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KEYWORDS: Aaron, body, history, literalism, metaphor, Moor, myth
ABSTRACT: Metaphor is crucial in Titus Andronicus and in the historical interpretation of it. Aaron, its villain, thinks mythically, reducing metaphors, myths, and their aestheticizing of violence to physical actuality, with Lavinia as the prime exhibit of both physical brutality and the myth of Philomela. Aaron is revealed progressively, as if layers were being peeled off to find his malignant core.
METAPHOR, INCLUDING ITS mythic forms, has a crucial role in Titus Andronicus and the criticism it attracts, and Aaron, the tutor of Tamoras sons and the plays villain, thinks in mythic terms. He is inside, not outside, them. Characteristically, however, he reduces metaphors, myths, and their aestheticizing, or elevating, of violence to physical actuality, with the raped and mutilated Lavinia as the prime exhibit of both physical brutality and the myth of Philomela. Aaron is revealed progressively, as if layers were being peeled off to find his core. He might be said to become in our eyes what he turns out to have been in the play, malignant. Only might be said, however: in a play in which perspectives oscillate quickly and seeming sureties are quickly qualified by complications and ambiguities, even this claim, like Aarons final confession, rests on unsteady ground. My essay begins with the consequences of focusing on Aaron, and it establishes the metaphorical framing of the play, highlighting how in it the constituent terms of metaphor collapse and fuse, thus canceling the defining distinction between terms that metaphor requires to exist. Aaron's confession of his crimes at the end of the play exemplifies such fusing, as do the staged personifications of Revenge, Murder, and Rape. As essential background, the essay reviews recent historical criticism of Aaron and his Moorishness, which also crosses conspicuously into metaphor, analogy, and allegory, before it concentrates on Aaron's role as tutor to the empress's sons and his ending, which physically, ironically, and fittingly realizes yet another classical myth.
Focalization and Literalism
Criticism about Aaron in Titus Andronicus, or more broadly about the category Moor, including Aaron, in Shakespeare's time creates the impression that when Aaron is focal, Lavinia's suffering is minimized, trivialized, or disappears. A dominantly figurative reading of the sort associated both with Aaron and...