suggests, Loomba is hesitant to consider the bond inherently unproblematic.
In her reading, race, gender, and class do set limits: what makes the marriage
initially acceptable is that it “preserve[s] existing hierarchies of gender and
rank” as well as the appearance of “racial purity,” which Tamora’s “whiteness”
allows.^38 Loomba concedes that ultimately “the marriage isconsidered inap-
propriate because it reveals Tamora’s ability to manipulate her way to power,”
underscoring her “status as alien.”^39 Yet if we consider the bond in the con-
text of a Rome habituated to the consequences of conquest, the marriage of
Roman and Goth seems not only “not unthinkable,” but rather imperatively
thinkable.
It is not that, after all, that ignites the initial chaos, but Bassianus’s asser-
tion of a prior claim to Lavinia—which Titus declares “treason” ( 1. 1. 288 ).^40 In
attempting to “bear his betrothed from all the world away,” Bassianus effec-
tively shatters the illusion of Titus’s homogenized Roman order, setting one
set standard against another, the rites of betrothal against the law of the Fa-
ther ( 1. 1. 290 ). Marcus attempts to resolve the conflict with an absolute state-
ment of the Roman way: “Suum cuiqueis our Roman justice” ( 1. 1. 284 ). But
although he thereby means to prove that “the prince in justice seizeth but his
own” ( 1. 1. 285 ), his efforts leave open the determinates of rightful ownership,
which, coded thus (“to each his own”), could apply as easily to either “prince.”
In the end, the Andronici sons turn against their father, with Mutius literally,
figuratively, and fatally obstructing Titus’s “way in Rome” ( 1. 1. 295 ), while
Bassianus flees with Lavinia, leaving the Andronici family in ruins.
Saturninus stands at a notable remove from this chaos, to the point that
he seems to be the last to know that—and “by whom”—“Lavinia is surprised”
( 1. 1. 288 – 89 ). Although his “sudden choice” of Tamora is arguably as startling
as Bassianus’s seizure of Lavinia, within the dramatic fiction it appears to be
both less contested and less contestable ( 1. 1. 323 ). We may denounce Saturni-
nus for allowing his “sexual attraction to Tamora” to “obscur[e] his sense of
duty to the Roman people,” bringing Rome’s “enemies” too close to home
and catalyzing a “barbarous infiltration” of aliens into the Roman body
politic.^41 We may fault the Gothic queen for “her behavior as an ambitious
woman” and set her beside the “chaste Roman matron,” Lavinia, as contrast-
ingly “assertive, deceptive, and lascivious.”^42 But tellingly, within the dra-
matic fiction, no one protests the marriage between the Roman emperor and
the Gothic queen as a problem in and of itself. While Saturninus is still be-
trothed to Lavinia, he declares Tamora “a goodly lady...of the hue / That I
would choose were I to choose anew”—apparently in front of a listening
76 chapter three