Titus Andronicus as Elizabethan black propaganda

postflaviana.org /titus-andronicus/
Jerry Russell
Readers of this website who have studied Gregory Bateson and the art of black propaganda, or for that
matter have understood the Flavians purpose in creating the Gospels as a pacifist message to radical
Jews, will understand that the perceived bona fides of the information source are crucial to the
effectiveness of the message. That is, the audience must believe that the source is one of their own, and is
working in their benefit.
Noting that Shakespeare seems to have been a nom de plume, many skeptics have suspected a hidden
motive for the plays, and focused their efforts on resolving the authorship question. However, from a
black propaganda perspective: even if the Stratford man did not write the plays, still it is important to
understand who he was; and (just as important) who he was perceived to be.
In Shadowplay (2005), Clare Asquith presents a spirited argument, not only that the Stratford man was
Catholic, but that the plays were filled with coded messages that would have been transparently obvious to
the beleaguered Catholics of the Elizabethan era.
To understand Asquiths point of view, it is crucial to realize that the Protestant vs Catholic dialectic had
taken center stage in Elizabethan England, contrary to textbook illusions that the English had promptly,
universally and enthusiastically rejected all the trappings of popery. In reality, the situation was perhaps
analogous to what would pertain in America if after every election, the winning party outlawed the losers,
beheaded the opposing party leadership, and made it illegal to possess, alternately, red items or blue. Of
course all the underlying disagreements, hatreds and fears can only be exacerbated by such events. In
England, the entire country had been flipped from Catholicism to Protestantism under Henry VIII in 1533,
back to Catholicism under Bloody Mary in 1553, and flipped again in 1558, with turmoil and bloodshed at
each turn. In the wake of Elizabeths accession, many Catholics in England remained emotionally
committed to the old religion and its traditions (though not necessarily to the Pope himself) and some
looked abroad to Philip II for rescue.
It was not illegal simply to exist as a Catholic in Elizabethan England but it was, at least nominally,
illegal to possess a rosary or other paraphernalia, to be a priest or harbor a priest, or to fail to attend
Protestant church services. In many situations, a loyalty oath to the Crown as head of the church was
expected. Stephanie Mann in Supremacy and Survival: how Catholics endured the English Reformation
estimated that During Elizabeths reign, 189 Catholics, 128 of them priests, were martyred for their faith.
Although a fearful total, this indicates that the vast majority of English Catholics survived the sustained
purge without undergoing this ultimate penalty. Inasmuch as it was impossible to kill all the Catholics, it
was necessary to convert them; a process in which I am arguing Shakespeare played a major role.
In his essay Bardgate, Peter Dickson also notes a growing suspicion among scholars who sense that the
man from Stratford-on-Avon might have been living a double life as a secret Roman Catholic. According
to Dickson, possibly the most notable biography supporting this viewpoint is Shakespeare: The
Evidence (1994), in which author Ian Wilson cited the following:

1 The explicitly Catholic-style testament of John Shakespeare, the Stratford mans father.
Chapter 4 (44-58)

2 The fact that John Shakespeares name appears on the recusancy list for March 1592
(123) and the Stratford mans daughter (Susanna) on a similar list for April 20, 1606 (320)
3 The Stratford mans marriage to Ann Hathaway in Temple Grafton in 1582 in what
appears to have been a Catholic ceremony (57)
4 The Stratford man in 1585 naming his twins after Hamnet and Judith Sadler, a couple
well-known as Catholics (58)
5 The Bards dedications to the Earl of Southampton, who was raised a Catholic until age
8, but later became a staunch Protestant, a fact Wilson ignores (136-137)
6 Shakespeares impresa design in 1613 for the Earl of Rutland, whose Catholic
orientation is overstated by Wilson (371)
7 The warning on the Stratford mans tomb not to move his bones in violation of the
Protestant practice of removing bones for storage after a period of time (394-396)
8 The Stratford mans ties to Warwickshire Catholic families, some of which were deeply
involved in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, drawing on research by Leslie Hotson and Peter
Levi (314-320, 453- 455, 485)
9 Thomas Combe and William Reynolds, two Catholics who appear in the Stratford mans
will (391)
10 A note from the 1660s by Richard Davies, chaplain at Corpus Christi (Oxford), that the
Bard dyed a Papist (410-411)
11 A Benedictine tradition that the Bard received the last rites of the Catholic Church (397,
450).
12 Purchase by Shakespeare in March 1613 of the Blackfriars Gatehouse, a haven in
London for secret Catholics, three of whom (John Jackson, William Johnson, and John
Robinson) appear as co-trustees or leaseholders of the propertyRobinson also appearing
in the Stratford mans will of 1616 (372- 376, 396-297, 418)

An essay by Richard Wilson, Shakespeare and the Jesuits, collects the evidence that the Stratford man,
who we will call Shagsper, spent some part of the first lost years from 1578 to 1582 in Lancashire under
the alias of William Shakeshafte, in the company of Edmund Campion and Alexander Hoghton where
he became a member of a household which was for six months, it seems, nothing less than the secret
college and headquarters of the English Counter-Reformation. The connections made there in Lancashire
may have helped Shagsper find his next position.
Sometime around 1590, Shagsper joined the acting company of Lord Stranges Men in London, and the
plays which were later published under the name of Shakespeare began to appear. The companys
patron, Ferdinando Stanley (Lord Strange, Earl of Derby), was suspected of being the beneficiary of
Catholic plots to place him on the throne. The company itself was noted for its production of politically
controversial plays. Later on, many actors from Stranges Men went on to join the Lord Chamberlains
Men. In 1598, the company moved their operation to the Globe Theater in Southwark, a neighborhood
which Asquith describes as a dissident powerhouse. The area was under the protection of Magdalen
Montague, who was oddly able to overtly practice a pious Catholicism until her death in 1608 in an era
when such practices would normally have led to serious penalties. She and her family used their

considerable resources in patronage to other Catholics (such as Shagsper) whose loyalties were only
thinly veiled in deference to the Elizabethan police.
Considering this network of connections, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that savvy Catholics of that era
might have looked to the Shakespeare plays for secret Catholic messages. Of course, if anyone at that
time had recognized that such messages were contained therein, they would in turn have referred to them
in veiled terms which have gone undetected up until now, at least as far as I am aware. This is an area for
future scholarship. Meanwhile, as these biographical hints have emerged, enterprising Catholic scholars
have likewise been re-examining the plays, looking for a pro-Catholic subtext. Asquiths Shadowplay is
possibly the most ambitious of these efforts. Asquith fruitfully covers the entire Shakespearean corpus, and
other such works have also appeared. Again, it is beyond the scope of this article to review all of
Shakespeares work in this context; our goal is simply to study Titus Andronicus as it relates to the Flavian
Gospel dialectic as well as the Catholic-Protestant dialectic.
Atwill argues that the true author of the plays (or, at least, the most important person among the authorship
team) was Emilia Bassano, an ethnically Jewish woman who is known as the first female to have
registered a poem for publication in England. Atwill shows that several Shakespearean plays contain a
typological level which inverts the Flavian comic system hidden in Josephus and the New Testament. In
this inverted typology, a Jewish person (or, occasionally, a friar or some other nominally Christian person)
causes the Gentiles to murder and cannibalize one another, reversing the ancient scenario in which the
Jews were forced to engage in cannibalism by the Romans in the Jewish war. The scenario sometimes
concludes with a Jewish person grafted into the Gentile royal lineage, inverting the Romans insertion of
their own lineage into the Maccabee (Jewish royal) line. Viewed at this level, the Shakespearean literature
may be seen as Jewish revenge literature, making Emilia Bassano a highly plausible authorship candidate.
As I mentioned above: in Shadowplay, Clare Asquith detects a partisan pro-Catholic allegorical level in
the Shakespearean literature. While at first glance this seems contradictory to Atwills position
in Shakespeares Secret Messiah, at least it can be said that Catholicism and Judaism both suffered
severely as targets of the Elizabethan police state, and followers of both were forced underground to
survive during Elizabeths reign. Accordingly, both Catholic and Jewish authors would have had good
reason to use veiled language to convey their messages. Since England had been so recently and so
rudely converted from near-universal Catholicism, of course there was a much larger potential audience
for materials dealing with the Protestant-Catholic dialectic. Also, the English elite identified themselves as
British Israel, beginning as early as Henry VIII; so Atwills Jewish protagonists might actually represent
the Elizabethan courts own view of themselves, variously as Jewish, Jesuit, or other strong-armed
characters.
In the book, Asquith discusses a number of Elizabethan authors, including Edmund Campion, Robert
Persons, Robert Southwell, Philip Sydney, Robert Chester, Edmund Spenser, Ben Johnson, and
Thomas Kid, and argues that all of them participated in developing a hidden, coded style of subversive
literature sympathetic to Roman Catholicism. This plausibly deniable literature, according to Asquith,
reached its highest expression in the Shakespearean works. It is beyond the scope of this article to go into
detail regarding this development process, but the reader is encouraged to go to Asquiths book for further
information about the related material.
Atwill states that of all the Shakespeare plays, the Flavian typology in Titus Andronicus is the most
transparent, with dense and highly interpretable parallels to the Flavian comic system. In fact, its very title
is an homage to the typological savior of the Flavian system. This was the play that first alerted Atwill to
this aspect of the Shakespearean literature.
In Shadowplay, Asquith also argues that Titus Andronicus is an ideal starting point for understanding
Shakespeares Catholic symbolic framework. Asquith wrote:

Denial is the word that best sums up the later critical reaction to Titus Andronicus. How
could Shakespeare have written such a terrible play? Terrible in every sense: not only do its
many digressions make it appear, in the words of one seventeenth-century critic, rather a
heap of Rubbish than a Structure, but it is embarrassingly tasteless, alternating obscure
debates with bouts of sadistic violence
Many scholars have tried to prove that Shakespeare was not the author, but the consensus
is that the play is unmistakably his, foreshadowing the themes of later dramas and closely
related to the poems he wrote at the time. The current approach is that it was an
experimental early work, and much ingenuity has gone into proving that it must have been
written in the late 1580s or very early 1590s. However, the playhouse records mark it as
new in 1594, when Shakespeare was producing his most sophisticated work; and indeed
there is a puzzling sophistication within the brutal framework of Titus Andronicus.
One of the revelations of the coded readings is that Shakespeares bad work always has a
purpose, albeit a purpose that relates to a topical context we no longer recognize. Of all his
plays, Titus depends the most completely for an appreciation of its high degree of artistry on
an awareness of the forgotten history of the times. It is the first of Shakespeares Roman
plays, all of which are directed primarily at the Catholic community. Like The Rape of
Lucrece, though in more sensational style, it dramatizes the sufferings of England up to the
year 1594; and the strange plot has clearly been devised around the hidden message a
passionate plea to the countrys dissidents to refrain from violent rebellion in spite of the
now intolerable pressure, and to await the promised invasion. This message is identical to
the instructions from Catholic leaders abroad, who repeatedly promised that diplomacy or
invasion would one day bring rescue.

(The above, and all following quotes from Asquith, are found in pp. 90-101 of her book.)
For a reader who is alert to techniques of black propaganda, this message to refrain from violent rebellion
in spite of the now intolerable pressure looks like yet another gambit drawn from the typical playbook. That
is, a diversionary message that benefits the status quo. So should we consider this Shakespearean
literature as truly pro-Catholic, or is it a false flag propaganda attack against the dissidents?
In the remainder of this post, we will reprise the analysis of Titus Andronicus presented in Shakespeares
Secret Messiah. Additionally, we will discuss Asquiths discoveries, and show how they interact with Atwills
earlier observations to produce a richer understanding.

Plot Summary
The plot is based on a struggle between the Romans and the Goths, who have been at war as the story
begins. Although the Goths and Romans fought a series of wars throughout the fourth through sixth
centuries, which ultimately led to the downfall of the Western Roman Empire, the plot of Titus Andronicus is
not in any way a historically accurate view of any of those wars. On the contrary, as Asquith and Atwill
would certainly agree, Titus only becomes coherent when it is taken allegorically.
As the story begins, the warrior Titus Andronicus, victoriously returning to Rome, brings a group of
defeated Goths in tow. The Goth royal familys eldest son is brutally and gratuitously sacrificed to the
memory of Romans who died in battle, as Tamora (Queen of the Goths) and her sons vow revenge.
Titus has been elected as the new emperor by the citizens. However, he yields the throne to Saturninus,
the eldest son of the previous emperor. He then announces that his daughter Lavinia shall be betrothed to

Saturninus. Titus is humiliated when Lavinia, already pledged to be wed to her lover Bassianus (brother to
Saturninus), flees with Bassianus in defiance of Titus command. Saturninus, seemingly as much satisfied
as humiliated, turns to Tamora, the Queen of the Goths, to be his bride instead.
At this point, Aaron the moor emerges as a central character. Captured in battle along with the Goths, he
proclaims that he is Tamoras lover, and that he will cuckold the Emperor and become the ruination of the
commonwealth. Tamora and her sons, Demetrius and Chiron, become his willing and eager accomplices.
They murder Bassianus, frame two of Tituss sons for the crime, and have them executed. Aaron tricks
Titus into allowing him to chop his hand off. Titus seemingly descends into madness.
Lucius, Tituss only surviving son, goes in search of an army to complete the cycle of revenge. His men
discover Aaron with a black child who he has sired with Tamora. With the rescuing army at hand, Titus
murders Demetrius and Chiron, bakes their bodies into a pie, and serves them at a banquet. In the
subsequent melee, Tamora, Titus and Saturninus are killed. Lucius emerges as the new Emperor, and
Aaron is buried alive, but his child is spared.

Inversion of Flavian Gospel Typology

In a strikingly original interpretation, Joseph Atwill observed that the plot of Titus Andronicus is a reversal of
the Gospel scenario, in which the Jewish royal line is pruned, the Jews are tricked into cannabalizing their
Messiah, and the Roman dynasty is grafted onto the Root of Jesse, and its spawn, the House of David.
Thus, the emperor Titus Flavius becomes the new Christ. In Titus Andronicus, it is the Roman and Gothic
lines that are pruned, their sons are cannibalized, and a Jewish graft is inserted into the royal lineage.
Titus Andronicus and his brother Marcus are identified by Shakespeare as the Flavians, Titus and
Domitian, by a passage in which Marcus kills a fly with his knife (III, 2, 52-80) in a manner identical to
Domitian (Suetonius, Domitian, 3). The name Andronicus is familiar as another conqueror of Jerusalem
identified in 2 Maccabees 4:30-38. Titus and his daughter Lavinia have their limbs lopped in a manner
similar to the many descriptions of atrocities committed by the Romans against the Jews, as described in
Josephus Wars.
Aaron the Moor is established as a type of Josephus, and his son as a type for the Messiah, by a scene in
which the child is hung on a tree and then brought down by Aaron (V, 1) in a manner reminiscent of
the story of Joseph of Aramathea in the New Testament, and its echo in Josephus (Vita, 26). Also, Aarons
activity in seducing Tamora and thus cuckolding the emperor Saturninus recapitulates Josephus Decius
Mundus puzzle (Antiquities 18.3.4) in which a man named Saturninus is the victim of a similar scheme.
While Atwills view is very well supported across the entire Shakespearean corpus, with many very explicit
verbal parallels showing a deep understanding of the Flavian typology on the part of whatever
person wrote the plays, at the same time the Atwill theory cannot necessarily explain every plot device and
every aspect of character development. In many cases, Shakespeare also seems to have inspiration
from current events, even for major aspects of the plays.
In Titus Andronicus, for example, Atwill does not attempt to explain why the Gentiles are divided into two
major camps: the Romans versus the Goths. What does this conflict mean and why does it exist, aside
from being the substrate for Aarons wickedness? The same problem exists for Atwill in several other plays
for example, Romeo and Juliet: if the Friar is the mastermind of evil, then what is the meaning of the
conflict between Montague and Capulet? For Asquith, the answer is that the Romans in Titus, like the
Montagues in Romeo, represent the Catholics; while the Goths, like the Capulets, are Protestants.

Romans vs. Goths

While Atwill sees the above characters and events as a typological reversal of the ancient Flavian Gospel
narrative, Asquith sees the same text as a topical allegory of current events in Elizabethan England.
She identifies Titus and his family as representations of the Roman Catholic church. Titus himself is
surnamed Pius (I,1,28) and the names of Marcus and Lucius are, of course, the Gospel authors. Lucius is
said to have had twenty popish tricks and ceremonies (V,1,76). In the person of Titus daughter Lavinia,
Asquith sees the lost and blameless spirituality of English Catholicism, symbolized as a light-colored deer.
Lavinia is lamented in terms similar to thousands of images of the Madonna and the saints still being
mutilated in this way all over England. Titus compares the bleeding but strangely unmoved Lavinia
specifically to a picture, and later to the broken arches of a ruined church that once sheltered royal
tombs. She is associated with common images of the takeover Lucrece, Philomel, the plundered
hives of the monasteries, pillage. As with the church, the heavenly harmony of her music has been
silenced. Her spouts of blood twice evoke the word martyrdom. (Asquith, pp. 93-94)
If Titus family represents the Catholics, Asquith reasons, the dangerous Goths must represent the
Protestants. In the play, Titus brings the Goths undying hatred upon his head by gratuitously giving the
order for the execution of Tamoras eldest son, Alarbus. He is given Religiously as a sacrifice. Tituss
four surviving sons, thirsting for blood, take Alarbus away swearing to hew his limbs and throw them into
a fire till they be clean consumed. (I, 1, 138-146) Asquith says this is an echo of the martyrdoms of
Protestants under Mary when some were burned, others hanged, drawn and quartered.
Titus is the peoples favorite, and has been justly elected to become the new emperor of Rome, but he
chooses instead to honor the rules of dynastic succession. Thus he turns the throne over to Saturninus, an
obviously unscrupulous and undeserving scoundrel. Asquith argues that Shakespeare is dramatising a
central argument from Personss Conference About the Next Succession: the dangerously radical
proposition that the legitimate heir to the throne was not necessarily the right choice. Compounding his
errors, Titus attempts to sever a love match and a planned marriage between Bassianus and Lavinia, with
the goal to force Lavinia to marry Saturninus, as his dynastic plans require. Thwarting Titus plan, Lavinia
flees with Bassianus. Saturninus quickly betrays Titus trust by choosing Tamora, the Goth, as his bride
and queen, instead of Lavinia. Thus, Titus himself has created the situation in which his own worst
enemies are in a position of ultimate, unbridled power over his destiny. He has sealed his doom: by
brutally murdering Tamoras son, by choosing his successor unwisely, and by his hubris in thinking he can
overrule the power of romantic love within his own family.

Hyper-Black and Hyper-White

If Asquith is correct that the Goths represent the Elizabethan royal court, then this was an extraordinarily
daring literary gambit on the authors part. The portrayal of the Goths in the play is hardly flattering. If
Queen Elizabeth or her agents shared this view, their pique could easily have been sufficient to send the
Stratford man to the gallows. (Unless, of course, Shagsper was only pretending to be a Catholic, but was
actually distributing black propaganda directed towards pacifying the Catholic population.)
Asquith argues that however daring this interpretation might be, it is also quite obvious. Saturnus was a
nickname of William Cecil, Elizabeths chief political advisor, Secretary of State, and Treasurer; while her
Moor who cannot change his color was a title that Elizabeth bestowed upon her spymaster Francis
Walsingham, on the occasion when he opposed her planned marriage to Francis duke of Anjou. As noted
below, Aaron is also a moor who cannot change color. Asquith suggests that Aaron may be a compound
character, also incorporating characteristics of Richard Topcliffe, a sadistic iconoclast who boasted that he
slept with the Queen.
In her essay Reading Like the Japanese: The Gothic Aesthetics of Horror in Shakespeares Titus
Andronicus, Adriana Raducanu points out that while Aaron is black, Tamora and the Goths are hyper-

white, and thus also other with respect to the mediterranean Romans. She explains:

Saturninus reference to Tamoras hue, his acknowledgement of her Germanic paleness

and beauty, develops into a classical comparison of significant aesthetic value. Thus, he
compares her with the pale goddess of the moon: lovely Tamora, Queen of Goths, That
like the stately Phoebe mongst her nymphs Dost over-shine the gallantst dames of Rome
(I.i.315-320). Interestingly, Shakespeare appears to deconstruct complacency in
automatically associating white with purity and beauty, by having Aaron, the black
character, deride Tamoras sons skin colour and the disadvantages this brings with it: Why,
theres the privilege your beauty bears. Fie, treacherous hue, that will betray with blushing
The close enacts and counsels of thy heart (IV.ii.117-118). Instead, Aaron proudly seems to
suggest that his skin colour matches up to the standards of beauty, conceived as fixed,
non-treacherous, resistant and eternal: Coal-black is better than another hue In that it
scorns to bear another hue; For all the water in the ocean Can never turn the swans black
legs to white Although she lave them hourly in the flood (IV.ii. 98-102).

The idea of pale, hyper-white Germanic Goths might suggest the foreign source of Lutheran and
Calvinist ideas an association that might have been obvious to the English of the time, even if
Shakespeare didnt explicitly say so.
However, the black-white racial theme is not maintained without a sense of irony. Tamora, in the forest with
Aaron and flirting amorously with him, compares herself and Aaron to (widow) Dido and her wandring
prince (II, 3, 22). This is either a race or a gender reversal: Dido was Phoenician, while Aeneas was
Trojan, that is, white. The comparison is also bizarre in that the relationship between Dido and Aeneas
does not end happily. Later, Aaron, confronted with the birth of his black child, comes up with a scheme to
prevent anyone from discovering what happened. Another blackamoor friend of his, Muliteus or Muley, has
mated with a white woman, but their child is white. Aaron sends Chiron and Demetrius to this couple,
carrying gold, hoping that a baby swap can be arranged. That way, a white child (carrying unexpressed
black genetics) will be raised in the imperial family, while Muley will have a black baby to raise as his own
(IV, 2, 150-164).

Ongoing Events of the Reformation

Following his murder, Bassianus body is thrown into a pit, and Tituss sons are lured to fall into that same
pit, leaving them in a highly incriminating position. A forged letter seals their doom. This pit is reminiscent
of the famous dungeon of the Tower of London. Regarding Tituss attempts to bargain to save his sons
lives, Asquith writes:

This scene where Titus loses his hand in exchange for two heads reflects meek
Catholic cooperation with the penal laws that banned priests and the Mass, laws that
instead of leading to toleration were actually given new force by the 1591 Proclamation
against Recusants. While presenting with physical accuracy Tituss reaction to losing a
hand, Shakespeare makes the scene historically accurate as well. In his secondary role as
old England, Titus falls, a feeble ruin while holding one hand up to heaven (III, 1, 207208), recalling the broken arches of the ruined abbeys. Next, his sighs and Lavinias dim the
sky and blot out the sun, evoking smoke from the great fires rather than sighs. There follows
one of Shakespeares most frequent images for the Reformation: Titus becomes a storm (I
am the sea) in which earth threatens heaven; and finally, retching was a metaphor used for

the most awesome weather-event of Elizabeths reign, the earthquake of 1580, seen as a
momentous physical symptom of the countrys spiritual upheavals. When Aaron returns the
heads and the hand, adding insult to injury, Tituss response is that of many in England:
When will this fearful slumber have an end? (III, 1, 253).

Asquith contends that the play continues from this point forward as an exact allegory of the ongoing events
of the English reformation. In Act III, scene 2, a sort of requiem mass is enacted by Titus in respect of the
loss of Lavinia and his sons, suggesting the claustrophobic world of Elizabethan catacomb Catholicism of
the early 1580s. At the end of act III, Lucius, seeking revenge for his familys losses, goes abroad to seek
an army to regain the country just as English Catholics looked abroad to help from Spain or France.
Meanwhile, in Act IV, scene 2, young Lucius is inexplicably sent on an errand from Andronicus to bring the
goodliest weapons of his armoury to the Goths, which Asquith relates to a tax on Catholic recusants that
was used to fund a war against Irish Catholics, and later against the Spanish armada.
In Act IV, scene 3, Titus Andronicus and his family stand outside the royal compound and shoot arrows
towards the Emperors court, with messages to the classical gods wrapped around them. They then meet
with a clown, and task him with bringing a supplication to the emperor, along with two pigeons and a
dagger. The clown goes to meet the emperor, tells him that the message is from God and Saint Stephen,
and reads out the supplication.
As Atwill points out, a supplication was in Roman times a synonym for Gospel, that is, news of military
victory. The two pigeons fulfill the requirement in Luke 2:24 that two pigeons be sacrificed at the birth of the
Messiah. However, if Atwills interpretation of the text seems incomplete, perhaps it is because the
playwright was constrained by a simultaneous goal of representing the continued flow of current events in
Elizabethan England. Asquith argues that the volley of arrows carrying classical references represents
Robert Southwells romantic pro-Catholic poetry of ~1589, while the Clowns message represents
his Humble Supplication of 1592, along with Richard Shelleys petition for toleration. The Clown is killed for
his efforts, as were Southwell and Shelley.

Saving Aarons Royal Child

As Aaron and his child stand before Lucius for judgment, Aaron now extracts the crucial pledge that his
child will be allowed to live. As child of the empress, he will be the sole surviving claimant to the royal
lineage (alongside Lucius and Young Lucius, whose claims seems to be political and spiritual rather
than through regal descent.)

Aaron
Lucius, save the child, And bear it from me to the empress. If thou do this, Ill show thee
wondrous things, That highly may advantage thee to hear: If thou wilt not, befall what may
befall, Ill speak no more but Vengeance rot you all!

Lucius
Say on: an if it please me which thou speakst Thy child shall live, and I will see it nourishd.

Aaron
An if it please thee! why, assure thee, Lucius, Twill vex thy soul to hear what I shall

speak; For I must talk of murders, rapes and massacres, Acts of black night, abominable
deeds, Complots of mischief, treason, villanies Ruthful to hear, yet piteously performd: And
this shall all be buried by my death, Unless thou swear to me my child shall live.

Lucius
Tell on thy mind; I say thy child shall live.

Aaron
Swear that he shall, and then I will begin.

Lucius
Who should I swear by? thou believest no god: That granted, how canst thou believe an
oath?

Aaron
What if I do not? as, indeed, I do not; Yet, for 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; for that I know An idiot holds his
bauble for a god And keeps the oath which by that god he swears, To that Ill urge him:
therefore thou shalt vow By that same god, what god soeer it be, That thou adorest and
hast in reverence, To save my boy, to nourish and bring him up; Or else I will discover
nought to thee.

Lucius
Even by my god I swear to thee I will. (V, 1)

The passage above is notable because it identifies Aaron as an atheist, while Lucius is a good (popish)
Catholic who believes in God and keeps his oaths. Both Aaron and Josephus have questionable
credentials as Jews: both seem lacking in any sense of moral compass, or respect for the Ten
Commandments, much less the rest of Jewish law. Although Josephus claims to be a Jew, he moves with
an uncanny degree of comfort within Roman imperial circles; persistent Internet rumors suggest that
perhaps Josephus is really from the Roman Piso family. Whereas, according to Asquith, the Aaron
character also represents the Machiavellian spymaster Francis Walsingham, whose namesake and
distant cousin was a noted Jesuit priest.
Asquith interprets the royal child as a symbolic representation of the future religion of England, as a
changeling offspring of Protestant and Jewish parents, pretending to belong to the ancient Catholic lineage
but really with little if any Catholic aspect at all. Nevertheless, she believes that the nature and the fate of
this baby would have been of foremost importance and interest to the original audience. The babys rescue
from the cross seems to be a hopeful sign. In Julie Taymors film Titus, Aarons child was carried into the
rising sun by young Lucius, showing that she must have understood this symbolism at some level.

Agents provocateur, and a black mass

To quote Asquiths analysis of the flow of events in act V, scene 2:

With a final glance at the role of

government agents provocateurs in
fomenting popish plots of revenge
(Tamoras attempt to persuade Titus that
she and her sons are the figures of
Revenge, Rape and Murder, ready to
perform his will), Shakespeares account
of the Catholic experience under Elizabeth
has reached the early 1590s the point
at which the play was written. In Act V, he
moves on from exploring the history of
suppressed English Catholicism to
delivering a stark warning on no
account must they rebel, they must wait for
rescue from abroad.
Like another celebrated figure of
Young Lucius carries Aarons child into the sunrise.
persecuted old England, Hieronymo, the
hero of Kyds Spanish Tragedy, Titus has
gone through three stages long-suffering loyalty, suppressed rage and madness. Now,
quite deranged, he stages a second banquet. Here again, there are specific echoes of the
Mass, but this time a black parody of the Mass. In a bid to shock Catholic extremists into
recognizing the evil of assassination, Shakespeare substitutes the divine sacrifice at the
centre of the eucharistic ritual with a grisly sacrifice inspired by human vengeance. The
horribly memorable spectacle could hardly be a more graphic illustration of the Catholic
prohibition on murder: a sin that makes a mockery of everything the Mass celebrates.
The Mass text still refers to Old Testament precedents for Christs sacrifice. In the murder of
Tamoras two sons, Titus regresses to just such a primitive, pre-Christian ritual. The victims
are bound and silenced like sacrificial lambs; Titus ceremonially cuts their throat while
Lavinia, following the ancient Jewish custom, catches their blood in a basin.

The irony is that Asquith, as a devout Catholic, cannot recognize what the playwright undoubtedly knows:
that the Catholic mass itself is also a cynical re-enactment of just such a grim scenario the brutal
treatment of the Jews at the hands of the Roman Flavian emperors and the actual fate of the Messianic
rebel Jesus, if indeed there was such an historical person.

Conclusion
If act V scene 2 represents a horrific warning to Catholics, in scene three we enter a realm of Catholic
fantasy or wish fulfillment. In the play, the events represent a stunning comeback for the Catholics.
Although Titus and Lavinia meet their doom, Lucius has returned with an army to save the day. The
Protestant sons Chiron and Demetrius are upended, slaughtered and cannibalized. Tamora meets the
knifes sharp point, and the vile Aaron is buried alive. Of course, in real life, such a rescue never came
although if the winds had blown differently for the Spanish Armada, who knows what might have
happened. At some level, elite figures such as Aaron dont really care: they always win, no matter who
loses.
Followers and fans of Atwill vs. Asquith might be tempted to argue over which interpretation is closer to the
original playwrights intention. Skeptics, of course, will think that both are seeing castles in the clouds, and

that Shakespeare was simply a humanist with a knack for clever plot devices. However, doubters of
Asquiths theory, in particular, might also consider her analysis of As You Like It.
Criteria such as distinctiveness, density, sequence, and interpretability have been suggested for evaluation
of parallels. In my opinion: by such criteria, Atwills parallels are much more highly demonstrable, while
Asquith is more vulnerable to criticisms of parallelomania. In Shadowplay, she briefly analyzes every
play in the canon at breakneck speed, in most cases allowing only a few pages for each play, leaving
plenty of room for future scholarship to explore the parallels (if any) in more detail.
I would suggest that both Asquith and Atwill might very well be correct. If so, then the Shakespearean
literature reflects a fascinating typological structure with a surface entertainment level, an allegorical level
of black propaganda regarding Elizabethan current events, and a deep level carrying the Flavian typology.

It seems clear to me that the vast majority of Elizabethan theatre-goers would no doubt have a similar
reaction as modern audiences when presented with the play. That is, it seems to be a gory spectacle with
a baffling, nearly meaningless and unintelligible plot. Nevertheless the audience would have been
delighted with the special effects.
A few well-educated, politically savvy middle class members of the audience would have seen through the
second level, as described by Asquith. They would have seen the depiction of the Catholics and
Protestants, and would have experienced various emotional reactions depending on their own loyalties and
their perceptions of the political struggles of the day. These struggles were, of course, a matter of life or
death for the participants, and the interpretations would have been much argued over at pubs and parties.
Orthodox and ethnic Jews might also have recognized Aaron as one of their own, however atheistic and
hate-filled he might have been, and presumably they would have been angered by the anti-Semitic
overtones (essentially, blood libel) in the unfair portrayal of Jewish villainy. A much smaller number might
also have recognized the Josephus parallel, and Aarons hidden victory.
(Amusingly, the Oxfordian scholar Eva Lee Turner in her book Hidden allusions in Shakespeares plays
(1931) expects the author to have Protestant leanings, and accordingly in Titus she sees the Romans as
English protestants, Lavinia as Elizabeth herself, and the Goths as Catholic. Aaron is arch traitor Charles
Arundel. While I personally find this analysis extremely strained and lacking in evidence, it is possible that
Shakespeare may have intentionally created enough mixed signals to leave such an alternate
interpretation open.)
The deep level of typology discovered by Atwill, would have been visible at the time only by the most
sophisticated, classically and historically trained sector of the population. Most likely, these would be
members of the inner circle of the court, who were privy to the secrets of the government and the history of
religious propaganda. In other words, they were the initiated and sworn members of the elite secret
societies of the day. They would probably have recognized that the struggle between Protestant and
Catholic was a false dialectic, stoked by the elite for the purposes of preventing the masses from
organizing and asserting their rights. (We will expand on this theme in a future essay at this site.) The play
shows the rival Catholic and Protestant protagonists destroy each other in an orgy of murderous revenge
and counter-revenge, as orchestrated by the Machiavellian, atheistic Aaron who stands above the fray. At
this level, the portrayal of Tamora, Saturninus and Aaron (that is, Elizabeth, Cecil and Walsingham) as
dark, wicked and atheistic (if not Satanic) figures would also be recognized as a shibboleth for popular
consumption, and nothing that anyone should take seriously. Or, perhaps, these elite figures took a certain
gloating satisfaction at their portrayal. At any rate, it was understood that the playwright was doing a good
job on their part, as part of the black propaganda team.

As to the identity of that playwright, the portrait of the Stratford man as a crypto-Catholic has emboldened
some advocates of the idea that Shagsper was, in fact, the true author. In their view, the missing
years might have been filled in with the sort of highly educational experiences that would have enabled the
Stratford man to write the plays. This seems unlikely to me, because no true Catholic would ever be able
to design the cynical Flavian typological aspects. That is, the existence of the deeply hidden Flavian level
is the proof that the author was being duplicitous in any presentation of a Catholic layer, because the
author of the Flavian layer was aware that Christianity (of any fundamentalist flavor) is a scam. So,
especially if Shagsper was a devout (exoteric) Catholic, he could not have written the plays.
Furthermore, even if Shagsper somehow picked up a suitable education during his missing years, its
difficult to understand why he would let his daughter grow up illiterate. Atwill argues that the author must
be Jewish, but my feeling is that the Jewish vs. Gentile conflict is also a false dialectic, and the actual
author could have been above that fray as well. Someone with atheist, Jesuit or Freemason leanings
could easily project a Jewish persona. Having said that, I would still argue that Emilia Bassano is a leading
dark horse authorship candidate. She had the requisite knowledge, experience of court life, and had the
time available to do the work, while Shagsper was busy as an actor and, presumably, as a Catholic
provocateur and double agent for the royal court. Christopher Marlowe might very well have been involved
in the creation of the plays, if indeed his death was faked, as Peter Farey and others have suggested. The
poet and statesman Thomas Sackville is another candidate with an unorthodox Catholic background, who
was a significant poet in his own right, with style and vocabulary very similar to Shakespeare. Group
theories are also very credible, and the Stratford man might have been a sort of literary secret agent for
plays from a variety of sources.

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