서강대학교

초록/요약

William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus delves deep into the notions of early modern subjectivity built around individuality and its conflict with communal, social, and public norms. This tension, heightened especially during the time of Shakespeare, is represented in a myriad of ways through the Roman patrician, the alien, and two noblewomen – Titus Andronicus, Aaron the Moor, and Lavinia and Tamora respectively. By examining how these four characters seek to assert their identity in the Roman world of Titus Andronicus, one may gain insight into how early modern men and women endeavored to find a way to live together in a world faced with rapid change, and greater awareness to the gap between the public and private self. Furthermore, I explicate how the notion of individuality claimed in Elizabethan England was a realm specifically limited to the upper class men. The way in which Roman patricians in the play assert their identity give insight to how early modern elite men employed institutional and ideological means to maintain superiority and to delimit social inferiors. Accordingly, public values strongly identified by the Roman soldier Titus Andronicus illustrate that the claims of supremacy based on honor and patriarchal power function at the expense of limiting female subjectivity to sexuality, and labeling racial others with savagery. As the tragedy of Titus Andronicus testifies, however, these ideologies are established to compensate for the male elite’s own anxieties regarding identity and power. By examining how one’s subjectivity is conceived and expressed in Titus Andronicus through the male nobility, the racial other, and noblewomen, I demonstrate that the individualism much lauded in Shakespeare’s time was not only inseparable from communal identity, but also self-contradictory and destructive of society.