notably flexible social position—one that defies easy colonialist codification,
the relative license and limit of his power and agency both unclear and un-
fixed. Once in Rome, he acknowledges the Gothic queen as his “imperial mis-
tress,” presenting her advance as the necessary vehicle for his own ( 1. 1. 512 ).
But before we take his words as a sign of an ingested, ideological if not actual
subjugation, as critics have done, we have to notice that his metaphorical self-
positioning shifts, the language of conquest calling attention to the improvi-
sational nature of his speech and vision.^50 Where at one point he presents
Tamora as his current “mistress,” at another he claims to have held her “pris-
oner” in their erotic past, “fettered in amorous chains / And faster bound to
Aaron’s charming eyes / Than is Prometheus tied to Caucasus” ( 1. 1. 514 – 16 ). At
another he casts—and emphasizes that he cancast—her aside with his “servile
weeds and slavish thoughts,” replacing the decision to “wait upon” the queen
with the choice to “wanton with” her instead ( 1. 1. 517 , 520 ). Tamora herself de-
picts him as the epic Aeneas, the “wandering prince,” to her Dido, their cross-
cultural liaison pivoting seductively on an ever-changing performance of
power ( 2. 2. 22 ).
In thus assigning the Moor a history which is already, inextricably, and
inexplicably merged with that of the Goths, the play insists on the openness
not only of Gothic society but also of Aaron’s cultural place and past, and
it establishes a crucial precedent for his present and presence in Rome. De-
spite his declared dependence on Rome’s “new-made empress,” Aaron’s in-
sinuation into the Roman body politic does not stop with the Gothic
queen’s body ( 1. 1. 519 ). For indeed, instead of being bounded off as alien, he
penetrates the inner circles of Rome, to the point that it becomes difficult
to tell when his plots and power end and the Roman court’s begin. In that,
he stands notably apart from the self-authorizing stage villains whose line-
age he shares. In The Jew of Malta, Barabas sets the terms of his own decep-
tions and dictates their performance without the backing or backdrop of the
Christian court. In Othello, Iago effects his destruction from a position well
outside the Venetian senate—in the dark streets of the city and in the
colonial outpost of Cyprus, the one as hard to see as the other is hard to
reach. There is no question in the case of either the Jew or the Venetian
under whose auspices these villains operate; their initiatives are undeniably
their own. At the end of Titus, Aaron will claim, and indeed celebrate, a
similar autonomy: he will resist Rome’s attempts to silence and subdue him
by confessing exuberantly and excessively like Barabas, even laying claim to
crimes he has not actually (but would like to have) committed. Yet until the
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