#jonathan bate and 1620 german translator i love you i love you i love you i l

[ardenrosegarden]

The next sign that Lavinia gives has been obscure even to the play’s editors. After Aaron’s ludicrously cruel deception of Titus, the heads of Quintus and Martius are brought onstage. There is, as Bate says, an implied stage direction at this moment, for Marcus says to Lavinia: ‘‘Alas, poor heart, that kiss is comfortless / As frozen water to a starved snake’’ (3.1.251–52). Samuel Johnson introduced a direction for Lavinia to kiss Lucius, which subsequent editors changed to Lavinia kissing Titus. Bate, however, acutely realized that Lavinia must here kiss the heads of her brothers: such a kiss earns Marcus’s sad comment on its lack of consolation, but this comment shows, in turn, how easily Lavinia’s signs are misread, or ignored. Her kissing of the heads intends not comfort, but expiation, a demonstration of the brothers’ innocence that remains an uncertain fact in the minds of her uncle and father.

Lorna Hutson, Rethinking the ‘‘Spectacle of the Scaffold’’: Juridical Epistemologies and English Revenge Tragedy