I enjoyed the recent and blood-soaked RSC production of Titus Andronicus — a play that languished near-total neglect between the Renaissance and the mid-twentieth century but which has become firmly embedded in the contemporary repertoire; this is the RSC’s third production since 2013. As is often the case, the programme included a series of short essays intended to position the play for its audience. One that caught my eye was titled Exploring Black Identity, a contribution by Dr Farah Karim-Cooper that examines race “through Shakespeare’s depiction of Aaron the Moor.”
As the title suggests, Karim-Cooper presents Aaron as “Shakespeare’s first exploration of black identity,” and as a figure shaped by the “growing multiculturalism of Tudor London.” She insightfully notes that it was unusual for Shakespeare to include a “Black African” in a play set in classical Rome. She then reaches by suggesting that Aaron “reflects the knowledge of the trafficking of African people in Elizabethan England,” and “demonstrates the ways in which the rising ownership of Black people in the early modern Transatlantic could be symbolised through the theatrical device of blackface.” From there, she challenges the notion that Aaron is “an uncomplicated villain,” proposing instead that he has “good reasons” for his evil deeds — namely, that they reflect “the cultural awareness of white supremacy at the time the play was written.” She concludes that the play “urges us to witness the historical foundations of racial oppression.”
Anyone actually watching the play will be struck by the sheer scale of Aaron’s cruelty and the grim precision with which Shakespeare charts his rise and downfall
These are familiar gestures. In academic and theatrical circles alike, Aaron is often reframed as a radical outsider — a voice of resistance, even of revolution. But anyone actually watching the play will be struck by the sheer scale of Aaron’s cruelty and the grim precision with which Shakespeare charts his rise and downfall. This is not a tragic hero silenced by imperialism, nor a misunderstood freedom fighter. Aaron is something else entirely — and his story offers a chilling insight, not just into racial oppression, but into the destructive logic of avenging it.
Aaron is a Moorish slave, captured alongside the defeated Goth army led by Tamora and her sons. We first hear him speak as he urges the princes, Chiron and Demetrius, to stage their “love” for Titus’s daughter, Lavinia, through a reenactment of Philomela’s fate in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Aaron explicitly cites the myth, observing that the “tragic tale” supplies a model for their assault. The parallel is obvious: Lavinia is raped, her tongue cut out, and — taking a tip from Ovid — her hands severed so she cannot expose her attackers in embroidery as Philomela does. If Aaron is to be cast as the forerunner of an anticolonial Black identity, this act — founded on a canonical piece of dominant-culture literature — becomes a grotesque form of post-colonial reading, a violent parody of efforts to decolonise the curriculum. Here, the subjugated figure seizes the imperial archive, not to transform it, but to desecrate it. The action echoes modern atrocities: ISIS at the Bataclan in 2015, or Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack – each turning a symbol of the host culture (a theatre, a music festival) against itself. At the time of the Hamas attack, some academics, invoking Fanon’s claim that “decolonisation is always a violent phenomenon,” indeed suggested this was decolonisation made literal. Aaron, then, may echo the rhetoric of anticolonial revolt, but Shakespeare leaves us with no romantic revolutionary – only a cautionary nightmare of vengeance.
Karim-Cooper’s note also glides past what becomes of Aaron after Lavinia’s assault. His malice only deepens. He dupes Titus into cutting off his own hand in exchange for the lives of two sons, only for their severed heads to be returned in a mocking basket. His liaison with Tamora, now Empress, then produces a child whose unmistakably Moorish features threaten to expose them both. When Chiron and Demetrius propose killing the infant, Aaron’s sudden paternal instinct ignites. He kills the Nurse who has witnessed the birth, jeering: “Wheak, wheak! so cries a pig prepared to the spit”. The taunt lands uneasily for a modern audience. It recalls the Tate–LaBianca murders of August 1969, when Charles Manson’s followers daubed “PIGS” in blood at the crime scene — an act many read as an attempt to spark the “Helter Skelter” race war Manson envisioned. Once again, Aaron invites disturbing contemporary parallels, offering no foothold for admiration.
Having arranged to substitute a white child for his own, Aaron flees Rome — only to be captured by the advancing Goth army, now led by Titus’s only surviving son, Lucius. Facing the prospect that Lucius will kill his child in revenge, Aaron strikes a deal: he will confess everything in exchange for the boy’s life. He asks Lucius to swear to uphold the bargain by invoking the Roman gods. Lucius, sceptical, replies that Aaron believes in no gods — but Aaron’s response is telling. He is confident that Lucius, though an enemy, will honour the oath because of his piety, his conscience, and his Roman sense of duty. In appealing to the moral authority of his captors’ religion, Aaron tacitly acknowledges the ethical framework of the culture he has tried to destroy. He places his son’s survival not in the hands of his own power or ideology, but in the honour of a system he has otherwise scorned.
What’s more, Aaron’s plan depends on his son being absorbed into the Roman order. The endurance of Roman culture — with all its structures of duty, piety, and hierarchy — becomes the only hope for this child of a Moor and a Goth. The same truth is tacitly acknowledged by the Goths under Lucius’s command. Unlike Tamora’s earlier horde, these Goths align with Rome in a reciprocal alliance, recognising that their future lies not in destruction but in alignment. Shakespeare does not present Aaron’s pattern of grievance and revenge as a viable mode of resistance; he shows instead that survival lies in alliance, not in vendetta. It is not a lesson radicals are likely to approve.
Some academic responses to the play’s final reassertion of Roman order suggest it merely caters to a white audience’s desire for moral clarity — where the racialised “other” is destroyed so that order may be restored. Yet Shakespeare may simply be offering a political reality: a rebellion like Aaron’s, rooted in destruction rather than reform, will always be put down — and its leader will likely die violently. Aaron’s fate invites comparison with that of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. Both are mercilessly hunted by their enemies. Both display defiance in the face of certain death — Aaron in words, Sinwar in the reported gesture of hurling a stick at the drone sent to kill him. In each case, the final act is not submission but a last assertion of agency against overwhelming force. Yet both end up dead — having helped perpetuate and prolong a cycle of retributive violence that neither could end.
I am not arguing that Shakespeare’s Rome is admirable. He shows Titus and his sons participating in human sacrifice — the inciting act that fuels the cycle of revenge. The point of the play is that there are no heroes. Rome is a corrupt and blood-soaked edifice. But attempts to avenge or “decolonise” it do not redeem the revengers; they simply perpetuate the violence. Aaron dies, as do others — guilty and innocent alike. To admire Aaron as a representative of a grievant identity is to miss the larger vision Shakespeare offers: a world in which vengeance, however justified it may seem, leads only to ruin.
Academics, temperamentally drawn to armchair rebellion, often find Aaron more sympathetic than Shakespeare does. Historical materialism and the valorisation of decolonisation may seem more compelling than a play that exposes the corruption of empire without offering any faith in revolution. Shakespeare’s vision is damning, and harder to digest: evil resides in both the dominant culture and its discontents. It falls to audiences to decide whether Shakespeare’s bleak vision is more truthful than the academic desire to elevate Aaron as a hero.
