On The History of Herodianand its relation to the 1577 chronicle, see Liebler, who
is the first to make the case. Other influential source studies include Hunter, “Sources and
Meaings in Titus Andronicus,” in The Mirror Up to Shakespeare: Essays in Honour of G. R.
Hibbard, ed. J. C. Gray (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984 ), 171 – 88 ; T. J. B.
Spencer, “Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Romans,” Shakespeare Survey 10 ( 1957 ): 27 – 38 ;
and Ralph M. Sargent, “The Sources of Titus Andronicus,”Studies in Philology 46 , no. 2
(April 1949 ): 167 – 83. See also Nicholas R. Moschovakis, “Persecution as Pagan Anachro-
nism in Titus Andronicus,”Shakespeare Quarterly 53 , no. 4 (Winter 2002 ): 460 – 86 , esp.
477 – 78 ; Eugene M. Waith’s introduction to his edition of the play (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1994 ), esp. 27 – 38 ; Vickers, 188 – 92 ; and Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and
Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. (London: Methuen, 1957 – 75 ), 6 : 7 – 10.
Liebler, 271 , 267. Compare Loomba, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism, who con-
cludes that Titusis “set in the fourth century ad, when the Roman Empire was waning”
( 76 ).
Compare Habib, 93 – 95 , who argues that the play’s “sourcelessness” may derive
from a deliberate suppression by the state ( 93 ).
From “The History of Titus Andronicus,” reprinted (with modernized spelling)
inTitus Andronicus, ed. Waith, 195 – 203 , 198.
Waith, 199.
Liebler concludes that “Shakespeare’s ‘Goths’ are not the same people who over-
threw Rome in the fifth century,” but rather represent a sort of generic barbarian, especially
of “Eastern origin” ( 272 ). See also Vaughan, “The Construction of Barbarism,” 168.
Compare Barker, 226 – 35 , who argues that these rituals bear markings of the
“primitive.”
Barker, 230 – 31.
Compare Ray, 34 , who reads the problem as “political absolutism.”
These actors may have been made up in black and white cosmetics available in the
period; see Callaghan, Shakespeare Without Women, 75 – 96.
The classic essay is Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its
Subversion, Henry IVandHenry V,” in Dollimore and Sinfield, eds., 18 – 47.
Having no historical account to turn to, we can only take Titus’s already compro-
mised word for it; if we choose not to, his choices seem all the more reactionary.
Compare Christopher Crosbie, “Fixing Moderation: Titus Andronicusand the
Aristotelian Determination of Value,” Shakespeare Quarterly 58 , no. 2 (Summer 2007 ):
147–73who argues that Tamora “employs the rhetoric of Rome’s civic piety...to ensure
her own tenuous hold on power” ( 161 ).
I am grateful to Matthew Cinotti, for provocative conversations about Tamora
that have helped me rethink her performance here.
See, for example, Habib, 87 – 120 ; Ian Smith, “Those ‘slippery customers’ ”; Little,
48 – 67.
Barthelemy, Black Face, 93 ; Gillies, 104. On Taymor’s interpretation of the play’s
politics, see David McCandless, “A Tale of Two Tituses: Julie Taymor’s Vision on Stage and
Screen,” Shakespeare Quarterly 53 , no. 4 (Winter 2002 ): 487 – 511.
