Blackwell Reference Online

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I started thinking in terms of time rather than space. Petrarch, “The Ascent of Mount Ventoux” Titus Andronicus 's reputation for excessive violence is singularly matched by its overt use of classical references and the playwright's manifest attention to language. Titus's superlative dramaturgy, both its fierce acts and florid language, might be mistaken for “the brashness and bravura of a younger poet, showing off both his knowledge of classical authors and his mastery of a crowd-pleasing popular genre” ( Kahn 1997 : 46). However, Coppélia Kahn contends, “this most self-consciously textual of all Shakespearean plays doesn't appropriate, imitate, allude to, and parody a host of classical authors merely to elicit plaudits for its author's learning and virtuosity” (p. 47). While loudly advertising its Renaissance humanist pedigree, the play's classicism is uniquely joined to brutal excesses. Violence and language or literature: this is the play's compelling conjunction that requires exploration. Renaissance humanism cannot be pigeonholed as a philosophical doctrine; rather, it is a set of philological and professional practices having in common “a scholarly, literary, and educational ideal based on the study of classical antiquity” ( Kristeller 1962 : 22). “The Renaissance ‘rediscovery’ of the classics,” Charles Nauert (1995) adds, “was not so much a real rediscovery as a habit ... log in or subscribe to read full text