SOURCE: Detmer-Goebel, Emily. “The Need for Lavinia's Voice: Titus Andronicus and the Telling of Rape.” Shakespeare Studies 29 (2001): 75-92.

In the following essay, Detmer-Goebel concentrates on the rape and silencing of Lavinia as it depicts the male repression of women's authority in Titus Andronicus.

In Act 2 of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, Lavinia refuses to name rape; she refers to an impending sexual assault as that which “womanhood denies my tongue to tell” and as a “worse-than-killing lust” (2.3.174, 175).¹ Lavinia's chaste refusal to say the word “rape” reminds the audience that even to speak of rape brings a woman shame. As feminists have pointed out, an environment that makes it shameful to speak of rape disallows a critique of rape and the culture that sustains it.² And yet, while the world of the play suggests how early modern culture's construction of gender “denies” a woman the “tongue” to talk of rape, the...