The Seeds of Dystopia in Titus Andronicus

ABSTRACT This article suggests that, for the contemporary reader, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus appears to incorporate some of the elements that would later flower into the genre of the literary dystopia. These elements include an alienated protagonist who recognizes the oppressive nature of their world, the manipulation of language as part and parcel of a repressive system, and the work’s reliance on hyperbolized metaphor. Most importantly, a necessary precondition to the creation of a dystopia is displacement, temporal or spatial. Titus Andronicus departs from our familiar reality by creating a Rome that is estranged from history. While some scholars have set the drama in the late empire, others insist that it does not take place in a recognizable historical period and instead presents a pastiche of moments from Roman history. In its contradictory sense of a hyper-historicized Rome that is not an effacement of history, but a kind of intensification, and in its inclusion of other dystopian elements, Titus Andronicus represents a pocket of spacetime, similar to the vaguely evoked Rome of some dystopian novels. The play’s evocation of a mythologized, ahistorical Roman past creates a bubble universe bathed in violence, subverting the idealized Renaissance image of classical Rome.