Titus Andronicus is a play that demonstrates early modern English dexterity with racial constructs. This nuance is demonstrated in part through its representations of racial mixing and mixed-race identity. Engaging these representations in the classroom can introduce students to an early modern England that was more familiar with racial difference than is sometimes commonly understood. Doing so can also help students track how Shakespeare leveraged that familiarity to stage complex and competing ideas about racial difference.

The experiment of racial difference

A great moment to start with seems to confirm that racial mixing was unfamiliar to the Elizabethan English, at least initially. During the forest scene, Lavinia finds Aaron the Moor and Tamora the Goth alone. She already suspects their relationship and upon finding them tells Tamora, “’Tis thought you have a goodly gift in horning / And to be doubted that your Moor and you, / Are singled forth to try experiments.”

The word “experiments” is an unusual way to describe a relationship, interracial or otherwise. It suggests that Aaron and Tamora are engaged in something new and untested. The phrase “singled forth” redoubles this characterization, immediately describing the pair’s deviation from the rest of the group in the scene, but also characterizing their relationship as singular.

I encourage students to think of this characterization as derived from a more multifarious position—not one fully representative of early modern English beliefs. In other words, I ask students to think of this framing in terms of the complexity generally attributed to Shakespeare’s work. Aaron and Tamora’s relationship is, of course, not even singular in the world of the play. When the pair’s child is born with darker skin, indicating that Aaron, rather than Saturninus, is the father, Aaron suggests swapping the child for another mixed-race infant. This child, born to his countryman Muliteus, is, he says, “fair” as Tamora’s sons, Chiron and Demetrius. Considering Lavinia’s ascriptions alongside this revelation can help students trace the play’s various discourses concerning mixed race identity.

Racial mixing is ostensibly being mobilized through Aaron’s revelation (the stealing of another child to protect himself) to propose a frightening possibility for an early modern England that frequently trafficked in and furthered racist ideas. But the moment is also undergirded by a matter-of-fact sense of the somatic possibilities of both inter- and intraracial procreation. Aaron demonstrates as much when overheard telling his child “where the bull and cow are both milk-white / They never do beget a coal-black calf,” a statement offered almost axiomatically as he imagines the possibilities had his child been born with Tamora’s “look.” Such casual observations appear drawn from contexts in which mixed-race identity was treated as neither experimental nor as profoundly consequential.

Perceptions of mixed-race identities from Shakespeare to now

Given that Titus is one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, examining its engagement with mixedness helps contextualize the topic’s appearance throughout the playwright’s dramatic work. Characters staged as late in Shakespeare’s career as Caliban might be placed into productive conversation with Titus’s approach to the topic. Drawing these types of connections invites students to see mixedness as having a more sustained role in the conceptual lexicon of early modern drama. Considering this lineage also includes interrogating lacunae in overt representations of mixed-race identity. Such gaps are especially notable given Titus’s proclivity for shunting mixedness into the foreground, including during the tragedy’s final scene, during which Marcus Andronicus asks those gathered to “behold” Aaron and Tamora’s child.  

When I teach Titus, I ask students to reflect through journaling exercises on how and where they see mixed race identity represented in the world around them. Students generally have a range of responses to this prompt, which not only brings into focus the various and inconsistent ways that race signals and operates today, but also offers a more immediate parallel to Titus’s own multifarious approach.

Drawing such connections can encourage students to look to the past as a way to better understand their present. It can also help students consider mixed-race identity—often treated as a late 20th- and early 21st-century formation—as having a much longer history than its inconsistent recognition and representation might otherwise suggest.