| dc.description.abstract | Critical examinations of William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus almost always
occlude questions of the domestic. Yet, a major portion of the play’s action takes place
in a house and the methods of the characters’ revenge can be construed as domestic.
More simply, in Titus, household properties and domestic rituals are transformed into
instruments of vengeance. With a particular focus on the cultural and historical
conditions governing literary production in early modern England, this thesis draws on
previous scholarly work and examines the intersection of domesticity and revenge in
Titus.
The thesis is divided into two sections, each of which addresses different, though
overlapping, ways in which domesticity – broadly speaking – operates in the play. The
first section examines the play’s two competing revenge plots, demonstrating that not
only are they domestic in nature, but also that many of the play’s features align closely
with generic traits and devices integral to plays classified as “Domestic Tragedies.” The
second section focuses on Titus Andronicus’ Senecan roots and examines carefully the
function(s) of the domestic setting in Titus as well as Seneca’s Thyestes, one of
Shakespeare’s sources. I explore the ways in which the play’s domestic setting is distinctly Senecan and discuss Shakespeare’s alterations to his Latin source. While the
house becomes a site of domestic and dynastic anxiety in both Seneca’s Thyestes and
Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s play evinces a concern with domestic
privacy that Seneca’s does not. | en |
