SOURCE: "Compelling Art in Titus Andronicus," in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 28, No. 2, Spring, 1988, pp. 197-218.

In the following excerpt, Hunt examines the tendency of characters in Titus Andronicus to use literary models as patterns for behavior and explores the relationship between art and divine providence in the play.

In the judgment of many critics, the Ovid of the Metamorphoses—like the proverbial candle for the moth—possessed a fatal attraction for a Shakespeare groping at times for literary models capable of becoming drama. "With Scene iii of Act II," Reuben Brower writes of Titus Andronicus [in Hero and Saint: Shakespeare and the Greco-Roman Heroic Tradition, 1971], "heroic history gives way to literal enactment of myth. The first difficulty occurs when the rape of Philomel, the sufferings of Io, the vengeful feasts of Philomel and Procne and Thyestes, are spelled out on the stage. Though neither the rhetorical...