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IN 1594 Shakespeare confronted the Elizabethans with the dramatic figure of Aaron, a literate African trained in the classics. Shakespeare's characterization of Aaron presented a striking departure from the established discourse of black inferiority. The novelty was calculated, in the first place, to unsettle the average Elizabethan theatergoer. It could not, however, have been a surprise to those playgoers who had a university education or to those courtiers and noblemen, like the Haringtons and Sidneys, who had been cultivating cultural relations with the Continent and had learned how to shape their beliefs and views in the light of the Spanish and Portuguese experience. There was, moreover, another category of spectators, the descendants of those English merchants who had pioneered slaveholding and dealing in early modern Andalusia from 1480 to 1532. The Mediterranean apprenticeship of slavery has been left unrecorded owing to the one-sided attention of Africanists and historians to the development of English slavery in the seventeenth century. I am going to make some use of the material I have uncovered from Spanish archives at the end of the present paper.
We must, moreover, bear in mind that the Elizabethans had witnessed the haphazard attempts made by the authorities to accommodate the presence of black Africans and Moors to the structure of Elizabethan society. The black presence, particularly in the last decade of the sixteenth century, had raised anxieties about interbreeding that asked to be addressed. This was the case particularly between 1592 and 1594, when the government was embroiled in the hitherto little noticed scandal caused by the legal and illegal importation of slaves from Guinea. I have, therefore, felt obliged to unfold the still poorly documented history of the black presence in Elizabethan England before turning my attention to Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus as performed at Burley-on-the-Hill by the Chamberlain's Men on January 1, 1596. The performance had been designed by Sir John Harington to be the political and cultural climax of his lavish Christmas festivities.
The Presence of Africans in Elizabethan England
The presence of Africans in early modern England has remained a subject in its infant stage of studies. As late as the 1980s, historians clung to the view that there is no way of establishing how many colored persons had been...