Lavinia As Coauthor of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (Critical Essay‪)‬

In his 1687 version of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, Edward Ravenscroft made the first documented assertion that the play was not wholly Shakespearean: "I have been told by some anciently conversant with the Stage, that it was not Originally his, but brought by a private Author to be Acted, and he only gave some Master-touches to one or two of the Principal Parts or Characters; this I am apt to believe, because 'tis the most incorrect and indigested piece in all his Works; It seems rather a heap of Rubbish then a Structure." (1) Striving to purify the supposedly polluted text., Ravenscroft attempts to replace Shakespeare's original collaborator by reordering and deleting much in the scenes that modern participants in the collaboration debate have attributed to George Peele. (2) While Ravenscroft may seem to anticipate later attempts to discern the work of different writers within the play, his alterations target another sort of coauthor, "one ... of the Principal Parts or Characters." As the subtitle of his version, "The Rape of Lavinia," indicates, Ravenscroft strives to assert Lavinia's rape as an utterly debilitating event. lie eliminates the moments when she is neither silent nor submissive (for example, her use of The Metamorphoses and her own words to reveal her rape (3)), identifying her with the "Rubbish" that stands in the way of a unified "Structure." In so doing, he evidences anxiety about the ways in which Lavinia intervenes in the narrative structures other characters attempt to enforce. Ravenscroft's fearful reaction to the possibility of multiple playwrights is symptomatic of the multiple narratives circulating within and about Rome in the play. He works to assert singular authorship over a diverse play as many of its characters struggle with the impossibility of maintaining a single, cohesive narrative for Rome. While the play's other authorial figures try to rewrite and reenact a dominant narrative, Lavinia utilizes many proliferating tales as the figure for and practitioner of coauthorship. As Ravenscroft's simultaneous discomfort and focus indicate, Lavinia functions within Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus like the unnamed coauthor Ravenscroft highlights even as he asserts his elimination. Although seemingly silenced, along with the unprovable Peele and the boy actors who played Lavinia (indeed, all participants who may have contributed to her making), this character demonstrates the skills they would have used in that creative process. The characters of Titus Andronicus respond to the idea of multiplicity in the city as Ravenscroft responds to the same idea in the play--by insisting on their contamination and so by assuming an earlier, pure ideal. The play is infested by authors, Rome by Goths. Within this schema Lavinia may seem contaminated, more like a collaborative text than a coauthor, since the Andronici and the Goths work to inscribe her with different stories. As Jeffrey Masten and Wendy Wall note, early modern writers and publishers often gendered texts feminine, for example, figuring books as loose women shamed as they were distributed in print. (4) However, Lavinia is not a text who matters merely in relation to the way others read her wounds. Collaboration was hardly an aberrant form of textual and dramatic production in the early modern theatrical world, but as Masten notes it "denaturalizes" common interpretive methodologies: "Collaboration is ... a dispersal of author/ity, rather than a simple doubling of it." (5) Thus my use of the terms "coauthor" and "collaboration" evokes the circumstances of Lavinia s production in order to identify this character's particular disruptive and creative agency within the play. Lavinia makes the dispersal of authority in Shakespeare's Rome visible. Through her, Titus, his allies, and adversaries are shown to be the aberrations, clinging to failed narrative techniques in the face of collaborative multiplicity.