There has always been a problem at the centre of studies of European martyrology and martyrdom in the early modern period (though it may not be a problem which is unique to that period). It is this: the narratives of persecution and suffering are in many ways quite “modern” in the sense that they express real horror at what they take to be the barbarism of the State and its agents, and also of the mindless mob which laughs and jeers at those about to die, and the sadistic cruelty of the ways in which such people are tortured and killed. Yet we know that European society in those centuries accepted as normative the use of capital punishment, and often of (to our, western, way of thinking) barbaric and cruel methods of inflicting it on ordinary felons and offenders as well as those arraigned and convicted of high crimes, all the way up to treason.

At this point one can get into an argument about whether burning people alive was worse than, say, breaking on the wheel; or whether the kinds of torture used by hate figures such as the ogre of contemporary English Catholic literature Richard Topcliffe were as bad as some of his victims alleged. And, indeed, some contemporary commentators did exactly this – i.e. argued about whose persecutions and modes of cruelty were worse. But the fact remains that even those who protested about the persecution of people for their (true) religious faith did not generally deny the right and indeed the duty of the authorities to use what modern European societies would almost all regard as sickening kinds of physical coercion and not just on run-of-the-mill criminals but also on those who could be argued to have transgressed communal religious norms and theological orthodoxies. Some of the leading Catholic martyrologists of the period (notably William Allen and Robert Persons) had no doubts that those who had been done to death by the authorities during the reign of Mary Tudor had not been the victims of injustice; they were rebels against both secular and religious authority and in effect got what they deserved.

Of course, there were some contemporaries who edged towards the position that coercion for the sake of religion was inappropriate – John Foxe was one such. David Anderson’s monograph tries to trace the emergence of that sensibility in contemporary literature. The basic argument here is that John Foxe’s on-the-surface tolerationist oeuvre translated itself on the stage and into the public consciousness via that medium. An introductory chapter sets the scene very well, in my view, demonstrating from a range of texts the contours of the early modern culture of in/tolerance. The author takes issue with the recently fashionable, in some circles, line about early modern persecution set out in Eamon Duffy’s Fires of Faith. Then the book deals with a number of canonical texts, King Lear, Duchess of Malfi, Doctor Faustus and Samson Agonistes. I have always been interested in King Lear as are most people who wonder about the link between Shakespeare and contemporary Catholicism. The book poses the question as to how far those who appear to be the victims of something like persecution in this text should be seen as analogous to those whom we think of during the period as having suffered for their faith. For the truth is that it is quite possible to read the play as a religion-free zone in which the spiral downwards into chaos, cruelty and disaster are actually the result of entirely this-worldly ambition, and political dysfunction and miscalculation. In other words, even if Cordelia is in some sense the epitome of human goodness, it is not obvious that she suffers for anything like faith. Stephen Greenblatt thinks that Edgar is a figure for a fugitive Jesuit but, again, this requires quite a stretch of the imagination, other than that into his mouth Shakespeare puts some of the language attributed at second or third hand by Samuel Harsnett to the Jesuit exorcist William Weston.

The same point can be made about the other texts dealt with here and, in fact, in a review of this length it is not possible to go through them all in the detail and at the length that they deserve. But the book raises very effectively the question of how issues which, by and large, might be taken to be political ones, may have translated onto the stage and into literary texts. The point is that though John Foxe might be thought to have created as a finished product the contemporary English understanding of what persecution meant and how it should be avoided, the issue of how far a regime ought to suppress dissent remained a live one for at least the next century and a half, if not longer; and that was something which one can show from a number of sources was deeply embedded in the popular consciousness or, rather, was not the preserve of a few professional martyrologists.