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Aaron is Tamora’s secret lover and the chief architect of the revenge plot against the Andronicus family. Like Othello, Aaron is a Moor—that is, an inhabitant of a region of the Roman Empire that is today part of Northern Africa. In the context of the play, his dark skin marks him as a symbol of ugliness and evil. Other characters frequently comment negatively on his blackness. Bassianus, for instance, describes Aaron as a “swarthy Cimmerian” whose “body’s hue” is “spotted, detested, and abominable” (2.3.72–74). His blackness is again decried when Tamora delivers a dark-skinned child, which the Nurse calls a “devil” (4.2.67) then goes on to describe as “a joyless, dismal, black, and sorrowful issue” (4.2.69). Perhaps surprisingly, Aaron doesn’t take issue with the racist idea that dark skin signifies evil. Rather, he embraces this idea and puts a positive spin on it: “Coal black is better than another hue,” he argues, “In that is scorns to bear another hue” (4.2.103–104). For Aaron, then, his skin color is a prideful mark of his inability to be influenced by others. Just as “the ocean / Can never turn the swan’s black legs to white” (4.2.105–106), no one can control him.
The fierce sense of individualism that Aaron expresses throughout the play is connected to his singular penchant for villainy. Again and again in the play he reflects on the joy he takes in causing pain, suffering, and death. He therefore seems like an embodiment of evil. The only evidence that contradicts such a reading is the paternal sense of protection he demonstrates when his son is born. Otherwise, he’s a pure, unadulterated villain. Shakespeare doesn’t offer any concrete indications about the source of his unchanging villainy. In one sense, the racial discourse of early modern England would have led many contemporary theatergoers to share the view expressed within the play, which attributes his evil to his skin color. However, another source for the character of Aaron is a figure known as “Vice.” A stock character in many Elizabethan morality plays, Vice is a one-dimensional figure of unadulterated evil. Much like Vice, Aaron feels no grief for any of the pain he’s caused, nor does his character develop in any significant way. Rather, in a perverse display of his villainy, he ends the play claiming that his only regret is that he couldn’t do more harm.
