The subject of exile: II

Abstract

Plays like Psyche et Filii Eius demonstrate one of the main topics discussed within this succeeding chapter: how, to quote Randolph Starn again, ‘name-calling was one of the few obvious pleasures of exile’. A list of some of the other subjects tackled within Jesuit drama – the break with Rome, and the martyrdoms of Sts Thomas a Becket, Thomas More and John Fisher – give a stronger impression still of how this exiled theatre was drawn towards material that was highly problematic on the legitimate English stage, treating it with a Catholic fury which would have been, quite simply, unstageable there. But if the incidental advantages of exile affected subject-matter within Jesuit drama and elsewhere, they did not themselves intrude as a subject; in expressed opinion, they hardly weighed against its defining sorrows. These were not simply a matter of being removed from home, family and possessions. In his massive Anatomy of Exile , Paul Tabori has distinguished between the destierro , the man deprived of land, and the destiempo , the man unable to pass time within his own country, and has described the exile as living in the present and the past simultaneously. These chapters prove, if nothing else, the imaginative potency of nostalgia to the English Catholics.