SOURCE: Royster, Francesca T. “White-limed Walls: Whiteness and Gothic Extremism in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus.” Shakespeare Quarterly 51, no. 4 (winter 2000): 432-55.

In the following essay, Royster analyzes the representation of black and while racial extremes in Titus Andronicus with reference to the characters Aaron and Tamora.

In criticism on issues of race in Titus Andronicus, blackness has usually been the focus, particularly as it is embodied in Aaron the Moor.¹ Whiteness remains in the background. In this essay, I will put whiteness in the foreground in an attempt to dismantle a black/white binary. I will explore the denaturalization of whiteness in Titus Andronicus and its construction along an unstable continuum of racial identities. Though Aaron's adulterous lover, Tamora, has attracted much less attention, the racial issues she raises are no less interesting. If Aaron is coded as black, Tamora is represented as hyperwhite. Her husband, himself a Roman, has...