occurs. I have been suggesting that she is taken to what in Titus is representative of “the dark place behind the law.” – the violence that is both the ‘under-side’ of the law, the emptiness behind the law in the absence of an ideal of beneficient, meaning-suffused nature, and the way the law appears to those upon whom it is imposed, and the foundation of the law in the absence of a foundation in nature or divinity. But how do Demetrius and Chiron (and Tamora) find out about this place, which is after all characterised by darkness sand silence – 39 whose very essence (so I argue) is that it cuts out tongues and removes limbs? The answer is that the law illuminates this place. This is the horrible theme of the later scenes of Titus: the theme of the visibility of the law. To make sense of this: there is an tradition that goes back to St. Paul that acknowledges a connection between the existence of the law and the capacity to transgress it. The Pauline observation that the law increases sin, leads to the Pauline doctrine on the inadequacy of the law “Once it was said obey the law…but now you must fulfil it in its own law in your own hearts…” This doctrine which plays a remarkable place in the history of mysticism, Messianism , the Reformation(and also, at its most ugly, particularly virulent strand of post-Reformation anti-Semitism) is related to the first Pauline doctrine that is also known to psychoanalysts and sociologists: namely that the prohibition of a particular crime, may give the act an increased voluptuousness, in the eyes of the criminal, which would not have been there in the absence of the prohibition. This is one form of the law making visible its dark underside, and opposite it, i.e. that which it (rightly) would like to conceal, suppress, stop, and ultimately, consign to oblivion. But I have said for Tamora and her sons, who, throughout Titus, use Roman laws, Roman nomoi (customs, conventions, ways) ‘instrumentally’ – as a means to an end -- 40 the law is visible only as its violence, ostentation, and this light, of violence illuminates a violence beyond the law. Titus, in the first Act personifies this light: his deference to the law makes him visible, as the law. Thus, curiously, those who would commit the transgressions that the law, illuminates picks him out as the possibility of a victim: he is the visible incarnation of the law and thus the visible (obvious) victim of its transgression. The pit into which Bassianus is thrown, and whose shadow provides the non-light for Lavinia’s rape, is the shadow which this light of the law (the light which makes the law visible along with its opposite, with crime.) is a shadow cast by the law itself. Tamora makes use of the law as a tool, to hide and fulfill her intentions with no regard for any kind of moral compulsion implicit. She has no regard for any “spirit of the laws” because the law for her is only blinding, violent fact: it can be worked around, it can be deferred to, it can be used, but it cannot be internalized, because in her mind there is nothing to believe, nothing to see, but that which puts out eyes. Thus the terrible prelude to Lavinia’s rape in which Tamora gives an injunction or command to her sons is exactly Tamora making use of the visibility of the law, as that which illuminates the dark places of its transgression or abuse. It now illuminates the spaces that for other characters would represent that which is explicitly forbidden by the law, which the law exists to cover over and to irrevocably close-off. This is the place, of the pit, the beyond of the law which for Tamora and her sons, murder, rape, 41 and above all that which Tamora herself personifies in the play (and will in a reflexive device disguise herself as) vengeance. I am running out of time, but I should make clear that I see the principle action of Titus in the journey of Titus, who passes from an agent and defender of the law to the person whose hollow laugh at Act 3, scene 1 line 263, crosses a threshold at which he responds to his abandonment by the law by his own abandoning of the law. The law has been, for Titus, exposed -- its dark underside revealed, which for his nemesis, Tamora, is not an underside, but precisely that in which the law consists -the light of its existence. Titus resigns himself in a very cold and frighteningly saneseeming madness to the cycle of violence that the law is by definition supposed, not to begin but to end. A few moments ago I mentioned, Seneca’s Thyestes and its beginning with the summoning of the shade of Tantalus, founder of the curse of the House of Pelops. Seneca’s play Thyestes concerns the revenge taken by Pelops son, Atreus, on Thyestes his brother who amongst other crimes has raped Atreus’s wife. It is this outrage to pietas, that once again ends, not as Lucrece does, in the unleashing of a terrible cycle of vengeance whose pursuit will contradict everything about the law and its spirit. But, although Thyestes ends with the terrible punishment that Atreus has contrived for his brother – the cannibalistic feast whose existence takes revenge beyond all legal punishment -- we also know in reading Thyestes that the fortunes of the dynasty -- of the cursed house of Pelops will only get worse from this point on . 42 In Thyestes Atreus’ brings his sons into his plots for vengeance. His sons are Agamemnon and Menelaus. And in the Greek tragedies and traditions to which Thyestes alludes, Agammemnon is of course murdered by his wife and her lover upon his return from leading the Greek host at Troy. His murderers are in turn murdered by A’s children Orestes and Elektra. Aeschylus’ Oristeia then tells the story of Agammemnon’s murder through to the point where Orestes, chased by the Furies, personifications of the demand for vengeance, finally reach the courts of Athens, where the furies are turned into (and not merely addressed as) the Eumenides -- the ‘kindly ones’, whose appearance in the law-courts of Athens spells an end to the cycle of violence and vengeance in the name of the law. Here, the underside of the law is portrayed not as violence, but as forgiveness, compassion, and understanding. Thus, in the Oristeia, the cycle of violence ends and can only end in justice. But the question is what happens if this transition to ‘justice’ is not the end of the cycle, but another moment in it, in which justice, petrified into legal forms, becomes the opposite of itself, i.e. something that feeds and perpetuates the cycle that it once shattered? This is the theme of Titus Andronicus. In this play, we see Titus is abandoned by the law whose angel (in the etymological sense of “messenger”) he has been for his whole life. He is Titus Andronicus, defender of the law, servant of Emperor, city, Empire. 43 He is abandoned by the law in the total, lawless cruelty of what is done to Lavinia, From this point, the law that Titus has served all his life (parodied, abused, and violated as it is by Tamora’s vengeful machinations) will only serve to wreak havoc on the Andronicci. Titus’ innocent sons are tried for the crime of killing Bassinaus, and they are seen to fall falls into the pit (representing the shadow of the law) Titus is then forced to acknowledge that the Emperor whom he has helped elevate to the throne, has no time for him this most loyal defender of city, Emperor, family and law: he is an enemy of pietas. In the end, Titus, abandoned by the law, will finally heed the appeal of his sons at the killing of Mutius and “listen” to the dictates of nature. But here, nature is not portrayed, as it is in the Forest of Arden or in The Winter’s Tale, as something touched by grace. Instead, here nature is simply the chaos of the law’s absence – the pit, whose cacophony –described above by Tamora is that of the meaninglessness of the cycle of vengeance. At 3.1.117 Titus speaks of the law having ‘tae’en revenge on [his sons]. Of the two explicit references to nature in the play the first occurs when the sons’ of Titus appeal that Mutius body be treated as fits his station and not their father’s anger. The second reference is made by Marcus and is actually a reference to the place of the pit, the place behind the law: 44 As the law breaks down and becomes a portion in the cycle of vengeance that it is meant to end (what I am arguing is the major action of the play) all that remains is for Lucius and his Goths to arrive, heralding the possibility of a new order, that will really end this cycle in which violence is opposed by the law, which turns into violence, that is opposed by more violence. The suggestion at the play’s end is that there is at least a chance that the new law will be less violent, and thus less selfcontradictory, something whose visibility cannot be equated with its self-desturction. But what does it look like, the law that Lucius might bring? This is a question which would require a whole vision of nature, human and otherwise. It would have to culminate in an idea or an image of the “globe” (theatre and world) whose working through, and reflection, might take the lifetime of a great poet. To see what this “behind of the law” might be, this vision of nature as something other than a pit, we will have to see sovereign power in human form in its moment of nakedness in a storm: lovers playing in the forest of Arden, flowers brought from warm Bohemia to cold Sicilia, bringing about a thaw that is also a resurrection. Faced with this topic, of a new and different law, I will end here, and like Iago, speak no more. But if we wanted to know more about this, we would, I would suggest, by way of a clue, that we might have to look at a speech towards the end of Antony and Cleopatra, in which Antony cries out to a servant called Eros (the irony being that eros, has 45 already been established both, through the action of the play, and an explicit line to this effect that eros is Antony’s master). According to a very venerable tradition, both well-known to and constantly explored by Shakespeare, eros is that within humanity which allows us to transcend humanity: it is something at the heart of (human) nature, that takes us beyond nature: something that seeks to move beyond the law, not in the name of anarchy, or lawlessness, but of breaking the cycle of violence which the law (against its will) may sometimes become a part. It is that which seeks the truth, and in doing so, not only the ground of the law, but of an end to violence, a place in which human beings might at last see each other face to face instead of through a glass, darkly.