Speaking of the Moor : From "Alcazar" to "Othello"

evades or draws eclectically on one or more potential sources, it effectively dis- locates its story in time and underscores the ...

rifice of an enemy Goth is necessary to appease the “shadows” and prevent dis- turbing “prodigies on earth” ( 1. 1. 102 – 4 ). L ...

dem” ( 1. 1. 5 – 6 ), gives precedence to inherited Roman rights, to the emperor “that held [the rule] last” and, according to T ...

at the moment, Titus imagines the transfer of prisoners as a complement to the new emperor’s “motion” to “advance” the Andronici ...

suggests, Loomba is hesitant to consider the bond inherently unproblematic. In her reading, race, gender, and class do set limit ...

court ( 1. 1. 265 – 66 ). Although the impertinence of these remarks has caused editors to mark the couplet as an aside, in the ...

The liaison between the queen of Goths and the Roman emperor, of course, proves to be hideously malignant. Yet nonetheless, the ...

public reconciliation: she urges Bassianus to “be more mild and tractable,” warns Titus to pay heed that “this day all quarrel d ...

Aaron is onstage, embedded in the newly conquered and colonized Gothic population, silent but distinctive in his color and in hi ...

turally pure self versus an easily demarcated and disenfranchised Other. And if on the one hand the incorporation of Aaron expos ...

notably flexible social position—one that defies easy colonialist codification, the relative license and limit of his power and ...

end, his plots take shape suggestively in the domains, if not under the authority, of the Roman court. Granted, when Aaron begin ...

follow the Moor to the “loathsome pit” where, he insists, a “panther” (really, the newly made corpse of Bassianus) lies ( 2. 2. ...

and encodes Saturninus’s venality, putting the Moor’s false writing on a plane of culpability with the emperor’s false reading. ...

peror / Sends thee this word” and that “the king” “will send thee hither both thy sons alive” ( 3. 1. 151 – 52 , 155 – 56 ). Wit ...

Yet as I have suggested, Aaron’s confessions are as notoriously suspect in their truth value as are those of Marlowe’s self-ster ...

those variable realities out. If he is the exceptional test case for reading Rome against the grain of an expected discriminatio ...

ing Chiron an “ass,” is sure that “the old man hath found [the brothers’] guilt,” but not his own ( 4. 2. 25 – 26 ). The image o ...

and “foul”) for “black” and through them naturalizing the association of blackness with badness ( 2. 2. 72 , 79 ).^59 In turn, L ...

Titus fantasizes that the “coal-black Moor” would naturally come to poison him. But to this point, not only have there been no s ...