SOURCE: "The Rape of Lavinia," in Shakespeare's Culture of Violence, St. Martin's Press, 1993, pp. 79-93.

In the following essay, Cohen investigates the politics of male violence in Titus Andronicus.

In three of Shakespeare's tragedies women protagonists are killed by men. In Titus Andronicus Lavinia is killed by her father; in Othello Desdemona is killed by her husband; in King Lear Cordelia is killed by a soldier. While the killing of Cordelia is represented as a cruelly unmotivated murder, Lavinia and Desdemona are killed precisely in order to sustain masculine ideals of honour which each woman is represented as having challenged or exposed. The death of Desdemona follows from her being perceived as willfully unfaithful to the masculine code of sexual fidelity.

Lavinia is a more complex case. Her innocence is known and affirmed y every character in the play, including her father who eventually kills her. Her conduct...