"‘I ask your voices and your suffrages’: The Bogus Rome of Peele and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus"

Journal article

This essay provides a contextual reading of Titus Andronicus, paying close attention to the play’s collaborative authorship. Peele and Shakespeare are shown to have manufactured a superficially compelling but in reality utterly fake image of the Roman state as an imaginary laboratory for political ideas, especially the elective principle. Topical allusions and deliberate anachronisms encourage the audience to relate the subject matter to the present, viz., late Elizabethan England in the throes of a succession crisis and rent by confessional divisions. Unlike Peele’s solo works, which exhibit a potent anti-Catholic bias, Titus remains confessionally aloof. The play invites the audience to reflect on the viability of particular modes of succession without committing itself either way, and shows that it is not institutional structures and processes but those who use and abuse them that make the difference to the state of the polity.

Authors: Kewes, P

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Journal: Review of Politics More from this journal
• Volume: 78
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 551-570
• Publication date: 2016-01-01
• Acceptance date: 2016-07-26
• DOI: 10.1017/S0034670516000589
• EISSN: 1748-6858
• ISSN: 0034-6705