ABSTRACT
Aaron, the wicked Moor in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, and Othello, the noble Moor in Othello, strike very different chords when one considers how each Moorish character is portrayed. Both are crafted within the habitus of late Elizabethan London within 10–15 years of each other. Habitus, following Monique Scheer, relates to “the ‘schemes of perception, thought, and action’ that produce individual and collective practices, which in turn reproduce the generative schemes.” The emotional dissonance of blackness between the two plays can be considered as a moment of ‘friction’ between the habitus and a changing social environment. Emotional reactions to and from the body are socially ordered in that emotions can be viewed as a practice that relates to habit. From medieval traditions, the early modern period inherited a complex set of cultural relationships and emotional practices associated with the colour black.
