"Sumptuously Re-edified": The Reformation of Sacred Space in Titus Andronicus

Blessed bodie! Whither art thou thrown?No lodging for thee, but a cold hard stone?

—George Herbert, "Sepulchre," from The Temple (1633)

Thy two-leaved gates, fair temple, unfold,And these two in thy sacred bosom hold,Till, mystically joined, but one they be;Then may thy lean and hunger-starved womb,Long time expect their bodies and their tomb.

—John Donne, "Epithalamion Made at Lincoln's Inn" (1633)

I. Martyred Bodies and Sacred Space

Readings of Shakespeare's grim drama of mutilation Titus Andronicus have time and again focused on the play's marred bodies.¹ Recently, scholars have made a connection between physical violence and characters' frequent allusions to martyrdom and argued for the play as a complex meditation on England's bloody struggles over religious reformation.² While sacrificial victimhood and its function in the play's gruesome dramatic logic has received some attention, there has been virtually no critical engagement with the sites that generate martyrdom. But it is Rome's spiritual geography (with the Andronicus tomb at its center) that produces the play's dramatic conflict. Titus, who calls the family grave "sacred receptacle of my joys," is committed to maintaining its sanctity at all costs; he insists that only in this hallowed place his dead sons, "slain in [their] country's wars" on foreign battlefields, will finally "sleep in peace" (1.1.94–95). I will argue that in Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare is not only concerned with the bloody culture of martyrdom, but more intensely with the constitution of and challenges to sacred space.

The culture of sacred spaces in Shakespeare's Rome produces what Robert Miola has termed a "fruitful estrangement"; at the same time, the play's "cultural drift"—the shift to the world of ancient Rome on the threshold of collapse—allows the playwright to comment on contemporary theological issues by way of an exotic religious culture.³ According to Carlos M. N. Eire, in a post-Reformation world "one holy place after another vanished from the map, first in Germany and Switzerland, later in France, the Netherlands, and England," leaving "the unity of the European religious vision … forever shattered."⁴ Toward the end of the play, a Gothic soldier admits to having "strayed" from his troops "to gaze on a ruinous monastery" (5.1.21). This famously anachronistic throwaway line appears to confirm that for Shakespeare's audience, traditional sacred spaces were a thing of the past. Philip Schwyzer suggests that Shakespeare's soldier gazes so intently to wrest some meaning from the decayed structure, but "the ruin in question declines to deliver up the expected moral."⁵ Even if the crumbling edifice is undecipherable for the Goth in this scene, it is a powerful signifier for the audience, a symbol of religious conflicts that altered spatial perception and the believer's place in the spiritual and material worlds. In what follows, I suggest that Shakespeare's early tragedy constitutes a powerful drama of sacred space, or, more precisely, a drama about its destructive "reformations." The playwright, by staging the tragic profanation of ancient holy sites and the grotesque counterreformations it produces, offers a bleak portrait of spatial and spiritual displacement in a culture on the cusp of profound religious change. In Titus Andronicus, a return to a venerable culture of sacred space is difficult and indeed undesirable because of the unrelenting violence that attends spatial consecration and renders Rome deeply compromised after Titus undertakes a forceful attempt at counterreformation. When Titus's son Lucius enforces the sanctity of the Andronicus grave in as violent a manner as his father, we do not question the deep-rooted spiritual need for sacred spaces but lament the failure to rethink the place of the sacred in the wake of cataclysmic violence generated by the space of the grave.

Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, which opens and closes on a funeral, assigns the sacred geography of burial a key role in spiritually and culturally situating a society and associates the modification and loss of traditional sacred sites with a culture's impending...