SOURCE: "Interpreting 'her martyr'd signs': Gender and Tragedy in Titus Andronicus," in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 3, Fall, 1989, pp. 317-26.

In the following essay, Green examines the intertwined workings of gender, revenge, and victimization in Titus Andronicus.

Today we are questioning the cultural definitions of sexual identity we have inherited. I believe Shakespeare questioned them too, that he was critically aware of the masculine fantasies and fears that shaped his world, and of how they falsified both men and women.¹

. . . by text we mean not something that is self-same on the page, not the intertness of an implacable letter, but rather those slippages and multiplications which determine and fix only to unmoor again, making all places provisional, all sites relational, all identity a matter of differences scarcely perceivable because forever changing.²

In Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus the parallels to other popular plays of the period are evident: bits of Marlowe...