SOURCE: "Dismembering and Forgetting in Titus Andronicus," in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 45, No. 3, Fall, 1994, pp. 279-303.

In the following essay, Rowe comments on the symbolic significance of dismembered hands in Titus Andronicus as images of "lost agency" and failed political action.

If you do know that here is one hand, we'll
 grant you all the rest.

(Ludwig Wittgenstein)

Ah, wherefore dost thou urge the name of hands,
 To bid Aeneas tell the tale twice o'er
 How Troy was burnt and he made miserable?
 O, handle not the theme, to talk of hands,
 Lest we remember still that we have none.

(Titus Andronicus, 3.2.26-30)¹

How should the dismembered body parts of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus be understood? As part of the world of stage properties or of character? Read as grotesque and abstract, aesthetically engaging and distancing, dramatically pivotal and superfluous, the severed hands, heads, and tongue have always had a...