SOURCE: Royster, Francesca T. “White-limed Walls: Whiteness and Gothic Extremism in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus.” Shakespeare Quarterly 51, no. 4 (winter 2000): 432-55.

[In the following essay, Royster analyzes the representation of black and while racial extremes in Titus Andronicus with reference to the characters Aaron and Tamora.]

In criticism on issues of race in Titus Andronicus, blackness has usually been the focus, particularly as it is embodied in Aaron the Moor.¹ Whiteness remains in the background. In this essay, I will put whiteness in the foreground in an attempt to dismantle a black/white binary. I will explore the denaturalization of whiteness in Titus Andronicus and its construction along an unstable continuum of racial identities. Though Aaron's adulterous lover, Tamora, has attracted much less attention, the racial issues she raises are no less interesting. If Aaron is coded as black, Tamora is represented as hyperwhite. Her husband, himself a Roman, has singled her out and married her for her “hue.” In the racial thinking of the time, the adulterous liaison between Aaron and Tamora that produces an illegitimate baby appears as a kind of enhanced miscegenation, ultrablack crossed with ultrawhite. Why are these racial extremes paired in this play, and to what cultural anxieties might the sexual misdeeds of Tamora and Aaron have been responding? What are we to make of the threat to Roman values that appears to lurk in Tamora's alien whiteness? Finally, what does a more nuanced conception of whiteness add to the already problematic representation of femininity?

Until recently, Shakespearean critics have often assumed that Elizabethans accepted white as a kind of default setting for human skin color, regarding other races as deviations from this norm. We have assumed that whiteness was, as Dympna Callaghan puts it, “racially invisible” for Elizabethans, in whose “dominant ideology … only the other is racially marked.”² Among the important contributions made by the 1992 collection Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period is its advancement of the discussion of whiteness as a raced position. Indeed the volume contains at least eleven essays that include whiteness in their spectrum of raced positions. I will argue that in Titus Andronicus Tamora's whiteness is racially marked, is made visible, and thus it is misleading to simplify the play's racial landscape into black and white, with black as the “other.” One of the play's striking features is its othering of a woman who is conspicuously white.

Aaron is black and, as an outsider, is barbarous in Roman eyes. But, just as important, Tamora's susceptibility to Aaron provides a multihued palette of barbarism. The play makes us aware that Tamora is always a Goth. Though she cunningly claims, “I am incorporate in Rome, / A Roman now adopted happily” (1.1.459-60),³ she is never absorbed into the body of Rome. With Tamora's first appearance in 1.1, her difference from the Romans is located in the flesh. In an aside Saturninus compares her to his intended bride, the Roman Lavinia: Tamora is “a goodly lady, … of the hue / That I would choose, were I to choose anew” (ll. 261-62). Saturninus's reference to Tamora's “hue,” I maintain, alludes to her Germanic paleness. When he again compares her favorably with darker Roman beauties, he likens her to the traditionally pale goddess of the moon: “lovely Tamora, Queen of Goths, / That like the stately Phoebe 'mongst her nymphs / Dost overshine the gallant'st dames of Rome” (ll. 312-14); the moon's paleness is mentioned again at 2.3.231: “So pale did shine the moon on Pyramus.” The whiteness of Tamora's two legitimate sons is highlighted in 4.2, where Aaron calls attention to it as a “treacherous hue” (l. 116). The nurse who brings in Aaron and Tamora's baby is apparently a Goth rather than a Roman, since her use of the adjective “our” groups her with the queen. She too refers to the striking fairness of the Goths, which she contrasts with the dark skin of the mixed-race child: “Here is the babe, as loathsome as a toad / Amongst the fair-faced breeders of our clime” (ll. 67-68).

That critics setting out to discuss race in Titus Andronicus usually treat only Moorish race suggests that we have not escaped the mind-set wherein whiteness is racially invisible. Although the word “hue” in relation to Chiron and Demetrius's “treacherous hue” indisputably refers to white skin color, even Emily Bartels, in one of the best discussions of race in Titus, does not accept that “hue” means skin color. About Saturninus's praise of Tamora's “hue,” she writes: “The word ‘hue’ here seems to be used in the sense of ‘appearance’ rather than color, since her sons' fears that the birth of her ‘blackamoor’ baby will ‘undo’ her indicate that she is not black. It is, of course, possible that Saturninus' remarks suggest that she is not white either.”⁴ Bartels does not entertain the possibility that Saturninus's remarks suggest that Tamora is more white than Roman women. The critical assumption that a reference to skin color can mean only “black” or “colored” seems based on a belief that white is not a hue, that whiteness is not “racial.” But I maintain that the play does racialize and complicate whiteness.

Hue is not a common word in Shakespeare; that he uses it much more frequently in Titus Andronicus than elsewhere suggests a real interest in racial issues. If we accept “hue” in the passage about Tamora as referring to her skin color, then all of the play's seven uses of hue refer to color, six of them to skin color. Of these, two refer to Aaron's black skin color, two to the white skin of Goths, and two to the color of the baby. In these passages hue is imbued with ethical as well as physical significance, a fact that further supports its connection to a specifically racial discourse. For example, Saturninus's preference of Tamora's “goodly hue” over Lavinia's is overtly sexual. Before becoming Saturninus's empress, Tamora was to be his consort. Such implications are consistent with the other racialized descriptions of skin color that occur in the play.⁵

What might be the larger stakes of whiteness for early modern race studies? First, attention to the variations of whiteness within Titus Andronicus has the power to take us from black/white dichotomies into white/white relations and a host of contexts that arise with them. Included among these contexts is the confrontation of the stranger or foreigner from within and, as a result, a more complicated vision of Rome as the cornerstone of England's national identity. Recent work on early modern England's emerging national identity reveals not only a burgeoning taste for imperial enterprise but one tempered by fears of invasion by others. For example, Daniel J. Vitkus has argued that English reactions to the constant threat of the Ottoman Empire on the Hungarian front in the 1590s express a national anxiety about incorporation into a non-Christian nation.⁶ As I will discuss later, supplementing this image of English vulnerability is the cross-identification with Rome not just as victors but as invaded civil bodies.

Second, through the failed project to incorporate Tamora into the Roman social body, we can see how white supremacy is normalized and patrolled through the bodies of women. We can observe the racialization of early modern womanhood from the position of a character whose own racial purity is contested. As Barbara Bowen has pointed out, the construction of white (right) womanhood was inextricably tied to England's thirst to define itself as an imperial power, bolstered by emerging theories of racial superiority. Bowen's formulation that in early modern England “not all women were women” links the foundational works of Third World feminist scholars such as Barbara Herrnstein Smith and Cherríe Moraga with that of more recent work by scholars of early modern race, including Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, Kim F. Hall, Ania Loomba, Jyotsna Singh, Joyce Green MacDonald, Dympna Callaghan, and others.⁷

Bowen suggests that a position on the margins of whiteness can lend women a “‘heightened sensitivity’” to difference, racial and sexual, and to the cultural implications of that difference. Aemelia Lanyer, for example, an Italian Jew, exhibited in her writings a critical sensitivity to patriarchal culture that defined her as outside normative femininity.⁸ Such sensitivity does not, however, necessarily yield cultural change. We could even consider Tamora's role in Lavinia's rape as a sign of Tamora's normativity in the play's own perverse terms. After all, rape was and is a key technique in warfare and nation-building. Tamora's complicity in Lavinia's rape mirrors the disregard for women's bodily integrity that Titus himself displays toward Lavinia with the proposed marriage to Saturninus and with his murder of her at play's end. Tamora also attempts to murder her black baby in order to secure her marriage and maintain the stability of Saturninus's political reign. Theologian Thandeka argues convincingly that continued membership in the white community is never unconditional: white group identity is enforced by the threat of exile and fundamental shame. Each individual must learn to be white, must choose whiteness, and must accept white privilege. Whiteness, she argues, is not invisible at all; white privilege carries “the pound of flesh exacted for the right to be excluded from the excluded.”⁹ We thus can include Titus Andronicus as part of a larger feminist inquiry about the racist as well as the misogynist dynamics of white women's communities, for, as Bowen points out, “one of the painful lessons of feminist history has been the extent to which white women's communities, even when formed for progressive purposes, have been constitutive of white racism.”¹⁰ A more complex construction of whiteness as one that is forever patrolling and disciplining the variations within it can help us to better understand the costs of white supremacy.

ORIGINAL SINS

Given Titus's kaleidoscopic depiction of cultural insiders and outsiders, just where would Shakespeare's audience have located its loyalties? It is not surprising that Titus Andronicus invites its viewers to identify with the Romans—England traced its origins to the Trojan Brut and represents Goths as well as Moors as barbaric, uncivilized, and racially other. For many in Shakespeare's original audience the image of the Goths oscillated between one of bold warriors and one of “wanton wast[ers] of a noble civilization.”¹¹ William Slator, for example, celebrated the Goths: “‘the North, being but the Temperate Zone, affordeth peoples ingenious, bold, & warlike and for outward lineaments of body, strong, goodly, and beautiful; that no Nation can deservedly have greater prayses.’”¹² Many shared Augustine's view that the triumph of the Goths over Rome in ad 410 was just punishment for Roman decadence, and some Protestants “began to see the Gothic overthrow of the Roman Empire as prefiguring the Protestant break-away from the Roman Catholic Church.”¹³ Indeed, in the eighteenth century Whigs such as Nathaniel Bacon would designate the Goths as the originators of democratic law in England.¹⁴

Still, in Shakespeare's time the more compelling image of the Goth was that of an embarrassing distant cousin. Italian humanists had fostered the “cliché of the Goths as cruel and stupid barbarians”;¹⁵ and in this play Chiron and Demetrius, at least, conform to it. Titus Andronicus paints the fate of the Goths in disturbingly familiar terms. Tamora and the rest of the Goths, like the ancient Britons, are to be “adopted happily” into Roman civilization. But instead of embracing Roman culture, the Goths in Titus confirm their own otherness and monstrosity by flouting sexual taboos. The English showed the same ambivalence to the Goths that they showed to their own ancient past: humanism had taught England to worship the works and ways of ancient Rome and to regard with shame the barbarity of their own ancestors. In Elizabethan texts Boadicea, the ancient queen of the Britons, was—like Tamora—both revered and reviled.¹⁶

The Goths are the voices of the play's basest motives. Shakespeare takes pains to distinguish between the Goths' behavior and that of Aaron the Moor. Where the Goths “brabble,” Aaron plans. Where the Goths are “degenerate,” Aaron seeks “controlment” and “justice.” For Aaron each action is a “policy and stratagem” (2.1.105), and play, especially sexual play, has serious consequences. Here is Aaron breaking up a quarrel between Demetrius and Chiron:

Away, I say.
Now, by the gods that warlike Goths adore,
This petty brabble will undo us all.
Why, lords, and think you not how dangerous
It is to jet upon a prince's right?
What, is Lavinia then become so loose,
Or Bassianus so degenerate,
That for her love such quarrels may be broached
Without controlment, justice, or revenge?
Young lords, beware. …

(ll. 60-69)

Aaron's familiarity and superiority in this scene liken him to the Falstaff of the Henry IV plays, or to the Vice figure of the morality plays.¹⁷ But his advice is also shrewdly self-protective, a quality that haunts all his dealings, whether with Roman or Goth. Aaron reminds Tamora's sons of the potential for their “undoing,” while at the same time he sets a moral distance between himself and the Goths. Aaron's sardonic oath “by the gods that warlike Goths adore” reminds us that he is not a Goth and puts to mocking question that adoration. Tamora and her sons embody the possibility of a savage self, which Aaron throws into high relief. This scene accomplishes two things: it encourages us to view the Goths as alien, and it puts Aaron in the interesting position of directing our judgments about who is alien. This black outsider can mimic Roman rhetoric and knows his Virgil and his Ovid better than the young Goths do. (When he carves cruel messages into enemy corpses, he even does so in “Roman letters” [5.1.139].) Again, the play's racial scenario is complex: if there are racial hierarchies, the Moor is by no means at the bottom of the heap.

Blackness was becoming racially unique in Elizabethan England, but the process was incomplete: at this point in history blackness still took its place in a complex, nuanced racial world rather than constituting one pole of a clearly binary system. It is true, however, that England was in the process of developing consciousness of blackness as a special case, “Moors” being in a separate category from other races. Kim Hall makes a convincing case that the adoration of “fair” women as set off from “dark” women—so highly visible in the lyric poetry of the later sixteenth century—developed contemporaneously with England's involvement in the African slave trade, that is, from the 1550s onward.¹⁸ Politically, too, black Africans were becoming a special case: “blackamoors” are singled out in one of Elizabeth I's 1596 edicts issued in her Privy Council:

Her Majestie understanding that there are of late divers blackmoores brought into this realme, of which kinde of people there are allready here to manie, consideringe howe God hath blessed this land with great increase of people of our owne nation as anie countrie in the world, whereof manie for want of service and meanes to sett them on worck fall to idlenesse and to greate extremytie. Her Majesty's pleasure therefore ys that those kinde of people should be sent forth of the lande, and for that purpose there ys direction given to this bearer Edwarde Banes to take those blackmoores that in this last voyage under Sir Thomas Baskervile were brought into this realme the nomber of tenn, to be transported by him out of the realme. Wherein wee require you to be aydinge and assysting unto him as he shall have occacion, and thereof not to faile.¹⁹

The 1590s saw serious harvest failures and famine; and, as is hinted in Elizabeth's rather sardonic statement “God hath blessed this land with great increase of people of our owne nation,” overpopulation was contributing to a major unemployment problem—people were threatened with starving in the streets.²⁰ As the edict suggests, this was an era of intense xenophobia and resentment of many kinds of foreign workers. Foreigners were obvious scapegoats, and the native unemployed were themselves tarred with the brush of foreignness—“rogue literature” routinely demonized the jobless as gypsies, Irish, or Welsh and depicted them as speaking thieves' cant, which was described as if it were a foreign language.²¹ If expelling ten Africans seems an inadequate solution to social problems of such magnitude, their skin color made them a visible minority, useful for scapegoating purposes. Race seems only to have added another dimension to their overall undesirability on an already-overstocked labor market. The coalition between the alien Moor and the captive barbarian queen in Titus Andronicus exists on a continuum with Elizabeth's edict: the interconnection between African outsiders and disenfranchised whites.

GOODLY HUES: MAPPING TITUS ANDRONICUS'S RACIAL EXTREMES

The Goths, dwellers in the extreme North, were, like Africans, often associated with extremes and with excess, hence distanced from the more moderate Romans. As Mary Floyd-Wilson notes, according to early modern scientific thought, “a region's atmospheric temperature, moisture level, as well as its soil and topography, determined an inhabitant's humoral complexion, coloration, and temperament.”²² For example, in The Merchant of Venice, the Prince of Morocco's comparison between himself and “the fairest creature northward born” plays on a hyperbolic opposition between Africans (associated with the extreme south) and Goths (associated with the extreme north):

Bring me the fairest creature northward born,
Where Phoebus' fire scarce thaws the icicles,
And let us make incision for your love
To prove whose blood is reddest, his or mine.

(2.1.4-7)

In contrast, the ideal Roman matron is the median of extremes; her beauty does not overpower. Titus says that Lavinia is the “cordial” (1.1.166) to soothe her father in his old age. She is “Rome's rich ornament” (l. 52), an accessory to complement others.

Moderation and restraint were to Elizabethans the quintessential Roman virtues. At the outset of Titus, Bassianus describes “[t]he imperial seat” of Rome as being “to virtue consecrate, / To justice, continence, and nobility” (ll. 14-15)—nobility was assumed to express itself in “continence” or self-restraint. When Titus is running to rhetorical extremes (“with our sighs we'll breathe the welkin dim / And stain the sun with fog” [3.1.210-11]), his brother gives him good Roman advice: “speak with possibility, / And do not break into these deep extremes. … But yet let reason govern thy lament” (ll. 213-14, 217). Significantly, Titus refuses to restrain himself or observe moderation: “If there were reason for these miseries, / Then into limits could I bind my woes” (ll. 218-19). It is indeed a play of extreme miseries—human sacrifice, rape, multiple mutilations, tortures, and cannibalism. It is a tragedy, after all, and tragedies deal in devastated human lives and perils to the state. In a culture that values moderation, it is appropriately lack of moderation which provokes disasters. In Titus over-the-top horrors are matched by excesses of rhetoric which finally tilt over into the comic, as when Marcus prettifies the sight of blood dripping from Lavinia's tongueless mouth with a precious simile:

Alas, a crimson river of warm blood,
Like to a bubbling fountain stirred with wind,
Doth rise and fall between thy rosèd lips,
Coming and going with thy honey breath. …

(2.4.22-25)

Or when Titus punningly responds to Marcus's thoughtless reference to hands in the presence of two characters who have had their hands chopped off: “O, handle not the theme, to talk of hands” (3.2.29). That Shakespeare fully intended the horrors to risk audience laughter is suggested by Titus's own hysterical laughter at the point at which he has “not another tear to shed” (3.1.265).²³ Titus reportedly believes that “[e]xtremity of griefs would make men mad” (4.1.19), and extremity is at the heart of the play's action and language. The black/white contrast makes extremity visual, offering a semiotic code through which to interpret Saturninus's erotic preference as an abandonment of moderation.

Since the Romans themselves are extremists in the play, their attribution of extremism to outsiders is a scapegoating transparent even to its victims.²⁴ Horrified by the Roman practice of human sacrifice, a Goth exclaims: “Was never Scythia half so barbarous” (1.1.131).²⁵ Clearly barbarity is in the eye of the beholder. Aaron dryly notes that the Romans don't live up to their own ideal of moderation and restraint: “know ye not in Rome / How furious and impatient they be, / And cannot brook competitors in love?” (2.1.75-77). Even the Romans worry that their deeds might be barbaric: “Thou art a Roman; be not barbarous” (1.1.375). Coppélia Kahn notes that “[t]he play insists on an antithesis between civilized Rome and the barbaric Goths only to break it down: the real enemy lies within.”²⁶ Symptomatic of the instability of race and of the boundary between civilized and barbaric is Shakespeare's experimentation with names: the play's Moor is given a Jewish name, and Shakespeare gave Tamora's Gothic sons Greek names, Chiron and Demetrius, possibly to fit in with the play's many allusions to the siege of Troy—a story in which the Greeks, usually an icon of the civilized, occupy the position of barbarians at the gate.²⁷

This racial color-coding, besides making Roman scapegoating more transparent, also denaturalizes whiteness as a cultural signifier. As we have seen, the text distinguishes between different types of white skin in the contrast between Tamora's “hue” and the coloring of Roman Lavinia. “White” can be viewed in multiple ways when we get an Aaron's-eye view of white skin and its disadvantages. Aaron scoffs at the Goth Chiron's blushing: “Why, there's the privilege your beauty bears. / Fie, treacherous hue, that will betray with blushing / The close enacts and counsels of thy heart” (4.2.115-17). Deriding Chiron and his brother as “whitelimed walls” and “alehouse painted signs” (l. 97), Aaron proclaims:

Coal-black is better than another hue
In that it scorns to bear another hue;
For all the water in the ocean
Can never turn the swan's black legs to white,
Although she lave them hourly in the flood.

(ll. 98-102)

Aaron here complicates the conventional view of blackness as that which cannot be washed away.²⁸ In the biblical stories of Cain and Abel and of Ham, evil is signified by a dark mark. Aaron twists these associations to embrace blackness as a sign of permanence and constancy. It is whiteness that is “limed” on. Whiteness here is the blank surface for readable if inconsequential messages. Blackness therefore becomes the natural state.

Something is gained by situating blackness in a discourse of constancy. The racial thinking of the day often emphasized the changeability of black skin, as when in “The Strange aduentures of Andrew Battel,” anthologized in Purchas his Pilgrimage, an English traveler describes children in Angola who are “borne white, and change their colour in two dayes to a perfect blacke.”²⁹ The changeability of black skin supports the early modern commonplace that whiteness is an originary and natural state, blackness a historically later deviation. Aaron's reversal, insisting on the changeability of white skin, so easily reddened, in contrast to the steadfastness of black skin, helps to destabilize such beliefs. What is gained in permanence, however, is lost to villainy—Aaron's main point is that the changelessness of black skin is an indispensable aid to the project of dissembling and of covering up wicked deeds. Macbeth, an unlikely candidate for successful murderer since he shows everything in his face, might by Aaron's reasoning have been better off with black skin, but in Titus Andronicus this irony hardly promotes racial tolerance.

What is most telling about Aaron's remarks on white blushing is that again, as with the attention called to Tamora's “hue,” we see whiteness as a racial identification—whiteness is denaturalized. Significantly, we see whiteness as racialized in reference to this community's most precarious subgroup: the Goths, who are on the margins of belonging. But neither is white Roman skin an uninterrogated norm: Saturninus's suggestion that Roman skin is deficient in beauty compared to Gothic skin makes Roman skin tones racially visible as well. So Roman whiteness is also a raced position. Aaron compares white skin to an advertisement, and, like a public sign, whiteness is a signifier whose meaning is shared by a community. Whiteness has an agreed-upon function in the social structure, just as anyone reading an alehouse sign may deduce that ale may be obtained in its vicinity. But blackness, Aaron boasts, does not function in the same way. In these lines Aaron destabilizes blackness as a functional signifier even while proclaiming its constancy. Blackness is constant in its resistance to reading. To be black is to have a natural aptitude for dissembling, to be born with a poker face.

FOUL DESIRES: MAPPING TITUS'S SEXUAL EXTREMES

Titus Andonicus postulates not a simple white race with uniform attributes but something more nuanced—a temperate Roman whiteness and a sexually insatiable Gothic whiteness, which is more lascivious and uncontrolled than African blackness. The presence of vividly color-coded emblems of extremism, the ultrawhite Tamora and the ultrablack Aaron, also underwrites an economy of sexual extremism in the play. Shakespeare was clearly not immune to his culture's conception of Africa as a kind of global epicenter of rampant sexuality.³⁰ Shakespeare's African characters, whether central or peripheral, including Aaron the Moor, Cleopatra, the (absent) Prince of Tunis, and Othello, appear in contexts that are highly charged sexually. This is not to flatten out the nuances of their sexual registers. Othello continually and actively resists the stereotype of excessive sexual desire, while Cleopatra takes pleasure in this role. She commands Charmian, an imaginary Antony, and the rest of her audience to “Think on me, / That am with Phoebus' amorous pinches black, / And wrinkled deep in time” (Antony and Cleopatra, 1.5.27-29). In contrast, the ultrawhite Goths are figures of monstrous sexuality in ways that disallow such complexity. The Gothic rapists Chiron and Demetrius live solely by their sexual appetites. Tamora's “foul desire” for a black man overtakes her actions, absorbs her, just as blackness absorbs all the colors of the spectrum. But Tamora's lustful extremism is inherited from the play's sources, where she is more the agent of lascivious campaigns than the victim of Moorish lust. In one possible source, the anonymous prose work The History of Titus Andronicus, the Goth queen calls all the shots:

She had a Moor as revengeful as herself, whom she trusted in many great Affairs and was usually privy to her Secrets, so far that from private Dalliances she grew pregnant, and brought forth a Blackmoor Child: This grived the Emperor extreamly, but she allayed his Anger, by telling him it was conceived by the Force of Imagination, and brought many suborned Women and Physicians to testify the like had often happened. This made the Emperor send the Moor into Banishment, upon pain of Death never to return to Rome; but her Lust, and Confidence she had put in him as the main Engine to bring about her Devilish Designs, made her Plot to have that Decree revoked; when having got the Emperor into a pleasant Humour, she feigned herself sick, telling him withal she had seen a Vision, which commanded her to call back the innocent Moor from Banishment, or she should never recover of that Sickness: The kind good-natur'd Emperor, who could not resist her Tears and Intreaties, with some difficulty consented to it, provided he should be commanded to keep always out of her Sight, lest the like Mischance might happen as had been before: This she seemingly consented to, and he was immediately sent for, and the former Familiarities continued between them, though more privately.³¹

Conception by imagination was part of Elizabethan monster lore: in “Living Images: Monstrosity and Representation,” Marie-Hélène Huet argues that, in early modern monster discourse, monstrous births (a category in which mixed-race children were often included) were spawned by the “lengthy contemplation of a desired object”—a painting of an Ethiopian prince, for example; a servant; even a kettle or an animal.³² The monstrous desire here belongs entirely to the Gothic queen: the Moor is reduced to sexual fantasy. And Shakespeare's play furthers this emphasis on Gothic sexual desire as even more rampant and disruptive than African sexual desire. It is, after all, Tamora who comes up with the injudicious project of copulating with Aaron in the midst of a forest swarming with Roman hunters, including her husband. The verbal foreplay she aims at “my lovely Aaron” is an audacious Gothic appropriation from the great epic of Roman national origins, The Aeneid:

                                                                                Aaron, let us sit,
And whilst the babbling echo mocks the hounds,
Replying shrilly to the well-tuned horns,
As if a double hunt were heard at once,
Let us sit down and mark their yellowing noise,
And after conflict such as was supposed
The wand'ring prince and Dido once enjoyed
When with a happy storm they were surprised,
And curtained with a counsel-keeping cave,
We may, each wreathèd in the other's arms,
Our pastimes done, possess a golden slumber
Whiles hounds and horns and sweet melodious birds
Be unto us as is a nurse's song
Of lullaby to bring her babe asleep.

(2.3.16-29)

Aaron might understandably respond by indignantly questioning the sanity of this proposition, since Tamora's husband and his compatriots are near at hand and armed. However, Aaron disclaims all interest in sexuality:

Madam, though Venus govern your desires,
Saturn is dominator over mine.
What signifies my deadly-standing eye,
My silence, and my cloudy melancholy,
My fleece of woolly hair that now uncurls
Even as an adder when she doth unroll
To do some fatal execution?
No, madam, these are no venereal signs.
Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand,
Blood and revenge are hammering in my head.

(ll. 30-39)

Shakespeare does not at all efface women's sexual agency or white women's desire for black men, as Ania Loomba shows to have been a racialist norm. Instead, he attributes such sexuality to a “monstrous” white woman and, in the process, projects a certain fear of black rape onto the Goths. The myth of the black rapist was already native to the cultural anxieties of the early modern period. Loomba writes that the idea of white women desiring black men was

especially threatening for white patriarchy … [in] the complicity of white women; their desire for black lovers. … combin[ing] black and female insubordination “threatens to undermine white manhood and the Empire at a stroke.” … The myth of the black rapist is … useful, for it perpetuates black animalism while obliterating female agency, and thus simultaneously “erases” the two most problematic areas for patriarchal racism—the humanity of the alien race and the active sexuality of women.³³

Aaron confesses to having been a rapist:

I curse the day—and yet I think
Few come within the compass of my curse—
Wherein I did not some notorious ill, …
[As] Ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it.

(5.1.125-29)

In this play he is shown not committing rape himself but plotting the way to do it, by egging on the two Goths. Perhaps this creates a kind of vicarious black rape that still plays into racialist fears about Moorish lust; but in fact Aaron claims an intellectual stake in the rape and disclaims sexuality: “I was their tutor to instruct them. / That codding [i.e., lustful] spirit had they from their mother” (ll. 98-99).

In 4.2, in reference to white blushing, Aaron had proclaimed the unreadability of the black race; here he locates a transparently intelligible racial semiotics. But how readable is he? Should we believe what he says here about his sexuality? Earlier, Aaron confessed in soliloquy to his pleasure in “fetter[ing] in amorous chains” the Gothic queen, and to his desire to “wanton with this queen” (2.1.15, 21). When he denies his sexuality, Aaron resembles Shakespeare's other prominent black African figure, Othello. Ruth Cowhig argues that Othello's talk of his weak physical function in 1.3 and denial that he wants Desdemona with him in Cyprus for sexual reasons are attempts to counteract the stereotype about black lust: “Othello must defend himself against the unspoken accusations, of the audience as well as of the senators, because of the association of sexual lust with blackness.”³⁴ Aaron's desexualizing of himself may be read as a similar move against racist representation of black African sexuality. But his actions, as well as his words, speak loudly here: he possesses the good sense and sexual restraint that Tamora conspicuously lacks. The moderation and self-discipline that the Romans in the play preach but seldom practice Aaron possesses in full measure. Loomba maintains that “Othello is described in terms of the characteristics popularly attributed to blacks during the sixteenth century: sexual potency, courage, pride, guilelessness, credulity, easily aroused passions.”³⁵ The portrait of Aaron, though, distinctly unsettles such notions: while he gives proof of sexual potency, he can resist arousal and control his passions; and he is anything but guileless and credulous. It is not his sexuality but Tamora's that is out of control. Again she is contrasted with a Roman Lavinia so moderate in her desires that, even on the morning after her wedding night, she is fresh and ready to go hunting. (In cool response to the emperor's rather leering suggestion that the hunt has begun “Somewhat too early for new-married ladies,” Lavinia asserts, “I say not. / I have been broad awake two hours and more” [2.2.15-17].) Over the course of the play, then, white is not simply the default racial setting for humanity, not an assumed standard: the play complicates whiteness.

When attempting to enter the mind-set of this earlier era, we need to approach gingerly the very idea of a standard. In many areas of Tudor culture regional diversities were taken for granted, especially in the earlier part of the sixteenth century. Accustomed as we are to international standardization—the same green freeway signs in Cincinnati and Seoul, the same number of ounces in a Big Mac from Peoria to Paris—it is hard for us to recapture the feel of an early modern world where many people passed their lives without ever traveling farther than thirty miles from home, where local saints performed distinctive miracles, where English regional accents differed so much that their speakers were sometimes unintelligible to each other. Standardization was an idea just dawning in the sixteenth century, and we can track its progress during Shakespeare's lifetime. The statute mile was just beginning to replace the flexible rural “mile” that differed from region to region.³⁶ The Reformation abolished worship of local saints, and the Book of Common Prayer aimed at standardizing the church service all over England. But the transformation in thinking about “standard” was far from complete. No serious attempt was made during this period, for example, to standardize spelling. Although the London dialect was beginning to be recognized as standard English, it was still acceptable for gentry to speak in a provincial accent; this remained true into the eighteenth century.³⁷

In racial attitudes, too, the move to standardization was still incomplete. Sir Thomas Browne sometimes seems to adopt the language of “standard” unthinkingly: in “Of the Blacknesse of Negroes,” he assumes that white is the originary, standard race and that Negroes at some point in history “became blacke”; in “Of the same,” he speaks of black skin as a “deformity.”³⁸ Eventually, however, he reverses this:

whereas men affirme this colour was a Curse, I cannot make out the propriety of that name, it neither seeming so to them [i.e., black people], nor reasonably unto us; for they take so much content therein, that they esteeme deformity by other colours, describing the Devill, and terrible objects White. … Beauty is determined by opinion, and seems to have no essence that holds one notion with all; that seeming beauteous unto one, which hath no favour with another.³⁹

It is impossible to say whether this cultural relativism is an early herald of a less ethnocentric era or a holdover from a time before standardization was firmly established. What is clear is that Browne's racial thinking is nuanced—he divides the world not into black and white but into many groups with a variety of facial and bodily features: “Flat noses seem comely unto the Moore, an Aquiline or hawked one unto the Persian, a large and prominent nose unto the Romane, but none of all these are acceptable in our opinion.”⁴⁰ That Browne racializes Romans on an equal footing with Moors sheds light on the complexity of the racial situation in Titus Andronicus. In terms of physical appearance Shakespeare distinguishes Roman Lavinia from Gothic Tamora as well as from Moorish Aaron; Lavinia represents the ideal of moderate Romanness—but the Anglo-Saxon Sir Thomas Browne wouldn't have cared for her nose. As I will discuss in the next section, increasing anxiety about miscegenation, especially in light of England's growing imperial interests, hastened the construction of a racial standard.

“CONFUSED MIXTURES”: MISCEGENATION, INFILTRATION, AND PASSING

Because black Aaron and white Tamora are meant to visualize the play's interest in extremism, it is crucial that they produce a child. Aaron's son is potentially a foreign invader, and it is important that the baby was produced in a Goth womb. Subverting the comic expectations of rebirth and rejuvenation that normally accompany Shakespearean births,⁴¹ the baby is the product of Tamora's and Aaron's transgression against Saturninus's authority and, by extension, a transgression against Rome. As a Goth, Tamora already makes unclear what is authentically Roman. The baby physically manifests the uncertainty about Tamora. But this sign of Tamora's sexual deviancy and Aaron's seductiveness also stands in for the foreign that perennially threatened Rome.

Titus Andronicus is the only one of Shakespeare's plays that includes miscegenation in its plot. What happens when you cross the ultrablack with the ultrawhite? In life, one might expect a child of some shade of brown; but in a play of extremes one gets a child who is either black or white. The child of Aaron and Tamora appears to be black and, like his father, he is designated a “blackamoor.” The child of the play's other mixed-race couple, black Muliteus and his white wife, is born pure white. The issue of miscegenation hovers in Lavinia's case, too: Titus tells her rapists that she is “the spring whom you have stained with mud, / This goodly summer with your winter mixed” (5.2.169-70). “Mixed” hints at a mixed-blood child to be born from the union of the wintry Gothic north and the summery Roman south. The play seems oddly preoccupied with miscegenation and mixed-race children.

The Elizabethan's fear of hybridity, so familiar in other contexts, applies to their reading of England's national past. When Tudor England looked back on its own barbaric past, what it saw was not what nineteenth-century purveyors of Anglo-Saxon ideologies saw: an important originary point for white racial identity. In his Description of England, William Harrison discussed the fifth-century Roman invasion of Britain and the engendering of the British people: he saw the time as one of invasion, enslavement, and interbreeding. Harrison's descriptions of the early Britons echo contemporary depictions of Africans—images of slavery, violated marital and sexual taboos, and the “confused mixtures of blood” thereby entailed. And, according to Harrison, the Romans who first settled in Britain and bred with the Britons and Celts were themselves mixed and excessive and brought with them “all maner of vice and vicious liuing, all riot and excesse of behauiour into our countrie.”⁴² Roman Britain was not an uncomplicated, racially pure nation but a conglomerate of several cultures vying for dominance. Harrison uses the language of miscegenation to describe the invasion of Britain by its surrounding cultures, where the island is a violated body:

Oh what numbers of all degrees of English and British were made slaues and bond men, and bought and sold as oxen in open market! … Hereby then we perceiue, how from time to time this Iland hath not onelie beene a prey, but as it were a common receptacle for strangers.⁴³

If we read Rome in Titus Andronicus as an analogue of Britain, we see a culture proudly committed to Romanness, to Roman honor, to ancestral Roman practices and values—clearly related to the new rhetoric of English nationhood. And there is the same garrison mentality in both nations—the same fear of invasion, the same panic about the danger of blurred boundaries. As Titus opens, the Romans have just defeated the Goths with whom they have been fighting intermittently for many years; but Elizabethans knew their Roman history well enough not to need a sequel: they knew the Goths would overrun Rome in the end. Here, however, the danger of invasion is displaced onto the danger of infiltration by foreign peoples. The barbarians are not at the gate but inside the gate: the queen of the Goths has married the emperor of Rome, and she has brought with her another outsider, a Moor, her lover. The mixed race of the child they produce compromises Roman racial purity, and he is not the only mixed-race baby in town. Aaron mentions another Moor who lives nearby, who, like him, has had a child by a white woman; but, unlike Aaron's child, this child does not have black skin: “Not far, one Muliteus my countryman / His wife but yesternight was brought to bed. / His child is like to her, fair as you are” (4.2.151-53). Aaron plans to substitute Muliteus's son for his own darker-skinned son, hoping to fool Saturninus into believing that the child is his. He plans to raise his own child outside the city limits as a warrior who can “command a camp” (l. 180), implying that the child may someday return to take over Rome. Thus, Aaron's strategy is twofold: to use the white Moor child to infiltrate the imperial household while his own child is to be raised in the wilderness, beyond Roman surveillance, preparing for later invasion.⁴⁴ Aaron is captured and condemned to death before he can carry out his plan, but the episode is revealing. It shows, for example, that although Aaron seems only recently to have arrived in Rome in the train of the Gothic queen, he has already made contact with the Moorish community there. The threat of Moors in the play is not simply the evil of one villain. There is the potential for a growing network of “others,” working together in possibly subversive ways, marrying white wives, having children who may pass for white.

The blackamoor baby produced by Aaron and Tamora would, as Lynda Boose suggests, have been unsettling in that the birth demonstrated “the dominance of dark pigmentation and its subordination/suppression of white”; but at least it would have conformed to the gender thinking of the time: “that a white woman married to a black man should bear a son who replicates the father actually fulfills the deepest patriarchal fantasy of male parthenogenesis (which the Aristotelian model of conception helped support), in which women were imagined primarily as receptacles for male seed.”⁴⁵ In his dark-skinned child, Aaron erases the mark of Tamora's influence. While the birth transforms Tamora from Roman empress to “the devil's dam” (as Aaron says with a kind of glee), the child does not bear the mark of his mother's whiteness but his father's “stamp” (ll. 64, 69). Like Aaron, the child is “a devil” (4.2.65). Only when Aaron describes his son as “half me and half thy dam” (5.1.27) do we get the sense that Tamora's whiteness might be a readable marker on the child's visage. For Aaron, however, Tamora is less important than the survival of his child: “My mistress is my mistress, this myself, / The figure and the picture of my youth. / This before all the world do I prefer; / This maugre all the world will I keep safe” (4.2.106-9). Tamora's whiteness is obliterated from the child's “picture” once the physical acts of conception and childbirth are completed. It is the trace of her coexistence in the child's body that is hidden and is in itself an act of conspiracy. In this way the child is a radical presence, one that challenges the status quo of an already vulnerable Rome.

But while the black baby born to a white empress would have been unsettling enough, it is the white baby born to black Muliteus who would most seriously have unsettled cherished Elizabethan beliefs, including the notion of the white race as originary. Another example of Elizabethan fascination with white children born to black parents may help to clarify this. In his travels in Angola, Andrew Battel encountered “Dondos,” white children born of black parents:

Here are sometimes borne in this Countrey white children, which is very rare among them, for their Parents are Negroes. And when any of them are borne, they bee presented vnto the King, and are called Dondos. These are as white as any white man. These are the Kings Witches, and are brought vp in Witchcraft, and always wayte on the King. There is no man that dare meddle with these Dondos. If they goe to the Market, they may take what they list, for all men stand in awe of them.⁴⁶

Within the social structure of this Angolan village, the Dondos necessitate a reorientation of cultural rules. Their white appearance confers upon them royal status and supernatural power, regardless of the appearance of their parents. The normal rules of trade do not apply to them either—they are free to roam through the marketplace, taking what they want and offering nothing in exchange. On the one hand, the Dondo children confirm exactly what an English explorer in Africa might want to hear: that the spectacle of whiteness opens doors, fosters awe, allows entry into social worlds otherwise barred to them. But the hovering presence of the black parents in the episode complicates what might otherwise be read as an ideology of white fundamentality, opening to question that white is the original racial state. The cultural commonplace that blackness was at some point acquired appears, for example, in Jonson's rehearsal of the Phaeton myth in The Masque of Blackness:

As one of Phaëton, that fired the world,
And that before his heedless flames were hurled
About the globe, the Ethiops were as fair
As other dames, now black with black despair;
And in respect of their complexions changed,
Are eachwhere since for luckless creatures ranged.(47)

But Battel's Dondos reverse this order of events. Whiteness here appears mysteriously out of blackness, disrupting myths of social place and genealogy. Battel's report of the Dondos opens the possibility that whiteness is something that one becomes and then performs, rather than what one is. Muliteus's white baby with a black father, while it might play into feelings of white reproductive potency, both disrupts the notion of the father as the primary agent of reproduction, the mother a mere receptacle, and undermines assumptions about the white race as originary, blackness as secondary.

Most disturbing of all for Elizabethans, however, might well have been the hidden black presence within the child. The white Moor in Act 5 of Titus Andronicus reveals the growing sophistication of English views of miscegenation. Not only can black characters invade, persuade, impregnate the white female populace; they can also pass. Aaron's plan to switch the white and black Moorish babies depends on the willingness of Muliteus's unnamed fair-skinned wife. Aaron instructs Demetrius to go to the couple “and give the mother gold” (4.2.154); he assumes the parents' willingness to play along because “their child shall be advanced / And be receivèd as the Emperor's heir” (ll. 156-57). But if mothers can be bought off so easily, why didn't Aaron just buy a white baby? His insistence on obtaining a baby who looks white but is “really” Moorish suggests allegiance to his race, a commitment to establishing a foothold of power for Moors within the very heart of Rome.

We see a Rome vulnerable to outside populations, a Rome in crisis regarding its national and racial identity. This crisis escalates with the birth of Aaron's child, when the single invader becomes two invaders. Aaron also allies himself with the Goths and joins a network of Moors, evoking the possibility of a population of invaders. Titus Andronicus stages a drama of invasion and dangerous multiculturalism, set in a mythical past all too familiar to British imaginings.

The very idea of racial passing suggests that skin pigmentation per se is not at issue in racial discrimination—that skin color is only the visible badge of some inner threat. The essence of Moorishness is not blackness of skin but an inner, “foreign” wickedness that remains even though by some genetic accident the skin may be white. Insofar as hidden evil is more difficult to detect and combat than overt evil, a white Moor is even more threatening than a blackamoor.

Tudor England lived in fear of impostors. The stripping of witches to search for devil's tokens expressed a fear that some apparently respectable neighbors were merely passing. Rogue literature warned against “courtesy men,” lower-class swindlers who dressed well and put on posh accents to infiltrate the aristocracy—a clear displacement onto “rogues” of a more generalized anxiety about the fluidity of social class. Edward Hext, a Somerset justice, believed that decent society had been infiltrated by well-heeled beggars: “they have intellygens of all things intended agaynst them, for ther be of them that wilbe present at every assise, Sessions, and assembly of Iustices, and will so clothe them selves for that tyme as anye shold deame him to be an honest husbondman, So as nothinge is spoken, donne, or intended to be donne but they knowe yt.”⁴⁸ It is this kind of deep cultural anxiety to which Titus Andronicus is responding when it posits that mere external appearance might not reveal a person's race. In such a schema, race becomes not a skin tone but a moral (or immoral) quality: the secret Moorishness of Muliteus's child is analogous to the moral passing involved when villains dissemble. Tamora makes a show of graciously forgiving Titus for the sacrifice of her son, asking Saturninus “at my suit [to] look graciously on him,” while in an aside she tells Saturninus, “My lord, be ruled by me, … / Dissemble all your griefs and discontents. / … I'll find a day to massacre them all” (1.1.436, 439-40, 447). The play is deeply concerned with a kind of encryption, a hiding of true natures, whether racial, barbaric, or moral; such encryption enables Goths and Moors to infiltrate Rome and plays on fears of an infiltrated England.

Aaron has preserved his baby's life and, though he will not live to bring his boy up as a soldier and potential invader, the engendering and birth of Aaron and Tamora's baby raises the possibility that populations with non-Roman “hues” will invade and inhabit Roman geographic and cultural space. As the play ends, Aaron's son remains alive somewhere. But perhaps even more threateningly, the son of Muliteus remains alive as well. Muliteus's white-Moor son, a Moor smuggled into Rome in a white womb, survives to encode Elizabethan anxiety about foreign influence, a racial encryption that threatens society from within.

There is certainly nothing we can admire in the play's identification of black skin (or ultrawhite skin) with moral evil (“Aaron will have his soul black like his face” [3.1.204]).⁴⁹ But from a modern perspective, the play's treatment of Moor/Goth/Roman seems more sophisticated than a black/white racial binarism; its foregrounding of white as a race (or races) among others, rather than a bland acceptance of white as a standard from which other races are mere deviants seems more complex; its positing of race as fluid, with mixed-race children turning out in unpredictable hues, seems more open-ended than the rigid “racialist” views K. Anthony Appiah dates to a later era, which declared that “all the members of these races shared certain fundamental, biologically heritable, moral and intellectual characteristics with each other that they did not share with members of any other race.”⁵⁰ Much of what we find more palatable in the racial representations of the play, of course, may well have been sources of palpable anxiety to Elizabethans in the original audience. Titus Andronicus is one of the rare Shakespearean tragedies in which offspring of the protagonist survive: as the play closes, Titus's son Lucius is proclaimed emperor of Rome, and posterity is emphasized by his summoning his own little boy: “Come hither, boy, come, come, and learn of us / To melt in showers. Thy grandsire loved thee well” (5.3.159-60). But other offspring survive too.

Notes

1. See, for example, Lynda Boose, “‘The Getting of a Lawful Race’: Racial Discourse in Early Modern England and the Unrepresentable Black Woman” in Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period, Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, eds. (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 35-54; Emily C. Bartels, “Making More of the Moor: Aaron, Othello, and Renaissance Refashionings of Race,” Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990): 433-54; J. A. Bryant Jr., “Aaron and the Pattern of Shakespeare's Villains,” Renaissance Papers (1984): 29-36; Ania Loomba, Gender, race, Renaissance drama (Manchester, UK, and New York: Manchester UP, 1989), 46-48; Karen Newman, “‘And wash the Ethiop white’: Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello” in her Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1991), 71-93, esp. 149; Eldred Jones, Othello's Countrymen: The African in English Renaissance Drama (London: Oxford UP, 1965), 52-60; Anthony Gerard Barthelemy, Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State UP, 1987), 91-103; Jack D'Amico, The Moor in English Renaissance Drama (Tampa: U of South Florida P, 1991), 135-47; and Elliot H. Tokson, The Popular Image of the Black Man in English Drama, 1550-1688 (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), 135-47.

2. Dympna Callaghan, “Re-reading Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedie of Mariam, Faire Queene of Jewry” in Hendricks and Parker, eds., 163-77, esp. 165.

3. Quotations of Shakespeare in this essay follow The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1997).

4. Bartels, 444n.

5. Tamora's extremely white hue yields some interesting questions concerning what Shakespeare's performance of whiteness might have looked like, though these issues reach beyond the scope of this essay. For instance, would Shakespeare's audience be able to read the degrees of separation between Lavinia and Tamora in terms of their skin? Dympna Callaghan suggests that, at least in terms of blackness, skin color on the early modern stage was often imprecisely represented (“What's at Stake in Representing Race?” Shakespeare Studies 26 [1998]: 21-26). Coal-black makeup was made to signify the range of racial hues from African to Eskimo to Indian (196). Given this, would the same hold true for whiteness?

6. See Daniel J. Vitkus, “Turning Turk in Othello: The Conversion and Damnation of the Moor,” SQ 48 (1997): 145-76.

7. Barbara Bowen, “Aemelia Lanyer and the Invention of White Womanhood” in Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women's Alliances in Early Modern England, Susan Frye and Karen Robertson, eds. (New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), 274-303, esp. 274. Bowen's formulation that “not all women were women” pays homage to the groundbreaking text All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies, Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds. (Old Westbury, NY: The Feminist Press, 1982). Other collections to which my own argument owes many of its foundational ideas include This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. (Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1981); Feminist Theory From Margin to Center, bell hooks (Boston: South End Press, 1984); and Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds. (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991). hooks's “Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination” (in her Black Looks: Race and Representation [Boston: South End Press, 1992], 165-78) has been tremendously helpful to me in finding a vocabulary to discuss the place of whiteness as it plays in my own imaginative response, as has Richard Dyer's White (New York: Routledge, 1997).

8. Kim Hall, quoted here from Bowen, 281.

9. Thandeka, Learning to be White: Money, Race, and God in America (New York: Continuum, 1999), 8.

10. Bowen, 279.

11. Ronald Broude, “Roman and Goth in Titus Andronicus,” ShStud 6 (1970): 27-34, esp. 28.

12. William Slator, The History of Great Britain (1621), quoted here from Broude, 29.

13. Broude, 30; see also 28.

14. See Samuel Kliger, The Goths in England: A Study in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1952), 20.

15. Broude, 28.

16. See Jodi Mikalachki, The Legacy of Boadicea: Gender and Nation in Early Modern England (London and New York: Routledge, 1998).

17. See D. J. Palmer, “The Unspeakable in Pursuit of the Uneatable: Language and Action in Titus Andronicus,” Critical Quarterly 14 (1972): 320-39, esp. 328-29.

18. See Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economics of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell UP, 1995), 62-122.

19. Acts of the Privy Council of England, AD 1596-7, ed. John Roche Dasent, 32 vols. (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1902), 26:16-17.

20. In Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell UP, 1996) William C. Carroll points to the regular modification and reissuance of the Poor Laws in the 1590s as suggesting “a dominant social order continually trying, and failing, to calibrate a consistent and effective response to the problem of poverty, and particularly to the phenomenon of vagrancy” (4). Mark Thornton Burnett's Masters and Servants in English Renaissance Drama and Culture (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997) turns to apprentices' tracts and their discussions of the moral necessity of proper training as proof of the tensions of this period as coming out of rising poverty. For more historical debates about the economic crisis of the 1590s, see Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525-1700 (New York, San Francisco, and London: Academic Press, 1979); Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London and New York: Longman, 1998); and Roger Manning, Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England, 1509-1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

21. See the opening chapter of Linda Woodbridge's Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature, forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press in 2001.

22. Mary Floyd-Wilson, “Temperature, Temperance, and Racial Difference in Ben Jonson's The Masque of Blackness,” English Literary Renaissance 28 (1998): 183-209, esp. 183. Floyd-Wilson further argues that works such as Jonson's Masque of Blackness sought to establish England as a “world divided from the world” and to fashion whiteness as its dominant and temperate complexion, separate from other geographic extremes (187-88). This required the repudiation of a spectrum of shades of whiteness in order to reconfigure the world into a binary of white and black. I argue here that Titus Andronicus enters before such repudiation has been completely accomplished.

23. As Clark Hulse notes, laughter “has been an appropriate and necessary response to the play since 1600” (“Wresting the Alphabet: Oratory and Action in Titus Andronicus,” Criticism 21 [1979]: 106-18, esp. 107n). Richard T. Brucher, in a sensitive essay on the play's comic violence, argues that “Shakespeare goes after extreme effects to engage the audience in the experience of an unpredictable world” (“‘Tragedy, Laugh On’: Comic Violence in Titus Andronicus,” Renaissance Drama 10 [1979]: 71-91, esp. 86).

24. As Ronald Broude shows, “Elizabethan thought about Rome … was rich and varied, formed by admiration for Rome's many accomplishments on the one hand and a thorough knowledge of her vices on the other” (27). And in The Scythe of Saturn, Linda Woodbridge notes that “A binary image of Rome, almost Lévi-Straussian in its precise mirror inversion, haunted the European imagination for a thousand years: Rome the implacable invader, thrusting its masculine armies deep into the virgin territory of the Goths, its soldiers raping the queen of Britain's daughters; and Rome the invaded, the sacked city, ravaged by Goths” (The Scythe of Saturn: Shakespeare and Magical Thinking [Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1994], 48).

25. The Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed. (prep. J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989]), gives several examples of contemporary literary uses of the word Scythian to evoke a legendary barbarity. See, for example, Marlowe's Edward III (1596): “That it may rayse drops in a Tartar's eye, / And make the flyntheart Scythian pytiful” (2.1.72). In The Present State of Ireland (1596), Spenser refers to the Irish war cry as “lewd,” “howling,” “uncivill and Scythian-like” (633/I). In 1602, Hering writes of “Such Schythicall … torturing and massacring of Men” (Anat. 20). Scythian evolves etymologically to connote not just barbarity but sexual perversity. In late-nineteenth-century medical nomenclature male crossdressing was referred to as “the Scythian insanity” (see the OED's entry A.2 for Scythian.)

26. Coppélia Kahn, Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 47. See also Dorothy Kehler, “‘That Ravenous Tiger Tamora’: Titus Andronicus's Lusty Widow, Wife and M/other” in Titus Andronicus: Critical Essays, Philip C. Kolin, ed. (New York and London: Garland, 1995), 317-32, esp. 326-27.

27. See Grace Starry West, “Going by the Book: Classical Allusions in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus,” Studies in Philology 79 (1982): 62-77; and Robert S. Miola, “Titus Andronicus: Rome and the Family” in Kolin, ed., 195-224.

28. The association between blackness and permanence is implicit in the Elizabethan commonplace that the epitome of futility is to wash an Ethiopian white. Andrea Alciati, an Italian emblematist (1492-1550), illustrates the impossibility of washing blackness away. Accompanying his picture are the lines “Albuis Aethiopem: quid frustra? / Ah desine. Noctis illustrare nigrae nemo potest tenebras” [“You wash an Ethiopian; why the vain labor? / Desist. No one can lighten the darkness of black night”] (quoted here from Tokson, 45). English emblematist Geoffrey Whitney uses this same motif in his Choice of Emblems (1586): “Leave off with pain, the blackamoor to scour, / With washing oft, and wiping more than due / For thou shalt find, that Nature is of power, / Do what thou canst, to keep his former hue” (quoted here from Tokson, 48). Barthelemy notes that “in a theological system that believes that sinfulness is the inheritance of all and that employs the trope of ablution through Baptism, the mark of sin on blacks is uniquely severe because the sign of their sinfulness is indelible” (3).

29. Andrew Battell, “The Strange aduentures of Andrew Battel …” in Samuel Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrimage (London, 1625), 970-85, esp. 980.

30. Kim Hall has traced, in the uses made of the works of Leo Africanus and other early modern texts and contexts, the cultural construction of the oversexed Moor (28ff). See also Tokson's chapter “The Erotic Moor,” 82-105.

31. The history of Titus Andronicus, quoted here from Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. (London: Routledge and Paul; New York: Columbia UP, 1957-75), 6:39.

32. Marie-Hélène Huet, “Living Images: Monstrosity and Representation,” Representations 4 (1983): 73-87, esp. 73.

33. Loomba, 52.

34. Ruth Cowhig, “Blacks in English Renaissance drama and the role of Shakespeare's Othello” in The black presence in English literature, David Dabydeen, ed. (Manchester, UK: Manchester UP, 1985), 1-25, esp. 10.

35. Loomba, 52.

36. See Garrett A. Sullivan Jr., The Drama of Landscape: Land, Property and Social Relations on the Early Modern Stage (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999), 131.

37. See Lynda Mugglestone, ‘Talking Proper’: The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 5.

38. Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, ed. Robin Robbins, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 1:515 and 518.

39. Browne, 1:520-22.

40. Browne, 1:522.

41. See Douglas H. Parker, “Shakespeare's Use of Comic Conventions in Titus Andronicus,” University of Toronto Quarterly 56 (1987): 486-99, esp. 487.

42. William Harrison, An Historicall Description of the Iland of Britaine … in Raphael Holinshed, Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1587), ed. Henry Ellis, 6 vols. (London: J. Johnson, 1807-8), 1:10.

43. Harrison, 13 (emphasis added).

44. Eldred Jones's theory that quick-witted Aaron simply makes up the story about Muliteus's child in order to get rid of Chiron and Demetrius, who are threatening his own baby, is predicated on the assumption that this plan is an incompatible alternative rather than a complement to the plan to bring up his own child outside Rome. Jones assumes that the first plan involves an exchange of Aaron's baby for Muliteus's. Douglas Parker, too, writes that “the plan is to exchange the children—a common romance motif” (493). What the text actually says, however, is that Aaron will substitute Muliteus's baby for his own, which would leave him in possession of his own child.

45. Boose, 44-45.

46. Battell, 980.

47. Ben Jonson, The Masque of Blackness in Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale UP, 1969), 52-53.

48. Edward Hext, quoted here from R. H. Tawney and Eileen Power, eds., Tudor Economic Documents, 3 vols. (London, New York, and Toronto: Longmans, 1924), 2:345.

49. Though it has often been remarked that European racism is dependent on the traditional use of the color black to represent evil and death, whiteness and paleness, too, can have strongly unpleasant connotations; some of these are present in Titus Andronicus. Black may suggest death, but the dead body of Titus is also “pale” (5.3.152). Envy traditionally creates pale faces (see 2.1.4), as does terror: Tamora's son worries about her looking “pale and wan,” and she demands, “Have I not reason … to look pale?” pretending that her life has been threatened in the forest (2.3.90, 91). At the sheer horror of seeing his brothers' severed heads, his father's severed hand, and his “mangled” sister, Marcus is “Struck pale and bloodless” (3.1.254, 256). One has only to think of the many pale, terrified faces in Macbeth, or of the deadly pale, wintry faces that turn red with new life in The Winter's Tale, to realize that Shakespeare inherited a vocabulary of ugly whiteness as well as ugly blackness.

50. Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Race” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, eds. (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1990), 274-87, esp. 276.