Still, the anticipated torture of the Moor promises to be physically more
extreme, visually more sustained, and ideologically more potent. It is, after all,
the Romans’ second attempt to impose on Aaron “some direful slaughtering
death / As punishment for his most wicked life” ( 5. 3. 143 – 44 ). Lucius has al-
ready ordered a hanging. But when Aaron boasts of having happily executed
a series of “heinous deeds” ( 5. 1. 123 ), Lucius commands his men to “bring
down the devil, for he must not die / So sweet a death as hanging presently”
( 5. 1. 145 – 46 ). While Tamora is literally eating her poisonous sons, the Romans
hold Aaron without “sustenance” until he can testify against her ( 5. 3. 6 ). And
when her death obviates the need for his testimony, Lucius constructs a
doom that will turn the Moor’s voice and body into a dehumanizing public
spectacle—burying him alive, so that he will “rave and cry for food” while
“some” “stay to see.” Part of Lucius’s efforts to rebuild the walls of Rome and
Romanness, to “heal Rome’s harms and wipe away her woe” ( 5. 3. 148 ), this
radical sentence serves to distance Aaron from both the Romans and the
Goths, to codify him ineradicably as a “barbarous Moor,” a “ravenous tiger,”
an “accursed devil,” an “inhuman dog,” and an “unhallowed slave” ( 5. 3. 4 – 5 , 14 ).
By this point in the play, the Moor’s characterization seems to have fallen
into stereotype.^2 In front of his Roman captors, Aaron exaggerates his villainy
to a point that strains the credibility of his statements and his characteriza-
tion. He not only lays claim to a “thousand dreadful things” that he has done
but also augments his criminal record with myriad things he regrets not doing
( 5. 1. 141 ). He “curse[s] the day,” which he counts as rare, “wherein [he] did not
some notorious ill, / As kill a man or else devise his death, / Ravish a maid or
plot the way to do it, / Accuse some innocent and forswear [himself ],” and so
on and on and on ( 5. 1. 125 – 30 ). His only regret is that he “cannot do ten thou-
sand more” notorious ills ( 5. 1. 144 ) as well as “ten thousand worse” ( 5. 3. 186 ).
Aaron’s confessional set piece points obviously back to Marlowe, as scholars
have noted: to the self-incrimination of Barabas, the Jew of Malta, who mar-
kets himself similarly through a panoply of false crimes, and of his Turkish
slave, Ithamore, who applauds and mimics them.^3 Tituspoints obviously
back, that is, to a play (The Jew of Malta), a playwright, and a passage which
capitalize self-consciously on the production and performance of stereotypes.
Moreover, Titus’s coding of the Moor as a subject deserving a fate worse than
death also directly invokesAlcazar’s: hanging seems too “sweet a death” for
Aaron just as drowning seems “too good for such a damnèd wretch” as Muly
Mahamet (Alcazar 5. 1. 246 ). Increasingly, scholars and editors are tending to
ascribe at least the first act of Titusto Peele.^4 And clearly, whether under
66 chapter three