- The abrupt change in speech is similar to Miranda’s in The Tempest, when she (de-
pending on how we assign the speech prefixes) suddenly castigates Caliban in 1. 2. 350. - Nor are Iago’s lines always speakable in polite scholarly society: I was once
asked not to quote them in an essay for a leading Shakespeare journal because of their
“vulgarity.” - See Bate’s introduction, 117 – 21.
- Titus calls Tamora “a queen attended by a Moor” ( 5. 2. 105 ).
- Habib reads the relation as part of Aaron’s “racial self-reclamation” ( 106 ); see esp.
106 – 10. - Compare Marion Wynne-Davies, “ ‘The Swallowing Womb’: Consumed and
Consuming Women in Titus Andronicus,” in The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist
Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Valerie Wayne (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991 ),
129 – 51. - Compare Royster, who argues that black does erase white; see also Loomba,
Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism, 90 ; and Habib, 106 – 10. - This is not to challenge Boose’s excellent piece on what the transmission of black
through white means for Renaissance society; see “ ‘The Getting of a Lawful Race’ ”; it is
to emphasize that here that “problem” collides with other concerns. - It is, of course, not unusual in this period for women to bear the brunt of accu-
sations when the alleged transgression is sexual. - The reference to the “pearl” probably invokes the proverb “a black man is a
jewel/pearl in a fair woman’s eye,” as Bate notes. Compare Othello’s representation of him-
self as someone who “threw a pearl away” (Oth. 5. 2. 343 ). - Editors question the speech prefix here. Although the quarto gives “Romane lord”
and the Folio, interestingly, “Goth” (perhaps another sign of the play’s effective blurring of
cultural boundaries), editors have tended to assign the full speech to Marcus and have thus
erased the political tension surrounding Lucius’s rise. See the note in Bate to 5. 3. 72. There
is question too about the lines that follow ( 5. 3. 87 – 94 ), which, in the quarto, are part of the
Roman lord’s speech. Bate assigns these to Marcus. Either way, crucial and evident here is
the public protest. - The Riverside assigns both articulations of this refrain to Romans. See Bate’s note
to 5. 3. 145. - See Arnold.
- The ballad appeared first in Richard Johnson’s Golden Garland of Princely Pleasure
and Delicate Delights; quotation is from the text provided in the appendix to Titus Andron-
icus, ed. Waith, 207.
chapter four
- This chapter has appeared inStudies in English Literature 46 , no. 2 (Spring 2006 ):
305 – 22.
2 .Acts of the Privy Council of Englandn.s. 26 ( 1596 – 97 ), ed. John Roche Dasent
notes to pages 90–100 213