Abstract
This chapter investigates the presence of the wound in Shakespeare’s Roman plays, seen as a coherent micro-corpus in itself, in the light of Benjamin’s Deutsche Trauerspiel. Seen in this perspective, the wound appears not as a simple rhetorical figure, but as a true allegory of the lacerations that invest both the ‘body politic’ and the ‘body of desire’. This study aims to show the constant intertwining of the two planes, from the obscene desire of Antony, who wants to rape the dead body of Caesar by inserting ‘many tongues’ into his wounds, to power as pure Eros as displayed in Antony and Cleopatra. Partially independent from this perspective is Coriolanus, whose words are blows, generating wounds, and whose strength is Negation. Finally, in the bloody whirlpool of Titus Andronicus (carefully investigated in the dizzying allusiveness of his proper names), History proves to be synonymous with trauma, that is, with wound.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Bibliography
Adelmann, Janet. 1992. Suffocationg Mothers. Fantasies of Maternal Origins in Shakespeare’s Plays. Hamlet to Tempest. London: Routledge.
Ahl, Frederick. 1985. Metaformations. Soundplay and Wordplay in Ovid and Other Classical Poets. Ithaca, New York and London: Cornell University Press.
Axton, Mary. 1977. The Queen’s Two Bodies. Drama and the Elizabethan Succession. Cambridge: Royal Historical Society.
Bates, Catherine. 2017. On Not Defending Poetry: Defence and Indefensibility in Sidney’s ‘Defence of Poesy’. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Benjamin, Walter. 2019. Origins of the German Trauerspiel. Trans. H. Eiland. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Bevington, David. 2005. Antony and Cleopatra. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bigliazzi. (2019). ‘Vendetta e giustizia selvaggia: Ecuba in Titus Andronicus’. Testo e Senso 20: 74–90.
Bloom, Harold. 1998. Shakespeare. The Invention of the Human. New York: Penguin.
Bono, Barbara. 1984. Literary Transvaluation: From Vergilian Epic to Shakespearean Tragicomdy. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Brown, Norman. 1959. Death Against Life. A Psychoanalytical Meaning of History. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.
Brown, Norman. 1974. ‘Rome. A Psychoanalytic Study’. Arethusa 7.1 (“Psychoanalysis and the Classics”), 95–101.
Burke, Kenneth. 1966. Language as Symbolic Action. Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Cadman, Daniel, Andrew Duxfield, Lisa Hopkins (Eds.). 2019. The Genre of Renaissance. Tragedy, Manchester: University of Manchester Press.
Cavell, Stanley. 2003. Disowing Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Charney, Maurice. 1961. Shakespeare’s Roman Plays. The Function of Imagery in the Drama. Harvard: Harvard University Press.
Covington, Sarah. 2009. Wounds, Flesh, and Metaphor in Seventeenth-Century England. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Dawson, Lesel. 2018. ‘In Every Wound there is a Bloody Tongue: Cruentation in Early Modern Literature and Psychology’. In Blood Matters: Studies in European Literature and Thought, 1400–1700, ed. B. Lander Johnson and E. Decamp, 151–166. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Del Sapio Garbero, Maria. 2018. The Illness of Shakespeare’s Rome. In Rome in Shakespeare’s World, ed. M. Del Sapio-Garbero, vii–xx. Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura.
Del Sapio Garbero, Maria, Nancy Isenberg, Maddalena Pennacchia (Eds.). 2010. Questioning Bodies in Shakespeare’s Rome. Göttingen: V&R Unipress.
DuBois, Page. 1985. ‘A Disturbance of Syntax at the Gates of Rome’. Stanford Literature Review 2: 185–208.
Elam, Keir. 2017. Shakespeare’s Pictures: Visual Objects in the Drama. London & New York: Bloomsbury.
Eliot, Thomas Stearns. 1931. ‘Donne in Our Time’. In A Garland for John Donne, ed. Th. Spencer, 1–20. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Fusini, Nadia. 2010. Di vita si muore. Lo spettacolo delle passioni nel teatro di Shakespeare. Milan: Mondadori.
Fusini, Nadia. 2016. ‘Rome Desired; or, The Idea of Rome’. Memoria di Shakespeare. A Journal of Shakespearean Studies 3: 123–134.
Goldberg, Jonathan. 2003. Shakespeare’s Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Goldman, Michael. 1972. Shakespeare and the Energies of Drama. Priceton: Princeton University Press.
Greenblatt, Stephen. 1995. ‘Toward a Universal Language of Motion: Reflections on a Seventeenth-Century Muscle Man’. In Choreographing History, ed. S. Leigh Foster, 25–31. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Gutwirth, Madelyn. 1992. The Twilight of the Goddesses: Women and Representation in the French Revolutionary Era. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Hale, David. 1971. Coriolanus: The Death of a Political Metaphor’. Shakespeare Quarterly 22.3: 197–202.
Hanses, Mathias. 2016. Love’s Letters: An Amor-Roma Telestich at Ovid, Ars Amatoria 3.507–510. In Wordplay and Powerplay in Latin Poetry, ed. Ph. Mitsis and I. Ziogas, 199–212. Berlin-Boston: De Gruyter.
Hardie, Philip. 2019. Classicism and Christianity in Late Antique Latin Poetry. Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Harrison, Jane Ellen. 1912. Themis. A Study on the Social Origins of Greek Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kantorowicz, Ernst. 1957. The King’s Two Bodies. A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kermode, Frank. 2010. Eliot and the Shudder. London Review of Books 32.9: 13–16.
Kerrigan, John. 1996. Revenge Tragedy. Aeschylus to Armageddon. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Khan, Coppélia. 1997. Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women. London: Routledge.
Kiefer, Frederick, 2003. Shakespeare’s Visual Theatre. Staging the Personified Characters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Knight, George Wilson. 1931. The Imperial Theme: Further Interpretations of Shakespeare’s Tragedies Including the Roman Plays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Krieger, Murray. 2019. Ehphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Marshall, Cynthia. 1996. Wound-Man: Coriolanus, Gender, and the Theatrical Construction of Interiority. In Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, ed. V. Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan and D. Callaghan, 93–118. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McConnel Scott, Andrew. 2012. The Petrarchan Apokalypse of Titus Andronicus: Poetic Mutilation and Elizabethan Visual Culture. In Titus out of Joint: Reading the Fragmented Titus, ed. L. Stavange and P. Heymeyer, 69–86. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Miola, Robert. 1983. Shakespeare’s Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mitchell, John Thomas. 1994. Picture Theory. Essays on Verbal and Visual Representations. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Mulryne, Ronnie. 2005. Cleopatra’s Barge and Antony’s Body: Italian Sources and English Theatre. In Shakespeare, Italy and Intertextuality, ed. M. Marrapodi, 197–215. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Murray, Guilbert. 1912. Excursus on the Ritual Forms Preserved in Greek Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nicoud, Vincent R. 2018. The World Upside-Down in 16th-Century French Literature and Visual Culture. Leiden-Boston: Brill.
Ovidio, Publio Nasone. 2013. Metamorfosi, ed. J.D. Reed, trans. G. Chiarini. Milano: Mondadori.
Parker, Patricia. 2004. What’s in a Name and More. In Renaissance Drama (New Series) 33: 201–244.
Pollard, Tanya. 2017. Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Seaton, Ethel. 1946. Antony and Cleopatra and the Book of Revelation. Review of English Studies 22: 219–224.
Seneca, Lucio Anneo. 1900. Minor Dialogs Together with the Dialog on Clemency. Trans. A. Stuart. London: George Bell and Sons.
Shakespeare, William. 2018. Titus Andronicus, ed. J. Bate. London and New York: Routledge.
Staley, Gregory. 2010. Seneca and the Idea of Tragedy, 17–18. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tanner, Tony. 1997. Prefaces to Shakespeare. Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Williamson, George. 1930. The Donne Tradition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Wind, Edgar. 1967. Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance. London: Penguin.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Stella, M. (2022). The Meta-physical Wound: Shakespeare’s Roman Plays. In: Bondi, F., Stella, M., Torre, A. (eds) The Wounded Body. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91904-7_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91904-7_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-91903-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-91904-7
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)