Yet as I have suggested, Aaron’s confessions are as notoriously suspect in
their truth value as are those of Marlowe’s self-stereotyping Jew. And although
the Andronici’s naïveté cautions us against taking Aaron’s words as the em-
peror’s, the plays offers provocative signs of some collusion or cooperation, or
at least malign inattention, from the court. It is, after all, necessary as well as
possible for Aaron to penetrate the prison, activate a messenger, and secure
the heads of bodies, all under the emperor’s imperious command. We know
that Aaron’s lover, Tamora, does not enable these actions, since she responds
to his account of his “sport” with kisses of surprise, at least according to him.
We are left to wonder, then, about the emperor’s involvement. The messenger
believes the “good hand” that Titus “sent’st the emperor” and that was “in
scorn... sent back” came to and from the emperor ( 3. 1. 236 , 238 ). In Act
Four, Saturninus himself will claim responsibility for the execution of Titus’s
sons. Disturbed by the barrage of arrows that the aimless Titus levels at the
gods and at the court, the emperor protests the “monstrous villainy,” asking
(rhetorically) whether the affront must “be borne as if his traitorous
sons, / That died by law for murder of our brother, / Have by my means been
butchered wrongfully?” ( 4. 4. 50 , 52 – 54 ). His question has a pointed and perti-
nent double edge, leaving open what is wrongful, the butchering itself (have
beenbutcheredwrongfully) or only its application (have been butchered
wrongfully). He will subsequently imagine himself a “slaughterman” ( 4. 4. 57 ),
immediately after sentencing an innocuous clown to an arbitrary death by
hanging.^54 We do not know where butchery and beheading fit under Saturn-
inus’s “law”; we only know that he has authorized an execution which Aaron
can and does reuse. What the play thus insistently obscures here is the all im-
portant difference between the lawful and the wrongful, the actions of em-
peror and the plots of the Moor.
For Aaron, then, to be “incorporate” in Rome is for him to stand in-
scrutably between the legitimate and the illegitimate, between his own means
and the law, an internally colonized subject who can move seamlessly from
court to forest, forest to court. Instead of simply exposing Rome as a “wilder-
ness of tigers,” signing its repressed violence, or undermining its truths, his
ability to decipher and penetrate Roman ways unsettles the bounds of cultural
identity from all sides, rendering the cross-cultural relation ultimately indeci-
pherable but nonetheless provocatively open. If that relation is also therefore
corruptible, that cost does not cancel out the fact that we are in a world driven
by the variable realities of suum cuique, read the phrase how one will. Nor
does it cancel out the fact that it is the representation of the Moor that brings
“Incorporate in Rome” 87