SOURCE: “Tragic Resolution in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus,” in CLA Journal, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 4, June, 1995, pp. 461-79.

[In the following essay, Washington argues that the figure of Aaron transcends the Renaissance representation of blacks “as stereotypical dramatic emblems of evil.”]

At the end of a tragedy the waters close over the wreck-age of the tragic figures. Those who remain pay tribute to the fallen, inviting the sense that life shall move on, the community having learned something useful from the sad events. Most critics assert that in Titus Andronicus, the new alliance between the Andronici and the Goths, with Lucius in the lead and Lucius Jr. in the wings, represents the solution to Rome's dilemmas, the renewed life after tragic events.¹ But despite Lucius' alliance and coronation at the end, it is black Aaron and his child who signal new hope for this tragic world, thereby undermining the play's representation of blacks as stereotypical dramatic emblems of evil.²

I

Aaron's role as a barbarous black infidel is rendered ambiguous by his relative merits and by subtly subversive patterns of dramatic action in the text. Thus in a tragedy of blood that presents fourteen on-stage murders, we see only one slaying carried out by Aaron, the play's so-called arch-“fiend.”³ More significantly, while Roman and Gothic characters wage acts of cruel revenge that beget more killings, Aaron's single murder of the nurse⁴ actually saves a life, that of his newborn son. In this latter scenario Aaron must also prevent the child's mother, Tamora, and half-brothers, Demetrius and Chiron, from murdering their own flesh and blood: his success in doing so saves (temporarily) his Gothic step-family from falling prey to the self-destructive family in-fighting that erodes Rome's political stability.⁵ Aaron not only preserves life, but he is also the only figure (except the black child and perhaps the midwife) to be threatened with death and not die. The Moor's ability to survive adverse situations provides some reason to suspect that his proposed execution at the end of the drama will progress no further than the attempt to hang him earlier on (V.i.47-48). In short, despite his instigations, his violent acts, and his confessions of wrongdoing, Aaron's role is aligned with patterns of family unity and survival that oppose the society's (and the play's) downward spiral toward dissolution and death.

Aaron's movement toward life is affirmed by food and devouring motifs. Rome is portrayed as a ravenous tiger, a famished “blood-drinking pit” (II.iii.224) that consumes all in its path. In this regard, we can hardly dismiss Titus' two banquet feasts, Aaron's reference to a survival diet as he flees with his son, and the Moor's final death sentence by means of starvation. Titus' first banquet is a light repast that aims to fit the Andronici for a long but ultimately victorious battle against their enemies, as Titus says: “So, so; not sit; and look you eat no more / Than will preserve just so much strength in us / As will revenge these bitter woes of ours” (III.ii.1-3). That Aaron also decides to eat sparsely during the course of his escape with his son suggests that lean feeding (in opposition to the voraciousness motif) is a metaphor for victory and survival in the play, as Aaron soliloquizes to the child: “I’ll make you feed on berries and on roots, / And feed on curds and whey, and suck the goat, / And cabin in a cave, and bring you up / To be a warrior, and command a camp” (IV.ii.178-81). The link between plain fare and salvation is strengthened insofar as Titus' second banquet involves a hideously rich dinner of human heads that signals the continuation of revenge mayhem. Although this banquet sets the stage for the drama's most gruesome carnage, Aaron is not a guest at this final, bloody feast. Rather it is his lot to be partly buried in (i.e., only half-swallowed by) the earth, thereupon to die of starvation. Yet, too coincidentally, Aaron's execution by starvation parallels the leanness motif which also describes the play's movement toward survival. Given that Aaron's demi-burial allows his persuasive tongue to flourish, and given his earlier reprieve from hanging, we wonder if the Moor, in slimmer shape, might not wriggle his way out of even this seemingly final death sentence. That is, the theme of reduced appetite as a means to salvation suggests “new life” for Aaron at the end of the play.

Aaron's impulse toward life is further corroborated by language and action which define children as prisoners. Titus calls the tomb where his dead sons lie a “cell of virtue” (I.i.93) and an “earthy prison” (I.i.99). Not surprisingly, he treats his living children like prisoners or even slaves: Titus wills his daughter, Lavinia, to Saturninus at the same time that he bequeathes to the new emperor his sword, his chariot, and his Gothic prisoners (I.i.243-52); he disowns his sons for challenging his parental authority (I.i.294); Saturninus refers to Lavinia as one of Titus' “stock” (I.i.300). Hence in a further instance of unhealthy family relationships among the Romans, we find children in the role of captives. Aaron, on the other hand, sees his child as an important family member who deserves freedom, for he comments to Demetrius and Chiron:

He is your brother, lords, sensibly fed
Of that self blood that first gave life to you;
And from that womb where you imprisoned were
He is enfranchised and come to light.

(IV.ii.122-25)

After refashioning his son's identity into that of a freedman, Aaron rebuts Tamora's directive to slay the child: “Tell the empress from me, I am of age / To keep mine own, excuse it how she can” (IV.ii.103-04). Being a mature adult and no child/prisoner, Aaron asserts that he is no captive, that he has freedom to nurture his son's life, not send it to an early grave (as is the practice in Rome). Aaron's final speech then gathers together the thematic threads that join him and the black child to the idea of salvation: “I am no baby, I, that with base prayers / I should repent the evils I have done” (V.iii.185-86). In these lines (which have little meaning outside the present context) Aaron declares to the Romans that he is no baby, no child that to them is a prisoner. It is Aaron's gritty claim of freedom and life for himself, not confinement and death. Moreover, if his statement is correct that babies are inherently capable of repentance (and since the only baby on stage is his), then should Aaron perish, the child's ability to repent could nevertheless lead to salvation. No comparable sense of survival and religious redemption, in form or content, occurs among the Romans as it does with Aaron and the black child. This seems to point to the blacks in this play as real or potential representatives of renewed life in a declining Rome.⁶

II

It is remarkable that in the midst of this Roman death chamber there is a birth, an event uncommon in Shakespeare and one much less suitable for tragedy than for comedy or romance. Aaron is the father and the only character willing to defend the infant's life in a society that slaughters its own children:⁷ “[The child] shall not live,” says Chiron, and Aaron replies, “He shall not die” (IV.ii.80-81). The normative critical response to the black child is that he is a reincarnated synthesis of two devils, Tamora and Aaron.⁸ Yet in a play where the only things “hatched” are evil plots that lead to death, this child comes to life, and it is suggested that it will thrive. While some argue that the black child merely emblematizes the magnitude of tragic evil in Rome,⁹ it should be noted that those in the play who would kill the child are villains who themselves succumb (save Lucius, who must be coerced into preserving life). That is, the callousness of the infant's would-be murderers encourages us to view the child as a positive entity, not only in the light of his survival but also in terms of his moral value.

Specifically, the black child is the only innocent character in the play, one who seeks no revenge and plots no murder: even the problem comedy pregnancies in All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure are more ominous in their bourgeois contexts of sexual decorum than is Aaron's living child in this Roman wasteland. It might also be noted that the child's retreat from a dangerous Rome through the countryside toward salvation—and Aaron's statement that his son would be great someday—is a dramatic pattern that echoes the journey of the infant Moses out of Pharoah's hands.¹⁰ This pattern also resembles the story of Romulus and Remus, whose trials led to the founding of Rome. Additionally, the child's emergence from a ruinous monastery wall suggests (with the extenuation of his life) a phoenix rising from the ashes. Each of these accounts involves a difficult sojourn through nature, the result of which is new, or improved, or extended life.

Further support for the view that the black child symbolizes salvation ensues from a few lines spoken by Aaron late in the play. After explaining to Demetrius and Chiron that they must accept a markedly new plan of action if they expect to survive the birth of the child, he whispers to his son: “Come on, you thick-lipp’d slave, I’ll bear you hence; / For it is you that puts us to our shifts” (IV.ii.176-77). A motif exists in the play which reveals that the closer the Romans come to seeing the truth about their plight, the more radical become the shifting sands of character behavior and plot. (Similarly, as action and character behavior become more extreme, the closer the Romans come to seeing the truth.) For example, Saturninus' heightened anxiety exposes his incompetence and prompts the citizenry to shift their support from him to Lucius and the alien Goths. When Titus loses his wits, Tamora and the boys respond to his extremes by disguising themselves, in truth, as the villains they are; this is turn leads to recognition by Titus and to the extremely shocking and bloody end. Lastly, the blackness of the newborn child reveals the truth of Aaron and Tamora's relationship, which impels the Moor to shift from Rome. Aaron's subsequent capture results in a full confession of all the previously hidden truths. The real tragedy of this play, however, is that despite the gradual emergence of truth, no one has the wherewithal to use the facts to halt the revenge: Tamora's mania for retribution causes her to underestimate the truth in her choice of allegorical disguises; Titus and the Romans see the truth but continue to wreak havoc. Conversely, in light of the unending chaos in Rome, Aaron's departure (the shift brought on by the advent of the child) denotes foresight and an impulse toward life as the black character abandons a noxious environment to make a new start in a land more replete in healthy family support and friends. (Lucius also leaves Rome but returns to continue the revenge.) Just as Aaron attempts to jettison the revenge cycle, to gain life by leaving Rome, it appears that the black child is capable of breaking free as well—as Demetrius' singular rejection of Lavinia's plea for mercy confirms: “What, would'st thou have me prove myself a bastard?” (II.iii.148). As the play's acknowledged bastard, the black child, unlike Demetrius, appears to possess the potential for mercy that could break the chain of endless retribution in Rome.

As noted above, critics of Titus Andronicus tend to dismiss the idea that the blacks in this play represent anything other than evil and death, due mainly to the new configuration of Andronici and Goth that heralds a new society at the end.¹¹ Yet many doubts exist as to whether this new configuration entails a substantive change from the past. My argument is that it does not. To support this assertion we may begin by noting that Lucius, the new emperor, helped to initiate the feuding in this play by sacrificing Tamora's son Alarbus; and like other Romans he never realizes the degree to which vengeance and lack of mercy contribute to Rome's sorrows. Lucius never confesses, never repents, and it is stated that he is a soldier who perhaps rapes when he pillages (IV.i.107-11). Additionally, Lucius has problems communicating (which brings into question his leadership capabilities); he is inconsistent (e.g., his desertion to the Goths); and ultimately, he continues the revenge cycle with the sentences he imposes on Tamora and Aaron. Lucius does agree to nourish the black infant—yet he could be nursing his own demise should the child develop the leadership qualities hoped for by Aaron. The Goths agree to join forces with Lucius, but this alliance results from their belief that Tamora and Aaron had defected to the Romans (V.i.16), which they had not. The revelation of this truth could render the Goths a Trojan horse rather than a loyal ally to Rome. When we look beyond the elder to the youngest Lucius, the prospects for change do not improve. Clearly, little Lucius, named for his father, signals no change; this stasis is affirmed by the boy's vow to follow his father's violent ways, even as his grandfather Titus teaches him to revenge (IV.i.106-19). Then, too, there is the boy's heartfelt and noble desire to take Titus' place in the tomb. Despite genuine grief, however, young Lucius' sacrificial impulse only accentuates the misdirected death-oriented nature of the Roman society. In short, when Rome's future leader is hinted to be a violent, vengeful, death-desiring character (who, like his father, would storm a mother's bed-chamber to redress a wrong [IV.i.112]), the prospects for change in a declining Rome seem bleak.

Beyond the questions raised concerning weaknesses in the new Roman leadership, another issue which casts suspicion on the conventional tragic renewal concerns the functionary role of women. Of Titus' twenty-eight children and grandchildren, Lavinia is his only female descendant, and she dies without issue. Marcus is without wife as is Lucius. Tamora, the only woman to give birth (in a play filled with swollen tombs that resemble swelling wombs [II.iii.239-40]), dies. From a dramatic standpoint Rome's future lacks the female element necessary for regeneration. Ironically, the only other mention of a woman in Titus Andronicus is the wife of Muly, Aaron's black countryman, who has a child (possibly a daughter) about the same age as Aaron's son. (The female nurse and midwife are more or less placental beings who would suffocate a newborn life unless they are cut away.) What this census suggests is that Rome, unchanged by new leadership, moves toward sterility and death while the promise of life and the future lie with Aaron and/or his son, and/or his countrymen. As such, we can hardly dismiss these black figures as simplistic conventional emblems of evil that are subsumed in the end by a superior Roman (or Gothic) race.

III

References to darkness and blackness in this play adhere by and large to expected negative values: coffins are draped in black, criminal acts of “black night” (V.i.64) occur in “shaded” (II.iii.16) woods, illicit love is “raven-colored” (II.iii.183), and a “black fly” (III.ii.66-67) symbolizes evil. Dark images are also used to foreshadow the entrance of the “devil” (V.i.40) Aaron, to denote the perniciousness of Aaron's words and deeds and to describe Aaron's (or his child's) Moorish being. These uncomplimentary views of blackness are expressed primarily by white characters, but even Aaron seems to speak of blackness in pejorative terms: “Let fools do good, and fair men call for grace, / Aaron will have his soul black like his face” (III.i.204-05). Despite the text's espoused loathing of blackness (and corresponding embrace of whiteness), patterns exist in the language, action, and themes of Titus Andronicus that challenge the neatness of this conventional literary dichotomy, particularly with respect to Aaron's role as a conventional racial emblem of evil.

As alluded to earlier, one hedge against this hierarchical color dichotomy is the imputation of evil to the play's white characters.¹² These imputations suggest that whites are deficient in certain capabilities, attitudes, and moral virtues which the black characters in fact possess. The play uses inversion to foreground these uncomplimentary views of whiteness. For instance, Lavinia's temperament, virtue, and beauty define her as “Rome's rich ornament” (I.i.52), yet peevish and sensual sides to her personality (II.iii.66-70; 80-84) undermine her role as the city's “spotless” (V.ii.176) princess. Equally incongruous is the ritualistic dressing of the new emperor in the “pure white robe” (I.i.183) of election, for we discover rather quickly that Rome's leaders are enmired in political fractiousness, excessive religious zeal, and homicide. Thus it is no accident that Titus not only rejects the pure white robe of office early on, but also, in the end, arrays himself in the blood-daubed whites of a demented cook—a hideous translation of the white gown of leadership that was to signify his unsullied worthiness.

Another vagary in the conventional dichotomy of black and white involves the ways in which Aaron qualifies the standard meanings of the color emblems. While Aaron occasionally employs negative epithets of darkness, he never implies that such usage denotes inherent deficiencies in racial blacks. Aaron's reference to his son as a “tawny slave” (V.i.27) is an affectionate description since he obviously sets great store by the child. Similarly, when he alludes to criminal behavior that is as “black” as his face, or when he likens his own imperviousness to guilt to that of a “black dog (as the saying is)” (V.i.122), these similes of comparison (as the parenthetical comment denotes) simply acknowledge his skin to be the same color as the hue conventionally associated with depravity and evil. Conversely, the whites (including Tamora and her boys) see racial blackness literally as a metaphor for naturalistic evil. Aaron therefore is a “foul fiend” and a portent of evil “that comes in the night in the likeness of a coal-black Moor” (III.ii.78). A semantic confrontation between these divergent figures of blackness occurs when Lucius captures Aaron and must decide how to punish him. Having already asserted that Aaron's color defines his moral character (Lucius calls Aaron “the incarnate devil” and his child the “growing image of Aaron's fiend-like face” who is “too like the sire for ever being good” [V.i.40,45,50]), Lucius says: “Bring down the devil, for he must not die … presently” (V.i.145-46). But Aaron's response (especially given the cogency of his earlier remarks concerning idolotry and hypocrisy in Roman religious practices [V.i.73-85]) clearly provides a more rational assessment of the relationship between race and deviltry: “If there be devils, would I were a devil, / To live and burn in everlasting fire, / So I might have your company in hell” (V.i.147-49). According to Aaron, if deviltry exists, it harbors no racial preferences; and since evil exists among the whites in Rome, Aaron's statement disposes of Lucius' inference that deviltry is determined by racial blackness.

When the conventional values of black and white (i.e., evil and good) in the play are qualified, undercut, or overturned, they signal themes of misperception, poor comprehension, or religious hypocrisy—problems that constitute stumbling blocks to civility and order in Rome. Hence Romam (and Gothic) assumptions about Aaron's moral turpitude (and about the sinfulness of a child who has committed no evil) allow the white characters to dismiss qualities in the Moor that could otherwise be useful to them. Aaron's critique of Roman religious mores could help Lucius to comprehend the problems that stem from his murder of Alarbus, but Lucius hears only the ravings of a pagan fiend. Aaron's commitment to family unity and political alliance contrasts with Rome's factionalism, yet both Romans and Goths would continue to murder their own—in the case of Tamora and her boys, because their own is black. Aaron's enduring sexual relationship with Tamora is seen as despicable due largely to the Moor's blackness, but this racial dodge allows Demetrius and Chiron to gloss their own beastly sexual appetites and their rape of Lavinia. Then, too, Titus' glint of perception concerning family unity, mercy, and wise leadership is dashed by Marcus' scapegoating of Aaron via the witless metaphor of a black fly (III.ii.52-72). These misperceptions do not prove that Aaron is benign or wholly innocent; rather they show how conventional white racism (or conventional literary antiblackness) in Titus Andronicus reflects the restrictive (and hence destructive) vision of this Roman society. When Marcus labels Aaron the “chief architect and plotter of these woes” (V.iii.122), we know better that Rome's problems have their deepest roots in the psyches of the Roman leaders and in the fabric of the society as Shakespeare re-presents it dramatically. Consequently we have little reason to believe that the removal of Aaron and his child from the community will bring an end to Rome's sorrows.

IV

Having suggested several ways in which Titus Andronicus allows us to see redeeming qualities in its otherwise evil black characters, the larger question becomes: Is there a significant dramatic point to be made concerning the unanticipated virtues in Aaron and his child? To answer this question, we might first note that blackness or darkness constitutes one pole of a pair of antithetical entities which vies with its opposite for ascendency in the play. In addition to black and white, other prominent polarities include Roman and Goth, high and low, speech and silence, word and deed, reason and madness, love and hate, life and death. Shakespeare uses racial differences to highlight the theme of polarized conflict, and Aaron's blackness represents the evil that opposes Rome's “pure white” valor, piety, and nobility. Regardless of the degree to which this morality struggle holds true, a further dynamic is at work between opposing dramatic forces which illuminates a more complex meaning for blackness in Titus Andronicus.

In a recent essay on blackness in selected early modern texts, Joyce MacDonald argues that the polarized racial codes in Titus Andronicus remain rigidly dichotomized throughout the play: “The racialist discourse out of which Shakespeare shaped [Aaron] posits an absolute gap between the racial selves it denominated as ‘black’ and ‘white’”¹³ I would argue, however, that while black and white racial images contend with each other throughout the play, there are times when this struggle abates to reveal a subtle, reconciling intermingling of antithetical poles—thereby bridging the “absolute gap” between black and white postulated by MacDonald. In Act IV, for example, Titus has seemingly lost both his power and his wits as he futilely endeavors to send complaint letters to the gods. As Marcus observes to his son: ‘O Publius, is not this a heavy case, / To see thy noble uncle thus distract?” (IV.iii.24-25). Realizing that Titus has reached a dangerously low point, Publius (i.e., the public? the society?) suggests a plan of action to cure Titus, one which brings dark and light images together with sensitivity and compassion:

Therefore, my lords, it highly us concerns
By day and night t’attend him carefully,
And feed his humour kindly as we may,
Till time beget some careful remedy.

(IV.iii.27-30)

Publius' remedy seems sound enough; however, as with the black fly incident, Marcus again blocks Titus' way to compassion and sanity when he proclaims Andronicus' miseries to be “past remedy” (IV.iii.31). Yet despite Marcus' dismissal of Publius' therapy, we find the “day and night” image of cure reinvoked at that critical point in the action when Titus realizes the truth about his misfortunes as he proclaims to Tamora when she appears as Revenge:

I am not mad; I know thee well enough:
Witness this wretched stump, witness these
          crimson lines;
Witness these trenches made by grief and care;
Witness the tiring day and heavy night:
Witness all sorrow that I know thee well
For our proud empress, mighty Tamora.

(V ii 21-26)

Here again the enjoinment of antithetical images of day and night, of light and dark, signal genuine progress toward sanity as Titus begins to recognize the immediate cause of his sorrows. As his perception of the truth improves (V.i.1-100), correspondingly the play's dialogue acquires several pairs of mingled opposites (e.g., right and wrong, talk and action, enemy and friend, day and night, etc.) that seem to clarion Titus' (and the play's) climactic moment of sight, truth, and remedy, as Titus observes insightfully to the disguised Tamora:

In the emperor's court
There is a queen attended by a Moor;
Well shalt thou know her by thine own proportion,
For up and down she doth resemble thee.

(V.ii.104-07)

The black and white images in Titus Andronicus are just one of several binary sets that must move from a state of destructive conflict to harmonious reconciliation (or dialectical equilibrium) if Rome is to free itself from the cycle of revenge. The “day and night” as remedy motif suggests that while antithetical opposition is a given in the play, the society's leaders must redirect this conflict toward conciliatory solutions or suffer the ongoing consequences of dissension, violence, madness, and death. Because Titus does not fully comprehend how the adumbration of polar conflict can lead to peace in Rome, he continues to seek revenge. Thus as Titus prepares to execute Demetrius and Chiron for their rape of Lavinia, he also deconstructs the salubrious blend of conflictual signifiers that seemed to offer remedy earlier:

Here stands the spring whom you have stain’d with mud,
This goodly summer with your winter mix’d:
.....Hark, villains, I will grind your bones to dust,
.....And make two pasties of your shameful heads.

(V.ii.169-70; 186; 189)

If harmonious opposites become brutally antagonistic when Titus resumes revenge, we might wonder too about Lucius' ostensibly curative alliance with the Goths. That is, despite Lucius' treaty with his former enemy, he too continues to carry out revenge with his murder of Saturninus, his sentencing of Aaron to a torturous death, and his decision to deny Tamora a civilized burial—a decision “devoid of pity” (V.i.199), not unlike the one which led him to murder, mutilate, and burn Alarbus at the start of the play.

Aaron, on the other hand, does surprisingly well at joining opposites. It is he who beats back the antagonistic white view that the infant should die because of its heterogeneous racial origins. He also intimates that blacks are more open to such mixing: that is, Aaron's (black) countryman, Muly, and his “fair” (IV.ii.155) wife have a child who (unlike Tamora and Aaron's dark child) resembles his light-complexioned mother. Clearly the Moorish culture is more accustomed to mingling varied opposites and more accepting of the diverse products of mixed extremes. The Moors are also more keenly aware of the folly that ensues from myopic presumptions concerning the worth of combined opposites, as is evidenced when Aaron is overheard to comment to his child:

Peace, tawny slave, half me and half thy dame!
Did not thy hue bewray whose brat thou art?
Had nature lent thee but thy mother's look,
Villain, thou might'st have been an emperor.

(V.i.27-30)

I would argue that no other character in the play exhibits as much concern for and insight into the nature of antithetical opposition (of any sort) as Aaron. His common-sense views on mixing and his defense of his biracial child encourage us to align his tolerance of enjoined opposites with Publius' day-and-night remedy for madness. If Publius is right in contending that a compassionate synthesis of light and dark brings forth cure, then with Aaron's compassion, the child of mixed racial origins may in fact represent a remedy for Rome rather than its endless woes.

V

As active as opposing characters, themes, and images are in Titus Andronicus, attracting and repulsing one another, their conflict is subsumed by an overriding truth that defines unabated conflict as destructive to civilized life. A civilized existence in Rome depends upon the recognition of relatedness even amidst a sea of potentially destructive difference. One way in which the play accentuates relatedness in spite of difference is through the idea of family. Mothers, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, sons, daughters, fathers, grandfathers, and stepfathers abound here; primogeniture is an emotional issue for parents and has particular import with regard to who will lead the state; marriages (and sexual relationships outside of marriage) create new family ties. Titus is called “father of my life” (I.i.253) by Saturninus; Lavinia asserts that Titus “gave … life” (II.iii.159) to Tamora when he pardoned her; Bassianus calls Titus the “father” (I.i.423) of Rome; and a peripheral messenger likens his sorrows for Titus to the sadness which he felt at the death of his own father (III.i.240). I would offer also that the competition for who will belong to whom (whether by virtue of war, desire, sexual relations, or marriage) creates a strong sense of relatedness that binds all members of the society together as a family. Even the culminating pact between the Romans and the Goths seems to echo the sudden and unlikely nuptials of Saturninus and Tamora. In addition to real and suggested familial bonds between and among the characters, the drama emphasizes commonality in its use of mirror plots: Tamora pleads for her son, and Titus pleads for his sons; Demetrius and Chiron argue over Lavinia as do Saturninus and Bassianus; both Aaron and Lucius have young sons; the clown is cut off when he petitions the court for the safe delivery of a family member; and Titus is similarly cut off from his sons by Saturninus. Along with the construed family ties, these mirror-like patterns seem to draw the characters together into a unified community that counterposes the dominance of polar conflict in the play.

Yet if it seems likely that familial and social unity provide solutions to Rome's giddy madness, then it is the Romans (or more generally the whites) who seem least equipped to see and act upon this truth. It is the whites who carry out all except one of the slayings, who demonstrate too little concern for the first-born sons of others, and who kill or seek to kill their own flesh and blood (as well as those who are different from themselves). Even when the white characters succeed in merging opposites, the harmony of the resulting union is suspect. Titus is able to mingle antithetical word-images of day and night, but he continues to seek revenge; Lucius joins with the Goths, but the alliance rests upon their mutual desire to “be aveng’d” (V.i.16); Saturninus mixes with Tamora but only for selfish and lascivious reasons, which highlight his character flaws and his weaknesses as a leader of Rome. Tamora has the ability to “gloze with all” (IV.iv.35), yet her fair words are deceitfully foul and destructive. Hence Tamora claims to have affection for Aaron, but her rejection of the black child exposes her deeper hatred of blackness and her disdain for new life. In the end, her unyielding appetite for revenge destroys her marriage to the Roman Saturninus and ultimately brings death to herself and her boys. In short, the forms of unity established by the play's white characters are unstable due to misperception, lack of foresight, immorality, racism, and the unwillingness to halt the revenge.

Despite the wrongs that Aaron has committed or engineered, the mixing he carries out constitutes the play's only substantive alliances between mighty opposites. Aaron engenders new life in a dying Rome through mixing, and then he preserves that life by orchestrating a double-mix between his biracial Gothic child and the white Roman society. While he makes little pretense of using fair words, in the end his foul words lead obversely to a fair end for his child in Rome. Most of Aaron's achievements derive from his witty ability to adapt to new and often dangerous situations with peoples and values that are antithetical to his presumedly static spheres of racial otherness: blackness, deviltry, beastliness, prurience, and treachery. With his good qualities, however, Aaron becomes, paradoxically, the character most fit to symbolize, if not actually to bring forth, the “day and night” solutions to a revenge-bound Rome; the one character sure to remain upright amidst the shifting sands of a declining empire; the character who does the most to get and preserve life in a place where death seems omnipresent.

The view that Aaron, despite his vices, is much more than a conventional black stereotype gains support from the Roman world that we find depicted in the play. Titus' Rome is not a glorious and wondrous antique city, but rather a “wilderness of tigers” (III.i.54), whose most prominent settings include the palaces of weak kings, the gloomy area around a family tomb, woods filled with more pits and plots than trees, ruined monasteries, and ruined family houses. In short, this Rome is an inverted green world that is more a wasteland of myopia, fractiousness, and death than a great civilization. If the values which made Rome great are turned upside down in this play, it is possible that Shakespeare's Aaron reflects and extends these inverted values by playing the part of a seemingly evil blackness that nevertheless harbors the seeds of hope in a dying Rome.

Notes

1. See, for example, Karen Cunningham, “‘Scars Can Witness’: Trials by Ordeal and Lavinia's Body in Titus Andronicus,” Women and Violence in Literature, ed. Katherine Anne Ackley (New York: Garland, 1990) 154; William Slights, “Sacrificial Crisis in Titus Andronicus,” University of Toronto Quarterly 49 (1979-80): 30; and Albert Tricomi, “The Mutilated Garden in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Studies 9 (1976): 103. For a counterview see Dorothea Kehler, “Titus Andronicus: From Limbo to Bliss,” Shakespeare Jahrbuch 128 (1992): 131.

2. C. L. Barber and Richard P. Wheeler refer to Aaron as “the villainous root of all evil.” (“Titus Andronicus: The Abortive Domestic Tragedy,” The Whole Journey: Shakespeare's Power of Development [Berkeley: U of California P, 1986] 131); Eugene Waith deems Aaron (and by extension, his baby) “embodiment(s) of evil, [their] blackness readily seen as emblematic” (in his introduction to the new Oxford Shakespeare edition of Titus Andronicus [Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984] 64); Alan Summers calls Aaron “the contriver and symbol of nightmare disintegration and revolting barbarism” (“Wilderness of Tigers,” Essays in Criticism 10 [1960]: 283).

3. William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. J. C. Maxwell, Arden edition, (London: Methuen, 1953) V.i.45. Subsequent references will appear in the text.

4. Aaron threatens the life of the midwife, but we never see the act carried out and never hear that it has occurred.

5. In Act I, before Aaron speaks a word, we see many examples of family and political bickering among the Romans. Saturninus and Bassianus contend for the throne and for Lavinia's hand in marriage; Titus argues with his family over Lavinia's right to marry Bassianus; Titus slays his son Mutius; Titus and Saturninus argue variously over the proper respect due to an eldest son, an emperor, and a valiant warrior of Rome.

6. The time period to which the play belongs is the 4th century, A.D., during the waning years of the Empire. The turmoil, social dysfunction, and bleak outlook represented in the drama are generally considered to be Shakespeare's view of the Roman Empire in decline. See Robert Miola, Shakespeare's Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983) 60-64, and Robert Broude, “Roman and Goth in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Studies 6 (1970): 27-30.

7. The Andronici execute Tamora's son, Alarbus; Titus kills his daughter Lavinia as well as his son Mutius; Tamora would have her own newborn baby slain.

8. In addition to Barber/Wheeler and Waith, cited above, see also Tricomi 94-97.

9. Charles Forker asserts that “[Aaron's] bastard child suggests the perpetuity of evil in the ecology of the tragedy” (“The Green Underworld of Early Shakespearean Tragedy,” Shakespeare Studies 17 [1985]: 38). Joseph E. Kramer argues similarly that “the black baby is the visual embodiment of the past evil and the living embodiment of the prime malefactors” (“Titus Andronicus: The Fly-Killing Incident,” Shakespeare Studies 5 [1969]: 16).

10. That Moses was the brother of the Old Testament figure Aaron gives further credence to this analogy.

11. In addition to Cunningham, Slights, and Tricomi, cited above, Bernard Spivak goes so far as to suggest that Aaron's role as a hybrid vice figure predisposes him to villainy that aims to destroy social harmony: “[Aaron] pours the sweet milk of concord into hell, his achievement this way being standard for the role of the Vice in any morality with political or social implications” (Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil [New York: Columbia UP, 1958] 383).

12. The convention of the “white devil” in Renaissance drama indicates that black/white color symbolism could be manipulated to alter the circumscribed values that typically attended this moralized color dichotomy.

13. Joyce MacDonald, “‘The Force of Imagination’: The Subject of Blackness in Shakespeare, Jonson, and Ravenscroft,” Renaissance Papers 1991: 74.