Shakespeare and Posthumanist Theory by Karen Raber

Author:Karen Raber
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

And bootless unto them.

Therefore I tell my sorrows to the stones,

Who, though they cannot answer my distress,

Yet in some sort they are better than the tribunes

For that they will not intercept my tale.

When I do weep, they humbly at my feet

Receive my tears and seem to weep with me

…

A stone is soft as wax, tribunes more hard than stone;

A stone is silent and offendeth not,

And tribunes with their tongues doom men to death.

(3.1.34–47)

More than once, the play raises the possibility that rather than enforcing hierarchy, a chain of being with humans at its apex, nature retains no categories of meaningful difference and is perfectly capable of levelling all. Here Titus compares tribunes invidiously to stones, but lurking in his imagery, and in Lavinia’s transformation into a plant or river or sun, is the suggestion that there is no way to produce comparison, analogy or systems of binaries that would distinguish among humans, plants, animals, weather or geological artefacts like stones.20 Chiron, who is specifically not a centaur but ‘simply’ a human, already personifies this very possibility – and he imposes that knowledge on the Andronici through Lavinia’s rape and mutilation.

Instead of plucking herbs from the field to cure Rome’s ills as would his mythological antecedent, this Chiron ‘prunes’ Lavinia of the usual instruments of human agency by plucking out her tongue and hacking off her hands. Chiron has left her with no access to ‘sweet water’ to wash her wounds (2.4.6). We should think of Lavinia at this moment as emblematic of Rome’s and the Andronici family’s ability to reproduce something it believes is ‘civilization’, in contrast to the barbarous Goths. Chiron undoes that distinction. And again, it isn’t just that Chiron is ‘bestial’ in what he does to Lavinia (which pretty much every one of the Andronici would happily call him), since by his name he already internally embodies a hybridity that encompasses the bestial, and because that binary is in fact too stable for what the play is suggesting. Rather, Chiron’s wilful hand has exposed the failure of civilization tout court, its inability to arrive at a curative potion or herbal remedy, perchance plucked by a hybrid physician-centaur’s hand from the bounty of nature, for a form of violence that is foundational, not incidental, to its existence.21

This may explain why the play’s only other mention of centaurs confuses Chiron, who we have seen is usually considered the polar opposite of his wilder brethren, with the crowd of rampaging centaurs who violate the decorum and hospitality of Pirithous’s wedding feast, and then further makes a mistake about whose feast that mythic tale involves. As he prepares to grind Chiron’s and Demetrius’s bones ‘to powder small’ to bake them in their ‘coffins’ (5.2.198, 188), Titus urges: ‘Come, come, be everyone officious / To make this banquet, which I wish may prove / More stern and bloody than the Centaurs’ feast’ (5.2.201–3). At first glance, Titus’s hands transform a human into meat, and in so doing confirm Chiron’s innately violent, poisonous,

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