Aaron’s Roots: Spaniards, Englishmen, and Blackamoors in <i>Titus Andronicus</i>

Abstract

Aaron's Roots: Spaniards, Englishmen, and Blackamoors in Titus Andronicus Focusing on the play's genealogy and various allusions to the black legend, this article recovers the long-neglected Spanish dimension of Gothic identity in Titus Andronicus and reconsiders the racial discourse of the play in the light of this information. Within an analogical setup associating Goths with Spaniards and Romans with Englishmen, the play attempts intellectual emancipation: it attempts to think through the topical question of the black African presence in 1590s England on English termsoutside of the Iberian conceptual frameworks with which black Africans had long been associated.Why is Aaron the Moor part of the Gothic court in Titus Andronicus? Given the importance of this character to the development of a racial discourse in early modern English theatre, investigating the reasons for his presence in the play is crucial. I seek to understand the merger of the Moors' and the Goths' histories, pushing beyond 'inextricability' and 'inexplicability', to quote Emily C. Bartels. 1 According to the dominant critical consensus, Aaron condenses and makes more visible through blackface the difference of the white barbarians within the Roman community. 2 Without rejecting that interpretation, I propose a complementary reading of Titus Andronicus in light of early modern European sociohistorical contexts and transnational exchanges. I argue that among the possible readings of Roman and Gothic identities in the play, one reading emphasizes the Spanishness of the Goths in late sixteenth-century perceptions. Reckoning with this analogy and recuperating the long-neglected Spanish dimension of Titus Andronicus can impact productively our understanding of Aaron and of the play's treatment of race and slavery. Indeed, close readings reveal that, within an analogical framework, the play attempts to think through the question of the black presence in 1590s England on English terms -outside of the older Iberian conceptual frameworks with which black Africans had long been associated. In Noémie Ndiaye (nn2274@columbia.edu) is a doctoral candidate in theatre in the department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.60 Noémie Ndiaye this article, I first pinpoint the most salient Spanish elements in the play before turning to moments when the play contests or distances itself from the Iberian cultural framework. Finally, I examine the incipient English take on race and slavery that the play proposes. Spain in Titus AndronicusIn España en Shakespeare, Pedro Juan Duque devotes a total of five lines to Titus Andronicus, stating that the play cannot be traced back to any Spanish source. 3 This assessment ignores the fact that the character of Aaron, as I will show, has its roots in Matteo Bandello's twenty-first novella (Part three), which is based upon a well-known incident that happened in the Spanish island of Mallorca in the second half of the fifteenth century. 4 Giovanni Pontano first imported this Spanish anecdote into Ital...

Spirited away: Race, slavery and childhood in early modern England

“…Others view the ideological construct of race as a powerful force in the very creation of colonial slavery, which in turn helped to define “whiteness” and its attendant privileges' (Donoghue, 2010, p. 949). Despite what is a commonly held view, that early modern slavery was disarticulated from race, scholars of premodern critical race studies—a term originated by Margo Hendricks (2019)—have demonstrated how strategies of race‐making authorized the enslavement of certain peoples and have also revealed the operations of early modern English engagement with Iberian slavery; see, for instance, Habib, 2008; Hall, 1995; Morgan, 2004; Ndiaye, 2016; and Weissbourd, 2015. I argue, furthermore, that even the ‘views of contemporaries’ were deeply implicated in strategic formulations and ideologies of slavery and race (2022).…”