Rome,” and, in fact, “five times he hath returned / Bleeding to Rome, bearing
his valiant sons / In coffins from the field” ( 1. 1. 32 – 35 ; emphasis added). That
Titus has returned from the war four (or five) times before, doing exactly what
he is doing now, can only make us wonder whether what we witness is an-
other in a continuous series of false stops or, once and for all, the real thing.^18
At the end of the play, Lucius will ally himself with an army of Goths, and al-
though the resulting siege is under his command, we are left nonetheless with
an instance of Goths once again advancing against a Roman regime.
If we turn to history in an attempt to nail Titus’s victory down, to locate
his war with the Goths in time, and to verify or refute his claims to closure,
we will find an open end. Indeed, among Shakespeare’s Roman plays, Titusis
anomalous not only because, within the dramatic fiction, the lopping of limbs
risks becoming a horrifying quotidian gesture; outside the script, there seems
to be no single source behind its representation of the past.^19 To date critics
have been able only to piece together that history from a set of chronologi-
cally, generically, and geographically disparate texts—prominent among them
an English translation of Herodian’s De imperatorum Romanorum, entitled
The History of Herodian(ca. 1550 ); a chronicle “conteyning the lives of tenne
Emperours of Rome” ( 1577 ), translated from Antonio de Guevara’s Decada
but probably drawn as well from Herodian; and a chapbook, The History of
Titus Andronicus, The Renowned Roman General, translated from Italian and
published between 1736 and 1764 , its materials possibly circulating early
enough to reach Shakespeare.^20 These records suggest notably different
chronologies. Where the chapbook has prompted scholars to elide Titus’s Sa t -
urninus with the emperor Theodosius, who ruled “during the last years of the
Empire, just before one of the early Gothic invasions in 410 a.d,” Herodian
points rather to the tortuous period between 180 – 238 a.d., when Rome was
controlled and internally fractured by “an Afro-Asiatic dynasty” and a brutal
ruler Bassianus.^21
It may well be that we misread the play’s agenda in searching for a defin-
itive text or history that would situate the dramatic action in time and
establish, from the outside, the legitimacy of Titus’s assumed triumph.^22
Throughout,Titusrepeatedly jars its spectators into viewing the past through
competing textual frames, mingling myth and allegory with classical history,
for example, and, through the imaginative texts, realizing the carnage that the
political story glamorizes as appropriate to war. Indeed, when fictional stories
such as Ovid’s tale of Philomel become fleshed out in actors’ bodies, textual
determinacy translates theatrically as terror. In any case, whether the play
“Incorporate in Rome” 71