Shakespeare’s interest in Abraham and sacrificing children explains the imaginary religious encounter between East and West that is Titus Andronicus.1 More specifically, Genesis 22 illuminates Aaron the Moor’s famous compassion for his infant son in a scene that has been misread from the eighteenth century up through Julie Taymor’s 1999 film adaptation Titus. In brief, Aaron’s compassion for his son should not be seen as compassion at all, but as a dramatic effort on Shakespeare’s part to engage in the multitude of Abrahamic elaborations that took place in the medieval and early modern worlds as the three monotheisms sought to figure themselves as the true children of the ancient patriarch.2 Let me quote again Martin Luther’s illustrative engagement on this issue:
The Saracens have invented horrible lies on the basis of this text [Genesis 22]. They tell the fictitious story that Ishmael was immolated in the place of Isaac, who, they say, ran away and did not obey his father. Hence they boast that they are the sons of Sarah; for, as they say, Isaac was not sacrificed, but Ishmael was sacrificed in his brother’s place. It is the perpetual custom of all heretics to transfer to themselves the glory of the church and the people of God, for everybody wants to be nearest to God. And this temptation has existed among men from the beginning of the world. Thus today the heretics and the pope want to be the people of God. The Turk wants to be the people of God.3
In so starkly juxtaposing the strange Jewish-Muslim conflation that is Aaron the Moor with his refusal to sacrifice his son to the wild sacrificial energies of the (pre-Christian) Roman general Titus, Shakespeare is again thinking through the narrative of Genesis 22 and what a true Abrahamic gift might look like. As I discussed in chapter 2, there are few—if any—narratives in Western thought wherein not killing your child could be considered an Aaron-the-Moor-type act of villainy. Genesis 22 is the exceptional example one can’t ignore, particularly in a play where the title character gives death to at least two of his own children (not counting the twenty-one sacrificed in battle or the two lost to Roman political in-fighting) and the arch-villain is supposedly redeemed by not sacrificing his son.
That Shakespearean scholarship has yet to offer any widely persuasive claim as to what motivates this intense treatment of sacrifice in this very early work is telling. Even René Girard, in his consideration of Shakespeare, A Theater of Envy, ignores this strange play. Speaking more generally, Titus Andronicus has confounded literary source studies.4 Situating the play in an Abrahamic context helps address this long-standing critical crux.
As I discussed in chapter 1, in the 1560s and 1570s Reformation iconoclasm and other internal cultural pressures suppressed the dramatic form that could represent Genesis 22 most directly—the medieval cycle plays. For Martin Luther and other reformers, the cycle plays and their explicit depiction of the biblical narrative were too closely connected to Catholic idolatry and ritual. However, serious, substantial intellectual and dramatic interest in the Genesis 22 story survived. Arthur Golding translated Theodore de Beze’s Abraham Sacrifiant, originally written in French in 1550, into English in 1577.5 Michael O’Connell notes that Beze’s play “had phenomenal success—ten editions in the sixteenth century; besides its English version, it was translated into Italian and twice into Latin.”6 That such a personage as Golding translated the work testifies to its significance and hints at a degree of notoriety. In composing Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare was certainly aware of Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis, one of the few sources of which we can be certain. In addition, Debora Kuller Shuger has reminded us that George Buchanan’s Jepthes sive votum tragoedia, published in 1554, went through “eighteen editions in the sixteenth century and twenty-eight in the seventeenth.”7 Buchanan’s play depicts the events of the story in Judges 11:30–40 wherein an Israelite chieftain vows to sacrifice the first thing he sees after a victorious battle and, “to his horror, his daughter, an only child, greets him.” As I discussed in chapter 2, Titus Andronicus addresses the same themes and concerns of the Abraham and Isaac story and alludes directly to it while, historically speaking, functioning as an interpretive contrast to Genesis 22.8 This considerable literary output corresponds to the iconic prominence of the Abraham tapestry at Tudor courts.
If, though, as I have been arguing, Shakespeare wanted to address the Abraham and Isaac story and the complex issues it raises around sacrifice on the popular stage, he would have had to find less direct means than his dramatic predecessors—both religious and academic—to do so.
Shakespeare’s own profound religious desire motivated his interest in the Abraham and Isaac story. But in the case of Titus Andronicus at least, we also can see how England’s increasing exposure to the broad geopolitical struggle between the Catholic Christian empire of Spain and the Islamic empire of the Ottomans shaped the direction of his thought. Jerry Brotton writes that it was “the complex exchanges between east and west . . . that created the culture, art and scholarship that have been popularly associated with the Renaissance”; Titus Andronicus is no exception.9
I am arguing, then, that Shakespeare’s Roman general has an absolute devotion, not to God, but to the Roman state—so much so that he is willing to give death to his children, without hesitation, for this abstract Other. In this context, though, as Kierkegaard writes in Fear and Trembling, “The idea of the state,” is “not qualitatively different” from “the idea of the church.”10 Titus, and his desire to give death, maps for us the desire underlying the Genesis 22 narrative.
When Titus’s son Mutius attempts to prevent the marriage of his sister Lavinia to the emperor Saturninus, Titus suddenly and surprisingly murders his own son (1.1.295). Another son, Lucius, immediately tells Titus “you are unjust” (1.1.297). But Saturninus’s brother, Bassianus, tells an audience the deed was done in “zeal” (1.1.424) for Rome. “Rome and the righteous heavens” (1.1.431), Titus claims, will be his judge. The Abrahamic desire for something absolutely Other that leads to deeds that defy common sense, normative ethics, and self-interest manifest themselves in Titus Andronicus and, in particular, in the title character’s actions. Titus’s killing of his son in Act 1 stems from his absolute “religious” devotion to Rome and Roman honor. In this instance, Taymor’s film version is absolutely correct to depict Mutius’s head on a sacrificial lamb in one of Titus’s visions.11
Of course, Titus’s is not an unproblematic religiosity for Shakespeare or a Shakespearean audience. Mutius’s death is a bloody sacrifice to Rome, not an Abrahamic gift outside sacrificial, economical logic. Indeed, the audience has been asked to question Titus’s religion from the play’s earliest moments. As Tamora pleads for her son who is about to be sacrificed, Titus explains that he and his family act “religiously” (1.1.127). The Queen of the Goths immediately challenges this claim: “O cruel, irreligious piety!”(1.1.133). An early modern Christian audience may have been tempted at this moment to agree with Tamora’s description of sacrifice. Tamora’s other sons, Chiron and Demetrius, compare Rome to Scythia, suggesting even that “civilized” Rome might be more barbaric than “barbaric” Scythia (1.1.134–35).12 The absence of the Christian God from the world of the play lends credibility to Tamora’s assessment of Titus’s religion, as does the dramaturgy.
At this early moment in the play, an audience would tend to feel more for Tamora, the mother pleading for her child’s life, than for the apparently stoic and victorious general. Later, at the moment of Alarbus’s sacrifice, it is far from clear whether Shakespeare wants audiences to admire Titus’s religious devotion—his willingness to give death—or not. When it comes to Titus Andronicus and the matter of sacrifice in particular, Nicholas Moschovakis has offered a qualified, slightly more religious version of Harold Bloom’s position on Shakespeare’s “secular transcendence”: “I do not claim for Shakespeare an attitude so prophetic of the Enlightenment or as skeptical in spirit. Still, to foreground human sacrifice [as Titus Andronicus clearly does] was to underline the need for Christians to make a clear distinction between pious and impious sacrifices and to understand how the notion of expiatory violence in Christianity differed from similar concepts in other religions.”13 In short, Shakespeare was Christian, but distant enough from his Christian culture to offer some kind of critique of it. “Shakespeare’s tragedy invites Christians,” Moschovakis argues, to question the violence seemingly inherent to Christianity.14 He suggests that Shakespeare had a “sense of the dubiousness (if not the absurdity) of post-Reformation polemics.”15 Even when critics clearly recognize the religious in Shakespeare, they feel compelled to explain the strangeness of that religion by somehow secularizing it.
I would point out, though, that Shakespeare immediately begins guiding audience sympathies toward—strange as it sounds—the zealous sacrificial impulses of Titus.16 The sacrifice of Titus’s own son Mutius, for interfering with the Emperor’s decree, forcefully establishes the consistency of the general’s beliefs. Even Titus’s own children do not outweigh his religious devotion to Rome. In the killing of Mutius, Titus quickly and dramatically answers Tamora’s plea to treat her children as his own (“if thy sons were ever dear to thee . . . [1.1.110–11]). This reading, by the way, would help explain the “Longleat Manuscript,” or “Peachum” drawing, which confusingly depicts a scene in the play that never happens. In that unique illustration a dark-skinned figure, presumably Aaron, holds a sword over two grown men and points at them.17 The gesture seems directed at Titus. If there were a caption for the picture, it might read, “Would you want this to happen to your sons?” This reading of the Longleat Manuscript is certainly in keeping with the play’s opening emphasis on the sons Titus has lost in combat; and it is consistent, too, with the direct killing of Mutius by Titus right after Tamora has pled for mercy for her sons. For his part, Shakespeare makes it clear that Titus may have been perversely devout in the sacrifice of Alarbus, but not murderous. Tamora, on the other hand, is different. She intends a “massacre” (1.1.451.). In quick succession the playwright provides the villainy of Aaron, the horror of Chiron and Demetrius, and the apparently short-lived grief of Tamora, who enters 2.3 with plenty of “lust” for Aaron but hardly a hint of worry about Alarbus. All this Shakespeare provides before the murder of Bassianus and the rape and mutilation of Lavinia.
An audience still can sympathize with the recently freed prisoners of Titus, and critics rightly have pointed out the logic of revenge for these alienated others trapped within the Roman Empire. But Shakespeare seems more intent on differentiating between the “pious”—albeit non-Christian and still sacrificial—actions of the Andronici and the excesses of Tamora et al. Tamora quite pointedly refuses Lavinia’s plea for a “charitable murder” (2.3.178). In brief, Tamora goes well beyond the child-for-child sacrifice Lavinia offers when Tamora reminds her of Alarbus. Similarly, Shakespeare displays not only Chiron and Demetrius’s rape and mutilation of Lavinia, but also their disturbing taunting of her afterward (2.4.1–10). Titus’s sacrificial “piety” may be “irreligious” for a Christian audience, but in this very early play, through these famous excesses, Shakespeare seems to want to make clear, perhaps clumsily, that this piety compares quite favorably to other non-Christian horrors. Moreover, he seems to want to make almost a typological link between Titus’s piety within the play and the piety of his own Christian culture. Titus cannot produce the pure Abrahamic Christian gift, but he prefigures it by desiring it.
When Act 3 opens, Lucius finds Titus praying for his sons who have been wrongly accused of Bassianus’s murder. These prayers are “bootless” (3.1.75) from an Elizabethan audience’s perspective, not only because the tribunes refuse to spare Titus’s children, but because the Roman does not pray to the Christian God. But pray Titus “must” (3.1.35), and this would draw an audience’s sympathy and should draw our attention too. Unlike Lucius, Titus does not immediately seek revenge; he has faith in Rome and its tribunes even though he knows they will not grant his request. Titus desires to give to the absolutely Other—again, the Roman state, not God—without guarantee of reward. This pre-Christian character reveals the same structural desire to give everything, absolutely, over to the Other that determines Christianity, but his position in history leaves him only with a “stone” (3.1.29) to pray to and bloody sacrifices to a state. We should note, too, that Titus displays remarkable empathy for his severely injured daughter in this scene, in a way that moves most audiences, past and present.18
And then Shakespeare reveals the position of the Andronici from the playwright’s Christian perspective: “O, what a sympathy of woe is this, / As far from help as Limbo is from bliss!” (3.1.148–49). The Andronici’s religiosity is not Christian, and is thus suspect, but it deserves the sympathy of those, like Dante’s Virgil, trapped in Limbo. It deserves that sympathy, and the Andronici deserve their place in Limbo (at least), because, again, of their willingness to seek to give everything over to the Other. More precisely, the Andronici deserve sympathy for their desire to escape Limbo, even through sacrifice. This desire to avoid Limbo had motivated the initial sacrifice of Alarbus (1.1.77–101); only at this later point in the play is an audience encouraged to grant more sympathy to the spiritual place of the Andronici. The Andronici, especially Titus, are thus figured as pre-Christian (Catholics).
Tamora, Chiron, Demetrius, and Aaron are also non-Christian, but they are not pre-Christian; Shakespeare makes the distinction primarily over their unwillingness to give everything over, even in sacrifice. As Titus and his family grieve, Aaron enters and mocks the Andronici’s sacrificial urges. He asks for a hand, any Andronici hand, to be chopped off in exchange for mercy for the sentenced sons (3.1.150–56). The “zeal” of the Andronici produces some grotesque comedy as Titus, Marcus, and Lucius argue over who will “give” the hand.
That Aaron in particular mocks their desire to give everything over marks a crucial contrast between the Moor and the Andronici. That contrast is most strikingly realized in the next scene, involving the birth of Aaron and Tamora’s illegitimate child. Critics have long been intrigued by this moment of sudden compassion in the otherwise amoral Moor who refuses to kill his own son to preserve the new-found place of the Goths in Rome. In a very useful review of twentieth-century scholarship, Philip C. Kolin calls Aaron’s love for his son “one of the most vexatious problems” of the play.19 Setting the play in an Abrahamic context provides a new way to understand this strange twist in Aaron’s character.
Aaron, I would argue, is in part a pre-Muslim figure, and he functions as a contrast to the pre-Christian Titus.20 Having no desire for the absolute Other, this character values only the self/same: in this case, his son. “My mistress is my mistress,” Aaron says upon receiving his child; “this myself, / The vigour and the picture of my youth, / This before all the world do I prefer, / This maugre all the world I will keep safe, / Or some of you shall smoke for it in Rome” (4.2.109–14). Aaron’s famous sudden compassion is not compassion at all, but an attempt by Shakespeare, a Christian, to disassociate this pre-Muslim from the common Abrahamic/Ibrahamic lineage as part of playwright’s larger exploration of what the true “gift” is. Unlike Titus, Aaron refuses to give death to his son to respond to the absolutely Other. There are, again, few contexts where not killing a child could be considered in any sense “evil” or “irreligious,” but Genesis 22 is certainly one, if not the one.
I do not anticipate this being a particularly popular reading of Aaron. It antagonizes those who want to believe in the supremely humane Shakespeare of the great tradition who gives even his worst villain a touch of humanity.21 And it equally antagonizes those more current readers who want to see Aaron and the preservation of his baby as “registering” the viable presence (or anxiety about the viable presence) of the barbaric/black/Moor/Muslim other.22 But Aaron is evil throughout, especially in his preservation of his son; and Aaron’s baby registers no viable presence of the “other”—as in other peoples or cultures, let alone anxiety about the presence of the other—only a carefully constructed version of difference by a Christian playwright. Marcus points to the child at the end of the play as incriminating evidence rather than as a persistent or potential problem (5.1.119–31). I will return to this point shortly.
Perhaps more problematic for the popularity of my reading is the fact that it reveals the proximity between these two seemingly distinct understandings of Shakespeare. The humane Shakespeare of the great tradition and the new historical Shakespearean text are two sides of the same coin. The former wants to believe in a Shakespeare who has universal compassion for everyone and the latter wants to believe in a Shakespearean “social text” that, with the aid of a properly empathetic reader, registers the significance of all peoples. This common relationship between these two Shakespeares manifests itself strikingly at the end of Taymor’s Titus, which concludes with Titus’s grandson carrying Aaron’s son into the sunrise (due east? to a new day?) as if the saved life signifies potential unity and harmony rather than an ancient and persistent difference. Unlike her rendering of Mutius’s sacrifice, here Taymor misreads history and religion.23
The persistent contrast and difference between Titus and Aaron seems rather stark, in fact, once introducing the Abrahamic context. When the nurse brings the “blackamoor” child on stage soon after his birth, she calls for “Aaron the Moor.” He responds in appropriate, if perverted, Abrahamic language, recalling the patriarch’s famous, unhesitating response to God in Genesis 22, “Here I am.”
Nurse: Good morrow, lords.
O, tell me, did you see Aaron the Moor?
Aaron: Well, more or less, or ne’er a whit at all,
Here Aaron is; and what with Aaron now?
(4.2.50–53, emphasis added)
Clearly, the nurse brings the child for a sacrifice—“The empress sends it thee, thy stamp, thy seal, / And bids thee christen it with thy dagger’s point” (4.2.69–70)—and this Moorish Abraham, rather irritated by the intrusive call to duty, refuses. He offers a substitute sacrifice of the nurse, transformed into, not a ram, but a pig: “Wheak, wheak!—/ So cries the pig prepared to spit” (4.2.147–48). One can usefully compare the response of a later Shakespearean “Moor,” called on after yet another flawed sacrifice: “That’s he that was Othello. Here I am” (5.2.292, emphasis added).
This is not to suggest that Shakespeare is particularly or peculiarly anti-Islamic. The lines call attention not only to Aaron, but also to Aaron’s often confusing name and ancestry. Leslie Fiedler was perhaps the first to point out the “Jewishness” implied in the name of this black Moor.24 Shakespeare repeats Aaron’s name three times in three lines, and Aaron himself makes a pun based on the fact that the designation “Moor” is not essential (“Well, more or less”) and, moreover, suggests sardonically that he may never have been a Moor at all (“or ne’er a whit at all”). At this sacrificial moment at least, Shakespeare’s Aaron is neither Muslim nor Jew in particular, but a non-Christian Abrahamic conflation juxtaposed with the pre-Christian Titus.25 The contrast is all.
The creation of Aaron has long been linked to Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, and that link is nowhere clearer than in this sacrificial scene and the treatment of Aaron’s name. In Marlowe’s play the “circumcised” enemies of Christendom, the Jewish Barabas and the Muslim Ithamore, join forces in villainy. As Julia Reinhard Lupton accurately points out, “The name Ithamore is itself borrowed from the Old Testament, where ‘Ithamar’ appears as the youngest son of Aaron (Exod. 6.23); by intensifying ‘-mar’ into ‘-more,’ Marlowe has effectively Islamicized this type of Jewish priest, semantically flagging the link between Judaic and Muslim law according to the habits of Christian typology.”26 In Renaissance England, Jew and Muslim often are linked as Abrahamic “others.” Shakespeare’s later choice of “Aaron,” Lupton goes on to suggest briefly in a note, simply clarifies Marlowe’s “allusive conflation of the two identities . . . substituting the familiar father for the obscure son.”27 In some sense, then, at this crucial moment in Act 4 of Titus Andronicus, Aaron combines the villainy of Marlowe’s Barabas and Ithamore in his refusal to sacrifice his son. The parallels to Othello, again, are striking. As Lupton reminds us, in the last lines of the Folio version at least, the Moor of Venice refers to himself at the moment of arch-villainy as the “base Judean” (5.2.357).
In his unflinching willingness to sacrifice children, the Roman Titus stands closer to Abraham and the Abrahamic gift than the self-centered Jew/Muslim Aaron, who is willing to give up all of Rome to save his son. This is true of Titus’s later sacrifice of Lavinia as well. In his revenge, Titus seeks to reconstitute the sacrificial logic of Roman law. Before sacrificing Lavinia, before giving the “charitable murder” she pleaded for earlier, Titus turns to Saturninus for a ruling based on legal precedent. And, thus, while a modern audience may not like it, Titus reestablishes the religious piety—his willingness to give completely, everything, absolutely to Rome—that had been interrupted by the presence of the Goths and Aaron the Moor.
This is not, I should stress, the piety sought by Shakespeare and his audience, but a flawed pre-Christian version of such piety. Titus’s Roman pre-Christianity certainly needs Reformation. Obviously, it misunderstands sacrifice and is committed to the wrong god; Titus sacrifices lives for Rome, rather than adhering to the one-time Christian sacrifice. As Aaron astutely puts it to Lucius near the end of the play, the Andronici are “idiots” for holding a “bauble for a god / And keep[ing] the oath which by that god he swears” (5.179–80). In fact, Aaron’s later perspective on the religion of the Andronici is more illuminating than Tamora’s early charge of “irreligious” piety. The religion of the Andronici remains vulnerable and flawed, he points out, because of its peculiar Roman “Catholicism,” a phase the “true” church must pass through before it emerges into its Protestant form.28
Aaron saves his son by understanding and manipulating this proto-Catholicism, just as he extracted Titus’s hand by playing on the general’s sacrificial impulses. In Act 5 Lucius agrees to spare the child if Aaron provides information, but Aaron demands first that Lucius “swear” to it (5.1.70). Lucius asks, “Who should I swear by? Thou believest no god. / That granted, how canst thou believe an oath?” (5.1.71–72). Aaron responds,
What if I do not? As, indeed, I do not.
Yet for I know thou art religious,
And hast a thing within thee called conscience,
With twenty popish tricks and ceremonies
Which I have I seen thee careful to observe,
Therefore I urge thy oath. For that I know
An idiot holds a bauble for a god
And keeps the oath which by that god he swears,
To that I’ll urge him. Therefore thou shalt vow
By that same god, what god soe’er it be
That thou adorest and hast in reverence,
To save my boy, to nourish and bring him up,
Or else I will discover naught to thee.
(5.1.73–85)
To the extent that the continued presence of Aaron’s son registers anxiety about alterity in Shakespeare’s imagination, it registers only the anxiety the Moorish other creates for Catholicism (and perhaps, more specifically, the empire of Catholic Spain facing off against the Islamic Ottoman Empire). The flaws of Catholicism preserved and nourished this “other,” the play suggests, not the developing Reformation culture of the play itself. In this, again, we see some commonality with Othello, where the fragility of that Christian conversion is tied to Italianate Catholicism and ultimately undone by the presumably Catholic and certainly Spanish Iago. In that tragedy, the Spanish Catholic villain undermines Othello to abandon his newly discovered faith by looking (as an iconophile) for truth, or “ocular proof” (3.3.370).
For the “true” Reformed church of Shakespeare’s England, the Abrahamic other that is Aaron’s son presents no problem. Shakespeare remains content to point toward the perfect piety imagined by Reformation culture, with or without Aaron and his son. Marlowe’s Barabas reminds us, and perhaps he did Shakespeare, that at least one historical Titus, the son of Vespasian who conquered Jerusalem in 70 A.D., brought emergent Christianity to the world’s consciousness: “Swine-eating Christians, / Unchosen nation, never circumcised, / Such as, poor villains, were ne’er thought upon / Till Titus and Vespasian conquered us” (2.3.7–10).29 But the total ambiguity on the matter is critical. Because of the Protestant restrictions on showing the sacred, one can also say that Shakespeare remains content to think that the true Abrahamic gift is outside the economy of exchange—in between Titus’s (Kierkegaardian?) sacrificial urges and Aaron’s (Levinasian?) devotion to his son—rather than display “the impossible.”
In short, locating and understanding the “other” in Shakespeare is simply more difficult than modern critics have allowed. To understand the playwright’s interest in alterity we cannot stop at Aaron, but we must be willing to follow Shakespeare through to the aporetics of impossibility that motivate his work—here, Aaron, an absolutely Other Abrahamic “Aaron,” is sought, but not possessed. We have, of course, a perfectly good reason not to do any such thing, not to expose ourselves or our critical methodology to that kind of religious (Derridean?) alterity again. For we have our Aaron right where we want him now. We have hold of him—this barbaric/black/Moor/Muslim/Other—who is, if not buried “breast-deep in [the] earth” (5.3.179), coddled in our arms (crying, perhaps, “I am no baby” [5.3.185]), an infantilized version of ourselves: an educated, globalized outsider, ironically and proudly disdainful of and resistant to a dominant culture, suggesting in his very being an interracial, global community of the future, and still a loving, compassionate, protective parent at home.
From a much different, critical, and provocative materialist perspective, Alain Badiou recently has made the powerful point that our “ethics” and, in particular, our ethical attention to the “other” is altogether too closely related to the religious. Because Levinas’s efforts to locate alterity in the other individual—the face-to-face—always returns to the self/same,
The phenomenon of the [Levinasian] other (his face) must then attest to a radical alterity which he nevertheless does not contain by himself. The Other, as he appears to me in the order of the finite, must be the epiphany of a properly infinite distance to the other, the traversal of which is the originary ethical experience. This means that in order to be intelligible, [our Levinasian] ethics requires that the Other be in some sense carried by a principle of alterity which transcends mere finite experience. Levinas calls this principle the ‘Altogether-Other,’ and it is quite obviously the ethical name for God. . . . To put it crudely: Levinas’s enterprise serves to remind us, with extraordinary insistence, that every effort to turn ethics into a principle of thought and action is essentially religious. . . . [E]thics is a category of pious discourse.30
“Whether [we] know it or not,” Badiou writes, and whether we like it or not, it is this Levinasian ethical/religious strain of twentieth-century phenomenology that underwrites much of early modern studies’ critical interest in alterity. In other words, reconsidering Shakespeare’s interest in alterity forces us to confront our own interest, and, surprisingly enough, the contrast reveals our interest as rather geared toward the self or same of Western metaphysics. We like Aaron because he is the “other” who is like us.
Even more, it seems to me our inclination as critics to embody alterity in Aaron renders us rather incarnational—that is, in some sense more Christian than Shakespeare, whose drama, if not his actual, personal faith and culture, points, like Kierkegaard or Derrida, “in the direction of a certain Abraham” beyond Christianity and outside Western metaphysics. Shakespeare’s profound and devout Christianity—his “religion without religion”—is both older than ours and still to come. We now habitually see Shakespeare pointing to the future: How far does he see?
This is a question to which I will turn in the next two chapters.