SOURCE: “‘Is Black So Base a Hue?’: Shakespeare's Aaron and the Politics and Poetics of Race,” in CLA Journal, Vol. XL, No. 3, March, 1997, pp. 336-66.

[In the following essay, White contends that Aaron in Titus Andronicus subverts the Elizabethan notion that equates blackness with evil.]

“Mislike me not for my complexion,” the Prince of Morocco passionately implores Portia in the Merchant of Venice.¹ In sharp contrast, Aaron, Shakespeare's first Moor, who makes his unforgettable appearance in Titus Andronicus, cares little about how others perceive him, finding in his color no reason for embarrassment of self-loathing. No apologist, he is quite comfortable with his hue, never mind that the play's other characters find in his blackness a symbol of negation. A complex and compellingly suave character who revels in inflicting pain on others, he marches to the sound of no drumbeat except his own. Aware as is Morocco of the social stigma attached to nonwhites, Aaron knows that overcoming his racial stereotype is well-nigh impossible in the color-conscious Roman society in which he finds himself. Conditioned to wedding darkness to wickedness like the Romans, Shakespeare's audience would have had no problems with equating a character of ebony shade to human depravity at its very worse. To the Elizabethans, in fact, blackness and evil were so synonymous that this notion spawned social attitudes predicated on the belief that black was always indicative of evil. As intelligent as he is shrewd, Aaron is fully cognizant of the fact that he is vilified because of his ethnicity and thus is predetermined to be Satan's ally. His color, in effect, predisposes him to ignoble deeds. This study proposes to show that “racial determinism” is very much a factor in Titus Andronicus and that it is the pernicious virus eating away at European society. Against such a scourge Aaron must continually wage his own battle, for his color is so inextricably linked to his destiny that it becomes the only barometer against which his personality and conduct are measured. In a very telling sense, the Moor's ends, as he well knows, are fated, but this awareness does not prevent him from constantly and consciously trying to subvert the established order as he perilously negotiates his space as subject and rejects his position as “other.”

The abhorrence of things black was not in any sense unique to the Renaissance. Indeed, the ideology of blackness as detestable had its literary and linguistic antecedents in the ancient world,² where black became a powerful metaphor for every conceivable type of aberration. By extension, of course, dark-skinned people were tarnished because their complexion rendered them social undesirables, devoid of humanity. Writing in Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French, Christopher Miller puts the allegorical significance of this much-maligned color succinctly into historical perspective:

Discourse in color moves between a reef and a maelstrom. Blackness would appear to be a rock of negativity: from Sanskrit and ancient Greek to modern European languages, black is associated with dirt, degradation, and impurity, as if it were the perfect representation of an idea. In texts from the Ancients on, whether the speaker's attitude is positive or negative in regard to black people, blackness remains a powerful negative element. If black people are deemed blameless, it is usually in spite of their blackness. By actively forgiving and overlooking the color of their skin, one perceives an “inner” whiteness.³

In establishing the tradition, Classical writers had given powerful poetic expression to their society's assumption that dark skin was a conspicuous badge of dishonor. To Renaissance scholars looking to the antique world for models, such stellar literary lineage was of great importance in helping them to find their own distinct voices. Instrumental, too, in influencing the Elizabethans were the teachings of the early Church fathers as well as the plays of their Medieval forebears. In carrying on the practice, these two groups continued to perpetuate the color myth, attesting to how widespread was the belief that black was akin to sin.⁴ With such precursors to guide them in the process of giving dramatic expression to a dominant social belief, Shakespeare and his contemporaries knew they had found the necessary tools to create a literature of their own—one that was essentially Renaissance in outlook. In short, they found in the works of the ancients and their more recent predecessors compatible ideas and endowed them with their own cultural traits. As expected, this merging of ancient and modern conventions aided them in fashioning their own fable of blackness as they brought their own individual visions to bear on the matter. In Titus, for example, Shakespeare expropriated the convention of disparaging blackness from its textual descendants to accommodate his own worldview. In so doing, he was able to articulate the racial attitudes of his own times by transforming and distilling the ancient themes to suit the purposes of the Elizabethan stage.

Winthrop D. Jordan points out in White Over Black that the English had long equated everything that was despicable and offensive with blackness. According to him, in their eyes “Black was an emotionally partisan color, the handmaid and symbol of baseness and evil, a sign of danger and repulsion.”⁵ Further illuminating these preconceptions, Jordan finds that whiteness and blackness stood distanced from each other at opposite poles, with the former representing fairness as opposed to the latter, which was closely allied to foulness. In this atmosphere he writes, “White and black connoted purity and filthiness, virginity and sin, virtue and baseness, beauty and ugliness, beneficence and evil, God and the devil” (7). By deliberately choosing as villain a black Moor,⁶ the figure who customarily bears the ancestral curse of Ham,⁷ Shakespeare was underscoring the precarious position of the “Other” in the England of his day. As a neophyte dramatist versed in feeling the pulse of his times, he chose to exploit a racial symbol that he knew would evoke negative responses. Surely it could not have been lost upon him that Aaron's dark skin, standing as it does in such striking visual contrast to the pale skin of the other characters, would have alerted his audience to the ominous presence of evil. Since in the Elizabethan conception, the Moor's color typified his state of grace, Aaron could not possibly have escaped all the unpleasant associations with degeneracy from the very outset. Not least among a host of unsavory traits that Moors were said to possess were grossness, brutishness, and debauched sexual natures, all highly suggestive of innate animalistic qualities. To a Renaissance play-going audience, such repulsive characteristics connected Moors to the demonic powers that inhabited the nether world. In a very real sense, then, since Aaron obviously is not made in God's image, he would be cast quite naturally in the mold of one of the damned, an ally of Satan himself, the proverbial Prince of Darkness. But if he is of the devil's party, he is quite unashamedly so, and he rides roughshod over all others in the play. No noble savage he! That he plays the barbarian in the midst to the hilt as if the Roman world were his personal stage is not all that surprising, given his understanding of his position as “Other” in a society that denies him any measure of humanity. Astute and calculating, he knows what is expected of him, how great a role his skin tone plays in defining who he is. Thus, as Gordon Ross Smith surmises, Aaron epitomizes “the well-known phenomenon of a person's becoming what he was thought by the people around him to be.”⁸

By any standard, Moors on the Elizabethan stage were looked upon as strange creatures, startlingly different in appearance, socially and culturally dissimilar, the highly peculiar and suspect Other. Usually, such characters were perceived of as being ruthless, diabolical, and dangerous. If they were like Othello, the Noble Moor of Shakespeare's later play, the chance of integrating peacefully into an alien society was, at best, still a rather difficult feat to accomplish. Thus, although Othello desperately strives for grace, the prognosis is much the same as it is for Aaron. In essence, the racial malady that afflicts European society is so deadly that looking beyond color for healing is not possible. No matter how honorable Othello is, no matter how virtuous, dignified, noble and well-meaning, ultimately, he must lose his way. Because he is black, he cannot escape the curse that his contaminating color imposes upon him in a world not his own, and he must, thus, in the eyes of Venetian society, succumb to the dark powers within as if his hue dictated that his ends would be fated. It is as if he is, from birth, like Winterbourne in Henry James' Daisy Miller, “booked to make a mistake.”⁹ For his part, Aaron fully epitomizes the prototype, the inherently evil, vile, and villainous Moor whose soul could never be washed white. All too conscious that he is viewed as satanic, he opts to employ Lucifer's prerogative—to go fourth and sin as much as he pleases. Rather than striving for decency and goodness, which would be pointless in this deterministic venue, Aaron positions himself so that he can become an active player in charting his own course. In repudiating the limitations which Roman society places upon him, he knowingly decides not to become an unhappy prisoner of skin tone in an overwhelmingly hostile white environment. By striking out against his oppressors, Aaron is able to wreak havoc, and he does so with sadistic and sardonic pleasure.

As Shakespeare presents the situation, Aaron is even further removed from the realm of grace than other Moors on the English stage, in light of the fact that in Titus no character truly resides inside this charmed circle. Indeed, this exalted sphere is home to no one in this drama in which social, political, and familial structures have broken down, leaving no stabilizing influences. Framed as it is by this rupturing of society, the grim world of the play is one in which smoldering hostilities and horrifying acts of revenge hold sway, canceling out, in the process, dignity, goodness, honor, and decency. Thus, it is not alone the fact that Aaron's color makes him the symbol of depravity in his work; indeed, as Titus himself so aptly sums up the social climate, “Rome is but a wilderness of tigers.”¹⁰ In employing the jungle metaphor, Shakespeare is accentuating the fact that beasts in the guise of men prowl the imperial city, holding it at bay. There is no question that the Romans in Titus Andronicus were living in deeply troubled and troubling times. Undeniably, the world of the play is one in which discord reigns, much of it exacerbated by Titus' refusal to accept the throne offered him. More than anything else, it is this tragic error, coupled with his sanctioning of Saturninus as emperor, that sets in motion the political and familial chaos that will rend the fabric of Roman society. But to no one's surprise, it is in Aaron's fertile mind that revenge takes form and meaning. Entering the play in the unenviable position of monstrous Other, he is, quite clearly, the dram of evil that will pollute a Rome already tottering on the brink of anarchy. In this decadent city of predators, however, where fantastic horrors are commonplace, cynical Aaron is in no sense the only one who preys on others; rather, he is just one among the many transgressors against decency and humanity. If he seems like a coiled snake ready to spring, he is not the only serpent in the fallen Roman world. In point of fact, Shakespeare shows that in the den of hissing vipers that is Rome, there is no line of demarcation separating the civilized and the unenlightened inhabitants. Whether they be Romans, Goths or Moors, the characters all display debasing and dehumanizing traits: all ghoulishly relish revenge; all suffer from the spiritual malaise that afflicts Rome; all are in need of grace. In the largest view, the most arresting image that emerges is that of frenzied cannibals devouring each other. With no truly virtuous people to maintain the rather sordid cause of humanity in this jungle-world, so eerily populated by scavengers and vultures feeding on one another, Aaron certainly is no worse than the rest. He is, after all, the primitive Moor, who is supposed to behave this way!

Jack D’Amico argues in The Moor in English Renaissance Drama that in such distressing sociopolitical settings, outsiders are always natural targets of blame. He contends, rightly, that in common with other civilizations at risk, European societies could not accept reponsibility for the moral and social dilemmas with which they were faced. As a result, they had to find scapegoats—the strangers in their midst—to shoulder the burden for whatever was amiss in their world. In this way, he writes, they were able to absolve themselves of any accountability:

The Moor as villain becomes a convenient locus for those darkly subversive forces that threaten European society from within but can be projected onto the outsider. The destructive forces of lust and violence are thus distanced by being identified with a cultural, religious, or racial source of evil perceived as the inversion of European norms.¹¹

Along with the rest of Europe, Renaissance England was exposed to the hazards of complex and changing times. In coming to terms with the religious, social, philosophical, political, and intellectual currents astir in the era, Elizabethans had to deal with the anxiety that always comes from apprehensiveness of the new. Clearly, their perceptions of reality arose from ideological and cultural preconceptions that were due to a very large extent to their desire to define themselves and interpret their position on the world's stage. With the reemergence of the classics along with colonial expansion, the voyages of discovery, the slave trade, competition with other European neighbors, and commerce with other countries, the English people were reacting to novel ideas at the same time that they were encountering hitherto unheard-of realms. Unquestionably, the nervous tensions that resulted from the uneasy meeting with non-Caucasians, those mysterious “Other” humans, were a direct consequence of their extreme uncomfortableness in “this brave new world.” This disquietude resulted from fear of the unfamiliar and having to look squarely at the issue of race. In this atmosphere where black was already taboo, no people could be more symbolic of the unknown than dark-skinned Africans, so emblematic of Western culture's long-held irrational fears. According to Jordan, this intersection of black and white was extreme enough to cause consternation by the very nature of abruptness:

The powerful impact which the Negro's color made upon Englishmen must have been owing to suddenness of contact. … England's immediate acquaintance with black-skinned peoples came with relative rapidity. While the virtual monopoly held by Venetian ships in European foreign trade prior to the sixteenth century meant that people much darker than Englishmen were not entirely unfamiliar, really black men were virtually unknown except as vaguely referred to in the hazy literature about the sub-Sahara which had filtered down from antiquity. Native West Africans probably first appeared in London in 1554. … The impact of the Negro's color was the more powerful upon Englishmen … because England's principal contact with Africans came in West Africa and the Congo where men were not merely dark but almost literally black: one of the fairest skinned nations suddenly came face to face with one of the darkest people on earth.(6)

Seeing their own white skin as the epitome of beauty, they naturally found people of black pigmentation and divergent facial features ugly (8). No effortless convergence of the twain here as the example of Aaron among the Romans illustrates so well.

By all indications, the shock of actually being in proximity to a race so dissimilar to their own spurred the Elizabethans to protective action. As a defense mechanism, they called upon their sense of nationalism and ethnic superiority to guide them to new self-definition. Not surprisingly, this state of affairs lent itself to the setting up of national barriers designed to keep nonnatives on the periphery of English society. In their quest to retain their national character and ethnic identity, they propagated the racial myths so prevalent in Titus. Noticeably, almost everyone in the play refers to Aaron's race with disdain,¹² holding him culpable for most of Rome's ills. Even before he ever says a word, he stands out conspicuously by color as a menacing figure whose sinister presence bodies ill. In her study “Making More of the Moor: Aaron, Othello and Renaissance Refashionings of Race,” Emily Bartels comments that prior to his first pronouncement, Aaron, though wordless, speaks volumes:

Tellingly, throughout the opening crisis the Moor stands beside Tamora, silent but threatening in his silence and blackness. After Saturninus' regime is securely in place, he gains a voice, and with it the capacity to contrive, control, and corrupt.¹³

As a Moorish character, Aaron is supremely qualified to epitomize the contrariness and unloveliness associated with difference both in the Classical and Elizabethan worlds, a fact that Shakespeare makes clear.

Without doubt Titus Andronicus is a chronicle of Renaissance beliefs and ideas. One of the most popular plays of its time,¹⁴ it gave dramatic and cogent expression to the concerns of the playwright's world. Although a novice, Shakespeare wisely chose to experiment with a dramatic form that had paid rich dividends for Thomas Kyd and others. However, in employing the revenge theme, he was doing more than delighting playhouse audiences. In truth, he was also using the genre to excoriate a society that held up classical virtues as ideals, while indulging in typical human vices such as envy, malice, self-interest, deception and corruption. That theatergoers could identify with the Roman world of Titus, where rape, racism, cannibalism, dismemberment, and murder took place, is not surprising, considering the fact that both the playworld and the dramatist's milieu mirrored the collective psychoses of societies in varying states of flux. As is so often the case, when such national and social dilemmas occur, violence results. In his definitive study, Violence and the Sacred, René Girard discusses how corrosive violence is, labeling it a force that gnaws away at the human psyche until it is finally unleashed. He declares that “Violence too long held in check will overflow its bounds—and woe to those who happen to be nearby.”¹⁵Titus proves the truth of this statement in that once Aaron realizes that there are familial and political hostilities brewing, he sets the mischief afoot that will usher in the cycle of violence that follows.

Violence is the Moor's instrument of empowerment. Rather than surrender to his racial legacy, Aaron defies the forces ranged against him by setting the wheels of violence in motion as a means to gain his ends. Ethical and moral constraints do not weigh heavily upon him, in great part because he feels no bond of kinship with the inhabitants of a society that forces dehumanization upon him. In the absence of the usual symbols of stability—family, beliefs, religion, traditions—he finds himself summarily cast adrift, rendered morally bankrupt by those who deride his difference. With no communal and familial ties to bind him, he is free to be a law unto himself, and in so doing, find his creative outlet through the plotting of violence. Estranged and isolated from those around him, Aaron must, of necessity, find ways to turn the tables on his oppressors. Moreover, in him, Shakespeare creates a character with no biography; in fact, any history he has is tied solely to his racial heritage. His societal dislocation thus is made even more startlingly total. So often defamed, the Moor, in accordance with his pariah status, decides to take vengeance on a race that holds him in contempt. Undoubtedly, he is avenging himself on white society for the many inequities it has visited upon him, foremost among these its refusal to grant him dignity and stature as a human being. What first seems like “motiveless malignity,” then, is, conceivably, retaliation for ancient ills and past wrongs. Such a view is supported by Gordon Ross Smith in Literature and Psychology:

The text of the play does not oblige us to accept Aaron's evil-doing as motiveless. To a medieval or Elizabethan audience the devil had commonly been represented as black, and by backward association we may suppose a black man a devil. … Along with his blackness supposedly went ill-doing, and he accepted that, too, … thereby at once conforming to what was thought of him and revenging himself from social acceptance just as surely as Shylock had been excluded.¹⁶

Simply put, this vilest of transgressors sins because he feels he is sinned against. When Shylock poses his famous questions in The Merchant of Venice, “If you prick us, do we not bleed? / If you tickle us, do we not laugh? / If you poison us, do we not die? / And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” (III.i.57-59), he speaks not only for himself as a Jew, but also for Aaron and other outsiders. In all likelihood the racial bigotry that the other characters so blatantly display spurs Aaron to vengeful action; however, the rage of centuries spilling across the ages also evidently dwells in him. For such a man, there can be no painful confrontation with sin, no self-tormenting struggle with conscience. An opportunist, he knows most assuredly that he must be vigilant in looking for chances to wreak havoc on those who have ill-used him, past and present. If such openings are presented to him, he will employ them to his advantage, without misgivings. As he bides his time holding his long-suppressed anger in check, Aaron displays no red-hot fury; rather, he remains calm, detached and controlled, icy cold almost, as he waits to put into effect his deviously conceived machinations. Fortuitously, the Andronicus family conflict provides him with a forum to give form to his heretofore fanciful imaginings. Here, offered a stage to effect revenge and in so doing forge an existence in antagonistic surroundings, his ire turns fiery and lethal. “Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand, / Blood and revenge are hammering in my head” (II.iii.38-39), he exults. With violence as a touchstone, he can now map his heady course toward chaos and confrontation. His reign of terror just beginning, he studiedly dedicates himself to plunging Rome and the Andronici further into nightmare. That he succeeds in the fullest measure can be attributed to the fact that he is always one step ahead, carefully crafting his plans for attack. By keeping his eyes and ears open, the Moor strikes when the moment is propitious for him. In essence, this is his “time to murder and create.”¹⁷

As Tamora's longtime lover, Aaron is in the position to help the new empress settle her score with Titus; indeed, he becomes the teacher to his paramour and her offspring and instructs them in the art of revenge. This is not to suggest that Aaron is Tamora's Mephistopheles, for, in point of fact, she is already well-versed in perfidy; indeed, she commits herself to vengeance as soon as the Andronici kill her oldest son. When as the new empress she promises to find a way to “massacre them [the Andronici] all” (I.i.450), we suspect that this is no idle threat. In Aaron, she finds a worthy accomplice for this goal. Possessed of the appetite for revenge, an imagination that can wax venomous, a vehement scorn for others, and an inborn boldness and daring, Aaron is eminently qualified to make Tamora's task a good deal easier. Given the plot to write his drama of blood, he sets about translating his schemes into action with stunning swiftness. Eldred Jones argues in Othello's Countrymen that the Moor truly is in his element as he pens the script for vicious reprisal. In reveling in the carnage and devastation he causes, Aaron, in Jones' opinion, is very much the creative artist who finds his muse in the revenge motif:

Aaron [is] an artist in villainy. … He is the confident artist delighting in his own sense of timing, and in his ability to manipulate his material. He takes a ghoulish pride in his work, is very conscious of his own wit, and despises those who are witless enough to be taken in by him.¹⁸

Certainly, Aaron's love of plotting and manipulating is evident throughout most of the play. But by all indications, it is not alone the working out of the performance that so enraptures him as Jones infers, but more importantly watching his pale-complexioned victims squirm. Toward this end, he plays on the other characters as if they were puppets, whose strings he relentlessly pulls at will, all the while enjoying the tumult which he sets astir. As a master schemer, he apprehends the importance of careful preparation. From laying the trap for Martius and Quintus in the forest to planning the rape of Lavinia, Aaron leaves nothing to chance. But although he directs, stages, and often acts in this blood-filled drama, he is never truly the divinity that shapes his own ends, much as he wishes to think so. Always Shakespeare reminds us that Aaron's personal script is pre-penned by a tense society that rationalizes and makes comprehensible his supposed inbred penchant for evil, a point which Emily Bartels underscores:

For while Shakespeare brings Aaron near the center of the staged court, accords him a voice of eloquence and knowledge, and allows his schemes to shape the plot, he concomitantly keeps the Moor on the outside, literally and figuratively, and both answers and promotes the darkest vision of the stereotype. Ironically, although the play creates a chaos in which distinctions between right and wrong, insider and outsider, self and other are problematically obscured, it does not challenge the racial stereotype. To the contrary, Titus Andronicus presents the stereotype as the one realistic measure of difference, the one stable and unambiguous sign of otherness. (442)

Significantly, though, much as others denigrate Aaron, the man himself is never ill at ease with his pigmentation. As he views the situation, dark is vastly superior to pale. In Act IV, Scene II, in which he upbraids Chiron and Demetrius for wishing their newborn half-brother dead, he holds white versus black up to the looking glass and triumphantly finds the latter color the stronger and more self-sufficient: “Ye white-lim’d walls! Ye alehouse painted signs!” he taunts Tamora's simpering sons. “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” (IV.ii.98-103). For him, blackness serves, moreover, as an impenetrable mask, a protective armor through which neither verbal nor physical abuse can pierce. In essence, no one can divine the mystery of this alien of dark mien; no soul is privy to his thoughts; none can view his mind's construction by simply looking at his face. Knowing that realistically there can be no erasure of difference, Aaron, in effect, validates his own existence by aggressively rejecting the prescribed negative notions of color. He does so by ridiculing whiteness, which he sees as the weak and “treacherous hue” that betrays by blushing. By way of contrast, as a Moor, he can take refuge symbolically behind his opaque color, while appearing to be the perfect servant. He can, in the words of Hamlet, “smile, and smile, and be a villain” (I.v.108), and no one is the wiser until it is too late. Seen from this perspective, blackness preserves the outward seeming while shielding the inner man. Aaron's color, in this instance, stands him in good stead, for he can use it as a means of self-concealment. Interestingly, African-American writers would later make much of the ability of blacks to hide their feelings from others in order to exist in an American society scarred by racism. As explained by Ralph Ellison,

the Negro's masking is motivated not so much by fear as by profound rejection of the image created to usurp his identity. Sometimes it is for the sheer joy of the joke; sometimes to challenge those who presume, across the psychological distance created by race matters, to know his identity. … [He] wear[s] the mask for purposes of aggression as well as for defense. … In short, the motives hidden behind the mask are as numerous as the ambiguities the mask conceals.¹⁹

In a very real sense, Ellison's characterization holds true for Shakespeare's Moor despite the great interval between the fifteenth and the twentieth centuries. To a very large extent, Aaron, so much reviled because of his race, has mastered the art of inscrutability. Through this means, he is able to screen himself effectively from the eyes of the world. With his psychological mask always in place, Aaron, Janus-faced, looks askance at those around him in jovial derision, knowing that they view him as their racial inferior. His perennial amusement thus is always at the expense of those who feel themselves better than he. Oftentimes in Titus Andronicus, he might seem to be laughing hilariously with the Romans and the Goths, but in actuality he is always snickering scornfully at them.

That Aaron also loves the feelings of superiority and power that villainy gives him must also he factored into the complex equation that is the Moor. In his quest for vengeance, such a man as this must of necessity boast of his skill and gloat over the misfortune of his unfortunate, less clever victims. And he does so with gleeful and malicious vitality. After he cuts off Titus' hands, for example, he gives malevolent expression to his delight: “O, how this villainy / Doth fat me with the very thoughts of it!” (III.i.202-03). Indeed, his ominous laughter, heard so often in the play, is that of a self-satisfied rascal who chooses to wield the only authority that his blackness gives him—the power of villainy. Aaron's crimes are of course no cause for mirth, but at times he seems much like a comic villain whose humor entraps the reader. Even while casting his menacing shadow over the play, he still manages to exude his disarming wit, neither evincing any shred of conscience nor offering any apologies for his misdeeds. Notwithstanding his evident short-comings, thus he captures and holds our attention as no other character in the play does.

Writing in Laughter, Pain and Wonder, David Richman compares Aaron to two other noteworthy villains of towering stature: Shakespeare's Richard III and Marlowe's Barabas. Labeling them “creatures of splendid melodrama,” he finds that “spectators are never allowed to forget the suffering they cause, but the audience's sense of that suffering is mitigated by a sense of their pleasure in causing it.” In short, he continues, “the audience roots for the villains, carried along by sheer glee in evil.”²⁰ Frequently in Titus, there is strong temptation to pass judgment on Aaron, because his spiritual and moral bankruptcy is so absolutely complete, but more often than not, we are forestalled by the power of his engaging and mesmerizing wit. As Richard T. Brucher finds, “It is not the love of violence that distinguishes Aaron from the Romans, but the witty conception of it.”²¹ In his introductory essay to his 1984 edition of the play, Eugene Waith comments along the same lines, pointing out that despite his depravity, Aaron still manages to emerge as an engaging character in the manner of Jonson's Volpone, a smoothly accomplished trickster, who is unfettered by scruples and unencumbered by conscience:

The ingenuity of Aaron's schemes and his sheer vitality in carrying them out give him the ambiguous appeal of a Richard III, whose cleverness can be seen as admirable even though his downfall is desired. When such characters are presented from a comic perspective, there is an even greater temptation to suspend moral judgment and join in their cruel laughter at the expense of their victims. Shakespeare offers precisely this temptation in the first scene of the fifth act, where Aaron tells of his trickery with … relish. In so doing he becomes no less villainous but, for the moment, undeniably more attractive.²²

At once fiendish and captivating, Aaron is self-assured, haughty, witty, bold, intelligent, and fearless. Not surprisingly, despite his alien status, he is not the type of villain who slithers along the fringes of Roman society afraid to look with contempt upon those who view him as an anomaly. Rather, he bestrides the play, confident and unafraid, unsusceptible to threat or intimidation. Looming largely as a figure shrouded in darkness, Aaron seems at times to be both villian and hero. Not unlike Seneca's Atreus, he dominates the action, often overshadowing Titus, the play's protagonist. He does so almost from the minute he utters his first words in Act II and never truly relinquishes this central role.

Scoundrel though he is, Aaron, unlike both Tamora and Titus, puts child welfare before all other considerations. Tellingly, he refuses to lift his hand against his son, in marked contrast to the Andronici patriarch, who slays two of his children; moreover, he never contemplates infanticide as the empress does. Unlike these two, he never disowns his own flesh and blood. Whatever his profoundly moral failings, Aaron is, ironically, the one character in the play who comes closest to displaying the solicitous qualities that one normally associates with parents. Manifesting immediate paternal tenderness, he contemptuously disobeys Tamora's decree that the baby, the fruit of their illicit love affair, be killed. Doubtless she views her newborn as a threat to her reputation and position as consort to Saturninus; certainly, his color will proclaim to the world that she had “so preposterously … err[ed].”²³ Not without irony is the fact that as the play opens, the captive queen piteously pleads with Titus to spare the life of Alarbus, her oldest son, as a distressed and loving mother. No such importunings for her youngest; instead, for him she ordains death, displaying none of the maternal instincts that she exhibits for her first-born. Rather, in this case, she selfishly seeks to protect herself, caring little that she is authorizing that most unpalatable of crimes, child-murder. In remarkable contrast, Aaron takes pride in the baby, feeling instant kinship. For this unlikeliest of doting fathers, there is an immediate and inextricable bond with his son. No longer “himself alone,” Aaron views the boy as his only link in an alien world. In short, the child is the one person whose life touches his in so special and personal a way. Not surprisingly, when the Nurse derisively refers to the infant as a “devil” (IV.ii.64), “a joyless, dismal, black, and sorrowful issue” (IV.ii.66), Aaron takes umbrage, immediately going on the offensive. “Is black so base a hue?” he asks (IV.ii.71). Once more, it is a question of racial perception. Where the white woman sees before her a creature “as loathsome as a toad / Amongst the fair-faced breeders of our clime” (IV.ii.67-68), the proud black father gazes fondly at the child, beholding “a beauteous blossom” (IV.ii.72). Loveliness and ugliness here are clearly in the eyes of the beholder.

For Aaron, his “first-born son and heir” (IV.ii.92) is a tiny being made in his sire's very own image, the triumphant embodiment of blackness. That the child means a great deal to him is evident when he informs the Nurse in no uncertain terms that Tamora's wishes are of no consequence to him at this point:

My mistress is my mistress; this my self;
The vigour and the picture of my youth:
This before all the world do I prefer;
This maugre all the world will I keep safe,
Or some of you shall smoke for it in Rome.

(IV.ii.107-11)

Without doubt, Aaron's narcissistic male ego is brought to bear on his feelings. Undeniably, he sees the infant as an extension of himself. But more than pride in his male potency or even his obvious celebration of blackness is his affirmation of his humanity, the capacity to care for someone other than himself. Aaron's concern for another person, albeit his own child, is the play's greatest surprise. This cynical man, for whom nothing prior to his son's birth is sacrosanct, in actuality, awakens to love. He might be brother to none, but he wishes desperately to be father to his son. This parental gentleness, so totally unexpected in Aaron, shows itself from the moment he first sees the baby. He will protect his child at all costs, notwithstanding Lucius'²⁴ desire to kill both erring father and blameless son. When Rome's next leader commands the soldiers to hang the infant along with his father, he is, in a very real sense, sanctioning infanticide, blinded by his inability to see beyond what he perceives to be the baby's sullying pigmentation. But Aaron will not be thwarted, intent as he is on shielding the boy from harm. Instead, once more he exerts his tremendous will, astutely negotiating with Lucius to save his son's life, uncaring of his own fate:

Lucius, save the child;
And bear it from me to the empress.
If thou do this, I’ll show thee wondrous things
That highly may advantage thee to hear:
If thou wilt not, befall what may befall,
I’ll speak no more but “Vengeance rot you all!”

(V.i.53-58)

His bargain sealed, Aaron enumerates a list of all the cruelties he supposedly has done in his lifetime, expressing the wish that he could live to do many more. Whether or not he really commits these vicious deeds can only be a matter of conjecture. With the exception of his severing of Titus' hand and his killing of the Nurse, we do not actually see him perpetrating any other crimes. Indeed, more than anything else, the tales of unspeakable horrors that he tells appear to be nothing more than the hubristic boasts of a man who refuses to let anyone triumph over him, especially so as he faces what is most surely his day of doom. He will go out no cowardly sinner, but rather as an ignoble and defiant reprobate, blithely verbalizing his questionable misdeeds:

But I have done a thousand dreadful things
As willingly as one would kill a fly,
And nothing grieves me heartily indeed
But that I cannot do ten thousand more.

(V.i.141-44)

Of more import than the confessions themselves is the fact that Aaron's account of his intrigues saves the life of the child. Perhaps his fantastic repertoire of past criminal activity is his ingenious way of getting Lucius' ear. Once more, assuming the role of the archetypal virulent and vicious Moor, Aaron trades upon the stereotype to achieve his goal, which, in this instance, is to prevent his son's death.

As is so much the pattern in whatever he does, Aaron takes control of the situation, and once more he looms larger than he should at this, his moment of reckoning. Thus, where Lucius appears as a vengeful, mean-spirited, and unforgiving leader, Aaron appropriates the more positive role of concerned father. That he shows no fear of the hell that Shakespeare's audience would have assumed most definitely awaited him is in itself noteworthy, in large measure because this stance diminishes the punishment of hanging that Lucius first decrees for him. Adroitly, he upstages Rome's new head. Effectively setting up an arresting tableau, Shakespeare situates Aaron atop the scaffold from which he is scheduled to be hanged. Spewing venom as he scornfully looks down from his elevated perch, Aaron quite literally towers above Lucius in Scene I of Act V, shrinking the other man's stature at this most crucial time. Unlike Iago, to whom he has been likened, Aaron refuses to keep his silence after his crimes come to light. If, indeed, speaking is the means whereby he will be able to prevent his offspring's death, he will utilize this method to get his way. In truth, his hectoring rhetoric serves another purpose, since it communicates the idea that gods do not exist in Aaron's world. Once more, in fact, Shakespeare is showing his villain's difference by using the conventional image of the godless Moor. Needless to say, Aaron's impious disregard for religion constitutes yet another source of alienation, but as expected, the opprobrium of the Romans matters nothing to him. He knows he is thought of as an enemy of religion, an infidel. As such he wields his godlessness as a weapon to prove his independence and self-sufficiency in contrast to Lucius, who, according to Aaron, is “an idiot [who] holds his bauble for a god” (V.i.79). If deities are not of great moment to Aaron, devils do not figure largely in his universe either. But he does concede that if perchance fiends do exist, he would not mind casting his lot with them. Evidently, he feels that these infernal beings would give him demonic voice, and thus the pleasure of orally slaying his enemies in the hereafter:

If there be devils, would I were a devil,
To live and burn in everlasting fire,
So I might have your company in hell,
But to torment you with my bitter tongue.

(V.i.147-50)

Realizing that nothing he can say can counter Aaron's blistering verbal onslaught, Lucius remains mostly quiet in Act V, Scene I. In the face of such vituperative articulation of the villain's seething hatred, Lucius appears somewhat intimidated, unable to assert himself. However, Shakespeare is, in reality, setting Aaron up for his promised fall. As the wheel comes full circle for him, it becomes apparent that his seeming domination of Lucius is nothing more than a ploy by the playwright to make his villain/hero's fall all the greater. Always he reminds us that in this conflict between the black Moor and the white Roman, the former cannot win. Conceivably, the Elizabethans would see Aaron's furious rage as the splendidly rendered death-defying cry of a doomed man moving inexorably toward his fate. Once he is made to descend the platform, Aaron's control dwindles, and by the end of the play he is a mere pawn at the mercy of Lucius. Accordingly, rather than have Lucius stand up to Aaron, Shakespeare engages him more profitably in hatching the grotesque punishment that he feels befits this basest of criminals—burial from the chest down and eventual starvation. But characteristically, Aaron refuses to make his captor's job easy; rather, he sets the stage yet again, this time for his final performance. Once more, he disdainfully attempts to wrest Lucius' power from him, deftly manipulating his terrible sentence into another display of resistance. True to form, he enacts this, his last role, exceedingly well—with the bravura and energy that we have come to expect from him, this despite the fact that he is about to be planted firmly in the earth as if he were no more than a tree. When Aaron finally is reduced to less than a beast of the field, Lucius will have inflicted a lethal blow from which he will not be able to recover. But strangely enough, although Lucius, surnamed Pius,²⁵ is clearly the victor in this most decisive round, he is neither an imposing presence nor a dominant and gracious figure. He emerges, instead, as just another vindictive character in the grisly parade of the play's retaliation-seeking avengers, bent more on devising inhuman punishments to settle old scores than on healing Rome's wounds.

Aaron, the stranger who has never been allowed to feel at home on Roman soil, is forced into an ignominious exit, his denouement, reduction to a torso and existence in a limbo world tethering precariously between death and life, little more than a leaf blown about by the wind. Ironically, he finds no resting place at his journey's end, since he will be denied not only a normal death but also the return to dust to which all human beings tend. But Aaron, his insolence intact, refuses to go either silently or gently to his doom. Instead, displaying the towering rage that now fuels his every utterance, he takes his unrepentant farewell, still impudent, still unbowed:

Ah, why should wrath be mute, and fury dumb?
I am no baby, I, that with base prayers
I should repent the evils I have done;
Ten thousand worse than ever yet I did
Would I perform, if I might have my will.
If one good deed in all my life I did,
I do repent it from my very soul.

(V.iii.184-190)

Irreligious Aaron, having dropped his smiling mask, snarls his way to his end neither believing that, nor caring if, he has a soul. What he most wants to do is retain his selfhood. As such, he will remain doggedly a man, spitting in the face of a society that has tried to emasculate him psychologically and socially. Still isolated in this his final inglorious moment upon the stage, Aaron attempts to prove one last time that his skin color may set him apart, but his spirit cannot be broken. Hence, no remorse, no apology, no regrets—a rebel with a cause to the end.

Shakespeare evidently was very much interested in presenting Aaron as a character endowed with humanity, despite the racial categorizations that the play trades upon. Understanding that Aaron is not without human worth, Eldred Jones makes the point that in having his villain/hero respond so positively to his son, Shakespeare invests his hero with human qualities:

Aaron emerges as a human being after all. His character … as a monster would have been all of a piece had he decided to regard the child … as an embarrassment. But Shakespeare veers away from this easier creation of a bogeyman, and makes Aaron, in spite of his villainy, into a human being. (59)

However, this very quality with which his creator invests Aaron, some critics take away. In fact, no less than for the Elizabethans, for most of the play's commentators Aaron is evil incarnate, a consummate and despicable villain devoid of any redeeming qualities. Put bluntly, for them Aaron is paradoxically less than, yet more than, a man; he is at once a black beast and a veritable demon. Representative of this viewpoint is James Calderwood, who finds no shred of humanity in Aaron; indeed, he goes so far as to make the Dracula connection in his book Shakespeare and the Denial of Death. In it he wonders “if there are enough crosses and sharpened stakes in Transylvania to harry this monster to his grave.”²⁶ From his purview, Aaron deserves far worse than he gets. To him, the Moor is an animal in human guise, an absolutely hideous monster who is far too malevolent to die, leaving behind as he does his accursed heir. Indeed, he sees Aaron's offspring as the living representation of his father's evil. As if inheriting paternal sins were not heavy enough a load to be placed on his tiny shoulders, the boy, according to Calderwood, is also the embodiment of a damned racial heritage:

[T]he villain is symbolically immortal. … More than that, however, the very viciousness of his punishment implies the kind of despairing overkill that comes from an attempt to destroy something more or less, or at any rate other than human, something that does not die like us. And to be sure whatever it is that pulses in Aaron pulses so strongly that his end is by no means certain. (199)

That the child is guilty of no sin other than being born black enters not at all into this critic's consciousness. Like the play's characters and its Elizabethan audience, Calderwood grounds his vision in the thinking of Shakespeare's era, and as a result arbitrarily links Aaron's offspring to his hereditary curse. In so doing, he brands the baby a thing of evil, the devil's spawn, whose presence will cast its blighting shadow over newly sanctified Rome. His color a mark of alienation, the boy will have no choice but to take his father's place as the intruding serpent in the soon to be restored Roman Garden of Eden. Curiously, former sworn enemies, Romans and Goths unite at the play's conclusion to bring an end to the civil war, but the little Moor remains on the outside, Rome's doors shut against his dark face. In a very telling sense, Aaron's son may well have been better off dead, for he will have to bear the yoke of lineage from the cradle to the grave. Without doubt, the sins of his father most certainly will be visited upon him. No matter what his leanings, the decks will be stacked heavily against him in much the same way as they had been against Aaron. Fated to be a lost soul and destined to be forever lodged outside the realm of grace, the infant will find no safe haven in the new Rome where Goths and Romans, the strangest of bedfellows, are now dubious allies.

Whatever designation is applied to Aaron, the fact remains that he has few options available to him as a Moor. Interestingly, Eldred Jones asserts that if nothing else, Aaron certainly had free will and therefore could have embraced good instead of evil had he so desired:

[Aaron's]… choice of evil is deliberate. There is implied in his behaviour a conscious turning away from grace, which is presumed to be open to him. … There is thus, even in the presentation of a stereotype, an element of personal responsibility and deliberate choice. (54)

As a realist he knows full well that no matter what he does, his color renders him an outcast, unworthy of divine guidance; thus, he will follow his predestined course, the path to evil. That he apprehends this concept is glaringly apparent after he lops off Titus' hand. Joyfully applauding himself, he gives jubilant expression to his belief that since he is damned by hue anyhow, he might as well enjoy himself. “Let fools do good, and fair men call for grace, / Aaron will have his soul black like his face” (III.i.204-05), he chuckles. If in fact he deliberately makes of evil a virtue as Jones argues, this puts him in the company of Satan, no great surprise here! Whatever his connection to Lucifer, however, Aaron is clever enough to have figured out that wickedness can empower him as goodness and decency never can. Eliot Tokson reasons that “if [Elizabethans accepted the idea that] blackness is the color indigenous to hell, it was not likely that the black man could escape the consequences of inevitable association. … [H]e was made to play the role of hell's agent.”²⁷ For his part, Aaron peforms the part remarkably well, never once deluding himself into believing that striving for redemption or divine sanction would render him attractive and thus acceptable to those who view him as malevolent and abominable. Doubtless he feels that to have done otherwise would have been to give in to the tenets of a world governed by racial prejudice.

In his fascinating essay “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity,” Ralph Ellison observes that even in twentieth-century fiction, an African-American character is not allowed to be a well-rounded human being:

Too often what is presented as the American Negro emerges an oversimplified clown, a beast, or an angel. Seldom is he drawn as that sensitively focused process of opposites, of good and evil, of instinct and intellect, of passion and spirituality, which great literary art has projected as the image of man. (43)

So it had been for Shakespeare's Moors; so it was for Aaron; so it will be for his son. In a very real sense, aside from the literary aspect of character portrayal, Ellison's comments underscore an unsettling truth: the fact that the passage of time has not wrought great changes in society's conceptions of the color black and those endowed with this hue. Indeed, the associations of black as emblematic of evil in eras past have survived to the fullest measure in our own distressing times. Seemingly, ancient fictions die hard. But Aaron rejects sitting idly by, miserably fettered by his so-called inherited sins. Rather, when the opportunity arises to rid himself of the shackles that restrain him because of his ethnicity, he boldly confronts his situation within Roman society, refusing to bear humbly the yoke of race. Instead, he strikes back at a world that reviles him because of his color. If his refusal to accept the reality of powers beyond his own depends upon trickery to alter events, this is probably due to the fact that this is the only avenue open to him. Very much his own justice system, Aaron is a lone adversary attempting to reshape the power wielded by the Romans and the Goths. That he succeeds only in propagating his ethnic stereotype in the eyes of the other characters attests to how much Shakespeare understood his audience's conception of the Moor as a racially inferior Other. As Joyce Green MacDonald points out,

Shakespeare fully voices the fundamental Otherness of his Moorish villain. … The play understands his blackness as the sign of absolute resistance to incorporation in any system of social or moral order originating outside himself.²⁸

In this early play, at least, good and evil could not coalesce in a character with black skin. Aaron, however, makes his presence felt and gives triumphant expression to his own personal conviction that black is not, in fact, the base hue that his detractors assume it to be. Shakespeare evidently concurs when he shows that his villain/hero is not a mere one-dimensional errant knave, but a splendidly witty and defective character who manages to assert the human worth everyone denies him. Although his son, the traditional “seed of time,” will not grow in grace on Roman soil, Aaron's offspring will reappear in Venice, full-grown, bearing the name Othello. In this case, good and evil will be able to coexist in a person of dark complexion. The Moor, though still condemned to bear the crushing weight of race, will emerge as a tragic hero, experiencing in some measure many of the rights and privileges that such stalwart protagonists enjoy. Sinning and suffering, laughing and despairing, winning and losing, loving and hating will serve, by turn, to showcase this Moor's human qualities as they never could for the less civilized Aaron. Oftentimes, Othello is a flawed hero, not unlike a Hamlet, a Lear, a Macbeth, but he is still unable to traverse the ethnic divide successfully. Always like Aaron, he is a fated character whose pigmentation matters greatly. In short, his identity is shaped by his blackness in much the same sense as Aaron's. As Othello's literary ancestor, Aaron, Shakespeare's trailblazing Moor, leaps boldly into the consciousness of the Elizabethans, daring to assert that black is a hue like any other, no more base than white.

Notes

1. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. Louis B. Wright and Virginia A. Lamar, The Folger Library General Reader's Shakespeare (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957) II.i.1. Further references to this text will be cited parenthetically.

2. In his fascinating study Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne, Anthony Barthelemy traces the literary usage back to the antique world. He quotes the following line (in translation) from Horace's Satires, Epistles, Ars Poetic to make his point: “This is a black, Roman; beware this” (2). He cites, too, a poem from the sixth century A.D. from the Codex Salmasianus that offers powerful evidence of the scorn with which the ancients looked upon blackness. As quoted in translation from Barthelemy's text, the verse reads:

   The son of Dawn, foster son of rising Phoebus,
   Produced black thousands of his race.
   Running to aid the Trojans with inauspicious omen,
   He produceeded at once to die by the sword of the descendant of Pelius.
   Already then it is shown how Troy awaits her fall,
   When Priam accepts black help. (2)

3. Christopher Miller, Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985) 29.

4. Barthelemy discusses, too, the fact that the early Christians continued the tradition of linking sin with blackness and whiteness with purity (2-3).

5. Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black (New York: Norton, 1968) 7. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

6. Although the term “Moor” could mean anyone other than white in the Renaissance, Aaron is described by everyone in the play as a character with distinctive Negroid features. Thus, I take Moor to mean black here, since all the descriptions of Aaron point to someone with very dark skin.

7. Ham was the son of Noah who, according to Genesis 9 and 10, saw his father lying naked in a drunken stupor, and unlike his brothers did not cover him or look away. Upon awakening, Noah reportedly cursed Ham, informing him that his destiny would be to serve his brothers forever. Winthrop Jordan finds that tracing the origin of the notion that Africans were the descendents of Ham is a somewhat difficult task. However, he theorizes that some Jewish “Talmudic and Midrashic” writings may have been the source, since these suggested that God darkened Ham's descendents, rendering them ugly. He finds rather curious the fact that such luminaries as Sts. Jerome and Augustine “casually accepted the assumption that Africans were descended from one of several of Ham's four sons, an assumption which became universal despite the obscurity of its origin” (18). In analyzing the Biblical story, Jordan discovers no reference to skin color in Noah's curse. More logically, he argues, the phrase implies that Noah's erring son and his descendents would be slaves (18).

8. Gordon Ross Smith, “The Credibility of Shakespeare's Aaron,” Literature and Psychology 10 (Winter 1960): 12.

9. Henry James, “Daisy Miller,” Great Short Stories (New York: Harper, 1966) 54.

10. William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. J. C. Maxwell, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1987) III.i.54. All future quotations will come from this edition.

11. Jack D’Amico, The Moor in English Renaissance Drama (Tampa: U of South Florida P, 1991) 2.

12. With the exception of Tamora, who always calls Aaron her “lovely Moor” or her “lovely Aaron,” all the other major players refer to Aaron's color with disdain. In Act II, Scene III, Bassianus calls him a “swart Cimmerian” (72) who is “spotted, detested, and abominable” (74). A few lines later, Lavinia berates Tamora by calling Aaron the empress' “raven-colored love” (83). For Marcus, Aaron is so like a “black ill-favour’d fly” that he kills the insect. When Titus, too, strikes at the creature, he comments that the fly “comes in likeness of a coal-black Moor” (III.ii.66, 78). Demetrius labels his mother's lover a “hellish dog,” a “foul fiend,” after learning that Tamora has given birth to Aaron's child. Not to be outdone, Lucius, in Act V, characterizes Aaron as an “incarnate devil,” with “a fiend-like face” (i. 40, 45), “a barbarous beastly villain” (i.96) “a ravenous tiger,” an “accursed devil,” an “inhuman dog” (ii.4, 5, 14).

13. Emily Bartels, “Making More of the Moor: Aaron, Othello and Renaissance Refashionings of Race,” Shakespeare Quarterly 41:4 (Winter 1990): 444. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

14. Along with The Spanish Tragedy, Thomas Kyd's blood-drenched revenge drams, Titus Andronicus shared the distinction of being one of the sixteenth century's most popular plays.

15. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991) 30.

16. Gordon Ross Smith, “The Credibility of Shakespeare's Aaron,” Literature and Psychology 10 (Winter 1960): 12.

17. Quoted from T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” line 28, The Norton Introduction to Poetry, ed. M. H. Abrams, 3rd ed. (New York: Norton, 1981).

18. Eldred Jones, Othello's Countrymen (London: Oxford UP, 1965) 55. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

19. Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: New American Library, 1966) 69-70. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

20. David Richman, Laughter, Pain, and Wonder (Newark: U of Delaware P, 1990) 64.

21. Richard T. Brucher. “Tragedy, Laugh On”: Comic Violence in Titus Andronicus,” Renaissance Drama ns 10 (1979): 82.

22. Eugene Waith's introd. to Titus Andronicus, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984) 64.

23. William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. Norman Sanders, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957) I.iii.62.

24. According to A. C. Hamilton, who quotes Holinshed in The Early Shakespeare, “Lucius was the first king of the Britains that received the faith of Jesus Christ” (84); thus Shakespeare's usage of this figure to lead Rome is not arbitrary. Coming from the Latin lucius—“born during the day”—the name “Lucius” means light, an appropriate choice for the character who ultimately restores order and rules Rome at the end of the play. That Lucius' son bears the same name suggests the continuation of the line. In addition, the figure of Lucius appears in Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book II. Characters named Lucius also appear as emissaries of light in Julius Caesar and Cymbeline.

25. Notwithstanding the fact that Lucius is destined to lead his nation back to greatness, his character is somewhat troubling to critics. He is the one who demands Alarbus' sacrifice at the beginning of the play and who describes in grim detail the dismemberment of Tamora's first-born son by the Andronici. There is no marked change in his appetite for gruesome revenge when he devises the penalties for Aaron and Tamora at the end of the play. In fact, these do not differ greatly from the types of punishments that Aaron may have concocted for his enemies.

26. James L. Calderwood, Shakespeare and the Denial of Death (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1987) 199. Hereafter cited in the text.

27. Eliot Tokson, The Popular Image of the Black Man is English Drama, 1550-1688 (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982) 43.

28. Joyce Green McDonald, “‘The Force of the Imagination’: The Subject of Blackness in Shakespeare, Jonson, and Ravenscroft,” Renaissance Papers, ed. George Walton Williams and Barbara J. Bain (Raleigh: Southeastern Renaissance Conference, 1991) 64.