Parola al Nero: "and wilt thou have a reason for this coil?". Intorno a Titus Andronicus

This paper addresses the question of poetic language as an instrument of knowledge in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus: can the poet, through his language, give sufficient reason both for the occurences of experience and, above all, for their emotional engrams in human mind? Let us consider Lavinia’s body as the ‘suffering human thing in itself’ – in this very sense, she is called, in fact, «map of woe» by her father, Titus, in III.2: can poetry ever make sense of the inevitable sorrowfulness of life? Is emotion poetically knowable? And if so, then how?