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ROBERT S. MIOLA
The Power of Rome
Rome exerted a two-fold power over Shakespeare and his contemporaries. As an ancient
city, mythic and marmoreal, Rome dominated
the early modern intellect and imagination. Its
language, Latin, furnished the core of humanist education in Europe and in Shakespeare's
Stratford grammar school. Its history - Livy,
Tacitus, Caesar, Sallust, Suetonius - provided
various lessons, military, moral. Its literature Horace, Ovid, Vergil, Seneca, Plautus, Terence provided archetypes for the West. This ancient
Rome fascinated Shakespeare throughout his career, appearing in an early collaboration with
George Peele, Titus Andronicus (1589-92), an early narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece (1594), then
in Julius Caesar (1599) and Antony and Cleopatra
(1606-07), and finally in Coriolanus (1608) and
Cymbeline (1608-10).
But Rome was a modern city for Shakespeare as well, and as the center of Roman Catholicism dominated the early modern imag-
ination (the Roman in that phrase is hardly
adventitious). Enemies regarded the city as
a sink of pagan idolatry and worldly corruption, still subscribing to the old reading
of ROMA as an anagram for Radix Omnium
Malorum Avaritia ("Avarice is the root of all
evils"). Protestants condemned the "whore of
Babylon" in apocalyptic indignation. Heinrich
Bullinger in 1538 denounced the "Kingdom of
Anti-Christ, that is to say of Mahomet [and]
the bishop of Rome" (STC 405). John Bale also
fulminated against "the great Anti-Christ of
Rome" (1544, STC 1291.5). After accepting the
hospitality of the Venerable English College at
Rome and returning home to bear witness
against Edmund Campion, Anthony Munday
sought to profit from his Roman sojourn with
The English Roman Life (1582), marketed as an
inside account of life in the unholy city, brimming with sedition and superstition, with pilgrimages and "paltry relics".
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markers: the famous walls, the forum or marketplace for business and, ironically, politics, the ancient Tiber river, the Tarpeian rock for executions,
the conflicted senate. Nobles, plebeians, tribunes,
aediles, flamens, soothsayers, and soldiers crowd
the streets on stage. It is also a world apart in the
depiction of its religious beliefs and practices the omnipresent invocations to the gods, the operation of a fame/shame ethos that validates suicide. General supernatural apparatus - portents,
signifying dreams and ghosts - appear with
more specifically Roman manifestations: the allusions to vestal virgins, the dramatization of the
Lupercalia (its race and potential cure for sterility) in Julius Caesar, the practice of divination.
Shakespeare depicts two authentically Roman
practices of divination: auspicium, or the examination of birds, and extispicium, the reading of entrails. Cassius reports before Philippi that the accompanying eagles have fled, now replaced by
ravens, crows, and kites (V.i.84-92)3. Before
Antony's defeat Scarus notes, "Swallows have
built / In Cleopatra's sails their nests. The augurers / Say they know not, they cannot tell"
(IV.xii.3-5). Diviners warn Caesar about going to
the Capitol: "They would not have you to stir
forth today. / Plucking the entrails of an offering
forth, / They could not find a heart within the
beast" (II.ii.38-40).
Contrarily, of course, Catholics and nonCatholics still flocked to the city and its 366
churches. Writing of his conversion to Catholicism, one seventeenth-century traveler, Toby
Matthew, eloquently recorded the powerful effect of the physical city on his imagination:
I must confess in the presence of God that the sight of
those most ancient crosses, altars, sepulchers, and
other marks of Catholic religion, having been planted there in the persecution of the primitive Church
(which might be more than fifteen hundred years
ago and could not be less than thirteen hundred), did
strike me with a kind of reverent awe.1
For many English Catholics, the discovery of
the St. Priscilla's catacombs in 1578 confirmed
their place in the Church Universal and, particularly, their solidarity with the ancient persecuted Christians "who were wont to lie hidden
and secret from their enemies", enduring persecution and danger. The catacombs ratified
"Catholic religion" as well as "Catholic rites
and observances", especially icons, images, and
reverence for saints. The past attackers were
Roman soldiers, the present, those who "presume to deface" pictures "and throw them out of
holy temples"2.
Shakespeare depicts ancient Rome as a
world apart by means of iconic topographical
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Shakespeare also supplies some charged
and spectacular examples of Roman ritual and
the supernatural. In Titus Andronicus Romans
offer human sacrifice, the Goth Alarbus, "Ad
manes fratrum" [to the shades of brothers, I.i.98].
In Antony and Cleopatra the god Hercules,
"whom Antony loved" (IV.iii.21), leaves him in
that eerie scene with hautboys sounding under
the stage. Neither scene is especially authentic.
The Romans, of course, did not practice human
sacrifice and their gods did not possess people in
that way. But freely substituting Hercules for
Plutarch's Bacchus, Shakespeare does portray
ancient Rome as an alien pagan culture, barbarous and strange.
This ancient Rome, however, is familiar as
well; it incorporates in surprising ways the contemporary vision of Catholic Rome. Throughout
his works the two Romes, ancient and modern,
collide, intersect, define, and contest each other.
The works present a series of mutually competing
and enabling images and discourses.
Shakespeare's ancient Rome, for example,
features priests and angels. The wedding at the
outset of Titus Andronicus has a priest and
Catholic accoutrements, "holy water" and burning "tapers" (I.i.324-5). Saturninus would not depart "a bachelor from the priest" (489). Priests
have special powers of offering sacrifice and interpreting the divine will: Caesar bids "the
priests do present sacrifice" and bring him "their
opinions of success" (II.ii.5-6). Aufidius says that
neither "prayers of priests nor times of sacrifice"
(I.x.21) will check his fury against Coriolanus.
Priests confer blessings, a contested early modern practice: "the holy priests / Bless her [Cleopatra] when she is riggish" (II.ii.249-50).
The recurrence of the word "priest" in
these contexts, usually associated with Roman
Catholicism, instead of the "augurer" or "flamen" used elsewhere, or some other substitute,
evokes a charged early modern controversy.
Luther famously declared everyman a priest.
Pointedly substituting "elder" for "priest" in
his translation of the New Testament, William
Tyndale drew upon himself the wrath of
Thomas More and the charge of heresy:
Now as touching the cause why he changed the
name of priest into senior, ye must understand that
Luther and his adherents hold this heresy, that all
Holy Order is nothing and that a priest is nothing
else but a man chosen among the people to preach.
And that by that choice to that office he is priest by
and by without any more ado and no priest again
whensoever the people choose another in his place,
and that a priest's office is nothing but to preach. For
as for saying mass and hearing of confession and absolution thereupon to be given - all this he saith that
every man, woman, and child may do as well as any
priest. Now doth Hitchens, therefore, to set forth this
opinion withal after his master's heresy put away
the name of priest in his translation as though priesthood were nothing.4
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spirit which keeps thee - is / Noble, courageous, high, unmatchable, / Where Caesar's is
not; but, near him, thy angel / Becomes afeard,
as being o'erpowered" (II.iii.20-3). Shakespeare
follows Thomas North here, who explained the
daimon as "the good angel and spirit that keepeth thee", in a natural, perhaps inevitable translation6. But as Peter Marshall and Alexandra
Walsham have shown in their recent book,
Angels in the Early Modern World (2006), angels
became an important contested site in "the
struggle to forge a new Protestant identity in
contradistinction to medieval Catholicism"
(135). Though biblically attested, belief in angels smacked of idolatry and superstition.
Calvin warned against the idea of the guardian
angel: "those [...] who limit the care which God
takes of each of us to a single angel, do great injury to themselves and to all the members of the
Church" (qtd., 16).
Such incidental references grow to something of great constancy, howsoever strange, in
Titus Andronicus, where the line between antiquity and modernity is tenuous and fluctuating 7. The spectacle of human sacrifice, mutilation, murder, and the Thyestean banquet defines the Romans as other, as an ancient pagan
More and Tyndale defined the terms of the
controversy for later generations. A Protestant
pamphlet in 1570 maintained that a "bishop and
minister is one" and that a "popish priest is no
lawful minister of the gospel" (STC 19185);
in 1581 I. B. presented a dialogue between a "virtuous gentleman" and a "popish priest" (STC
1039), categorical opposites. The 1585 antiCatholic legislation penalized "professed Jesuits,
seminary priests, and other priests, which have
been and from time to time are made in the parts
beyond the seas by or according to the order and
rites of the Romish Church"5.
Angels also make a surprising appearance in
Shakespeare's ancient Rome. Brutus asks
Caesar's ghost, "Art thou some god, some angel, or some devil, / That mak'st my blood cold
and my hair to stare?" (lV.iii.281-2). The complicated and hazily understood ancient daimon,
originally an "allotter" of divine power but by
the time of Hesiod and Plato a personal attendant spirit, Shakespeare naturally transforms
into a guardian angel:
"For Brutus, as you know, was Caesar's angel. / Judge, O you gods, how dearly Caesar
loved him!" (III.ii.182-3). Witness also the
Soothsayer to Antony: "Thy daemon - that thy
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Supremacy (1559) required an oath of subscription from all officers ecclesiastical and temporal,
as well as from all persons suing livery of lands,
taking holy orders, or proceeding to a degree at
the Universities; James I required a milder Oath
of Allegiance (1606). Catholics struggled with
competing loyalties. Thomas More's refusal to
ratify the Henrician Act of Succession clearly articulated the terms and stakes of the conflict: "in
good faith my conscience so moves me in the
matter, that [...] unto the oath that here is offered
to me I cannot swear, without the jeoparding of
my soul to perpetual damnation"8. Aaron's
anachronistic mockery evokes a potent cultural
paradigm which destabilizes and subverts: the
villainous Moor plays Protestant magistrate; the
pagan Roman plays defeated Roman Catholic.
The barbarous ancient world of Titus
Andronicus evokes contemporary Rome in other
ways. The clown greets Saturninus: "God and
Saint Stephen give you good-e'en" (IV.iv.42-3).
The jingle alludes to a fully-realized example of
apostolic martyrdom, the first Biblical Saint to
die for Christ. Memorialized in St. Stephen's
Alley and in two London churches, Stephen became an important Renaissance prototype for
martyrs. The discourse of martyrdom sounds
surprisingly throughout the Roman play.
Lucius asks the ravished Lavinia, "Speak, gentle
sister, who hath martyred thee?" (III.i.81). Titus
notes that Lavinia has no tongue to tell "who
culture. But an invading Goth strays to "gaze
upon a ruinous monastery," fixing his eye upon
the "wasted building," finding a crying child
beneath "a wall" (V.i.21, 23-24). Ancient Rome
momentarily takes on the look of contemporary
England, purged of Roman Catholicism, land of
the stripped altars and bare, ruined choirs. The
villain Aaron goes on to characterize his enemy,
the ancient Roman Lucius, as a modern Roman
Catholic: "I know thou art religious / And hast
a thing within thee called conscience, / With
twenty popish tricks and ceremonies / Which I
have seen thee careful to observe, / Therefore I
urge thy oath" (V.i.74-8). Aaron here appears as
a Protestant, scorning Roman Catholic "ceremonies", a derogatory term for the superstitious beliefs and practices of Catholics. William
Turner wrote against the Pope and his "ungodly ceremonies" (1545, STC 24355); Pierre Viret
against the "cautels, canons, and ceremonies of
the most blasphemous, abominable, and monstrous popish mass" (1584, STC 24775). Article
19 of the Thirty-Nine articles declared the
Church of Rome "hath erred, not only in their
living and manner of ceremonies, but also in
matters of faith" (1571, STC 10038.11). The term
has wide currency in anti-Catholic polemic.
Mocking Lucius's conscience and ceremonies, demanding an oath from a popish
Roman, Aaron plays out another scene familiar to
early modern audiences. The Elizabethan Act of
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with a disturbing image of its own religious
discourses and practices.
Shakespeare's ancient Rome is also a place
that lives by the imagery of the Roman Catholic
mass, particularly that of sacred, mystical, vivifying blood. Lucrece sheds her blood to purge
her shame and regain lost honor. Antony resolves to live or to bathe his "dying honor in the
blood / Shall make it live again" (Ant., I.ii.6-7).
The most pointed example, of course, occurs in
Julius Caesar. Plutarch tells of Calpurnia's dream:
hath martyred thee" (III.i.107); he must interpret "all her martyred signs" (III.ii.36). Before
cutting the throats of Chiron and Demetrius,
Titus says: ''Hark, wretches, how I mean to martyr you" (V.ii.180).
The claiming and counter-claiming of martyrdom occupied Protestants and Catholics
alike in Shakespeare's England. John Foxe's
Acts and Monuments (1563) recounted gruesome tales of Marian martyrs, including Hugh
Latimer and Nicholas Ridley. Catholics such as
Robert Persons in his monumental three-volume A Treatise of Three Conversions (1603-4) defended the persecutions. Elizabeth oversaw the
execution of at least 183 Catholics (including
123 priests); thousands more were fined, imprisoned, tortured, and forced into exile.
During Shakespeare's lifetime the horrific public deaths of Jesuits like Edmund Campion
(1581) and Robert Southwell (1595) stirred public debate. William Cecil, Lord Burleigh, published a defense of torture and execution in a
work significantly titled The execution of justice in
England for maintenance of public and Christian
peace against certain stirrers of sedition and adherents to the traitors and enemies of the realm, without
any persecution of them for questions of religion
(1583). Catholic response was swift from
Robert Persons, Thomas Alfield, and William
Allen, who decried religious persecution and
proclaimed the victory of martyrdom. The
shadow of modern Rome in the ancient city
provides the Elizabethan culture of martyrdom
[S]he dreamed that Caesar was slain and that she
had him in her arms. Others also deny that she had
any such dream, as, amongst other, Titus Livius
writeth that it was in this sort: the Senate having set
upon the top of Caesar's house for an ornament and
setting forth of the same a certain pinnacle,
Calpurnia dreamed that she saw it broken down and
that she thought she lamented and wept for it. (83)
Shakespeare expands upon this hint in
baroque, sanguinary fashion:
She dreamt tonight she saw my statue,
Which like a fountain with an hundred spouts
Did run pure blood; and many lusty Romans
Came smiling and did bathe their hands in it.
(II.ii.76-9)
Decius interprets the dream as follows:
Your statue spouting blood in many pipes,
In which so many smiling Romans bathed,
Signifies that from you great Rome shall suck
Reviving blood (II.ii.85-8)
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ment", salve nobilis & pretiose sanguis, de vulneribus crucifixi Domini mei Jesu Christi profluens &
peccata totius mundi abluens ("All, hail, O noble
and precious blood, gushing out of the wounds
of my Lord Jesus Christ crucified, and washing
away the sins of the whole world", sigs. T5vT6); and the "Prayer to the wounds of Christ,"
a quibus emanavit ille pretiosus sanguis quo sumus
redempti ("out of the which flowed that precious blood wherewith we are redeemed", sig.
T10v-T11).
Christ's blood became a powerful affective
symbol in Catholic drama as well as devotion,
accessible to Shakespeare in the mystery plays,
as Emrys Jones and, more recently, Beatrice
Groves have demonstrated. All the surviving
cycles feature Longeus' miraculous cure of
blindness through contact with Christ's blood
in the Crucifixion scene. The Croxton play of
the Sacrament presents a bleeding host that becomes Christ, who appears to convert blasphemers. Christ's wounds inspire various wellknown literary and iconographical traditions,
including Christ as winepress (from Isaiah 63)
or the Fountain of Life. In St. Bavo's Cathedral,
Ghent, a painting presents Christ's wounds
bleeding into a fountain, "while some people
below are washing their hands in the streams of
blood issuing forth from the fountain and others
Shakespeare's rewriting of Plutarch draws
upon Eucharistic discourses and controversies
and upon long traditions of Catholic iconography. An originary text is the language of the
Consecration from the canon of the Catholic
mass: Accipite et bibite ex eo omnes: hic enim calix
sanguinis mei novi et aeterni testamenti, qui pro vobis et pro multis effundetur in remissionem peccatorum ("Take this, all of you, and drink from it:
this is the cup of my blood, the blood of the
new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed
for you and for all so that sins may be forgiven"). Many Catholic prayers celebrate the
mystical and vivifying blood of Christ, which
the faithful drink and bathe in. Witness Saint
Anselm's Salutatio ad dominum: Christi sanguis,
ave, caeli sanctissime potus, / Unda salutaris crimina nostra lavans ("Blood of Christ, hail!
Heaven's most holy drink, / River of salvation
washing away our sins"). Or Aquinas's Adoro te
devote: Pie pellicane, Iesu Domine, me immundum
munda tuo sanguinet cuius una stilla salvum facere
totum mundum quit ab omni scelere ("Deign, O
Jesus, Pelican of heaven, me, a sinner, in thy
blood to lave, to a single drop of which is given
all the world from all its sin to save")9.Two examples may serve from Richard Verstegan's
Primer (1599), the most important collection of
Catholic prayers in the early modern period:
"A prayer before receiving the blessed sacra-
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are drinking it"10 (Cf. Jean Bellegambe's similar
painting, "The Mystic Body").
The language describing Calpurnia's dream
oddly and inappropriately departs from Plutarch
to echo Roman Catholic doctrines and devotions.
Believing that Decius has "well expounded" the
dream, Caesar accepts the image of himself as
fountain of "reviving blood" (II.ii.91, 88) and
goes to his death in the Capitol. The dissonance
between Roman Catholic language and ancient
Roman action gets louder and even more disturbing when the conspirators literally enact the
prophesied bathing after the assassination.
man, not a god. His death remains for audiences
fascinating and horrible, unsusceptible of transformation by his rhetoric, by the presiding masters of ceremony, or by the rituals themselves.
If Caesar is not a god, how about a saint?
Decius interestingly casts him in this role when
he claims that great men will come to Caesar's
blood for "For tinctures, stains, relics, and cognizance" (II.ii.89). Mark Antony, likewise, imagines people kissing Caesar's wounds, dipping
their "napkins" in his "sacred blood", bequeathing even a "hair" as a "rich legacy" (III.ii.13439). Here ancient Roman practices reflect those
of modern Rome, particularly the popular and
contested veneration of relics. This veneration
(doulia, as opposed to latria, or worship) began
as early as the second century, acquired theological justification in the works of many Church
Fathers, and flourished in the celebrations, pilgrimages, and miracles of the Middle Ages. In
early modern England, a culture of suppression
and erasure, relics provided a material protest
and memorial; they brought believers into direct, thrilling, and humbling contact with saints
and with their dead. Speaking of the veneration
for martyrs like Edmund Campion, William
Allen wrote: "And for the Catholics of Italy,
Spain, France, and namely (which is less to be
marveled at) of England, more than the weight in
gold would be given and is offered for any piece
Stoop, Romans, stoop,
And let us bathe our hands in Caesar's blood
Up to the elbows and besmear our swords.
Then walk we forth even to the marketplace,
And, waving our red weapons o'er our heads,
Let's all cry, "Peace, freedom, and liberty!" (III.i.106-11)
Shakespeare presents a culture that here
mistakes its own blood for Christ's sacred, mystical, and redemptive blood, with tragic results.
The action of the murder itself, the multiple
stabbings that cause blood to splatter on the
white togas and boards, and the gory brutality
of bathing do not indicate whether Caesar was a
tyrant or not - the crucial political question for
early modern audiences - but only that he was a
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piece of their relics, either of their bodies, hair,
bones, or garments, yea, or anything that hath
any spot or stain of their innocent and sacred
blood". Executions were carefully guarded and
bodies boiled; hands and fingers were thought
to have special powers; handkerchief-dipping
was widespread. Legend has it that a drop of
Campion's blood spilled on Henry Walpole and
converted him. The incident seems to be recalled
in these verses (attributed to Walpole):
thenly superstition of canonizing the relics, as
well of Jesus Christ as of his saints, for to make
idols. This kind of doing is a filthy pollution".
John Polyander agreed: "Of all the idolatries in
the world there is none more displeasing to
God nor more hurtful to a superstitious man
than that which he committeth by the religious
worshipping of the bones and relics of the
dead"13. Article 22 of the Protestant Thirty-Nine
flatly prohibited veneration of relics. Scores of
Protestant writers mocked Catholic credulity.
To create his ancient Rome Shakespeare uses the resonant doctrines, devotions, and controversies of Roman Catholicism. This makes
his ancients alien but at the same time, strangely contemporary and familiar. Even displaced,
as we have seen, into contexts of delusive selfaggrandisement and rhetorical manipulation,
the charisms of Roman Catholicism still have
evocative power. They tell us nothing of the
playwright's personal beliefs (biographical
Catholicity) or doctrinal convictions (literary
Catholicity); they are not some sort of abstrusely coded shadowplay. Instead they witness the
power, affective and spiritual, of forbidden beliefs and practices. These references constitute a
cultural Catholicity, which in Shakespeare's ancient Rome, has real presence.
This martyr's blood hath moistened all our hearts;
Whose parted quarters when we chance to see,
We learn to play the constant Christian's parts.11
Of course, the veneration of relics was controversial. Catholic writers, including Chaucer
and Erasmus in his Colloquies, ridiculed abuses
and called for reform. The Council of Trent proposed guidelines and defended the proper veneration of relics as part of its defense of images
and saints, arguing that "the honour which is
shown them is referred to the prototypes which
those images represent, in such wise that by the
images which we kiss, and before which we uncover the head and prostrate ourselves, we
adore Christ"12. Protestants were not persuaded. John Calvin wanted to abolish "this hea-
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