The All-New Shakespeare ABC starts today!

A is for Aaron.

This is the best way to start a Shakespearean ABC especially as this one has a double-A beginning. So who was this Aaron - one of the relatively few Biblical names used by WS in his plays? (Other Biblical names he used were, Adam, Eve, Laban, Hagar, Noah, Jael, Deborah, Samson, Goliath, David, Achitopel, Solomon, Jezebel, Jephthah, Lazarus, the prodigal son etc.)

Aaron is a Moor who, in Titus Andronicus is brought to Rome and is beloved by Queen Tamora. He is a really nasty character and checks a quarrel between Tamora's sons over Titus Andronicus' daughter, Lavinia, "Rome's rich ornament." He encourages her sons to rape and mutilate Lavinia and then organises the murder of Bassianus, Saturnius' honest brother. Aaron then frames Titus' sons, Quintus and Martius with this murder  and they are executed for having committed this crime.

                                                   Anthony Quale as Aaron

Aaron then tells Titus that he can save his other sons if he chops off his right hand and send it to him as evidence of his good faith. In the meanwhile, Tamora bears Aaron's illegitimate child and this threatens to expose his treachery. However, he refuses to get rid of the evidence, i.e. have the child killed which shows us that he isn't 100% evil. (Like Lady Macbeth who, when the time comes, cannot murder King Duncan as "Had he not resembled my father as he slept, I had done't")

Aaron is captured by Lucius' (son of Titus) army while trying to smuggle the baby out of Rome and confesses to his crimes when Lucius agrees to spare his child. In the end Aaron learns that evil does not pay as he is condemned to be set 'breast-deep' in the ground and starved to death.

Titus Andronicus was one of WS's first plays, (1592-4) and Aaron is the prototype of several evil characters in the Bard's later plays. Further developments of such a man include Iago in Othello (1603-4) and Richard III. They all share a common scorn for "honest men."  

In Who's Who in Shakespeare, Peter Quennel and Hamish Johnson say that Aaron is a mixture of three Elizabethan theatrical types: Barabus in Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, Muley Hamet in Peele's The Battle of Alcazar and the typical stage devil of Elizabethan theatre, the natural follow-on of the Vice character of the earlier medieval morality plays.

         The author of the Shakespeare ABC at the WS exhibition,    

                                    London February 2016.