“Lawes of the Forrest”: Mapping Violence on the Female Bodyscape in Titus Andronicus
“Lawes of the Forrest”: Mapping Violence on the Female Bodyscape in Titus Andronicus

Summary/Abstract: This paper discusses the definition of the forest as a space regulated by the repetitive act of appropriation on the part of the royal authority as well as the correspondences between the rhetoric of forest possession and the construction of another locus communis for the political use of nature, i.e. female body. Spatialization/naturalization of the female body in William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus is introduced with the use of the interlocking imaginary topographies of “feminized” topography of Rome and that of the forest as a whore. It is between these two that the politicized female bodies of Lavinia and Tamora oscillate, mapped in language as bodyscapes, onto which violence of “lawes of the forrest” is inscribed.

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