Presentism, Anachronism and the Case of<i>Titus Andronicus</i>

Abstract Today Shakespeare studies is exploring alternatives to an exhausted new historicism, and critical presentism is one of the new tendencies being explored. But presentism itself is a pluralistic endeavour, and this article pursues one possible path within it and one that speaks to one of the major criticisms made in reaction to early presentism: its supposed ignoring of history. But presentist criticism investigating how our present shapes our views of history has already been developed and can help rescue the field from an overly positivist approach to mere historical "facts" through its value-conscious engagement with the past. Here we focus on such a reading of "Titus Andronicus," a play which fully expresses its historical moment of composition in the early 1590s. But today, the play in addition speaks to us of our own twenty-first century experience of terrorism. This approach can be seen as anachronistic, but it is an anachronism that opens up the play to its full meanings as a work of art in the twenty-first century. The use of anachronism in the context of consciousness of historical consciousness creates a form of presentist criticism which this article exemplifies. Indeed, recent historicist criticism of the play is already influenced by the new interest in Islamic cultures characteristic of the West since the events of Sept. 11, 2001, illustrating the sense in which historicist criticism itself has an important presentist dimension. In this reading, the play's own anachronisms—most prominently the Moorish character Aaron placed in Roman late antiquity—signals both the anxiety of Elizabethan audiences towards the Ottoman Empire and our own day's fear of terrorism from the Middle East. Keywords: Presentism Titus Andronicus historicismMoorsterrorismanachronismneoclassicismOrientalismthe MediterraneanIslam. Notes 1. The term "presentism" used in a positive sense to describe critical methods which acknowledge the productive influence of the present on interpretation first appeared in Grady's Shakespeare's Universal Wolf (4–8). The term was taken up and applied to his own related critical methods by Hawkes in Shakespeare in the Present and further discussed by Grady in Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne (1–25). Presentism was further defined by Fernie in "Shakespeare and the Prospect of Presentism" and exemplified in two critical anthologies: Grady and Hawkes, eds., Presentist Shakespeares, and Gajowski, ed., Presentism, Gender, and Sexuality in Shakespeare. There are of course any number of critics and critical methods which employ presentist principles without using that term. If there is a manifesto for contemporary presentism in Shakespeare studies, it is Hawkes, Shakespeare in the Present, particularly the brief Introduction (1–5) – although all of Hawkes's works of recent years (including the 1986 That Shakespeherian Rag and the 1992 Meaning by Shakespeare) are examples of his particular version of presentism. 2. For detailed critiques of presentist criticism, see Pechter; Wells, "Historicism and 'Presentism' in Early Modern Studies" and Shakespeare on Masculinity; Holbo; and Good. See also the three papers critical of presentist criticism given in Loewenstein. For brief overviews, see Moore; and Brown. For a more positive account see Fernie, "Shakespeare and the Prospect of Presentism". Arguments on both sides can also be found in Grady, "SHAKSPER Roundtable: Presentism". 3. There are others with similar goals beyond those who explicitly affiliate with "presentism". See, especially, Harris, "Untimely Meditations" and the other articles in this special issue of the journal Early Modern Culture, for a related discussion of issues of temporality in interpreting early modern texts that also critiques contemporary historicist criticism, draws from some of the same theorists we do (notably Walter Benjamin and Fredric Jameson), and briefly identifies anachronism as a possible solution to some of these problems – although Harris's preferred term for such temporal anomalies is "the untimely", and he never mentions presentism in the article. His argument is expanded to book length in his Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare, where he does briefly allude to presentism, faulting it for tending to treat past and present as discrete units (224, n. 1) – a position we believe is based in misunderstanding. In the same special issue, Charnes also searches for creative ways to disrupt the one-sided temporality of much contemporary historicist criticism, emphasizing an awareness of the orientation of texts to the future. Our present effort can be seen as within the same discursive universe explored by Harris and Charnes – indeed, we would call both of their approaches "presentist" because the term has from the start denoted a collection of related methods emphasizing the relevance of the present on our readings of the past and is meant to be inclusive rather than unitary; and Charnes was a contributor to both recent collections of presentist essays mentioned below. There are several specific theoretical and pragmatic differences between their (separate) approaches and ours which would need to be addressed elsewhere. 4. The changing responses of theatrical publics to Shakespeare's plays in light of contemporary history are a basic issue for theatrical producers. See, as an example of recent theatre discussion, Karim-Cooper's review of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre production of the play in 2006 (directed by Lucy Bailey), "Shakespeare's War on Terror". As the title suggests, the review takes the influence of the present on the audience's perceptions of the play for granted, but not for the purpose of critical anachronism which we propose here. 5. Battersby explores the difficult relationship between terrorism and aesthetics through the philosophy of the sublime as explored by such figures as Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke. She begins with the controversy that emerged when the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was reported to have characterized the 11 September 2001 attacks in New York as "'the biggest work of art anywhere, for the whole cosmos" (qtd. in Battersby 67). 6. There are now similar debates about presentism and historicism in American literature, provoked especially by Barrish; in Romantic studies, especially in the scholarly online website Romantic Circles Praxis Series, see the forum entitled "Presentism vs. Archivalism in Research and the Classroom"; in Victorian studies, Robbins; and in queer studies, see, for example, Stockton. In addition, presentism versus historicism in the older sense is an issue of continuing controversy in the fields of history, psychology, and in social science generally. A lively debate in medieval studies on similar issues has also developed: see Cohen; Holsinger; Dinshaw; and Biddick. Unrelated to these issues, a heated debate about the ontology of time presented in a theory called "presentism" has been ongoing for some years in philosophical circles. 7. In contrast, theoretical presentism in the positive sense – ironically for us, using the term "historicism" as its self-designation – goes back at least to the Italian early twentieth-century philosopher of history Benedetto Croce, who wrote, for example, "The practical requirements which underlie every historical judgment give to all history the character of 'contemporary history' because, however remote in time events there recounted may seem to be, the history in reality refers to present needs and present situations wherein those events vibrate" (History as the Story of Liberty 19); see also his History: Its Theory and Practice. And of course a milestone work of a previous generation with specific presentist principles is Kott. Many of the criticisms of historicism and new historicism now deployed by a variety of presentists were first elaborated by Felperin, The Uses of the Canon. 8. See Grady, Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics (152–54), for a fuller discussion of these features of Benjamin's concept of allegory; the present remarks are adapted from that discussion. 9. Bate addresses the tradition of allegorical reading in his Arden Introduction by quoting T.J.B. Spencer in "Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Romans": "The play does not assume a political situation known to Roman history; it is, rather, a summary of Roman politics. It is not so much that any particular set of political institutions is assumed in Titus, but rather that it includes all the political institutions that Rome ever had" (16–17). See also, Liebler. For a fully developed allegorical reading of the play's use of Rome, see James. 10. The 1999 film Titus, directed by Taymor has been the stimulus for several reconsiderations of the play; for an overview of the critical fortunes of the play before and since Taymor's film, see Kingsley-Smith. Among the many notable critical discussions of the film are: Cartelli; Lehmann; Lehmann, Reynolds, and Starks; and Chillington Rutter. 11. There are of course another range of contemporary contexts highly relevant to our understanding of this play, those involving the important issue of violence against women. For reasons of focus we limit ourselves to a different constellation of issues here. For an informative summation and discussion of the relevance of feminist connections of the play to presentism, see Gajowski, "Lavinia as 'Blank Page'". There are too many feminist assessments of the play to cite them comprehensively here. Of particular note, however, are those by Eaton; Green; B. Harris; and Marshall. These sources are noted, among others, by Willis (n. 2). 12. Moschavakis reads the opening sacrifice using the trope of anachronism to argue that the ironic "piety" Titus and the Andronici exercise forces the Elizabethan audience to ask whether persecution and murder done in the name of post-Reformation Christianity is any more defensible than the play's ritualistic violence, which they "must reject as anachronistically pre-Christian or idolatrously un-Christian" (461). 13. Derrida, in Spectres of Marx, opens his discussion with a quotation from Act 1 of Hamlet, and the "time is out of joint" trope is developed throughout. 14. Robson uses this example in his critique of presentism. We agree with Robson's use of Derrida to help conceptualize the radical temporality of readers negotiating centuries-old texts. But Robson does not develop the possible connection to the case of presentism, a term he understands to mean a kind of "pure" anachronism – not only an admission "of the ineradicability of reading's own contextual determination", but a thoroughgoing disavowal of the text's historical determination (13). But this critique, we believe, is based on a one-sided understanding of presentism that ignores its "moment" of negotiating with a text's past – and in its encounter with the text, defining not only the text's congruence with our present ideologies, but also its resistances to them, its status as art in relation to an ideology that cannot capture it. 15. Felperin, The Uses of the Canon, made a number of these and related points 20 years ago in his deconstructive critique of the new historicism; see especially pp. 79–99. 16. Fernie, "Action! Henry V", has defined this aspect of presentism succinctly. Presentists, he writes, "mustn't merely cater to and confirm present values. But any really responsive engagement with Shakespeare's inimitable and even alien presence in the present will in fact creatively confront, unsettle and transcend routine modes of thinking" (97). For Fernie, the irreducibility of the literary work's presence to antiquarian interests is the condition that ultimately distinguishes us as literary critics from mere historians, and so the need to revalue the presence of the text in the present is, as we have been arguing, a matter of disciplinary urgency. 17. Some historians have suggested that Peacham recalled the episode from memory many years after performance, that he confused his memory of performance with a reading of the subsequent first Quarto edition (1594) or a ballad version of the story, or even that Peacham had another dramatic version of the play in mind. For the latter argument, see Schlueter. 18. See, for example, Robertson, who answers earlier nineteenth-century detractors of anachronism, especially pp. 211–12. 19. This is what Jameson calls the quality of their being "always already read": "we never really confront a text immediately, in all its freshness as a thing-in-itself. Rather, texts come before us as the always-already-read; we apprehend them through sedimented layers of previous interpretations, or—if the text is brand-new—through the sedimented reading habits and categories developed by those inherited interpretive traditions" (ix–x). 20. The first four books were printed in 1565, and reprinted with the remainder in 1567. They were printed by Robert Waldgrave in 1587 under the title "The xv. Bookes of P. Ovidius Naso, entitled, Metamorphosis, a worke very pleasant and delectable, Translated out of Latin into English meeter by Arthur Golding gentleman". They were reprinted again in 1593, possibly after the composition of Titus Andronicus. 21. Lefebvre thus argues: "space is neither a mere 'frame', after the fashion of a frame of a painting, nor a form or container of a virtually neutral kind, designed simply to receive whatever is poured into it. Space is social morphology: it is to lived experience what form itself is to the living organism" (93–94). 22. Soja described the utility of "geohistorical" reading for early modern theatre studies in a plenary session paper presented at the Folger Institute Symposium, "Theatre and the Reformation of Space". He deploys the trope in a number of works as early as Thirdspace. See also Soja, Postmodern Geographies. 23. Here, it might be tempting to deploy the distinction developed by Weimann in which he borrows the terminology often used to discuss the late medieval stage arrangement of "place and scaffold", where the scaffold provides the space for localized representations of setting, sometimes called the locus, versus the more fluid uses of stage space in the place of performance, or platea, where actors might, for example, draw attention to the fact of performance itself by speaking directly to an audience or by alluding to contemporary events or figures. In Weimann's argument, the distinction is better understood as modes of performance rather than actual physical spaces on the stage. But if we detach the locus/platea theory from physical structures such as a scaffold stage or theatrical venue, the binary becomes even more problematic because it underscores the point made by Lefebvre that space is equivalent to the uses to which it is put, to perceptions, social formation and imagination. The evidence offered by the Peacham sketch appears to confirm that such distinctions as, for example, between locus and platea are false binaries. 24. Vitkus explores the viability of reading Orientalism back to early modern Europe in "Early Modern Orientalism", especially p. 209. Burton has offered a more pluralistic model of transcultural encounter between Europe and North Africa under the rubric of "trafficking", in Traffic and Turning. More recently, Burton has suggested that "it is old saw to argue against Edward Said's contention that Orientalism can be traced back as far as the European Renaissance. A virtual army of critics indicates instead that not only were relations between 'the East' and 'the West' often characterized by European compromise, deference, and a desire for exchange, nothing resembling discursive coherence in regard to 'the Orient' was even possible before the eighteenth century" ("Emplotting the Early Modern Mediterranean" 22–23). In support of this point, Burton cites a number of the sources we cite here below. Several of the essays in the earlier Loomba and Orkin also anticipate more recent objections in the vein of Burton's. 25. Chakrabarty argues that the very act of historicizing masks European assumptions – originating in the German philosophical tradition and culminating in the postmodernist critique of capitalism – about historical development and the colonial encounter: "Historicism is what made modernity or capitalism look not simply global but rather as something that became global over time, by originating in one place (Europe) and then spreading outside it. This 'first in Europe, then elsewhere' structure of global historical time was historicist …. Historicism thus posited historical time as a measure of cultural distance (at least in institutional development) that was assumed to exist between West and the non-West" (7, emphasis in original). 26. Vitkus, in particular, has made the very important point that the postcolonial reading of Shakespeare often fails to account for the difference between the material realities of failed colonial enterprises (as, for example, England's foundering claims in Ireland under Elizabeth, or England's disastrous first attempts to establish colonies in America under James) and discursive fantasies of empire. See his Turning Turk, especially chapter 1, 1–24. See also Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen, especially chapter 10. 27. Much recent scholarship has turned to the question of England's place within and against the Mediterranean, particularly as represented in early modern drama; see, in particular, Brotton; Wilson; and, most recently, Stanivukovic. 28. This argument has been made persuasively by James. While the treatment of Titus Andronicus is impressive here, the argument proposes an intentional wholeness that depends not only upon the assumption of single authorship, but upon a consistency and integrity of intention that rarely applies to the changing and often collaborative form of drama in the period. 29. Barbour considers England's encounters with the East Indies, the establishment of the Charter for the East India Company in 1600 and representations of the East on the English stage. 30. For a full and fascinating account, see Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen. 31. See Bartels, "The Battle of Alcazar", especially p. 98. See also her more recent book, Speaking of the Moor. 32. A small but significant sampling of those who address Titus Andronicus specifically include: D'Amico (135–47); and, earlier, Barthelemy; Bartels, "Making More of the Moor"; and Smith, "Those 'Slippery Customers'". Other significant discussions of race in early modern England include: Floyd-Wilson; Hall; Little; and Loomba. Royster emphasizes the complexity of racial constructions in Titus Andronicus by focusing on its characterizations of the Goths and Tamora in particular in terms of "hyper-whiteness". 33. Smith, in "Barbarian Errors", argues that "speech acts" in early modern plays such as Othello are performative markers of racial identity, and, more specifically, that rhetorical "barbarisms" are the linguistic markers of outsiders whose presence represents a transgression of the normal social order. He also provides a critical etymology of the terms "barbarian" and "barbarism." 34. For discussion of these competing characterizations of the Moor in this play, see Bartels, "The Battle of Alcazar", especially p. 107. 35. There are also a number of captivity narratives from the period, the majority occurring from the turn of the seventeenth century. These are chronicled by Matar in "English Accounts of Captivity". 36. This position is given greater scope by Burton in Traffic and Turning, especially chapter 6. 37. See Grady, Shakespeare's Universal Wolf (109–30); and, more recently, Pye. 38. In his 1984 Oxford edition to the play, Waith suggests that the character Aaron probably derives from a sixteenth-century European folktale about a wicked Moorish servant who seeks revenge on his master by killing the nobleman's wife and two children, before killing himself. An English version of c.1569 likely predated the play, but the earliest surviving English text is dated 1693. 39. This reference to Muly may come, in fact, directly from Peele himself, whom Vickers recently claimed to be Shakespeare's co-author in Titus – though this has not been accepted in all quarters. See Vickers (449–73). In his Introduction to the Arden edition, however, Bate explores the possibility of collaborative authorship but finally dismisses it (82). 40. Among the many notable discussions of violence and orality in the play, the best remains Wynne-Davies'. See also the many exemplary essays in Kolin, especially Wilburn; and Kehler. 41. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first English usage of "terrorism" to 1795, following the Jacobin Reign of Terror, to mean by as directed and out by the in in the of the of the

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