The Spectacle of Rhetoric and Violence: Titus Andronicus 1 Luciano Cabral Doutorando em Literaturas de Língua Inglesa (UERJ) lucianocabraldasilva@gmail.com In the turbulent years that succeeded the Second World War, Georges Bataille concluded that, in its innermost part, literature is evil. Some of us might state that such remark sounds hasty and pessimistic. Nonetheless, we are likely to agree with the fact that, by recollecting the Greek tragedies, Grimm brothers’ tales, English gothic stories, Russian short stories, science fiction accounts, American noir fiction, post-colonial narratives, and our Brazilian contemporary novels, just to name but a few, we may realize that literature has never been innocent, and therefore, it should really plead guilty (BATAILLE, 2015, p. 9). In his collection of essays, Bataille writes about eight authors, among them are Emily Bronte, Charles Baudelaire, Franz Kafka, William Blake and Marquis de Sade. As he scrutinizes their texts, he spots evil in many instances: the Heathcliff-Catherine relationship, Baudelaire’s poems, Kafka’s father, Blake’s attraction of opposites, the sadistic pleasure, and so on. I am not going as far as to discuss evil so broadly (eager to find an answer for the essence of literature, Bataille moves towards transcendentalism). I intend to restrict my argumentations to the physical implications of this matter. Thus, what I call violence, in the title of this text, stands for the bodily harm done by human beings against human beings. But the title also brings up the word rhetoric. It has to do, roughly speaking, with the particular way of using language to persuade, convince or please. For my purposes, I will particularly take rhetoric as language techniques employed to trigger delectare and movere 2 , that is to say, as discursive strategies to delight and move an audience. So, in this essay, I will be debating how violence and rhetoric – two elements commonly seen as incompatible – can possibly coexist in certain literary works. In so doing, I will be based on William Shakespeare’s The Most Lamentable Romaine Tragedy of Titus Andronicus (1594) for it is believed that this play bears striking evidence of such 1 Article originally published in: Escritos Discentes em Literaturas de Língua Inglesa. Volume IX. Leila Harris & Aparecida Salgueiro (ed.). Rio de Janeiro: Letra Capital, 2016, pp. 45-54. 2 My approach is based on Marcus Tullius Cicero’s Orator (46 BCE), who argues that orators, while addressing speech to the audience, have three aims: docere, or teach; delectare, or please; and movere, or move, stir emotions.