05/06/2026
Elizabeth Dieterich is one of EMU's English graduates now finishing up her doctoral dissertation at Carnegie Mellon University. Please join her zoom presentation tomorrow:
ELIZABETH DIETERICH
"'And What With Aaron Now?' Performing Race in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus.
Thursday May 7th 12:45-2pm
Baker Hall 255 B (Swank Room) and on zoom:
https://cmu.zoom.us/j/7079043848
The premiere of William Shakespeare’s bloody revenge tragedy Titus Andronicus, around 1594, attracted a playhouse crowd of thousands who were drawn into shared responses of fear, grief, and laughter by the play’s dynamic mix of comedy, sorrow, and horror. But the affective power of this play’s earliest performances hinged on a stickier, more insidious element: the portrayal of the sinister villain Aaron the Moor, who enacts his nefarious machinations while proclaiming he will “have his soul black like his face” (III.i.209). This explicit and inextricable link between Aaron’s internal, diabolical nature and external, phenotypical blackness, constituted a novel means by which the English stage racialized characters.
This talk will explore this turning point in the depiction of race in English drama by examining Aaron’s role in the original performance context of Titus Andronicus with a particular focus on Aaron’s soliloquies alongside the ambiguous drawing of him on the Longleat manuscript (c. 1595). I will demonstrate how Aaron’s black(ened)ness, as portrayed by a cosmetically darkened white actor, promoted exclusionary habits of feeling and thinking among spectators that provided replicable scripts of what Barbara J. Fields and Karen E. Fields (2012) have termed ‘racecraft.’ For those who flocked to see this play, Aaron not only confirmed the perceived dangers of otherness in the social body, but he also set the stage, so to speak, for characters in subsequent drama, such as Shakespeare’s Othello and Caliban, to function similarly. Ultimately, I argue that encountering staged figures such as these trained audiences to respond negatively to real-life racialized subjects in European society outside the playhouse—an affective and mental habituation that is sustained by the racist scripts of today.
Elizabeth Dieterich is a Ph.D. Candidate in Literary and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research focuses on dramatic literature and the culture of playgoing in early modern England. Her dissertation, Affect, Race, and the Performance of Early Modern Drama traces the dramaturgy of racecraft on the English stage from the 1580s through the 1630s. She has published and presented papers on affect theory, early modern performance, and adaptations of Shakespeare. In addition to her teaching and research at CMU, she has taught composition and literature at Eastern Michigan University, Jackson College, City Colleges of Chicago, American Islamic College, and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and worked as a performer, dramaturg, and education manager with professional theatre companies in Michigan and Chicago, IL.
The Center for Print, Networks, and Performance (CPNP) is a research hub collectively organized by scholars at Carnegie Mellon University whose work focuses on the art, culture, and politics of early modernity (c. 1500-1800).
Undergraduates across disciplines are welcome and encouraged to attend.
