"My fleece of woolly hair that now uncurls": Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, "Black" Hair, and the Revenge of Postcolonial Education

Abstract:This essay offers a cross-historical, politically responsive reading of one line from Titus Andronicus: "My fleece of woolly hair that now uncurls" (2.3. 34). No critic, to my knowledge, has ever noticed this description as anything more than an obvious representation of its speaker's, Aaron's, racial difference; film, for its part, has either cut it from the script or kept it as an unperformed and therefore oddly inconsequential line. Specifically, what has not been explored or explained is the performative magic of a Black man straightening his kinky "black" hair in a Roman forest on an early modern stage. Addressing and drawing on the under-appreciated interdisciplinary value of a Black Studies critical consciousness, this essay argues that Aaron's hair straightening represents Shakespeare's racialization of Ovid's Metamorphoses in an effort to develop for England a liberating, pro-creative alternative to the Roman literary tradition. In this regard, Titus is an anti-colonial play, and Aaron its anti-colonial hero. And it is through the application of Ovidian magic to his hair—like the application of a poetic hot comb or hair relaxer—that Shakespeare imagines a post-colonial future for England.