Today’s Totally Random
Lines
Stay,
murderous villains! Would you kill your brother?
Aaron
Titus Andronicus Act IV, Scene ii, Line 88
In this play everyone pretty much kills anyone, so I’m
not quite sure why Aaron is questioning whether these guys would kill their
brother. In fact, if you’re going to pick one random line from this play, picking
one with the words murderous villains in it seems quite appropriate.
I had thought to skip the context this morning, because it’s pretty convoluted,
but it’s occurred to me that since the topic is race, maybe we should go for
it.
Okay, in one sentence: Queen Tamora had a baby with Aaron the Moor (black
man, not her husband) and sends her adult sons, with the newborn, dark-skinned
baby that no one’s seen yet, to Aaron with instructions for the baby to be
killed and disposed of. How’s that? Problem is, Aaron doesn’t want to kill the
baby, his only son.
Now here's the thing, it’s interesting that in this play
of heinous acts of murder, right and left, there is such an emphasis on
parental love: Titus doing what he can to protect his kids (to the point of
cutting off his own hand), Tamora’s strong protective sense for her sons (well,
not this new son - sorry, but that little dark-skinned guy could get her killed),
and now Aaron also looking out for his son.
So if we can look past all the violence for a minute, today’s line gets into the issue of how Will
treated minorities in his plays. Granted, there wasn’t too much of their
presence in his works (or perhaps in his world?), but it was there. He looks at
it here in Titus (blacks), with Shylock in Merchant (Jews), and
with the strangers in Sir Thomas More (immigrants).
In each case there are very compelling arguments that Will recognized the
existence of the prejudices but that he looked past those prejudices and
presented the human side of the marginalized minorities. In fact I would argue
that Will did a better job than some of us are doing now. Will recognized and
showed the reality of his world. The reality is that there were people being treated
differently and poorly. He didn’t’ try to whitewash it, but he did try to show
that these people were people, like the rest of us. I would argue that some of
today’s writings don't do as good a job recognizing the reality of our world. Yes,
like it or not, the prejudices and mistreatments continue to exist. I think in
some instances, good intentioned or not, we want to whitewash it. Not a good idea.
In the interest of today's theme, Mojo suggested that I use a pic of his Tennessee cousins for today's post. He thought it would be nice to show a picture of different colors and types coexisting in harmony.
Left to right, that's Luigi, Truffles, Maple, and Jess.
