In investigating "the evidence for Shakespeare's Catholicism or Catholic sympathies and the way resistance to the implications of this evidence has affected the reading of both Shakespeare's life and his plays," examines how an awareness of Shakespeare's Catholic sympathies opens up interpretative possibilities in Titus Andronicus. Concludes that in the play Shakespeare "exploit's Rome's polyvalence by fabricating an ahistorical ancient Rome interspersed with references to the sixteenth-century breakup of the Roman Catholic West."