Warriors and Ruins

Abstract

This chapter explores Shakespeare’s response to the ‘bare ruined choirs’ of dissolved churches and monasteries, focusing on Cymbeline (c.1610) and showing how this play’s language of ruin works to remind Shakespeare’s contemporaries of the potential for anti-catholic intolerance to incite further acts of religious violence in early Stuart England and Wales. Cymbeline conveys a double vision of Wales, the site of Britain’s heroic victory over Rome, but also the scene for Welsh acts of savagery and rebellion that coalesce around the image of Cloten’s headless corpse, described by Lucius in the play as a ‘ruin … that sometime | … was a worthy building’ (4.2.353–4). The chapter shows how Shakespeare uses this language of ruin to reflect anxieties over the role of Welsh catholics in the Essex rising (1601) and Gunpowder Plot (1605), in which demands for greater toleration of catholics were a recurrent concern. Cymbeline condemns these acts of catholic rebellion, but the chapter argues that it also questions the merits of England’s Jacobean culture of intolerance towards catholics—an intolerance that, as Shakespeare hints, must also take some measure of responsibility for catholic acts of rebellion in the early seventeenth century. Shakespeare’s emphasis on the need for toleration of catholic loyalism need not, however, imply Shakespeare’s own sympathies for catholic beliefs and practices. The chapter shows how Shakespeare remembers the monastic ruinations under Henry VIII in order to reflect on the continuing cycles of religious violence that this originary moment of reformation iconoclasm unleashed.