"Irreligious Piety" and Christian History: Persecution as Pagan Anachronism in Titus Andronicus

For the violent spectacle ofTitus Andronicus, Shakespeare drew much of his inspiration from Rome's lurid founding myths and from the legend of its imperial decadence. ¹ The annals of post-Reformation Christianity, however, afforded episodes of bloodshed and persecution that were more recent and closer to home. During the Armada year of 1588 alone, the English government executed more than thirty Catholics as traitors. Over the following six years, more than fifty were put to death. ² The number of Elizabethan Protestants dying for offenses related to their faith was comparatively small, yet their ranks were supplemented by vivid chronicles of persecution under previous Catholic regimes. Recently, critics have begun to compare the traumas of Titus with those of sixteenth-century religious strife, compellingly suggesting the young Shakespeare's sensitivity to the pathos of the religious struggle. ³

More radically, I shall argue, Shakespeare's glances at contemporary religious conflict in Titus question the legitimacy of violence as a means of establishing and preserving Christianity. Most critics agree that Shakespeare regarded with skepticism both the principles of ecclesiastical politics and the invocation of providentialist rhetoric in secular causes. ⁴ To this observation I wish to add the claim that Titus elicits troubling parallels among various historically specific instances of violence sanctioned by religion. The play does so by implying a discreditable resemblance between the pious pretexts of Reformation violence and religious justifications of violence in ancient paganism, as well as in Christianity's own self-authorizing histories of antiquity.

The reflections of Christian culture in Titus facilitate an alienation effect, defamiliarizing early modern pieties; conversely, they make the vices of pagans appear all too familiar, urging audiences to doubt whether the experience of post-Reformation Christians is able to substantiate their religion's claims to ethical superiority. This discrepancy between Christendom's moral ideals and the violence of its recent history is brought to our attention by Shakespeare's frequent employment of what we would now call "anachronism." Instances of incongruously Christian language in Titus range from "heaven," otherworldly "bliss," and "grace" (2.2.41; 3.1.150, 205) to "ever-burning hell" (3.1.243), and from "begging hermits in their holy prayers" (3.2.41) to an "incarnate devil" who inspires "burning lust" (5.1.40, 43). My approach to such allusions follows recent critical definitions of Shakespearean anachronism as a deliberate artistic device. Used effectively, anachronism enjoins the reevaluation in present terms of subjects otherwise regarded as past. It transforms "the Then," as Clifford Ronan writes, into "a Now that urgently must be dealt with." ⁵

In the early 1590s, before the conventions of Roman plays were well established, the presentation of paganism must have struck audiences as an "anachronism" in our secondary sense of the word, denoting what is obsolete or repugnant to current values. ⁶ From its outset, Shakespeare's tragedy brings an imagined Roman culture concretely to life. As though its pagan mores were not shocking enough, he juxtaposes them with discordant reminders of the Christian cultural context that might be presumed to bound the audience's moral horizons. On one hand, these reminders may cue spectators to notice the grossly un-Christian motives of Shakespeare's characters. On the other hand, the contrast might remind them of the peculiarity of Christianity's claim to unique and universal authority, and of the exaltedness of the spiritual and moral standards that Christians would have to meet in order to affirm their religion's aspirations.

Such an appeal to the conscience of Christians generally is consistent with evidence that Titus evades all attempts to be read as partisan invective. For Elizabethan audiences, representations of Roman paganism and human sacrifice would recall Protestants' denunciations of idolatry in the Roman Catholic Church—or even in the Church of England. The polemical value of such comparisons lay in the common Christian belief that, ever since the...