Aaron is onstage, embedded in the newly conquered and colonized Gothic
population, silent but distinctive in his color and in his prominence beside
the Gothic queen. Before he ever speaks, the “raven-coloured” Moor appears
to be a self-contained, self-incriminating sign system—a darkness that seems
undeniably visible. He himself will later articulate the negative connotations
of his blackness and acknowledge, indeed celebrate, the potential congruity of
having (he says “Aaron will have”) “his soul black like his face” and of there-
fore standing in bold-faced contrast to “fair men” who “call for grace”
( 3. 1. 205 – 6 ). He does not take that congruity for granted; he actively “wills” it
into being. But Titusclearly draws on a colored opposition that is already
loaded, already lethal, already in circulation in England. When Aaron finally
does speak, after the vexing political ruptures have come and ostensibly gone
and the Romans and Goths have agreed to a conciliatory hunt, he voices a
readable malignancy that seems neither motivated nor mitigated by the com-
plications of conquest.^47 He admits that he is hell-bent on “mount[ing] aloft
with [his] imperial mistress,” who he knows will “charm Rome’s Saturnine /
And see his shipwreck and his commonweal’s” ( 1. 1. 512 , 522 – 23 ). His illicit li-
aison with the Gothic queen provides an exposing antitype of her legitimat-
ing marriage to the Roman emperor, and the parallel draws attention to the
fact that the incorporation possible for her seems to be contrastingly impos-
sible for him.^48 Aaron is in some ways, then, the test or limit case for Rome’s
ostensible cosmopolitanism. For if the evidence of toleration and accommo-
dation begins with the ultrawhite Gothic queen, we expect it to end with the
darkly coded Moor.
Yet notably, although Aaron’s dark exterior may seem automatically to
give his malignancy away, within the dramatic fiction it does not. Conquered
with the Goths, Aaron is freed with the Goths, and, for the Romans, who ini-
tially pay no further attention to his presence, that seems to be the end of the
story. For us, however, it is the beginning of a critique that complicates the
revenge plotline—the “shipwreck” of “Rome’s Saturnine” and of Saturninus’s
Rome—that Aaron dictates and that finally is too simple to define or contain
him. For despite the “dreadful things” that Aaron will soon set in motion,
what is most striking as the play unfolds is that he is taken in by the Romans,
even as they are taken in, in another sense, by him. When his horrors do come
out, the Moor must be brought into visibility and meaning, his darkness
given a significance which it does not otherwise seem to hold. The stakes,
then, are higher, the choices harder, in the “real” world of conquest than they
are in an ideologically overdetermined world staked on good versus evil, a cul-
80 chapter three