[Aar.]  O how this villainy
Doth fat me with the very thoughts of it!
Let fools do good, and fair men call for grace,
Aaron will have his soul black like his face. 

Titus Andronicus, 3.1.202-05

Like Shakespeare’s representation of Richard III, that of Aaron the Moor displays the components of the figure of stigma that Shakespeare returned to time and again in his career: abnormality, villainy, irony, and tragicomedy. With respect to abnormality, Richard has his birth defects and Aaron his black skin. Regarding villainy, both Richard and Aaron are murderers, machiavels, and merry tricksters in the tradition of the Tudor Vice and the Middle English Devil before him. As for irony, each establishes an alarming intimacy with us, speaking directly to us in soliloquies and asides about both his abnormality and his villainy, eliciting our sympathy and securing our support, and both Richard and Aaron are narcissists who turn their abnormality into an object of affection. And on the point of tragicomedy, Richard is killed by the Earl of Richmond, who becomes the King of England, and Aaron by Lucius Andronicus, who becomes the Emperor of Rome, each an instance of virtue and vice getting their just deserts.

While one is physically marked and the other is racially marked, both Richard and Aaron do the same things, invoke the same themes, meet the same ends, and fill the same roles in their respective plays, which allows us to observe that Shakespeare used the figure of stigma to represent ultimately discrete kinds of outsiders. Insofar as Shakespeare associates them with each other, Richard and Aaron are identified not by what they are but by what they are not, which is, in a word, normal. That is, Shakespeare represented neither physical deformity nor racial minority but stigma, difference from cultural norms. From this perspective, studies of “Shakespeare and disability” and “Shakespeare and race” are equally limited because each, conceived of as such, is ultimately addressed to physical bodies as opposed to social interactions, which is the very error Shakespeare sought to expose in his treatment of stigma as drama. Shakespeare thought that stigma was not an object, but an event; not a physical feature of the body, but a social circulation of meaning; not nature, but culture.

Not only do Richard and Aaron align on the four points of the figure of stigma, but both experience and respond to stigma in the same ways: their enemies say their abnormal bodies are omens of an existential evil that was embodied when they were born, and they both use their bodies as a way to express the villainy they devote themselves to in the course of their lives. In other words, just as the representations of both Richard and Aaron show the elements of the figure of stigma, those representations also show the competing ways of conceptualizing stigma in the Renaissance – stigma as metaphor (as a sign of villainy) and stigma as metonymy (as a cause of villainy) – a competition that opens up a third way of thinking: stigma as drama.

Context

Black Skin on the Elizabethan Stage
Black Skin in Early English Literature
Black Skin in Renaissance Italian Literature
Black Skin in Shakespeare

Bibliography

Barthelemy, Anthony Gerard. "Princes of Darkness: Black Villains on the Mimetic Stage." Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987. 72-146.

White, Jeannette S. “ ‘Is Black So Base a Hue?’ Shakespeare’s Aaron and the Politics and Poetics of Race.” College Language Association Journal 40.3 (1997): 336-66.

Braxton, Phyllis N. "The Hue and Crime of Shakespeare's Aaron." CLA Journal 43.2 (1999): 207-28.

Schlueter, June. “Rereading the Peacham Drawing.” Shakespeare Quarterly 50.2 (Summer, 1999): 171-184.

Royster, Francesca T. “White-Limed Walls: Whiteness and Gothic Extremism in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.” Shakespeare Quarterly 51 (2000): 432-55.

Thompson, Ayanna. “The Racial Body and Revenge: Titus Andronicus.” Textus: English Studies in Italy 13.2 (2000): 325-46.

Loomba, Ania. “Wilderness and Civilization in Titus Andronicus.” Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 75-90.

Crawford, Kevin. “A ‘Black, Black, Black Man’: Aaron’s Represented Blackness on Stage and Screen.” Journal X: A Journal in Culture and Criticism 7.2 (2003): 101-28.

Boyd, Brian. "Kind and Unkindness: Aaron in Titus Andronicus." Words That Count: Essays on Early Modern Authorship in Honor of MacDonald P. Jackson. Ed. Brian Boyd. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004. 51-77.

Vaughan, Virginia Mason. “Talking Devils.” Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 34-56.

Reynolds, Bryan, and Glenn Odom. "Becomings Roman/Comings-to-be Villain: Pressurized Belongings and the Coding of Ethnicity, Religion, and Nationality in Peele & Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus." Transversal Enterprises in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 183-226

Habib, Imtiaz. "Racial Impersonation on the Elizabethan Stage: The Case of Shakespeare Playing Aaron." Medieval and Renaissance Drama In England 20 (2007): 17-45.

Bartels, Emily C. “ ‘Incorporate in Rome’: Titus Andronicus and the Consequence of Conquest.” Speaking of the Moor: from Alcazar to Othello. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. 65-99.

Smith, Ian. “Shakespeare’s Africans: Performing Race in Early Modern England.” Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors. New York: Macmillan, 2009. 123-54.

Ndiaye, Noémie. "Aaron's Roots: Spaniards, Englishmen, and Blackamoors in Titus Andronicus." Early Theatre 19. 2 (2016): 59-80. 

Howard, Jean E. "Is Black so Base a Hue?" Shakespeare in Our Time: A Shakespeare Association of America Collection. Ed. Dympna Callaghan and Suzanne Gossett. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. 107-14.

Chapman, Matthieu. "Aaron's Incorporation and the Destruction of Civil Society." Anti-Black Racism in Early Modern English Drama: The Other “Other.” New York: Routledge, 2017. 156-81.

Teramura, Misha. "Black Comedy: Shakespeare, Terence and Titus Andronicus." ELH: English Literary History 85.4 (2018): 877-908.

Brown, David Sterling. "'Is Black so Base a Hue?': Black Life Matters in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus." Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Cassander, L. Smith, Nicholas R. Jones, and Miles P. Grier. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 137-55.

LaPerle, Carol Mejia. "'If I might have my will': Aaron's Affect and Race in Titus Andronicus." Titus Andronicus: The State of Play. Ed. Farah Karim-Cooper. London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2019. 135-56.