When Carnival Turns Bitter A Bakhtinian Reading Of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus

Written around 1594, Titus Andronicus achieved great popularity among the Elizabethans and sunk into near oblivion in the following centuries. The excessive violence that pervades it has become a bane of its staging and critical reception. In the twentieth century, a number of modern innovative stage and cinematic productions of it have managed to minimize the shock brought by its violent factor and have likewise kindled scholar’s interests in the play again. Nevertheless, satisfactory account for its flagrant violence has not been given in spite of the various critical attentions it has received from modern scholars.Drawing on Bakhtin’s theory of carnival, carnivalization and polyphony, this thesis argues that Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus is an uncanny representation of medieval carnival spirit and the carnival logic of "pathos of radical changes and renewals" flows beneath its veil of violence. Moreover, during his representation and appropriation of medieval carnival spirit, Shakespeare discards the regenerative power embedded in medieval carnival and makes Titus Andronicus a bitter carnival that questions the efficacy of carnival as a socially redemptive force.Taking grotesque body images and carnival logic as points of departure, this paper seeks to explore the way Shakespeare creates his own carnival by employing carnivalesque elements. The differences between the grotesque body images in Titus and the medieval ones as conceived by Bakhtin constitute the framework of the first chapter, which strives to prove that Shakespeare has striped medieval grotesque bodies of their regenerative power and made his own grotesque bodies as simple carriers of ambivalence. The following part examines Shakespeare’s manipulation of the social function of carnival by engaging all the characters in the bloody carnival he creates and suggests that by turning the carnival bitter Shakespeare shows his distrust of carnival as a socially transformative power. In the last part, the paper explores the carnivalization of language in the play and identifies polyphony without dialogue at work throughout the play.