SOURCE: Smith, Ian. “Those ‘slippery customers’: Rethinking Race in Titus Andronicus.” Journal of Theatre and Drama 3 (1997): 45-58.

In the following essay, Smith probes the significance of the juxtaposition of blackness and barbarity imposed on the character of Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus.

I

As an alternative to the tedious restatement of the bloody revenge tragedy theme, that is, Titus Andronicus as a debased, melodramatic, questionably Shakespearean transposition of Seneca, more recent work has opened up a line of criticism that focuses on Shakespeare's use of language. The tendency to tally body counts, rape and dismemberments, has been joined to a metalinguistic interest that identifies an analogous and reflexive series of verbal mutilations “in which language engenders violence and violence is done to language through the distance between word and thing, between metaphor and what it represents” (Kendall 299). This critical analysis can be described in terms of the...