Chapter 2

Tarquin and Aaron

We began with Iago as Shakespeare’s archetypal villain, who sums up the qualities of many previous villains. I would like to proceed now with a discussion that is more or less chronological, beginning with Tarquin in The Rape of Lucrece and Aaron in Titus Andronicus. I think we find that Shakespeare, very early in his career, started to think of the villain in specific ways, probably related to the Vice figure in the morality plays that Bernard Spevack discusses so rewardingly in Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil (New York, 1958). To turn the discussion the other way around, Tarquin and Aaron are both villains whose traits are more fully developed in Iago.

The Rape of Lucrece and Titus Andronicus were probably written very close to each other in the early 1590’s; it cannot convincingly be determined which came first.1 Tarquin is surprisingly well developed as a dramatic character. Although he is certain that the rape of Lucrece is wrong, he is powerfully motivated to exercise his will. His debate with himself has all the rudiments of dramatic conflict. Without any mitigation, he knows that what he plans to do is loathsome, so that when he considers the moral issues it seems as if he is trying to convince himself not to do a deed that will stain his honor forever:

And die, unhallowed thoughts, before you blot

With your uncleanness that which is divine.

Offer pure incense to so pure a shrine.

Let fair humanity abhor the deed

That spots and stains love’s modest snow-white weed. (192–96)

He is sure of his own debasement: “A martial man to be soft fancy’s slave” (200).

His anticipation of a momentary sexual pleasure is similar to the intense disillusionment of Sonnet 129, “Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame.” Tarquin is interesting as a tragic figure because he is so clear-sighted about the limitations of the sexual fulfillment he so avidly seeks:

What win I if I gain the thing I seek?

A dream, a breath, a froth of fleeting joy.

Who buys a minute’s mirth to wail a week?

Or sells eternity to get a toy [trifle]? (211–14)

He has none of Troilus’s transcendental yearnings in Troilus and Cressida after a joy that is teasingly transient. Tarquin engages in a moral debate, a “disputation/‘Tween frozen conscience and hot-burning will” (246–47). We know how it will end, but we are engaged by his conscience, which hardly seems frozen at this point. It is actively in play.

The debate soon comes to an end as Tarquin asserts his manly, military, youthful will: “Affection is my captain” (271) and not reason: “Desire my pilot is, beauty my prize;/Then who fears sinking where such treasure lies?” (279–80). There is a strong emphasis on will (as opposed to reason), as there is in Shakespeare’s sonnets 135 and 136 (with extensive puns on Shakespeare’s name, Will). Tarquin speaks of his will as if it were an inevitable force that Lucrece cannot possibly resist: “thou with patience must my will abide,/ My will that marks thee for my earth’s delight” (486–87). In this dualistic argument, he speaks of his will as something over which even he himself has no control: “But Will is deaf, and hears no heedful friends;/Only he hath an eye to gaze on Beauty” (495–96). He allegorizes and personifies his Will (a rhetorical strategy that Lucrece is overly fond of later in the poem). Tarquin addresses apostrophes to himself. There is a strong emphasis on military imagery, as if he were the conqueror laying siege to Lucrece’s beauty. He is “come to scale/ Thy never-conquered fort” (481–82).

Tarquin also uses a good deal of animal imagery to define his aggressive, manly purpose, and this creates a model for many of Shakespeare’s villains. His sword is “like a falcon tow’ring in the skies” (506). He is like the cockatrice or basilisk, the fabulous creature with a “dead-killing eye” (540). (Compare Aaron’s “deadly-standing eye” in Titus Andronicus 2.3.32, another basilisk allusion.) Lucrece like a “weak mouse panteth” (555), while Tarquin, the “foul night-walking cat” (554), dallies with her. Her serious behavior only “feeds his vulture folly” (556). Later on Tarquin is a “wolf” (677), a “full-fed hound or gorgèd hawk” (694), a “thievish dog”(736), a “wand’ring wasp” (839), a canker “worm” (848), a cuckoo, and a toad (849–50)—all animals and insects connected with destructive and disgusting prey. Tarquin is not literally a murderer in this narrative, but he in effect kills Lucrece when he chooses to rape her. This is another continuing theme for villains: they tend to be either killers or without any scruples about killing to accomplish their purposes.

In the Troy tapestry that Lucrece describes in such detail, the duplicitous Sinon in the Trojan horse is compared with Tarquin:

For even as subtile Sinon here is painted,

So sober-sad, so weary, and so mild

(As if with grief or travail he had fainted),

To me came Tarquin armèd, to beguiled [beguile]

With outward honesty, but yet defiled

With inward vice. As Priam him did cherish,

So did I Tarquin; so my Troy did perish. (1541–47)

Like Tarquin, Sinon is a “confirmèd devil” (1513) who hides his “secret evil” (1515). He is “perjured Sinon, whose enchanting story/The credulous old Priam after slew” (1521–22). It is the false appearance of Sinon that deeply disturbs Lucrece: “So fair a form lodged not a mind so ill” (1530). She somehow holds herself at fault, like Priam, for not being able to see through Tarquin (here analogized with Sinon). But Priam, like Lucrece, was won over by Sinon’s seemingly truthful narrative.

It is only a short step from Tarquin and Sinon in The Rape of Lucrece to Aaron in Titus Andronicus.2 Titus remembers Tarquin when Lavinia uses a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses to compare her own rape and dismemberment with that of Philomena, which is of course the source story for the rape of Lucrece. Titus thinks mistakenly that it was Saturnine “as Tarquin erst,/ That left the camp to sin in Lucrece’ bed” (4.1.63–64). Later in the scene Marcus refers to Brutus, who swore to take revenge for the rape of “that chaste dishonored dame” (90). These references suggest that Shakespeare was thinking of The Rape of Lucrece while he was writing Titus Andronicus (or vice versa)—the rapes of Lucrece and Lavinia are conceptually quite close.

What allies Aaron with Iago is his jocularity, a term that Spevack uses to trace the origin of Shakespeare’s villains in the Vice figure of the morality plays. Very early in Othello, Iago tells Roderigo that if he can cuckold Othello “thou dost thyself a pleasure, me a sport” (1.3.364–65), and a few lines further in his soliloquy Iago assures the audience that he is only spending time with such a “snipe” as Roderigo “for my sport and profit” (377). The word “sport” is eroticized when Iago speaks of intercourse as “the act of sport” (2.1.226) and Desdemona herself as “sport for Jove” (2.3.17).

Similarly, in his proud recital of his deeds in Act V, scene i, Aaron uses “sport” as a sexual word for the rape and dismemberment of Lavinia:

Why, she was washed, and cut, and trimmed, and ’twas

Trim sport for them which had the doing of it. (95–96)

Aaron puns mercilessly on “trim,” which is both a barber’s term and a familiar adjective meaning fine, nice, or pretty. He is thoroughly enjoying himself in his shockingly original and expansive discourse, which Lucius questions: “O detestable villain! Call’st thou that trimming?” (94) Aaron is proud of his verbal dexterity. When Titus cuts off his own right hand in a futile effort to redeem his sons from death, Aaron also thinks of this event as “sport”:

And when I told the Empress of this sport,

She sounded [swooned] almost at my pleasing tale,

And for my tidings gave me twenty kisses. (118–20)

Beyond the idea of evil deeds as sport—and “sport” is also a favorite word of Puck in Act III, scene ii of A Midsummer Night’s Dream—Aaron overreaches Iago in his own hearty laughter at his clever exploits. By way of confession, he tells Lucius:

I played the cheater for thy father’s hand,

And when I had it drew myself apart,

And almost broke my heart with extreme laughter.

I pried me through the crevice of a wall,

When for his hand he had his two sons’ heads;

Beheld his tears and laughed so heartily

That both mine eyes were rainy like to his. . . . (111–17)

A “cheater” is an escheater, an officer appointed to look after property forfeited to the King (with a pun on the usual sense of “cheat”). This is a high point for Aaron in the play. He is thoroughly enjoying his own gleeful account of his adventures and how shocking all of this is to his hearers. Aaron’s speech sounds like the vaunting of Barrabas and Ithamore in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, a play written just a few years before Titus (around 1592). This is the essence of Shakespeare’s black comedy.

If we go back to the scene itself (III,i), we see Aaron at his most sardonic, which is a good word for him because it includes ideas of bitterness, scorn, and mockery. Titus, distracted by grief, speaks to Aaron as a trusted friend (as Othello does to Iago):

With all my heart, I’ll send the Emperor my hand.

Good Aaron, wilt thou help to chop it off? (160–61)

Aaron is delighted with the irony and says aside:

If that be called deceit, I will be honest,

And never whilst I live deceive men so:

But I’ll deceive you in another sort,

And that you’ll say, ere half an hour pass.

He cuts off Titus’ hand. (188–91)

There is again the adjective “honest,” a favorite word for Iago and for Brutus, too, in Antony’s funeral oration in Julius Caesar.

In another soliloquy before he exits, Aaron expresses pure pleasure at his ingenious scheme: “O, how this villainy/ Doth fat me with the very thought of it!” (203). “Fat” means to make fat or to nourish. Aaron is really enjoying himself, as he expresses it in this triumphant couple when he exits:

Let fools do good, and fair men call for grace,

Aaron will have his soul black like his face. (204–5)

Aaron is, of course, joking when he speaks of his soul because he makes it clear in the play that he is an atheist,3 as are many villains in Shakespeare, most notably Edmund, whose goddess is Nature. Iago, too, is certainly a firm believer in Nature rather than in anything even vaguely religious.

The point is made explicitly in Act V, scene i. Aaron tells Lucius that he shall not reveal any of his deeds unless Lucius swears that his black baby shall live. Lucius asks the obvious question:

Who should I swear by? Thou believest no god:

That granted, how canst thou believe an oath? (71–72)

Aaron acknowledges that he is non-believer, but he teases Lucius about his conscience, which seems very Catholic in this exchange:

What if I do not? As indeed I do not;

Yet, for I know thou art religious,

And hast a thing within thee callèd conscience,

With twenty popish tricks and ceremonies,

Which I have seen thee careful to observe,

Therefore I urge thy oath; for that I know

An idiot holds his bauble for a god,

And keeps the oath which by that god he swears. . . . (73–80)

Nothing further is said about Lucius’s religion, but he does swear “by my god” (86) that he will protect Aaron’s black baby. Even though Aaron doesn’t believe in any god, he likes the ceremony of swearing. He is a devotee of Nature.

At the very end of the play, Marcus speaks of Aaron as “that misbelieving Moor” (5.3.143), and Lucius pronounces a horrible judgment on him, but Aaron’s last speech is boastingly defiant:

I am no baby, I, that with base prayers

I should repent the evils I have done:

Ten thousand worse than ever yet I did

Would I perform, if I might have my will:

If one good deed in all my life I did,

I do repent it from my very soul. (185–90)

Aaron is a self-promoting creature of will who rejects totally Christian prayer and repentance. His final speech sounds like a kind of heroic vaunting that Iago never indulges in.

Aaron, like Othello, is a Moor, but in this play an important distinction is made between the civilized Romans and the uncivilized Goths and Moors. The difference is enunciated in the first scene, when Marcus exhorts his brother Titus to allow for the burial of his son Mutius (whom Titus has slain) in the family tomb: “Thou art a Roman, be not barbarous” (379). In other words, Titus must adhere to a high moral standard, just as Cleopatra the Egyptian claims that she will commit suicide “after the high Roman fashion/ And make death proud to take us” (Antony and Cleopatra 4.15.86–87). Aaron is a Moor, a “barbarous Moor” (2.3.78 and 5.3.4), “coal-black” (4.2.99) like his infant son—also “coal-black” like the mad Titus’s fly (3.2.78)—but there is no mention made of his being from Africa. He enters the play in the first scene as a prisoner of war in Titus’s triumphal procession, along with Tamora, the Queen of the Goths, and her three sons.

We learn from his Marlovian soliloquy in Act II, scene i that Tamora is Aaron’s mistress:

whom thou in triumph long

Hast prisoner held, fettered in amorous chains,

And faster bound to Aaron’s charming eyes

Than is Prometheus tied to Caucasus. (14–17)

There is parade of classical allusions and quotations (or near quotations) in Shakespeare’s first Roman play. After Aaron’s black baby is born, he takes it to the Goths, “There to dispose this treasure in mine arms,/And secretly to greet the Empress’ friends” (4.2.174–75). The child will be brought up close to nature, since Aaron himself is a natural man without any religious beliefs:

I’ll make you feed on berries and on roots,

And feed on curds and whey, and suck the goat,

And cabin in a cave. . . . (178–80)

This sounds like the misogynistic Timon in Timon of Athens after he has fled Athens to live in the woods. In Act V, scene i Aaron is captured by a soldier of the Goths, now led by Lucius, the exiled son of Titus.

As a “misbelieving” (5.3.143), “irreligious” (121) Moor, Aaron trusts only in his own will. Like many of Shakespeare’s villains, Aaron speaks in a familiar, colloquial, style that often uses vulgar, sexual words. For example, when he is advising Chiron and Demetrius, the sons of Tamora, on how to rape and mutilate Lavinia, he proceeds immediately to the heart of their dilemma:

Why then, it seems, some certain snatch or so

Would serve your turns.

Chiron. Ay, so the turn were served.

Demetrius. Aaron, thou hast hit it.

Aaron. Would you had hit it too,

Then should not we be tired with this ado. (2.1.95–98)

Both Jonathan Bate, the Arden editor of the Third Series. and J. C. Maxwell, the previous Arden editor, note the bawdy context without noting that “snatch” is a current slang term for the vulva or vagina (Random House Dictionary, 2 ed., meaning 13). “Turn” and “hit” are also specifically sexual terms. The Messenger reporting Antony’s marriage to Octavia answers Cleopatra’s “For what good turn?” with “For the best turn i’ th’ bed” (Antony and Cleopatra 2.5.58–59). “Hit” is used very often in Shakespeare with sexual innuendo (to hit a target), nowhere more repeatedly than in the wit combat in Love’s Labor’s Lost (4.1.120–30).

Even Chiron and Demetrius seem shocked by Aaron’s aggressive vulgarity in Act IV, scene ii when the birth of Aaron and Tamora’s black baby is revealed. Demetrius asks the obvious question: “Villain, what hast thou done?,” to which Aaron replies curtly: “That which thou canst not undo.” But Chiron insists on spelling out the public shame: “Thou hast undone our mother.” But the jokey Aaron has the last, punning word: “Villain, I have done thy mother” (73–76). Antony and Cleopatra, too, has many eroticized references to “doing it” (“do’t” at l.l.38, l.2.79, and 4.l5.86).

Like all of Shakespeare’s villains, Aaron uses significant animal imagery, which links him to man’s animal nature. Without any speeches or moral reflections, he kills the Nurse who announces the delivery of his black baby as if he were sticking a pig. Only the Empress, the Nurse, and the midwife know of its existence, so Aaron acts decisively to dispose of the witnesses:

Go to the Empress, tell her this I said.

He kills her.

Wheak, wheak!

So cries a pig preparèd to the spit. (4.2.145–47)

This is the jocular Aaron thoroughly enjoying himself by a sudden stabbing right on stage. “Wheak, wheak” imitates the squealing of a stuck pig. It’s the only occurrence of this word in Shakespeare and a sign of Aaron’s mimetic, linguistic energy.

In the final scene, Lucius calls Aaron “This ravenous tiger” (5.3.5) as he does Tamora (195), and Aaron is also an “inhuman dog” (14). Earlier, Demetrius called Aaron a “hellish dog” (4.2.77), but Aaron is proud of this connection. In boastfully revealing his dark deeds to Lucius, Aaron seeks praise for his tutoring of Chiron and Demetrius in their rape and dismemberment of Lavinia:

That bloody mind, I think, they learned of me,

As true a dog as ever fought at head. (5.l.100–1)

J. C. Maxwell quotes Dr. Johnson’s explanation that this is a reference to bulldogs seizing the bull by the nose,4 but it may also be a more familiar reference to the brave dogs in the bloody sport of bear-baiting. Aaron always thinks that his diabolical deeds are praiseworthy. When a Goth soldier asks: “What, canst thou say all this and never blush?,” Aaron refers him to the familiar proverb: “Ay, like the black dog, as the saying is” (121–22). “To blush like a black dog” (Tilley D507) was proverbial for brazenness and impudence. We remember Roderigo’s anguished cry when Iago stabs him: “O damned Iago! O inhuman dog!” (5.1.62). As Armstrong points out, dogs generally have negative connotations in Shakespeare.5

Aaron, like Iago and many of Shakespeare’s villains, is a plotter who takes particular pleasure in his schemes and stratagems. They are a product of his vivid imagination, as the play itself is the product of Shakespeare’s imagination. This link between villain and author is a puzzling but teasing element in all of Shakespeare’s works. “Policy” (and “politic” and “politician”) are key words for many of Shakespeare’s villains. Aaron uses “policy” only twice, but both occurrences are significantly negative. In his advice to Chiron and Demetrius on how to rape and dismember Lavinia, “’Tis policy and stratagem must do/ That you affect” (2.1.104–5). In other words they must be cunning and crafty and not direct in their pursuit of Lavinia. “Policy” was the word associated with the popular Renaissance idea of Machiavellianism, derived loosely from the chilling doctrines of machiavelli’s The Prince (written in 1513 and translated into English in 1640, but notorious popular for its diabolic doctrines). When Aaron kills the Nurse who announces the birth of his and Tamora’s black baby, he calls it

a deed of policy!

Shall she live to betray this guilt of ours?

A long-tongued babbling gossip? No, lords, no. (4.2.149–51)

This murder is just the right thing for a politic villain to do.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “policy” in its “bad sense” as political expediency: “cunning, craftiness, dissimulation” (sense 4). The word is especially associated with Polonius in Hamlet, who “hunts the trail of policy” (2.2.47). After Hamlet kills him, he declares satirically that “A certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him” (4.3.19–21). In Coriolanus, the protagonist protests against his mother’s equivocating desire to combine “Honor and policy” (3.2. 42; also 46–48). In Timon of Athens, the First Stranger comments like a chorus on the cynical indifference of Timon’s so-called friends: “For policy sits above conscience” (3.2.92). In The Taming of the Shrew, Petruchio boasts that his plan for the taming of Kate seems to be working: “Thus have I politicly begun my reign” (4.1.182). I could go on with many further citations, but “policy,” “politic,” and related words are used frequently by Shakespeare with strongly negative connotations.

Like “policy,” “practice” is another word associated with villains. Tamora dressed as Revenge is sure that she can trick Titus, who she believes is mad:

I’ll find some cunning practice out of hand [at once],

To scatter and disperse the giddy Goths,

Or at the least make them his enemies. (5.2.77–79)

A “practice” is a scheme or stratagem, as in the case of Laertes, killed with his own “Unbated and envenomed” rapier (Hamlet 5.2.318): “The foul practice/ Hath turned itself on me” (318–19). In King Lear Edmund concocts a speech for his brother Edgar about his “plot and damned practice” (2.1.73) against his father. And in Othello, Iago’s second speech in the play looks to the future in the words he uses to condemn Cassio: “Mere prattle without practice/ Is all his soldiership” (l.l.23–24). Iago’s boasted “practice,” or practical knowledge, leads to the deaths of Othello, Desdemona, Roderigo, and Emilia. There is an implicit pun on “practice” throughout the play.

The Rape of Lucrece is not a subtle poem, but Tarquin is remarkable for his struggles with his conscience. Of course, his will to rape Lucrece overpowers his conscience, but this occurs seemingly without Tarquin wishing it. There is no doubt that he is a villain—perhaps Shakespeare’s first portrait of a villain—and he has many of the characteristics that we will see in later villains. Aaron is a particularly vigorous and energetic dramatic character, who is notable as a laughing villain, laughing and sardonic. Not only is he not penitent at the end of Titus Andronicus, but he remembers that when Titus let him cut his hand off supposedly to save his sons, he “almost broke my heart with extreme laughter” (5.1.113). He seems to be influenced by the villains in Marlowe, especially in The Jew of Malta. Aaron is noteworthy as a strikingly colloquial speaker. Again, there is a great deal in Aaron that we find later in Iago, who is also a Moor, as well as in Richard, Duke of Gloucester, and Edmund.

Notes

1. See Introduction to the third Aden edition of Titus Andronicus ed. Jonathan Bate, London, Routledge, 1995.

2. See Maurice Charney, Titus Andronicus, Harvester New Critical Introductions to Shakespeare, New York, 1990, for a detailed account of Aaron’s role in the play.

3. See the comprehensive article by Earl Dachslager, “’The Stock of Barabbas’: Shakespeare’s Unfaithful Villains,” Upstart Crow, 6 (l986), 8–21. Dachslager views atheists in the wider context of infidels.

4. See J. C. Maxwell’s Arden edition of Titus Andronicus, London, 1961, p. 106.

5. See Edward A. Armstrong, Shakespeare’s Imagination, rev. ed., Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1963.