at the moment, Titus imagines the transfer of prisoners as a complement to
the new emperor’s “motion” to “advance” the Andronici “name and hon-
ourable family” ( 1. 1. 242 – 43 ). Accordingly, he assures the Gothic queen that
she is “prisoner to an emperor, / To him that for your honour and your
state / Will use you nobly and your followers” ( 1. 1. 262 – 64 )—sure that Saturn-
inus will uphold the “Roman” standards of order and honor that he himself
defines.
Titus is not the only one setting the terms here, however. The play not
only critiques the Rome he would create as dangerously self-centered but also
juxtaposes it to a contrasting reality, which increasingly displaces and replaces
Titus’s untenable ideals. Recent interrogations of Titus’s colonial politics have
tended to focus on the colonized subjects—Aaron, predominantly, and Ta-
mora, secondarily.^34 Yet installed with Saturninus’s regime is an accommoda-
tion of “outsiders” that suits the situation of conquest in a way that Titus’s
myopic and nostalgic politics do not. Saturninus is, of course, no prize. It is
not without reason that scholars have singled him out as distinctively
“wicked” or “vicious,” even when they notice the pervasive corruption within
Rome, and not without reason that Julie Taymor’s Tituscasts a smarmy Alan
Cummings in the role.^35 Within criticism on the play, Saturninus’s marriage
to the Gothic queen emerges as especially problematic, since it “places the
enemies of Rome too near the heart of its power.”^36 That liaison does prove
dangerous, creating an opportunity for both the Goths and the Moor to take
revenge against their Roman conquerors and enact an Ovidian nightmare of
appalling proportions. Yet to blame Rome’s downfall on Saturninus’s incorpo-
ration of “enemies” is, I think, to miss the complexity of the cultural picture
here: it is to think of Rome, as Titus does, through an insular model of state,
and to overlook the presence and pressures of internally colonized subjects.
For Saturninus acts on and through the side effects of empire, the inevitable
cross-cultural connections, which Titus denies. Within the dramatic fiction,
whatever hideous outcome the marriage of the Roman emperor and Gothic
queen ultimately brings, as a dramatic device it signposts an important open-
ness that, instead of Titus’s fantasies, define the Roman state.
As we think about Titus’s take on racial and cultural crossing, we should
not be too quick to condemn Saturninus’s unlooked-for liaison with the
Gothic queen. Ania Loomba has argued provocatively that “as a white though
foreign queen, [Tamora’s] marriage to the Emperor Saturninus is not unthink-
ablein a feudal dynastic world in which both war and intermarriage between
different groups and kingdoms were widespread.”^37 As the double negative
“Incorporate in Rome” 75