Shakespeare and the Conscience of Aaron

Abstract

Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s first Roman play, stages the story of a city which quickly and relentlessly slips from a victorious and Roman ‘pious’ scenario into one of revengeful horror. Evil, however, emerges as a question, as the play is heading to its closure: when the butchery of a total war seems to have exhausted the possibilities of horror and a disgraced humanity − like Walter Benjamin’s angel − is violently propelled into the future with its “face turned to the wreckage it leaves behind” (Benjamin 1999, 249). This is epitomized by the displacing space of a ruined monastery, the place where the surviving heir of the Andronici’s (the general Lucius) and the Moor following the Goths (Aaron) are strategically summoned by Shakespeare as if to an endgame: a challenging dispute on evil and conscience. This essay foregrounds the tangle of issues (religious, theological, philosophical, cultural, racial) triggered by Act 5 and the provocative role this scene assumes within the framework of the play as well as in Shakespeare’s tragic canon.