ABSTRACT
Titus Andronicus's discourse of cultural disintegration is writ large in the two extreme signs of violation, Tamora's Pit and Lavinia's body, twin loci of violent mayhem and of literary contamination. Titus insistently focuses his macabre play with literalizing signs on Lavinia's body, which serves as the figurative ground for refashioning his cultural myths, his course of action, and his identity. The turning point from Vergil to Ovid is the rape of Lavinia. This grisly fulcrum functions logically in the poetics of cultural disintegration, for as Shakespeare knew, Rome was founded on rape, the rape of the Sabine women, the rape of Lucrece, the rape of Ilia, Aeneas' dynastic marriage to Lavinia, which threatened to repeat the rape of Helen of Troy and with considerable and distressing ambiguity, the seduction of Dido. In treating the classical texts of imperial Rome, Shakespeare replicates the tragedy's patterns of competition, mutilation, and digestion-the latter a term for imitations which absorb and transform their sources.
