Peele’s hand or influence, Aaron’s characterization resembles Muly’s in appear-
ing unusually stylized, potentially retrograde, historically out of fashion, and
dramatically out of date, especially at the play’s end. These precedents in turn
anticipateLust’s Dominion, where Eleazar’s “perfect villainy” will result in a
state-sanctioned act of racially based discrimination.^5 Stuffed, tortured, or ap-
propriated as the prompt for the expulsion of a race, Muly Mahamet, Aaron,
and Eleazar become the durable signposts of an excessive villainy that requires
and justifies extraordinary gestures of public retaliation.
But if Titus Andronicusends with an inscription which seems to insist
that the Moor be written permanently out of mainstream culture and into a
detachable, indictable type, that is not where the play begins. Already critics
have understood that Aaron’s appearance within Rome disturbs the assump-
tion of cultural purity, clarity, and “civility” of the Roman—and by extension,
English—state. The specter of barbarism emerges immediately within the
political chaos of the opening scenes, raising the question, in Ian Smith’s
words, of “who is, really, the barbarian here?”^6 For Smith and others who have
come at the issue from the angles of language, race, and culture, the Moor
gives the lie away, signaling the pervasive presence of the “alien within,”
Rome’s “guilty secret.”^7 In such readings Aaron, the Moor in Rome, repre-
sents what Michael Neill sees as Roderigo’s take on Othello, the Moor of
Venice: “a principle of wild disorder lodged in the very heart of metropolitan
civilization.”^8 If Rome is to remain the seat of culture, to preserve the illusion
of its sanctity as a civilized state, it must cordon off all signs of internal viola-
tion and eliminate the “detritus” that is both its other and its own.^9 Conve-
niently, but not coincidentally, the Moor’s distinctive blackness supplies a
sinister touchstone—both as a thing in itself, which, if Neill and others are
right, was becoming England’s “most important criterion for defining other-
ness,” as a well as a thing that could invade Roman and Gothic bloodlines,
producing a miscegenous mess.^10 So while the Gothic Tamora has, as it were,
her day in court, Aaron the Moor provides the more visible and viable subject
for strategic derogation.
Or does he? The problem with reading Aaron as the sign that Rome (or
England) is itself a “wilderness of tigers” ( 3. 1. 54 ) is that we start therefore with
the assumption that Aaron is necessarily out of place in Rome. We start with
a Rome and an England anxious about the penetration of cultural borders and
populations, unused to the consequences of conquest, and uncomfortable
with the prospect of cultural intermixing and exchange—a Rome and an En-
gland that are, in current terms, metropolitan more than they are cosmopoli-
“Incorporate in Rome” 67