Shakespeare: playing with the past

Titus Andronicus and ideas of racial difference

by Rebecca Adusei

At the start of Titus Andronicus – one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, believed to have been written around 1590 – the protagonist, Roman general Titus, returns home after fighting the Goths. What then follows is a violent story of death, racism, cannibalism and mutilation.

The idea of race infuses the play entirely. Although Shakespeare presents his characters as being in two tiers – the Romans, and the people seen as ‘the other’ – even that portrayal is multifaceted. The character of Tamora, for instance, is queen of the Goths, a people repeatedly characterised in the play as barbarous. Yet she has an ability to infiltrate and move within Roman society because of her whiteness, and is chosen by the emperor Saturninus to be his wife.

Tamora has autonomy and agency, freedoms that were not afforded to her lover, ‘Aaron the Moor’. The intercultural relationship between Tamora and Saturninus would have been more palatable to early modern audiences, because it was believed that the Goths were ancestors of the English. The idea of Tamora and Aaron together, however, may have made those audiences feel uncomfortable.

By the turn of the 17th century, black characters were commonplace on the stage. Around that time, Europeans were increasingly encountering people from sub-Saharan Africa, a development reflected in the growing numbers of black characters that appeared in dramatic works. Possibly the earliest example appears in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, written around 1587 – so pre-dates Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.

The early modern theatre industry generated a lot of revenue, and playwrights such as Shakespeare and Marlowe had vested economic stakes in the industry, so they had strong motivations to include excitement and novelty