Shakespeare's vengeance on schoolmasters?(William Shakespeare)(Critical essay)

Vernon Guy Dickson's discussion of Titus Andronicus exhibits the popular lit-crit tendency to champion anything in an early-modern English text that "can be read" as critical of alleged Elizabethan cultural norms. Here what Shakespeare is supposedly attacking is the pedagogical and moral philosophical tradition that proposed the emulation of classical models of behavior as recounted in translated history and myth. In Titus Andronicus--as Dickson does a good job showing--characters are steeped in historical or mythic precedents, and frequently use Ovidian examples to justify outrageous behavior. Titus, for example, kills his raped daughter Lavinia and cites Virginius's killing of his …