Rome; and Loomba, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism, who argues that Aaron and Ta-
mora together are “singled out as pariahs,” 77. Related readings include Coppélia Kahn,
Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1997 ); Virginia Mason Vaughan, “The Construction of Barbarism inTitus Andronicus,” in
Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the Renaissance, ed. Joyce Green MacDonald (Madison, N.J.:
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997 ), 165 – 80 ; Gillies, 102 – 12 ; MacDonald, “Black
Race, White Ewe: Shakespeare, Race, and Women,” in A Feminist Companion to Shake-
speare, ed. Dympna Callaghan (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000 ), 188 – 207 ; and Little,
58 – 67.
8. Neill, Putting History to the Question, 271.
9. Barker, 233. See also my discussion in “Making More of the Moor,” 422 – 47.
10. Neill, Putting History to the Question, 275. A pivotal essay on the implications of
miscegenation in Titusis Boose, “ ‘The Getting of a Lawful Race.’ ”
11. Underscoring and adding another layer to the cross-cultural connection, Sebastian
associates Claribel with the famous Carthaginian “widow Dido,” whose legend pivots on
her tempestuous erotic engagement with the Roman Aeneas ( 2. 1. 98 ); William Shakespeare,
The Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel.
12. On the common association of Jupiter (“Jupiter Capitolinus”) with the Capitol,
see A. R. Hope Moncrieff, Classic Myth and Legend(New York: William Wise, 1934 ), 31.
13. Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity, argues that early modern English writers
had tried, unsuccessfully, to own that classical inheritance in order to “circumvent[ ] the
embarrassments of a northern descent,” itself implicitly “barbaric,” “dissolute, mingled,
and intemperate” ( 15 ).
14. Barker argues that in the structural anthropology of this play the only “culture” is
Rome’s ( 230 – 31 ).
15. See, for instance, Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare’s Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983 ), 42 – 75 , esp. 46 ; and Barker.
16. For a critique of the claims and politics of representative government, see Sid Ray,
“ ‘Rape, I fear was root of thy annoy’: The Politics of Consent in Titus Andronicus,”Shake-
speare Quarterly 49 , no. 1 (Spring 1998 ): 22 – 39 ; and Oliver Arnold, The Third Citizen:
Shakespeare’s Theater and the Early Modern House of Commons(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2007 ).
17. In trying to explain this apparently puzzling word choice, the editors (Greenblatt
et al.) of The Norton Shakespeare(New York: Norton, 1997 ) have interpreted the remark as
“ironic, since the Goths were defeated in battle” (see 1. 1. 85 , note 5 ). Given Titus’s almost
fatal lack of irony elsewhere, it seems more plausible to assume that this line draws further
attention to the questions surrounding that defeat.
18. How we count depends on whether or not we take Marcus’s “five” as inclusive of
the present moment.
19. On Titus’s interest in dismemberment, see Katherine A. Rowe, “Dismembering
and Forgetting in Titus Andronicus,”Shakespeare Quarterly 45 , no. 3 (Fall 1994 ): 279 – 303 ,
who argues that “the severed hands...symbolize the horror of the lost fiction of a contin-
uous history” ( 303 ).
210 notes to pages 67–71