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Titus, I am incorporate in Rome,
A Roman now adopted happily,
And must advise the Emperor for his good.
This day all quarrels die, Andronicus. (1.1.472–75)
Tamora addresses these lines to Titus in a sham expression of peace. As the beginning of this passage affirms, Tamora’s ascension to the position of empress has made her “incorporate in Rome.” The word incorporate is crucial here, since it literally means, “united in one body with.” The metaphor deployed here stems from Renaissance political theory, which made popular the concept of “the body politic.” This theory figuratively equated the kingdom to a body, the head of which was represented by the monarch, also known as “the head of state.” In this sense, Tamora is expressing her sense of newfound political might. Yet as with so much of the language in this play, its meaning will be reversed in the acts to come, such that the metaphor of a single united body will devolve into a grotesque carnival of dismemberment.
Speak, gentle niece. What stern ungentle hands
Hath lopped and hewed and made thy body bare
Of her two branches, those sweet ornaments
Whose circling shadows kings have sought to sleep in,
And might not gain so great a happiness
As half thy love? Why dost not speak to me?
Alas, a crimson river of warm blood,
Like to a bubbling fountain stirred with wind,
Doth rise and fall between thy rosèd lips,
Coming and going with thy honey breath.
But sure some Tereus hath deflowered thee,
And lest thou shouldst detect him cut thy tongue. (2.4.16–27)
These lines come from a long speech that Marcus delivers upon discovering Lavinia ravished and disfigured in the forest. As the most cherished of Titus’s children and the ultimate symbol of Andronicus virtue and honor, her physical mutilation is tantamount to the figurative dismemberment of the Andronicus family. The language Marcus uses in this passage suggestively underscores this reading, starting with the reversal of “gentle” and “ungentle” in the opening line, which signals a shift from nobility to incivility. Ironically, Lavinia has been ungentled by the “ungentle hands” of Tamora’s newly ennobled sons—barbarous boys who are now part of Rome’s gentry. It’s also worth noting how the phrase “lopped and hewed” echoes the language used by the executioners of Tamora’s eldest son: “Alarbus’ limbs are lopped” (1.1.143). But what’s most interesting about this passage is the way Marcus attempts to recuperate Lavinia’s losses in language. He idealizes her missing hands as “sweet ornaments.” He also imaginatively transforms her missing tongue first into a “river” and then into a “fountain. He longs to restore her severed parts, but his language proves powerless to do so.
You sad-faced men, people and sons of Rome,
By uproars severed as a flight of fowl
Scattered by winds and high tempestuous gusts,
O, let me teach you how to knit again
This scattered corn into one mutual sheaf,
These broken limbs again into one body,
Lest Rome herself be bane unto herself,
And she whom mighty kingdoms curtsy to,
Like a forlorn and desperate castaway,
Do shameful execution on herself. (5.3.68–77)
Marcus addresses these lines to the citizens of Rome, who have convened around the carnage at Titus’s house. Ever the politician, Marcus draws the people’s attention to Rome’s future. With the stage now strewn with the bodies of Rome’s ruling class, the metaphorical “body politic” of the empire is fully dismembered. The question now is how the “broken limbs” of the state will once again be “knit . . . into one body.” Marcus’s healing words also have an ulterior motive: he’s rhetorically preparing the way for Lucius to become the next emperor of Rome. In this way, the play ends where it began, with Marcus “help[ing] to set a head on headless Rome” (1.1.186).
