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Shakespeare · Lewkenor · War and the wounded body

Titus Andronicus: The Wounded Soldier and the Theatre of Cruelty

O sweet Revenge, now do I come to thee,
And if one arm’s embracement will content thee,
I will embrace thee in it by and by.

Titus, Titus Andronicus, V.ii.

A soldier’s damaged body, a daughter’s silenced testimony and a country turned into a stage for bloody tragedies.

Titus returns to Rome carrying the losses of a long military career. The city that should honour his service becomes the place where his family is destroyed. His sons are condemned, his daughter is raped and mutilated, and his own hand is cut off in a bargain that saves nobody. The tragedy makes the soldier’s body a record of service and then a target for further violence.

Lewes Lewkenor’s experience gives this reading a disturbing contemporary setting. His petition of 1587 describes the crippling of his right arm and hand. His published account of the Low Countries records violence against civilians, including soldiers cutting women’s fingers off to obtain their rings. The comparison joins documentary testimony about bodily injury to a play in which the loss of hands becomes a repeated and terrible language.

“Nothing acted, but bloody tragedies”

In The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), Lewkenor describes the Low Countries through the metaphor of a theatre. The country is a stage; prolonged war supplies its action:

There is no calamity in the world, of which these miserable people hath not tasted: their country being as a stage, upon which for the space of this twenty years, there hath been nothing acted, but bloody tragedies. Their noble men and rulers in whose virtue and courage consisted their chiefest refuge in times past, when they were wronged and tyrannized, have been murdered, strangled, poisoned, and slain by the bloody ministers of their cruel king. They are taxed in great sums of money, and numbers of their men sent violently into France and foreign wars; and the relics of their nobility, forced to go with them to their apparent slaughter, leaving in the meantime their own country in prey to the neighbouring enemy, their villages flaming in fire, and their towns battered about their ears with the cannon: their privileges taken from them, their cities that sometimes strove in opulence and glory with the goodliest and greatest of the world, are governed by base and barbarous Spaniards, bridled with their garrisons and castles, and sacked and spoiled by them at such time as their payment faileth.

I could at length recite unto you the histories and declarations of these several points here briefly touched, but that I should trouble you with matter altogether tragical and delightless: and withal, they being so common, apparent, and lately done, that there is scarcely any one unacquainted therewith, at least of such as have had any the least desire to look into the estate of foreign matters. In fine, there is no face of justice in their commonwealth, the same being wholly pliable to the will of such strangers as are governors of their towns, and captains of their castles. Their commonwealth justly now resembling the Turkish government, where the peaceable estate obeys the military, and where there is no laws but such as arms prescribe.

Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595); spelling modernised.

The theatrical figure does more than decorate the account. It gives political violence an audience, a duration and a succession of victims. Lewkenor goes on to describe villages burning, towns battered by cannon and civil government subjected to military power. The account ends with a state in which military power dictates what may pass for law.

Lewkenor’s central political fear is also present in Titus: the collapse of justice when the institutions that should protect a community become instruments of coercion. Rome has laws, ceremonies and titles, but these repeatedly fail to restrain cruelty.

The fingers and the rings

Lewkenor’s description of billeted soldiers moves from political oppression to the invasion of a household. Food, bedding and possessions are taken; the people themselves are assaulted:

But the misery of these poor people endeth not here. For besides all this, they are forced and compelled many times to lodge soldiers in their houses, as they march along the country upon service, at which time it is scarcely credible what outrages they receive. They have their cattle killed, to the use of their unthankful guests, their corn threshed out, and some carried away, the rest given to horses, their chests broken up, their goods, even to the very sheets, and the ticks of their beds, the feathers being turned out, stolen and carried away by the soldiers when they march; themselves beaten, and besides constrained to give money, their wives and daughters abused: and in fine, what else is to the nature of man most grievous and intolerable, they are constrained to endure: yea, insomuch that I have seen the rude and barbarous soldier cut off the fingers of women to come to their rings, which otherwise would not come off with such speed as they desired.

Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595); spelling modernised.

“I have seen” makes the final detail personal testimony. The violence has an appallingly ordinary motive: a ring will not come off quickly enough. Lewkenor shows what happens when an armed man’s impatience becomes more powerful than another person’s bodily safety.

The mutilations in Titus Andronicus belong to an elaborate revenge plot, yet the soldiers’ brutality gives them a recognisable world beyond the theatre. Lavinia’s injuries are designed to prevent her identifying her attackers. Titus’s hand is demanded as the price of a false promise. In each case, the body becomes something the powerful can exploit, damage or exchange.

Lewkenor’s injured arm and hand

Lewkenor’s petition of 1587 presents a soldier in financial distress after exile and service abroad. Among the reasons for relief, the translated passage records:

Besides several grievous injuries he has received, lingering illness and the crippling of his right arm and hand.

Lewkenor’s petition, 1587, Brussels archival document; translated extract.

The petition places bodily injury beside exile, confiscated property and the need for relief. A military career has left its mark upon the means by which the soldier can live. Injury becomes part of the case he presents for recognition, just as the wounded body becomes a persistent language in the play.

When Tamora comes disguised as Revenge, Titus answers her performance with an account written upon his body:

I am not mad. I know thee well enough.
Witness this wretched stump; witness these crimson lines;
Witness these trenches made by grief and care;
Witness the tiring day and heavy night;
Witness all sorrow that I know thee well
For our proud Empress, mighty Tamora.
Is not thy coming for my other hand?

Titus, Titus Andronicus, V.ii.

“Witness” turns the injured body into evidence. The stump, the lines in his face and the passage of sleepless time all testify. Lewkenor’s petition similarly asks that injury and service be recognised. The appeal joins past service to present suffering. The injured man demands that those before him recognise what his body has endured.

The hand as ransom

Aaron turns the family’s willingness to sacrifice itself into another instrument of cruelty. The promise is made in the Emperor’s name:

AARON:
Titus Andronicus, my lord the Emperor
Sends thee this word, that if thou love thy sons,
Let Marcus, Lucius, or thyself, old Titus,
Or any one of you, chop off your hand
And send it to the King; he for the same
Will send thee hither both thy sons alive,
And that shall be the ransom for their fault.

TITUS:
O gracious emperor! O gentle Aaron!
Did ever raven sing so like a lark,
That gives sweet tidings of the sun’s uprise?
With all my heart I’ll send the Emperor my hand.
Good Aaron, wilt thou help to chop it off?

LUCIUS:
Stay, father, for that noble hand of thine,
That hath thrown down so many enemies,
Shall not be sent. My hand will serve the turn.

Titus Andronicus, III.i.

Lucius names the hand’s history before it is cut away. It has served Rome and defeated enemies. Aaron’s bargain turns that service into a vulnerability: the father will give the part of himself that his son honours, believing it can purchase the lives of his children. The returned hand and severed heads expose the promise as another calculated torment.

John Stubbs and the punishment of a writer

In 1579 John Stubbs published a pamphlet attacking Elizabeth’s proposed marriage to the Duke of Alençon. Stubbs and William Page, who distributed the book, were punished by the loss of their right hands. William Camden records the scene:

Hereby had Stubbs and Page their right hand cut off with a cleaver driven through the wrist with the force of a beetle, upon a scaffold in the market place at Westminster. The printer was pardoned. I remember, being present thereat, that when Stubbs, having his right hand cut off, put off his hat with his left, and said with a loud voice, God save the Queen, the multitude standing about was altogether silent, either out of horror of this new and unwonted punishment, or else out of pity towards the man being of most honest and unblameable report, or else out of hatred of the marriage, which most men presaged would be the overthrow of Religion.

William Camden, Annales, account of 1579; English translation, spelling modernised. A beetle is a heavy mallet.

The punishment makes the writing hand a public warning. Stubbs answers it with an act of allegiance performed by the hand that remains. His cry and the crowd’s silence hold loyalty, dissent and bodily violence together in a single spectacle. Titus’s fear that Tamora has come for his other hand belongs to an England in which such a punishment had been enacted before witnesses.

Lavinia: a book becomes testimony

The attack on Lavinia attempts to destroy her capacity to testify. Her tongue is cut out and her hands are removed. Speech and ordinary writing have both been denied her, but the story of Philomela in Ovid’s Metamorphoses gives her another means of making herself understood.

TITUS: Lucius, what book is that she tosseth so?

YOUNG LUCIUS: Grandsire, ’tis Ovid’s Metamorphosis.
My mother gave it me.

MARCUS: For love of her that’s gone,
Perhaps, she culled it from among the rest.

TITUS: Soft! So busily she turns the leaves.
Help her! What would she find?—Lavinia, shall I read?
This is the tragic tale of Philomel,
And treats of Tereus’ treason and his rape.

Titus Andronicus, IV.i.

The classical story provides a pattern through which the family can recognise her experience. Marcus then demonstrates writing with a staff guided by feet and mouth:

This sandy plot is plain; guide, if thou canst,
This after me. I have writ my name
Without the help of any hand at all.
Cursed be that heart that forced us to this shift!
Write thou, good niece, and here display at last
What God will have discovered for revenge.
Heaven guide thy pen to print thy sorrows plain,
That we may know the traitors and the truth.

Marcus, Titus Andronicus, IV.i.

Lavinia writes “Stuprum. Chiron, Demetrius.” The assault and its perpetrators have been named. A scene built around damaged hands becomes a scene about the persistence of literacy: reading makes disclosure possible, and a new form of writing defeats the attempt to silence her.

Aaron reads the message

The classical books do more than supply plots. They allow characters to communicate under the eyes of people who fail to understand them. Young Lucius brings weapons wrapped with a Latin verse from Horace:

DEMETRIUS:
Integer vitae, scelerisque purus,
Non eget Mauri iaculis, nec arcu.

CHIRON:
O, ’tis a verse in Horace; I know it well.
I read it in the grammar long ago.

AARON:
Ay, just; a verse in Horace; right, you have it.
[Aside.] Now, what a thing it is to be an ass!
Here’s no sound jest. The old man hath found their guilt
And sends them weapons wrapped about with lines
That wound, beyond their feeling, to the quick.

Titus Andronicus, IV.ii. The Latin says that a man upright in life and free from crime has no need of the Moor’s javelins or bow.

Chiron recognises a school exercise; Aaron recognises an accusation. His literacy exposes the failure of men whose birth and position promise an education they cannot put to use. Words become weapons, and the learned outsider understands the wound before its intended recipients can feel it.

Aaron and the child

Aaron helps devise the destruction of Titus’s family. His defence of his own son does not erase that cruelty, but it creates a powerful contradiction within it. When Tamora’s sons propose killing the baby to conceal its parentage, Aaron threatens them:

Stay, murderous villains, will you kill your brother?
Now, by the burning tapers of the sky
That shone so brightly when this boy was got,
He dies upon my scimitar’s sharp point
That touches this my firstborn son and heir.

Aaron, Titus Andronicus, IV.ii.

He insists that the child belongs to their family, despite their wish to deny him. His declaration of priority is uncompromising:

My mistress is my mistress, this myself,
The vigor and the picture of my youth.
This before all the world do I prefer;
This maugre all the world will I keep safe,
Or some of you shall smoke for it in Rome.

Aaron, Titus Andronicus, IV.ii.

The contrast with Titus is unsettling. The Roman patriarch kills his son Mutius early in the play and later kills Lavinia; Aaron, the character whom Rome marks as an outsider, struggles to keep his child alive. The tragedy makes its language of honour and barbarism unstable. Neither Roman identity nor military distinction guarantees humane conduct.

The soldier driven into exile

Lucius is banished from Rome and finds support among the Goths. His return with an army reverses the relationship between citizen and enemy. He reminds the Romans that the body they expelled had already been wounded in their defence:

Lastly, myself unkindly banishèd,
The gates shut on me and turned weeping out
To beg relief among Rome’s enemies,
Who drowned their enmity in my true tears
And oped their arms to embrace me as a friend.
I am the turned-forth, be it known to you,
That have preserved her welfare in my blood
And from her bosom took the enemy’s point,
Sheathing the steel in my advent’rous body.
Alas, you know I am no vaunter, I;
My scars can witness, dumb although they are,
That my report is just and full of truth.
But soft, methinks I do digress too much,
Citing my worthless praise. O, pardon me,
For when no friends are by, men praise themselves.

Lucius, Titus Andronicus, V.iii.

Scars testify where official recognition has failed. The phrase “Rome’s enemies” also names the central political danger of exile: a state can drive its own subjects into the arms of its opponents. Lewkenor’s writing addresses Englishmen caught in precisely that question of foreign service, allegiance and return.

His appeal to those still abroad draws on the image of a displaced child and a welcoming mother:

Let them not tire out their years and youth in so comfortless and unrewarded a service, the end whereof is never other than untimely death, desolation, or beggary; let them not trust themselves to sleep in the bosom of a flattering stepmother, that holdeth a knife in her hand to cut their throats, when they may securely throw themselves into the arms of a loving natural mother, that will receive them, coming like penitent and obedient children, with true tears and perfect joy. Let them cast back their eyes upon the glory and greatness of her Majesty, their sovereign Princess, who indeed is a true and loving mother to us all, let them but look into the happy and blessed estate of their native country, and finally consider the duty they do owe unto them both. They are not yet so far past, but that their submission may be received: yea, and such services they may do, highly rewarded too.

Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595); spelling modernised.

Lucius returns by force; Lewkenor urges submission and reconciliation. Their courses differ, but both texts test the bond between the injured soldier and the country that claims his loyalty. The imagery of arms, wounds, family and belonging gives that political problem a bodily form.

The play onstage and in print

Henslowe’s diary records Sussex’s Men performing “titus & ondronicus” at the Rose on 24 January 1594. On 6 February, John Danter entered the play in the Stationers’ Register, alongside a separate ballad entry. The first quarto appeared that year without an author’s name. Its title page associates the play with the companies of Derby, Pembroke and Sussex. Explore the surviving documents.

These records place the tragedy within the commercial theatre of the early 1590s. A performance account, a printed play, a ballad and the Peacham drawing preserve different parts of its early life: money taken at the theatre, words prepared for readers and singers, and the visual arrangement of figures whose story was already recognisable.

The strongest Lewkenor comparison lies in the words that can be placed directly beside one another: a country staged as “bloody tragedies”; the witnessed mutilation of women; a petition describing a disabled arm and hand; and the dramatic insistence that wounded bodies bear witness. Those connections make the violence of Titus legible within the lived experience of continental war.

Sources

William Camden, Annales, account of the punishment of John Stubbs and William Page in 1579.

Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595): the Low Countries as a stage for “bloody tragedies”, military government, the treatment of civilians and the appeal to English soldiers abroad. Spelling modernised.

Lewkenor’s petition of 1587, Brussels archival document, translated extract concerning injury to his right arm and hand.

William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, IV.i–ii and V.ii–iii; Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book VI, Philomela, Procne and Tereus.

Philip Henslowe’s diary, performance entry for 24 January 1594; Stationers’ Register, 6 February 1594; first quarto (1594).

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