African men in early modern drama often draw attention to their appearance, highlighting physical traits that contemporaries associated with Blackness. Othello famously draws attention to his Black skin in the context of condemning his wife’s alleged infidelity. Goaded by Iago, he blames his own Blackness: ‘Haply [i.e. perhaps]’ she rejects me ‘for I am black’, he speculates.^[1] Later on, he will once again understand her supposed unfaithfulness in terms that align her moral state with his skin colour, Black being shorthand in the period for all that is evil, sinful, and even nonhuman.^[2] ‘Her name,’ he tells Iago, ‘that was as fresh / As Diana’s visage, is now begrimed and black / As mine own face’ (3.3.289-91). The Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice similarly evokes his Black skin in the context of pleading with Portia, the rich heiress he wishes to wed, to give him a chance. ‘Mislike me not for my complexion, / The shadowed livery of the burnished sun / To whom I am neighbour and near bred’.^[3] Aaron in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (1590s) similarly draws attention to the physical traits contemporaries associated with Blackness, famously defending his and his baby’s Black skin against racist slurs hurled at them both by the nurse who conveys his lover’s, the Empress’s, message that he ‘christen it [the baby] with thy dagger’s point’ and by the latter’s two sons.^[4] Celebrating Blackness, he draws attention to its integrity, for unlike the ‘white-limed walls’, the ‘ale-house painted signs’ that are Tamora’s sons, ‘Coal-black is better than another hue / For that it scorns to bear another hue, / For all the water in the ocean / Can never turn the swan’s black legs to white, / Although she lave them hourly in the flood’ (4.2.100-102).

Aaron’s celebration of the constancy of Blackness evokes a contemporary saying about the futility of ‘washing an Ethiope white’, emblematised in the image above. Image accessed here

Aaron’s references to his physical traits includes one that is key to understanding depictions of Black men on the contemporary stage, Aaron being a prime example that would prove extremely influential on later portrayals. Addressing his lover, Tamora, and explaining he is not in an amorous mood as she seems to expect him to be, Aaron explains:

Madam, though Venus govern your desires,

Saturn is dominator over mine:

What signifies my deadly-standing eye,

My silence and my cloudy melancholy,

My fleece of woolly hair that now uncurls

Even as an adder when she doth unroll

To do some fatal execution?

No, madam, these are no venereal signs:

Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand.

Blood and revenge are hammering in my head. (2.3.30-39)

Medusa (c.1597) by Caravaggio, accessed here 

Unlike other African male characters in early modern drama, Aaron’s reference to his ‘woolly hair’ does not only draw attention to his raced physical appearance constructed on the stage by black paint, prosthetics, and costumes, as the Peacham sketch suggests.^[5] More importantly, he associates his ‘woolly hair’ with powerful, dangerous femininity. His reference to the way his hair ‘uncurls / Even as an adder when she doth unroll / To do some fatal execution’ clearly evokes Medusa, the monstrous Gorgon in Greek mythology who had living, venomous snakes for hair and whose gaze had the power to turn anyone who gazes back into stone.^[6] This metaphorical association is literalised in the play in Aaron’s relationship with the Empress, Tamora, who is depicted as the epitome of dangerous, transgressive femininity. She dominates the Emperor, stage managing his encounters with his enemies: ‘be ruled by me,’ she counsels him, ‘Dissemble all your griefs and discontents’, instructing him to leave revenge on the Andronici to her (1.1.445-6, 453). She is, perhaps more damningly, associated with destructive, monstrous motherhood: though unwittingly, she ‘fe[eds]’ on the bodies of her slaughtered sons, ‘baked in [a] pie, / [thus] [e]ating the flesh that she herself hath bred’ (5.3.60-2). Tamora becomes the personification of devouring, female-coded nature imagined earlier in the play where the ‘blood-stained hole’ into which Bassianus’s body is thrown is suggestively described as a ‘fell devouring receptacle,’ ‘Cocytus’ misty mouth’ and a ‘swallowing womb’ (2.3.210, 235, 239). Perhaps Tamora’s most transgressive action is her pollution of the Roman line of descent. Tamora and Aaron’s relationship introduces the threat of racially mixed children and of illegitimate children being raised by the unwitting father as his legitimate offspring. This threat takes on a specifically political slant because Tamora’s cuckolded husband is the Emperor, whose son is heir to Rome’s throne. Acknowledging that racist attitudes block the Black child’s path to the throne (5.1.29-30), Aaron plans to replace this child with a white one born to an interracial couple. ‘Not far,’ he explains, ‘one Muly lives, my countryman: / His wife but yesternight was brought to bed: / His child is like to her, fair as you are’ (4.2.154-6). ‘By this’, he gestures to his Black child, ‘their child shall be advanced, / And he received for the emperor’s heir, / And substituted in the place of mine, / […] let the emperor dandle him for his own’ (4.2.159-161, 163). Although the Black child will be banished from court, the Muly’s son, raised as the emperor’s heir, remains a threatening spectre of Blackness interfering with dynastic lines of succession and inheritance. While the plan never comes to fruition (Aaron is arrested and his child seized by the Andronici (5.1)), it embodies the threat that transgressive female sexuality poses to white male lines of descent.

This association between African masculinity and dangerous femininity is no coincidence. The pair spoke to contemporary anxieties surrounding Africans, male dependents, and transgressive female sexuality. Such anxieties have already been shaping, and will continue to inform, depictions of murderous women and dangerous male dependents in early modern drama. Master Arden of Faversham’s Alice Arden and her servant Michael conspiring to kill her husband and his master is one such example; Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling’s Beatrice-Joanna and De Flores executing her unwanted fiancé is another. Race introduces into this familiar scenario the threatening prospect of racial pollution, a spectre evoked most strikingly by another Shakespearean character alarmed at the news of the marriage of an African man and a woman he now sees as deviant and sexually transgressive, one who, he warns Othello, ‘has deceived her father, and may thee’ (1.3.294). ‘[I]f such actions [interracial marriages] may have passage free’, Brabantio warns, ‘Bond-slaves and pagans shall our statesmen be’ (1.2.98-9).

Aaron’s allusion to Medusa in the context of describing his physical appearance has gone mostly unnoticed in critical responses of the play. This blog post has attempted to draw attention to its centrality not only to the depiction of Aaron in this particular play, but also to later portrayals of African men on the early modern stage.

References

Bate, Jonathan and Eric Ramussen (eds.). The Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus. Houndmills: Macmillan, 2007.

Chapman, Matthieu. Anti-Black Racism in Early Modern English Drama: The Other “Other”. New York: Routledge, 2017.

De Barros, Eric L., ‘“My fleece of woolly hair that now uncurls”: Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, “Black” Hair, and the Revenge of Postcolonial Education’, College Literature, Volume 49, Number 4 (2022), 628-651doi:10.1353/lit.2022.0023.

Drakakis, John (ed.). The Merchant of Venice. London: Bloomsbury, 2010.

Honigmann, E. A. J. (ed.). Othello. London: Arden Shakespeare, 1997.

^[1] Honigmann, E. A. J. (ed.), Othello (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1997), 3.3.267. Further references are incorporated in the text.

^[2] Chapman, Matthieu. Anti-Black Racism in Early Modern English Drama: The Other “Other” (New York: Routledge, 2017), 25.

^[3] John Drakakis (ed.), The Merchant of Venice (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 2.1.1-3.

^[4] Jonathan Bate and Eric Ramussen (eds.), The Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus (Houndmills: Macmillan, 2007), 4.2.72. Further references are incorporated in the text.

^[5] For the construction of Blackness on the early modern stage, see Ian Smith, ‘White Skin, Black Masks: Racial Cross-Dressing on the Early Modern Stage’, Renaissance Drama, Vol. 32 (2003), pp. 33-67.

URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41917375

^[6] In a recent article, Eric L. De Barros observes the way Aaron’s woolly hair links him to the fury Tisiphone who is recruited as an avenging power in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book 4 (‘“My fleece of woolly hair that now uncurls”: Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, “Black” Hair, and the Revenge of Postcolonial Education’, College Literature, Volume 49, Number 4 (2022), 636. https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2022.0023635). De Barros, however, reads the association in relation to the entire Goth family, maintaining that ‘Representing a conquered people, Tamora and her sons desperately hope for this kind of avenging power’. I, by contrast, see the allusion as solely applying to Aaron and emblematising the play’s association between threatening Black masculinity and transgressive femininity. I am grateful to Dr Richard Rowland for sharing this article with me.

Title Image: Henry Peacham’s 1595 sketch of a performance of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus accessed here