public reconciliation: she urges Bassianus to “be more mild and tractable,”
warns Titus to pay heed that “this day all quarrel dies,” and advises the An-
dronici to kneel and seek pardon ( 1. 1. 475 , 471 ). In response, Titus initiates a
celebration, a hunt, which begins the literal and figurative “dawning” of a new
day and, to Titus’s mind, a “new comfort” ( 2. 1. 10 ). With the Andronici’s bless-
ings, Tamora declares herself “incorporatein Rome, / A Roman now adopted
happily” ( 1. 1. 467 – 68 ; emphasis added). These words have broader resonances,
beyond the situation (of intermarriage) that they here describe: “incorporate”
means “formally admitted, by legal procedure,” or more loosely, being “admit-
ted to fellowship with others,” and “united in” “one body”; “adopted” indi-
cates a legal but “voluntary taking of someone into a relationship as heir,
friend, citizen.”^46 In deploying these terms, the Gothic queen assumes—and
raises the provocative possibility—that the Romans share with her a technical
vocabulary not just for her own case of intermarriage, but for cross-cultural
integration of a more inclusive, if less determinate, nature. Though she will
turn against the Andronici, they, notably, do not turn against her, and for a
moment what we glimpse is a state defined not by exclusion but by inclusion.
Perhaps the critical problem that Titus’s opening act sets up, then, is not
that a bond between the Romans and the Goths formsbut that, because of the
devious personalities of the involved players, it fails. After all, the play’s reso-
lution will depend significantly on a crucial alliance between Romans and
Goths—one (Goth 2 ) who supplies the Romans absolutely crucial insiderin-
formation, bringing Aaron’s and Tamora’s miscegenous affair to light. And al-
though the marriage of Saturninus and Tamora becomes neither productive
nor reproductive, the latter always a bad sign in Shakespeare (witness, for in-
stance,Macbeth, where the unsuckled and unsexed maternal body breeds
bloody murder), it is not their mixed union that sets the revenge play in mo-
tion, but Titus’s inability to read and reach across cultures, to recognize the
problem of the Gothic sacrifice and the potential of the Gothic threat. In
Titus, there is no room for Romans to be Romans, Goths to be Goths, or
Moors to be Moors. For in its world of empire, these cultures not only in-
evitably clash but also, as inevitably, intersect.
***Enter Aaron. If Rome’s cultural boundaries really are negotiable, how then do
we—and they—accommodate the unsettling presence of the “barbarous,”
“accursed,” and “misbelieving” Moor? While the initial tensions play out,
“Incorporate in Rome” 79