and “foul”) for “black” and through them naturalizing the association of
blackness with badness ( 2. 2. 72 , 79 ).^59 In turn, Lavinia denounces Tamora for
“horning” with her “raven-coloured love” ( 2. 2. 67 , 83 ). If the impact of her im-
agery pales when she then calls the white queen a “raven” ( 2. 2. 149 ), the un-
precedented vehemence and vulgarity of her language stands out against the
courteous compliance that characterizes her speech at court.^60 The difference
draws attention to contingency—to the fact that these attacks are spoken, and
apparently speakable, only in the shadowy outskirts of Rome, where Tamora
is “unfurnished of her well-beseeming troop” ( 2. 2. 56 )—much in the same way
that Iago’s vituperations against Othello, as a “black ram” “tupping” Braban-
tio’s “white ewe,” are speakable only on the Venetian streets, out of the sen-
ate’s hearing (Oth. 1. 1. 88 – 89 ).^61 Bassianus and Lavinia do threaten to tell the
Emperor of the “foul desire,” but their own disruptive desire has already pre-
vented that possibility, alienating them from court. Separated from the hunt-
ing party, they themselves are out of range, their voices beyond reach—as it
turns out, permanently.
If the forest scene thus encodes such racist derogations as unspoken, if
not also unspeakable, within Rome, the bizarre fly-killing scene in Act Three
presses them to the brink of absurdity, effectively denaturalizing their logic.
In it, when Marcus kills a fly, Titus rails against the deed, first as tyrannous,
then as inhumane. To calm Titus’s frenzy, Marcus likens the “black ill-
favoured fly” “to the empress’ Moor” ( 3. 2. 67 – 68 ). Satisfied and inspired, Titus
“insult[s]” on the fly “as if it were the Moor / Come hither purposely to poi-
son [him]” and declares the corpse a “likeness of a coal-black Moor”
( 3. 2. 72 – 74 , 79 ). Marcus concludes (and who would not?) that the aggrieved
Titus has gone mad, taking now “false shadows for true substances” ( 3. 2. 81 ).
But if the plot is hard to take seriously, the imagery is not. We can only think
of Donne’s “The Flea,” which may look back to Titus, and which takes per-
verse pleasure in, and poetic power from, the excessive overloading of image
onto insect, metaphysics onto mite. In Titus, take away the uneasy superim-
position of Moor onto fly and what remains, for English audiences, is a not
unthinkable translation of “coal-black” into poisonously “ill-favoured.”
Scholars and editors commonly view the episode, which appears in the
Folio but not the earlier quarto, as an addition designed (probably by Shake-
speare) to register Titus’s wholehearted descent into madness.^62 Even so, we
cannot but notice what the scene scripts as a sign of madness: a color-coded
discrimination against the Moor. It is not just Titus’s conflation of fly and
Moor that registers falsely but also his equation of blackness and criminality.
90 chapter three