"From Titus To Titus: Edward Ravenscroft's Titus Andronicus And The Emasculation Of Shakespeare's Tamora."

I examine the diminished rhetorical and sexual agency of Tamora in Edward Ravenscroft's rewritten Titus Andronicus. Examining the changes in the play between the Renaissance version and its adaptation, I note the ways in which Ravenscroft's Titus reflects a changed sense of sexual physiology and of the relationship of the passions to social and private selves. These changes in Tamora, I suggest, help us to understand a shift in the perception of revenge from an 'effeminizing' heated and embodied drive to a rational, if immoral masculine "dish best served cold."