Encoding the Papacy and St. Peter in Recusant Drama
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| Year of publication | 2013 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
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| Description | After the Regnans in Excelsis (1570), a Pope, or “the Italian priest” was regarded as an open enemy of the English state. Protestant Culture engaged itself in ‘apocalyptic disclosures’ (Alison Shell) identifying the Pope as the Whore of Babylon, or the Devil incarnate, which was often expressed by the theatrical gesture of tearing a veil or a curtain and showing the Devil behind the seated Pope. Such imaginative techniques led to ‘a dualistic habit of thought’ or ‘a process of binary opposition, inversion or argument from contraries’ (Peter Lake). Recusant culture, contrariwise, has evolved a series of figures and tropes for veiling the positive religious meaning of Peter’s successors, e.g. allegorical patterns of miraculous fishing, gate-keeping and key-bearing, the Rock; Peter’s Complaint; Peter in Chains; homophony: room=Roome; the usage of Imperium and Caesar instead of Ecclesia and the Pope, commemorating Roman antiquities in English history, and the like. In my paper I shall concentrate upon demonstrating those sophisticated, but effective ways of encoding and orchestrating the Papacy in a non-political and non-dualistic mode, using the figure of St. Peter to remind the public of his true title and commitment. I dare to hope to bring my own piece of recusant exegesis to the almost comprehensive detection made so far by present-day scholars, by analyzing the encoded figure of Peter the Apostle in Sir Thomas More and Romeo and Juliet. In Sir Thomas More, we find his attributes in More’s invitation to Chelsea for ‘fishing’ with ‘a cunning net, not like weak film’ metaphorically enforced by the name of John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, and by the mention of Julius Caesar’s foundation of the Tower, and Chelsea’s association with the place of the first Peter’s Pence paid by Offa to Rome (787). In Romeo and Juliet a much more complicated symbolism seems to be employed. |
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