12 - Reviving Aaron

Summary

The new drama introduced by Aldridge in the early 1850s that aroused the greatest curiosity among theatergoers was an adaptation of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus in which he played Aaron the Moor. This was a classic black role he had never attempted before, possibly because Aaron was so repulsive a villain that it would have been demeaning to represent him on the stage. True, Aldridge had played many other vengeful black characters, but each of them had a discernible motive for behaving badly. Hassan, in The Castle Spectre, was angry at the Christian white world for having captured and enslaved him. Zarambo, similarly aggrieved in The Negro's Curse! or, The Foulah Son, tried to lead a slave revolt against plantation masters. Christophe, in The Death of Christophe, King of Hayti, was also an anticolonial rebel, whereas Karfa, in Obi; or, Three-Fingered Jack, struck out against white women to avenge the deaths of his wife and daughter, and Antony Latour, in The Creole, hated whites for treating him, a mulatto, as a secondclass citizen. Sometimes small slights led to momentous consequences. Zanga, in The Revenge, wanted to retaliate for a slap he suffered from a Spanish General, and Pompey Jackson, the treacherous slave in The Banks of the Hudson; or, The Congress Trouper, resented being prevented from kissing a Quaker chambermaid. Muley Hassan, the double-crossing trickster in Fiesco; or, The Conspiracy of Genoa, was willing to sell his villainous services to the highest bidder, and even Black Brandon, the cruel slave dealer in My Poll and My Partner Joe, committed some of his worst offenses in response to verbal insults. These were malefactors for a reason, but Aaron was so morally depraved that he committed crimes for their own sake, reveling in the harm he infl icted on others. At the end of the play he confessed his numerous misdeeds, boasting that

I have done a thousand dreadful things

As willingly as one would kill a fl y,

And nothing grieves me heartily indeed

But that I cannot do ten thousand more….

If one good deed in all my life I did

I do repent it from my very soul.

Aaron was a degenerate scoundrel, a personifi cation of evil.