130 , 128 ). Significantly, Marcus changes the terms, now and only now bring-
ing forth Aaron and his offspring as a potent visual aid. To justify the An-
dronici’s actions against “wrongs unspeakable,” Marcus produces the baby,
beseeching the still silent Romans to “behold the child,” “the issue of an irre-
ligious Moor, / Chief architect and plotter of these woes” ( 5. 3 .125, 118, 120 – 21 ).
As he prompts Rome to “hail” Lucius as “Rome’s royal emperor,” he orders
some attendant to “halethat misbelieving Moor,” these gestures linked by the
homonymic echo ( 5. 3. 140 , 142 ; emphasis added). Bringing Aaron into visibil-
ity appears thus as a way to make invisible Lucius’s politically unconscionable
murder of the legitimate head of state. The climax of this strategy, and the cli-
max of the play, becomes then the final sentence, the “direful slaughtering
death,” imposed on Aaron. Marcus and, following his lead, Lucius seem fi-
nally to have done their new historicist homework, producing the Moor as
villain at just the right moment to validate and verify their reclamation of
Rome.
This is neither a routine nor a successful scapegoating or invention of
“the Other,” however, which would instantiate and require a degree of cul-
tural bias that, I have argued, Titus’s Rome does not show. For not only does
Marcus’s turn to the Moor happen as a sort of coda, an afterthought to Lu-
cius’s indictment of the Goths, a desperate supplement to the not yet settled
or convincing restitution of state. His turn against the Moor arbitrarily intro-
duces terms of “misbelief ” that do not fit the picture we have seen or are see-
ing. With the discovery of the “black” baby, Lucius has condemned Aaron
with, it seems, every stereotype in the book, declaring him a “barbarous
Moor,” a “ravenous tiger,” an “accursed devil,” an “inhuman dog,” and an
“unhallowed slave,” all abstractions that could apply to any number of Oth-
ers, Turks, Muscovites, Jews, Indians, and such and that, in this play, in fact,
do: Lucius himself calls the Gothic Tamora a “ravenous tiger” ( 5. 3. 194 ). Alter-
natively, in invoking a religious marker, Marcus emphasizes a feature that was
associated more distinctively (though not exclusively) with the Moor, an Is-
lamic “infidel,” like the Turk—notably, while pointing to Aaron’s “child,” the
telling “issue” of blackness. We cannot here miss the fact that neither Marcus
nor Lucius condemns the Moor through the color, the clearly available evi-
dence that, we imagine, might absolutely clinch the case. Nor can we ignore
the signs that Marcus’s resort to faithlessness is both arbitrary and untenable.
The difference belief or nonbelief marks must be taken, as it were, on faith.
But in Titus’s Rome, pure faith is as hard to come by as it is hard to read. Ta-
mora has charged the Andronici with their own brand of “cruel irreligious
96 chapter three