ilarly preoccupied with the fact that while the baby lives, “our mother is for
ever shamed” ( 4. 2. 114 ). Similarly, the attendant nurse wants to “hide [the
baby] from heaven’s eye” because, she emphasizes, it evidences “our empress’
shame and stately Rome’s disgrace” ( 4. 2. 60 – 61 ). For the Gothic contingent,
blackness is not problematic in and of itself. Within the nurse’s description of
the “joyless, dismal, black and sorrowful issue,” blackness, in fact, figures as
one among several adjectives of melancholy ( 4. 2. 68 ). Nor is it problematic as
a miscegenous product of black and white. Construct a plot (the substitution
of Muly’s “fair” child for Aaron’s black one) that takes away the shameful ev-
idence of adultery, produce an offspring (itself half Moor) who can “be re-
ceived for the emperor’s heir,” and, as far as Chiron and Demetrius are
concerned, the crisis is resolved ( 4. 2. 156 , 160 ). But blackness is problematic—
because impossible—when both partners within a breeding couple are sup-
posed to be white. The nurse declares “the babe” “as loathsome as a
toad / Amongst the fair-faced breeders of our clime” ( 4. 2. 69 – 70 ), the enjamb-
ment here at once teasing us toward an abstract proposition (the baby is
loathsome) and then attaching a crucial condition (a community of fair
breeders). As Aaron allegedly has stated before, “where the bull and cow are
both milk-white, / They never do beget a coal-black calf ” ( 5. 1. 31 – 32 ). In the
confrontation over the baby, Aaron does press the question of color, defend-
ing and celebrating its representational power, asking whether “black” is “so
base a hue” and insisting, on principle, that “coal-black is better than another
hue” ( 4. 2. 73 , 101 ). But his question receives no answer, his argument no re-
sponse. What ultimately matters to the Goths is not what black, in the ab-
stract, is but what, in the particular context of “fair-faced breeders,” black does.
We might not be surprised by these reactions, since the Goths initially
appear with the Moor incorporate among them. But if their reading of the
colored offspring does not stand out as remarkably practical and provisional,
the Romans’ reading does. The revelation of the baby coincides, accidentally
but significantly, with Lucius’s return to reclaim Rome. His responses are
therefore inextricably entwined both with his need to “signif[y]” “what hate”
Rome “bear[s]” the current regime and with the desires of his new Gothic al-
lies to “be avenged on cursed Tamora” ( 5. 1. 3 , 16 ). In confronting the “issue,”
he condemns Tamora’s sexual transgression (which he registers as hers) at least
as much as he condemns the Moors’ racial penetration.^68 Specifically, when
Aaron’s story comes out, Lucius excoriates him not only as “the incarnate
devil / That robbed Andronicus of his good hand” but also as “the pearl that
pleased [the] empress’ eye” ( 5. 1. 40 – 42 ).^69 Though he clearly demonizes Aaron,
“Incorporate in Rome” 93