Presentism, Anachronism and the Case ofTitus Andronicus

Today Shakespeare studies is exploring alternatives to an exhausted new historicism, and critical presentism is one of the new tendencies being explored. But presentism itself is a pluralistic endeavour, and this article pursues one possible path within it and one that speaks to one of the major criticisms made in reaction to early presentism: its supposed ignoring of history. But presentist criticism investigating how our present shapes our views of history has already been developed and can help rescue the field from an overly positivist approach to mere historical “facts” through its value-conscious engagement with the past. Here we focus on such a reading of “Titus Andronicus,” a play which fully expresses its historical moment of composition in the early 1590s. But today, the play in addition speaks to us of our own twenty-first century experience of terrorism. This approach can be seen as anachronistic, but it is an anachronism that opens up the play to its full meanings as a work of art in the twenty-first century. The use of anachronism in the context of consciousness of historical consciousness creates a form of presentist criticism which this article exemplifies. Indeed, recent historicist criticism of the play is already influenced by the new interest in Islamic cultures characteristic of the West since the events of Sept. 11, 2001, illustrating the sense in which historicist criticism itself has an important presentist dimension. In this reading, the play's own anachronisms—most prominently the Moorish character Aaron placed in Roman late antiquity—signals both the anxiety of Elizabethan audiences towards the Ottoman Empire and our own day's fear of terrorism from the Middle East.