When mercy was out for the day

"Thou hast no hands, to wipe away thy tears:
Nor tongue, to tell me who hath martyr'd thee....."

                                                  Titus Andronicus      (III, i)

In one of Shakespeare's earliest plays, Titus Andronicus, the noble Roman title character addresses his daughter Lavinia in a scene usually regarded as Shakespeare's most shocking. Lavinia has been horribly assaulted and maimed by Demetrius and Chiron, sons of Tamora, Queen of the Goths. Their butchery leaves Lavinia with no hands or tongue, to prevent her from disclosing their identities.

The assault is so brutal that over the centuries since Shakespeare's death, some scholars have expressed doubts that the scene could possibly have been written by the same poet that gave us Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, King Lear, Othello. Another current of thought holds that it's simply the young Shakespeare writing for the groundlings, getting his dramatic legs up and moving without any sense of maturity or gentility to draw from. That refinement would come later.

We should bear in mind that most Londoners in Shakespeare's age were neither unacquainted nor particularly squeamish about brutality: they saw it at its worst in the horrific public executions of persons convicted of treason or any number of other crimes. Execution sites at Tyburn (for the commoner or less upscale), Tower Hill and Tower Green (for the most noble yet treasonous nonetheless) stayed busy enough to satiate the blood lust of most Englishmen.

They had already lived through the reign of Queen Mary, "Bloody Mary," Elizabeth's half-sister and immediate predecessor, who had ruled from 1553 - 1558. Staunchly Catholic, she had tried to forcibly return the English people to the papal fold by burning recalcitrant Protestants up and down the land in gruesome public spectacles meant to provoke fear whenever, wherever faith wouldn't budge.

Pictured above is a woodcut illustration of the burning of two Protestant martyrs during Mary's reign, from one of Agecroft Hall's 16th-century books, John Foxe's Actes and Monuments, often referred to as the Book of Martyrs. The book in Agecroft's collection is a third edition printed in 1583 by John Day of London; Foxe's first English edition had come out in 1563, the year prior to Shakespeare's birth. That first edition had 1741 folio-sized pages, with more pages added in later editions describing countless acts of violent persecution. Foxe was nothing if not thorough. His book was an enormous success and became a commonplace volume throughout the once-again Protestant England of Good Queen Bess. After the first few years and the early assassination plots of Elizabeth's reign, Catholics were the ones who had to look back over their shoulders. Violence? So what else is new?