mon voice,” Lucius, it seems, does. Laying down the law, he sentences the
Moor to a “direful slaughtering death,” outdoing the “never-heard-of tortur-
ing pain” that Saturninus promises to the doomed Andronici brothers.
Though we do not see the execution of the Andronici, the play emphasizes
the anticipated culmination of Aaron’s story as something to see—something,
according to Lucius, that “some muststay to see.” Yet at this moment, instead
of writing the Moor outof Roman society, Lucius effectively writes him in.
For embedded within his mandate against the Moor is an anticipation—and
significantly harsh regulation—of popular resistance. That is, attached to the
order that Aaron be set in earth and left to “stand and rave and cry for food”
is the additional provision “if anyone relives or pities him, / For the offense he
dies.” In the case of the deceased Goth queen, Lucius has no worries: though
he insists that “no funeral rite, nor man in mourning weed, / No mournful
bell shall ring her burial,” he imagines that only birds will “pity” her
( 5. 3. 195 – 96, 199). In the case of the incorporate Aaron, however, there is no
such guarantee. Hence, at the moment that the Moor becomes most visible
as a target of discrimination, the possibility that the Romans will nonetheless
embrace him comes into visibility under the law, his presence becoming
therefore not only a public fact of life but a cause for public dissent.
When the story of Titus Andronicus is retold in a ballad, “Titus Andron-
icus’ Complaint,” first printed in 1620 , the spectacular punishment of the
Moor provides the culminating image for a didactic Christian closure:
Then this revenge against their Moor was found:
Alive they set him half into the ground,
Whereas he stood until such time he starved;
And so God send all murderers may be served.^73Here there is no question about the appropriateness of the sentence, no worry
about the intervention of the public audience, no sense, finally, of contingen-
cies: the Moor’s punishment provides a timeless template for the treatment of
“all murderers.” At the end of Titus, we may want to stay and see the Moor,
who has done so many “dreadful things,” treated like an “execrable wretch,”
condemned to a “direful slaughtering death,” and bounded off once and for
all. Yet to look to that moment for unconditional dramatic, political, and cul-
tural closure is to miss a crucial point: discrimination against the Moor is
never here the end of the story but always only the beginning. Ultimately, we
cannot know how the Goths or the Romans would react to the “black” baby
98 chapter three