and encodes Saturninus’s venality, putting the Moor’s false writing on a plane
of culpability with the emperor’s false reading. As Aaron scripts it, the un-
signed letter relies on—and encourages false—inference and induction.
Hardly transparent, its incrimination requires complicity in the constitution
of blame. The letter’s text mentions only Bassianus (not his murderers) by
name and introduces a superfluous “huntsman” who is to “dig the grave” for
Bassianus if the unnamed author(s) of the letter “miss to meet him handsomely”
( 2. 2. 268 – 70 ). Its pronouncement, “Thou know’st our meaning,” cagily invites
conspiracy ( 2. 2. 271 ). Picking up Aaron’s cues, Saturninus orders his men to
seek the huntsman out. He then chooses what for him are the more conven-
ient and pertinent targets, Quintus and Martius, literally and figuratively let-
ting the fabricated third party go. In using the prop to condemn the
Andronici, Saturninus acts on his own vengeful score, with the result that his
and Aaron’s actions and agendas therefore merge, the Moor’s voice and vision
not displaced as much as they are extended.
There is, we have to note, a significant textual problem in this scene, one
that raises questions about the transmission of the very letter that is its crux.
Aaron directs Tamora to “take [the letter] up” and give it to Saturninus, as she
does ( 2. 2. 46 ). But when Saturninus attempts to verify its validity by tracing its
course, Tamora declares, in an echo of Aaron, that Titus did “take it up”
( 2. 2. 294 ). Titus confirms the “fact” on the spot, seizing the chance to plead si-
multaneously for his sons’ “bail” ( 2. 2. 295 ); and Aaron confirms the story later,
in one of his final self-aggrandizing confessions. But if these testimonies are
true, where and why did Titus get the letter? For what strategic or dramatic end?
It may well be that the discrepancy is a textual glitch, as editors have suggested,
deriving from error or another (no longer extant) version of the play.^53 But even
if the textual mishandling of the prop is an accident, it is not, I would argue, a
coincidence. Given the grounds of “incorporation” from which Aaron and the
play operate, it makes sense that the letter, in which the Moor impersonates a
Roman, would get inexplicably diverted into Roman hands. The confusion fol-
lows almost too coherently from the play’s concerted insistence that the bound-
aries between the Moor and the Romans are penetrable—so coherently that it
seems as if the text has fallen into a plot, a logic, of its own design.
This is not the only instance where the faultline between Roman and
Moor, Aaron and the emperor, blurs. Take the gruesome exchange of prom-
ises and body parts between Aaron and the Andronici, after the unwarranted
imprisonment of Quintus and Martius. Aaron invites the Andronici to ran-
som the brothers with a severed hand, assuring Titus that “my lord the em-
“Incorporate in Rome” 85