Abstract
“I racked him,” is the triumphant handwritten insertion against the name of a Catholic priest in the history of the Jesuit mission to England, kept as a convenient guide to England’s most wanted by the notorious Elizabethan pursuivant and torturer Richard Topcliffe (1531–1604). The doodle of a stick figure hanging from the gallows serves as the gleeful marginal record of another priest’s execution.1 Topcliffe could be a character out of William Shakespeare and George Peele’s Titus Andronicus (1590). Mutilation and dismemberment are the signatures of that play, techniques in which, albeit on a slightly more mundane level, Topcliffe also specialized: distending limbs on the rack, applying “the manacles” (the English version of the strappado), and a variety of other techniques including the use of hot tongs, bone saws, and sharp objects. Topcliffe had, in addition, a particular predilection for torturing members of the Society of Jesus (founded by Ignatius Loyola in 1540), who sought to bring Counter-Reformation Catholicism to England. Officially this constituted prealable or preliminary punishment insofar as it was the precursor to the execution of a capital sentence (in this case for treason), which automatically applied to Jesuits, whose very presence contravened a statute of 1584/85.2 Priests were tortured by Topcliffe, therefore, not only for evidence that would incriminate or convict them, but importantly also for information about Jesuit activity in the realm.
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Notes
Girolamo Pollini, Historia Ecclesiastica della Rivoluzion d’Inghilterra (Douai, 1592).
See Frank Kermode, The Age of Shakespeare (New York: Modem Library, 2004), p. 143.
James Heath, Torture and English Law (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), p. 130
Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2004), p. 89; Frank Kermode observes “Monstrous reprisals were thought to have been a deterrent, an argument the Queen seems to have accepted, though she was not herself a particularly vindictive or sadistic woman” (The Age of Shakespeare, p. 144).
Paul E.J. Hammer, The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 174 n. 130
Thomas Birch, Memoirs of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, vol. 1 (London, 1754), p. 160.
ODNB; P.W. Hasler, ed., History of Parliament, House of Commons 1558–1603, vol. 3 (London: Published for the History of Parliament Trust by HMSO, 1981), pp. 513–15.
Heath, Torture, pp. 119, 120; John H. Langbein, Torture and the Law of Proof (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 67, 68, 69, 72, 77.
Elizabeth Hanson, Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 31
Francis Bacon, Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Ellis, and Douglas Heath, vol. 3 (London, 1868–90), p. 114.
Michael Kiernan, ed., Sir Francis Bacon: The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 16–17.
See Nicholas Brooke, Horrid Laughter in Jacobean Tragedy (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1979).
James D. Carroll, “Gorboduc and Titus Andronicus,” Notes and Queries 51:3 (2004), 267.
On Norton see Michael A.R. Graves, Thomas Norton: The Parliament Man (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).
On Munday see ODNB; J.C. Turner, Anthony Munday: Elizabethan Man of Letters (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1928)
David Bergeron, ed., Pageants and Entertainments of Anthony Munday: A Critical Edition (New York: Garland, 1985).
Ronald Broude, “Revenge and Revenge Tragedy in Renaissance England,” Renaissance Quarterly 28:1 (1975), 38–58, esp. 47.
See F.A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), and “Elizabeth as Astraea,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 10 (1947), 27–82, which explore the numerous references to Elizabeth as Astraea in both the poetry and the painting of the period. Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke’s poem “Dialogue between Two Shepherds in Praise of Astraea” is but one example of the traditional pastoral tribute to Elizabeth.
Foakes thus designates Marlowe’s plays and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Henry VI. R.A. Foakes, Shakespeare and Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 9, 53–58.
On Lavinia’s rape and mutilation, see Karen Cunningham, “Renaissance Execution and Marlovian Elocution: The Drama of Death,” Publications of the Modem Language Association 105 (1990), 209–222; “‘Scars can Witness’: Trials by Ordeal and Lavinia’s Body in Titus Andronicus,” in Shakespeare’s Early Tragedies, ed. Mark Rose (Englewoood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995), pp. 65–78; Catherine R. Stimpson, “Shakespeare and the Soil of Rape,” in Shakespeare’s Early Tragedies, ed. Rose, pp. 58–64
David Willbern, “Rape and Revenge in Titus Andronicus,” English Literary Renaissance 8 (1978), 159–82
Molly Smith, Breaking Boundaries: Politics and Play in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 1998), p. 45.
See Heather James, “Cultural Disintegration in Titus Andronicus: Mutilating Titus, Vergil and Rome,” in Violence in Drama, ed. James Redmond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 123–40; Willbern, “Rape and Revenge,” 159–82.
On the coauthorship of the play, see Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-author (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 148–243.
Katharine Eisaman Maus, Four Revenge Tragedies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 328.
John Kerrigan, Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 196.
On executions as punishment in early modern England see Cynthia Herrup, The Common Peace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), esp. ch. 7
Katherine Royer, “Dead Men Talking: Truth, Texts and the Scaffold in Early Modern England,” in Penal Practice and Culture 1500–1900, ed. Simon Devereaux and Paul Griffiths (Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 63–84
Peter Lake with Michael Questier, The Archbishop’s Lewd Hat (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), ch. 7
Anne Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535–1603 (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2002)
J.A. Sharpe, Judicial Punishment in England (London: Faber and Faber, 1990).
Thomas Whitfield Baldwin, William Shakespeare Adapts a Hanging (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1931), p. 30.
Fredson Thayer Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy 1587–1642 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1940), p. 110.
Quoted in Richard Marienstras, New Perspectives on the Shakespearean World, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 56.
See Bate, Titus Andronicus, p. 19; Samuel Kliger, The Goths in England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952; rpt. 1972), pp. 33–34.
Francis Barker, “A Wilderness of Tigers: Titus Andronicus, Anthropology, and the Occlusion of Violence,” in The Culture of Violence: Essays on Tragedy and History, ed. Francis Barker (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1993), pp. 43–206. For a critique of Barker see Foakes, Shakespeare and Violence, pp. 15–16.
On punishment in early modern England see Devereaux and Griffiths, Penal Practice; Sharpe, Judicial Punishment; Lake and Questier, The Archbishop’s, chs. 1, 9, 12; and J.M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England 1660–1800 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).
David Cressy, Agnes Bowker’s Cat (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 221.
William M. Lamont, Marginal Prynne (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), ch. 6.
Lily B. Campbell, “Theories of Revenge in Renaissance England,” Modern Philology 28:3 (1931), 283.
N.E. McClure, ed., The Letters of John Chamberlain, vol. 1 (Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 1939), p. 397.
Linda Anderson, A Kind of Wild Justice: Revenge in Shakespeare’s Comedies (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1987).
Dympna Callaghan, ed., Romeo and Juliet: Texts and Contexts (Boston, MA: Bedford St. Martins, 2003), pp. 194–200, 208–44.
Broude points out that the watch is an instance when private citizens work for the state, thus further complicating the distinction between public and private justice (“Revenge and Revenge,” p. 48). See also Lorna Hutson, “Rethinking the ‘Spectacle of the Scaffold’: Juridical Epistemologies and English Revenge Tragedy,” Representations 89 (2005), 30–58.
Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus, The Norton Shakespeare (New York: Norton, 1997), p. 1384.
Sir Edward Coke, The First Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England, or a Commentary upon Littleton (London, 1628), section 141a.
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© 2007 Dympna Callaghan and Chris R. Kyle
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Callaghan, D., Kyle, C.R. (2007). The Wilde Side of Justice in Early Modern England and Titus Andronicus . In: Jordan, C., Cunningham, K. (eds) The Law in Shakespeare. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230626348_3
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