Presentism, Anachronism, and Titus Andronicus

Abstract

Shakespeare’s plays and poems in their own time reflect a fractious, often violent, and uncertain moment in the shift from feudalism to modernity, a moment that continues to resonate in our own, often violent and precarious moment in late modernity.1 In the early, extremely violent play Titus Andronicus, this convergence is particularly apparent, and it has become even more so in the wake of the attack on the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001. We want to make use of this convergence to exemplify one version of the Presentist criticism discussed in the Foreword by Terence Hawkes and in our Introduction. As we noted, there is no one single kind of Presentism, but rather a multiplicity of possible approaches. In this essay, we offer one example of a specific kind of Presentism, one that acknowledges the importance of scholarly attempts to understand the contexts of the texts that come down to us—while also acknowledging that such historicist efforts nevertheless are always already implicated in the assumptions and values of the “now” within which they are created. The “timelessness” of literature, we have learned, is a façade for our reconstructions of the past at our specific historical moment—and all too often a façade concealing unspoken assumptions from our own time.