bly 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”
( 4. 2. 124 – 27 ). Even if we read these claims as Aaron’s ploy to elicit sympathy
for a baby that the brothers are set to kill, the lines nonetheless call attention
to the Gothic blood that brings that baby “to light.” Further, a Goth reports
overhearing Aaron describe his son, in one and the same breath, as a “coal-
black calf,” who lacks its “mother’s look,” andas a “tawny slave,” who is “half
me and half [its] dame” ( 5. 1. 32 , 29 , 27 ). Neither the Goth nor (if we believe
his report) the Moor registers any contradiction in declaring a baby with half-
white, half-Goth roots “black” or “coal-black” as well as “tawny.” Color obvi-
ously matters and means, but it is neither exclusive nor excluding. Aaron, in
fact, expects his son ultimately to live successfully among both Goths and Ro-
mans. According to the overhearing Goth, he anticipates that a “trusty Goth”
will “hold” the baby “dearly for [its] mother’s sake” ( 5. 1. 34 , 36 ). Although he
recognizes that his black son cannot be emperor, he intends to “bring [him]
up” “to be a warrior and command a camp” ( 4. 2. 181 – 82 ). That he does not
specify what camp, whether of Goths, Romans, Moors, or some other, sug-
gests that the limit he anticipates is not of race or culture but of class. Black-
ness distinguishes race, but in the incorporated world of conquest, it is a race
predicated not on a sacrosanct purity but rather on cross-cultural intermixing
and exchange.
Certainly, the discovery of the baby does prompt Rome’s alienation and
punishment of Aaron. Yet the “cause” is neither clearly nor simply anxiety
about miscegenation or the consequent replication of blackness that the baby,
as a racial icon, makes obvious. The play moves us beyond this kind of ab-
stracting ideology, insisting instead that the baby’s figuration and fate derive
from pressing political contingencies, involving the support or subversion of
the Roman regime.^67 For by coincidence not design, Aaron’s son poses both a
practical problem for the seated Goths who would secure that regime and a
practical solution for the ascendant Romans who would instead undo it, and
what makes the difference within his representation is not a generalized color
prejudice but particularized political aim.
As much as the baby’s color underlines the racial integrity of the emer-
gent Moorish line, what the Goths are obviously worried about is the fact that
the color betrays the empress’s adultery and so undermines her place (and
their places) in the court. Tamora has no trouble fornicating with the Moor,
but to preserve her reputation, she orders, must order, the death of the child
that bears Aaron’s telling “stamp” and “seal” ( 4. 2. 71 ). Her Gothic sons are sim-
92 chapter three