The Meta-Physical Wound. Shakespeare's Roman Plays

This chapter investigates the presence of the wound in Shakespeare’s Roman plays, seen as a coherent micro-corpus in itself, in the light of Benjamin’s Deutsche Trauerspiel. Seen in this perspective, the wound appears not as a simple rhetorical figure, but as a true allegory of the lacerations that invest both the ‘body politic’ and the ‘body of desire’. This study aims to show the constant intertwining of the two planes, from the obscene desire of Antony, who wants to rape the dead body of Caesar by inserting ‘many tongues’ into his wounds, to power as pure Eros as displayed in Antony and Cleopatra. Partially independent from this perspective is Coriolanus, whose words are blows, generating wounds, and whose strength is Negation. Finally, in the bloody whirlpool of Titus Andronicus (carefully investigated in the dizzying allusiveness of his proper names), History proves to be synonymous with trauma, that is, with wound.