Aaron (Titus Andronicus)
Tamora's Moorish lover in "Titus Andronicus." Shakespeare only created four other black characters before the tragic hero Othello, and Aaron is the most substantial of the four. As he himself admits, there is not a crime in Titus in which he has not had a hand. He is practically the engine of action in Act II, bringing Tamora's dream of revenge to reality. This simplistic, depthless portraiture of evil is a descendant of the "Devil" or "Vice" from early Elizabethan morality plays, created only to move the audience to contempt. For that reason, there is little about Aaron to win our sympathy or to even explain the motivation for his evil. H...read more