“The Obscene ob skene: Offstage Sexual Violence in Early Modern Drama”

In William Shakespeare’s notoriously violent Titus Andronicus , approximately 115 lines elapse between the time Lavinia leaves the stage with her rapists and then returns, dismembered and ravished, her tongue cut out, her hands cut off, her body wholly abused and presented as a spectacle of interpretation. In a practical dramaturgical sense, 115 lines is not a very long time to accommodate this level of material change in costuming and makeup, not to mention the challenging mental transformation many actors might undertake to embody such a rapid character shift. But in comparison to other early modern performances of offstage sexual violence, 115 lines is a luxury. Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women gives Bianca 33 lines between the moment when the Duke’s aggressive sexual advances push her offstage and her return to the limelight, “unexpectedly beguiled” (2.2.394–5). Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling provides 24 lines of dialogue to account for Beatrice Joanna and De Flores’s violent and sexually charged encounter in an offstage closet. In perhaps the most extreme example, Thomas Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece allows only 15 lines to transpire between Lucrece’s violent exit and her “unready” return; put another way, the eponymous act around which the entire play revolves takes only 15 lines to commit. Furthermore, these rapid encounters – whether elapsed for effect or intentionally brief – were perhaps even shorter than written when staged, following Joe Falocco’s convincing argument whereby early modern scripts were routinely cut for time and abridged in performance (Falocco 123). So, which dramatization of rape is more affective, or rather, more effective? 115 lines, or 15 lines? When considering the effect of offstage sexual violence, does the elapsed time matter?