tan. We start with a Moor whose barbarous behavior, though it may reflect the
inherent violence and defining chaos of Rome, is signally different, enough
that he can serve as an open dumping ground for displaced and disturbing dis-
orders. His menacing presence may expose the darker side of Rome and, by
extension, England. Still, as the outsider within, he is always part of the prob-
lem, a symptom as much as a sign of catastrophic cultural breakdown.
But suppose we begin where Alcazarends—not just with the stuffed and
stymied Muly Mahamet, but with the triumphant Muly Seth and his strategic
embrace of the defeated Christian king of Portugal. Suppose, that is, we begin
with a stage and a society where Moors stand beside Europeans, Englishmen,
and Turks, and against each other, unscripted partners in a volatile history of
conquest and consent. Shakespeare will provide glimpses of that kind of envi-
ronment not only in Othello, where Othello is set to defend the Venetians
against the Turks, but also in The Tempest( 1611 ), where the Neopolitan Clari-
bel weds the King of Tunis.^11 Although Muly Mahamet creates and fulfills un-
seemly expectations of “the Moor” in Alcazar’s space of “all the world,” his
self-defeating solipsism is challenged by the pressures of a political scene where
interaction, alliance, and exchange are key to survival. If this is one of the dra-
matic starting points of Titus’s representation of the Moor, then Aaron’s story
is complexly more than the sum of Muly’s part. And what is especially surpris-
ing, dramatically risky, and crucial in Titusis not that an attempt to codify and
discriminate against the Moor happens, along with the expected tragic recog-
nition,too late; what is remarkable is that it happensat all.
I want to argue that the association of the Moor with the alien is not what
is given here, but what must be made—and made against the odds of a soci-
ety that takes its very definition from conquest and so depends, even thrives,
on the cultural intermixing that is the predictable result. Crisis occurs not be-
cause Rome is or becomes unbounded, its assumed sanctity undone by the
presence or exposure of the alien within. Crisis occurs because at an arbitrary
moment in history Rome attempts to lay down the law and postulate an idea
and ideal of cultural purity as crucial to its core. That the ideal is acted out on
and over the body of one embedded Moor is neither inevitable nor even en-
tirely plausible within the dramatic fiction; from where we sit in the theater,
that choice is at least partly, provocatively ironic.
***68 chapter three