SOURCE: Moschovakis, Nicholas R. “‘Irreligious Piety’ and Christian History: Persecution as Pagan Anachronism in Titus Andronicus.” Shakespeare Quarterly 53, no. 4 (winter 2002): 460-86.

[In the following essay, Moschovakis interprets Titus Andronicus as a potentially revolutionary critique of cultural violence sanctioned by religion.]

For the violent spectacle of Titus 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 audiences 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 religions 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 Incarnation, paganism had lost whatever concrete applicability it had once possessed; the comparisons in themselves are thus good examples of the deployment of anachronism for critical purposes. Overall, though, Shakespeare's portrayal of paganism in Titus fails to subserve the Protestant (or for that matter Catholic) use of paganism as a trope for the falsehood of rival claims to ecclesiastical authority. Titus contains bits of Elizabethan anti-Catholic discourse, yet these are curiously inconsistent and are overshadowed by apprehensions of the dangers of discord per se.

In the first section of this essay I consider the human sacrifice that occurs early in the play, supplying some early modern contexts for its reception and raising serious objections against any attempt to read this scene as sectarian polemic. The essay's second section addresses the relevance of Judeo-Christian sacrificial discourses—and the related topic of Christian martyrdom—to the cycle of revenge which the sacrifice sets in motion. In the third section I explore associations between the course of destruction in Titus and an early chapter in Christian providential historiography. In the fourth section I comment on Aaron's irreverence and its ominous import for post-Reformation Christian community. Throughout the essay I emphasize how, to Christians who habitually think of their church as a “light to lighten the Gentiles,”⁷ Shakespeare proposes that the bloodthirstiness attendant upon both Reformation and Counter-Reformation is tragically, anachronistically pagan.

PAGAN SACRIFICE AND POST-REFORMATION CULTURE

One of the opening conflicts in Titus concerns a human sacrifice. By insisting on the ritual, the Andronici demonstrate their inconsistency with any recognizably Christian form of worship.⁸ This evident moral contrast between Roman and Elizabethan religious practice offers post-Reformation audiences an occasion to ask themselves whether the spilling of blood, even in Christianity's name, is ever more defensible than the ritual violence that they must reject either as anachronistically pre-Christian or idolatrously un-Christian. Shakespeare broaches this volatile issue by introducing pagan characters whose religious motivations appear to be, ambiguously and paradoxically, at once pious and impious.

When Lucius Andronicus sacrifices the Goth captive Alarbus, he justifies his deed as an offering to the spirits of Titus's dead sons. Shakespeare makes clear that this pagan obligation inaugurates a cycle of revenge in the manner of the ancient tragic myths.⁹ Nevertheless, the institutional structures and values that shape the rites cultural context are analogous to those of early modern English practice. First, the sacrifice's offstage setting is defined with reference to two pagan monuments: the Capitol, or Temple of Jupiter Capitoline, and the “sacred Pantheon” (1.1.246). Marcus Andronicus stresses the Capitol's sacral function, reminding us that the Romans “pretend to honour and adore” this edifice (l. 45). The place names give to Shakespeare's Roman rites a local habitation at least as prominent as St. Paul's for the Elizabethan church. Within the play's picture of pagan religious practices as embodied in patriotic institutions, Titus's motives are not incomprehensible but reflect those that might lead any post-Reformation Christian to champion an established faith.¹⁰

There were other reasons, too, for literate members of the audience to associate Titus's insistence on the rite with positive examples of devotion. No less an authority than Virgil had depicted human sacrifice as an element in the cult of Rome's heroic founders:

vinxerat et post terga manus, quos mitteret umbris inferias, caeso sparsurus sanguine flammas

[Aeneas had bound behind their backs the hands of those whom he meant to send as offerings to the Shades, sprinkling the flames with the blood of the slain.]¹¹

In Titus, Lucius adds more detail, explaining that Alarbus must be killed “so the shadows be not unappeased, / Nor we disturbed with prodigies on earth” (ll. 103-4).¹² Again Lucius emphasizes that the ritual is an institution no less patriotic than religious: “See, lord and father, how we have performed / Our Roman rites: Alarbus' limbs are topped / And entrails feed the sacrificing fire” (ll. 145-47). It is in part because of his insistence on such rites that Titus has earned Aeneas's own epithet, “Pius” (l. 23). Within the Roman context, the term denotes a hero renowned for deeds done in his country's and his family's service, however violent. But in a Christian context it is jarringly anachronistic for Titus to be praised as pious, when major aspects of his piety are so manifestly un-Christian.¹³ Tamora emphasizes this disjunction of perspectives when she indicts her son's sacrifice as an instance of “cruel, irreligious piety” (l. 133). This oxymoron would be pointless were she not appealing to Christian, as opposed to pagan, intuitions about what is religious and “irreligious.”

If Titus 1.1 is considered in its post-Reformation context, the scene reveals even more mixed messages. In Calvinist polemic the topos of human sacrifice was associated with the doctrine of the Real Presence and the allegedly idolatrous qualities of the Roman Mass—and, by extension, with ceremonialism in the Elizabethan communion service. The struggle over liturgical language reflected this difference. For example, whereas the prayer book approved for use during Elizabeth's reign suggested that it was permissible to describe the Eucharist as a “sacrifice,”¹⁴ an English adaptation of Calvin's Genevan prayer book admonished Protestant worshippers to remember that no sacrifice, apart from Christ's, deserved God's acceptance.¹⁵ Shakespeare's attribution of human sacrifice to pagan Rome might thus be interpreted as a Catholic-baiting gesture, or even as a “godly” Protestant's criticism of the liturgy mandated in the Elizabethan prayer book.¹⁶ Even Tamora is a sympathetic figure so long as she is pleading with the Roman sacrificers to spare her son.¹⁷ Again, when she implores Titus to “draw near the nature of the gods” by rejecting his Roman pieties and becoming “merciful” (ll. 120-21), she voices a normatively Christian sentiment.¹⁸

But Shakespeare's introduction of the captive Goths as victims and critics of an idolatrous religious order proves to be no more than a set-up, once we perceive its dramatic relation to subsequent events. Spectators who, out of a hatred for Catholic ritual, view the Andronici as villains in 1.1 are being prepared to have their sympathies thrown off-balance.¹⁹ On the death of her son, Tamora will reveal her “pitiless” side (2.2.162); the Andronici will become victims of the new Roman regime in which she wields her influence; and Titus will assume the passive, persecuted, and comparatively sympathetic position that she once occupied. By the end of 1.1, Titus's enemies are associated no less closely than he is with Catholic ritualism, since Saturninus and Tamora's offstage wedding is set to take place in the Pantheon with a “priest” and “holy water” (l. 328). Later in the play, Tamora herself, like Spenser's Duessa or the demonized caricatures of Mary Stuart, corresponds in part to Protestant representations of the “Roman whore.”²⁰

For all of these reasons, it appears that even if the sacrifice of Alarbus impressed some viewers as a Protestant allegory—pitting proto-Christian Goths against anti-Christian Romans—it would have been hard to make the rest of the tragedy accord with this initial impression.²¹ Still more confusing is that Lucius, who performs the sacrifice, is finally acclaimed as Rome's new emperor. Bate and others have tried to make Lucius seem a congenial character from the English Protestant point of view, noting that he shares his name with the apocryphal King Lucius of Britain, whom contemporary Protestant sources credited with the importation of Christianity and the establishment of an apostolic church. Yet we can scarcely regard Lucius Andronicus, a ritual butcher, as a magnet for the nostalgia of Protestants hoping to restore the English rite to its primitive state.²² His accession ought rather to distress any Christian spectator, of whatever persuasion, who is alert enough to infer that this event reaffirms and reestablishes the institutions of pagan Rome earlier denounced by Tamora. To this point it might be objected that Lucius's final command, to deprive Tamora's body of mourners, “bell,” and “burial” (5.3.196), makes Lucius sound better versed in early modern funeral customs than in ancient Roman ones, and that by this point in the play he has come to represent an order more Christian than pagan. Yet if Lucius regards the denial of burial rites as a punishment, then he could hardly be identified with the cause of those Calvinists who condemned many rituals as worthless remnants of popish superstition.²³

When these contradictions are taken into account, it seems that the only plausible reading of Titus as a Reformation polemic would be a crude one, in which the play's jumble of Roman crimes and errors broadly represents the corruption of Renaissance Rome with anachronistic vestiges of pagan superstition. In fact, a case has been made for imposing a similar gloss on The Spanish Tragedy.²⁴ A disadvantage of such readings, however, is their reductivism in matters of reception. To anyone in whom the apocalyptic rhetoric of the Reformation has not extinguished pity, the miseries of Shakespeare's Rome afford occasions for commiseration and not just coded cues (such as allusions to 1588) for zealous or patriotic self-compliment at the expense of the sufferers onstage.

Throughout Titus, Shakespeare does elicit sympathy on behalf of characters who bear the stigma of un-Christian culture. Such generosity signals his willingness to contest, or to provoke reflection on, more rigid demonstrations of internal solidarity and hostility toward people of other faiths which post-Reformation communities regularly incited. As I have shown, there are incompatible ways of mapping early modern religious passions and conflicts onto the play. This inconsistency may reflect Shakespeare's sense of the dubiousness (if not the absurdity) of post-Reformation polemics, whose authors attempted to reduce the spiritually and ethically complex realities of historical experience to a binary opposition between pristine and corrupt churches. The diffusion of good and evil motives among opposed factions in Shakespeare's Rome, much as in the England of his historical tetralogies, mirrors a difficulty familiar to all conscientious Christians: that of seeking true righteousness in a world full of pious-sounding rhetoric yet compromised everywhere by sin and error.

SACRIFICE AND THE CULTURE OF MARTYRDOM

Quite apart from the relevance of sacrificial themes to contentious theological and liturgical questions, their use in Titus might cause some consternation to anyone who shares the Christian conception of Christ's passion as a sacrifice.²⁵ When Europeans reported on human sacrifice in America, they portrayed it as an anachronistic pre-Christian survival.²⁶ Yet Debora Kuller Shuger has argued that certain thinkers apprehended at a more abstract level the possibility of tracing analogies between such practices and the cult of Christ's sacrifice.²⁷ Those analogies could undermine European confidence in the superior origin and authority of Christianity—as indeed, in time, they would. I do not claim for Shakespeare an attitude so prophetic of the Enlightenment or as skeptical in spirit. Still, to foreground human sacrifice was to underline the need for Christians to make a clear distinction between pious and impious sacrifices and to understand how the notion of expiatory violence in Christianity differed from similar concepts in other religions.

A source of potential uncertainty on this count is suggested by one of Titus's central motifs—the violent death of offspring. Shakespeare links this theme, which is itself inevitably rich in Christological overtones, to sacrifice. At the same time, he detaches it from the consolations that might be provided to the victims of such violence in a play with a Christian setting. The result implies a rueful view of persecution in post-Reformation Europe. As I have been arguing, Titus draws uncomfortable parallels between the sacrifices made by Shakespeare's pagans and religious incitements to violence among professed Christians. The play's repeated child-killings reinforce these parallels, confirming Robert S. Miola's observation that in Titus, “Roman barbarity … affords the Elizabethan culture of martyrdom a disturbing reflection of its own religious discourses and practices.”²⁸

Before the tragedy starts, many of Titus's own sons have already been killed in the campaign against the Goths. The play proceeds through what one critic has called a “series of filial sacrifices,”²⁹ beginning with that of Alarbus. Three more of Titus's sons then die. The first, Mutius, is killed by Titus himself (1.1.295 s.d.) for an act of filial disobedience motivated by what Mutius regarded as honorable principle. He is followed by the hapless Quintus and Martius, whom Aaron ensnares in the pit with Bassianus's corpse (2.2, 3.1). Later, a vengeful Titus cuts the throats of Chiron and Demetrius in retribution for his family's losses (5.2.203 s.d.). Finally comes the death of Lavinia (5.3.35-44). When Titus kills her to expunge the shame of her violation, he takes as his example the death of Virginia at the hand of her father, Appius.³⁰ Within Christian discourse itself, however, the scene of a child's death by a paternal hand would have brought another exemplum to mind, that of Abraham and Isaac (Genesis 22:1-18).

Evocations of Abraham's sacrifice occur elsewhere in the Shakespearean corpus but are nowhere more pronounced than here. Most of the slain sons in Titus are presented to their killers under restraint or otherwise helpless, not unlike traditional images of Isaac bound for the slaughter. The spectacle of Titus's outrage when he kills Mutius suggests a travesty of Abraham's submissive faith in God, a favorite Reformation theme.³¹ According to Christian hermeneutic tradition, Isaac's journey to the altar is an Old Testament type of Christ's passion. When the image of the “slaughtered lamb” is applied to Bassianus (2.2.223), it suggests Isaac's deliverance and the common image of Christ as the “Lamb of God,” yet without any of the comforting consequences that attend Christ's sacrifice. The deaths of Alarbus and Lavinia mark a trajectory of crime and expiation without redemption, the overarching design of which may be viewed as a parody of Christian history.

The narrative of Abraham's sacrifice presents some of the most intractable ethical difficulties in the Judeo-Christian tradition. These difficulties have been met with ingenious apologetics. In Titus, it is Lavinia's death that most vividly recalls the agony of Abraham's decision to obey God. Her death stands out from those of other children not just in respect to her sex but also because she, like Isaac, may be thought a willing party to her own sacrifice.³² Yet if Lavinia's death is voluntary, then, in addition to the precedent of Virginia, it recalls the story of Jephthah's daughter (Judges ll:30-40), in which a father going off to war vows to offer up to God the first creature that should greet him upon a victorious homecoming; this happens to be his daughter, who submits sadly to her father's will.³³ Christian commentators presented Jephthah's inflexible devotion as a cautionary example, and their view suggests that Lavinia's death could only be judged as a vain sacrifice, the bloody price of worldly honor.³⁴ Some spectators might have remembered other ancient precedents, notably Iphigenia and Polyxena, both of whom were ritually sacrificed: the former by her father, the latter by the killer of her father in order to appease his own father's restless shade.³⁵ All these parallels could imply a view of religious violence as vicious and deluded.

In Titus the problematic morality of sacrifice becomes more disturbing through the anachronistic relation between these instances of pagan child-slaughter and the valorized example of Abraham's sacrifice. Once displaced into a pagan context, the topos is stripped of the consolations that were supposed to reconcile Christians to the necessity of violence and loss—Abraham's faith, Isaac's patience and deliverance, and the redemption wrought by Christ's passion. Titus instead articulates the compensations offered by pagan culture to those who make the sacrifices it requires and which, being founded in pride and temporal honor, are diametrically opposed to those recommended by Christ. At the outset of Shakespeare's career in tragedy, it must have seemed convenient for him to represent the worst human motives and the vanity of human outcomes by assigning them to pagan characters. Yet he also managed to communicate the danger of accepting such pride and vanity under ostensibly pious forms, whether pagan or Christian. As Debora Shuger has shown, both the Jephthah episode and that of Abraham's sacrifice adumbrated the urgent dilemmas facing post-Reformation Christians, of which the most urgent was posed by the call to martyrdom.³⁶

Titus contains several references to martyrdom, first when Lucius and Titus both describe the maimed Lavinia as “martyred” (3.1.82, 108), and again in the words of Titus to Chiron and and Demetrius, who are bound and gagged: “Hark, wretches, how I mean to martyr you” (5.2.180). If the latter reference is cruelly ironic, the first two are less obviously so. The manner and effect of Lavinia's death seem to owe much to the paradigmatic deaths of Christian martyrs. Yet to identify any pagan character as a martyr is a startling anachronism. This perception has led Miola to object strenuously that “neither Lavinia, a pathetic victim, nor Chiron and Demetrius, her tormentors, suffer, in any sixteenth-century sense, martyrdom. … A martyr must suffer for something, must give witness to a higher truth, to Christ.”³⁷ True, it was a commonplace on all sides of the Reformation conflict that “it is not the paine, but the cause, that maketh the Martyr.”³⁸ It is for this very reason that the pains of Shakespeare's pagans prevent his play's identification with any partisan cause, since parallels to the mutilations and deaths of Titus are equally to be found in both Catholic and Protestant martyrologies.³⁹ Instead, the play's martyrological resonances are directed against the ideological dynamic that made deadly violence a linchpin of ecclesiastical and moral authority in post-Reformation culture, for those who endured it and those who inflicted it.

What a martyr experienced as an occasion for an act of heroic self-abnegation was, from the opposing perspective, both a commendable deterrent to heresy and an opportunity for accused heretics to recant to their own profit. Within the culture of early modern martyrdom, according to Brad S. Gregory, it is possible to discern “a porous membrane between praising the desire to die in the Church's cause and commending those willing to kill for it.”⁴⁰ In Titus, similarly, the ethos of paganism not only motivates Shakespeare's Romans to sacrifice other people's children for piety's sake but even moves parents to demand the deaths of their own.⁴¹

To ask rhetorically “But to what end?” is not enough to prove that Titus depicts an alien culture, sealed off from Christian habits of thought. My point is that Shakespeare's tragedy invites Christians to ask this question concerning their own society. How could so many violent deaths of professed Christians serve a purpose more charitable than destructive, more Christian than pagan? As though to underline the need for such scrutiny, Shakespeare emphasizes a degeneration of motives in the violence that propels his tragic plot. Alarbus's death is at least intended as a pious rite of sacrifice to ensure “rest … silence and eternal sleep” for departed spirits, to prevent their being doomed to “hover on the dreadful shore of Styx” (1.1.154-58, 91). Mutius is sacrificed to the patriarchal principle but also to cement Titus's ill-conceived alliance with Saturninus. Quintus and Martius die under even less dignified pretenses, as the objects of Tamora's vengeance for Alarbus's death; they are in turn avenged by the deaths of Chiron and Demetrius, whose heads and blood go to make an imperial meal. Whereas Alarbus dies to fulfill a perceived sacred duty, Mutius dies for ephemeral motives of political prudence and to vindicate the temporal law of the father. The rest die only for vengeance and a wish to torment the victims' parents—at least until the death of Lavinia, by which point a spectator will not easily be reassured of the necessity of Titus's action or the worthiness of his intentions.

Despite his self-regard and self-pity, Titus never claims the title of “martyr” for himself. This is just as well, since he dispels any thought of his possession of Christian virtues, if not in 1.1, then surely in the comic episode with the Clown in 4.3 and 4.4. Here we encounter the one character in Titus who is evidently a Christian, or at least an Englishman. His intrusion into Shakespeare's pagan scene thus momentarily synchronizes the action with ordinary Elizabethan life. As the Clown is on his way to offer his “pigeons to the tribunal plebs” (4.3.91-92), he meets Titus, who, gulling him, sends the innocent yokel off to a certain death. Titus's reasons for playing this joke are obscure: does he mean to sting Saturninus's conscience, to prove an antic point against tyranny, or merely to relieve his impotent anger against a helpless object? What is certain is that when the Clown brings Titus's knife, wrapped in a message, to the emperor, he is hung as a traitor. This victim of Titus's revenge makes the play's only reference to a Christian personage by name—“God and St. Stephen / Give you good even” (4.4.42)—a salutation evoking the memory of the Christian martyrs, whose first exemplar and model after Christ was St. Stephen.⁴² Although the Clown himself displays no qualifications as a Christian martyr, his case raises a twinge of pity along with our laughs and directs our attention momentarily to the paranoid style of persecuting institutions.⁴³

The motif of martyrdom does not support an argument for Shakespeare's commitment to a clearly defined partisan interest. As I have noted, because of his initial association with sacrificial ritual, it is occasionally possible to see Titus as a representative of Roman Catholicism. Indeed, his words as he slays Chiron and Demetrius—“Receive the blood” (5.3.197)—have prompted Bate to suggest that Shakespeare intended a “dark parody of the language of the holy eucharist.”⁴⁴ Such mockery, however, would surely imply Titus's reformist sympathies. On the other hand, any Protestant spectator who would cheer on a revenger because of anti-papal sentiments would also be unlikely to forgive Titus's earlier devotion to idolatrous sacrificial rites. And Chiron and Demetrius are much less similar to Christian martyrs of any faith than either Lavinia or the Clown. Once again, the strained search for a definitively Protestant or Catholic message here results only in cryptological vertigo. Titus's cry of triumph as he slaughters Chiron and Demetrius resonates most harshly not as travestied Catholicism but as a generically anti-Christian depiction of vengeful pride. Ultimately, in fact, if we seek positive exempla in the play, we are hard pressed to identify any characters whose motives and actions the godly, or for that matter any Elizabethan Christian, might conscientiously approve.

Between the pagan bloodletting of the Andronici and their persecution by Saturninus, Tamora, and Aaron, the play's whole cast of characters other than Lavinia and the Clown appears to be driven by desires, beliefs, and habits of feeling that early modern Christians could only regard as satanic. And if at crucial moments Titus seems to become Lavinia's tragedy, these moments are more suggestive of Ovidian myth than Christian doctrine. It would be too simple, however, to conclude that such sufferings in Titus are nothing more than negative exempla—that as futile parodies of Christ's passion they lack any more specific critical force. Shakespeare's saturation of the play with child-killings and allusions to martyrdom makes the pagan setting of Titus into a jagged mirror for Christians, reflecting the troubled conscience of post-Reformation Europe. The play intimates that so far as a church or state admits violence as a principal emblem of its piety and guarantee of its legitimacy, to that extent its behavior is more pagan than Christian.

VIOLENCE AND ITS PRETEXTS: THE NAME TITUS AND CHRISTIAN PROVIDENTIALISM

So far, I have been arguing against the possibility of reading Christian allusions in Titus as part of a coherent polemic along Protestant or Catholic lines. At the same time, I have been interpreting them as gestures toward a critique of post-Reformation society that, if fully articulated, would have been quite radical in an early modern context. This apparent paradox results from the fact that a complaint against religious violence would strike nearer the roots of early modern social order than activism in any strictly reformist or counter-reformist cause. In English public discourse, both Roman Catholic voices and those emanating from Calvinist opinion jointly assumed the need for the “true” church to take compulsory measures against implacable enemies. This assumption could threaten as well as sustain the basis of secular authority. The wars in France showed that Protestants and Catholics were equally able to condone violent resistance, with all the attendant miseries of civil strife, in the name of “true” religion.⁴⁵

Those who sought to justify violence as necessary to God's providential plan could cite numerous Judeo-Christian precedents, both scriptural and historical. Among the latter was an incident from the early Christian era, to which Titus may be indebted in ways that clarify its critique of ecclesiastically sanctioned violence. In the year 70 ce, an heir to the Roman Empire named Titus Flavius Vespasianus besieged and recaptured an insurgent Jerusalem on behalf of his father, the emperor Vespasian. His troops inflicted horrible sufferings on the city's inhabitants and destroyed its temple, which had been the sacrificial center of ancient Judaism. Early Christians saw the event as “proof” that God had sided with them against “the Jews.”⁴⁶ Through the writings of Eusebius, a Christian who based his version on the eyewitness account of Josephus (himself a Jew), this providentialist interpretation became axiomatic in later Christian historiography. As a historian of Judaism has observed ironically, Titus became “the greatest religious reformer in history,” in virtue of the effect of the temple's destruction on both Jewish and Christian religious traditions.⁴⁷

Shakespeare dramatized the story of a different Titus, not a reformer but a revenger, who champions an ethos that may be regarded as providentialist yet is also violently pagan. If audiences perceived any relation between this Titus and the historical Titus, a chief effect of the allusion must have been to cast aspersions on Christendom for its pious endorsements of past atrocities. And, in fact, he and his early audiences are likely to have associated the title of Titus Andronicus with representations of Jerusalem's fall. The narrative of the destruction was well known during the Renaissance, both directly from Josephus's Jewish War and indirectly from Eusebius's History of the Church, as well as from less reliable sources, including Jacobus de Voragine's Golden Legend.⁴⁸ All of these accounts of the episode had been translated into English and published by 1590.⁴⁹ Between late 1592 and early 1593 at the Rose Theatre, where Shakespeare's Titus probably made its first appearance a year later, a play entitled Titus and Vespasian, now lost, was given ten recorded performances. Another play of 1592, also lost, bore the title Jerusalem.⁵⁰ For many theatergoers, then, the representation of a conquering Roman nobleman named Titus would bring to mind the siege of Jerusalem and the temples ruin.⁵¹ A few would have been able to make this connection (even if, as some maintain, the plot was not original to Shakespeare but had its source in a lost Elizabethan forerunner of an eighteenth-century chapbook).⁵²

The significance of the temple itself for early modern Christianity was complex. The Jewish sacrificial cult was no more acceptable among Christians than were those that honored pagan deities. Blood sacrifice had become superfluous in the new dispensation, a religious anachronism whether performed by Jews or by Gentiles. Yet as the symbolism of sacrifice remained both crucial and contested, so that of the temple was subject to conflicting interpretations. This was especially the case during the Reformation, when Roman Catholics and traditionalists defended ceremonial worship while iconoclastic reformers attacked it as showing an idolatrous reverence for the house of worship.⁵³ From either point of view, literal references to the temple in the Gospels stood as a reminder of Christianity's historical continuity with Judaism. A ritual offering of two young pigeons, pertaining to a Jewish mother's purification after childbirth, is mentioned on the occasion of the Presentation of the infant Jesus in the temple. There may be a reminiscence of this in the fact that the Clown in Titus carries a pair of pigeons (4.3.76 s.d.).⁵⁴ Allegorically, even for those Christians who were most hostile to Jewish ritualism, the temple retained positive value in the typological discourse that defined their spiritual descent from the people of Abraham.⁵⁵ Christians of all persuasions were compelled to affirm what the temple signified in certain contexts, even while repudiating it in others. Shakespeare's Titus, who embodies contradictions in Christians attitudes toward sacrificial discourse, could thus also evoke their divided inclinations regarding the temple destroyed by his historical namesake.

A more immediately recognizable source of common significance in Shakespeare's play and in the Jerusalem narrative is the dominant element of grotesque violence. To catalogue the miseries that attended the siege of Jerusalem was so lengthy a task that the Elizabethan translator of Eusebius added a brief abstract in his own words:

The temple is sett on fire, the priestes, the women, and children, with other people which hid themselues in vautts, in vans, and in corners of the temple, which also were burnt to ashes. … Titus tooke the citye; the souldiours killed untill they were weary. Titus commaunded all that wore armour to be slayne; such as were olde, weake, and feeble, the souldiours dispatched. The yong, the lusty and profitable, they shutt up in a certayne place of the temple for further consideration. Many were sould for a small price; there were many to be solde, but few to bye. All the theeves, robbers, and seditious persons within the city he commaunded forth with to be dispatched … neyther did antiquity prevaile, neither great riches profit, nether the fame dispersed throughout the whole worlde, neither the great glory they put in their religion, helpe them at all that the cytye should not perishe.⁵⁶

While the scale of such a calamity made it unwieldy matter for art, it could easily be divided into smaller sub-tragedies, as in Thomas Nashe's Christs Teares Over Ierusalem which was one of Shakespeare's likely influences.⁵⁷ For instance, Nashe adapted a Josephan anecdote in which a starving mother kills and cooks her infant, eats part of its flesh, and serves the remainder up with harsh reprimands to a predatory gang of Jews who have been extorting food from their neighbors.⁵⁸ Both in its essential desperation and in its perversely triumphant, self-vindicating tendency, the mother's awful sacrifice is recalled by the Thyestean banquet where Titus Andronicus concludes his revenge.

To early modern Christian moralists, such horrors exemplified the plagues of sin and the providential punishment of God's enemies. Jerusalem was their prototype for all recalcitrant peoples, sinful, proudly unrepentant, and reserved by God for the purpose of exemplary punishment. Eusebius had reminded his readers that Jesus promised nothing less to the Jews:

If thou haddst knowne … these thinges whiche belonge unto thy peace, even at this daie, thou wouldest take hede. But nowe are they hidde from thine eies … there shalle be greate trouble in the lande, and wrath over all this people, and they shall fall through the edge of the sworde, and shall be ledde away captive unto all nations, and Jerusalem shall be troden downe of the Gentiles, untill the time of the Gentyles be fulfilled.⁵⁹

As applied by early modern authors, this prophecy was as relevant to the sinners of London as it had been to the ancient Jews. Many of London's preachers promoted the prophetic “notion of God's special relationship with England as paradigmatically Israel,” addressing “London [as) to all intents and purposes Jerusalem.”⁶⁰ The memory of the city's destruction was a permanent warning of the plagues that lay in store for the reprobate in both this world and the next.

Reading Titus with reference to these homiletic contexts, one might even be tempted to see Titus as a hero, his cause subliminally exalted by the connotations of his name in Christian history, and to see his victims as idolatrous worldlings undeserving of sympathy. So far as an intertextual analogy can be drawn between the victims of Titus's revenge and the Jews who died in 70 ce, this reading is disturbingly consistent. It would accord with our knowledge of early modern anti-Semitic prejudice, which at its worst made Christians ready to consign all Jews to a fate like that of their forebears in Jerusalem. As the translator of Eusebius in 1585 put this, moralizing the tale of the mother's sacrifice summarized above: “Such were the rewardes of iniquity, & impiety committed by the Jewes against Christ and God.”⁶¹ For Shakespeare, however, such prejudices, even against the race of Christ's accused murderers, were not to be indulged without question or dispute. Moreover, any possible relevance of an anti-Semitic context to Titus would be complicated by its contradictory applications to the play. Among the fictions of Jewish impiety perpetrated by medieval and early modern Christians, perhaps the most insidious was the widespread rumor that Jews practiced human sacrifice.⁶² Thus, even if the name of Shakespeare's protagonist seems to place him in heroic opposition to Christian constructions of the Jewish other, yet his early actions align him pejoratively with those constructions.

In other ways, Shakespeare's handling of the historical associations of the name Titus tends to unhinge those associations from their established functions within the triumphal narrative of Christian providentialist history. In some respects the character of Titus Andronicus departs significantly from that of Titus Flavius Vespasianus. In the tradition established by Eusebius the historical Titus is represented as a virtuous pagan, one who might indeed be called “pious” in a practically Christian sense. According to an Elizabethan chronicler, he was notable “for wisedome, for grave counsayle, and for feates of warre,” yet this Roman virtus was joined to an unimpeachable righteousness that began with a conversion from a life of sin while he was still a youth: “his vices for a time were so odious, as that … for his wickednes they called him another Nero; but after wardes, so greate was his chaunge as that nothinge of vice remayned in him.”⁶³ An early Tudor book, printed twice by Wynkyn de Worde, even made the historical Titus an actual Christian, in accordance with a manifestly fictional passage from the Golden Legend.⁶⁴

For medieval and early modern Christian readers, Titus the conqueror was thus a mediating figure. His providentially authorized role allowed Christians to participate vicariously in their god's anger at the Jews while deploring its human consequences. The Elizabethan translator of Josephus may be observed amplifying his source in order to encourage such an identification, portraying Titus as a remorseful conqueror seeking forgiveness (or exoneration):

Titus seeyng the innumerable carkases of the dead that were cast into the brooke Kidron lyke doung, was woonderfully amased with feare, and stretched out his handes towarde heauen, saying, Lorde God of heauen and earth, whom the Israelites beleeue in, dense me from this synne, whiche surely I am not the cause of: for I requyred peace of them, but they refused it, and they them selues are long of this mischiefe, they haue synned agaynst theyr owne soules and lyues: I beseeche thee, recken it not to me for a synne, that the jewes dye on this fashion.⁶⁵

This image of the conscience-stricken Roman soldier praying to the god of Israel was a convenient one for Christian authors who wished to depict the historical Titus as an agent of divine providence. Yet it contrasts baldly with the pagan pitilessness of Shakespeare's Titus, toward his defeated enemies and the victims of his revenge. In fact, despite the persistent tendency of translators to Christianize the historical Titus, the fidelity with which ancient sources were transmitted had improved at least enough by Shakespeare's time to inform him that both Titus and his father Vespasian were pagan, not Christian. Titus himself, upon his entry into Jerusalem, was said to have turned the site of the ruined temple into a place of pagan sacrifice.⁶⁶

Had Shakespeare indeed read the works of the ancient historians, he might have noticed that they sounded apologetic in their portrayals of Titus. It is a point that would readily suggest itself to anyone reading history skeptically and critically, a skill that Shakespeare seems to have begun practicing by the early 1590s. When Josephus wrote his Historie, its account of Titus's role in the siege of Jerusalem was already compromised by the author's blatant currying of imperial favor. Thereafter, the importance of Eusebius to the medieval church had depended on the rigorous determination of the author's interests by “the notion of orthodoxy and … its relations with a persecuting power.”⁶⁷ Though Eusebius and his successors had depicted the fall of Jerusalem as material proof of the church's divine mission, it could well have occurred to Shakespeare that the destruction really illustrated the fundamentally violent underpinnings of Roman imperial government.

Like Shakespeare's chronicle plays, Titus thus presents a counterpoint to the tradition of providentialist historiography, a genre that enables the violent to justify the sufferings of violated peoples by attributing their defeat to the will of superior powers and to the merits of the violated themselves. Notably, and with an ironic symmetry that suggests the hypocrisy usually evident in such apologetics, both sides in Titus seek to displace agency and blame onto the victims of their violent actions. Tamora insists that not she but Titus himself is the cause of the pain that he and his family will feel from her revenge: “Remember, boys, I poured forth tears in vain / To save your brother from the sacrifice, / But fierce Andronicus would not relent” (2.2.163-65). Her disclaimer resembles that of Christian assertions that the Jews of Jerusalem deserved their fate at the Romans' hands. In the account printed by de Worde, for instance, Vespasian (here unhistorically represented as a Christian) declares to the Jews whom he has besieged: “Yf ye wylte yelde me the cyte & all them that are within (w' the) to my mercy & wyll, I am redy for to do it. But I tell you that I shall haue also lytell pyte on you as you had on Ihesu cryst, for I shal venge his dethe in you and upon you.”⁶⁸ In Tamora's case, such self-righteous and ruthless convictions rebound against the person who utters and acts on them. Her own dignity as a victim will suffer according to the same logic she used to justify her own malice.

The couplet spoken by Lucius over Tamora's corpse—“Her life was beastly and devoid of pity, / And being dead, let birds on her take pity” (5.3.198-99)—thus contains an ironic etymological echo of Tamora's initial complaint against the “irreligious piety” of the Andronici themselves. As much as Tamora may have seemed deficient in pity, the Andronici have proved equally pitiless. Even spectators who concur in the justice of Tamora's death and her body's desecration will not readily accept Lucius's implication that she and only she is to blame for everything that has occurred.⁶⁹ In their rivalry for sole possession of the moral high ground, both parties to the feud that divides Shakespeare's Rome succeed only in exposing their pride and their blindness to the claims of humanity, as well as their insensibility to the virtue that Christians call caritas—to the quality of mercy. The complicity of a “Titus” in this mutual failure of conscience may insinuate that Christianity's authorized historians have been no less partial, exploiting Jerusalem's tragedy and countenancing the violence of its fall in the service of their providentialist master narrative.

According to Debora Shuger, early modern English representations of the fall of Jerusalem evince a complex psychological attraction to violence; Titus, on the contrary, resists sanctifying either the causes of violence or its effects.⁷⁰ The play thus contributes to a critique of the rhetorical uses of scapegoating. Once Titus has accomplished his violent purge of the Roman imperial court, it is the alien Tamora who must bear the burden of Rome's bad conscience by dying—much as it was the historical Titus Vespasianus, a pagan (however virtuous), whom historians made liable for the baptism of Christianity's institutional authority in Jewish blood, Shakespeare seems to comment here on the tendency of religious establishments and parties in the Christian era, and not least in his own day, to place the onus of violence on others, including its victims. Such disingenuousness, especially in those professing the cult of the scapegoat, was surely a tragic anachronism.

AARON'S CRITICAL SPIRIT AND THE PREDICAMENTS OF “CONSCIENCE”

In Titus, I have claimed, Shakespeare decries the anachronistic resemblance of a pervasively violent present to a Roman past that is imagined as violently un-Christian and anti-Christian. If there is any truth in the thesis, then there must have been some positive ethical standard for Shakespeare's audience to arrive at such a judgment, some element in Christian culture that militates against the use of violence itself. That necessary reference point is of course to be found in some of the most distinctive and idealistic of all Christian teachings, which are also among the most frequently and flagrantly violated in Titus and in history: “Loue your enimies, blesse them that curse you, doo good to them that hate you, pray for them which hurt you, and persecute you: That ye may be the chyldren of your father whiche is in heauen” (Matthew 5:44-45).

Titus poses a serious challenge to secularist readers of the plays who would discount this idealistic strain in Christianity as mere ideology, a mystification and impediment to the recognition of political society's real basis in material interests and the operations of power. Tellingly, the figure in Titus who best instantiates the unabashed, demystified pursuit of self-interest is Aaron, the pointedly “irreligious” and “misbelieving Moor” (5.3.120, 142). There is little in the play to suggest that Elizabethan spectators would embrace his amoral ends, even if he appears admirably masculine and heroic in his pursuit of them. The best that may be said for Aaron's impiety is that, like the irreverence of Marlowe's machiavels, it helps to unmask others' false pieties. The worst is that it tempts them to further corruption, making them falser and more impiously violent than before. In the exemplary case of Titus, it is only after he discovers the full extent of Aaron's deceptions that he rejects the roles of the stoic soldier and sorrowful father to play the villains part. Henceforth, as Richard Brucher has shown, he seeks vindication through emulation of Aaron's murderous devices.⁷¹

Titus's metamorphosis suggests a travesty of conversion—itself the paradigmatic experience for many of the most zealous antagonists in post-Reformation religious conflicts. In the antic mockery of his petitions to the pagan pantheon in 4.3, an Elizabethan audience might well recognize the feelings of disillusionment typically shown by converts toward their former faith. The piety of his fellow Romans now strikes Titus as an anachronism in its own time; all the pagan gods are now, like Astraea, dei absconditi (4.3.4ff, 50-52). Yet this revelation only drives Titus further from a Christian view of virtue, as he dedicates himself to his revenge. Ultimately, while Titus accomplishes his subversion of a corrupt Roman order, his deeds horribly mimic the sacrificial violence of the rituals that symbolized that order in its original state. The difference is that, along with those pious, if un-Christian rites, he has entirely forsaken whatever natural virtues he once honored.

Aaron's effect on others shows that he is more than just a Machiavellian atheist; he also incarnates the unsettling consequences of widening religious and cultural divisions in early modern society. In the first place, his cultural identity is confused, combining hints of paganism and Islam (in his Gothic allegiance and his Moorish origin) so as to convey his Vice-like, protean character. A Hebraic connotation is additionally present in his name, that of Israel's first priest (Exodus 4:14-16); for some early modern Christians, this association could have brought to mind current controversies over church government. Yet the name that allies Aaron with priestcraft would seem to clash with his abrupt appropriation of English Protestant rhetoric in 5.1, after his capture by the Romans. Other critics have noted how Aaron mocks the “conscience” of his captors here, linking it with “popish tricks and ceremonies” (5.1.75-76), and some have adduced these lines in support of a reformist reading of the tragedy. They cannot prove that Titus is an anti-Catholic (or, for that matter, anti-episcopal) play, since Aaron would be a poor mouthpiece for any beliefs that Shakespeare wanted his audience consciously to applaud.⁷² The association of Aaron with hostility to Catholicism—prefigured here by the story of his apprehension in “a ruinous monastery” (l. 21)—must be interpreted with care, especially given the many aspects of his identity that would have alienated him from most Elizabethan spectators. If his slur against Roman religion employs the language of English Protestant invective, this only shows how readily such impudent speech may be adapted to the expression of his heretical opinion: that religion as such is nothing but the self-delusion of an “idiot” (l. 79). Far from betokening a reformist agenda on Shakespeare's part, the conflation of anti-popery with atheism in Aaron's discourse suggests a certain discomfort with the virulent animosity of reformers toward Catholic traditions.

To say, then, that Aaron's opinions must be seen in a somewhat ironic relationship to Shakespeare's is not to say that Shakespeare lacked any affinity for the viewpoint of reformist satire, or for the critical perspective on tradition that it presupposed. After all, the “god” whom Aaron ridicules is the pagan god of Lucius (ll. 82, 86). Here, again, one must remember that Lucius was introduced as a champion of human sacrifice, the “careful” observance of which he may be expected to continue along with Rome's other un-Christian customs (l. 77).⁷³ A Christian spectator can only assent to Aaron's opinion that Lucius, as a pious pagan, has ludicrously mistaken a superstitious devotion for the voice of “conscience.” What Aaron appears to signify is not the inherent vulnerability of Christian faith to an atheistic or materialistic critique so much as the danger of demoralization and eroded faith that the critical spirit brought with it—and the difficulty of restraining that spirit once unleashed.

While the publicization of theological and ecclesiastical debates was instrumental to both reformist and counter-reformist projects, it was also potentially a vehicle for further, anti-Christian revolutions of thought and value. When Aaron ridicules the “conscience” of the Romans, he also abuses the Christian term designating the will of God as the worshipper understands it. In this sense conscience is the final authority of truth, to which persecutors, martyrs, and religious militants of the sixteenth century made their common appeal.⁷⁴ Aaron thus denounces the principle that was most essential to the perpetuation of divisions within early modern Christianity, as well as to the individual faith that bound the adherents of any given form of church government to it and to each other. Meanwhile, the corruption of Titus by Aaron's example seems to warn even the most pious of post-Reformation Christians against allowing an outwardly righteous wrath to mislead them, through an apocalyptic zeal for the execution of God's judgments, into a Satanic contempt for human life.

CONCLUSION

There is nothing novel in this essay's claim that a Shakespearean tragedy may express a revulsion from violence, as opposed to—or as well as—a fascination with it. Nor am I original in arguing that Shakespeare eschewed controversial partisanship in religious matters. I have claimed to discover an abhorrence of state persecution and a critique of the culture of martyrdom in Titus.⁷⁵ For an English subject in the 1590s actually to espouse the cause of religious toleration could be a highly suspect and dangerous gesture. In late-sixteenth-century Europe, few participants in public life ventured to suggest that members of the true faith could achieve any acceptable modus vivendi that did not include the extirpation of heresies. For a Christian polity to renounce the forcible suppression of unorthodox religious views was to most authorities an absurd impossibility; to propose toleration in the interest of the common weal would be to uphold a perverse contradiction.

Notable sixteenth-century exceptions to this intolerant consensus were the Continental politiques, who for the most part endorsed limited toleration only as an essentially distasteful yet practically necessary alternative to prolonged civil wars.⁷⁶ For a critique of religious violence motivated by morality rather than expediency, we must look back to Erasmus, who in 1533 offered the following radically (and unrealistically) irenic comments:

There are those who outrageously shout, “Heresy! To the flames!” and misconstrue harmless assertions interpreting what even is pious in a malign fashion. Many of those whom they deem worthy of destruction they could reconcile with good will. … [This] faction is unwilling to accept changes, while the other wishes nothing of the old to remain. … This fire will be extinguished only if we remove the fuel. The chief source of the disturbance is a breakdown of morals. … All of us are guilty of calling down God's wrath, and it is essential that all of us turn with a contrite heart to our Saviour. He will, on his part, unquestionably turn to us and transform those infused with this disturbance once again into a state of tranquillity, awarding each of us a just portion of what we strive for.⁷⁷

Elsewhere Erasmus rebuked his Christian contemporaries for the violence that they committed in war against one another and the “infidel” Turks, comparing it unfavorably to the conduct of ancient pagans toward their enemies. He thus sounded a note that would reverberate in Marlowe's piercing indictments of Christian hypocrisy and, over a century later, in the writings of Christianity's bitterest critics, such as Voltaire.⁷⁸

In Shakespeare's England, though, most articulate protests against religious persecution originated with the government's notorious adversaries, such as the Jesuit author Robert Parsons. They were not yet associated with that sense of a just and due respect for freedom of conscience that the word tolerance came to signify a century after, with the Lockean separation of church and state. Much less did the idea of toleration then connote the expansiveness of imagination and generosity of spirit that it did for later critics, who admired Shakespeare's negative capability, his sympathetic and tolerant suspension of judgment, as attributes of his universal genius.

Was Shakespeare giving form in Titus to opinions that we must classify as radical for their time? If I am right, he went so far as to attack pretexts for religious violence indirectly, through depictions of bloody pagan ritualism and the massacre of innocents by un-Christian tyrants and revengers. Titus presupposes the existence of an irenic standpoint from which the hope of compromise and reconciliation seems preferable to violent confrontation and even to the victory of any particular faction. Such a perspective would suggest an attitude more Erasmian than doctrinally protestant; anyone who disapproved categorically of coercion, however, would be in this respect as radical as the most radical movements that emerged from the Reformation. At the same time, we must recognize that the latent radicalism of an irenic logic need not be mobilized in the cause of tolerance. It might instead be coordinated with a self-protective policy of Nicodemism, the outward dissimulation of conformity in contradiction to the dictates of one's private conscience.⁷⁹ Indeed, it is this possibility that may account for the vagueness of Shakespeare's relationship to the major religious divisions of post-Reformation England. Nowhere in his work does he unambiguously ally himself with a doctrine or a form of church government; if anything, Titus bears the imprint of his private religious convictions, its significance veiled by the pagan setting to preserve deniability (anachronism serving as a distancing device). We may recall Annabel Patterson's thesis that a poet who was ambitious to represent his views on public questions but not to be embroiled in affairs—let alone to feel the repercussions of a confrontation with powerful interests—might aim at an ambiguous sophistication inviting uncertain, or contradictory, constructions, “so that nobody would be required to make an example of him”⁸⁰

It is fair, then, to ask whether Shakespeare himself may simply have been too self-interested to articulate criticisms any more efficaciously than through a play about imagined Romans. It is also fair to ask whether he could have been expected to do so. Perhaps the noncommittal ironies of Titus might have answered a need that was in the last analysis more pragmatic than programmatic. Certainly by avoiding trouble with ecclesiastical authorities, Shakespeare left the impression of a man who was reluctant to deviate outwardly from approved Anglican practice, even if he had reasons for doing so. This view may not satisfy our wish for an activist Shakespeare, but it is a familiar phenomenon for artists not to wish to take practical responsibility for their politics, if only because their theoretical politics are often so idiosyncratically radical.

The oft-remarked effect of grotesque excess in Titus, and especially the irony with which the poet employs a rhetoric of complaint to highlight the impotence of tyranny's victims, may thus in part appear to be a compensation for his own sense of helplessness against intolerable conditions in post-Reformation Christendom. Or, quite possibly, I find this idea appealing for my own, culturally specific reasons—just because, in our own society of horrifying inequities and compensating diversions, the makers of popular entertainment often seem to share the motives that I am attributing to Shakespeare's ironic drama, massaging a painful sense of complicity with an art of caricature and catharsis. But for the critic to reflect in this manner is to raise, in the most immediate way of all, a problem of anachronism. If Titus has only now begun to recover its early popularity, to what extent does this reflect a real continuity, or even an essential affinity, between our concerns and Shakespeare's? Might not every apparent horizon of coincidence between his interests and our own prove a mere projection of present preoccupations?

One plain difference between our twenty-first-century context and that of the sixteenth century is that the idea of toleration in religious affairs is an article of faith in liberal societies. What may well strike us as most anachronistic in Titus is the depth of its investment in religious conflict as a matter of urgent public interest, without any obvious solution. In our communities of audiences and readers, unlike Shakespeare's own, the appeal to dogma as a source of political authority is now at least partly obsolete; for many, the early modern European assumption—that if only the Christian church were established as originally intended, its value to humanity would surpass that of any other form of polity—has become an anachronism. Not even Christians today can appreciate Titus from the standpoint of a culture in which an institution ostensibly dedicated to the values of mercy and self-sacrifice was situated at the center, not the margins, of the state and its interests. How should we take account of this in our work on Shakespeare? As interpreters, we are faced with a choice between pressing our readings further into an arcane erudition (our anachronistic expertise) or on the other hand wilfully choosing to ignore whatever students, audiences and we ourselves at first resist as anachronistic.

Titus's juggling of cultural and religious perspectives is one that we must in turn juggle with to understand its relevance. Perhaps our encounters with early modern English religious discourses ought to be replete with anachronism—the shock of the old—much as descriptions of paganism surely were for the young Shakespeare. A function of anachronism in art is to startle us with reverberations between our own discourses and those they claim to have superseded, making us strain to look past the blind spots of our time. Ours is a society in which many cultural conflicts are polarized between those who attribute suffering to a resurgent quasi-pagan materialism and those who blame them on the mystifications of religion; to each, the other's principles appear retrograde, or anachronistic. It might unsettle our post-Enlightenment pieties to consider how Shakespeare could equate the Andronici's reverence for tradition with murderous superstition while identifying Aaron's atheism with spiritual desolation. As liberal egalitarians, we have been happy to point out how his role raises concerns about racial scapegoating, and how Tamora's raises concerns about the scapegoating of female agency; and, we are unlikely to be much distressed by my claim that the historical associations of Titus's name reflect negatively on institutional justifications for violence. We may find it harder to come to terms with the likelihood that, even if Shakespeare was depicting the evils of persecution in Titus, he was not thereby attacking Christian intolerance in the name of a more tolerant, secularist culture. Instead, he was opposing un-Christian violence to a view of Christ's dispensation as implicitly more tolerant, a view that was entailed by his portrayal of sacrificial bloodshed as un-Christian and hence anachronistic. In this, at least, Shakespeare proceeded from a very premodern assumption: that the definition of a moral society was bound to coincide, in the last analysis, with that of a truly Christian one.

Notes

1. See The Arden Shakespeare Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate (London: Routledge, 1995), 16-19; quotations of Titus Andronicus throughout this essay follow this edition. Quotations of other Shakespearean texts follow The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).

2. See Patrick McGrath, Papists and Puritans Under Elizabeth I (London: Blandford Press, 1967), 202-3, 177n, and 256n.

3. See John Klause, “Politics, Heresy, and Martyrdom in Shakespeare's Sonnet 124 and Titus Andronicus,” in Shakespeare's Sonnets: Critical Essays, James Schiffer, ed. (New York: Garland Publishing, 2001), 219-40; Robert S. Miola, “‘An Alien People Clutching Their Gods?’: Shakespeare's Ancient Religions,” Shakespeare Survey 54 (2001): 31-45, esp. 34-35; and Cynthia Marshall, The Shattering of the Self. Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2002), esp. 121. See also Lukas Erne, “‘Popish Trickery and a Ruinous Monastery’: Titus Andronicus and the Question of Shakespeare's Catholicism” in The Limits of Textuality, Lukas Erne and Guillemette Bolens, eds. (Tiibingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2000), 135-55.

4. See, e.g., the excellent survey in John D. Cox and Eric Rasmussen's introduction to their Arden 3 edition of King Henry VI, Part 3 (London: Thomson Learning, 2001), 1-176, esp. 49-64. Cf., however, Steven Marx, “Holy War in Henry V,” SS [Shakespeare Survey] 48 (1995): 85-97.

5. Clifford Ronan, “Antike Roman”: Power Symbology and the Roman Play in Early Modern England, 1585-1635 (Athens and London: U of Georgia P, 1995), 14. Other relevant discussions include T. J. B. Spencer, “Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Romans,” SS 10 (1957): 27-38; and Phyllis Rackin, “Temporality, Anachronism, and Presence in Shakespeare's Histories,” Renaissance Drama 17 (1986): 103-23 (adapted as chap. 3 in Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare's English Chronicles [Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1990], 86-145). See also Bate, ed., 16-18.

6. Unlike the use of anachronism to mean “contamination between sets of empirical details proper to representations of discrete chronological periods,” this pejorative sense corresponds to an attitude found in any culture equipped with the idea of a change in the times or in nature, of universal human progress from a primitive condition to a developed state.

7. “An Order for Evening Prayer throughout the Year” in The Book of Common Prayer, 1559: The Elizabethan Prayer Book, ed. John E. Booty (Charlottesville: Published for the Folger Shakespeare Library by the UP of Virginia, 1976), 61-67, esp. 63.

8. Of course, Renaissance writers deployed the discourses of classical paganism in refined and complicated ways. Humanists, as Arnaldo Momigliano wrote, “could almost simultaneously sympathize with their pagan ancestors and accuse their enemies (most frequently Roman Catholics) of preserving pagan rituals. … The relation between paganism and Christianity then became a question of historical continuity or discontinuity between specific aspects of paganism and Christianity. Conversely, elements in paganism that were judged to be true were ascribed to the survival within paganism of early revealed truths” (On Pagans, Jews and Christians [Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1987], 22-23).

9. Ronald Broude has described human sacrifice as Shakespeare's “characteristic example of pagan vengeance” (“Four Forms of Vengeance in Titus Andronicus,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 78 (1979): 494-507, esp. 496).

10. For an account of how Titus's Stoical commitment to “patriotic religious obligation” makes him represent “an Elizabethan aristocratic ideal in Roman dress,” see John D. Cox, Shakespeare and the Dramaturgy of Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1989), 173-75, esp. 174 and 175.

11. The Aeneid in Virgil, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. G. P Goold, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999-2000), 242 and 243 (Bk. 11, lt. 81-82). The parallel has been noted by Cox (174 and 256n).

12. At 1.1.126-29, Titus reiterates this reasoning, which finds support in the commentary tradition as early as Servius's gloss on Aeneid, Bk. 3, 1.67.

13. James D. Garrison has traced the transition, in commentaries on the Aeneid, from a medieval insistence on the “assimilation of Vergilian to Christian pietas … to a more historically conscious acceptance of the Aeneid” by Renaissance writers; the latter were more willing to assume that some of Aeneas's violent actions contradicted Christian principles (Pietas From Vergil to Dryden [University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1987], 31-32). On pius and pietas in Titus, see Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare's Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983), 48; Bate, ed., 1.1.23n; and Heather James, Shakespeare's Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 51-55.

14. “O Lord and heavenly Father, we thy humble servants, entirely desire thy fatherly goodness, mercifully to accept this our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving … we offer and presente unto thee, O Lord, ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and lively sacrifice unto thee … And although we be unworthy, through our manifold sins, to offer unto thee any sacrifice, yet we beseech thee to accept this our bounden duty and service, not weighing our merits, but pardoning our offenses” (“The Order for the Administration of the Lord's Supper, or Holy Communion” in The Book of Common Prayer, 1559, 247-68, esp. 264, emphasis added).

15. In strictly Calvinist terms, it was thus Christ who “offered up himself as the onely sacrifice to purge the sins of al the world: so that all other sacrifices for sin are blasphemous & derogate from the sufficiencie therof” (“A Confession of the faith, of the Churches of Englande” in A Booke of the Forme of common prayers, administration of the Sacraments, &c. agreeable to Gods Worde, and the vse of the reformed Churches [Middleburg, 1587], sigs. A2r-A6v, esp. sig. A3r).

16. See Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Later Reformation in England, 1547-1603, 2d ed. (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave, 2001), 78-86; cf. Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Berkeley: U of California P, 1967), 362-71.

17. Broude, 497; James, 54-55; Ronan, 23-24 (citing Rackin, Stages of History, 94). For an argument that Tamora's rhetorical strategy is ill-conceived, however, see Jane Hiles, “A Margin for Error: Rhetorical Context in Titus Andronicus,” Style 21 (1987): 62-75, rpt. in Titus Andronicus: Critical Essays, ed. Philip Kolin (New York: Garland Publishing, 1995), 233-47.

18. For scriptural echoes in these lines, see Naseeb Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare's Tragedies (Newark: U of Delaware P; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1987), 66-67.

19. See Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare's Reading (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), 118.

20. Barbara Parker examined these correspondences in an essay circulated to the Titus Andronicus seminar held at the 2001 annual meeting of the SAA [Shakespeare Association of America].

21. For an argument that the sacrifice episode was inserted after the play's initial composition, see Bate, ed., 103-4.

22. Critics who foresee a rule of virtue under Lucius are ably refuted in Anthony Brian Taylor, “Lucius, the Severely Flawed Redeemer of Titus Andronicus,” Connotations 6.2 (1996/97): 138-57; on recent discussions of the Goths in Titus, see Anthony Brian Taylor, “The Goths Protect the Andronici, Who Go Aloft: The Implications of a Stage Direction,” Notes & Queries 241 (1996): 152-55.

23. Although bell-ringing was one funeral custom that generally survived the Reformation, it did not escape Calvinist criticism. Anthony Gilby included “bells of various kinds” among the idolatrous trappings of churches in A Pleasavnt Dialogue (London, 1581). Gilby is cited in Margaret Aston, England's Iconoclasts, Volume 1: Laws Against Images (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 335; see also Jennifer Woodward, The Theatre of Death: The Ritual Management of Royal Funerals in Renaissance England, 1570-1625 (Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 1997), 58-60. Philip Morgan notes that bell-ringing at funerals was “seen by many, probably rightly, as pagan in origin” (“Of worms and war: 1380-1558” in Death in England: An Illustrated History, Peter C. Jupp and Clare Gittings, eds. [Manchester, UK: Manchester UP, 1999], 119-46, esp. 142).

24. See Eugene D. Hill, “Senecan and Virgilian Perspectives in The Spanish Tragedy” in Renaissance Historicism: Selections from English Literary Renaissance, Arthur F. Kinney and Dan S. Collins, eds. (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1987), 108-30; and Eric Griffin, “Ethos, Empire, and the Valiant Acts of Thomas Kyd's Tragedy of ‘the Spains,’” English Literary Renaissance 31 (2001): 192-229.

25. See, e.g., St. Augustine, City of God, ed. David Knowles, trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1972), sect. X.20; cf. sect. X.6. On the “satisfaction” wrought by Christ's sacrifice (according to St. Anselm's seminal account), see Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, 5 vols. (Chicago: U of Chicago P 1978), 3:113-14, esp. 139ff.

26. See Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991), 131-32.

27. Shuger discusses views of sacrificial ritual in the writings of Bartolome de Las Casas and Hugo Grotius; see Debora Kuller Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley: U of California P, 1994), 82-87.

28. Miola, “An Alien People Clutching Their Gods,” 35.

29. Maurice Hunt, “Compelling Art in Titus Andronicus,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 28 (1988): 197-218, esp. 205-6.

30. See Bate, ed., 92n and 6.3.36n.

31. On Protestantism as a factor in dramatizations of Abraham's sacrifice, see John R. Elliot Jr., “The Sacrifice of Isaac as Comedy and Tragedy,” Studies in Philology 66 (1969): 36-59, esp. 53ff; and Shuger, 160-62.

32. See Bate, ed,, 5.3.46n.

33. This biblical passage was of course well enough known to Shakespeare that he alluded to it in Hamlet (2.2.392ff).

34. See, e.g., St. Augustine, 16-31 (l.16-19). Cf. The Rape of Lucrece, lt. 1189-90; and Miola, “An Alien People Clutching Their Gods,” 32-33.

35. Iphigenia is sacrificed by Agamemnon. Possibly better known to Shakespeare (if not so familiar to us) was the story of Polyxena, Priam's captive daughter, whom Pyrrhus is compelled to slaughter before the Greeks can return home (as recounted in Book XIII of Ovid's Metamorphoses).

36. On Renaissance depictions of Jephthah, especially the Latin tragedy Iephthes by James Buchanan (written by 1543[?] and published in 1554), see Shuger, 128-66. On the relationship between Christian conceptions of sacrifice and martyrdom, see “Sacrifice” in The Encyclopedia of Early Christianity, ed. Everett Ferguson, 2d ed. (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), 1015-18.

37. Miola, “An Alien People Clutching Their Gods,” 35.

38. In the Armada year of 1588, these words were said “on the gallows” to a condemned seminary priest and are quoted here from Peter Lake and Michael Questier, “Agency, Appropriation and Rhetoric Under the Gallows: Puritans, Romanists and the State in Early Modern England” (Past and Present 153 [1996]: 64-107, esp. 79), which cites a reprint of the account of William Hartley's execution in A True Report of … John Weldon, William Hartley and Robert Sutton [London, 1588]; see also Lake and Questier, 72-73. Inevitably, Catholics upbraided Protestants in exactly the same terms; thus Foxe recorded how the Marian Protestant martyrs Nicholas Ridley and Hugh Latimer, in 1555, had been admonished by their Catholic persecutors that “the goodness of the cause, and not the order of death, maketh the holiness of the person” (John Foxe, Actes and Monuments [London, 1576], quoted here from Religion and Society in Early Modern England: A Sourcebook, David Cressy and Lori Anne Ferrell, eds. [London: Routledge, 1996], 34).

39. Klause (cited above in note 3) sees particular parallels as evidence of Shakespeare's special interest in the literature of recusant Catholics during the early 1590s.

40. Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1999), 297; for a discussion of principles and procedures in heresy prosecutions, see pages 74-96.

41. Cox stresses Titus's fidelity to Roman values (173-175).

42. See Hunt, 206 and 217n (citing Leslie A. Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare [New York: Stein and Day, 1972], 178-79); Anthony Brian Taylor, “The Clown Episode in Titus Andronicus, the Bible, and Cambises,” Notes & Queries 244 (1999): 210-11; Miola, “An Alien People Clutching Their Gods,” 34.

43. The probable date of Titus's composition coincides with that of several high-profile prosecutions of Elizabethan separatists. In 1593, notable Protestants, including Henry Barrow and John Greenwood, were put to death; see McGrath, 307-10.

44. Bate, ed., 5.2.197n; see also Bate, ed., 20. Cf. the words of the missal, as established by Pius V in 1570: “those of us who by taking part … shall have received (sumpserimus] the sacred Body and Blood” (“Canon of the Mass” in Liturgies of the Western Church, Bard Thompson, ed. [New York: Meridian Books, 1961], 72-91, esp. 76-77). The Elizabethan Communion liturgy called celebrants “partakers” of Christ's “moste blessed body and bloude” (“The Order for the Administration of the Lord's Supper …” in The Book of Common Prayer, 1559, 247).

45. See Donald R. Kelley, “Ideas of Resistance before Elizabeth” in The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture. Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier, eds. (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1988), 48-76.

46. James Carroll, Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews, A History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 108.

47. Elias J. Bickerman, The Jews in the Greek Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988), 139.

48. For reference I have used the accounts of the siege in Josephus, The Jewish War, trans. G. A. Williamson, rev. E. Mary Smallwood (London: Penguin, 1981); Eusebius, The History of the Church (selections), trans. G. A. Williamson, rev. and ed. Andrew Louth (London: Penguin, 1989); and Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993), 1:269-77 (“Saint James, Apostle”).

49. See Joseph Ben Gorion [Flavius Josephus), A compendious and most marueilous Historie of the latter times of the lewes common weale, begynnyng where the Bible or scriptures leaue, and continuing to the utter subuersion and last destruction of that countrey and people. … Translated into Englishe by Peter Morwyng, of Magdalen Colledge in Oxforde (1575); Meredith Hanmer's translation of Eusebius, The Avncient Ecclesiasticall Histories of the first six hundred yeares after Christ …, was first issued in 1577. A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave's Short-title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475-1640 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1926) dates eight editions and issues of Morwyng's Josephus to the period before 1590, listing thirteen editions in all for the period 1558 to 1615.

50. See G. Harold Metz, Shakespeare's Earliest Tragedy: Studies in Titus Andronicus (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP; London and Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1996), 163-65.

51. In the first scene of Titus Andronicus the protagonist is called Titus more than twenty-five times (considerably more than he is called Andronicus). The fall of Jerusalem was a popular subject for printed ballads; see Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), 311; and Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991), 97-99.

52. This lost chapbook, entitled The History of Titus Andronicus, is discussed in Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. (London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: Columbia UP, 1957-77), 6:34-44. See also Metz, 150-58; and Bate, ed., 83-92.

53. See, e.g., John Calvin's attack on Roman Catholic traditions: “we ourselves are God's true temples … let us leave this stupidity [of sanctifying buildings] to Jews or pagans” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles [Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1893).

54. That two pigeons were a biblical “sin offering” is noted in Taylor, 211, citing also Leviticus 5:7.

55. St. Augustine, having exulted elsewhere in the destruction of pagan temples, thus rejoiced that among the Gentiles “a House of God is being built, through the new covenant, far more glorious than that temple erected by King Solomon, and restored after the captivity” (824 [sect. XVIII]; see also 830-31 [sect. XVIII.48] and, on the temples of the pagans, 7-12 [sect. 1.2-6]).

56. Hanmer, trans., in Eusebius, Ecclesiasticall Histories, 44.

57. A strong case for Nashe's influence on Titus is made in J. J. M. Tobin, “Nomenclature and the Dating of Titus Andronicus,” Notes & Queries 229 (1984): 186-87.

58. “… (S)he said, this is my natural) sonne, and this is the worke of myne owne handes; eate, for I have eaten; be not you more tender than is a woman, or proner to compassion then a mother. If you are so godly, and mislike this my sacrifice, I truely have eaten in your name, and that whiche remaineth I reserve for my selfe; whiche when she had said, they all trembled at this one horrible fact …” (Eusebius, Ecclesiasticall Histories, 40; cf. Josephus, The Jewish War, 353-54). See also Thomas Nashe, Christs Teares Over Ierusalem (London, 1593), fols. 33r-36.

59. Eusebius, Ecclesiasticall Histories, 41, citing Luke 19 and 21; cf. 567 (in Hanmer's “Chronographie,” 525-600).

60. Patrick Collinson, “Biblical Rhetoric: The English Nation and National Sentiment in the Prophetic Mode” in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 15-45, esp. 24-25.

61. Eusebius, Ecclesiasticall Histories, 40.

62. On this topic and the presence of cannibalism in some variants of this anti-Semitic slander, see James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia UP, 1996), 100-111.

63. Richard Reynoldes, A Chronicle of all the noble Emperours of the Romaines, from Iulius Caesar, orderly to this moste victorious Emperour Maximilian, that now governeth (London, 1571), fols. 50 and 51.

64. The dystruccyon of Iherusalem by Vaspazian and Tytus (London, 1510). The passage appears to be derived directly from de Voragine, who referred to his account as “admittedly apocryphal” even while reproducing it in his Golden Legend (1:273).

65. [Josephus] A compendious and most marueilous Historie, fol. 198r; cf. Josephus, The Jewish War, 331; and de Voragine, 1:276.

66. T. D., Canaans Calamine Ierusalem's Misery, fol. G2.

67. Arnaldo Momigliano, “Pagan and Christian Historiography in the Fourth Century a.d.,” in The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century, Arnaldo Momigliano, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 79-99.

68. The dystruccyon of Iberusalem by Vaspazian and Tytus, sig. F2.

69. Heather James has observed how the Roman state in Titus, with Shakespeare's collaboration, attempts to uphold its own integrity “by troping internal threats as female and Gothic” (48). On the parallel of the concluding scene with the opening of the play, see Hiles, 244.

70. For Shakespeare's use of the terms charitable and charity in Titus, see Bate, ed., 2.2.178 and 5.1.89, respectively. On Jerusalem in early modern English texts, see Shuger, 89-127, esp. 94 and 122-27.

71. On Titus's recovery of agency, see James, 70-71; and Katherine A. Rowe, “Dismembering and Forgetting in Titus Andronicus,” SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly] 45 (1994): 279-303.

72. See Jonathon Bate, “Lucius, the Severely Flawed Redeemer of Titus Andronicus: A Reply,” Connotations 6.3 (1996/97): 330-33, esp. 332.

73. For a parallel from Cymbeline that echoes the Aeneid, see James, 165-66.

74. See Jonathan Wright, “The World's Worst Worm: Conscience and Conformity during the English Reformation,” Sixteenth Century Journal 30 (1999): 113-33, esp. 126-33.

75. On this point I share some ground with several recent critics. See Donna B. Hamilton, Shakespeare and the Politics of Protestant England (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1992), 82; Hamilton, “Anthony Munday and The Merchant of Venice,” SS 54 (2001): 89-99, esp. 96; and Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare's Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002).

76. Cf., however, Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1978), 2:244-50, where this generalization is somewhat qualified.

77. Desiderius Erasmus, “On Mending the Peace of the Church” (De Sarcienda Ecclesiae Concordia), trans. John P. Dolan, in The Essential Erasmus, ed. John P. Dolan (New York: Meridian-Penguin, 1983), 331-88, esp. 377-78. On Erasmus's advocacy of restraint in “the burning of heretics at the stake,” and his cherishing of irenic prospects for Christian reconciliation, see Joseph Lecler, Toleration and the Reformation, trans. T. L. Westow, 2 vols. (New York: Association Press; London: Longmans, 1960), 1:118-20 and 120ff, esp. 118.

78. See Erasmus, “Dulce bellum inexpertis,” trans. Margaret Mann Phillips, in Erasmus on His Times: A Shortened Version of the Adages' of Erasmus, ed. Margaret Mann Phillips (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1967), 107-40, esp. 116-17, 120ff.

79. George Huntston Williams, The Radical Reformation, 3rd ed., Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies XV (Kirksville: Truman State UP, 2000), 893; see also 892-96 and passim.

80. Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1984), 11.