Lavinia’s Tongue: pain and empathy on page, stage, and screen.
Part One: Compression, getting the whole from the parts1
by Amy Cook
Movie trailers, like the dumb show to which Hamlet objects at the start of the Mousetrap2,
impart the argument of the film; two hours or more are compressed down to some quick shots,
dramatic narration, and loud music. They do not always “work,” either because they fail to
seduce their target audience (as measured in ticket sales) or because they seem to
misrepresent the film. Trailers for films by Shakespeare or based on his plays have the added
complication of the cultural weight of the author’s name—for some it will be enough to
ensure attendance, for most, though, it is something to be compensated by: “yeah, it’s
Shakespeare but no one wears tights and there are explosions.” One of the most important
ways that Hollywood trailers for Shakespeare films work is by focusing on the celebrities in
the film; rather than tell us who the characters are or the conflict or the story, the trailer gives
us the name and face of the film’s stars. Compressed in those celebrity faces is the drama in
miniature.
Early modern England did not have trailers, but there is a similar effect evidenced on
the Quarto title pages. These privilege the name of the play and the name(s) of the noblemen
whose “servants” have “plaid” it. The title-page of Q1 of Titus Andronicus authorizes itself by
linking the text to its previous performance: “As it was Plaide by the Right Honourable the
Earle of Darbie, Earle of Pembrooke, and Earle of Suffex their Servants.”3 The names of the
earls here are brands, linking the play to an impressive array of noble-authorized
performances. One wonders how much the experience of reading the play in this form was
ghosted by what the reader knew about these earls or their players. In this paper I want to
explore a relationship between names and characters: both are compressions, rigorously and
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efficiently working to facilitate memory and create an experience of rich and deep
individuals. I will use conceptual blending theory to present an understanding of character and
“belief” that structures our processing of the stories around us. This cognitive process works
the same with fictional characters as with non-fiction characters and counters, I think,
Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief.” Ultimately, our preciously guarded belief in the
individual, in the “Human” as Harold Bloom calls it, is only a fiction, but one that has
patterned and promoted many powerful narratives. This narrative patterning is visible In Titus
Andronicus, as Lavinia’s fate is foretold in a combination between her name and Aaron’s
invocation of Lucrece.
Brief theoretical background
Current research in cognitive linguistics has radically upended previous assumptions about
how we make meaning, and such a change demands a rethinking of literary theory. Language
exists in a context; it both reflects and shapes the culture of its speakers. It is not arbitrary (à
la Ferdinand de Saussure), not generated in a language area of the brain through words
memorized listening to mother (à la Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker), and it is not
cognitively determining or individually interpellating (à la Louis Althusser).4 A shift in the
understanding of how we think, speak, and compose meaning creates the larger seismic shift
away from the ‘objectivism’ of the traditional view of thinking towards the “experiential
realism” of embodied, metaphoric thinking.5 I will omit a discussion of the radical changes in
our understanding of language and thought that have occurred in the last thirty years, and
simply focus on the role of compression in thinking and speaking. Maps are an excellent
example of compression: we compress a large and infinitely detailed physical environment
into a scale most useful for driving, say, or tracking wildlife. As Mark Johnson reminds us,
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maps are not actually there, “We do not experience the maps, but rather through them we
experience a structured world full of patterns and qualities.”6 We do not experience maps,
rather we experience what the maps make it possible to perceive. Compression can be very
visible in the political thinking of others, for example, but is nonetheless present in the
political thinking of all.7 Compression is central to cognition.
Conceptual integration theory (or blending) suggests that we use compression in all of
our thinking and speaking as a way of connecting networks of associations, from the concrete
and physical to the abstract or theoretical.8 We compress and selectively project information
from two or more mental spaces to create a third blended space that can contain emergent
properties not available in the input spaces. This is not a combination or a blurring of two
ideas, it is a complicated network evoked and integrated to create a new idea. Conceptual
blending theory seeks to understand the way in which language creates emergent structure—
novel ideas, creative leaps, and powerful associations. A particular blend might vary from
individual to individual. The network of spaces prompted in a given situation is more
powerful as a process in flux, a series of variables, than simply a final blend. Almost by
design, a complete description of the spaces within a network built by a blend is impossible,
because there are an infinite number of possible associated spaces. In The Literary Mind,
Mark Turner suggests that a “blend can reveal latent contradictions and coherences between
previously separated elements. […] Blends yield insight into the conceptual structures from
which they arise.”9 The conceptual blending theory of Gilles Fauconnier and Turner has
provided me with tools to pursue my interest in the formation of meaning in the plays of
Shakespeare. While a close attention to text is not new to Shakespeare scholarship, a different
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conception of how we compose meaning with that text opens up new connections or avenues
of research.10
A turn toward blending theory in the humanities should answer questions important to
the humanities; it should be a methodology that unlocks the play and performance experience
as a whole. I am not interested in being a disciplinary tourist, but rather a disciplinary
ambassador. I want the work being done in the sciences to address and understand the
questions we are asking and answering in the humanities and I want the humanities to address
and probe the research being done in the sciences. Both cognitive linguistics and literary
studies aim to understand language in a rich and embedded way and this makes this
combination of fields, I believe, particularly fruitful for dialogue. F. Elizabeth Hart boldly
claims that blending theory will
be the aspect of cognitive linguistics that has the most lasting impact on literary
studies, and here, in brief, is why: theirs is a theory of meaning that acknowledges the
postmodern problematics of interpretation (the view of where we’ve been) while at the
same time addressing our need to comprehend the mechanics of even imperfect
meaning and interpretation (the view of where we’d like to go).11
What she is speaking to is the dead-end of poststructuralist conceptions of language but also
the incredible importance of contingency in meaning. Conceptual blending theory can expose
the conceptual structures that keep problematic narratives and paradigms in place and offer a
tremendous tool to those of us wanting to know how and why stories are told by bodies
onstage. There have been several important works integrating blending theory into literature,
though fewer examining its impact on theatre scholarship.12 An application of blending theory
to theatre and performance confronts the complexity of a meaning-making event that includes
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the bodies of the participants, unlike literature, for example, where the character’s body
remains constructed out of words.
Casting, compression, and the movie trailer
In hushed tones, the narrator of the trailer for Julie Taymor’s Titus (1999) starts out: “For
those who think revenge is sweet …” and then pauses as Anthony Hopkins plays with a knife
as he taunts Chiron and Demetrius, hung upside down like cattle for slaughter, with his plans
to “grind their bones to dust.” The narrator then returns to finish with: “taste this” over a close
up of Hopkins snapping hungrily at the air. Many viewers of this trailer would not have
needed more than the image of knife-wielding Hopkins to be reminded of his academy-award
winning performance in Silence of the Lambs (1991). Hopkins himself referred to the
performance as a mixture of Hannibal Lecter and King Lear.13 What is rendered visible in
Hollywood casting of celebrities in films, however, is in fact present in any and all casting of
plays: the “character” found onstage is always a mixture of inputs, a collision of references.
When the actor walks onstage, he is no longer simply an actor; elements of the
character, the set, the program, the cultural/historical context of performance, the other actors
onstage, all these things and more create information that a spectator uses to compose the
meaning of that man there. Bruce McConachie sees this as part of a creative involvement on
the part of the audience: “When spectators blend identity with actors and character to create
actor/characters, they can add more or les of each ingredient to whip up their theatrical
recipes.”14 While I agree that the process of conceptual blending is individual, it is not a fully
conscious procedure nor do I see it as a binary operation. McConachie takes Fauconnier and
Turner’s idea of “living in the blend” wherein people behave as if a fictional space is real15
and applies that to the audience experience, arguing that spectators oscillate in and out of the
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blend—sometimes seeing the actor, sometimes seeing the actor/character. McConachie’s
formulation, for me, reifies the idea of “the actor’s identity” and “the character” and I do not
believe that either pre-exist the blending process. I also believe that Fauconnier and Turner’s
“living in the blend” might be a clever way to describe certain phenomena, but it undermines
their larger argument; blending is not some strange, psychotic or literary state. Blending is
how we make sense out of disperse pieces of information. Their later work focuses on the
centrality of the network and it is here that the work becomes strongest. If all meaning is
networks, than there is no “out” of the blend.
Discussions of celebrity casting refer to the impact of the persona on the meaning of
the performance, so an application of blending theory is, in many ways, unnecessary. 16 In
“Celebrity and the Semiotics of Acting,” Michael Quinn argues that celebrity threatens to
subvert “good art” by keeping the actors from “disappearing entirely into the acting figure or
the drama” and creating a “collision with the role.”17 Quinn’s formulation depends on a stable
and fixed “celebrity” and an authorial and fixed “character.” Marvin Carlson argues that
celebrity does not always subvert the authority of the character, as Quinn suggests, but rather
often enriches and deepens it. He calls this “doubleness of perception” of actor and character,
a kind of “ghosting.”18 Barbara Hodgdon’s reading of the actors’ bodies in Ian McKellan’s
Richard III and Al Pacino’s Looking For Richard finds the relationship between character and
actor highlighted by specific codes written on each actor’s body. While McKellan’s body
comes pre-coded as gay, Pacino uses his body as “a lever to decenter, though not discard, the
text-based core of Shakespeare studies” and each re-author Shakespeare’s villain on their own
backs.19 While Carlson’s and Hodgdon’s readings of the performances are compelling, neither
articulates how the spectator comes to see one ghost and not another, how McKellan’s body
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becomes “gay” in this context while another actor’s sexuality does not get staged. Samuel
Crowl’s criticism of Taymor’s casting of Alan Cumming as Saturninus is not about factors
intrinsic to the actor but rather a kind of failed intertextuality:
Her efforts are weakened further by her decision to cast Alan Cumming as Saturninus.
Cumming came to Titus fresh from his award-winning performance in the revival of
Cabaret, and one sees what must have struck Taymor about parallels between the
demimonde world of 1930s Berlin and ancient Rome, but trying to link Saturninus
with the Nazis and Fascists remains an idea poorly realized. The Nazis were cold,
efficient killers; Cumming’s Saturninus is an insipid brat who strikes poses.20
For Crowl, Cumming is still “fresh” from his role in Cabaret and thus imports with his body
the period of the revival that then clashes with the actor’s own choices about who the
character is. Unlike Hopkins, whose portrayal of Titus is helped by the ghosting, Cumming
fails to match the expectations of his past.
What blending theory offers, I believe, is a methodology to probe how we make up
characters when celebrity is not involved—or even when fiction is not involved. By casting
Laura Fraser as Lavinia, as opposed to, say, Mira Sorvino (Academy Award winner for
Mighty Aphrodite in 1995), Taymor placed more focus on the character/actor’s future than
past. Lavinia/Fraser did not have to compete with Fraser’s persona in order to create Lavinia.
In making predictions about the behavior of others, we compress previous experience with
them into traits that we then use to read their current behavior. This may be efficient, but it is
not always accurate or fair. 21 By learning to read the networks that make up the blends we
can remain present to alternative readings or blends.
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Names as synecdoches
As Claudius and Gertrude demonstrate with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, names are
difficult to remember. The way to make naming simple would be for all of us to have
different words to identify ourselves. If there were no other Amys in the world, you would
never have to explain which one you meant. On the other hand, if every one had to have
his/her own word identifier, it would multiply our language to such an extent as to be
completely unmanageable. There are major historical differences between the early modern
period and now in terms of the number of names in circulation. As Michael Ramscar and his
collaborators have shown, regulation of naming is relatively recent and industrialization has
shifted our names away from our origins. In 1600, “50% of the boys born in England were
named William, John or Thomas”22 whereas my son’s second grade class has an Equin,
Atticus, and a Titus, but no William, John, or Thomas. Surnames once helped link us to our
family (Donald-son), our geographic region (of Orange), our appearance (white head), or our
job (Farmer) and thus we could be located categorically, if not individually. Then and now,
names are like a suitcase handle, facilitating the movement and use of a lot of information.
Shakespeare uses names to help this categorization, giving characters names that
communicate personality--Malvolio, Benvolio, Dogberry—or stage geographic regions of
England—Westmoreland, Gloucester, Exeter—or evoke tales memorized at school—
Ganymede, Lavinia, Titus.
Just as we knew that Hopkins/Titus was going to be involved in some kind of
cannibalistic darkness from the first moment we saw his face, an early modern audience
would bring to the play certain expectations about the characters from their names. Murray J.
Levith tells the story of the name Lavinia from Virgil’s Aeneid: “Despite a previous betrothal,
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she is promised to Aeneas by her father, and thus becomes the innocent cause of much
anguish”23 and Jonathan Bate glosses the arc of her name in Titus Andronicus as “Virgil’s
Lavinia, the mother of early Rome, becomes the mutilated daughter of late Rome.”24 Lavinia
is referred to by her name twenty times in the short time that she is onstage before being raped
and the tale foretold by her name is enacted before act one is complete: despite being
betrothed to Bassianus, she is given to Saturninus by her father. At the start of act two, Aaron
connects her to Lucrece (“Lucrece was not more chaste / Than this Lavinia, Bassianus’ love”)
and her fate becomes patterned by a historic wife of later Rome. Aaron then mentions the
third precedent for Lavinia’s fate (Philomel) to Tamora. Before killing his daughter at the end,
Titus asks Saturninus to give his opinion on another legal precedent: “Was it well done of
rash Virginius / To slay his daughter with his own hand, / Because she was enforced, stained
and deflowered?” (5.3.36-8). From her introduction--“Gracious Lavinia, Rome’s rich
ornament” (1.1.55)--Lavinia points to a larger story. Just as in the “tedious sampler” on which
Philomel “sew’d her mind,” these stories are compressed down to the pattern meant to predict
or inspire current and future action, reaction, and revenge.
Lavinia’s missing parts
How might this understanding of character inform an understanding of the scene of Lavinia’s
exposed trauma? Shakespeare silences Lavinia on “Confusion fall--” and the brothers take her
offstage as Aaron leads her brothers onstage to fall into the “unhallowed and bloodstained
hole” (2.2.210). Shakespeare’s stage directions begin act two, scene three with: “Enter the
Empress’ Sons with Lavinia, her hands cut off and her tongue cut out, and ravished.” Alan
Dessen (after Richard Hosley) makes a distinction between “fictional” and “theatrical” stage
directions, where “theatrical” stage directions point to the theatrical structure of the make
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believe world and “fictional” remain in the narrative frame. Shakespeare’s description of
Lavinia is “fictional” of course, and, though there is no evidence of how this is staged, we
know Shakespeare is referring to the character not the actor since (if nothing else) the actor
would have been a he. What did the Groundlings see and what should the emotional reaction
be? Most theories of narrative empathy or emotion suggest that we believe the fictional world
is real and therefore feel real emotions toward an unreal event.25 I do not think that a spectator
could believe that Lavinia/actor was just raped just as I do not think that he/she could believe
that Lavinia/actor has had her hands and tongue removed. If we assume that empathy requires
perspective taking, than to take Lavinia/actor’s perspective is to be in a strange place of
disconnection, since Lavinia’s state and the actor’s have been so radically separated. Reading
The Rape of Lucrece we can take Lucrece’s perspective (and indeed Shakespeare labors to
facilitate this); but Titus Andronicus is a play and therefore always calls for those noble (or
otherwise) “Servants” to embody these characters. In this scene, Lavinia cannot be embodied.
I also do not think we can take Marcus’s perspective; his Petrarchan ode to her
damage seems to see her as dead, perhaps like one of the animals killed on his hunt and
perhaps strapped to his side,26 and yet we see the actor alive. Indeed, when he brings her to
Titus he says: “This was thy daughter” (3.1.63), as if he is carrying an unrecognizable dead
body. Titus does not take Marcus’s perspective either, restoring her to life and relation with
“Why, Marcus, so she is” (3.1.64). Perhaps, as Steven Mullaney suggests, there’s a pathos to
be found in being forced from viable staged perspective and an “affective irony” involved in
the emotional experience of not belonging in the scene at all.27 Or perhaps belief and
perspective taking are not necessary for an emotional reaction. We create character and
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narrative to make sense of the senseless; just because it is an effective strategy does not mean
it actually relates to things of (cognitive or emotional) sense.
1
This essay is now a week late and it has become clear to me that the project I set out to write is far larger than
what I can do here. I am aiming at a larger project that seeks to reimagine pain and empathy on stage and screen.
These 10 pages cannot do that. I am so grateful to all of you for (what I hope is) your patience with this early
work.
2
The Murder of Gonzago’s status as “something like” the murder of King Hamlet (rather than being a replica of
it) is rendered more visible by the dumb show being “something like” the Murder of Gonzago. The
representations get smaller and smaller, like embedded Russian Dolls.
3
Bate, Jonathan, ed. Titus Andronicus. London: The Arden Shakespeare, 1995; 96. All subsequent references to
the play are from this edition.
4
See Saussure (1966); Chomsky (1969); Pinker (1999); and Althusser (1971). This is, I admit, a simplistic
account of very complex work. I should note that there are still adherents to these theories but they are more and
more in the minority.
5
See Lakoff (1987): xv. For more on the history of the shift in cognitive linguistics from generative or
objectivist theories of language to compositional and experiential theories of language, see Lakoff (1987);
Johnson (1987); Turner (1996). The paradigm shift in cognitive linguistics is that, as opposed to an idea of
generative grammar proposed by Noam Chomsky and others, language and thinking is creative and embodied.
Johnson’s (1987, 2007) work on meaning and the body is particularly useful for studies in literature and the arts.
6
Johnson (2007): 132.
7
See Coulson and Pascual (2006) and Cook (2010): 31-6.
8
See Fauconnier (1985), and Fauconnier/Turner (2002).
9
See Turner (1996): 84.
10
Perhaps the cognitive turn in literary and performance studies smacks of hegemonic claims to Truth or
universalizing. Let me quickly insist this is not the case. Cognitive science does not privilege thinking over
feeling and does not separate body from mind. This privileging of imagination, creativity, and the body is part of
the reason I find the integration of cognitive science into my research so productive. I deploy the sciences not
because it is more “objective” or true than previous theoretical movements in theater, but because the interests
and findings within that field shed light on this field. It is, however, usually falsifiable. Even theories that remain
contentious within cognitive science work on the assumption that a gathering of evidence and a growing body of
work that finds the new interpretation capable of providing answers to previously unanswered questions will
eventually gain consensus and the next set of research/questions will go from there. That it will be considered
“true” until evidence arrives that suggests that it is “not true.” F. Elizabeth Hart points out that literary theory
should be evaluated for how they fit with research on language produced and studied within cognitive linguistics,
since, “both deconstruction and materialist studies have internalized basic formalist assumptions about the
operations of language that are indigenous to linguistic structuralism.” She provides an insightful “science based
critique of Derridean language theory, focusing on the formalism latent in Jacques Derrida’s narrative of
différence.” See Hart, “Matter, System, and Early Modern Studies: Outlines for a Materialist Linguistics,”
Configurations 6.3, (1998): 313–14. For a strong argument for the integration of the sciences into the
humanities, see Bruce McConachie, “Falsifiable Theories for Theatre and Performance Studies,” Theatre
Journal 59, no. 4 (2007): 553–77.
11
See Hart (2006): 233.
12
See Crane (2001), Crane/Richardson (1999), Dancygier/Sweetser (2005), Freeman (1995), Hart (1998),
Spolsky (2001), Sweetser (2006), Moschovakis (2006), and Turner (2004, 1996). For applications in theatre and
performance studies, see Blair (2009), Cook (2006 and 2010), Hogan (2003), McConachie (2008), Lutterbie
(2011).
13
Holden, Stephen. “It’s a Sort of Family Dinner, Your Majesty” New York Times Review, Section E, Part 1,
Page 19. December 24, 1999. According to David McCandless, “When a steely but wild-eyed Anthony Hopkins
condemns Tamora’s sons to become cannibal fodder, Titus’s retributive mania both evokes and subsumes the
seductive monstrosity of Hannibal Lecter, Hopkins’s most famous film incarnation.” See McCandless (2002),
492-3.
14
See McConachie (2008): 44.
11
15
See Fauconnier and Turner (2002): 83-4.
The most prominent in this field, which I do not cite here is Roach (2007).
17
See Quinn (1990): 155.
18
See Carlson (2001): 9.
19
See Hodgdon (1998): 210.
20
See Crowl (2003): 208.
21
I’m thinking most obviously of stereotyping and racial profiling. But additionally, Gerrig and his collaborators
have examined the “Psychological Processes Underlying Literary Impact” and found that we ascribe
dispositional explanations for people’s behavior and bring this to our reading experience. In a way, we already
create characters out of others.
22
See Ramscar et al currently in manuscript.
23
Murray (1978): 44.
24
Bate (1995): 18.
25
For more on narrative empathy see Keen (2005). For more on my argument about emotional reactions in the
theatre and “belief” see Cook (2006) and (2011).
26
Dessen suggests that perhaps the stage direction that calls for Marcus to enter “from hunting” is a theatrical
signal, rather than part of the narrative, a direction that then calls to mind another contemporary stage direction
wherein “as if from hunting” means the figure had “‘Bowe and Arrowes, and a Cony at his girdle.’” Dessen then
wonders “If ‘[as if] from hunting’ can include a small animal ‘at his girdle,’ especially a blooded animal without
its limbs, consider the effect upon the ‘imagery’ of the remainder of Titus, 2.4, Marcus’ painful confrontation
with Lavinia …, an encounter that includes such lines as ‘what stern ungentle hand / Hath lopped and hewed and
made thy body bare / Of her two branches….” See Dessen (1996): 57.
27
Mullaney, Steven. “Affective Irony: The Emotional Logic of the Elizabethan Stage,” unpublished paper.
16
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