Titus fantasizes that the “coal-black Moor” would naturally come to poison
him. But to this point, not only have there been no signs of poison (though
Aaron’s ancestor, the Jew of Malta, has poisoned with a vengeance); there
have also been no signs that Titus suspects Aaron of catalyzing any crimes.
While he understands the Moor to be attendant on the Goths, to the end he
insists that “Chiron and Demetrius” “ravished” his daughter and “did her all
this wrong” ( 5. 3. 55 – 57 ).^63 What emerges thus in bold, if somewhat comic, re-
lief is a jarring disjunction between the “true substance” of the Moor that
Titus knows from experience and the “false shadow” of the Moor that he
derogates from expectation.
If we look beyond these “false shadows” to the “true substance” of what
blackness actually signifies when the Moor, the Goths, and the Romans bring
it into visibility at the play’s end, blackness encodes not villainy but race, un-
derstood as family line. With the birth of Aaron’s “first-born son and heir”
( 4. 2. 94 ), the play explicitly raises the connection between lineage and color,
in a way that it does not in the case of either the Romans (who seem to have
no color) or the Goths (who have “hue” but who identify as Goths). Aaron
has pressed the correlation between his “black” “face” and his villainous
“soul,” but with the appearance of his son, he emphasizes rather the power of
that color to carry his imprint and mark his race.^64 He celebrates the fact that
his own “seal” is “stamped” in the baby’s face, that “the black slave smiles
upon the father, / As who should say, ‘Old lad, I am thine own’ ” ( 4. 2. 129 ,
122 – 23 ). The child may be the Goths’ “brother by the surer side” (i.e., the fe-
male body), as Aaron admits ( 4. 2. 128 ). But blackness, which “scorns to bear
another hue,” gives Aaron an unusually firm claim to paternity, linking father
to son as part of an indelible race ( 4. 2. 102 ). I do not think, as some critics do,
that the effect is to draw our sympathies toward Aaron for his potentially hu-
manizing “paternal” sentiments.^65 Aaron is already “in blood / Stepp’d in so
far,” too far, for that (Macbeth 3. 4. 135 – 36 ); and his tagging of his son as a
“black slave,” a “thick-lipped slave” ( 4. 2. 122 , 177 ), and maybe (it is hearsay) a
“ ‘brat’ ” ( 5. 1. 28 ) has as much potential to convey antipathy as it does to con-
vey affection. Less ambiguous and more persuasive than the paternal is pater-
nity, which grounds the crucial racial relation.
Yet significantly, that race, though signed by blackness, is inherently het-
erogeneous. The baby, after all, embodies a fusion of black and white, Moor
and Goth, and though his blackness does not show another hue, it indeed
contains one. Black does not erase white here any more than white erases
black.^66 Aaron assures Chiron and Demetrius that the child has been “sensi-
“Incorporate in Rome” 91