A. Kiss: From Image into Word: The Semiography of Titus Amironicas

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From Image into Word: The Semiography of Titus Andronicus

Attila Kiss

When mapping out and thematizing technologies of identity and the interior spaces of the body, recent poststructuralist studies of the semiotics of culture have focused on an emerging post-modern affinity towards those aspects of early modern culture which were groundbreaking or subversive in their own time. The fusion of cultural registers in consumerist culture makes this affinity particularly manifest. Renaissance texts that used to be canonized as high literature now show up among the commodities of popular culture, participating at the same time in that process of decanonization and recanonization which now questions and revises the reading practices and standards of earlier canons. New perspectives are also applied to the much debated interrelationship and hierarchy of word and image, of verbal and visual representation in the early modem emblematic theater of the English Renaissance. Instead of polemic discourses on whether speech overruled spectacle, or whether costumes were more important than actual bodies, a significant amount of critical literature recently began focusing on an understanding of the representational logic of the complex effects in the emblematic theater. By the 1990s, the human body had become a specifically favored theme in extensive literature on the “discovery" of early modern subjectivity and the social practices of self-fashioning. However, such. scrutinizing and iconographie representations of the body appear not only in scholarly literature but in general postmodern cultural practices as well. The cultural imagery of malls, shopping centers, plazas, movie productions and exhibitions is loaded with representations that establish a parallel between early modem and post-modern representational traditions.

When I first entered the building of the main library at the University of Oregon in Eugene 1 1 years ago, I caught sight of a large poster advertising a performance of Coriolcmus with the subtitle: “A natural born killer, too.” The title of Oliver Stone’s influential film was used as a marketing technique for a postmodern Shakespearean commodity. Five years later, at the University of Hull, I read articles about ambulance cars lining up in front of a London theater playing Titus Andronicus. A couple of years ago, after watching the exhibition of the theatrical anatomist Giinter von Hagens in Vienna and reading his program for starting an anatomical theater in London, I saw posters in a cinema plaza with Hannibal the Cannibal staring at me from beneath a great big title saying TITUS. These examples of affinity between post-modem and early modem representation point towards ways that renaissance culture