Alternative to TextView?

Question

I need to draw a whole bunch of text elements with shadows very quickly in an Android app. Right now I'm using a bunch of TextViews for this, but looking at the documentation ("TextView is a full text editor ...")) it seems like it can be a very difficult way to draw text and on some devices (like this one ), performance that I get pretty awful.

Is there a more effective alternative? I need to be able to draw only one line of text (without breaking the line) in a custom font with one (potentially transparent) color and a blurry shadow.