ABSTRACT

Despite being one of two well-known Shakespearean characters of color, Aaron from Titus Andronicus has been the focus of much less theoretical scrutiny than his counterpart Othello. This discrepancy is most apparent when it comes to reading the characters to interpret potential Early Modern English constructions of race. While Aaron has been the focus of numerous articles and chapters on race, critical inquiry focused on Othello’s race outnumber those focused on Aaron’s race by a large margin. While I cannot say for certain why this is the case, I can speculate on a few potential reasons for this discrepancy. It could be that the preference for focusing Othello as opposed to Aaron could be the fact that, as a valiant Moor, Othello is a contradiction that lends itself to theoretical scrutiny. With notions of race often tied up in various categories of difference,1 Othello’s status as simultaneously Moorish, non-white, non-Christian, a potential religious convert, and a foreigner both to the English and within the world of the play to the Venetians allows for the examination of the varying intersections of racialized categories that Othello represents. Although Othello is a character who embodies these intersecting categories, much of the scholarship on Othello’s race is written to dispute his color; the text has the potential to be read with the Moor as light-or dark-skinned, with each interpretation allowing for theoretical inquiries into how the Early Modern English read skin color as a racializing factor within the broader context of humanity.2 Shakespeare does not grant scholars the same room for interpretations of Aaron vis-à-vis skin color in Titus Andronicus; as Ania Loomba points out in Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism, “Because Aaron is a textbook illustration for early modern stereotypes of blackness, his skin colour has never been disputed in the same way that Othello’s has.”3 Loomba then continues to read Titus Andronicus as a meditation on how already developed notions of “barbarism, black sexuality, and evil evoked by Aaron mediate newer anxieties about nation, religion, race, and femininity.”4