The Complete Plays of Jean Racine: Volume 5: Britannicus 9780271065311

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The Complete Plays of Jean Racine

The Complete Plays of Jean Racine Volume 5: Britannicus

Translated into English rhymed couplets with critical notes and commentary by

Geoffrey Alan Argent

the pennsylvania state university press university park, pennsylvania

All Rights Reserved caution: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that performances of britannicus (“Play”) are subject to royalty. This Play is fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America and of all countries covered by the International Copyright Union (including the Dominion of Canada and the rest of the British Commonwealth), and of all countries covered by Universal Copyright Convention, the Pan-​American Copyright Convention, the Berne Convention, and of all countries with which the United States has reciprocal copyright relations. All rights, including professional and amateur stage rights, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio broadcasting, television, video or sound recording, and all other forms of mechanical or electronic reproduction, such as cd-​rom, cd-​i, dvd, information storage and retrieval systems, and photocopying, are strictly reserved. All inquiries concerning any of the aforementioned rights should be addressed to Patrick H. Alexander, Director, Penn State University Press, 820  N.  University Drive, USB 1, Suite  C, University Park, PA 16802, www​.psupress​.org.

Please Note After having received permission to produce this Play, it is required that the translator geoffrey alan argent be given credit as the sole and exclusive translator of the Play on the title page of all programs distributed in connection with performances of the Play and in all cases where the title of the Play appears for purposes of advertising or publicizing the production. The name of geoffrey alan argent must appear on a separate line immediately beneath the title line and in type size equal to 50 percent of the size of the largest letter of the title of the Play and the acknowledgment should read jean racine’s britannicus Translated into English Rhymed Couplets by geoffrey alan argent Library of Congress Cataloging-in-​Publication data will be found in the back of this book.

for

Leslie Eric Comens “dio, che nell’alma infondere amor volesti e speme, giuriamo insiem di vivere e di morire insieme.” “treue trink’ ich dem freund. froh und frei entblühe dem bund blut-​brüderschaft heut!” and in this bicentennial of their birth, to

Giuseppe Verdi (1813 –1901) and

Richard Wagner (1813 –1883), for the priceless treasures they have bequeathed to us

Contents

Translator’s Note   ix Britannicus: Discussion   1 Racine’s Dedication   65 Racine’s First Preface   67 Racine’s Second Preface   75 Britannicus   81 Britannicus: Notes and Commentary   159 Appendix A   219 Appendix B   222 Bibliography   229

Translator’s Note

This translation of Britannicus, Racine’s fifth play, is one of a series that, when complete, will offer in English translation all twelve of Racine’s plays (eleven tragedies and one comedy), only the third such traversal since Racine’s death in 1699. This traversal, in addition, is the first to be composed in rhymed iambic pentameter couplets. My strategy has been to reconceive Racine in that pedigreed indigenous English verse form in order to produce a poetic translation of concentrated power and dramatic impact. After all, as Proust observes, “the tyranny of rhyme forces good poets into the discovery of their best lines”; and while subjected to that tyranny, I took great pains to render Racine’s French into English that is incisive, lucid, elegant, ingenious, and memorable. For  I believe that the proper goal of a translation of a work of literature must be, first and foremost, to produce a work of literature in the language of the target audience. For a considerably more expansive discussion of my approach to translation, as well as a vigorously, rigorously argued rationale for my decision to employ rhymed couplets, I direct the interested reader to the Translator’s Introduction that appears in Volume I of this series, devoted to my translation of Racine’s first play, The Fratricides. This translation is based on the definitive 1697 edition of Racine’s theater as it appears in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition of 1980, edited by Raymond Picard. The 1697 text represents Racine’s final thoughts on this play. The divergences between the first

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edition (1670) and the last are, with three exceptions, relatively inconsequential. Most of them involve minor textual emendations that Racine made for his later editions, all of which represent clear, if subtle, improvements over the earlier versions. All three of the noteworthy changes occur in Act  V (and indeed I devote a note to each). The first involves Racine’s deletion of eight lines for Britannicus that originally preceded line V.i.56. I have consigned these lines, translated into rhymed couplets, to note 12 for Act V, where, in addition, I expatiate on several cogent reasons for deleting verses that do no service either to Britannicus or to Britannicus. The second significant change, a more consequential one, in that it restructures the second half of Act  V, involves Racine’s removal of an entire, albeit brief, scene, signaled by the reappearance of Junia, who has, to say the least, an awkward moment when she encounters Nero after Britannicus’s murder. Again, I offer this scene, comprising all of twelve lines, as well as the original version of the last few lines of the prior scene and the first few lines of the following scene (all for Agrippina) —​ which Racine had to modify when he jettisoned the intervening scene —​ translated into rhymed couplets, in note 31 for Act  V. That this intrusive scene was an undoubted miscalculation on Racine’s part was soon recognized by Racine himself, notwithstanding his having at first, in the face of criticism from friend and foe alike, defended its dramatic necessity with much vehemence but little cogency in his first preface, for, soon after the first edition was published, he discreetly removed the scene, ensuring that, in the subsequent editions of 1676, 1687, and 1697, it would never again rear its ugly head. (See the seventh paragraph of Racine’s first preface for his specious defense of this scene and note 11 for my refutation thereof.) The third change of any significance occurs in V.vi, in Agrippina’s final denunciation of Nero, where Racine replaces a single, entire line (a rare occurrence among Racine’s emendations); the original line can be found in note 38 for Act V, where I comment on the greater gain and the lesser loss involved in the line substitution. Of far greater significance, however, than this single-​line rewrite and those two deletions of Racine’s, which I have implemented in conformance to the 1697 edition, is the momentous and

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unprecedented reinstatement I have presumed to make of an eightytwo-​line scene between Burrhus and Narcissus that, although of unquestionable authenticity, has never appeared in any English-​ language edition of Britannicus (I can only speak to the high unlikelihood of its having appeared in any non-​English translation), but which Racine originally intended should open Act III, where, in my translation, it is to be at long last found. Commensurate with the momentousness of this reinstatement, I have provided both a brief discussion of the provenance of this scene and an (I hope) irresistibly persuasive rationale for its inclusion in this fifth volume of what I trust will become a reference edition in English of Racine’s theatrical oeuvre. That expansive discussion/rationale, being both too unwieldy and too important to be relegated to a mere footnote, may be found as Appendix B. The translations of Racine’s dedication and his first and second prefaces are my own, as are the translations of passages from the critical commentaries in the Picard and Forestier editions that appear in the Discussion and the Notes and Commentary. In my own critical commentaries, when I refer to a play or a character, I use the title or name as it appears in my translations. It should be noted, however, that where any other commentators (writing in English) retain the French spellings, I have respected that preference and beg the reader to pardon the discrepancies. Speaking of discrepancies, I should note, now that this traversal is nearly halfway toward completion, that the extremely alert reader may begin to notice occasional (and inevitable) discrepancies between lines of verse from any particular play, as cited in earlier volumes, and the revised and (one hopes) improved versions of those verses as they appear in the volume devoted to the complete translation of the play in question. I like to think that so astute a reader would find such discrepancies more interesting than irritating, so I shall not beg her or him to pardon them. I have preserved the scene divisions as they are given in the Pléiade edition (each new scene marking the arrival or departure of one or more characters) and have, likewise, listed the characters participating in each scene just below the scene number. I have, in addition, furnished these translations with line numbers (every

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fifth line being numbered, and the numbering beginning anew for each scene), for ease of reference for readers and actors and to enable me to cite passages precisely in the Discussion and the Notes and Commentary. Be it noted that these line numbers do not conform to those of any French edition, the Picard, for example, providing no line numbers at all and the Forestier using unbroken numbering from beginning to end; besides, I have found it necessary once or twice to expand one of Racine’s couplets into a tercet, or even two of his couplets into three, a procedure that would vitiate any linefor-​line correspondence. I thought it might also be helpful, having myself struggled to disentangle the complex familial relationships among the characters in Britannicus, to provide the reader with a genealogical chart (to be found as Appendix A), beginning with Augustus and his wives and tracing their descendents down to Nero and Britannicus; and in order to better clarify those interrelationships, I have judiciously pruned the family tree to show only those boughs, branches, and twigs that have any bearing on the play, that is, to include only those family members who appear in the play or are referred to therein (thirteen in all), and only such additional relatives (seven of them) whose inclusion on the tree is necessary in order to “connect the dots,” so to speak (for example, Drusus the Elder and Antonia, Claudius’s parents). The Discussion is intended as much to promote discussion as to provide it. The Notes and Commentary, in addition to clarifying obscure references and explicating the occasional gnarled conceit, offer, I hope, some fresh and thought-​provoking insights, such as are occasionally vouchsafed the sedulous translator. But whatever the merit of the ancillary critical material, I believe that the enduring value of these volumes will reside in the excellence of the translations. New approaches to studying Racine will undoubtedly be discovered and developed, opponent schools of thought will continue to clash, arguments may be challenged or overturned, but I am hopeful that the value of these translations will prove indisputable. I would like to express my warmest thanks to my great friend Adrian Ciuperca, my go-​to person (along with his wife, Mioara

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Canciu) for all things cybernetic, who has done such a beautiful job producing the elegant family tree (now flourishing as Appendix A) that I should really have labeled it Appendix A+. All that remains (and it is much) is to acknowledge the unflagging support and assistance of Leslie Eric Comens, who has, for the purposes of the present volume, done the unthinkable: succeeded in inculcating in me a genuine interest in history —​ and Roman history no less (stopping short, however, of cajoling me into reading Tacitus and Suetonius in the original Latin), which has had the gratifying effect of rendering the Discussion and the Notes and Commentary at once so erudite and so entertaining. And, once again, Leslie has acted as the Sixtus Beckmesser (a benign one, of course) to my Hans Sachs: as Merker, “immer bei Sachs,” enthusiastically noting all my many Fehler (fortunately he permits me more than sieben), but just as eager to acknowledge that “ein Lied von Sachs, das will was bedeuten” (a song by Sachs, that counts for something!).

Britannicus: Discussion

i Among those plays of Racine that are based on real-​life events and people, Britannicus is by far the most deeply anchored in historical data, that data being chiefly furnished by Tacitus’s The Annals of Imperial Rome. Indeed, Racine professes that when he wrote the play he had been “so steeped in reading that excellent historian, that there is hardly a striking effect in my tragedy for which he did not provide me with the idea.” But just as he would rework the raw material of Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis to his own purposes, adding characters (principally Eriphyle), refashioning events, and creating virtually new portraits of several of the Greek playwright’s characters, so, too, in Britannicus, Racine has ingeniously transformed Tacitus’s raw reportage into a complexly plotted drama with, in this case, one key character ( Junia) created virtually out of whole cloth, alliances among the historical characters realigned, and, most important, Tacitus’s turbulent, eloquent, but hardly edifying account provided with a subtle but powerful tendentious underpinning. John Campbell (130) cites the view of Jean Rohou, who, “in what he calls ‘the Machiavellian conflict recounted by Tacitus,’ finds that Racine substitutes ‘a moral antinomy absent from his sources’ (‘L’anthropologie pessimiste’ 1529).” But how could it be otherwise? Racine had a

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context within which to place the events Tacitus describes: for him they do not compose a story, but a history. The “decline and fall of the Roman Empire” was a concept unknown to Tacitus and Suetonius, but was a received moral artifact for Racine’s age, just as it still is for anyone reading or seeing Britannicus today. For The Annals of Imperial Rome paints an unrelievedly grim picture of the movers and shakers of the ancient Roman Empire. (Suetonius’s account, in The Twelve Caesars — ​consulted more sparingly by Racine — ​with its almost Grand Guignol approach, occasionally bordering on the surreal or the absurd, may strike the reader, depending on his or her point of view, as rendering the horrors described either more horrific or more hilarious.) Such shafts of light as illumine the pervasive gloom are purely editorial: spontaneous expressions of sympathy, or considered moral sententiae provided by Tacitus himself. The sense one has in Tacitus of stifling, noxious, irredeemable amorality, of benighted souls meandering through a benighted landscape, is something Racine would capture to perfection in Bajazet, his seventh play. There, all is darkness and aimless wandering. Although none of the principals survives at the end of that play (Roxane and Bajazet are brutally killed, Atalide commits suicide onstage, and the doubtful fate of Akhmet, the grand vizier, is rather a matter of indifference to us), Bajazet, as I wrote in my Discussion for that play, “leaves us with a sense of ignoble waste,” rather than stirring our souls by the evocation of any tragic downfall. In order for there to be a downfall, there must be some height from which to fall, and the protagonists of Bajazet can scarcely be considered upright, let alone of noble stature. The death sentence that impends over Bajazet and Roxane is a correlative rather than a cause of the inevitability of their ignominious fate. But The Fratricides, Racine’s first play, had already demonstrated that a high body count (Racine ruefully admits in his preface that “there is hardly a character in it who does not die at the end”) is no guarantor of profound tragedy. In Britannicus, by contrast, although only Britannicus and Narcissus are dead by the end of the play, one is left with a crushing sense of tragic downfall, of the extinguishing of light and the obliteration of virtue. (Indeed, as I shall demonstrate later, while

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most would consider the world well rid of Narcissus, even his death is darkly disquieting in a way that resonates with the tragic tone of the play; one might even make the case that the tragic implications of his murder are as far-​reaching as those of Britannicus’s.) One of the aims of this Discussion will be to discover whence derives the sense of tragic loss that pervades the whole play, not just its doom-​ laden ending.

ii As mentioned, only two characters die in the course of the play: Britannicus and Narcissus. (Since both of them die violent, horrific deaths, it follows, given the rigid rule of bienséance [decency or decorum] governing French theater of the time, that the deaths of both are narrated, after the fact, by eyewitnesses — ​Burrhus and Albina, respectively.) But to suggest that Nero is, in some sense, the only character left standing at the fall of the curtain would be to offer a more accurate description of the outcome. Since, as Bernard Weinberg (126) correctly observes, “Néron is distinguished from the others as the center of an action which he very largely accomplishes through his own volition,” a reasonable inference would be to conclude that it must have been as a result of Nero’s confrontations, conflicts, and interactions with Agrippina, Junia, Britannicus, Burrhus, and even Narcissus that they have been destroyed. Certainly, although Agrippina, Burrhus, and Junia are still alive at the end of the play, they have all been rendered irrelevant, their lives effectively over, and each wishing for the oblivion of death in her or his own way. Agrippina, having foreseen the loss of what gives her life meaning — ​her power — resentfully faces her own death: My place usurped, I’m nothing and no one. .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . Forsaken, and avoided everywhere . . . Albina, such a thought I cannot bear! (III.v.11, 20 –21)

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Your hand has shed the lifeblood of your brother, And I foresee your blows won’t spare your mother. (V.vi.28 –29) It’s done; now naught can curb his cruelty. The blow that was foretold will fall on me. (V.vii.5 – 6) Burrhus, too, loses what gives his life meaning — ​his hopes for Rome and his stubborn but misplaced trust in Nero: Ah! I’ve no wish to live another day. If only heav’n, with blessed cruelty, Had let his newfound fury fall on me; Or if this horrid deed didn’t adumbrate A future of misfortune for the State! .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . Let him complete his work, madame, and kill A captious counselor who opposed his will; For, far from fearing what his wrath may do, I’d find the swiftest death the sweetest too. (V.vii.8 –12, 19 –22) As for Junia, having lost, in one day, both her love and her freedom — ​ in short, having been virtually destroyed by her contact with Nero and with Rome — ​she goes off, ostensibly to “seek such solace on Octavia’s breast / As suits my present sorrow and dismay” (see note 31 for Act V), but proceeds instead to enroll herself among the vestal virgins (“Myself I offer to the Immortals’ care, / Whose altars, by your virtue, you now share” [V.fin.sc.22 –23]), eschewing human consolation and effectively entombing herself in the temple of Vesta. In Burrhus’s case, his relationship with Nero is fairly straightforward and does not lend itself to any arcane or controversial interpretations; the above-​cited quotations eloquently suggest how Burrhus, “by this assassination left prostrate” (V.v.30), is “dispatched” by Nero. The empire having “placed its rise — ​or ruin — ​in my hand” (I.ii.57), Burrhus, realizing his life’s work has been rendered null and

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void by the unmistakable evidence of his charge’s having irrevocably abandoned every moral precept he had attempted to inculcate, now harbors a death wish, a sincere desire to be put out of his misery.

iii Narcissus’s relationship with Nero, unlike Burrhus’s, is rather complex, a consequence in no small part of his having the unique distinction among Racine’s characters of serving as a full-​fledged confidant to two characters, namely, Britannicus and Nero. And of course his dual function, interesting in itself, is made more so, first, by his being by no means a passive confidant and, second, by his consistently offering one of his masters (Britannicus) the very worst possible advice in every situation and the other (Nero) the very worst possible advice in every situation. Before examining Nero’s relationship with Narcissus during the course of the play, I think it worth taking note of how, historically, it ended. Narcissus, who had actually been a staunch partisan of Britannicus (see note 2 for Act II) — ​presumably unbeknownst to Nero — ​was already dead at the time of Britannicus’s murder. He had earlier, for health reasons, “retired to Sinuessa, to recover his strength in its mild climate and health-​giving waters” (Tacitus, XII, 66). Shortly after Claudius’s death, however, Agrippina, now wielding absolute power, took steps to have this long-​standing thorn in her side removed: “Imprisoned and harshly treated, the threat of imminent execution drove him to suicide” (Tacitus, XIII, 1). As Racine, citing Tacitus, notes in his first preface, “Nero bore very ill the death of Narcissus, because this freed slave had a marvelous compatibility with the vices of the prince which still remained hidden.” In Racine’s play, while we cannot know whether Nero feels any regret at the demise of such a resourceful partner in crime, he shows no inclination to intercede on his behalf with the angry mob who take up Junia’s cause, and his chagrin at losing her leaves no room to indulge any grief, let alone guilt, over Narcissus’s death. To describe Nero’s relationship to Narcissus briefly, they “play” each other. For his part, Narcissus, while he may not act the role of

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agent provocateur with Nero (as he does with Britannicus: see note 57 for Act I), likes to feel that he is in control, subtly goading Nero, relishing every opportunity of reporting back to Nero the slightest inculpatory remark or action of Britannicus’s, and even, in his Act IV scene with Nero, “express[ing] with impunity the contempt in which his all too authentically snide and circumstantial account of Nero’s detractors’ animadversions suggests he himself holds his master,” as I remark in note 53 for that act. But, in reality, for the most part, Nero could as well address to Narcissus the same remark he offers Burrhus (in an entirely different connection): “You tell me nothing my heart doesn’t know” (III.ii.17), for Nero needs no urging or advice to carry out his long-​planned schemes (as I shall discuss at length) and only pretends, when it suits his purpose, to be ambivalent or irresolute. Odette de Mourgues (110) declares that, during the Act V banquet, after Britannicus has been poisoned, at the moment when “Narcisse’s personality disintegrates in a sneer of triumphant glee” (“His perfidious joy he couldn’t contain,” as Burrhus later reports [V.v.27]), “the opacity of the monster is now the privilege of Néron.” By “opacity” she means the inscrutability of a character’s motives, hence, an inability on the audience’s part to fathom what is going on in the character’s mind at any point; this is in contrast to the “transparency” with which she believes Racine endows his leading characters (but not, generally speaking, their confidants), a transparency that, contrariwise, by allowing the audience to see into those characters’ minds, renders them sympathetic to the audience, whatever their character flaws. But opacity, I would argue, has always been a characteristic of Nero’s, indeed, perhaps his defining characteristic. And, following de Mourgues’s own line of thought, it is this attribute that offers the most convincing explanation for the utter absence of sympathy we feel for Nero, from his first appearance to his very last (where his above-​mentioned chagrin is a product, not of any pitifully thwarted love, but of his thwarted will, and less a product of his loss of Junia’s face, however lovely, than of his loss of face, tout court). There is no other Racinian character, however cruel, depraved, manipulative, misguided, or brutal (Roxane, Hermione, Pyrrhus, Phaedra, Agamemnon, Eriphyle, and Athaliah come immediately to mind) from whom we so thoroughly, so unthinkingly, so involuntarily, withhold our

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sympathy. (Of course, Nero’s cause is not helped by his manifesting no compensatory, let alone redeeming, traces of goodness, or even kindness. In fact, other than in Burrhus’s no doubt expediently exaggerated reminiscences in IV.iii of Nero’s erstwhile benignity, the play shows no good side of him at all, the only other reference to Nero’s benignity being an instance of dramatic irony: Junia declares with relief, toward the end of their first meeting, just before he reveals the full extent of his monstrous design, that “on your goodness, Sire, I’ve ever relied” [II.iii.139].) By contrast, even in Tacitus’s account, where his extravagant debauchery and heinous acts of cruelty are laid out far more expansively than in this play, there are moments when the pathetic side of Nero’s nature does manage to elicit some sympathy. In Narcissus’s case, while it is true that we are never given any real explanation for his actions (his four-​line soliloquy that closes Act II [II.viii.11–14] offers no more than the briefest glimpse into his motives), any more than we are for those of Shakespeare’s Iago, with both villains, we are privy to their machinations, if not to their motivations. Except for the last scene of Act I, which Racine deliberately couches in such a way as to manipulate the audience into misreading the relationship between Narcissus and Britannicus as that of, on the one hand, the sympathetic, wise, and concerned mentor, and, on the other, his justifiably trusting charge, so that Narcissus’s apparent volte-​face shortly after the beginning of Act II will induce the greatest shock and revulsion in the audience (who can, however, mere minutes later, reread Narcissus’s duplicitous advice and Britannicus’s gullibility correctly) — ​except for that scene, there is not a single moment during the play when we are unaware of Narcissus’s intentions and strategies: he has no hidden agenda. In Nero’s case, his entire agenda is hidden: we can only guess at his motives and his plans. He jealously keeps his own counsel until such time as, his plans having fully ripened, he is ready to spring some new outrage upon an unsuspecting victim, or upon the world at large. That is why Agrippina and Albina spend the entire first scene puzzling over, and exchanging views about, Nero’s character and his intentions. Usually, the first scene of a Racine play is devoted to exposition, filling in the audience on “the plot thus far”; here, what is most conspicuously exposed — ​or, rather, posed — ​is the huge riddle that

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is Nero. Even Agrippina, his own mother, has no idea what game he is playing, and sums up her hopeless “cluelessness” when she poses those highly significant questions: “What does he want? What moves him: love or hate?” (I.i.55). Compare, for example, the opening scene of Andromache, where Pylades attempts to apprise Orestes about the current disposition, both mental and relational, of the other three protagonists, Hermione, Pyrrhus, and Andromache: ambivalent though their feelings may be, fluid and fluctuating though their interrelationships may be, we (and Orestes) are left with a satisfyingly coherent sense of the status quo as the play opens. Moreover, in Britannicus, the “opacity” of Nero’s character, as presented in the opening scene, is never further illumined as the play proceeds, which is why there is such disagreement among critics about such crucial questions as the following: Is Nero already Racine’s “monstre” at the beginning of the play, or does he grow into the role? Is Nero still under the influence of Agrippina, his mother, and is the play, then, about his freeing himself from that influence (which no one disputes that he has done by the end of the play)? Is Nero truly in love with Junia, or does he merely wish to believe he is? And if neither, what is his interest in her? Do Nero’s intentions and feelings toward his stepbrother, Britannicus, actually waver during the course of the play, as they certainly ostensibly do, or has it been his intention all along to eliminate him, and if so, why? As one can see, all these vexed questions center on Nero, the enigma; but enigmas can be solved, and if Nero never shows his hand, that is not to say that the play itself does not provide us with a sufficient number of clues to enable us to find convincing answers to the questions just posed. By contrast, all the other principal characters are perfectly “legible”: we are never in any doubt as to what they are thinking and feeling. Any misconceptions about Nero’s relationships with Agrippina, Britannicus, and Junia — ​ and they are widespread — ​must stem from Nero’s inscrutability.

iv In our attempt to penetrate Nero’s “opacity,” let us first focus on the question of Nero’s “monstrosity,” to use a term. In this regard, one

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should mention the view of William J. Cloonan, who, in Racine’s Theatre: The Politics of Love, argues that Nero is the fully formed monster from the beginning of the play and that, having already overcome those obstacles he enumerates to Narcissus (“My mother’s tirades and Octavia’s tears,  / Seneca, Burrhus, Rome! Three virtuous years!” [II.ii.89 –90]), Nero, in his successive confrontations with Narcissus, Junia, Burrhus, Britannicus, and Agrippina, does not really interact with any of these characters, but simply acts, as if he were in a play-within-a-​play with them, a play of which he is the writer, the director, and the star. Cloonan is of the opinion that in Nero’s confrontations with the other characters, the latter are nothing better than his dupes, that Nero’s apparent candor is nothing but lip service, time-​serving accommodations rehearsed and regurgitated on cue. As this Discussion will make abundantly clear, I am in complete agreement with him about this. Nor am I the first to invoke a comparison with Richard III: certainly, Racine’s Nero proves, during the course of the play, that he can smile, and murder whiles he smiles (as his blasé response to Britannicus’s death demonstrates), and frame his face to all occasions (as the yet-to-be-​crowned Richard of Gloucester confides to us in Henry VI, Part 3). One difference, however, is that Nero, being afforded no substantive monologue, has no opportunity to wink at the audience to let them in on his secret, to proudly apprise them of his hidden agenda, his ulterior strategies, his covert connivances. It is left up to the actor portraying Nero to suggest how much Nero relishes the duplicity, the theatricality of his own performance. On the other hand, at certain key moments (notably his abduction of Junia, his blackmailing of her, and his murder of Britannicus), Nero, not content merely to “let the mask drop,” feels the need to flaunt his evil nature, to unsheathe the claws of the monster, as it were, in order to demonstrate his limitless power; indeed, the flaunting is the point: the crimes themselves are almost incidental. In light of Racine’s famous phrase (employed in both prefaces) to describe his presentation of Nero’s character in this play, “monstre naissant” (that is, a monster in the process of being born), one might bear in mind that, biologically and psychologically speaking, a monster must always have been a monster, ab ovo, and, conversely,

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a monster in its embryonic stage cannot grow into something harmless and benign. Already at the beginning of the play, then, one might say that the monster that is Nero is a “foetus accompli.” Certainly, Racine makes sufficiently clear in his two prefaces that his view of Nero is of someone irredeemably evil. Statements such as these, from his first preface: “For my part, I thought that the very name of Nero connoted something worse than cruel,” “One need only have read Tacitus to know that if for a time he was a good emperor, he was always a very wicked man,” “I must confess that the idea of Nero being a good man had never occurred to me,” and “It seems to me that sufficient instances of cruel behavior slip out to prevent one’s mistaking his character” (in regard to this last remark, see note 28 for Act II) leave no room for doubt. And the following statements, from his second preface, written six years later, confirm that, on this point at least, his views had not altered: “Nor, however, do I represent him as a virtuous man, for he never was one,” and “It proves that Nero was already vicious, but that he dissimulated his vices.” In short, one must conclude that any appearance of goodness in Nero is merely the concealment of evil. Nonetheless, even if we are convinced that Nero’s character does not develop during the course of the play, that what he is exposed as at the end is what he has been all along, we may still judge Racine successful in representing the development, the maturation, of this monster, since, effectively, Nero reenacts that progression during the course of the play. For, however fully constituted Nero’s character may be, there must have been a time, and not that far in the past, when his nefarious characteristics must have first manifested themselves to Nero himself, when he started to become aware of his own possibilities and his own desires, when he could encourage, could nurture, the development of those characteristics, could witness their gradual burgeoning and their eventual blossoming. Encounters very similar to the ones we witness in Britannicus must have taken place earlier, when Nero was in earnest, when his responses to his advisors, to his mother, to his stepbrother (there had been a time, as Burrhus reminds Narcissus, when “Nero, more docile once to our direction, / Treated his brother with sincere affection” [III.i.59 – 60]), and to the world at large, would have been more hesitant, more

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equivocal, when his relations with the other characters were more in the nature of trials of his crystallizing personality. If we read the play as Cloonan does, we can savor the self-​conscious theatricality of Nero’s performances, but we can, at the same time, respond to them as to a series of flashbacks to a time when Nero was still testing the waters.

v In regard to Nero’s dealings with his mother, Agrippina, we should recall Racine’s assertion in his second preface: “My tragedy is no less about the disgrace of Agrippina than about the death of Britannicus.” Racine, often guilty of misleading us about the true nature of his creations, might have observed, with greater accuracy, that Britannicus is (as we shall find) no more about the disgrace of Agrippina than it is about the death of Britannicus. Most commentators seem to take at face value Burrhus’s description of her as “dangerous” (“Sire, Agrippina’s always dangerous” [III.ii.8] — “redoutable” in the French), but does Burrhus himself really find her to be so, or is he just trying to put the fear of god into Nero? His own further intercourse with Agrippina suggests that what he really means by “dangerous” is clamorous. For when they meet two scenes later, in response to her ranting declaration that “your efforts will prove vain to stop my tongue” (III.iv.24) and her wild threats to expose “our common crimes” (III.iv.41), he calmly asserts that “they’ll never credit you” (III.iv.46). It is true that Burrhus tries to convince Nero that Agrippina wields as much influence as she would have Burrhus believe she does (they both invoke the revered and still-​potent name of her father, Germanicus: III.ii.10 and III.iv.36), but, just as he tries to soothe Agrippina with specious justifications for Nero’s behavior, while being unable to be reassured by them himself (see note 16 for Act III), he expediently exaggerates Agrippina’s power and resources to Nero in a desperate attempt to place some restraint on what, in his brief soliloquy, he calls “his [Nero’s] wildness, which you thought you could subdue” (III.iii.2), an attempt whose futility he himself instantly recognizes, which, ironically, prompts him to confidently

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assert to Agrippina that “on such well-​built foundations stands his throne, / It cannot, even by you, be overthrown” (III.iv.59 – 60). He reiterates that view in his last-​minute counsel to her before her Act IV audience with Nero: “He is your emperor. Like us, you are, too, / Subject to powers that he’s received from you” (IV.i.11–12). Although Nero avows to Narcissus (“and here I bare my soul to you” [II.ii.127]) that “soon as ill luck propels her [Agrippina] into view . . . astounded by her soul, my own soul quails” (II.ii.128, 134), we must take his statement with several grains of salt. First, just as in Bajazet, Akhmet, Bajazet’s mentor, speaks of “Bajazet’s great soul” (I.i.117), attributing to him heroic qualities of which, however, we find scant evidence in the play itself (and, in this regard, Racine himself, as suggested above, “misreads” his own creation, assuring us in his preface that Bajazet “retains in the midst of his love the ferocity of his nation” — ​a ferocity that is never on display), so in this play, we never see Nero “quailing” before his mother; rather, he appears quite undaunted, his behavior toward her being a combination of patronizing impatience, insolence, and studied sang-​froid. (And we can surmise that in his unstaged encounter with her between the fourth and fifth acts, which Agrippina gushes about to both Britannicus and Junia [V.ii and iii], he has resorted to shameless flattery, feigned affection, and outright mendacity.) Second, even if we were to accept Nero’s assertion that when within his mother’s immediate sphere of influence “[his] own soul quails,” we must not forget his more readily credible preceding declaration: “Far from her eyes, I give commands, make threats, / Receive your counsels, which I dare endorse, / And steel myself to counter force with force” (II.ii.124 –26). That being the case, all Nero need do (as he must well know) is weather any maternal squall that may be brewing, in order to be able, when once out of Agrippina’s presence, to do just as he pleases. Third, it is highly unlikely that Nero, deviously deceitful soul that he is, ever really bares that soul to his putative confidant, Narcissus; indeed, his announcing so histrionically his intention of doing so (the French for II.ii.127 reads, “Je t’expose ici mon âme toute nue”: here I expose my soul to you completely naked) argues rather for his doing no such thing. It is far more likely that, given his absurd theatrical pretensions (pretensions that Narcissus himself,

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as mentioned, later slyly mocks), he so delights in “performing” that he cannot resist playing the part of the hapless victim, tyrannized by “my mother’s tirades and Octavia’s tears, / Seneca, Burrhus, Rome! Three virtuous years!” (II.ii.89 –90). (See note 51 for Act IV for some vastly entertaining passages from Suetonius that confirm to what outrageous lengths Nero’s theatrical aspirations went.) Furthermore, given Nero’s vanity — ​and his designs (see Section XIII below) — ​it would be wholly in character for him to advertise the opposition he will have to face (“the harsh harassment . . . the arguments!” [II.ii.87– 88]) and the above-​cited obstacles, in order to add greater luster to the glory he will attain once he has unmistakably demonstrated, as he will have done by the end of the play, that he has surmounted such daunting impediments.

vi In investigating the question of Nero’s supposed susceptibility to “the power of eyes [namely, Agrippina’s]  / That taught me daily where my duty lies” (II.ii.129 –30), it might be instructive to consider, not how others regard Agrippina’s power, or lack thereof, but how she regards it. As Weinberg (113) pointedly observes, “The summary that she gives of what has happened (IV.ii) is the summary of one who thinks that she is — ​and of one who is — ​a victim.” Those commentators who concur with Burrhus’s ostensible view that she is “dangerous” usually posit her as Nero’s great opposite in this play, one of two antagonists who vie for control of the empire. (One certainly cannot deny that Nero and Agrippina are the two most conspicuously larger-than-​life characters in the play.) But while such a view may be in accordance with the historical facts and events, at least as recounted by Tacitus and Suetonius, the character that Racine creates here is incompatible with such an interpretation. The narrative arc of the play does not trace the progress of the Nero-​ Agrippina nexus from a state of equilibrium, however precarious, to one in which the balance of power has shifted decisively from mother to son. The “disgrace of Agrippina” can be thought of as one of the chief subjects of Britannicus only if we take the phrase

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as denoting a product, not a process, since that disgrace is as fully accomplished at the outset of the play as Nero’s maturation into a “monstre” is. And it is Agrippina herself who most eloquently bears witness to this fact. For Racine’s portrayal of Agrippina not only confirms that her bark is worse than her bite: it is a portrait of a woman far more prone to whimpering than to barking. When she leaves the stage toward the end of Act I, she may assure Britannicus that she is determined to acquit herself of the pledges she has made to him, uttering these lines, darkly suggestive of game-​changing developments: “I’ll say no more. To Pallas’ house repair, / If you’d hear further; I’ll await you there” (I.iii.17–18); but, shortly afterward, Narcissus, who certainly has the right of it, reports to Nero that “your enemies, stripped of hopes that have proved vain, / At Pallas’ house now helplessly complain” (“pleurer leur impuissance”: literally, to bewail their impotence, II.ii.3 –4). Much of Agrippina’s discourse is devoted to complaining about her waning powers and worrying about further incursions thereon. Yes, every so often she will attempt to assert her illusive authority, but no more convincingly than does Britannicus, when he indulges in boyish bravado. (See Section IX of the Discussion below.) And far more consistently, Agrippina appears — ​or rather, presents herself — ​as someone whose “wonted sway / Has weakened swiftly with each passing day” (I.i.111–12), and the sharpest glimpse we get of that “wonted sway” is now merely a bitter memory for her: Those days are past when Nero would report The heartfelt wishes of his doting court, When, my hand guiding the affairs of state, The senate, at my call, would congregate. Then, veiled but present, I would play my role: That august body’s all-​controlling soul. (I.i.91–96) Now it is Nero who is “veiled but present,” either literally, as in the famous eavesdropping scene (II.vi), or, indirectly, through his network of spies, as Britannicus attests:

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My so-​called friends, who trade in treachery, Observe my moves with assiduity; Chosen by Nero for this enterprise, They search my soul, whose secrets Nero buys. (I.iv.25 –28) And Britannicus’s avowal to Narcissus, several lines later (in another dose of Racinian irony), that “my heart’s emotions he, like you, can trace” (I.iv.31), should prompt us to consider the likelihood that Agrippina herself has also served as Narcissus’s unsuspecting dupe, for, while they never share a one-on-​one scene on stage, she ruefully confesses to Burrhus in the penultimate scene, “You I condemned, Narcissus had my ear!” (V.vii.2).

vii Even in Agrippina’s dealings with Junia and Britannicus, although she tries, with bustling officiousness, to play the role of protectress, benefactor, and wise mentor, adopting a grandly patronizing tone with both of them, confidently reiterating to Britannicus her promises of assistance (“Whate’er your enemies do, / I shan’t revoke the vows I’ve sworn to you” [III.vi.23 –24]) and smugly reassuring Junia (“Dismiss your fears, for all has been arranged. / I’ll answer for a truce sworn ’neath my eye” [V.iii.12 –13]), her confidence rings hollow when judged in the context of her earlier, self-​deprecatory remarks, such as “To shame me, Nero wants the world to know / That what I promise I cannot bestow” (I.ii.126 –27) and “On Agrippina’s aid who’d think to call / When Nero makes my ruin known to all?” [I.ii.152 –53]. And let us not overlook the fact that her above-​ cited declaration to Britannicus is uttered in the immediate wake of the near-​hysterical anxiety she displays (III.v.8 –21) to Albina, her confidant, when confronted with the prospect of her position’s being usurped by Nero’s new love interest (namely, Junia). In her intercourse with Burrhus, on the other hand, while she may throw it in his face that he is a nonentity “whose ambition I could have let

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rot / In some vile legion or some distant spot, / Obscure, unhonored, and at last forgot” (I.ii.26 –28) and that she is “Wife, daughter, sister, mother of your kings!” (I.ii.30), he is the one who adopts the patronizing tone toward her, whether patiently calming her as if she were a petulant child, offering her counsel from his position of more privileged knowledge, or solicitously advising her, for her behoof, how to deal with Nero. And her haughty insistence on his inferior status only makes her position seem even more ignominious when we hear her complaining, variously, to Albina, that “where once my help was needed, / Now Seneca’s or Burrhus’ words are heeded” (I.i.113 –14), to Burrhus, that “like a wall, ’twixt him [Nero] and me you’re thrust” (I.ii.17), and to Nero, that “Burrhus has dared to lay his hands on me!” (IV.ii.108). Indeed, the very opening of the play presents Agrippina in a most humiliating position — ​and that, before a word of dialogue has been exchanged; for we see her impatiently waiting outside Nero’s door, as if she were a flunky (a reasonable paraphrase of the French’s untranslatable “à  titre d’importune” [I.ii.15], as she herself describes her situation to Burrhus when she accosts him at the beginning of the next scene). So  abject is the Agrippina whom we meet when the curtain rises that even her servant is more concerned for her mistress’s self-​respect than she is, scolding her, “la mère de César” (the mother of the emperor, line 4), for wandering about the palace with no retinue and waiting outside her son’s door until he awakes. (Perhaps it is a recollection of Albina’s almost scandalized outburst that stings Agrippina into some renewed, if momentary, sense of her own exalted position when she, in turn, reminds Burrhus in the next scene [I.ii.30] that she is “la mère de vos maîtres” [the mother of your masters].) And when we carefully examine her one-hundred-plus-​line tirade in the fourth act (only in Mithridates do we find one of equal length, where it is also a parent, Mithridates, addressing, in his case, two sons), even that turns out to be less epic than episodic. This “great ‘confession,’ ” as George Dillon calls it (and who confesses but a suppliant?), “gives us a decade of Roman history (condensing books XII and XIII of the Annals) in a style as stringently documentary as its original, much of it literally translated from Tacitus” (Dillon, 60). Here, then, there is nothing like Mithridates’ thrilling narrative of

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his flight to safety after the defeat of his army or his stirring rhetoric as he unveils his plans to march on Rome (“It’s not, sons, at the world’s periphery / That Roman fetters weigh most heavily; / No: rousing close to home the fiercest hate, / Your greatest enemies, Rome, are at your gate” [Mithridates  III.i.64 – 67]), nor anything like Clytemnestra’s impassioned tirade in defense of her daughter Iphigenia (“Shall this cruel priest, urged by a crueler crowd, / Lay criminal hands on her and be allowed  / To rend her breast and, by his probing art, / Consult the heav’ns in her still-​heaving heart?” [Iphigenia IV.iv.137–40]) — ​in its noble ferocity, the verbal equivalent of a lioness protecting her cub. In contrast to those speeches, there is very little of the dramatic about Agrippina’s “big moment,” being neither a gripping narrative nor a theatrical outburst; it can hardly even be called an argument, except in the archaic sense of a résumé of “the plot thus far.” It is only in the last fifth of her speech that she begins to work up a head of steam, and even then the subject of her harangue is, again, her humiliating ill treatment at Nero’s hands. And that the imperious, impassioned denunciation we might have expected at this point should prove to be such a spiritless, not to say spineless, recital of her machinations on Nero’s behalf may lead us to conclude that it was a deliberate strategy on Racine’s part not to allow us to witness the earlier confrontation between Nero and Agrippina that must have taken place sometime between III.vi and III.ix (as I explain in note 31 for Act III), a scene that would surely have presented us with an Agrippina far less meek and retiring (though still powerless), inasmuch as Agrippina herself, aflame with righteous indignation, anticipates it thus: “In vain my guilty son my wrath shall flee, / And, soon or late, he’ll have to hark to me. . . . My son I shall besiege on every side” (III.vi.25 –26, 31). By contrast, in the scene Racine offers us, Agrippina, for all her verboseness, certainly comes off as the weaker, less worthy adversary. To her whining rehearsal of her wrongs Nero responds with a powerfully argued demonstration that she wields too much power, resorting to the same stratagem of “quoting” Rome’s purported views (“This much-​blamed son: what has been his offense? / And has she had him crowned just to obey? / He holds the scepter, then, while she holds sway?” [IV.ii.122 –24]) that Narcissus will employ in his scene with

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Nero later in the act (IV.iv.78 – 88 — ​in that case, the cited views being those of Nero’s detractors), and to telling effect, for Agrippina is immediately put on the defensive. It is only when his mother has utterly capitulated (“I’ve done my utmost; it’s enough you reign. . . . If you desire, take my life too, I pray, / Provided angry Rome, at my demise, / Does not reclaim from you the hard-​won prize” [IV.ii.172, 174 –76]) that Nero, by now convinced — ​by Agrippina herself — ​ of her impotence, solicitously inquires, with feigned meekness, “What do you want from me?” (IV.ii.177); and, in reply to the list of demands that his mother rattles off, he responds with an equally prompt and comprehensive obligingness that subsequent events will confirm as highly suspect. (In the very next scene he abruptly informs Burrhus of his fixed intention of doing away with his stepbrother.) In the last analysis, what was intended as a strategic self-​ justification, serving both to redeem herself with her son and to remind him of his obligations of due gratitude toward her, proves, ironically, to be a justification for all his recent and future actions: she has demonstrated all too well the efficacy of mendacity, treachery, and machination and the rewards of callousness, cruelty, and, indeed, ingratitude (which is why, when she later accuses him of having murdered Britannicus, he is conveniently able to parry with a thinly veiled accusation of his own: “One would believe, to listen to his wife, / That I curtailed the days of Claudius’ life” [V.vi.6 –7]). After such a disappointing showing on Agrippina’s part, one can almost imagine Nero, as his mother withdraws, musing to himself (if Romans spoke Italian back then), “E avanti a lei tremava tutta Roma!” (And before her all Rome trembled!), to adapt the famous phrase uttered by Floria Tosca at the end of Act II of Puccini’s opera Tosca (1900), as she stands over the dead body of Baron Scarpia, the chief of police of Rome in 1800, whom she has just stabbed to death with a fruit knife.

viii When Dillon (60) astutely points out that “Racine attenuates Agrippina’s historical reputation,” he of course means her reputation as

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a power-​hungry, ruthless, and somewhat deranged murderess. One sure confirmation of Dillon’s assessment (and Racine’s intentions) is that, in the course of her lengthy and otherwise frank account of her machinations, manipulations, and general skullduggery (IV.ii), Agrippina never once mentions, or even hints, that she was instrumental in Claudius’s death (see note 56 for Act I). (In Iphigenia Racine similarly “attenuates” the standard conception of the character of Clytemnestra. In his version there is no hint of the murderous or the adulterous: all her passion is directed toward protecting her child. One might also mention, by the way, that she too often manifests the same “impuissant courroux” [impotent wrath, I.iii.15] that characterizes Agrippina.) Bearing this construction of Agrippina’s “reputation” in mind, we would have to say that her reputation is not at all redeemed in the fifth act, “where,” as Dillon goes on to say, “she becomes embarrassing, almost ridiculous, in her premature triumph.” While the baleful import of her oracular commination of Nero after Britannicus’s murder (V.vi.27–46) — “This Rome, this sky, this life I’ve let you share: / They’ll bear my image always, everywhere. / Remorse, like Furies’ whips, you’ll vainly flee” (V.vi.34 –36) — ​may be borne out by the historical sequel (see note 39 for Act V), in the play, Nero does not even honor her diatribe with a reply, exiting with a dismissive “Narcissus, follow me” (V.vi.47, his last line in the play). Could Racine have provided us with a more telling demonstration of Agrippina’s influence having been rendered utterly ineffectual? Nor, for that matter, does the play suggest that the distracted state Albina finds Nero in (quite understandable in the wake of Junia’s having unexpectedly escaped his clutches) will last more than a few brief hours, let alone threaten his life along with his wits. (See Section XXI below.) Compare the end of Andromache, where Orestes, after suddenly learning of Hermione’s suicide, becomes totally unhinged, leaving his comrades and the audience in doubt about the recovery of his reason. But, after all, Nero is no Orestes: he is neither mad nor madly in love. Weinberg (113) lucidly sums up Agrippina’s position in the play thus: Agrippina contributes to the total structure of the play reaction rather than action. Whatever she does follows upon

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an action of Néron, responds to it, displays disapproval or approval of it. Even so, she actually does very little; she may scold and rant, she may accuse and complain, but nothing that she says is of any consequence in the subsequent action of the play. . . . We cannot say that she performs or causes any important action. She is . . . a victim; that is, she is acted upon (and always to her disadvantage) by Néron. If, in Agrippina’s encounters with Nero, we never have a sense of witnessing a meeting of equals, let alone a sense of a domineering mother and a submissive son, there is certainly no doubt that their relationship is recognizably that of parent and child, albeit a highly hostile one (that is, until Agrippina’s somewhat mawkish mellowing toward her son early in Act V, which, for that matter, is somehow more disturbing). Oddly enough, it is in Agrippina’s dealings with her stepson, Britannicus, that we find a parent-​child relationship whose dynamic is much less contentious — ​indeed quite conspiratorial. Although Agrippina and Britannicus, as I observe in note 27 for Act III, would seem to be “strange bedfellows,” she takes a more recognizably maternal interest in his well-​being than she does in Nero’s. It is as if she finds in him the malleable, ingenuous, and candid son that she has learned to despair of finding in her own untrustworthy, intransigent offspring. She counsels him, admonishes him, and encourages him, however patronizingly. That being the case, and given the manifestly abject and insignificant position she has already been reduced to, we get some sense of just how truly irrelevant Britannicus’s position is in the context of Nero’s court.

ix Britannicus’s downfall, no less than Agrippina’s, has taken place before the play opens, but he will fall still farther during the course of the play: in fact, he will fall to his death. Nero’s murder of Britannicus and, later, of Agrippina, are so well documented in the accounts of Tacitus and Suetonius that it would certainly have been surprising if Racine had chosen not to treat of at least one of those events in

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a play about Nero. (Of course, if the play concerned the death of Agrippina, Britannicus, murdered several years earlier, could not have been among the dramatic personae.) In effect, Racine had it both ways, since Agrippina’s murder is foreshadowed several times in the play, Agrippina herself repeatedly alluding to the prediction of the Chaldean seers that her son would kill her, and near the end of the play uttering her own prophecy to the same effect with an oracular intensity that would render such an outcome a certainty for the audience, even if it were ignorant of its Roman history. But although Britannicus’s death is undoubtedly the key event in the play, its significance has nothing to do with Britannicus’s stature as a character or with what he might be considered to represent, since, on investigation, he will prove to be no worthier an adversary for Nero than I have shown Agrippina to be. (What purpose is served, then, by Nero’s ridding himself of such an unthreatening rival — ​ more nuisance than nemesis — ​is a question I shall shortly address and, I hope, throw some fresh light on.) It would not be overstating the case to assert that the only thing Britannicus — ​as unresourceful as a leader as he is unreliable as a lover — ​accomplishes in the course of the play bearing his name is to get himself killed. (I use the last phrase advisedly, since his death is, in some sense, no less a consequence of his eager swallowing of the poisonous lies Nero plies him with before the celebratory fete in Act V than of his imbibing Locusta’s lethal brew.) Britannicus, despite being the titular character, is something in the nature of an incidental one. This is as much an effect of his personality as of his situation. To treat the situational aspect first, he has, as mentioned, already been reduced to a subservient position, having been disinherited (“hurled . . . down from that throne / That blood and birthright should have made his own” [I.i.61– 62]), as well as banished, ostracized, and stripped of his princely trappings (“His honors lost, his palace desolate” [II.iii.122]). To Junia he boyishly boasts that “true loyalty, madame, has not yet vanished. / My anger meets approval in men’s eyes” (II.vi.28 –29), but, earlier, he had acknowledged to Narcissus that “I’m alone . . . / My father’s friends are strangers now to me” (I.iv.19 –20). And what underscores more emphatically the futility, the absurdity, of Britannicus’s aspirations is

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the fact that, first, when he makes his boast to Junia, Nero is eavesdropping, and, second, when, in the next act, he assures Agrippina that “men’s hearts are moved to see how we’re mistreated” (III.vi.2), he unknowingly undercuts his triumph by informing her (in a deft touch of Racinian irony) that “your friends and mine, . . . provoked to righteous wrath, . . . have made known to Narcissus their concern” (III.vi.4 – 6) — ​Narcissus, who we already know passes on to Nero all of Britannicus’s confidences. In the end, we never get any sense, as we do, for example, with Bajazet and with Orestes (in Andromache), that he has any steadfast partisans, let alone armed adherents, waiting in the wings, ready to stand by him, whether to defend his rights or to rescue him. Indeed, the only one who seems willing to take up his cause is, as I have remarked, Agrippina.

x Britannicus’s disclosure to Narcissus of his seditious activities is but one instance of the consistent gullibility that marks his character and that at times comes close to reducing him to a comic dupe (à la Tartuffe’s Orgon). Georges Forestier (1438) suggests as a possible reason for Racine’s suppressing eight lines’ worth of such egregious credulity in the first scene of Act  V (see note 12 for Act  V for the deleted lines) that “he tried to attenuate to some extent the excessive characteristic blindness of the prince with regard to his confidant.” But there is no denying that in virtually every scene in which Britannicus appears he is bested by his interlocutor, whether it is a question of his being duped by Narcissus, bossed about by Agrippina, or shown up, in his scenes with Junia, as the less noble, less admirable character. (As Martin Turnell [107] observes, “Junie is visibly much more mature than Britannicus.”) Indeed, his character is very much more that of the jeune premier than of the noble hero, whether tragic or otherwise. Unlike Junia, he lards his speeches with empty, precious gallantries, thoughtless in both senses: when he encounters Junia for the first time, in the wake of the night of horror she has been subjected to, his speech is all about his ordeal,

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his romantic torment, climaxing with the cloying “Did you take pity on the pain I’d feel?” (II.vi.14). (As Karl Vossler [60] pithily remarks, in regard to Britannicus’s potential stature as a tragic hero, “Precious characters cannot be tragic.”) And, likewise, when Junia reveals to him in their next meeting that the reason for her seeming coldness was that Nero “eavesdropped on our conversation, . . . his vengeance poised to fall upon his brother / At the least sign we understood each other” (III.viii.33, 35 –36), instead of inveighing against Nero’s cruel treachery, Britannicus turns on her, insisting that “surely you / Could have deceived him and not duped me too! . . . What suffering you’d have saved me with one glance!” (III.viii.37–38, 41). (Saved him, forsooth!) Upon which, she has to patiently explain to him, first, that he was not the only one who was made to suffer, and, second, that her suffering was aggravated by understanding what he must have been going through: “What torment, when in love, to stand like stone, / To make you suffer and to hear you moan” (III.viii.47–48). He can perhaps be forgiven, in the earlier scene, for his not having been able to read the torment Junia was going through by having to feign coldness toward him (see note 38 for Act III, however), but not for being so quick to believe her capable of “such deceit, unheard-​of here at court,” in spite of his having found “that noble heart . . . a foe, from youth, of courtly perfidy” (III.vii.21, 18 –19). Furthermore, although we never witness the reconciliation scene between Nero and Britannicus that takes place between Acts IV and V, we can gather from the latter’s ebullient optimism at the opening of Act V that, once again, he has been bested by his interlocutor: this time, so blinded by Nero’s blandishments that even Junia’s doubts and misgivings, bordering on hysteria, have no effect on him; indeed, he almost chides her for tears he considers both unwarranted and discordant with his own euphoria, and goes off to his death still believing that he and Nero have been finally reconciled. The one scene in which Britannicus, rising to the occasion, seems to get the better of his opposite is his famous confrontation with Nero, who, thanks to Narcissus’s vigilance, has just come upon Britannicus and Junia in a pose that amply bespeaks their mutual

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affection. Several critics cite this scene as giving evidence of Britannicus’s moral backbone, a hint of his latent heroic quality. One cannot deny that in this verbal swordplay (Racine’s most extended, uninterrupted passage of stichomythia) Britannicus lands the more palpable hits. But may we not just as easily read his behavior as a sign of youthful hotheadedness, little different in that respect from his suddenly lashing out against Junia for her apparent faithlessness? Certainly, the disastrous upshot of his outburst suggests that some tact, some circumspection, some self-​restraint, might have been the wiser course, not only for himself, but for Junia, whose interests he hardly seems to take into account, heedlessly choosing to exploit her preference for him to deliver another jab (“I’ve misjudged Junia if such views should raise / A smile of pleasure or a word of praise” [III.ix.34 –35]). In Junia’s invocation to Augustus’s effigy at the end of the play, she describes Britannicus as “your sole descendent who,  / If he had lived, might have resembled you” (V.fin.sc.18 –19). But the play furnishes scant evidence of such resemblance, or even the promise of its developing over time. For the ideal ruler must not only possess good qualities himself: he must be able to recognize such qualities — ​ and, just as important, the absence thereof — ​in others. Among the right choices he needs to make is that of whom to trust. Phaedra provides us, in Theseus, with a cautionary example of a monarch whose faulty powers of judgment (which culminate in his placing his trust in Phaedra, based solely on her nurse’s testimony, rather than in his son, whose appeal to him is so manifestly that of a righteous man wrongly accused) are attended with catastrophic consequences. One could well place Aricia’s reprimand to Theseus about his son (“So little do you understand his heart? / Goodness and guilt can you not tell apart?” [Phaedra V.iii.16 –17]) in Junia’s mouth, albeit with an opposite implication: as a warning to Britannicus against Nero’s duplicity. According to Lucien Goldmann (69), “We can define the character of Britannicus with a formula which can equally well be applied to Thésée in Phèdre: the being who is mistaken, who always believes those who lie to him and never believes those who tell him the truth.” However pitiable Britannicus’s demise, his walking blindly into the trap Nero has set for him — ​as Vossler (59) puts it,

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“With self-​satisfied naïveté he trips away to death” — ​suggests that, while Britannicus (Racine’s Britannicus, at least ) would undoubtedly have proved less monstrous than Nero as an emperor, he hardly seems the stuff of which great rulers are made. (As for history’s Britannicus, we should bear in mind that any son of his parents, Messalina and Claudius, had he partaken of the less admirable qualities of each, would hardly be likely to have turned out appreciably more noble or more virtuous than the infamous son of Agrippina and Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus. See note 56 for Act I.) Apropos of great rulers, I am reminded of the thrilling confrontation scene between Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart in Schiller’s Maria Stuart (a meeting wholly of Schiller’s invention), when Mary hurls these lines to her captor: “Regierte Recht, so leget Ihr vor mir im Staube jetzt, / Denn ich bin euer König” (If justice reigned, you would now lie in the dust before me, for I am your king). If justice prevailed in Britannicus — ​as it does at the end of Andromache, where, as Pylades announces in the final scene, “Here [in Epirus] they obey Andromache’s command; / They’ve named her queen” (Andromache V.fin.sc.5 – 6) — ​at the end of the play, the Roman mob would not only take Junia under their protection, but they would name her empress. For it is she herself — ​not Britannicus — ​who, alone of all Augustus’s descendents, resembles him. In light of the above, it is a great misconception to fail to make a moral distinction between Junia and Britannicus, to conjoin them, as  Forestier (1413), among others, does, characterizing them as “a pair of victims, whose purity and innocence permits the blackness of the tyrant to stand out in greater relief,” even positing them as “a veritable tragic couple” (1407). Putting aside the dubiousness of the concept of a “tragic couple,” to attribute “purity and innocence” to Britannicus is to mistake ignorance for innocence, that is, to lend a moral value to a mental attribute, and to mistake youth and inexperience for purity. In Junia’s case, by contrast, those attributes do her less than justice. She is pure and innocent only in the strictly moral sense of being incorruptible, but what enables her to contend against the forces of evil and corruption is her deep knowledge and understanding, products of her willingness and ability to face harsh truth. In the last act of the play, she can avouch to Britannicus that

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she has grasped the full extent of the treachery and deception that pervades Nero’s court, albeit “the court and Nero I’ve known for just one day” (V.i.42), while Britannicus, though he has been a victim of the same appallingly sadistic ploy as Junia, is easily beguiled by Nero’s latest overtures into a false and fatal sense of security. In sum, then, Britannicus’s description of himself and Junia as “two hearts whom their ill fortune unified” (I.iii.10) is simplistic and somewhat misleading, for, throughout the play, he serves, rather, as a foil to set off Junia’s more sterling qualities.

xi In no way, then, can Britannicus be considered a worthy opponent to Nero. Junia, however, announces herself as such from her very first words: “I can’t disguise . . .” (II.iii.3). Confronting the master of disguise, whose virtually every speech and action in this play masks a dark design, she responds to him with unflagging, forthright honesty: “to speak true” — ​as I have her go on to say — ​is what she proceeds to do throughout this long interview. Far from being intimidated by Nero, or attempting to curry favor, or even mincing her words, she intrepidly thwarts him at every turn, “pushing his buttons” with unerring accuracy, and by “buttons” I mean his three bêtes noires: Octavia, Britannicus, and Agrippina. She has hardly entered his presence before she has managed to antagonize him, letting him know, in her immutable frankness, that she would have preferred the company of Octavia (whom he detests) to his. Later in the scene, she takes up the cudgels on Octavia’s behalf, asserting her (i.e., Octavia’s) rights as the legitimate empress, even after Nero has declared that he is planning to divorce Octavia, with Rome’s blessing. And when he reminds Junia, with some petulance no doubt, that “my wife I have renounced, as I’ve made clear” (II.iii.95), she, nothing daunted, tells him to his face that their marriage would be “a crime that robs the rightful heir” (II.iii.108). Campbell (130) cites Volker Schröder’s view of the play as “a lesson in history and politics, an expression of support for absolute monarchy that shows the kind

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of tyranny from which France has escaped.” But can one imagine anyone defying Louis XIV so fearlessly, so outspokenly? Accusing him of a crime? Talk about lèse-​majesté! (Many of the operas of the French baroque, in fact, eulogized the monarch, whether through the allegorical implications of their story lines or, more explicitly, in their prologues, which featured mythological figures unmistakably embodying the king’s virtues. Racine’s only concession to such sycophantic homage — ​if  one accepts Schröder’s view — ​would appear to have been to portray monarchs so egregiously vicious or tyrannical as to convey the consolatory moral: “And you think we have it bad!”) Indeed, Racine was to fall victim to the kind of tyranny from which France had not escaped. For reasons still obscure, Racine, toward the end of his life, came under a cloud, having somehow incited Louis XIV’s displeasure, the effects of which are poignantly registered in this letter of March 4, 1698, to Mme de Maintenon: “I sought consolation at least in my work; but judge what bitterness must be cast over this work by the thought that the great monarch himself with whom my mind is constantly occupied perhaps regards me as a man more worthy of his anger than of his favors” (cited by A. F. B. Clark, 244). Nor does Junia fail to touch upon the subject of Agrippina, goading Nero on his most sensitive spot: his submissiveness (whether feigned or real) to his mother. When Junia observes that Britannicus “adopts his father’s view [that she and Britannicus are betrothed], / Which, I dare say, is yours — ​your mother’s, too, / Since your every design is her design” (II.iii.34 –36), Nero once again has to set her straight, declaring testily, “My mother has her plans, and I have mine. / Of her and Claudius speak no further here” (II.iii.37–38). Thus, when Junia uses the expression “I dare say” (“j’ose dire”), it is not merely a figure of speech: she is verily bearding the lion in his lair. (She shows the same Daniel-​like self-​assurance and dauntlessness, if not temerity, that the ten-year-​old Joash displays in his confrontation with the equally formidable Athaliah.) But what really irritates Nero’s vindictive nature is that, as he himself astutely surmises, “the brother, not the sister, claims your care” (II.iii.112), in other words, that Junia is in love with Britannicus. True to her own moral code

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(“What my heart declares, my lips repeat” [II.iii.116]), she makes no attempt to disguise her feelings for Britannicus, and rubs salt in the wound by assuring Nero that, gilded though his suit may be by “this grandeur and these gifts” (which she throws back in his face as “such senseless glory” [II.iii.105, 104]), she still gives the preference to the destitute and disinherited Britannicus. So thoroughly has she managed to provoke Nero during this long interview that it would seem that nothing short of the ingeniously sadistic scene that he forces her to enact with Britannicus could serve as a sufficiently condign punishment to salve his sore ego. But what is so extraordinary about Nero’s response is that it is not, in fact, a scheme devised on the spur of the moment as an act of revenge, for we must remember that, at the end of the prior scene, Nero had already determined on such a meeting between Junia and Britannicus, as he announced to the nonplussed Narcissus: “I give my blessing. This sweet news convey: / He shall see her” (II.ii.147–48); and when Narcissus demurs (“No, Sire, send him away!”), he assures him that “Oh, I’ve my reasons; and you well may guess / He’ll pay a high price for his happiness” (II.ii.148 –50), although neither Narcissus nor the audience can possibly imagine the nefarious scheme Nero has cold-​bloodedly concocted, with no “heat of the moment” to extenuate its vileness.

xii In fine, then, having surveyed Nero’s interactions with the other three principal characters, namely, Agrippina, Britannicus, and Junia, it is clear that only the last can in any way be considered a worthy antagonist to Nero. As a corollary, it is equally clear that, between Junia and Britannicus, she is the nobler, the more heroic, character. I use the last epithet deliberately, for I cannot resist putting forward the suggestion, however far-​fetched, that it is possible to regard Junia and Britannicus as, in some respects, Wagner’s Brünnhilde and Siegfried (in Der Ring des Nibelungen) in miniature. Certainly, the parallels between these two couples are striking. Each young man is brash and fearless, boyishly naive but good-​hearted; each young

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woman is fearless too, but withal sadder and wiser. Junia needs but one day at court to understand how power corrupts: But in this court, alas! I have to say: Men’s thoughts and words are worlds apart, my lord! Between their hearts and tongues how slight the accord! Here men betray each other with such glee! (V.i.43 –46) Similarly, in the last act of Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods, the final installment of the Ring cycle tetralogy), Brünnhilde herself can declare, “Alles weiss ich, alles ist mir nun klar” (I understand everything, everything has now become clear to me). About her sojourn at Nero’s treacherous court, Junia famously exclaims, “How strange a stopping place for you and me!” (V.i.47); Brünnhilde and Siegfried find themselves similarly out of their depth when they stumble into the court of the Gibichungs, where treachery, greed, lust, and lust for power conspire to sabotage their love and bring them to ruin. At the mercy of the evil, scheming Hagen and the selfish Gunther and Gutrune, Siegfried, like Britannicus, falls victim to forces he cannot control or understand; both are treacherously murdered (Siegfried is, literally, stabbed in the back) by people whom they have been beguiled into trusting, but who, under the guise of friendship and reconciliation, plot against them. Further coincidences abound. Both are killed at parties: Britannicus at Nero’s celebratory fete, Siegfried at a hunting party organized by Hagen; both murderers glibly fabricate plausible explanations, which they deliver with the utmost brazen insolence, Nero matterof-​factly proclaiming that Britannicus’s apparent death throes are nothing more than a temporary indisposition, Hagen announcing that Siegfried was gored by a wild boar. More appropriately to their heroic stature, Brünnhilde and Junia both choose self-​immolation, as a redemptive gesture intended to vindicate the power of love over the love of power, both, in some sense, passing through fire: Brünnhilde exultantly riding her steed into the purifying flames of Siegfried’s funeral pyre, Junia, more symbolically, sacrificing herself to “the precious flame . . . that glorifies the Gods to whom Rome

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prays” (V.fin.sc.30 –31). But whereas the closing pages of Wagner’s magnum opus clearly signal, as a sequel to the Twilight of the Gods, the dawn of a new moral order (or the instauration of the unsullied, nature-​based world evoked at the beginning of the cycle), uncorrupted by gold, greed, and self-​aggrandizement, the end of Britannicus projects a much darker future: in fact, the Twilight of the Good.

xiii Earlier, in discussing Britannicus’s conspicuous lack of any noble, let alone heroic, qualities, I raised the following question: What purpose is served by Nero’s ridding himself of such an unthreatening rival? The answer to this will become clear when we investigate Nero’s “agenda” in this play, for Nero’s strategy is a two-​pronged one. I have already demonstrated that Nero’s supposed battle royal with Agrippina is really hardly more than a series of skirmishes whose victor is never in doubt. Nero’s hostilities against Britannicus and Junia, however, are at the heart of the play. Unlike Nero’s interactions with Agrippina, which, after all, alter nothing, Britannicus’s death and Junia’s defeat change everything. For what is the ultimate outcome of the play, the significant transformation that has occurred? Yes, Nero has finally been revealed as a fully formed monster, but that, as I have argued, is not a transformation. What has also become manifest by the end of the play — ​far more significantly — ​is that Nero is now, finally, omnipotent. A monster can be kept caged, after all; without Nero’s limitless power, then, his monstrous nature would have consequences far less grave, less far-​reaching, than what is so frighteningly portended by Burrhus’s famous final line: “Please heav’n this prove the last of Nero’s crimes!” (V.fin.sc.53). Now, in what does Nero’s omnipotence consist, but in his power to obtain or to destroy whatever he wants? In Nero’s case, how better to establish, to indisputably demonstrate, that omnipotence than by obtaining that which is most inaccessible ( Junia) and by destroying that which is most inviolable (Britannicus)? Let us first examine this latter aspect of Nero’s strategy in an attempt to answer the question reiterated at the top of this section.

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When Nero, speaking of Britannicus, says, “As long as he lives, I half live, at best” (IV.iii.13), the significance of his avowal is not that Britannicus threatens his life or prevents him from living fully, that while Britannicus lives he leads a stunted, deprived existence — ​he is emperor, after all (indeed, as Junia reminds him, “All that you see conduces to your pleasure; / The enchanted days glide by in even measure” [II.iii.125 –26]). Its true import is that by the very act of killing Britannicus, Nero announces that as emperor he is released once and for all from any constraints, moral or pragmatic, thus realizing the full potential (in both senses: possibility and potency) of that role, that is, someone free to flout every received dictate of society and morality, to live — ​and rule — ​in obedience to his will alone. Speaking of free, one might argue that the less real the threat Britannicus poses, the less justification for his removal that a concern for Nero’s safety can provide, the more his murder must be considered as an acte gratuit on Nero’s part (like Raskolnikov’s), meant to prove a point, the act itself being the end, not the means to an end. And for that purpose Nero has chosen his victim with supreme cunning: the murder of Britannicus — ​young, innocent, defenseless, boyishly endearing, the son of the emperor Claudius, formerly affianced to Junia (in Racine’s version), in love with and loved by her, and, lastly, sheltered under Agrippina’s wing — ​must appear from every point of view as egregiously horrific, inexcusable, and unforgivable. And that is not to consider the manner of his murder. And by manner, I do not mean the actual convulsive workings of Locusta’s poison, however frightful, but rather, the “staging” (certainly, le mot juste) of the murder. Consider the events that bring Act III to a tumultuous conclusion. First, Nero discovers Britannicus and Junia in what he could justifiably claim was a compromisingly intimate situation; then, the hostility between the stepbrothers escalating, their confrontation ends with a heated stichomythic exchange, Britannicus’s final contributions to which Nero might well construe as an act of lèse-​ majesté; indeed, as a provisional discipline, Nero orders his guards to place Britannicus and Junia (separately) under house arrest. In short, Nero finds himself in the advantageous position of having at his

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disposal several plausible pretexts for punishing Britannicus — ​and not by a gentle reprimand. But just when he would appear to have the upper (whip) hand, Nero deliberately divests himself of all pretexts for murdering Britannicus. His reason for doing so may be deduced from a suggestive remark Racine makes about Nero in his second preface: “What we have here is a monster being born, but who dares not declare himself, and who seeks pretexts for his wicked actions.” It follows, then, that if Nero has reached the point where he not only does not seek pretexts for his wicked actions, but goes out of his way, by his ostentatious reconciliation with Britannicus, to invalidate them, we can assume he does so in order to “declare himself.” (Forestier [1422 –23] suggests that, “in defining . . . the characteristics traditionally attributed to youth, [Racine, in his first preface] would have it understood that there is in these ‘qualities’ much that would push his hero to make a tragic error.” But Britannicus makes no “tragic error,” not even by being himself.) Another aspect to consider, which will further clarify Nero’s motives, is that, had Nero’s true purpose been to rid himself of Britannicus for pressing political or personal motives, and not merely to advertise his assumption of unconditional power, he surely could and would have chosen a more discreet way of doing so, one that would have cast no suspicion on himself. Here, on the contrary, Nero has staged Britannicus’s murder with the clear intention of being caught virtually in flagrante delicto. For none of the guests believe for a moment — ​nor does Nero expect them to — ​that he had no hand in Britannicus’s death, any more than they could have been expected to believe, in the immediate wake of Britannicus’s violent death throes, that these were merely the mild and momentary manifestations of a long-​standing but not life-​threatening complaint, as Nero casually explains to the appalled onlookers. (Indeed, Nero would undoubtedly have been frightfully disappointed if his “audience” had failed to appreciate, for example, his artful touch of having placed the virulent concoction in a “loving cup” meant to signalize his reconciliation with Britannicus. One can easily imagine Nero saying to himself, minutes before Britannicus’s demise, “I can’t wait to see the expression on their faces!”) Such calculatedly ingenuous deportment

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on Nero’s part is meant to proclaim, with utmost insolence, not his innocence, but his impunity.

xiv Turning our attention now to the other half of Nero’s campaign, his attempt to possess himself of Junia, we must first of all recognize the complexity of the character that Racine has created in Junia and the multiple purposes she serves in the drama. (Racine was to create, with equally amazing ingenuity, another such multipurpose character in Iphigenia’s Eriphyle, unconstrained as he was, in that case, by considerations of faithfulness to his source play, Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis, since Eriphyle does not appear in it — ​or anywhere else for that matter — ​and, in the present case, by considerations of historical accuracy, since the historical Junia Calvina, whose name Racine used for a character otherwise wholly of his own invention, “is all but unknown to us,” as he informs us in his first preface. Like Junia in Britannicus, Eriphyle plays a crucial thematic role in Iphigenia: as the envious outsider, the sullen loner, she malevolently and calculatedly corrodes the “family values” at the heart of the play. Plotwise, she is involved in a love triangle [Iphigenia, Achilles, and herself ], and she plays a key role as well in Racine’s artful “surprise” denouement of the play.) Junia, among her other functions, serves, of course, as the “love interest” for the title character. (Some would argue that, like Antigone, Atalide, Monima, Iphigenia, and Aricia, Junia forms [with Britannicus and Nero] part of a love triangle — ​ in Monima’s case it is more like a “tetrangle” — ​but later in this Discussion I will contend against that view.) I have already demonstrated the pivotal role Junia plays as an equipotent adversary to Nero, the progress and resolution of their agon constituting the main theme of the play. Whereas he has no virtues, indeed, no admirable qualities at all (unless one considers his highly developed acting ability as one), she is virtue personified, having no qualities that are not admirable. (She is certainly Racine’s most noble character; compared with her, for example, even two of

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Racine’s most sympathetic characters, Berenice and Titus — ​both of them liable, at times, to be selfish, petty, and querulous — ​can seem almost ignoble.) And as I suggested in my excursus about Wagner’s Ring cycle, Junia’s ultimate defeat at Nero’s hands, the obliteration of the goodness, kindness, honesty, courage, and selflessness that she represents by the depravity, cruelty, cunning, mendacity, and selfishness that Nero represents, is what weighs so heavily and with such dire foreboding at the end of the play. I must say I find untenable the views of those critics (several of whom are cited by Campbell [128 –132]) who maintain that the outcome of the play in any way represents “the triumph of Junie” (as Volker Schröder [277] would have it), or, to quote the ecstatic view of Anne Ubersfeld (in “Racine auteur tragique,” cited by Campbell [133]), that “nowhere will you hear more clearly the pure song of the love that triumphs over violence and death, the love that is the very basis of resistance to the tyrant.” Even Campbell himself (132) asserts that Albina’s last lines “clearly show an isolated figure [i.e., Nero] with madness and suicide on the road ahead. It is hard to visualize this ending as the triumph of evil.” Au contraire: I would say that it is hard not to. Even if one were to concede that Nero is reduced to despair at the end of the play (and later I shall strenuously argue against such an interpretation), thirteen years (the time that would elapse before Nero would be forced to commit suicide in order to escape a much crueler demise) is a long “road.” Certainly, given the unmistakable personalities of these two moral adversaries, it would be just as absurd to maintain that Junia, grief-​stricken over the death of Britannicus, will ever find any consolation, as it would be to maintain that Nero will never find any. With all that has come before, is it not the height of absurdity to imagine Nero as “heartbroken”? Surely, the play has amply demonstrated that he lacks the one thing needful to be reduced to such a condition. No, Nero will undoubtedly readily find another inamorata — ​another victim, that is — ​on whom to lavish his “affections.” By contrast, the bloodier, more definitively “deadly” ending of Bajazet leaves us with far less of a sense of despair because no one in that play is sufficiently more virtuous or more moral, let alone nobler,

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than anyone else, for us to identify any decisive moral defeat. Granted, it is debatable which is the bleaker prospect: a world without goodness or one where goodness is defeated by evil. (If Nazi Germany had triumphed in World War II, would our spirits be uplifted or further crushed by the thought that so many brave, noble souls had fought the good fight in vain?) Campbell (131–32) does, however, cite the view of one French critic who would seem to be a staunch proponent of the latter view, Jean Emelina (“Les tragédies de Racine et le mal” 107), for whom, “despite his aversion to ‘pessimistic’ interpretations of le tragique racinien, this play is different: ‘The most unbearable thing — ​and here the sense of the tragic is absolute — ​is when the evildoer continues to live on happily and with impunity. This is the case, quite uniquely, with Néron. [. . .] Britannicus is without doubt the bleakest of Racine’s tragedies.’ ” But if, on the other hand, we are not to label the ending of Britannicus as tragic, are not to feel such a commensurate heavyheartedness, then, apparently, however grim the outcome of a play, as long as we have seen the cruel and crushing defeat of those who were conspicuously undeserving of meeting such an end, we have no choice but to consider it a “happy ending.”

xv Having explored the antipodal aspect of Nero’s relationship with Junia, we must investigate the question of what it is that “attracts” Nero to Junia, and I use “attracts” in its broadest sense in order to comprise both my thesis, that Nero wishes to “obtain” Junia, and the rival thesis, as I will contentiously call it, namely, that Nero falls in love with Junia. This is an extremely complicated question and one that intertwines almost inextricably with the crucial question Ronald W. Tobin poses in his Jean Racine Revisited (71): “Why did Néron have Junie kidnapped?” One thing we can categorically assert is that he could not have done so because he was in love with her at that point, since, if he had ever seen her before, it could not have been at all recently (when they first meet, he upbraids her for having dared to “hide yourself so long from Nero’s sight” [II.iii.14]), and, as he

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testifies to Narcissus, when he supposedly fell in love with Junia, it was at first sight. Thus, the “love thesis” is irrelevant in addressing Tobin’s question. Whatever other explanations we may discover for Nero’s abduction of Junia, I venture to say that my thesis, that Nero wished to demonstrate his omnipotence by “obtaining” Junia, sufficiently accounts for it. Clearly, we are to understand by Tobin’s query that a satisfactory answer must not only address the reason(s) for Nero’s abduction of Junia per se but must also offer some explanation of what he intended to “do with her” once she arrived at the palace, for her abduction, in and of itself, could hardly serve any purpose worth the trouble of arranging it. Here, of course, those who hold the view that Nero, after one distant, nocturnal glimpse of her, instantly fell in love, would readily answer that, of course, he, in the very next instant, determined to marry her, overcoming whatever obstacles stood in the way. But, again, such a view begs the question, Why did he abduct her in the first place? Whatever his motives in doing so, whatever plans he must have had about Junia’s future, must have existed before he fell in love with her. Indeed, we shall find that all of Nero’s behavior, all of his actions with regard to Junia, both before and after her abduction, can be accounted for by his deliberate design of “obtaining” her, and, furthermore, that, while some of his actions could just as well be accounted for by Nero’s being in love with Junia as by his objective of “obtaining” her, none of them need to be so explained, and, in fact, most of those actions could sooner be accounted for by his hating her than by his loving her. Tobin himself (71) adduces two interesting, pregnant answers to his own question: “As Agrippine has surmised, Néron’s act is at once an adolescent’s symbolic signal of freedom from the mother and a desire to replace one female presence with another.” In regard to the first, Agrippina would seem to shed some light on Nero’s longer-​ range plans when she thus challenges Burrhus: “Explain why Nero, now a ravisher, / Pursues Silanus’ sister, abducting her. / Is it his aim to taint with infamy / The shining blood that Junia shares with me?” (I.ii.101–4). If her metaphorically couched surmise is correct (and the metaphor, conveniently, can represent equally well the insult to Agrippina and the injury to Junia), then we can assume it

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had been Nero’s intention before ever seeing Junia to ravish her. In that case, it is reasonable to regard such an outcome as amply answering the objective I have posited of Nero’s intending to “obtain” Junia. QED. In regard to Tobin’s second explanation (replacing one female presence with another), in what sense could Junia’s presence represent a replacement for Agrippina’s, unless Nero planned to marry Junia? For then, indeed, would Agrippina’s worst fears be realized: Now, with a rival they’ve confronted me! If this disastrous knot can’t be undone, My place usurped, I’m nothing and no one. Till now, Octavia’s title has meant naught; At court she is ignored, her aid unsought. The favors I alone used to dispense Won me men’s loyalty as recompense. Now someone new has captured Caesar’s heart: Mistress and wife, she’ll play a potent part. All that I’ve worked for, Caesar’s majesty —  One glance from her will win it all from me. (III.v.9 –19) And this scenario, in which it had been Nero’s intention before ever seeing Junia to marry her, answers, at least as satisfactorily, Nero’s putative objective. Again, QED. Now, can we think of any further reasons why Nero would want to marry Junia (and thereby, or therefore, “obtain” her), apart from his being in love with her? Well, Nero himself has provided us with two, neither of which depends on his being in love with Junia. First, as he makes quite clear, he is heartily sick of Octavia: Not that a remnant tenderness, in truth, Attracts me to my wife or pleads her youth. Long weary of the kind concern she shows, I seldom deign to watch her weep her woes: Too happy if a merciful divorce Relieved me of a yoke imposed by force! (II.ii.91–96)

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Second, she has proved barren: Heav’n, too, in secret, shows itself severe; Four years she’s prayed, but heaven will not hear: Octavia’s virtue leaves the Gods unmoved, And with a barren bed she’s been reproved. In vain the Empire asks an heir of me. (II.ii.97–101) What further incentives could any husband require to remarry? But, of course, Nero is not just any husband, and I would suggest that there may be another, darker reason for his wishing to marry Junia. I take my cue from several remarks of Racine’s in his second preface: “[Nero] could not bear Octavia, a princess of exemplary goodness and virtue” and “He had not yet killed his mother, his wife, his tutors; but he bore in him the seeds of all those crimes. . . . He hates these people one and all, and he hides his hate from them under false caresses.” Racine’s description of Octavia as “a princess of exemplary goodness and virtue” is striking, since it serves also as a perfect description of Junia and, indeed, of the crucial thematic role she plays in Britannicus. Racine alludes to Nero’s murder of Octavia, but he did not merely murder her; he systematically tortured her, psychologically as well as physically (see note 14 for Act II for Tacitus’s wrenching account of her short, sad life and her horrific death); as Racine tells us, Nero hated her, and, undoubtedly, for just those attributes that she so conspicuously shares with Racine’s Junia. It may be, then, that when Tobin suggests that Nero wished “to replace one female presence with another,” the female presence he wished to replace was not Agrippina but Octavia. Given Nero’s sadistic personality (of which additional evidence will be adduced later), nothing seems more likely than that, having extracted from his relationship with Octavia all the pleasure to be derived from torturing and, ultimately, destroying her, Nero, like a serial killer, craves a new victim to demean, degrade, and destroy, and who more eligible than Junia, who, her virtuous reputation having preceded her, would surely prove an enticing and entertaining challenge to

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debauch or, failing in that attempt, a helpless victim on whom to unleash his sadistic vindictiveness?

xvi We have established, then, Nero’s possible motives for having abducted Junia, none of which relates in any way to his being in love with her, but all of which can be subsumed under the general heading of wanting, in some sense, to possess himself of Junia, which is consistent with my contention. What is more than merely consistent with my contention, however, what offers compelling corroboration for it, is the “supreme cunning” (the expression I employed earlier in connection with Nero’s selection of Britannicus as the perfect victim to demonstrate the destructive aspect of omnipotence) with which he has selected Junia to appropriate, since, on close inspection, her most salient characteristics all bespeak an inaccessibility, an untouchability, that would make such a conquest a conspicuous triumph and most loudly proclaim his omnipotence. Junia’s “qualifications,” those attributes and circumstances that render her such a clear first choice for the achievement of Nero’s ulterior objective, are not difficult to discern. Put in simplest terms, she is the most forbidden fruit, and withal, almost out of reach, one might say: she is not even at court, being in self-​imposed exile, and so must be abducted from her retreat. And a retreat it is certainly is: she is there, “nursing in obscurity her woes” (II.iii.89), as she later tells Nero, those woes including, in addition to losing her parents, whom “she saw extinguished in her infancy” (II.iii.88), the suicide of her brother, Silanus, four years ago. Indeed, when Nero surmises (fantasizes, rather, I would say) that she “thinks I’m to blame for her poor brother’s fate” (II.ii.40), we can suspect that he finds in such a surmise an additional inducement to possess himself of her. (One is reminded of Richard of Gloucester’s grotesque wooing of Lady Anne as she stands mourning over the body, practically still warm, of her father-in-​law, the late Henry VI, whom Richard, as she well knows, has recently slain. True, Nero has not murdered Silanus, nor

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is the latter so recently deceased, but there is the same malevolent covetousness underlying both men’s intrusions on a grieving relative, and if Nero has not yet murdered Junia’s fiancé, as Richard had recently slain Edward, Anne’s husband, he fully intends to do so.) Then, as Racine takes care to have Nero point out, she is egregiously (in its literal sense of “standing out from the crowd”) virtuous — ​the only moral, incorruptible woman in all of Rome: It’s just this virtue, not at all the fashion, Whose perseverance stimulates my passion. There’s not one Roman woman, I maintain, Whom my attentions have not made more vain, And who, embellished with alluring art, Has not made an attempt on Caesar’s heart; Junia alone, withdrawn, all modesty, Regards such honors as ignominy. (II.ii.45 –52) Next, Junia is practically engaged to Britannicus, having several years before been promised to him by Claudius (as Junia will aver and Nero himself acknowledge in their first, lengthy meeting), and Agrippina has taken it upon herself to reconfirm that promise, which Nero’s abduction of Junia has placed in jeopardy: “In vain I’ve named Britannicus my choice. . . . I gave him hope this marriage would take place” (I.ii.123, 125). Furthermore, Junia and Britannicus are in love with each other. Although Nero coyly asks Narcissus, “Tell me, Britannicus loves her as well?” (II.ii.55), Agrippina has already made clear that Nero “well knows — ​how could such love be ignored? — / That by Britannicus Junia’s adored” (I.i.51–52). Moreover, there is the obstacle, on Nero’s side, that he is already married — ​to Octavia, Britannicus’s sister, that marriage having actually been arranged by Agrippina, who Nero justly anticipates will be furious at seeing “the sanctity of knots she’s tied” (II.ii.114) desecrated. Finally, Nero also could expect to encounter resistance from Burrhus, who, although he attempts to rationalize Nero’s abduction of Junia to the outraged Agrippina, trying to pass it off

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as a dynastically prudent political move, will later roundly lecture Nero about the impropriety of his alleged amorous interest in Junia. Clearly, then, before having cast his eyes on Junia, Nero was well aware of those peculiar attraits (charms) of Junia’s that rendered her the ideal object for his purposes — ​that she was, to appropriate the romantic phrase, “the one.” And those charms, we shall find, form a far more convincing body of evidence to corroborate my view than any that we will be able to discover to support the view that, after catching a brief glimpse of Junia upon her arrival at the palace, Nero determined that she was, in the romantic sense, “the one.”

xvii Of course, it would be helpful for our present purposes if Nero were given a soliloquy that would settle the question of whether he is really in love with Junia or not. But, after all, would that not strike at the heart of Nero’s interest as a character, namely, that, as mentioned earlier, he is a “riddle”? On the other hand, who knows but that such a soliloquy would draw yet another veil of inscrutability over him, since, as C. M. Bowra (32) observes, he is “a man . . . so corrupted by falsehood that he himself does not always know whether he means what he says or not.” It is noteworthy that none of the four principal characters in this play is given a soliloquy. (Nero has one brief moment when he talks to himself [III.x.1–5], which is not, however, strictly speaking, a soliloquy, since, although Nero is unaware of his presence, Burrhus overhears him; in any case, it is as unrevealing as it is brief. Oddly enough, Narcissus and Burrhus are granted soliloquies, but in each case it is, again, only a single, brief, inconsequential one.) Interestingly, Nero and Junia are denied soliloquies, but for diametrically opposed reasons, as befits their position as protagonist and antagonist. In Nero’s case, it is because, in communing with himself, there would be a chance — ​when he is not lying to himself — ​that he might reveal what is actually going on in his mind, which is clearly exactly what Racine wishes to avoid: he wants us never to be able

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to trust anything Nero says, nor, for that matter, does he want us to be able to mistrust with certainty anything he says. In Junia’s case, she has no need for a soliloquy, or, rather, the audience has no need for her to deliver one, since one of her most salient characteristics — ​along with her courage, her virtue, and her empathy — ​is her honesty: she always speaks her mind, regardless of who is there to listen. By the same token, she is given no confidant. Of course, her having been abducted so suddenly, in the middle of the night, would explain why she has none, but if there had been some need for her to have one, it would hardly have been impossible for Racine to have devised some plausible explanation for her having an attendant in tow. The point, in any case, is that Junia has no need of a confidant, the dramatic purpose of a confidant being to enable the protagonist to divulge to the audience information, feelings, or plans that it would be ill-​advised or even dangerous to reveal to any or all of the other characters, an irrelevant consideration for someone like Junia, who is uncompromisingly honest, even, as we have seen, when being so is not in her own interests. There is another, far more telling reason for Nero’s not being accorded a soliloquy, namely, that soliloquies are usually reserved for characters who inwardly waver: characters caught in a dilemma (usually hopeless), torn between two options whose advantages and drawbacks they find themselves constantly in need of assessing and reassessing. (Hermione, Roxane, and Agamemnon are three such who come immediately to mind. In regard to the first, for example, Richard Wilbur observes in the Introduction to his translation of Andromache that Hermione “can credibly pass in some thirty lines through six shifts of attitude toward Pyrrhus” [Andromache, xiv].) Clearly, for someone like Nero, who, first of all, is utterly untroubled by the moral implications of his actions, and, second, has had, from the opening of the play, a set purpose that he has relentlessly and undeviatingly pursued, a soliloquy would be inappropriate and unnecessary. There is no question here of a character in conflict with himself, of any battles being waged, of any soul-​searching or soul-​ wrestling (as one sees in Agamemnon), only after which, capitulating to his evil genius, would he finally determine to kill Britannicus.

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Since Nero is granted no intensely introspective soliloquy, the only evidence available to us concerning the true nature of his feelings for Junia must be gleaned from what he says — ​reveals would be going too far — ​to Junia and, more significantly, from the way he treats her. Later, when we analyze the lengthy scene of their first meeting, we will scrutinize his behavior toward Junia, and that will prove revealing, but for now I would just offer a small but telling observation based on a brief, selected verbal comparison of Nero’s Act II scene with Narcissus and his subsequent scene with Junia. In the former, Nero, most conspicuously, uses the flamboyant “idolâtre” (idolize, which I translate as “adore,” II.ii.12) to describe what he feels for Junia, having decided that the just-​uttered “aime” (love) could not do justice to such a passion; and during the course of that scene, the word “love” in its various forms (“amour,” “aime,” “aimer”) is used thirteen times, and of those thirteen, eight refer to his feelings for Junia. By contrast, in his scene with Junia, the word “love” appears seven times, and of those seven, regardless of who is speaking, six of them refer to Junia’s love for Britannicus or his love for her; only once does Nero use the word in regard to his feelings for Junia, and there it is almost lost in the midst of the climactic rhetorical peroration that closes his marriage proposal: Weigh well this boon that Caesar would bestow, Worthy the lengths that love has made me go, Worthy those eyes, too long concealed from view, Worthy the world which claims you as its due. (II.iii.75 –78) The word “désirs” (desires), one should also mention, is used twice (by Junia), once to refer to Britannicus’s love for her and once to refer, with no amorous implication, to Nero’s wishes, which she galls Nero by declaring “are always so consistent with hers [that is, your mother’s]” (as the French for II.iii.36 literally translates). These statistics would certainly suggest that Nero’s professions of his love for Junia are more effusive when he is conveying his putative passion to Narcissus than when he is speaking directly to Junia. Nor can this

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reticence by any means be attributed to his being tongue-​tied at seeing her tête-à-​tête for the first time, since his elaborate marriage proposal (and I use the word “elaborate” advisedly, since, as I mention elsewhere, he probably spent much of the previous night working on it, and then, undoubtedly, rehearsing it) and its prefatory narrative about his attempt at matchmaking on her behalf — each of them a rhetorical tour de force — ​are delivered with eloquent aplomb.

xviii Aside, then, from a judicious sprinkling of amorous expressions in his conversation with Narcissus (expressions conspicuously absent from his discourse when in Junia’s presence), we are left with Nero’s torrid account (bordering on a reenactment) of his momentous first view of Junia to provide some verbal corroboration of his love for her. And I think that it is precisely in this famous, overwrought reliving of the genesis of his love for Junia that we will find the most convincing evidence of that love’s being an extravagant figment. In this regard, it is essential to recognize that Nero is a master of mendacity. He possesses the two essential qualities that make for a consummate liar: he can concoct plausible stories and, as an accomplished actor, he can make them sound like the truth. While not everything he says is a lie, enough of what he says can be confirmed as untrue for us to be able to feel a reasonable doubt about the truth of the rest. A case in point is the account he regales Junia with, when they first meet, of the exhaustive search he conducted to find the ideal husband for her. If one were to listen to that account out of context, that is, if we had no reason to suspect it was untrue, we would not even think to question its veracity (indeed, we would be disposed to admire such an unselfish, painstaking effort on his part). But of course we do have good reason to do so. In note 22 for Act II, I conclude that Nero’s account is “a complete fabrication,” and here are two further circumstances, not adduced there, that would in themselves expose it as a lie. First, it would be entirely out of character for Nero to do anything so altruistic as search for a suitable husband for her (let alone go out of his way to bestow upon

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such a prospective husband so rare a gift as Junia, even if he had no designs — ​of whatever nature — ​on her himself ). Second, if he had conducted such an extensive search, surely Agrippina, Burrhus, Narcissus, and the whole court would have known about it, but there is nothing to suggest they did. Tobin (50) has pointed out that “to avoid confusing the audience, Racine’s practice in the matter of falseness and deception is almost always to have a scene of lying preceded by one in which the truth is told.” Here, we must backtrack from a scene of proven lying to one in which we are thus prompted to question the veracity of what was alleged at that time, little though we may have thought to do so then. In the case of Nero’s rhapsodic recollection, we are confronted, not with an outright falsehood, as in the case of his supposed search for a husband for Junia, but with a fantasy. Still, let us assume that, having heard Nero’s declaration of love (“Nero’s in love. . . . One moment since, but now and evermore. / It’s Junia whom I love — ​love? — ​no, adore” [II.ii.10, 11–12]), we are now listening — ​once again, completely out of context — ​to his subsequent description of Junia’s advent at the palace. In that case, not only would we have no reason to doubt the sincerity of Nero’s passionate avowal: we would almost be surprised if he had not fallen in love with Junia. And why is that? Simply because the scene he has described is almost a recipe for falling in love at first sight. For what is this episode but a damsel-in-​distress scenario, with all the trappings? Apparently, some villain has abducted this poor, helpless, beautiful girl, bearing her away in the middle of the night, half-​clothed and completely unattended, subjected to the callous maltreatment of brutish guards, and clearly confused and frightened out of her wits by all the noise, the glare, and the commotion. Whose heart would not go out to such an unfortunate princess (for such her appearance, however disheveled, confirms her to be)? Had he observed her in this pitiable plight without knowing who she was or how she came to be so mistreated, his romantic concern and pity for this “damsel in distress” would give ample plausibility and credibility to his amorous professions. Now, placing this episode back into its context — ​knowing, in other words, that Nero himself was the “villain” who perpetrated

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this dastardly deed — ​we are prompted to refine upon Tobin’s question cited earlier. With Tobin’s assistance we have found satisfactory answers to the question, Why did Nero have Junia kidnapped? But now we should ponder the question, Why did Nero have Junia kidnapped? — ​that is, why did he have her brought to the palace in such a barbaric way? He could easily have insisted on her presence at the palace without resorting to her abduction by bodily force. He could have allowed her to arrive in a more civilized manner, in the daytime, escorted by her own servants, and, having been given sufficient notice, properly attired. (I think that when Nero describes her as “sans ornaments, dans le simple appareil” [II.ii.17], we can assume that, having scarcely had enough time to throw on a shift, she is half-​naked.) Looking at Tobin’s question in this new light, we can draw two new, revealing conclusions. First, the fact that Nero deliberately arranged for Junia to be so mistreated and mortified confirms as a truth (which one can then apply to interpreting much of his other behavior) that Nero is a practiced sadist. Recounting Junia’s advent, he is clearly savoring a theatrical spectacle he had staged himself, and his lip-​smacking, heavy-​breathing recollection of it confirms it as the realization of a sadist’s fantasy. Of course, Nero doesn’t see it that way: he has created a setting, a scenario, that, by his lights, is the most conducive to falling in love, indeed, for him, the only way of falling in love, a formula that he neatly epitomizes later in his speech: “I even loved the tears she owed to me” (II.ii.30). Besides, if one chooses not to believe that Nero was fully resolved to fall in love with Junia, how does one ignore the huge coincidence of Nero’s happening to fall madly in love with the very woman whom he had taken such great pains to have brought to the palace for what one must assume were compelling reasons, reasons which, however, could have had nothing to do with his being in love with her? The second conclusion we can draw, then, is that Nero staged Junia’s abduction in such a lurid, melodramatic way in order to convince himself that he had fallen in love with her. And why? Because he couldn’t (to reverse the cliché): that is, because he wished to prove, as another aspect of his omnipotence, that he could love — ​and, as befitting his imperial preeminence, not just love, but “adore.” But, of course, Nero cannot love. Agrippina, referring to his “flinty

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heart” (IV.ii.163), makes that clear: “From earliest youth, my care and tenderness / Drew no more from you than a feigned caress” (IV.ii.161– 62). Nero can go through the motions of love, but not its emotions. Indeed, it is as if he bypasses entirely any initial tenderness, which he is not even capable of simulating, and proceeds immediately to a consuming, covetous, and cruel jealousy, an emotion that comes much more naturally to him. (So naturally, that when, in their first encounter, Nero warns Junia, “My jealousy, above all, don’t betray” [II.iii.147], we need not ascribe that jealousy to any love on Nero’s part, but merely to his instinctual envy and covetousness, which he had, in fact, demonstrated within the first few seconds of their meeting, when he betrayed his “jealousy” of Junia’s friendship with Octavia. For the Nero Racine presents would hardly need to be actuated by love to be susceptible to the sting of realizing that someone else’s company, let alone affection, could be preferred to his own.) De Mourgues (146 –47) may believe that Nero’s steamy, romantic effusion — ​unprecedented, unique, indeed anomalous, in Racine’s oeuvre — ​testifies to “the depth and genuine quality of Nero’s passion,” but she herself, taking her cue from Thierry Meunier (Racine, 173), points out that “this is not Racine painting a poetic picture, it is Néron.” Exactly. What is a painting or a poem but a work of art, a creation (or even, in this case, a re-​creation, if you will) that reflects the mind, the desires, the fantasies of its creator? Why is Nero, alone of Racine’s characters, given the opportunity to recite a “poem”? Because he (deludedly) believes that he is a great poet, a great actor, a great singer. He has “composed” both this entire scene and the poem to which it has given rise, but for Nero, truth is not beauty, and, beautiful as his ode is, it is not truth.

xix Now let us turn to the third scene of Act II (between Junia and Nero), which casts a long, dark shadow back over the preceding scene between Nero and Narcissus, for this scene will prove to be a far different sort of encounter from what one might have expected,

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given the verbal ebullition of Nero’s amorous feelings for Junia that fueled the earlier scene. Certainly, its thematic significance warrants a close, extensive examination of what is the only extended confrontation between the protagonist and the antagonist of the play. (Their second lengthy scene together [III.ix] is principally a heated confrontation between Nero and Britannicus, to which Junia makes only two late, pacific contributions, and their third and final encounter, brief and fairly inconsequential, was, in any case, cut by Racine after the first edition.) The scene starts off on the wrong foot, with Nero taking veiled umbrage at Junia’s undisguised preference for his detested wife, Octavia (her partisanship for Octavia, as mentioned earlier, becoming more emphatic as the scene progresses): “[I]  envy, I must own,  / The kindness toward Octavia you’ve shown” (II.iii.5 – 6). His admission is couched as a polite cliché, but beneath the surface his jealousy seethes, as confirmed by his next, seemingly flirtatious, but subtly menacing innuendo: “You think Octavia alone might care / To claim the acquaintanceship of one so fair?” (II.iii.8 –9). This is followed by his more overtly minatory badinage about her clandestine relations with Britannicus, of which the ever-​reliable Narcissus has apprised him in the preceding scene (“Once he’s seen her he returns appeased” [II.ii.70]). In Nero’s first couplet of this speech (“And do you deem it, then, a crime so slight / To hide yourself so long from Nero’s sight?” [II.iii.13 –14]), whose “chilling irony goes far beyond the harmlessly flirtatious gallantry we would take this for in any other context” (as I remark in note 18 for Act II), we have a foreshadowing of the ending of the play, by which point, given Nero’s achieved omnipotence, such a voluntary exile, or indeed any other action or behavior, can be treated as a crime. Next, Nero stages a charming mini-​playlet, wherein he announces to Junia that he has found a husband for her, fully worthy of her imperial blood (to quell her misgivings on that score), and then, in a coup de théâtre, steps out from behind the curtain, as it were, to announce that he himself is that “worthiest treasure chest for such a treasure” (II.iii.56). He recounts to Junia how it was only after conducting an exhaustive search to find her the perfect consort that he made the happy discovery that he was the one man in the world capable of pleasing her. In note 22 for Act II

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(where I describe this elaborate lie as “a piece of self-​aggrandizement masquerading as altruistic concern”) I suggest that “a not insignificant part of the time he spent ‘occupied with my new love’ [II.ii.33] was devoted to conceiving and composing this elaborate marriage proposal, a masterpiece of rhetoric,” but who is to say that Nero was not making it all up as he went along, so fecund and fluid is his genius for lying? These relatively innocuous masquerades are followed by a lengthy passage in which Junia, expressing concerns on her own behalf — ​ she basically wishes to continue “nursing in obscurity her woes” (II.iii.89) — ​as well as on Octavia’s and Britannicus’s, manifests a decided reluctance to close with Nero’s offer. Nero, of course, who calculates her motives by his own (to adapt Burrhus’s rebuke to Narcissus [III.i.43]), dismisses as implausible Junia’s altruistic concerns for Octavia’s interests: I see just how concerned for her you are; The firmest friendships seldom go so far. Let us, however, lay this mystery bare: The brother, not the sister, claims your care. (II.iii.109 –112) Nero’s escalating frustration, engendered by Junia’s steady resistance to his blandishments and an increasingly determined commitment to Britannicus, eventually provokes him to drop the mask, but only after one final feint of generosity, elating her with the news that, “in fact, madame, I’ve bid him meet you here” (II.iii.138) — ​just as he had instructed Narcissus at the end of the previous scene to seek out Britannicus and “this sweet news convey: / He shall see her” (II.ii.147–48). It is pertinent here to cite Jocasta’s bitter words to her daughter, Antigone, in The Fratricides, about “heav’n’s deadly spite”: Alas! just when its aspect seems most fair, Its deadliest stroke it hastens to prepare. .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . Thus, always cruel, always full of ire, It acts appeased, then shows itself more dire,

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Holds back its blows to strike more forcefully, Withdraws its arm to better batter me. (The Fratricides III.iii.65 – 66, 75 –78) For, as I remark in note 23 for Act II, “in imperial Rome, it is the emperors who have, in effect, supplanted the gods as the arbiters of destiny, the dispensers of justice, and the capricious, willful agents of mere mortals’ torments,” and here Nero, by tormenting Junia, is fulfilling that godlike function. It is at this point, then, that Nero, having elicited from Junia the grotesquely ironic “Ah! on your goodness, Sire, I’ve ever relied” (II.iii.139), delivers the “deadliest stroke,” ordering her to send Britannicus away, giving him to understand, “from lips he loves” (II.iii.145), that she is choosing Nero over him and “that all his prospects here he must forgo” (II.iii.151), but affording no hint, by word or glance, that she is anything but cruelly sincere. He warns her that, to ensure she abides by the latter injunction, he will be secretly observing their meeting, but Nero’s real reason for spying on them, bespeaking a singular depravity rather than a generic despotism, is so that he can sit back and enjoy the show he has staged. Now it is Junia who will be made to play her own scene of disguise, prevarication, and deception (like so many of Nero’s scenes in this play). And that is precisely what will make that scene so gut-​wrenching, for Nero, with fiendish ingenuity (and one should not forget to give due credit to Racine for such a stroke of genius on his part), has coerced Junia, already staggering under the double blow of learning that Britannicus is to be banished and that she must be the bearer of such deplorable tidings, into lying about the situation, which Nero must realize, having over the past several minutes had firsthand experience of her painful honesty, is anathema to her, and which will be sure to prove, in and of itself, torturous for her. It is hard to decide who is the more despicable: Nero, who malignantly blackmails Junia into lying, or Mathan, the apostate priest in Athaliah, who attempts to exploit Josabeth’s own inviolable honesty to blackmail her into divulging the truth about Joash’s parentage: I know that, tireless foe of any lie, You, Josabeth, would doubtless rather die

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Than save your life, if that would mean that you Had to speak just one word that was untrue. (Athaliah III.iv.41–44) It is a testament to Junia’s virtue that she is willing to make what is for her almost the supreme sacrifice — ​her honesty — ​to save Britannicus’s life, although one may be certain that she, no less than Josabeth, would not hesitate to sacrifice her own life to preserve her honesty.

xx In preparation for the entertainment he has devised for his private delight, Nero, master thespian that he is, warns Junia to lie convincingly, wishing her performance to be as “professional” as possible, in order to maximize the pleasure he anticipates deriving from watching his two victims, whom he has placed in a hopeless, helpless predicament, tear each other to shreds emotionally — ​a psychological gladiatorial combat, which neither can win nor escape: if she shows her hand, Britannicus will perish, and if she conceals it, she will as good as die. For, as this ten-​minute scene — ​their very first meeting, remember — ​all too harrowingly demonstrates, if Nero were finally to succeed in “obtaining” her, he would, within a matter of months, at most, be left with a woman he has systematically reduced to a living corpse, a ruin of her former self — ​in fact, just what he has already done to Octavia. And, in all likelihood, Nero would eventually have her murdered, as, again, he would later do with Octavia. Even in this scene between Britannicus and Junia, then, there is adumbrated the sort of callous, sadistic bloodlust that, modeled on, and inculcated by, imperial depravity, would manifest itself on a vast, popular scale in the sanguinary spectator sports that thrived in the Colosseum and hundreds of smaller venues. (See Section XXIII below for further telling evidence of such adumbration. Also, see note 55 for Act V.) It is truly a wonder that Racine, though barred by considerations of decency and decorum (to say nothing of pragmatic concerns) from any depiction of the physical violence, the barbarity, the callousness, and the active delight in witnessing the suffering of

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others that was so characteristic of the Roman ethos at that period, manages nevertheless to capture, or at least suggest, all those aspects in his depiction of Nero’s torture of Junia and Britannicus. The play provides ample corroboration of, on the one hand, the pleasure Nero has derived from this performance — ​at once theater piece and sporting event — ​and, on the other, the grievous pain it has inflicted on its participants. In its immediate aftermath, we find Nero already gloating over their suffering. Referring to Britannicus, he declares, “I’ll derive my joy from his despair. / His pain a pleasant prospect opens out” (II.viii.4 –5), and wastes no time in ordering Narcissus to “go, with new doubts torment his heart” (II.viii.8); as for Junia, he plans to “watch her weeping for her love” (II.viii.9). Just before rushing off at the end of that torturous scene, Britannicus, for his part, implores Junia to “relieve this torment you subject me to” (II.vi.48), and before she rushes off, she implores Nero, “Let me, at least, now go / And shed these tears his eyes shall not see flow” (II.vii.2 –3). Even more telling, however, is the way Junia and Britannicus relive this nightmarish scene when they next meet in Act III. Putting aside the consideration that Britannicus, not yet not knowing that Nero had been eavesdropping, begins by berating her for her faithlessness, and that, even after learning the truth, he blames her for not somehow having “tipped him off,” if we examine her long speech (much more likely, in any case, to be replete with moral truth), we find the following words: distress, sighs, torment, suffer, moan, fears, tears, anxiously, feared, pallor, feared, pain, feared. (In the French we find: désordre, soupirs, tourment, gémir, affliger, pleurs, inquiète, troublée, effrayé, craignais, pâleur, douleur, craignais.) Confronted by such a spate of expressions conveying human suffering, and considering that Nero’s insidious scheming has managed to provoke such an outpouring within a mere few minutes of interaction with Junia, are we ourselves not provoked to ask — ​adapting the righteously indignant queries of Clytemnestra (“Is this the way a father ought to feel?” [Iphigenia IV.iv.134]) and Jocasta (“My son, is the way to treat a mother?” [The Fratricides IV.iii.127]) — ​Is this the way a lover ought to feel? Is this the way to treat one’s beloved? Since the answer to both these questions is a resounding no, we have no choice but to concur with Bowra’s conclusion (31–32): “When

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Néron first appears, gloating over the abduction of Junie, he says, with apparent fervour, that he is passionately fond of her. . . . But we soon see from his horrible glee in making her suffer that he is moved not by love but by lust for some new and violent sensation.” Agrippina may well ask, “What moves him: love or hate?” (I.i.55). For, having thus carefully scrutinized the course of Nero’s direct, personal interaction with Junia, have we been able to detect any signs that bespeak a feeling that we could even remotely recognize as love, as opposed to either lust, a sadistic desire to torment her, or the inexorable working out of his grand design to “obtain” her? After all, hardly any time elapses between his protestations of eternal love for Junia and his venomous threats to this same beloved. Apparently, all it took was Narcissus’s guileful insinuation that Britannicus’s love for Junia was reciprocated to turn Nero’s putative love into something bearing a far greater resemblance to hate.

xxi In Racine’s first version of Britannicus, Nero and Junia had one further scene together, a brief, awkward, eleventh-​hour encounter, just after Britannicus’s murder, a scene he cut for all subsequent editions. In note 31 for Act V, I am somewhat dismissive of this scene, perhaps even a bit hasty in concurring with Racine’s decision to jettison it, and I would like to “revisit” the subject here. As their last meeting, it does, in fact, serve several purposes. First, it confirms that Nero, too callous to observe any decent interval after Britannicus’s murder, was eager to move forward with his plan to “obtain” Junia. And here his idiosyncratic style of wooing, which had proved so successful in winning Junia’s heart, is again on display: he insolently trots out an all-​purpose consolatory saw, “Thus are our fondest fancies foiled by fate,” in the same vein as his “I can’t answer for fate’s every blow” (V.vi.9) to Agrippina (who was as moved by such patent hypocrisy as Junia must be), followed by the faux-​rueful “We’d have drawn closer still [he and Britannicus], but heav’n said no.” (He has the effrontery to blame heaven for frustrating so cherished a hope — ​such is the undignified role “heaven” has been assigned in

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this play.) Second, we should take note of the fact that this scene is, in some sense, a miniature reprise of their first, calamitous meeting, which, in its essence, involved Junia’s resistance to Nero’s overtures of marriage, arising from her concerns on behalf of Britannicus and Octavia — ​as Junia’s speech, in effect, suggests, when she reminds Nero that “I loved him, Sire; I frankly told you so” and proffers a “request / To seek such solace on Octavia’s breast / As suits my present sorrow and dismay.” The latter verses (her last in the play), interestingly, serve another purpose in this scene: they beautifully bring full circle Junia’s intercourse with Nero in this play, for her very first words to him were also to let him know that she was on her way to see Octavia, and for the very same purpose, to seek some comfort, after her traumatic abduction. And lastly, given her bluntness in reconfirming her love for Britannicus, whom we can be sure she would never be able to forgive Nero for taking from her, and her galling preference for the solace the detested Octavia can provide, we can be fairly certain that the “tender attention” Nero would, sooner rather than later, have shown her, had she not escaped from him, would have been of a piece with the appalling blackmail plot that concluded their first encounter. There are some commentators who see in Nero’s distracted state after Junia’s flight (Nero’s last “interaction,” as it were, with her), as described by Albina in her climactic récit, evidence of the sincerity of his love for her (or even — ​to go from its psychological implications to its moral implications — ​of a restoration of the moral order), but I would argue against such a conclusion, and on several fronts. First, I think I have already presented ample evidence whence to conclude that, whatever Nero’s interest in Junia, whatever he may have felt for her, it is nothing that we could feel comfortable in identifying as love. When we first hear Nero’s declarations of love, we might be excused for taking them at face value, but by the time we reach the end of the play, having witnessed Nero’s staggering powers of mendacity, employed both to further his dual agenda and to indulge his irrepressible theatrical bent, we cannot, unless we are Molière’s Orgon, trust anything he says (or does). Fool us once, shame on him; fool us twice, shame on us. Second, regardless of whether or not one “buys” Nero’s love for Junia, his emotional

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turmoil at the end of the play can just as convincingly be accounted for by the frustration of his goal of “obtaining” Junia as by the frustration of his “love,” if not more so. For if we believe that Nero was as determined to “appropriate” Junia as to dispose of Britannicus (and we have seen how inexorably he pursued the latter part of his program), then we would expect him to feel and manifest a fury of frustration commensurate with that monomaniacal determination, upon learning that he had been thwarted in the other part of his program (the double denouement of the play thus representing the fulfillment of one of Nero’s aims and the frustration of the other). After all, if he was intent on demonstrating his omnipotence, to have then been at least partially foiled in that plan, “first time out,” so to speak, and by an evasive move at once so simple yet so unexpected and — ​most crushing — ​so irrevocable, would be enough to make any megalomaniac walk around in circles, eyes downcast, muttering over and over the name of the woman who had thus thwarted him. One can get some sense of how shocking such an outcome must be for Nero from Agrippina’s startled outburst when Albina announces that “Junia’s forever lost to him” (V.fin.sc.3): “What’s this? Junia has killed herself, you mean?” (V.fin.sc.4), for, as I remark in note 46 for Act V, “Nero’s plenipotent reign having at last, with his scot-​free murder of Britannicus, been well and truly inaugurated, what other explanation could occur to her for Junia’s being lost to him, for his not being able to ‘have’ her if he wants her, but that she is dead?” In fine, Nero is distracted not because he misses Junia, but because he has missed her in the other sense: missed his target, that is. Furthermore, in assessing the implications of Albina’s description of Nero’s “madness” (V.fin.sc.2), which bear mightily on one’s interpretation of the denouement of the play, commentators, for some reason, seem to overlook the question of the reliability of the “messenger.” In Bajazet, the fatuous vizier Akhmet’s misconstruction of the supposed reconciliation between Bajazet and Roxane, by arousing Atalide’s jealousy, precipitates the tragic outcome (see note 32 for Act IV of this play and note 9 for Act III of Bajazet). Here, too, we should be somewhat skeptical of Albina’s account. I  suppose that Albina, who, as confidants go, is a rather passive one, does not invite much attention, let alone analysis. But if one

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examines her interchanges with Agrippina (her only contributions to the play apart from her lengthy Act V récit), we find, surprisingly, that she consistently shows herself to be Nero’s stubbornly staunch partisan, defending his interests and refusing to hear anything bad about him (she almost gives the impression of being his most ardent “fan”). No one else in the play seems to be nearly so genuinely concerned about his well-​being. Why place any trust in the almost hysterical concern of a woman whose faulty powers of judgment and discernment have been sufficiently demonstrated by her blind praise of Nero (I.i.23 –30), to which even Agrippina’s more excusable partiality cannot allow her to subscribe? Moreover, although Albina knows that Junia, having deeply loved Britannicus, must be suffering terribly after his murder (albeit she can have no idea who was responsible), and has, but moments ago, actually witnessed Junia, prostrate with despair, clutching the knees of Augustus’s statue for some succor, the very first couplet of her long speech (“To bow with endless grief the Emperor’s head, / Although she hasn’t died, to him she’s dead” [V.fin.sc.5 – 6]) demonstrates that her chief concern is for Nero, who, having lost Junia, will — ​as she imagines — ​ be overcome by grief. Indeed, as suggested by the oblique syntax of this couplet, one can almost detect a note of blame on Albina’s part, as if she were suggesting that Junia deliberately made herself “dead” to Nero in order to “crush him with eternal despair” (as the French literally translates) and that if Junia is “dead” to Nero, then she really ought to be dead without the quotations. This is made more explicit in the French (“Pour accabler César d’un éternel ennui”), whose opening preposition, “pour,” does, in fact, carry the sense of “in order to.” (In her frantic concern for Nero, by the way, Albina expresses herself so melodramatically that one could well imagine her extravagant expressions being uttered by Nero himself — ​perhaps she is a huge “fan” of his theatrical performances as well.)

xxii In his first preface, Racine declares, “My tragedy does not concern itself at all with affairs of the world at large. Nero is here in his private

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sphere and within his own family.” Once again, we have Racine exemplifying the case of an author being an unreliable interpreter of his own work. For in Britannicus, as I will attempt to demonstrate, the depiction of its characters, the drift and development of its dramatic events, and even its diction, ensure that those characters and events both reflect and affect “the world at large.” Indeed, it would be surprising if they did not; for how could Racine, having steeped himself in the detailed accounts of those historical events, and viewing them from so distant a perspective, not have had before his eyes, and in “high definition,” “the big picture”? Certainly, none of Racine’s other plays concern themselves with the world at large except insofar as its affairs provide a context that generates a conflict among his characters, and we must draw a distinction between Britannicus and such a play as The Fratricides, where, while the fate of Thebes ostensibly hangs on the outcome of a conflict between two brothers who claim the throne, Thebes itself (despite its being the “title character” in the original French — ​La Thébaïde [The saga of Thebes]) has no significance, or even reality, for the audience and, a fortiori, neither does its fate. While Racine may not have a dual agenda, as does Nero, in his deliberate attempt to announce his omnipotence, he succeeds, nonetheless, in presenting, through, and in addition to, Nero’s “coming of age” story — ​that is, the birth of the monster that was the Roman Emperor — ​the birth of the monster that was the Roman Empire. For the essence of the Roman Empire was its fusion of a moral licentiousness with a military and bureaucratic strictness, which, on the one hand, invested the emperor with unprecedentedly plenary power to indulge his every wish, however unjust or depraved, with utter impunity, and, on the other, put in place a highly efficient military machine that could, on a far vaster scale, impose the will of Rome, however unjust and tyrannical, on the enslaved multitudes both within the city itself and within Rome’s subjugated provinces. Of course, in Britannicus, Racine’s concern is focused on the narrower, more personal, but for that very reason, more horrific, subject of the emperor’s omnipotence. But the (literally) broader implications of Nero’s newly flaunted amoral order are subtly adumbrated at the end of the play, as I will proceed to explain.

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To that end, let us examine the final important “scene” of the play, namely, Junia’s flight from Nero, as narrated by Albina. Elsewhere (chiefly in my Discussion for The Fratricides) I have argued that such récits, far from representing untheatrical compromises, misguided dramatic concessions to a stale convention, provide some of the most powerful dramatic moments in Racine. (Furthermore, it is no less true in this case than in those others that the events described — ​particularly Narcissus’s slaughter at the hands of an angry mob — ​could hardly be effectively enacted on stage, irrespective of any convention of bienséance.) Here, I would further argue that the fact that this scene takes place offstage and is merely narrated is rather a proof of its significance than otherwise, since the more far-​reaching the event described, both in its physical scope and in its implications, the less likely it is to be confinable within the conventions of the stage and the more it cries out for the “cinematic” treatment of the récit. First, let us focus on Junia’s secretive escape from the palace and her sudden “chance encounter” with the statue of Augustus. As a corollary to my establishment of Junia as the worthy antagonist to Nero, the virtuous counterweight to his profoundly evil nature, I would suggest that her desperate self-​banishment represents the expulsion of goodness — ​of every noble, altruistic, and ethical value of which she has been the embodiment in the play — ​from Rome, leaving behind a world of which Nero is now left as the representative embodiment, serving not only as the avatar of unbridled profligacy, but as its arbiter, enforcing his own conscienceless depravity on a vast empire. It is significant that, in Albina’s narration of Junia’s flight, Racine does not have her describe Junia’s appeal to or reception by the vestal virgins, which might strike the note of her seeking and receiving asylum in a presumably moral retreat. (The play offers no context whatsoever for the temple of Vesta’s providing Junia some sort of religious consolation.) Rather, she is shown flinging herself at the feet of the statue of Augustus. At the beginning of the play, Nero is likened (by Albina — ​who else?) to Augustus (“He governs like a father, like a sage: / His youth recalls Augustus’s old age” [I.i.29 –30]); since then, he has proved himself cruel, merciless, and stony-​hearted. How fitting, then, that, once

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the monster that is Nero has revealed himself in all his maleficent might, Junia’s appeal for mercy should be to someone who, once the living embodiment of goodness, justice, and wisdom, has now himself been reduced to an unhearing, unseeing, unfeeling — ​in short, actually stony-hearted — ​effigy of a vanished era of goodness. The effect that Racine achieves here is something almost opposite to the classical last-​minute rescue by a deus ex machina: rather than the god miraculously materializing “out of the machine,” he is represented as retreating into one, or, at least, into something inanimate, and therefore incapable of offering succor or providing consolation.

xxiii Turning our attention now to Junia’s second confrontation, with Narcissus, we might perhaps find it surprising that the central episode of Albina’s climactic narrative — ​the denouement of the play, after all — ​should feature such a seemingly gratuitous juxtaposition. Heretofore, the direct interaction between Junia and Narcissus has been minimal: although they have shared several scenes (II.iv–vi), the only verbal exchange between the two has been Junia’s desperate, frantic appeal to him to forestall Britannicus’s arrival (“Ah! dear Narcissus, warn your master! Say . . .” [II.v.1]), an appeal that, ironically, he will belatedly obey in Act III, when he rushes off to warn his true master, namely, Nero, of the unauthorized tryst between Junia and Britannicus. The underlying antipodal relationship between Junia and Narcissus, however, has been intimated earlier by the reciprocal warning each gives Britannicus of the untrustworthiness and duplicity of the other (Narcissus, with utmost cunning, in III.vii, Junia, with utmost candor, in V.i). Now, suddenly and quite unexpectedly, Racine stages an epic confrontation between them, fraught with suspense, drama, and significance, given their respective characters as projected in this play. Junia, as has been demonstrated, clearly seems to be the embodiment of virtue, honesty, courage, and empathy (indeed, one might justifiably describe her as “the noblest Roman of them all”). And Narcissus seems to embody almost better than Nero does the very opposite qualities from those that ennoble

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Junia, at least inasmuch as, in Narcissus’s case, there is never even a pretense of wavering in his villainy or of only gradually realizing his full evil potential. Indeed, de Mourgues (127) refers to Narcissus as “that superb creation of pure evil,” and she is by no means alone in being persuaded to believe that “moral order is restored at the end of Britannicus when the Roman people kill Narcisse,” for Racine offers us a confrontation whose outcome one can hardly help being gratified by, the fate Narcissus meets with, however gruesome, striking one as being no more than condign punishment, especially if one recalls his cold-​blooded Act II curtain line: “For my own good, these wretches [Britannicus and Junia] I’ll undo” (II.viii.14). But, more closely examined, the manner of Narcissus’s death hardly seems to bear witness to the establishment, or reinstatement, let alone the ultimate ascendancy, of any “moral order.” Although in several of Racine’s plays (this one, Athaliah, The Fratricides), he implicitly condemns, whether through the advocacy of patently “bad” counselors or the admonitions of patently “good” counselors, those rulers who act on the principle that (as Jehoiada, a “good” counselor, cautions Joash in Athaliah) “their will should be their sole authority; / All else must bow before their majesty; / Only to weep, to work, are most men fit. . . . If they are not oppressed, they will oppress” (Athaliah IV.iii.90 –92, 94), he just as often betrays (in Iphigenia and Andromache, among others of his plays) misgivings about the potential violence and volatility of the masses, who are, for that matter, seldom if ever depicted as an innately virtuous, moral group, ready to do the right thing. And viewed in that context, Narcissus’s murder, while it may serve as a meet end for a particularly repellent villain, may also be regarded as vindicating Racine’s misgivings. Already in Andromache the mob’s ready, uncontrollable bloodthirstiness has been described for us, when Orestes recounts the assassination of Pyrrhus, who “found himself surrounded by the rout”: To deal the glorious death-​stroke each Greek sought, While in their hands some time he furiously fought. Bloody with blows, he tried to break away, But at the altar fell, and lifeless lay. (Andromache V.iii.23, 25 –28)

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(One should bear in mind, however, that Pyrrhus recklessly incites that outbreak of violence by recognizing Andromache’s son, Astyanax, as king of Troy, as provocative a declaration as can be imagined, since, in the eyes of the Greeks, by his doing so, “the baleful blood of Troy she [Greece] sees you raise” [Andromache I.ii.10], as Orestes had earlier cautioned him.) In Iphigenia, too, the potential fury of the mob is an ever-​present threat, prompting Ulysses’ warning to Agamemnon: “What might not Greece try, / Moved by an anger she can justify? / Take care you don’t incite a furious horde / To choose between the Gods and you, my lord” (Iphigenia I.iii.17–20). And later, Agamemnon, “king of kings,” plaintively poses a similar question to his daughter, Iphigenia: “What rein could curb the people’s recklessness, / When, to their rash zeal leaving us a prey, / Heav’n casts their too oppressive yoke away?” (Iphigenia IV.iv.71–73). And while our potential abhorrence at the Greek army’s crying out with one voice for a human sacrifice (the ritual slaughter of Eriphyle) is effectively tempered by the consideration of how richly Eriphyle — ​ like Narcissus — ​deserves such a fate, we should ask ourselves what our reaction would be if those same Greeks had acquiesced just as readily to the ritual killing of the innocent, virtuous Iphigenia — ​ which they would undoubtedly have done, had it been she whose “death would purchase Troy’s downfall” (Iphigenia V.fin.sc.49) and not the evil, murderously envious Eriphyle. But the moral indirectly pointed there is brought home much more forcefully, in the context of Britannicus and its concerns, by the murder of Narcissus. For, somewhat ironically, Narcissus falls victim to the bloodthirsty mob violence that will become a characteristic feature of Roman life, as condoned, or rather, encouraged, by an emperor whose own behavior, craftily inculcated by Narcissus himself, is characterized by the callous indulgence of his sadistic lust, devoid of all pity for others’ suffering — ​indeed, deriving his pleasure therefrom. And that the crowd falls upon Narcissus with sanguinary fury in the name of offering succor to this helpless girl by no means makes it any less symptomatic of a mob mentality, since in the Colosseum, the crowd undoubtedly demonstrated the same capricious fervor, having little to do with true compassion, in shouting for some favored gladiator to be spared — ​favored for having racked

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up a gratifyingly high body count of unfortunate opponents — ​that they would have shown in gleefully turning their thumbs down and clamoring for the death stroke to reward the unsatisfactory efforts of some hapless contestant. Moreover, to reach too hasty and ill-considered a conclusion regarding the altruistic benevolence of the mob that sets upon Narcissus is to follow their example of rushing to judgment without examining all the facts. After all, they can have no idea who Junia is — ​she arrived at the palace only the night before — ​let alone the nature of her travails. Certainly, her desperate invocation to Augustus, if it doesn’t actually sound somewhat crazed, can make little sense to a crowd who must know nothing of Britannicus’s assassination, nor of any vows to which “they wish me to be unfaithful” (as the French for V.fin.sc.20 literally translates). Nor can they have any inkling of the nefarious part Narcissus played in reducing her to such an abject state. Now, however, Narcissus, far from threatening her with any bodily harm, is merely trying to arrest her progress toward the temple of Vesta; indeed, no one could have a more vested interest in seeing that Junia comes to no harm than does Narcissus, who, “pour lui plaire” (that is, to please Nero), wishes to return her as soon as possible to his master. Are we warranted in viewing as Junia’s heaven-​sent savior a mob who with so little provocation can ferociously slaughter a man, when, if our reading of Junia as an embodiment of virtue and reason, utterly antithetical to the cruelty and violence Nero represents, is well founded, we can be certain that she herself must have recoiled in horror at such an outcome, however much she may have despised Narcissus? (Racine tells us nothing further of Junia’s actions or reactions consequent to the attack on Narcissus, but he does touch in this graphic, telling detail: “Junia’s splattered with his faithless blood” [V.fin.sc.37], as much as to say that even the immaculate Junia is in some way tainted or besmirched by this sanguinary violence. In the French [“Son infidèle sang rejaillit sur Junie”], the implication is even clearer, since rejaillit carries the sense of recoiled upon or reflected back on. Junia may be en route to the temple of Vesta to don the white robes of its priestesses, but she makes her first appearance there in a blood-​spattered gown.) No, these are no “Samaritans,” but, rather, an unruly mob,

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ready and eager to be swayed to commit mayhem; indeed, they might pass for a lynch mob. And Racine, through his diction, subtly suggests that this is, at bottom, the same mob that, ravenous for the thrill of bloodletting, will fill the Colosseum for the gladiatorial revels. For here we have a crowd that, “astonished by this spectacle [ Junia’s performance at Augustus’s statue], / Pours in from all sides, circling her about” (V.fin.sc.24 –25), and whose “thousand blows repay his [Narcissus’s] hardihood” V.fin.sc.36). Put together “astonished,” “spectacle,” “pours in from all sides,” “circling” (literally, surrounding), “thousand,” and “blows” (mortal blows in the French), and you have the Colosseum in full swing. Of course, “a thousand blows” is a trademark Racinian hyperbole, but, be that as it may, Narcissus’s murder is surely a case of “overkill.” (Again, there is no question here of any such plausible motive for this mob violence as one finds in Andromache or Iphigenia, nor does Racine suggest — ​ which he could have easily done if that had been his intent — ​that they recognize in Narcissus the man to whom, according to Burrhus, “Claudius left Rome to writhe beneath your hand” [III.i.46], or that among this crowd there numbered any of those “accusers who, / Ready to rise up ’gainst your tyranny, / Were going to make known their misery, / And . . . demand some justice” [III.i.50 –54].) Narcissus’s murder, then, far from providing any moral uplift, any sense of the triumph of justice or the vindication of virtue (and if he succumbs to the very violence he has fostered and fomented, does that render it any less a vindication of his own vicious values?), only seals with a more oppressive weight the tragic ending of Britannicus, a tragedy not of a person, but of a people: for is Nero’s cold-​blooded murder of the innocent Britannicus and his sadistic destruction of the brave and virtuous Junia, his utter cruelty and callousness, more to be censured, more horrific, than the behavior of thousands of Roman citizens who showed no more pity for couples just as blameless, just as young and innocent, as Britannicus and Junia, who were thrown to the lions to be torn apart, merely for the crowd’s titillation, at once arousing and slaking their bloodlust? Thus does Racine, by means of the two confrontations he stages for Junia in this final scene — ​first, her futile appeal to the lifeless icon of a vanished decency and, second, her escape from Narcissus’s clutches

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through the agency of a sanguinary mob — ​dovetail the dual aspects of the “fall” of the Roman Empire that (whether he knows it or not) he is concerned to demonstrate: the banishment of virtue and the nourishment of vice, through the corruption of the Roman emperor and of the Roman people. In his first preface, Racine cites the view of his critics, that “the play is over with the recounting of the death of Britannicus, and one ought not to listen to the rest,” but he goes on to assert that “one does listen to it, however, and indeed as attentively as to the end of any tragedy.” More attentively, I would venture to say. As Eugène Vinaver (37–38), who characterizes the banquet scene in which Britannicus is murdered as “a vision more dramatic than moving in its impact,” observes: “Beyond the peripeteia of the drama the pathetic, he [Racine] seems to say, attains a higher plane, that on which is played the fate of Rome. . . . A new world arises in this final scene, a world unknown to pity, implacable as the look in the tyrant’s eyes, and like him constant in its indifference: the world created by man to abolish what is human.” Or, as Dillon (60), no less bleakly, puts it, Racine conveys “the sense of a whole era helplessly pervaded by evil, of which his characters are as much the victims as the instruments.”

Racine’s Dedication

Britannicus To His Grace, the Duc de Chevreuse1 Your Grace, You will perhaps be astonished to see your name at the head of this work; and if I had asked your permission to offer it to you, I doubt whether I would have obtained it. But it would be ungrateful in a way to hide from the world any longer the kindnesses with which you have always honored me. How would it look for a man who works only for glory to remain silent about a patronage so glorious as yours? No, Your Grace, it is too much to my advantage for me to let it be known that you show a concern even for my friends, that you take an interest in all my works, and that you have procured for me the honor of giving a reading of this particular one before a man whose every hour is precious.2 You yourself witnessed with what a keen mind he analyzed the structure of the play, and how the concept he formed of [what constitutes] an excellent tragedy is beyond anything I could have conceived. Have no fear, Your Grace, that I mean to venture any further, and that, not daring to praise him to his face, I address myself to you in order to praise him the more freely. I know that it would be risky to weary him with his own praises; and I dare say that this very modesty, which you have in common with him, is not one of the least ties that attach you to one another.3 Modesty is merely an ordinary virtue only when one

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encounters it associated with qualities that are merely ordinary. But that, with every excellence of heart and mind, with a discernment that, it seems, could only be the fruit of several years’ experience, with a thousand intellectual gifts which you cannot hide from your intimate friends, you still maintain that wise restraint that everyone admires in you, that is without doubt a rare virtue in an age where one’s vanity is piqued by the least little thing. But I am letting myself be carried away unawares by the temptation to speak of you. It must be a powerful temptation indeed, since I have not been able to resist it in the course of a letter whose only purpose has been to testify with what respect I am, Your Grace, Your most humble and obedient servant, Racine.

notes 1. Picard (1096) provides a helpful précis of Racine’s relationship with the Chevreuse family: “The Chevreuse are [sic] one of the most powerful families in the kingdom, longtime friends of Port-​Royal [the Jansenist institution where Racine was raised and educated]. Racine had entrée at their home from the time of his arrival in Paris, thanks to the ties that united him to the great abbey of the valley of Chevreuse, and thanks also to his cousin Nicolas Vitart, who was their steward. When Racine fell afoul of Port-​Royal [as a result of his pursuit of a worldly theatrical career], the Chevreuse family continued to offer him their patronage.” It should be noted that this dedication was permanently jettisoned by Racine for the collected edition of 1676, along with those he had composed for La Thébaïde, Alexandre le Grand, Andromaque, and Bérénice. 2. This would be the estimable and influential Jean-​Baptiste Colbert (1619 – 1683), who served as Louis XIV’s minister of finance from 1665 until his death. Racine dedicated his next play, Bérénice, to Colbert. 3. Racine’s artful allusion to the fact that the duc de Chevreuse had married Colbert’s eldest daughter.

Racine’s First Preface 1

Of all the works I have given to the public, there is not one that has elicited more praise or more criticism than this one. Whatever care I may have taken to fashion this tragedy, it seems that as much as I have endeavored to make it fine, so much have certain persons endeavored to decry it. There is no cabal that they have not organized, no criticism of which they have not availed themselves. There are even some among them who have taken Nero’s side against me. They have declared that I made him too cruel. For my part, I thought that the very name of Nero connoted something worse than cruel. But perhaps they refine upon his history, and wish to suggest that he was a virtuous man in his early years. One need only have read Tacitus to know that if for a time he was a good emperor, he was always a very wicked man.2 My tragedy does not concern itself at all with affairs of the world at large. Nero is here in his private sphere and within his own family.3 And they will spare me the trouble of pointing out to them all those passages which would readily prove to them that I have no amends to make him. Others have said that, on the contrary, I have made him too good. I must confess that the idea of Nero being a good man had never occurred to me. I have always regarded him as a monster. Here, however, we have a budding monster. He has not yet set Rome on fire. He has not murdered his mother, his wife, his tutors. Apart from that, it seems to me that sufficient instances of cruel behavior slip out to prevent one’s mistaking his character.4

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Some have taken up Narcissus’s cause, and have complained that I have made him a very wicked man and Nero’s confidant. One passage will suffice to respond to them. “Nero,” says Tacitus, “bore very ill the death of Narcissus, because this freed slave had a marvelous compatibility with the vices of the prince which still remained hidden: Cujus abditis adhuc vitiis mire congruebat.”5 Yet others are scandalized that I should have chosen a man as young as Britannicus for the hero of a tragedy. I have made clear to them, in the preface of Andromache, Aristotle’s views regarding the hero of a tragedy; and that, far from being perfect, he must always have some imperfection. But I will tell them again here that a young prince of seventeen, who has a great deal of heart, a great deal of love, and a great deal of candor and credulity, qualities not unusual in a young man, seemed to me amply capable of exciting compassion. I require no more of him.6 But, they say, this prince had only entered his fifteenth year when he died. I have made him live — ​him and Narcissus — ​two years longer than they actually did. I would not have addressed this objection, had it not been made somewhat indignantly by a man who had allowed himself the liberty of having an emperor reign for twenty years who only reigned for eight, notwithstanding that, chronologically, such a change must be a far more consequential one, given that time was reckoned by the years of the emperors’ reigns.7 Nor has Junia lacked for critics. They claim that I have made of an old coquette, named Junia Silana, a most virtuous young girl. What would be their response were I to tell them that this Junia is an invented character, like the Émilie of Cinna, or the Sabine of Horace?8 But I must tell them that if they had read their history carefully, they would have found a Junia Calvina, a member of Augustus’s family, the sister of Silanus, to whom Claudius had promised Octavia [in marriage].9 This Junia was young, beautiful, and, as Seneca says, festivissima omnium puellarum.10 She tenderly loved her brother; “and their enemies,” Tacitus says, “accused the two of them of incest, although they were guilty of only a minor indiscretion.” If I represent her as more reserved than she actually was, I have not heard it said that we are forbidden to amend a character’s manners, especially when that character is all but unknown to us.

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People find it strange that she appears onstage after the death of Britannicus. Certainly it is a very delicate sensibility that cannot bear having her announce in four rather touching lines that she is on her way to Octavia’s. But, they say, it was hardly worth the trouble of having her reappear. Someone else could have mentioned it instead of her. They are unaware that one of the rules of the theater is to narrate only those things that cannot be represented on stage; and that all the Ancients often have actors return on stage who have nothing else to say except that they are coming from one place and that they are returning to another.11 All that is of no account, say my critics. The play is over with the recounting of the death of Britannicus, and one ought not to listen to the rest. One does listen to it, however, and indeed as attentively as to the end of any tragedy.12 For myself, I have always understood that, tragedy being the imitation of a complete action, in which several persons participate, that action is over only when one learns in what situation it leaves those very persons. That is the practice of Sophocles in almost every case. Thus, in Antigone, he devotes as many verses to depicting the fury of Haemon and the punishment of Creon after the death of that princess as I have devoted to the imprecations of Agrippina, the flight of Junia, the punishment of Narcissus, and the despair of Nero, after the death of Britannicus.13 What would one be required to do to satisfy such captious judges? The thing would be quite easy, were one willing to fly in the face of good sense. One would merely need to deviate from what is natural in order to abandon oneself to the extraordinary. Instead of one simple action, dealing with a limited subject, such as any action must be that takes place in the course of a single day, one which, advancing by degrees to its conclusion, is sustained only by the interests, the feelings, and the passions of the characters, it would be necessary to fill that same action with a quantity of incidents which could hardly transpire within the space of a month, with a great number of theatrical tricks, the more surprising the less plausible they are, and with a vast number of declamations in which one would have the actors say everything that is contrary to what they ought to say. It would be necessary, for instance, to portray some drunken hero, who would force himself to hate his mistress just as

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a lark, a Lacedaemonian blowhard, a conqueror who would spout nothing but amorous maxims, and a woman who would give lessons in pride to conquerors.14 There you would doubtless have something to make all these gentlemen cry out in admiration. But what would that small number of judicious persons whom I strive to please say meanwhile? In what guise could I dare show myself, so to speak, to the gaze of those great men of antiquity whom I have chosen as models? For, to make use of the thought of one Ancient, 15 those are the true spectators to whom we address ourselves; and we should ceaselessly ask ourselves: “What would Homer and Virgil say, if they read these verses? What would Sophocles say, if he saw this scene performed?” However that may be, I have never presumed to forbid anyone from speaking against my works. It would have been futile to do so. Quid de te alii loquantur ipsi videant, says Cicero; sed loquentur tamen.16 I would only ask the reader to pardon me for this little preface, which I have written to justify my tragedy to him. There is nothing more natural than to defend oneself when one believes oneself unjustly attacked. I notice that Terence17 himself seems to have written prologues solely in order to justify himself against the criticisms of a malevolent old poet, malevoli veteris poetae,18 who had been inciting others to raise their voices against him up to the very moment when his plays were about to be performed. Occepta est agi; Exclamat, etc.19 There is one objection that might have been raised against me, but has not been. But what has escaped the attention of the audience might well be noticed by readers. It is that I have had Junia enter the order of Vestal Virgins, where, according to Aulus Gellius,20 no one under six years of age or over ten was received. But here the people take Junia under their protection, and I thought that, in consideration of her birth, her virtue, and her misfortune, they might have waived the age requirement prescribed by their laws, as they waived the age requirement for the consulate in the case of so many great men who had merited that privilege.

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In conclusion, I am quite convinced that additional criticisms might well have been leveled at me, regarding which I would have had no choice but to profit from them in the future. But I much pity the sorry fate of the man who works for the public. Those who best discern our faults are those who would most willingly disregard them. They pardon us those passages that have not pleased them, for the sake of those that have given them pleasure. There is no one, on the contrary, more unjust than an ignorant man. He always believes that admiration is a hallmark of those who know nothing. He condemns an entire play on account of one scene he doesn’t approve of. He attacks even the most brilliant passages, in order to make people think he is intelligent; and when we fail to be swayed by his views, he brands us as too presumptuous to give credence to what anyone says, and does not realize that he sometimes takes greater pride in a very bad piece of criticism than we take in a rather good play. Homine imperito numquam quidquam injustius.21

notes 1. This preface appears only in the first edition of Britannicus (1670). Still smarting from the somewhat hostile reception with which the play had been greeted, Racine was apparently bent on (to borrow a phrase from Sheridan’s Lady Sneerwell) “reducing others [notably Corneille] to the level of his own injured reputation.” But those vindictive, if understandable, swipes at his detractors were no longer timely when the next edition of Britannicus appeared in 1676, since its status as one of Racine’s most highly esteemed plays had been fully established by then, and Racine wisely provided a new, less peevish preface to supersede the earlier one, of which he retained only a few brief passages. 2. Such an assertion certainly confirms that it was never Racine’s intention to portray someone in the process, whether gradual or sudden, of becoming evil, a morally ambivalent soul wrestling with itself, a man wavering at the crossroads between virtue and vice, down either of which paths he could, at last, decide to tread. 3. I have occasion, in the Discussion and the Notes and Commentary, repeatedly to take exception to the implications of these two complementary statements, for, while it might be valid to assert that most of Racine’s plays do effectively shut out the world at large, whatever their apparent historical, mythological, or religious contexts, and that in the case of at least a third of them (The Fratricides, Andromache, Iphigenia, and Phaedra) the dramatic concerns are worked out more or less strictly en famille, in Britannicus, by contrast, the impact of the dramatic events on the world

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at large is so central to the theme of the play as to render the familial drama being enacted almost incidental and the tragic outcome of the characters portrayed as no more than collateral damage. 4. Including one such act (in II.iii) that I characterize, in note 28 for Act II, as “the single most horrific . . . in all of Racine, the one most steeped in a frighteningly sophisticated, psychotic evil, compared to which the various threats made by Pyrrhus, Roxane, and Athaliah seem almost benign.” 5. The English that precedes this Latin quotation, from “had a marvelous . . .” up to the colon, is an accurate translation of Racine’s French, which is in turn an accurate translation of the Latin. 6. In a misplaced effort to establish Britannicus’s credentials as a bona fide Aristotelian tragic hero, Racine resorts to “a chain of reasoning both forced and highly contrived” (Picard, 1097). One might almost believe that Racine was being deliberately obfuscatory here, with his willful misconstruction of Aristotle (as Forestier points out, 1422 –3) and his befuddling non sequiturs, since the argument he seems to be trying to make — ​that Britannicus’s youthful indiscretion, if not hotheadedness, was to some extent the cause of his own undoing — ​is not borne out by the play. Rather, as I argue in Section XIII of the Discussion, Nero’s motive for having Britannicus killed had, in a way, nothing to do with Britannicus himself, who, boyishly imprudent though he may have been, posed no real threat to Nero’s reign. In any case, this paragraph was wisely jettisoned when Racine composed a new preface. 7. The miscreant in question is Racine’s older rival, Corneille, who overextended the reign of Phocas by twelve years in his Héraclius empereur de l’Orient (1647), as he himself acknowledged (albeit well over a decade after the fact) in the Examen (survey) for his play. Forestier (1423) notes that “this type of playing fast and loose with history was not really considered to be anything unusual in classic tragedy.” But whether Racine’s distortion of history was more or less consequential than Corneille’s is immaterial if one believes, as I do, that Britannicus is neither a tragic hero nor even the hero, in any sense, of the play that bears his name. 8. Again, the object of this almost catty implied criticism is Corneille; Cinna and Horace are, in fact, two of his finest plays. 9. See note 19 for Act I. 10. That is, “the liveliest of young ladies” (Seneca, Apocolocyntosis divi Claudii, VIII [The gourdification of the divine Claudius]). Racine judiciously omits to mention the source of this seemingly complimentary description, a scathingly satirical work (as may be divined from its title) — ​which leaves open to question just how flattering such a description might have been. 11. Another strained and rather silly response to his critics, for, while it may be true “that one of the rules of [Racine’s] theater is to narrate only those things that cannot be represented on stage,” there is surely no rule in Racine’s theater or anyone else’s requiring that everything, however trivial, that can be represented on stage should be. And, indeed, this paragraph became irrelevant when Racine himself, notwithstanding his strenuous efforts here to justify the reappearance of Junia (whose four verses, by the way, were framed by an additional eight for Nero), bowing to his own better judgment, if not that of his critics, deleted all twelve lines

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for the 1676 and subsequent editions. See note 31 for Act V for my translation of this superfluous little rencontre. 12. Interestingly, Racine’s early critics seem almost more convinced than Racine himself that Britannicus is “the hero of a tragedy,” since they would have it that “the play is over with the recounting of the death of Britannicus, and one ought not to listen to the rest.” In any case, by the time Racine came to write the second preface, five years later, having reassessed what the play was really about, he was more equivocal in his views about Britannicus’s centrality to the play and certainly made no further claims for Britannicus’s being the hero of his tragedy. See note 15 for Racine’s second preface. (I should point out that a similar objection had been raised in regard to The Fratricides, since the titular brothers — ​whose status as protagonists, if not as tragic heroes, is surely easier to justify than Britannicus’s — ​are both killed between Acts IV and V, and, their death being narrated midway through Act V, the second half of that act was judged anticlimactic, if not superfluous. In my Discussion of that play, however, I make a case for Racine’s having succeeded in making the second half of Act V integral to the play, providing closure, as it does, for some of the play’s main themes.) 13. Racine is certainly on much firmer ground here than he was in the preceding paragraph, but not so much for the reason he adduces (that a good tragedy must, so to speak, tie up all the loose ends) as for the obvious consideration that the death of Britannicus could hardly be a fitting conclusion to a play the respective dramatic weight and thematic significance of whose characters definitively belie the suggestion, provided by the title Britannicus, that the titular character is in any way its protagonist, let alone its tragic hero. 14. Yet again, the target of Racine’s potshots is Corneille, four of whose recent tragedies come under fire here: Attila, Agésilas, Sertorius, and Sophonisbe. The characters satirically sketched are, conveniently, the title characters of their respective plays. 15. Longinus, the Greek rhetorician, in his famous treatise, On the Sublime (XII). 16. That is, “What others say of you is their own business; but they will continue to talk” (Cicero, Republic, VI, 16). 17. Publius Terentius Afer (ca.  190 –159 b.c.), one of the two preeminent comic playwrights of the Roman republic, the other being Plautus (Titus Maccius Plautus, 254 –184 b.c.). 18. Racine has just provided his own translation. 19. If there were any doubt about whom Racine had in mind by “a malevolent old poet,” this quotation (“The play has just begun; he yells out . . . , ” from Terence’s prologue to The Eunuch) provides sufficient clarification, for it was reported that at the first performance of Britannicus, the play had hardly begun, when Corneille was heard to make very audible, derisive remarks about the work. 20. Second-​century Latin author, whose only extant work, the valuably documentary Attic Nights, is the source of Racine’s information. 21. That is, “There is no one more unjust than an ignorant man” (from Terence’s The Adelphi), an observation that Racine has just offered, in French, in the fifth sentence of this final paragraph..

Racine’s Second Preface 1

Of all my tragedies, this is the one on which I can say I have labored the hardest. Yet I confess that its success did not at first answer to my hopes. Hardly had it appeared upon the stage than there rose up against it a multitude of criticisms that seemed determined to destroy it. I myself believed that its future destiny would be less fortunate than that of my other tragedies. But what happened to this play in the end is what always happens to works that have some merit. The criticisms have faded away; the play survives. Now it has become, of all my plays, the one that the court and the public most gladly come to see; and if I have ever created something of substance and which merits some praise, the majority of connoisseurs are in agreement that it is this same Britannicus.2 To tell the truth, I had based my work upon models that were immensely helpful in creating the portrait I wished to draw of the court of Agrippina and Nero. I had copied my characters from the greatest painter of antiquity, by which I mean, from Tacitus. And I had been at that time so steeped in reading that excellent historian, that there is hardly a striking effect in my tragedy for which he did not provide me with the idea.3 I had wished to include in this collection a selection of the most beautiful passages that I attempted to imitate; but I found that such a selection would take up almost as much space as the play. So the reader will not take it amiss if I recommend him to this author, who is, moreover, available to everyone; and I will content myself with offering here a few remarks of his about each of the characters that I introduce in this play.

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To begin with Nero, one must bear in mind that here he is in the first years of his reign, which, as one knows, were happy ones. Thus, I was not authorized to represent him as wicked as he was subsequently. Nor, however, do I represent him as a virtuous man, for he never was one. He had not yet killed his mother, his wife, his tutors; but he bore in him the seeds of all those crimes. He is beginning to wish to shake off his yoke. He hates these people one and all, and he hides his hate from them under false caresses: Factus natura velare odium fallacibus blanditiis.4 In a word, what we have here is a monster being born, but who dares not declare himself, and who seeks pretexts for his wicked actions: Hactenus Nero flagitiis et sceleribus velamenta quae sivit.5 He could not bear Octavia, a princess of exemplary goodness and virtue: Fato quodam, an quia praevalent illicita; metuebaturque ne in stupra feminarum illustrium prorumperet.6 I have given him Narcissus as his confidant. In this I have followed Tacitus, who says that Nero bore very ill the death of Narcissus, because this freed slave had a marvelous compatibility with the vices of the prince which still remained hidden: Cujus abditis adhuc vitiis mire congruebat.7 This passage proves two things: it proves that Nero was already vicious, but that he dissimulated his vices, and that Narcissus encouraged him in his evil tendencies. I chose Burrhus in order to present an honest man in opposition to this pestilential courtier; and I chose him rather than Seneca, for the following reason. They were both mentors of Nero’s youth, one for arms, and one for letters; and they were both renowned, Burrhus for his military experience and for the severity of his morals, militaribus curis et severitate morum;8 Seneca for his eloquence and for his engaging wit, Seneca praeceptis eloquentiae et comitate honesta.9 Burrhus, after his death, was sorely missed on account of his virtue: Civitate grande desiderium ejus mansit per memoriam virtutis.10 All their efforts were directed toward resisting the pride and the ferocity of Agrippina, quae cunctis malae dominationis cupidinibus flagrans, habebat in partibus Pallantem.11 I say only this one word about Agrippina, for there would be only too much to say on the subject. It is she whom I was above all concerned to portray successfully, and my tragedy is no less about the disgrace of Agrippina than about

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the death of Britannicus. That death was a veritable thunderbolt for her, and it seemed clear, Tacitus records, from her fear and her consternation, that she was as innocent of that death as Octavia.13 Agrippina lost in him her last hope, and this crime caused her to fear a greater one: Sibi supremum auxilium ereptum, et parricidii exemplum intelligebat.14 The age of Britannicus was so well known that it was not permissible for me to represent him otherwise than as a young prince who had a great deal of heart, a great deal of love, and a great deal of candor, qualities not unusual in a young man. He was fifteen years old, and they say that he was very gifted, whether that be true, or whether his misfortunes caused that to be believed of him without his having given any signs of it: Neque segnem ei fuisse indolem ferunt; sive verum, seu periculis commendatus retinuit famam sine experimento.15 One should not be astonished that the only person close to him was such a wicked man as Narcissus; for, a long time before, orders had been given that Britannicus should have around him only men who possessed neither honor nor honesty: Nam ut proximus quisque Britannico neque fas neque fidem pensi haberat olim provisum erat.16 It only remains for me to speak of Junia. One must not confuse her with an old coquette named Junia Silana. This is another Junia, whom Tacitus calls Junia Calvina, of the family of Augustus, sister of Silanus to whom Claudius had promised Octavia [in marriage]. This Junia was young, beautiful, and, as Seneca says, festivissima omnium puellarum.17 She and her brother loved each other tenderly; and their enemies, Tacitus says, accused the two of them of incest, although they were guilty of only a minor indiscretion. She lived on until the reign of Vespasian.18 I have her enter the order of the Vestal Virgins, although, according to Aulus Gellius, they never received anyone under six years of age, nor over ten. But here the people take Junia under their protection. And I thought that, in consideration of her birth, her virtue, and her misfortune, they might have waived the age requirement prescribed by their laws, as they waived the age requirement for the consulate in the case of so many great men who had merited that honor. 12

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notes 1. The initial hostility from certain far-from-​disinterested parties that greeted Britannicus having long since died down, and the play having found favor among public and critics alike (as Racine acknowledges in his opening paragraph), when Racine was preparing the first collected edition of his plays (through Iphigenia) in 1675, he realized that the jarringly contentious and determinedly polemical tone of the first preface had been rendered wholly inappropriate, and proceeded to compose a new one (retaining only a few brief passages from the earlier version). It proved a very wise decision: the writer of this second preface comes off as far more modest, generous, and ingratiating, and what he has written appears, likewise, far more reasonable, judicious, and, frankly, interesting. 2. Of course, this assertion predates Phaedra (1677), which, if it is not universally adjudged Racine’s greatest creation (some few accord that distinction to Athaliah and some fewer to one or another of his plays), is far and away his most popular and best known. But Britannicus does perhaps, after all, contain more of what might appeal to modern audiences, by virtue of having less of what might be found off-​puttingly melodramatic, fusty, even risible by modern sensibilities. As one small but telling example of Britannicus’s enduring appeal and viability, when London’s Almeida Theatre Company decided to stage two of Racine’s plays (in London and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music) to mark the three hundredth anniversary of his death in 1999, they chose, along with the inevitable Phaedra, Britannicus (both starring Diana Rigg as, respectively, Phaedra and Agrippina). 3. Racine is far too modest here. After all, this is a very different case from that of Iphigenia, where the source of Racine’s borrowings, Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis, was an existing verse drama, already possessing potent literary and theatrical qualities: whatever Racine borrowed was, so to speak, prêt-à-​porter. In the case of Tacitus’s Annals of Imperial Rome, Racine was dealing with a voluminous chronicle comprising multifarious material: people, places, and dates; anecdotes and reportage; authorial viewpoints, commentary, and surmises. That Racine was able to take this unwieldy source material and organize it into a coherent dramatic structure, by a process of the most judicious and artful selectivity, adaptation, and conflation, represents a creative triumph greater, perhaps, than if he had had to “fabricate” the play from scratch. 4. That is, “He was naturally disposed to hide his hate under false caresses” (Tacitus, XIV, 56). 5. That is, “Up to that point Nero had sought to disguise his debaucheries and his crimes” (Tacitus, XIII, 47). 6. That is, “Whether owing to some fatality, or to the lure of forbidden fruit; and it was feared lest he proceed to debauch women of high birth” (Tacitus, XIII, 12). 7. The English that precedes this Latin quotation, from “had a marvelous compatibility . . .” up to the colon, is an accurate translation of Racine’s French, which is in turn an accurate translation of the Latin (Tacitus, XIII, 1). 8. The English that follows “Burrhus” is an accurate translation of Racine’s French, which is in turn an accurate translation of the Latin (Tacitus, XIII, 2).

Racine’s Second Preface 

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9. The English beginning with “Seneca” accurately translates Racine’s French, but the Latin actually says, “for his instruction in eloquence” (Tacitus, XIII, 2). 10. Again, the English beginning “was sorely” accurately translates Racine’s French, but Racine omits the Latin’s “sorely missed by the people [of Rome]” (Tacitus, XIV, 51). 11. That is, “who, burning with all the fires of a selfish, malevolent power, had made Pallas her ally” (Tacitus, XIII, 2). 12. A significant, telling, and much discussed admission on Racine’s part that Britannicus is hardly the unique focus of this play, let alone its tragic hero, a distinction Racine no longer bothers to claim for him. But, as I remark in the Discussion, Racine “might have observed, with greater accuracy, that Britannicus is . . . no more about the disgrace of Agrippina than it is about the death of Britannicus.” Or, put another way, if Britannicus is a misleading title for this tragedy, then Agrippina would be no less so, for it is Nero who is its true protagonist. 13. That is, Agrippina was just as innocent of the murder of Britannicus as Octavia must have been, the latter being his loving sister. In fact, the unhappy Octavia was present at the murder of her brother, according to Tacitus (XIII, 16), who gives this poignant account of her reaction: “Octavia, young though she was, had learnt to hide sorrow, affection, every feeling. After a short silence the banquet resumed.” 14. That is, “She saw her last support snatched away from her, and she apprehended that this was a rehearsal for matricide” (Tacitus, XIII, 16). 15. The English beginning with “they say” accurately translates Racine’s French, which is a fairly accurate translation of the Latin (Tacitus, XII, 26). Racine’s citation of Tacitus’s comment — ​a comment that hardly adds luster to Britannicus’s portrait — ​further undermines Racine’s already halfhearted claim, in his first preface, that Britannicus is the tragic protagonist of his play. 16. The English beginning with “for, a long time before” is an accurate translation of Racine’s French, which is in turn an accurate translation of the Latin (Tacitus, XIII, 15). 17. That is, “the liveliest of young ladies.” See note 10 for Racine’s first preface. 18. Vespasian (reigned a.d. 70 –79), by the way, was the father of Titus, the tragic hero of Berenice, Racine’s next play.

Britannicus

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cast of characters nero, Emperor, son of Agrippina britannicus, son of the Emperor Claudius agrippina, widow of Domitius Ahenobarbus, Nero’s father, and, by a second marriage, widow of the Emperor Claudius junia, in love with Britannicus burrhus, tutor of Nero narcissus, tutor of Britannicus albina, confidant of Agrippina Guards The scene is in Rome, in a room of Nero’s palace.

act i, Scene i 

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act i Scene i [agrippina, albina] albina What’s this, madame? While sleep seals Nero’s eyes, You must come here to wait for him to rise? Wandering these halls, unguarded, on her own, Does Caesar’s mother keep watch here alone?1 Return to your apartments, I implore. agrippina Not for an instant will I leave his door.2 I must wait here. Howe’er long his repose, I’ll scarce have time to think about my woes. All I foresaw is now a certainty: Nero is Britannicus’s enemy.3 The headstrong Nero’s self-​restraint is ended;4 He wishes to be feared now, not befriended. Britannicus provokes him, and I learn That every day I do so in my turn. albina What! you, to whom he owes his very existence; Who called him back to Rome from such a distance;5 Who, cheating Claudius’ son out of his own,6 Gave fortunate Domitius Caesar’s throne?7 Everything tells him what is due to you. He owes his love. agrippina         He owes it to me, it’s true, And if he’s generous, everything has weight, But if ungrateful, everything breeds hate.8

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albina Ungrateful? No, madame: I would have thought His conduct shows a dutiful soul, well taught. These three years prove, by all he’s said and done, Rome’s found a perfect emperor in your son.9 To Rome, these past three years, under his reign, It seems the age of consuls lives again. He governs like a father, like a sage: His youth recalls Augustus’s old age. agrippina I’m not unjust: his virtues I’ve commended; But, though he starts where great Augustus ended, I fear his future may undo his past, And imitate Augustus’ youth at last.10 In vain his forebears’ humors he’d disguise: I read their sullen sadness in his eyes. The savagery drawn from his father’s side Blends in his blood with my Neronic pride.11 Tyranny always dawns benign and bright: Caligula, awhile, was Rome’s delight; When madness, though, broke through his virtuous guise, Then fear replaced affection in Rome’s eyes.12 But what though Nero prove a paragon, Whose virtue, as a model, will live on?13 Have I placed in his hands the reins of state To steer as Rome and senate shall dictate? Let him be Rome’s proud father if he will,14 But not forget that I’m his mother still.15 By what name, though, I ask, are we to call This outrage that the dawn’s disclosed to all? He well knows — ​how could such love be ignored? —  That by Britannicus Junia’s adored. And this same Nero, led by virtue’s light, Arranges Junia’s ravishment by night!16 What does he want? What moves him: love or hate?

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act i, Scene i 

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Does torturing them provide a joy so great? Or might his late malevolence be meant To punish them for the support I’ve lent?17 albina For your support? agrippina         Albina, stop! I know ’Twas I alone who worked their overthrow.18 I hurled Britannicus down from that throne That blood and birthright should have made his own.19 When I denied Octavia for his wife, Silanus, Junia’s brother, took his life:20 He on whom Claudius’ favoring gaze was bent, And who from great Augustus claimed descent. That favored Nero. Now, to claim my due, I must maintain the balance ’twixt these two, So that Britannicus, in like degree, May one day do so ’twixt my son and me.21

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albina Such schemes! agrippina        I need safe harbor from these gales, For Nero will break free, if this curb fails. albina But he’s your son: why act so warily?22 agrippina I’d soon fear him, once he stopped fearing me.23 albina Perhaps the fear you feel’s a groundless one.

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But if you’re disappointed in your son, At least his change of heart is not apparent, But kept concealed ’twixt Caesar and his parent. Whatever new rank Rome exalts him to, Not one, but straight your son confers on you;24 His generosity knows no restraint. In Rome, like him, you’re honored as a saint; Rome shuns Octavia in her wretchedness. The great Augustus honored Livia less;25 Nero insists the fasces, crowned with bay, Be held before you as you make your way.26 To prove he’s grateful, what do you require? agrippina More trust and less respect’s what I desire.27 These tributes and these gifts provoke my pique: My honors grow, my influence grows weak. Those days are past when Nero would report The heartfelt wishes of his doting court, When, my hand guiding the affairs of state, The senate, at my call, would congregate. Then, veiled but present, I would play my role: That august body’s all-​controlling soul.28 Uncertain whether Rome was on his side, Nero was not yet drunk with pomp and pride. But memories of that day still stun my mind, When Nero’s own refulgence struck him blind: Ambassadors from far-​flung kingdoms came To pay him tribute in their master’s name; I stepped up to the throne to take my place. I don’t know who incited my disgrace, But Nero, soon as he caught sight of me, Let spite suffuse his face for all to see. My heart misgave at this ill-​boding sight. With false respect the ingrate veiled his slight; He rose, and rushed to offer his embrace, Barring me from the throne, my rightful place.29

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act i, Scene ii 

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And since that fatal blow, my wonted sway Has weakened swiftly with each passing day. Little remains: where once my help was needed, Now Seneca’s or Burrhus’ words are heeded.30 albina But now that your soul knows what may befall, Why kill yourself by drinking draughts of gall? Deign to explain yourself to Nero now. agrippina Such tête-à-​têtes the Emperor won’t allow. He schedules me a public interview; Each answer is prescribed — ​each silence, too. A certain pair, his masters and my own,31 Observe our talks; we’re never left alone. But I’ll pursue, the more he runs away, And profit from his present disarray. Wait! Someone’s coming out. Now I must go And tell my son that I demand to know The reason he abducted that poor girl, Surprising, while his head is in a whirl, The secrets of his soul. — ​What! can it be? Burrhus has met with him clandestinely?

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Scene ii [agrippina, burrhus, albina] burrhus Ah! Nero’s bid me inform you, in his name, Of orders apt, at first, to incur your blame;32 But, rest assured, they’re sage and well advised, And Caesar wished that you should be apprised. agrippina Let us go in; then he can counsel me.

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burrhus At present he preserves his privacy. The consuls have forestalled you with your son.33 (They use a door not known to everyone.)34 Let me go back inside, madame; if you’d . . . agrippina On such state secrets I dare not intrude. But, please, this once, could we, with less constraint, Hold converse face-to-​face and without feint?

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burrhus Lying is something I’ve always abhorred.35 agrippina How long do you plan to keep me from your lord? Must I now wait in line to catch his eye? Have I, then, raised your fortunes up so high That, like a wall, ’twixt him and me you’re thrust? Caesar, left to himself, you dare not trust? Have you and Seneca a rivalry To see who’ll first efface my memory? Tell me: did I entrust to you his fate, Only to have you make him an ingrate, While you two, under his name, rule the State? The more I ponder, though, the more I see You dared not think to make a pawn of me: You, whose ambition I could have let rot In some vile legion or some distant spot, Obscure, unhonored, and at last forgot; And I, through whom a royal lineage springs: Wife, daughter, sister, mother of your kings!36 When I gave Rome one emperor, can it be You thought I wished to have to deal with three? Nero’s no child. Isn’t it time he reigned?37 How long will fear of you keep him restrained?

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act i, Scene iI 

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Shall he see nothing, not seen through your eyes? Can’t he call on his forebears to advise? Let Nero, if he would be virtuous, Look to Augustus or Tiberius,38 Or imitate my sire, Germanicus. To rank with such great men I don’t pretend; I have some wisdom, though, which I can lend. I might instruct him, say, how to preserve ’Twixt subjects and himself a due reserve. burrhus Caesar has charged I give you satisfaction, On this occasion, for a single action; But since, wishing that matter set aside, You’d have the rest of his life justified, Then, with a soldier’s frankness, I’ll reply.39 (I could no sooner paint the truth than lie.) You’ve given Caesar’s youth into my care, A charge of which I’m constantly aware. But such a sacred trust should I betray By teaching Caesar only to obey? I needn’t account to you for what I’ve done. He’s master of the world, not just your son.40 Such reckoning is for the Empire to demand, Which placed its rise — ​or ruin — ​in my hand. If ignorance was all you wish he’d learned, To Seneca and me why, then, have turned? Why banish flatterers from his side, and then Seek out in exile more corrupting men?41 Claudius’ court could have afforded you A thousand slaves, where you required but two, Each vying for that prize: to make him vile And, through a misspent youth, age him the while. Why these complaints? As Caesar’s, so is your fame: With equal reverence we invoke your name.42 It’s true he doesn’t swell your court each day

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Or offer up the Empire to your sway. But ought he to, madame? Can gratitude Only express itself in servitude? Shall Nero, always humble, always tame, Never be Caesar Augustus but in name?43 May I speak out? Rome will not have it so. Rome, long a slave whom three freedmen brought low,44 Scarce breathing from the yoke ’neath which she strained, Rome reckons herself free since Nero’s reigned. Nay, more: for virtue seems reborn today; The Empire is no more one master’s prey.45 The Field of Mars sees Rome choose magistrates; Nero names the army’s chiefs at its dictates. Thrasea, a senator, and Corbulon, A general, have, neither, been undone By politics, despite the fame they’ve won.46 The deserts where our senators were exiled Now harbor those by whom they were reviled. What though your son on our advice rely, If Caesar’s glory gain, not lose, thereby, And if, throughout a reign in robust flower, Rome remain free, and Caesar wield full power?47 But Nero, surely, can make his own way; I don’t pretend to instruct him: I obey. He has his ancestors to urge him on;48 To thrive, he can be his own paragon, Fortunate if his virtues form a chain: The years to come like these three come again. agrippina I see you dare not trust what he might do; You think he’ll go astray, unchecked by you.49 But you who, so content with what you’ve wrought, Bear witness to the virtues he’s been taught, Explain why Nero, now a ravisher, Pursues Silanus’ sister, abducting her.50

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act i, Scene iI 

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Is it his aim to taint with infamy The shining blood that Junia shares with me?51 Pray, how did she commit lèse-​majesté? Why treat her like a criminal today? Having been raised in such a modest way, Had Nero not abducted her, she might Never have come within the Emperor’s sight; Indeed, she might have felt some gratitude For his not troubling her sweet solitude.52 burrhus I know that she’s suspected of no crime. But Nero’s made no charges at this time, And here she need feel no anxiety: This palace echoes with her ancestry. The rights she brings with her, let’s not forget, Could render any spouse of hers a threat; Nor can the blood of Caesar be allied With someone in whom Caesar can’t confide; To marry off Augustus’ niece, one must53 Consult him first: to fail to wouldn’t be just. agrippina Nero, I see, would tell me through your voice, In vain I’ve named Britannicus my choice. In vain, to turn his eyes from his disgrace, I gave him hope this marriage would take place: To shame me, Nero wants the world to know That what I promise I cannot bestow. Rome has supported me too fervently; To see her disabused he injures me, Instilling fear and warning everyone Not to confuse the Emperor with my son. He may do so; but first he should ensure That, ere he strikes, his empire is secure. While forcing me to the necessity

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Of countering with my weak authority, He shows his own; and if we stand opposed, My name may bear more weight than he’d supposed.54 burrhus Madame, why must you doubt your son’s respect? Can Caesar take no step that’s not suspect? Does Nero know you’ve taken Junia’s side? That with Britannicus you’re re-​allied? Your enemies’ causes do you now sustain, And use them as a pretext to complain? The least report one passes on to you Prompts you to wish the Empire split in two? Will mutual fear ne’er cease? Must each embrace To never-​ending arguments give place? Ah! leave this stern censoriousness behind; Act like a doting mother: lenient, kind. Suffer these slights without such loud retort, Lest you incite your ouster from the court. agrippina On Agrippina’s aid who’d think to call When Nero makes my ruin known to all? When he won’t let me see him anymore? When Burrhus dares detain me at his door?55 burrhus Madame, I see it’s time our talk should end; I fear my candor’s starting to offend. Anger’s unjust, and if it’s not placated, Its grievances are only aggravated. Here is Britannicus. I’ll yield him place, And leave you to commiserate his disgrace, Finding, perhaps, the blame for it resides With those in whom the Emperor least confides.

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act i, Scene iv 

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Scene iii [agrippina, britannicus, narcissus, albina] agrippina Where are you rushing, Prince? What mad despair Lures you so blindly to your enemies’ lair? What are you searching for? britannicus             What searching for? All that I’ve lost is here, all I adore. Junia has been disgracefully dragged here, Seized by his soldiers and transfixed by fear. To such a timid soul, what must have been The horror and the shock of such a scene! They’ve stolen her. Some harsh law would divide Two hearts whom their ill fortune unified. They don’t want us to merge our miseries, Lest, thus allied, our sorrows we should ease. agrippina Enough. Your injuries I too can feel: My protests, Prince, have forestalled your appeal. That’s not to say a powerless tirade Acquits me of the pledges that I’ve made. I’ll say no more. To Pallas’ house repair, If you’d hear further; I’ll await you there. Scene iv [britannicus, narcissus] britannicus Narcissus, dare I take her word that she

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Would arbitrate between her son and me? Is this not that same Agrippina whom My father chose to marry — ​to my doom —  And who, when his last days, as you contend, Dragged on ’gainst her designs, hastened his end?56 narcissus No matter. She feels all your outrage too; She’s pledged her word Junia shall marry you. Unite your grievances, confirm your ties. In vain these halls would echo to your sighs: If like a suppliant you should appear, Airing your wrongs, and not instilling fear, If in discourse your righteous anger’s spent, Trust me, there’ll be naught left but to lament.57 britannicus You know, Narcissus, if a servile state Is one that I could ever tolerate, And if, though stunned by my defeat, I could Renounce my destined empery for good. But I’m alone: chilled by my misery, My father’s friends are strangers now to me; My very youth has kept those far apart Who’ve harbored faithful feelings in their heart. For me, the experiences of this past year Have, sadly, made my situation clear: My so-​called friends, who trade in treachery, Observe my moves with assiduity; Chosen by Nero for this enterprise, They search my soul, whose secrets Nero buys.58 Howe’er it’s done, I’m sold out every day: He previews all my plans, hears all I say. My heart’s emotions he, like you, can trace.59 What do you make of this?

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act i, Scene iV 

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narcissus             What soul so base . . . ? You must select your confidants with care, Not squander all your secrets everywhere.60 britannicus You speak the truth,61 but mistrust is an art That’s learned late, even by the greatest heart: One can be fooled for long. I trust you’re true, Or, rather, vow to trust no one but you. My father always praised your loyalty; Alone of his freed slaves, you’ve stood by me. Your eyes, observing me with vigilance, Have saved me from a thousand accidents. Go, then; see if our friends know what’s occurred,62 If, by this storm, their courage has been stirred. Observe their looks, and listen to what’s said; Tell me if I can count on them for aid. Above all, ascertain — ​but with address —  How cautiously he’s guarded the Princess. Find out if fear still fills her lovely eyes, And if all converse with me he denies. Now, though, to Nero’s mother I must speed; She’ll be with Pallas, whom my father freed. I’ll see her, sound her, spur her — ​but I aspire To go even further than she may desire.

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act ii Scene i [nero, burrhus, narcissus, guards] nero Rest assured, Burrhus: she’s unjust, it’s true, But, being my mother, leniency is due, So I’ll ignore these last caprices too. But I shall neither suffer nor ignore This minister who goads her on to more: Pallas’s counsel is poisoning my mother; Nay, he’s beguiled Britannicus, my brother. They heed his every word, and I dare swear: Were you to visit him, you’d find them there! Enough! I want them both freed from his sway. For the last time: he must be sent away. I wish — command — ​that Pallas, by tonight, From Rome and from my court shall take his flight.1 This step the Empire’s interests now require. Approach, Narcissus. Let the rest retire.

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Scene ii [nero, narcissus] narcissus Thank heav’ns, with Junia in your hands today, The rest of Rome will fall beneath your sway.2 Your enemies, stripped of hopes that have proved vain, At Pallas’ house now helplessly complain. What’s this, though? You, uneasy and oppressed, Appear, more than Britannicus, distressed. Does the distraction of your somber glance, And this strange sadness, presage some mischance?

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Act II, Scene II 

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Fate smiles on you, indulging each desire. nero The die is cast: Nero’s in love. narcissus              You, Sire?

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nero One moment since, but now and evermore. It’s Junia whom I love — ​love? — ​no, adore.3 narcissus You love her? nero       By some curious urge compelled, Her advent here last evening I beheld. Tristful, she raised to heav’n eyes moist with tears, Which glimmered ’gainst the torches and the spears; Lovely, her scant attire seemed to disclose A beauty barely roused from its repose. I don’t know if it was that negligence, Her captors’ fierceness, or their insolence, The gloom, the glare, the silence or the cries, That heightened the sweet shyness of her eyes.4 Howbeit, such beauty took my breath away: I tried to speak, my tongue would not obey. Astonished, I remained immobile there; To her apartments I let her repair. My own I sought. Once there, alone, in vain I strove to drive her image from my brain: Too real she seemed, too real our colloquy; I even loved the tears she owed to me. I asked her pardon — ​ever, though, too late; I sued with sighs, then tried to intimidate.

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Thus, occupied with my new love, my eyes, Ne’er closing, waited for the sun to rise. But, sure, she’s not as fair as I made out: The mise-en-​scène enhanced her charms, no doubt. Narcissus, what say you?5

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narcissus            How could it chance She’s hid herself so long from Nero’s glance? nero You’ve noticed, then. And be it that she, irate, Thinks I’m to blame for her poor brother’s fate,6 Or that her proud heart, jealous of its prize, Would guard her budding beauty from our eyes, True to her grief, she’s hidden from the light, Rejecting the renown that is her right. It’s just this virtue, not at all the fashion, Whose perseverance stimulates my passion. There’s not one Roman woman, I maintain, Whom my attentions have not made more vain, And who, embellished with alluring art, Has not made an attempt on Caesar’s heart; Junia alone, withdrawn, all modesty, Regards such honors as ignominy. Nor does she, so aloof, attempt to learn If I can love, or be loved in return.7 Tell me, Britannicus loves her as well?8 narcissus Loves her? nero      But then — ​so young — ​how can he tell? Love’s poisoned glances he’s yet to discover.9

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Act II, Scene II 

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narcissus Seldom, my lord, does reason rule a lover. No doubt he loves her, and her charming eyes Have made the tears in his materialize. Her least desires he’s learned to accommodate. His love she may, by now, reciprocate.

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nero What’s that? O’er Junia’s heart his heart holds sway? narcissus I’ve no idea, but this much I can say: I’ve sometimes seen him secretly depart, Hiding from you the anger in his heart; Cast out from court, bewailing his harsh fate, Sick of your splendor and his servile state, ’Twixt fury and fear he seems to vacillate; But once he’s seen her he returns appeased.

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nero So much the worse for him if she is pleased: He’ll wish she’d shown him some hostility.10 Let him beware who wakes my jealousy. narcissus And why should you feel any anxiety? She shares his pain, commiserates his woe; But, then, who else’s tears has she seen flow? Today, her eyes, unsealed, will see the light: Your splendor, Sire, which scintillates so bright; They’ll see those uncrowned kings gathered about,11 Jostling unknowns — ​her lover ’mongst the rout —  Glued to your eyes, to glory in one glance You condescend to cast their way by chance. When you, Sire, greet her, glorious as the sun, To avow with sighs the victory she’s won,12

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Then, with her heart so charmed, I guarantee: Command that you be loved, and loved you’ll be.

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nero The harsh harassment I’ll be subject to! The arguments! narcissus        Why? what’s to hinder you? nero My mother’s tirades and Octavia’s tears, Seneca, Burrhus, Rome! Three virtuous years!13 Not that a remnant tenderness, in truth, Attracts me to my wife or pleads her youth. Long weary of the kind concern she shows, I seldom deign to watch her weep her woes:14 Too happy if a merciful divorce Relieved me of a yoke imposed by force! Heav’n, too, in secret, shows itself severe; Four years she’s prayed, but heaven will not hear: Octavia’s virtue leaves the Gods unmoved, And with a barren bed she’s been reproved. In vain the Empire asks an heir of me. narcissus Then why delay in seeking liberty? Your wife’s condemned by Rome, by your own heart. Augustus pined for Livia, for his part; Their dual divorces, then, conjoined those twain. To those divorces, Sire, you owe your reign.15 Tiberius, wedded to his royal race,16 Renounced Augustus’ daughter to his face,17 While you alone, thus far, thwart your own views, And this divorce, so much desired, refuse.

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Act II, Scene II 

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nero You know that Agrippina’s merciless. My anxious love foresees, to my distress, Her ushering in my wife and, angry-​eyed, Urging the sanctity of knots she’s tied; Then, beating on my heart with brutal strength, She’ll dwell on my ingratitude at length. Can I face such a furious interview? narcissus Are you not your own master, and hers too? To her demands, Sire, why must you defer? Live and reign for yourself and not for her. You fear her? But you can’t be terrified: Just now, you banished Pallas in his pride, This Pallas, whose presumption she abets. nero Far from her eyes, I give commands, make threats, Receive your counsels, which I dare endorse, And steel myself to counter force with force. But then (and here I bare my soul to you), Soon as ill luck propels her into view, Whether I can’t deny the power of eyes That taught me daily where my duty lies, Or, mindful of her generosity, I secretly give back all she gave me, It seems, for all my efforts, naught avails: Astounded by her soul, my own soul quails. To free myself from such subservience I flee her everywhere, or give offense; Sometimes, indeed, her anger I incur, So that she’ll flee from me, as I from her.  — ​Too long I keep you, though; you’d best retire: Britannicus might guess that we conspire.

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narcissus Britannicus has utmost faith in me: He thinks our meeting’s held at his decree, That I shall find out all that Nero knows, And what concerns him I shall then disclose. His lover he awaits impatiently, Whom, through my loyal aid, he hopes to see.

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nero I give my blessing. This sweet news convey: He shall see her. narcissus       

No, Sire, send him away!

nero Oh, I’ve my reasons; and you well may guess He’ll pay a high price for his happiness. Take credit for this happy strategy: Tell him that, for his sake, you’re duping me, That I forbade their meeting. — ​She draws near. —  Go find your master now and bring him here.

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Scene iii [nero, junia] nero You seem perturbed, madame. You’ve turned quite pale. Does something in my eyes cause you to quail? junia I can’t disguise my error: to speak true, I came to see Octavia, not you. nero I know it well and envy, I must own,

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Act II, Scene III 

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The kindness toward Octavia you’ve shown. junia You, Sire? nero      You think Octavia alone might care To claim the acquaintanceship of one so fair? junia To whom else would you have me make my plea? Whom ask about a crime unknown to me? But you, who punish it, that crime can name. In mercy, say: wherein am I to blame? nero And do you deem it, then, a crime so slight To hide yourself so long from Nero’s sight?18 These treasures from the Gods with which you’re blest, Were they supplied to you to be suppressed? Shall fortunate Britannicus, then, see His love, your charms, mature in secrecy, Undaunted — ​rather say, unseen — ​by me? Why, cheated of such glory till today, Have I, at court, been cruelly kept away? It’s said, too, unoffended, you allow Britannicus his true thoughts to avow. I can’t think, though, that, without my consent, Stern Junia would give him encouragement, Nor, being loved, would yield her love in turn, And of that love, by rumor, let me learn.19 junia I won’t deny that when I heard his sighs, His love I could not fail to recognize. He did not spurn a wretched girl like me, The last of an illustrious family,20

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Perhaps recalling, on a happier day, His father chose me as his fiancée.21 He loves me; he adopts his father’s view, Which, I dare say, is yours — ​your mother’s, too, Since your every design is her design. nero My mother has her plans, and I have mine. Of her and Claudius speak no further here. It’s not by their direction that I steer. It’s up to me to guide your destiny, And I shall choose the man whose wife you’ll be.

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junia But think what shame another match would bring To Caesar’s royal line from which I spring! nero The husband I’ve in mind may place with pride His ancestors at your ancestors’ side; Unblushing, with his suit you may comply.

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junia But who, then, is this spouse, my lord? nero                  It’s I. junia You? nero    Yes. Another name I’d nominate Were there but one of loftier estate. To make a choice agreeable to you I’ve scoured the court, Rome — ​nay, the Empire too.22

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Act II, Scene III 

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The more I’ve searched (and still I cast my eyes), To find a guardian worthy of such a prize, The more, madame, seems Caesar, by all measure, Best qualified to afford fair Junia pleasure: The worthiest treasure chest for such a treasure. To whom could you be worthily consigned But him Rome’s called to reign o’er humankind? Think back to your first years, when Claudius Destined you for his son Britannicus; But that was when he thought that son, someday, Would o’er the vast Empire of Rome hold sway. Now, far from flouting the high Gods’ decree,23 You ought to validate my empery. With such a gift they’ve honored me in vain, If from its share your heart should now abstain; If your charms sweeten not the cares of state; If, when, weighed down by worry, I’m kept up late —  Days to be pitied, yes, but envied, too —  I can’t find solace, gazing up at you. Don’t think you need to fear Octavia’s frown, For Rome, like me, confers on you the crown, Rejects Octavia, and asks me to untie A bond the heav’ns refuse to ratify.24 Weigh well this boon that Caesar would bestow, Worthy the lengths that love has made me go, Worthy those eyes, too long concealed from view, Worthy the world which claims you as its due. junia A just astonishment I must betray. I’ve seen myself — ​and in a single day —  Seized, like a criminal, and transported here; And when I’m brought before you, numb with fear, Scarce trusting in my innocence alone, I’m offered, suddenly, Octavia’s throne. Moreover, I’ve deserved, I dare to claim,

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Neither the excessive honor, nor the shame. And can you wish a girl whose family She saw extinguished in her infancy,25 Who, nursing in obscurity her woes, Has shaped her virtues to conform to those, To soar so suddenly from somber night To such a rank, exposed to public sight, Whose glare, when distant, disconcerted me, And which befits another’s majesty? nero My wife I have renounced, as I’ve made clear; No need for modesty, madame, or fear. Don’t think my choice is blind or idly meant; I answer for you: you need but consent. Of your high birth recall the memory, And don’t prefer, to the sure dignity Of honors Caesar reinstates in you, The glory of a snub, which you may rue.26 junia Heaven, my lord, knows well my inmost thought: Such senseless glory I have never sought. This grandeur and these gifts I do not slight; The more, though, such rank bathes me with its light, The more it would cast shame on me, its glare Lighting a crime that robs the rightful heir. nero I see just how concerned for her you are; The firmest friendships seldom go so far. Let us, however, lay this mystery bare: The brother, not the sister, claims your care. Britannicus . . . junia        He’s taught my heart to feel,

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Act II, Scene III 

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And what I’ve learned I’ve not tried to conceal. Doubtless my candor may not be discreet, But what my heart declares, my lips repeat. Absent from court, there was no need for me To master its polite duplicity. I love him, yes: destined for him alone When, having wed me, he’d have claimed the throne. Those hardships, though, by which he’s been beset: His honors lost, his palace desolate, A hostile court from which he’s had to flee, Are but so many ties entwining me. All that you see conduces to your pleasure; The enchanted days glide by in even measure. Of such, the Empire is the unstinting source; Or if some trouble should disrupt their course, The world, concerned to keep them flowing free, Rushes to erase it from your memory. Britannicus is alone. When he’s depressed, There’s none but me to take an interest; The only pleasure that provides relief: Some tears that sometimes serve to ease his grief. nero It’s just those tears, those pleasures, I begrudge;27 Were it someone else, I’d prove a sterner judge. My plans, though, for this prince are less severe; In fact, madame, I’ve bid him meet you here.

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junia Ah! on your goodness, Sire, I’ve ever relied. nero His entry here I ought to have denied, But wished to avoid the risks that might ensue, The risks his anger makes him liable to. I’ve no desire to ruin him. This decree Will prove less hard for him to bear if he

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Hears it from lips he loves, it seems to me. If his life’s dear to you, send him away; My jealousy, above all, don’t betray. Let him impute to you his banishment; By silence or by speech be eloquent; At least by coldness, give the Prince to know That all his prospects here he must forgo.28 junia Could I pronounce so cruel a decree? A thousand times I’ve sworn the contrary; And if such words I forced myself to say, My eyes would still enjoin him not to obey. nero Hidden close by, I’ll watch while you confer. Deep in your soul your love you must inter; Nor think that secret languages will boot: I’ll understand the looks that you think mute. His ruin will be assured should I espy One gentle gesture or one soothing sigh. junia Alas! if one last boon I dare implore, Then, grant, Sire, that I never see him more!29 Scene iv [nero, junia, narcissus] narcissus Britannicus would see the Princess, Sire. nero Bid him approach.

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Act II, Scene vi 

junia        

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My lord!

nero             I shall retire. His fate depends on you more than on me.30 While seeing him, think: you’re under scrutiny. Scene v [junia, narcissus] junia Ah! dear Narcissus, warn your master! Say . . . Too late! I’m lost! I see him come this way. Scene vi [junia, britannicus, narcissus]31 britannicus Madame, what happy chance brings me to you, To savor thus so sweet an interview? But midst such pleasure, I’m devoured by pain, Despairing lest we never meet again! Will I be forced to steal, some devious way, A joy your eyes afforded every day? Last night! This morning! Couldn’t your innocence, Your tears, disarm those cruel men’s insolence? Where was I then? What envious demon’s spite Prevented me from dying in your sight? Alas! when you were feeling fear’s constraint, Did you address to me some secret plaint? Princess, for my support did you appeal? Did you take pity on the pain I’d feel?32

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Such silence! Such a welcome! Such cold glances! Is it thus your eyes console my circumstances? Speak. We’re alone. Our hoodwinked enemy Is elsewhere occupied and leaves us free. Let’s profit from this precious privacy. junia His power pervades these halls, still holding sway: These walls have ears to hear all that we say; The Emperor’s never very far away.33 britannicus Since when, madame, have you been prone to fear? Love pines away so soon, held captive here?34 What happened to the heart that used to swear Nero would envy this great love we share? But all your futile fears may now be banished. True loyalty, madame, has not yet vanished. My anger meets approval in men’s eyes, And Nero’s mother’s known to sympathize; Even Rome herself takes umbrage at his dealings . . . 35 junia My lord, you know these aren’t your true feelings. Yourself, a thousand times have sworn to me Rome praises him with unanimity; You’ve always rendered him his due acclaim. Doubtless, for such a speech your grief ’s to blame.36 britannicus Your words, I must confess, leave me surprised. I didn’t come here to hear him eulogized. What! to confide to you my weighty woes, I barely steal this moment luck bestows, And, lo! this precious time you dedicate To praise the man who hounds me with his hate!

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Act II, Scene viii 

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Who makes you so contrary in just one day? Even your looks, it seems, have naught to say.37 What’s this? Your eyes refuse to meet my eyes? Nero has won your heart? Me you despise? Ah! If I thought . . . Madame, I beg of you: Relieve this torment you subject me to. Speak: to your heart am I no longer dear? junia Please go. The Emperor will soon be here.

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britannicus In whom, Narcissus, can I now confide? Scene vii [nero, junia, narcissus] nero Madame . . . junia       No further talk can I abide. You’ve been obeyed. Let me, at least, now go And shed these tears his eyes shall not see flow. Scene viii [nero, narcissus] nero The violence of their love was plain to see: It spoke despite her taciturnity. She loves my rival — ​all the signs were there; But I’ll derive my joy from his despair. His pain a pleasant prospect opens out;38

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His lover’s heart he’s now begun to doubt. I’ll follow her. To you he will impart His grief. Go, with new doubts torment his heart, And while I watch her weeping for her love, Make him pay dear for bliss he knows naught of.39 narcissus [alone] Fortune, Narcissus, calls on you again, And such a summons would you, then, disdain? No — ​her benign behests I’ll carry through; For my own good, these wretches I’ll undo.

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Act III, Scene I 

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act iii Scene i [burrhus, narcissus] burrhus What! does Narcissus, stalking Caesar here, Leave poor Britannicus quaking with fear —  Narcissus, whom true friendship ought to inspire To pay the son all that he owes the sire; Who should with his misfortunes sympathize, Sequestering his grief from Caesar’s eyes? Do you want him, crushed by horror and distress, Pressed by despair, which feeds on loneliness,2 To hasten the defeat he would delay, And force the Emperor not to spare his prey? When Claudius — ​old, infirm, near his last hour —  Left all of Rome in Agrippina’s power, Learning whom heav’n had chosen to succeed, Whose name on every face he soon could read, That prince, measuring your zeal by all he’d done,3 Judged you a trusty tutor for his son, Who would, with firm resolve, attempt to guide Both Fortune and the court from Nero’s side. But now, at the least threat that seems to loom, Presaging poor Britannicus’s doom, Narcissus, who should be his last mainstay, Is first to thrust him in misfortune’s way. Where Caesar goes, he’s sure of seeing you. narcissus Like all the world, I render him his due: That’s why I’m here.

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burrhus          He’d be more gratified To know you’re at Britannicus’s side. You fear your absence Caesar might resent? His grandeur assumes that you’re obedient. It’s to your charge that you need justify An interest his misfortunes must belie. His misery you can fearlessly console: To ruin his brother is not Nero’s goal. Though their cold hearts may not be reconciled, I’m sure your master has not been exiled. Nero himself, his heart touched by your zeal, Might think such loyal services reveal More than these servile tokens vainly tendered: Forgotten ’mongst the crowd as soon as rendered. narcissus Your true intent, sir, is not hard to read; My counsels Caesar sometimes deigns to heed: My attentions please him, and so you’re annoyed . . . In future, sir, his presence I’ll avoid.4 burrhus You calculate my motives by your own: You think your failings are not yours alone. Thus, when, no longer fit to rule his land, Claudius left Rome to writhe beneath your hand, Your troubled conscience proved so onerous, You kept Rome’s groans from reaching Claudius. Your flattering friends you kept from Claudius, too; The rest you deemed to be accusers who, Ready to rise up ’gainst your tyranny, Were going to make known their misery, And, speaking for the senate and the State,

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Demand some justice ere it was too late. I fear to see you with the Emperor; I fear — ​since I must speak severely, sir —  All those who, like you, flattering his desires, Corrupt his heart and fan its vicious fires.5 Nero, more docile once to our direction, Treated his brother with sincere affection, And veiling his own splendor from his sight, Let him forget he’d fallen from such a height. Today, what vengeful thought, what dark suspicion, Has ruptured that fraternal coalition? Junia’s abducted; Agrippina quakes, As does your jealous charge, whom hope forsakes; Caesar’s wife, banished from his heart and bed, Awaits the shame of a divorce with dread; She weeps. Whose counsel has cost them so dear? A flatterer’s, who has the Emperor’s ear.

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narcissus You make your point more bluntly than you ought. But you’re in charge: I listen and say naught. My actions, sir, will answer you ere long. Till then . . . burrhus       How glad I’ll be if I’m proved wrong! Please heav’n my words such virtue can instill!6 My harsh reproaches I’ll help you to still! Seneca, who might well allay my fears, Is far from Rome, not knowing danger nears.7 His fatal absence let us two make right: The last of Caesars’ blood let’s reunite, And reconcile these princes with all speed, Before the rupture can’t be remedied.

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Scene ii [nero, burrhus] burrhus Sire, Pallas will obey. nero          Now let me know: How does my mother feel, her pride laid low? burrhus This blow’s struck home, my lord, and, have no doubt, In harsh reproofs her wrath will soon break out.8 Her passions, long pent up, burst forth of late. In futile cries I pray they dissipate!

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nero With some new plot you think she’d threaten us? burrhus Sire, Agrippina’s always dangerous. Her forebears Rome and all your troops revere; Germanicus, her sire, they still hold dear.9 She knows her power; her courage you well know; And what above all makes me fear her so Is just that you yourself provoke her ire And give her arms to use against you, Sire.

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nero I, Burrhus? burrhus       Yes, this love possessing you . . .  nero I understand you, but what can I do?

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Act III, Scene III 

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You tell me nothing my heart doesn’t know. I must love. burrhus       No — ​you just imagine so. Your love you’ve made scant effort to suppress: Why fear a newborn ill that’s powerless? For if your duteous heart scorns to agree To make a compact with its enemy; If you review your glorious early life, And call to mind the virtues of your wife, Who’s borne your unjust scorn so patiently, O’er which her love has won a victory; Above all, if, avoiding Junia’s gaze, You absent yourself from her for several days;10 Trust me: though love may seem to master you, One does not love unless one wishes to.11 nero I’ll trust your counsel when, midst war’s alarms, We must maintain the glory of our arms, Or when, more tranquil, we deliberate, Called to the senate on affairs of state: Then, on your wisdom I’ll place my reliance. Believe me, though, love’s quite another science,12 And it would go against the grain for me To compromise your strict severity. Adieu. Parted from Junia, I’m in pain. Scene iii [burrhus, alone] burrhus Nero’s true nature is, at last, made plain.13 His wildness, which you thought you could subdue, Is ready, Burrhus, to break free from you.

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O Gods! to what excesses it might lead! I must take counsel in this time of need. Seneca, though, who might assuage my care, Is far from Rome, of danger unaware.14 If Agrippina’s feelings I could stir, I might . . . She comes! Good fortune summons her.

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Scene iv [agrippina, burrhus, albina] agrippina Well, sir! have my suspicions been belied? By your fine lessons we’re well edified! You’ve exiled Pallas, whose crime seems to be He raised your master up to empery. Without his counsel, Claudius, in his care, Would never, you know, have made my son his heir.15 What’s more, you give his wife a rival now, And franchise Nero from his marriage vow. Fine work for such a foe of flattery, Chosen to curb his youthful ardency: To flatter him yourself, and foment strife ’Twixt son and mother, emperor and wife! burrhus Madame, it’s much too early to accuse; The Emperor has done naught one can’t excuse. Pallas’s pride provoked his banishment: An overdue and fitting punishment; Caesar has just reluctantly commanded What all the court had secretly demanded. The other problem’s not without recourse: Octavia’s tears can be stanched at the source.16 Master your ire. If milder means you tried, You’d sooner send him back to Octavia’s side.

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Act III, Scene IV 

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These threats and throes will make him more unstrung.17 agrippina Your efforts will prove vain to stop my tongue. The less I say, the more I’m scorned, I see; I need not fear a creature made by me. Pallas, you know, was not my last resource: To avenge my ruin, heav’n leaves me some recourse.18 Claudius’ son has started to resent Those crimes that I, alas! can but repent. Make no mistake: I’ll tell our troops the truth And rouse their pity for his injured youth; Then they, like me, will right the wrong they’ve done. On one side, they shall see an emperor’s son, Demanding rights of which he’s been beguiled; And they’ll believe Germanicus’s child.19 On the other, Ahenobarbus’ son they’ll view, Sustained by Seneca, as well as you —  Recalled from exile, both of you, by me,20 To share, before my eyes, the sovereignty. Our common crimes I wish them all to learn: The paths I’ve led him down, each twist and turn. To ensure his power and yours stir up their hate, Each damning rumor I’ll corroborate: Exiles, assassinations, poisonings, too; All will come out . . . 21 burrhus           They’ll never credit you. They’ll look askance at such dishonest ruses, And doubt a witness who herself accuses. Myself, the first to second all you’d planned, Who slipped the army’s reins into his hand, I don’t regret my zealous, earnest deeds. He’s simply a son whose father he succeeds: Adopting Nero, Claudius arranged

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That your son’s rights and his son’s be exchanged. Thus, Rome could choose your son, as, no less fair, She chose Tiberius as Augustus’ heir, While young Agrippa, of royal blood descended, Saw the crown seized to which he had pretended.22 On such well-​built foundations stands his throne, It cannot, even by you, be overthrown; And if my words have influence with him still, His goodness will disarm all your ill will. I mean to consummate what I’ve commenced.

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Scene v [agrippina, albina] albina Your sorrows, madame, make you quite incensed. If Caesar were to see such a display! agrippina Ah! let him show himself to me today! albina In heaven’s name, your anger you must smother. You wish to help the sister and the brother,23 But must you, for their sake, disturb your ease? And may not Caesar love whome’er he please? agrippina They’re striving to abase me, don’t you see? Now, with a rival they’ve confronted me!24 If this disastrous knot can’t be undone, My place usurped, I’m nothing and no one. Till now, Octavia’s title has meant naught; At court she is ignored, her aid unsought. The favors I alone used to dispense

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Act III, Scene VI 

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Won me men’s loyalty as recompense. Now someone new has captured Caesar’s heart: Mistress and wife, she’ll play a potent part. All that I’ve worked for, Caesar’s majesty —  One glance from her will win it all from me. Forsaken, and avoided everywhere . . .  Albina, such a thought I cannot bear!25 And though it hasten heaven’s dire decree,26 If Nero treats me so ungratefully . . . But here’s his rival, come to visit me.

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Scene vi [britannicus, agrippina, narcissus, albina]27 britannicus Our common enemies can be defeated; Men’s hearts are moved to see how we’re mistreated. While we let slip the time in vain lament, Your friends and mine, till now so reticent, Provoked to righteous wrath, with which they burn, Have made known to Narcissus their concern. Nero’s not won that ingrate for his own,28 Her for whose sake my sister’s overthrown; If, madame, you still take my sister’s part, We may yet win back Nero’s erring heart. We’ve half the senate on our side, you know: There’s Sulla, Piso, Plautus . . . 29

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agrippina              Is this so? You’ve named the chiefs of the nobility! britannicus I see my words do you an injury,30 And that, unsure, irresolute, your ire

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Already fears to attain what you desire. My fall you’ve engineered too thoroughly; Nor need you fear my friends’ audacity, Since, prudently effecting your own ends, You’ve drawn in or drawn off my former friends. agrippina Abandon these suspicions; we shall need To trust each other if we’re to succeed. Enough: I’ve sworn. Whate’er your enemies do, I shan’t revoke the vows I’ve sworn to you. In vain my guilty son my wrath shall flee, And, soon or late, he’ll have to hark to me.31 I’ll use what means I can, some soft, some strong; Or else I’ll take Octavia along, And, broadcasting her sorrows and my fears, We’ll rally hearts to vindicate her tears. My son I shall besiege on every side. Farewell. But heed me: hide from Nero, hide!

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Scene vii [britannicus, narcissus] britannicus By false hopes have you let me be misled? Should I now trust your latest tales instead?32 narcissus Yes, every word is true, but it’s not here, My lord, that I can make these mysteries clear. Let us go now. What are you waiting for? britannicus What for? Alas!

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Act III, Scene VII 

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narcissus        Explain yourself. britannicus               Once more, If you could but arrange it, I would see . . . narcissus Whom, then? britannicus        I could await my destiny More calmly if . . . I blush to admit to you . . . narcissus With all I’ve said, you still believe her true? britannicus No — ​she’s ungrateful, criminal, untrue, Worthy of my just wrath; but, though I’ve tried, My disbelief I still can’t sweep aside. Excusing her, my willful, wandering heart Still idolizes her and takes her part. My lingering doubts I wish to extirpate, And unreservedly indulge my hate. Who’d think that noble heart, which seemed to me A foe, from youth, of courtly perfidy,33 Could, scorning virtue’s glory, at once resort To such deceit, unheard-​of here at court? narcissus And who knows if this ingrate hadn’t planned, In her retreat, to win the Emperor’s hand? Certain her charms could not remain concealed, Perhaps, to be sought out, she fled the field,

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Trusting he would, for glory’s sake, decide To lay siege to her still-​unconquered pride.34 britannicus I cannot see her, then? narcissus           My lord, I fear To her new lover’s suit she now gives ear. britannicus All right, let’s leave. But who comes here? It’s she!

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narcissus [aside] The Emperor must be told immediately!35 Scene viii [britannicus, junia] junia Retire at once, and flee an anger, sir, My constancy has caused you to incur: Nero is quite irate. I slipped away While Agrippina held her son at bay.36 Farewell, and in my faithful love confide; One joyful day you’ll see me justified. My heart will ever hold your image dear: Nothing can banish it. britannicus           Your meaning’s clear: You hope my flight will further your desires; That, with me gone, you’ll fan these fresher fires. Doubtless a secret shame, at seeing me, Pollutes your pleasures with anxiety.

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Act III, Scene VIII 

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So be it! I must depart. junia           My lord, don’t chide . . . britannicus You might have taken longer to decide. But, after all, why grumble when I see Mere friendship fall to Fortune’s flattery; When, dazzled by imperial delights, You’d reign, regardless of my sister’s rights? It’s just that, having seemed so unimpressed By grandeur, you’re seduced like all the rest.37 My heart was holding out against despair, But this blow it was not prepared to bear. I’ve seen injustice triumph at my fall, And heaven heed my persecutors’ call. To appease its wrath, my woes were still too few: It but remained to be forgot by you. junia In happier times I justly might resent Your feeble faith and force you to repent. But Nero threatens you: while dangers press I have no wish to add to your distress. Now go, be reassured, and cease your plaint: Nero was there, and ordered me to feint.

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britannicus How cruel . . . junia        He eavesdropped on our conversation, And kept me under keen-​eyed observation, His vengeance poised to fall upon his brother At the least sign we understood each other.

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britannicus Nero was listening! Gods! but surely you Could have deceived him and not duped me too! Couldn’t your eyes have made the culprit known? Has love no tongue, no language of its own?38 What suffering you’d have saved me with one glance! junia To save you, silence was my only chance. How many times my heart, I must confess, Was going to divulge its dire distress! Alas! how many were my stifled sighs, While I had to avoid your longed-​for eyes! What torment, when in love, to stand like stone, To make you suffer and to hear you moan, When just one look would have allayed your fears —  One look that would have cost so many tears! When I recall that scene, so anxiously, It seems my inner thoughts were plain to see; It seems I failed to feign successfully. I feared the telltale pallor of my face, The grief of which my glances bore the trace; I feared lest Nero, angered, should complain I tried too hard to assuage my lover’s pain. I feared my love could easily be descried; At last, I wished I had no love to hide. Alas! for all our sakes it had been best If our hearts’ hidden thoughts he’d never guessed. Go, but, again, stay out of Nero’s way;39 At leisure you’ll hear all my heart would say. A thousand secrets more I would reveal. britannicus Too many! You’ve already made me feel My crime, my joy, your generosity. You realize what you’re giving up for me?

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My guilt I wish to expiate at your knees. junia You must get up! Your rival’s coming! Please! Scene ix [nero, britannicus, junia] nero Go on, Prince, with your charming rhapsody. His thanks bespeak your generosity, Madame, since I’ve surprised him at your knees. Perhaps I too am owed such courtesies: I’ve kept you captive here to enable you To afford him such a tender interview.40 britannicus My joys, my woes, I’ll lay at Junia’s feet Where’er her goodness grants that we may meet; Nor do these rooms to which she’s been confined Succeed in striking terror to my mind.

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nero What’s in them that does not admonish you Obedience and respect are here my due?41 britannicus They haven’t seen us grow to man’s estate, I, to obey, and you, to intimidate, Nor, at our birth, did they expect to see Domitius one day lord it over me.42 nero Thus destiny’s reversed our paths today: Once I had to obey, now you obey.

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If you’ve not learned to act, sir, as you ought, You’re young yet: we can take care that you’re taught.43

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britannicus Who’ll teach me, then? nero           Rome — ​nay, the Empire too. britannicus And ’mongst your rights has Rome accorded you Those of injustice, cruelty, and force, Imprisonment, abduction, and divorce?44 nero Rome shows me her respect: she never pries Into the secrets I hide from her eyes. Imitate her respect, sir, if you’re wise.

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britannicus One knows just what Rome thinks, at any rate. nero She holds her tongue. Her silence imitate. britannicus Nero begins to lose control, I see. nero Nero begins to suffer from ennui. britannicus All men shall bless his happy reign, that’s clear. nero Happy or sad, let it suffice they fear.45

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britannicus I’ve misjudged Junia if such views should raise A smile of pleasure or a word of praise.

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nero At least, if I can’t please the heart I prize, A reckless rival I can still chastise. britannicus I know, whatever peril threatens me, I need fear nothing but her enmity. nero No — ​wish for it: that’s all I’ll say now, sir.46

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britannicus I wish but for the joy of pleasing her. nero You’ll please her always, Prince, for so she swore. britannicus At least I wouldn’t eavesdrop at her door. On all that touches me, she may speak out; To stop her tongue, I do not slink about.

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nero I understand you. Guards!47 junia            What would you do? Your brother’s moved by jealousy, like you. My lord, his life a thousand ills oppress. Can you be envious of his happiness? The bond between your hearts let me renew By hiding from his eyes, and from yours too.

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Your fatal feud my flight will serve to quell; The vestal virgins’ ranks I now shall swell.48 Dispute no longer over wretched me, But let the Gods decide my destiny.

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nero How strange and sudden this plan you have in mind. Guards, in her chamber let her be confined, And in his sister’s have him kept apart. britannicus ’Tis thus that Nero strives to win one’s heart. junia Don’t taunt him, Prince; this storm we’d best outwait.

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nero Obey my orders, guards — ​don’t hesitate! Scene x [nero, burrhus] burrhus What’s this? O heav’n!49 nero [not seeing Burrhus]           Thus have their flames been fanned. I know by whom this rendezvous was planned, For Agrippina must have come to me And dragged her discourse out so lengthily Just to effectuate this hateful plot.50 [noticing Burrhus] Ah! is my mother still about, or not, Burrhus? I want you to detain her here. Lend her my guard; dismiss hers.51 Is that clear?

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burrhus What? your own mother? Won’t you hear her? nero                     Wait. I’ve no idea what scheme you meditate; But, lately, it has seemed, whate’er I’ve planned, You’ve proved a critic, prone to reprimand. Take care of this for me, or, if you’re loath, I’ll find someone to take care of you both.

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act iv Scene i [agrippina, burrhus] burrhus Take all the time you need for your defense; To hear your case himself Caesar consents. Perhaps his plan was, in detaining you, To offer you just such an interview.1 Howe’er that be, if I may speak my mind: If he’s offended you, best be resigned. Open your arms in reconciliation; Defend yourself, but make no accusation. On him alone, you see, the court’s fixated. Though he’s your son, a creature you’ve created, He is your emperor. Like us, you are, too, Subject to powers that he’s received from you.2 As you win his caress or incur his curse, The court will crowd about you or disperse. It’s his support they seek, seeking your own. But here he comes. agrippina          Let us be left alone. Scene ii [agrippina, nero] agrippina [seating herself] Draw nearer, Nero; take your place, I pray. It seems that your suspicions I’m to allay. I know not with what black crime I’ve been stained, But everything I’ve done shall be explained.

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You reign. But quite a distance ’twas, you’ll own, That birth marked out ’twixt you and Caesar’s throne;3 Though Rome revered my regal ancestry, That path to power led nowhere without me. But when Britannicus’s mother’s fall4 Left Claudius without a wife, ’mongst all Those many scheming beauties who then planned To win his freedmen’s help and, thus, his hand,5 I coveted his bed, my only thought: To leave to you the throne that I, too, sought. Curbing my pride, for Pallas’ aid I pressed.6 His master, whom my arms each day caressed, Drew, by degrees, from his dear niece’s eyes The warmer love I made sure should arise.7 But then our common blood-​ties made him dread To lead his bride to an incestuous bed: He did not dare to wed his brother’s child. The senate was seduced:8 a law more mild Placed Claudius in my lap — ​and all Rome, too. All this gained much for me, but naught for you. You entered, in my wake, his family, And soon espoused his daughter, thanks to me. Silanus loved her and, being cast away, Marked with his blood that melancholy day.9 But even now, the battle was not won: Could you be sure, despite all I had done, He’d raise his son-in-​law above his son?10 Thus, Pallas’s support I sought anew; Swayed by him, Claudius adopted you, Renamed you Nero, and, before your hour, Saw fit to share with you imperial power.11 ’Twas then that Rome, remembering the past,12 Descried my well-​advanced designs at last: Britannicus’ disgrace, now imminent, Aroused his father’s allies’ discontent. My promises to some dazzled their eyes;

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The angriest, exile served to neutralize. Then Claudius, finally heeding my appeal, Drove from his son those partisans whose zeal Had long since pledged to make his cause their own,13 And who might smooth his way back to the throne. I did still more, and, from my retinue, Picked out the worst to entrust his conduct to;14 Your mentors, though, I chose, contrariwise, From men who’d won respect in Roman eyes. Deaf to intrigue, in true worth I believed. One soldier and one exile I retrieved:15 Burrhus and Seneca I thus selected, Who since . . . 16 But then, in Rome, they were respected. Meanwhile, my hand, at Claudius’ expense, Displayed, in your name, great extravagance. Gifts, spectacles, persuasive bribery, Endeared the people and the soldiery, Who, stirred once more with patriotic fire, Favored in you Germanicus my sire.17 Now Claudius, having steadily declined, Opened his eyes at last, for so long blind: He saw his error. Though by fear undone, He couldn’t conceal his sorrow for his son.18 He wished his friends to lighten his last hour —  Too late: bed, palace, guards were in my power.19 I let his grief consume him, fruitlessly; His final sighs were heard by none but me: Seeming to spare him sorrow as he died, His dear son’s tears I took good care to hide.20 He died.21 Such damning rumors circulated, I didn’t announce his death at once, but waited.22 Then, while I sent off Burrhus, secretly, To exact the army’s pledge of loyalty, And you marched to the camp, under my name, Rome’s altars smoked, with sacrifice aflame; The impassioned populace, by me misled,

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Prayed for the health of one already dead.23 The loyalty of your legions now secured And, thus, the power of your reign assured, Rome viewed her prince and, taken by surprise, Took in at once your reign and his demise.24 There you have my sincere avowal, my lord. Such were my crimes. Observe now their reward. Though grateful for the efforts I had made, Your gratitude in six months I saw fade, And, weary of the enforced respect you’ve shown me, You’ve now, it seems, affected to disown me. Burrhus and Seneca, it’s plain to see, Have sharpened your suspicions against me, Giving you lessons in disloyalty, Charmed to see you exceed their excellence. I’ve seen you take into your confidence Otho, Senecio, young, yet decadent,25 Who lend your vices suave encouragement. And when, provoked by insults to complain, I’ve asked you to account for your disdain, With fresh affronts against me you’ve lashed out (An ingrate’s last recourse, when he’s found out). Today I promised Junia to your brother; They’re grateful to be plighted by your mother: What do you do? Bring Junia here by night; By morning she’s become your heart’s delight; And from that heart I see Octavia effaced, Ready to leave the nuptial bed, disgraced, The nuptial bed wherein I’d had her placed. Pallas? Expelled! Britannicus? Arrested! My liberty itself you have molested: Burrhus has dared to lay his hands on me! And when, convicted of such perfidy, You ought to come to me in expiation, It’s you who order my justification.

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nero I know that it’s to you I owe my reign; Don’t trouble to rehearse it all again. Your goodness, madame, could, quite tranquilly, Have placed its faith in my fidelity. What’s more, these tireless plaints, these accusations, Have made all those who’ve heard your protestations Believe — ​in private, let me mention it —  You’ve worked, in my name, for your benefit. Such honors, they’ve been saying, such deference: For all her pains, is this poor recompense? This much-​blamed son: what has been his offense? And has she had him crowned just to obey? He holds the scepter, then, while she holds sway? Not that I wouldn’t have been — ​were there a way —  Delighted to deliver into your hand The reins of power your cries seem to demand. Rome wants a master, not a mistress, though. My weakness stirs up rumors, as you know:26 The senate and the people take it ill That every day I dictate at your will, And claim that Claudius, in his dying hour, Bequeathed me his obedience with his power. You’ve seen our soldiers angrily object To bear their eagles past you, in respect, Ashamed to insult by this indignity The heroes they uphold in effigy. To anyone else they’d not have pled in vain; But though you may not rule, you still complain. Once more you’re on Britannicus’s side, And that alliance would be fortified, Were Junia to become my brother’s bride. It’s Pallas’ hand that guides this treachery. And when my peace I’m forced to guarantee, Your anger and your hate burst into flame.

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You’d have the army endorse my rival’s claim: Already round the camp the rumors fly. agrippina I, make him emperor, ingrate? You think I . . . ? And with what view? To what could I pretend? What honors and what rank could his court lend? If in your court I’ve no immunity, If here I face my accusers’ scrutiny, And if their emperor’s mother they pursue, Then, midst a stranger’s court, what would I do? They’d lay at my door, not my futile cries, Nor plots which, soon as hatched, met their demise, But crimes committed in your sight, your name, For which I’d all too soon incur the blame. You don’t fool me, all your sly tricks I know: You are ungrateful and were ever so. From earliest youth, my care and tenderness Drew no more from you than a feigned caress. Nothing could conquer you; your flinty heart Should have curtailed my kindness from the start. Unhappy me! That all my pains and cares Should lead to nothing but these fruitless prayers! I’ve but one son. O hear me, heav’n, and own That all my prayers have been for him alone. Remorse, fear, danger: nothing daunted me; I overcame his scorn, I would not see My fatal destiny, long since made plain. I’ve done my utmost; it’s enough you reign.27 Now, with my freedom, which you’ve snatched away, If you desire, take my life too, I pray, Provided angry Rome, at my demise, Does not reclaim from you the hard-​won prize. nero Well, then! pronounce. What do you want from me?28

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agrippina Punish my accusers’ vile audacity; Let your stepbrother’s anger be assuaged; Let Junia choose to whom she’d be engaged; Let both of them go free; let Pallas stay; Let me come see you any time of day; Let Burrhus, who now joins our interview,29 Never again prevent my seeing you.30 nero My gratitude, I trust, shall, from this hour, Engrave in all men’s hearts, madame, your power. Our recent happy coldness I must bless, Since it refires our former friendliness. What Pallas may have done, I shall ignore; Britannicus shall be my friend once more. As for that love, which has provoked our hate: I make you judge and you shall arbitrate. Go bear these joyful tidings to my brother. Guards: let all show due deference to my mother.31

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Scene iii [nero, burrhus] burrhus What an enchanting scene for me, my lord: To witness such embraces, such accord!32 You know I never spoke against her, Sire; To part you two was never my desire; Her anger toward me is unearned, unjust. nero Frankly, I’d come to eye you with mistrust: I sensed an understanding ’twixt you two; Her rancor, though, restores my faith in you.

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Too swiftly to her triumph she has rushed. I’ll clasp my rival, yes — ​until he’s crushed.33

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burrhus What? nero     It’s too much. His ruin must set me free From Agrippina’s mad attacks on me. As long as he lives, I half live, at best. She’s tired me with this name that I detest: Her rash injustice she shall answer for, If she should promise him my throne once more.

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burrhus Then, for Britannicus she’ll soon shed tears? nero By sunset I shall have no further fears. burrhus To compass such a scheme what urges you? nero My fame, my love, my life, my safety do. burrhus No, no, whate’er you say, a scheme so dire Was not conceived within your bosom, Sire. nero Burrhus! burrhus      O heav’ns! to hear such words from you! Can you, Sire, hear them and not tremble too?

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Think with whose blood your hands you would be staining! In Roman hearts is Nero tired of reigning? What will men say? Whither do your thoughts run? nero A prisoner of the glory that I’ve won,34 Must I be mindful of Rome’s fickle love, Which chance bestows, then swiftly robs us of ? Slave to their wishes, hostile to my own: Am I their emperor to please them alone?35 burrhus Some satisfaction, surely, you must feel To know you’ve labored for the common weal. You still are master here and have free will. Virtuous till now, you can be virtuous still. Your way is clear, nor can you be withstood; You need but guide your steps from good to good. But if you heed your flatterers’ advice, You’ll find your course career from vice to vice.36 Old cruelty new cruelty demands: In blood you’ll have to bathe your bloodied hands. Britannicus, in dying, will excite The zeal of allies, keen to espouse his fight: Avengers who will stir up new allies, Who’ll have successors, too, at their demise. You’ll light a fire you’ll find you can’t subdue.37 Feared by all men, you’ll have to fear them, too; Trembling while you pronounce your cruel decrees, You’ll count your subjects as your enemies. Ah! does your first years’ happy experience Make you, my lord, despise your innocence? O heav’ns! recall what joy-​filled years were those! You felt them flowing by in sweet repose! What pleasure to have been able to claim: Now, everywhere, men love me, bless my name; My smiles have soothed their sullen enmity;

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And when men weep, the Gods cannot blame me. At sight of me, they’ve no cause to be frightened; When I pass by, the people’s hearts are lightened! Such were your joys. What change have you gone through? The basest blood used to be dear to you.38 The senate, once, with due deliberation, Pressed you to sign some felon’s condemnation; You strove to counter their severity: Your heart accused itself of cruelty; Cursing the cares the crown placed on your head, I wish I didn’t know how to write, you said.39 Heed me, or else my death will spare my eyes The sight and sorrow of his sad demise. I shan’t survive your glory, Sire. If you Commit this heinous crime you have in view, [He falls on his knees.] I’m ready now, my lord: before we part, Let daggers pierce my unconsenting heart; Call those cruel men who urged you to this deed: Let them acquire the experience they’ll need.40 My tears have touched my emperor, I see; Your virtue trembles at their treachery. Tell me the traitors’ names — ​and with all speed —  Who dared incite you to this murderous deed. Embrace your brother and forget your ire . . .

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nero What would you have? burrhus           He doesn’t hate you, Sire. He’s been betrayed: I know his innocence And answer for his true obedience. I run to arrange so sweet an interview. nero In my rooms, then, I shall await you two.41

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Scene iv [nero, narcissus] narcissus All is in order for a death so just. The poison’s brewed. The famed Locusta fussed42 With twice her usual care and cunning, Sire: Before my eyes, she caused some slave to expire.43 The sword cuts short a life less speedily Than this new poison she’s prepared for me.44

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nero Thanks for your pains: I’m grateful, I avow; But that’s enough: please go no further now. narcissus What’s this? Your hate for him, now grown so mild, Forbids me . . . ?45 nero         Yes. We shall be reconciled. narcissus To steer you from this course I have no mind, But, Sire, he has been forcibly confined, An insult he won’t soon forget to feel. There are no secrets time will not reveal: He’ll know a poison, coming from my hand, Was ordered and prepared at your command. May the Gods never lay this complot bare! Perhaps, though, he will do what you don’t dare. nero His heart is vouched for; mine I shall subdue.

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narcissus Their marriage, then, will reconcile you two? You make this sacrifice so readily?

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nero You question me too much. Howe’er it be, I count him ’mongst my enemies no more. narcissus Then, Sire, it is as Agrippina swore: She’s regained over you her sovereign sway.

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nero What has she said? What do you mean to say? narcissus She made this boast quite publicly. nero                What boast? narcissus That it would take one moment, Sire, at most, For all your outbursts, all your deadly hate, In modest silence to evaporate; That you would press for peace if she would deign To overlook what’s passed between you twain. nero Narcissus, what advice have you for me?46 I’d gladly punish her audacity; For her rash triumph I would make her pay With lifelong, deep regret, had I my way. But then, what would our people say of me? Would you have me resort to tyranny,

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Let Rome strip me of titles and of fame And honor Nero with a poisoner’s name? They’d treat my vengeance as rank fratricide.47 narcissus And do you take their whims, Sire, as your guide? You thought they’d hold their tongue year after year? To their discourse why must you lend an ear? Are your own wishes, then, to be ignored, And you alone not have your trust, my lord? As for our Romans, though, you’ve much to learn. You’ll find them, as a rule, quite taciturn. Your cautiousness could cost your empire dear: If you’re afraid, they’ll think you ought to fear. To meekly bear the yoke they’ve long been trained: They love to kiss the hand that holds them chained. You’ll find they have an eagerness to please. Their groveling made Tiberius ill at ease.48 Myself, decked out with powers but lent to me, Which Claudius gave me with my liberty, A hundred times, while I, in glory, reigned, I tried their patience, but it never waned. You fear this poisoning will leave a stain? Renounce the sister, have the brother slain: Rome, hungry for fresh victims, won’t dissent; She’ll find them guilty, though they’re innocent. The birthdays of those siblings you shall see Set down as days of ill-​starred augury.49 nero Again I say: I can’t attempt this now. Burrhus persuaded me: I made a vow; And if that vow I were to violate, I’d arm his virtue to retaliate. Faced with his reasons, my resolve grows weak: My heart misgives me when I hear him speak.50

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narcissus His words and thoughts may not be in accord: Self-​interest prompts his virtuous pose, my lord. Or, rather say, such men have but one thought: They’d find, by such a stroke, their power made naught. You would be free then, Sire, and you’d soon see These prideful masters bend, like us, their knee. What? Don’t you know the views they dare maintain? Nero, they’d have it, was not born to reign. His words, his acts, are out of his control: Seneca steers his mind, Burrhus, his soul. His greatest gift, his optimal career? To drive around the course, a charioteer, Competing for an ignominious prize; To be a spectacle for Roman eyes, Declaiming speeches in the theater here, Reciting poems he hopes Rome will revere;51 The while his soldiers move amongst the press, Winning the crowd’s approval by duress.52 Surely you wish to see such talk suppressed?53 nero Narcissus, come. We’ll see what course seems best.54

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act v Scene i [britannicus, junia] britannicus Yes, Nero (who’d have thought it?) summons me To embrace me as his brother, in amity.1 He’s asked our gallant youth to attend us there; He’d have the happy pomp and festal air Lend warmth to our embrace and, in men’s sight, Confirm the faith of vows we newly plight.2 He quells his love, the source of so much hate, Appointing you the sovereign of my fate. Though I have lost my forebears’ rank, and though He flaunts their finery in a gaudy show, Since now my love he no longer impedes, And all the glory of pleasing you concedes, My heart, I own, forgives him secretly, And gives the rest up less regretfully.3 Think! every day to have my Junia near! Think! even now, to view, unfazed by fear, Those eyes which sighs and threats could not subdue, Which spurned an emperor — ​nay, an empire, too!4 But, madame, tell me, what new fears impair The joy that, midst my transports, you should share? And even as I speak, how does it chance Your eyes, so sad, probe heaven with their glance?5 What do you fear? junia         But still I fear.

I know not, I confess;

britannicus        You love me?

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junia             Alas, yes! britannicus Nero won’t trouble our felicity.

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junia But can you vouch for his sincerity? britannicus Do you suspect him of a hidden hate? junia But now, he loved me and swore to seal your fate; He seeks you out now, while he flees from me: Can such a change be wrought so rapidly? britannicus To Agrippina’s efforts it’s all due: She thought that, with my ruin, hers would ensue.6 Thanks to the jealous foresight she’s displayed, Our greatest enemies have lent us aid.7 I trust the passionate interest she has shown;8 Burrhus I trust; his master, too, I own: I think that Nero, imitating me, Is now incapable of treachery, And hates not, if he hates not openly. junia Don’t judge his heart by yours, Prince, for I’ve found, On very different paths you two are bound. The court and Nero I’ve known for just one day, But in this court, alas! I have to say: Men’s thoughts and words are worlds apart, my lord! Between their hearts and tongues how slight the accord!9 Here men betray each other with such glee! How strange a stopping place for you and me!10

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britannicus But be his friendship false or be it true, If you fear Nero, does not he fear, too? So vile a crime he cannot contemplate: He’d face the people’s and the senate’s hate.11 Besides, he knows well how unjust he’s been. His deep remorse Narcissus too has seen. If you’d but heard how he was going to . . . junia But is Narcissus not deceiving you?

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britannicus You think my trusting him is a mistake?12 junia What do I know? But, Prince, your life’s at stake. All men are suspect, prone to treachery; I fear both Nero and harsh destiny. Dark omens torture me in my despite, And make me loath to let you leave my sight. What if this peace on which your heart relies Should prove a deadly plot in harmless guise! If Nero, galled to see us thus allied, Beneath night’s mantle bids his vengeance hide! If, as we speak, he aims his blows at you! If this should prove our final interview!13 Ah, Prince! britannicus       You’re weeping! Ah, my dear Princess! On my behalf your heart feels such distress? What! on this day when, his pride at its height, Nero would, with his splendor, blind your sight,14 Here, where they worship him and flee from me,

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You choose, o’er all his pomp, my misery! What! on this day, and here, can I believe You spurn an empire and for me you grieve? But, madame, please arrest those precious tears; My swift return will soon dispel your fears. It might provoke suspicion if I stay. Adieu. With loving heart I make my way To where blind youth cavorts in mad excess, But seeing and feeling naught save you, Princess.15 Farewell.

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junia      Prince . . . britannicus          They’re expecting me, you know. junia At least await some summons ere you go. Scene ii [agrippina, britannicus, junia] agrippina Bestir yourself, Prince! Why procrastinate?16 Nero complains, impatient you’re so late. The joy and pleasure of the festive rout Await your warm embraces to break out. So longed-​for a delight you shouldn’t defer: Be off, while we attend Octavia, sir. britannicus Sweet Junia, go: have no anxiety; Embrace my sister, who waits eagerly.

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[to Agrippina] Soon as I may, I shall return to you, And offer for your pains the thanks they’re due.

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Scene iii [agrippina, junia] agrippina Do I mistake, or during your good-​byes Did some o’erflowing tears bedim your eyes?17 May I inquire why you seem so aggrieved? Do you mistrust this peace that I’ve achieved? junia Today’s events have taken such a toll, How can I ease my agitated soul? I scarce believe this miracle, I confess. I’d fear some obstacle to your success, But change is commonplace at court; indeed, By fear love always seems accompanied.18 agrippina Enough.19 I’ve spoken, everything is changed. Dismiss your fears, for all has been arranged. I’ll answer for a truce sworn ’neath my eye: On Nero’s pledges we may now rely. If you had seen how he, with each caress, Confirmed his promises, his faithfulness! With what embraces he just clung to me!20 His arms, at our adieus, wouldn’t set me free! With candid kindness, on his brow displayed,21 Some trifling secrets he at first betrayed. Having come freely to his mother’s side, He held forth like a son, forgetting pride. But soon he changed that mild mien for another: An emperor now, conferring with his mother,

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His august self entrusted then to me Secrets affecting human destiny.22 No, to his glory, we must here confess: His heart can harbor no maliciousness. It was our foes alone who undermined His goodness, preying on a heart too kind. But now, in turn, their power is on the wane; Rome will know Agrippina once again: Already, at my return to grace, men cheer.23 But let us not let darkness find us here.24 Let’s join Octavia and share with her this night, As marked by bliss as day seemed marked by blight.  — ​But what’s that uproar? How tumultuous! What’s to be done? junia          Heav’n, save Britannicus! Scene iv [agrippina, junia, burrhus] agrippina What means this, Burrhus? Stop. Where are you flying? burrhus It’s done, madame: Britannicus is dying. junia My prince! agrippina       He’s dying? burrhus           Rather say, he’s dead.

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junia Forgive my frenzy. I must run ahead And rescue him from such a fate, or share it.

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Scene v [agrippina, burrhus] agrippina How foul a deed! burrhus         Madame, I cannot bear it. The Emperor and the court I must now flee. agrippina He shed his brother’s blood so brazenly? burrhus The plot was more discreetly engineered.25 As soon as Caesar’s stepbrother appeared, He rose, embraced him; not a sound was heard;26 Then Nero raised his glass and spoke this word: To bring to an auspicious end this day, This cup’s first drops my hand now pours away.27 To this libation let the heav’ns attest; May our reunion by the Gods be blessed. The selfsame oath Britannicus now swore; Narcissus filled the cup for him once more, But scarcely had his lips embraced the rim When, swift as sword, a change came over him: His eyes, madame, glazed o’er, no light was left; He sank, supine, of warmth, of breath, bereft.28 You may well judge this stroke astounded all: Half, horrified, in uproar fled the hall. The rest, to courtly crises long exposed, Watched Caesar, on whose eyes their gaze reposed.29

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But he, meanwhile, lay on his couch, collected, And by this shocking scene seemed unaffected. Such fits, he said, whose violence prompts your fears, Have plagued him, without peril, many years.30 A due dismay Narcissus tried to feign, But his perfidious joy he couldn’t contain. Myself, though it might wake the Emperor’s wrath, Through that vile, courtly crowd I cut a path; By this assassination left prostrate, All I can do now is commiserate Britannicus, and Caesar, and the State.

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agrippina He’s here. You’ll see if I brought this about.31 Scene vi [agrippina, nero, burrhus, narcissus] nero [seeing Agrippina] Gods! agrippina    Don’t go, Nero, please: I must speak out. Britannicus is dead — ​I know whereby; I know his murderer. nero           Who, madame? agrippina                 You. nero                   I! And such are the suspicions which you frame! Are there no ills for which I’m not to blame?

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One would believe, to listen to his wife, That I curtailed the days of Claudius’ life.32 You loved his son, his death has laid you low;33 But I can’t answer for fate’s every blow. agrippina No, no, he died of poison, by your hand: Narcissus offered it at your command.34

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nero Who dared plant such a story in your mind? narcissus By such suspicions, Sire, are you maligned?35 Madame, the secret plots your stepson laid Would have made you feel more hurt, more betrayed. At marrying Junia he’d not have stopped short: He would have punished you for your support. He had you fooled; and, to avenge his shame, The past you stole, his heart meant to reclaim. Whether fate’s served your ends in spite of you, Or whether, with life-​threatening plots in view, Caesar has trusted to my loyalty, Leave to your foes these tears, this misery, To count amongst their worst calamities.36 But . . . agrippina [to Nero]     Keep with you such ministers as these: Then, the most glorious deeds will crown your brow. You haven’t come this far to turn back now. Your hand has shed the lifeblood of your brother, And I foresee your blows won’t spare your mother.37 I know the hate you feel, deep down, for me;38 From galling gratitude you would be free. I hope, though, that you’ll find I’ve died in vain,

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And that the peace you sought you’ll never gain. This Rome, this sky, this life I’ve let you share: They’ll bear my image always, everywhere. Remorse, like Furies’ whips, you’ll vainly flee; You’ll try to appease it with fresh butchery.39 Your rage will work itself up to new rage, Its course marked with fresh blood at every stage.40 But heav’n, worn out by your career of crime, Will add your death to all the rest, in time. Then, stained with others’ blood and with my own, You’ll find yourself compelled to shed your own. In times to come, the mention of your name Will make the cruelest tyrants blush with shame. Thus does my heart predict your destiny. Now you may go.

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nero         Narcissus, follow me. Scene vii [agrippina, burrhus] agrippina How unjust my suspicions now appear: You I condemned, Narcissus had my ear!41 Burrhus, did you observe how Nero’s eye Shot me a furious glance as his good-​bye? It’s done; now naught can curb his cruelty:42 The blow that was foretold will fall on me.43 To crush you in your turn he’ll find a way. burrhus Ah! I’ve no wish to live another day. If only heav’n, with blessed cruelty, Had let his newfound fury fall on me,44

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Or if this horrid deed didn’t adumbrate A future of misfortune for the State! It’s not his crime alone makes my heart bleed: Jealousy might have urged him to the deed; But — ​if my grief you’d have me clarify —  Unblushingly he watched his brother die. His eyes have the cold callousness, in truth, Of tyrants steeped in crime from earliest youth. Let him complete his work, madame, and kill A captious counselor who opposed his will; For, far from fearing what his wrath may do, I’d find the swiftest death the sweetest too.45

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Final Scene [agrippina, burrhus, albina] albina Ah, sir! ah, madame! to the Emperor run, Lest, in his maddened state, he be undone! Junia’s forever lost to him: he’s seen . . . agrippina What’s this? Junia has killed herself, you mean?46 albina To bow with endless grief the Emperor’s head, Although she hasn’t died, to him she’s dead. You know that Junia left here suddenly: She said she sought Octavia’s company;47 But soon a devious route I saw her take. She hastened on; I followed in her wake. Distracted, through the palace gates she hied. At once Augustus’ statue she espied. Moistening the marble with the tears she shed, She clasped it closely in her arms and said:48

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Prince, by these knees which I am moved to embrace, Protect me now, last remnant of your race. In your own palace, Rome’s just had to view The murder of your sole descendent who, If he had lived, might have resembled you.49 The vows I swore to him they’d have me abjure. But to preserve my faith forever pure, Myself I offer to the Immortals’ care, Whose altars, by your virtue, you now share. Astonished by this spectacle, the rout Pours in from all sides, circling her about; Touched by her tears, struck by her suffering, With common voice they take her ’neath their wing. They lead her to that shrine where, from of old, Our faithful virgins, in that cult enrolled, Piously keep the precious flame ablaze That glorifies the Gods to whom Rome prays. Caesar looks on, but dares not interfere. To please his lord, Narcissus, bold, draws near. He makes for Junia, heedless of a fray; With impious hand, he seeks to bar her way. A thousand blows repay his hardihood, And Junia’s splattered with his faithless blood. Caesar, so staggered by this scene, this strain, Midst their encircling hands lets him remain. When he returns, all flee: he’s silent, grim; Alone does Junia’s name escape from him. He walks in circles; his distracted gaze Stares out of haunted eyes he dares not raise.50 It’s feared, if night, conjoined to solitude,51 Should draw despair from his disquietude, If you should leave him now without support, His days by dolor may soon be cut short. Time presses: run, for, on a whim, he might Take his own life.52

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agrippina         And that would serve him right.53 But let us watch his passion take its course. We’ll see what changes rise from his remorse, And if he’ll mend his ways in future times.54 burrhus Please heav’n this prove the last of Nero’s crimes!55

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Britannicus: Notes and Commentary

act i 1. “Caesar” is the honorary surname assumed by every emperor from Augustus on; hence, Albina is referring to Nero’s mother. 2. Here, as at the beginning of Bajazet, the implications of a door standing open or remaining shut are great. In Bajazet we learn within the first few lines that the doors to the seraglio now stand wide open, those doors “beyond which even glances never pried. . . . Swift death once punished such audacity” (Bajazet I.i.4 –5): in other words, the entire moral world of the strictly run seraglio has been completely overturned. Its confines have been breached and with them all custom, order, and stability. And in Britannicus the initial mise-en-​scène provides a hint of many of the situational and psychological aspects of the play. As we will learn in the next scene, Nero, far from “abandoning himself to sleep” (as the first line literally translates), is wide awake, being in secret conclave, first with Burrhus and then with the two elected consuls, and, indeed, has been up the whole night, as we will learn early in Act II (“Thus, occupied with my new love, my eyes, / Ne’er closing, waited for the sun to rise” [II.ii.33 –34]). Thus, it is Agrippina, standing vigil at his door, behind which she imagines he is still sleeping, whose eyes are closed, in the figurative sense, and will remain so until the very end of the play, both willfully on her part and also as a result of Nero’s cunning self-​disguise and careful concealment of his agenda. (And how astounded she will be at the end of this scene when she sees Burrhus issuing from Nero’s chambers and realizes he has been closeted with her son while she “slept”!) The ongoing action and denouement of the play, moreover, will bear out that an essential, a defining, part of Nero’s character (and he is certainly the protagonist of the play) is that much, if not all,

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of what he does goes on “behind closed doors,” and that his state of mind, no less than his activities, is kept a closely guarded secret. 3. This line establishes another case of two “frères ennemis.” The title of Racine’s first play was La Thébaïde ou les frères ennemis (The saga of Thebes or the enemy brothers — ​The Fratricides in my translation); its central concern is, almost monothematically, the hatred between the dead Oedipus’s two sons, Eteocles and Polynices. In Britannicus it is, of course, a case of stepbrothers. Other antagonistic siblings will turn up in Bajazet, Mithridates (half brothers), Phaedra (half brothers), and Athaliah (foster brothers). 4. This is the crisis (which can be treated within the prescribed period of one day, in accordance with the classical “unity of time”) from which the action of the play springs, the decisive moment when Nero will break free of a self-​restraint imposed on him by Agrippina, by his tutors, and by public opinion. (One might remark, parenthetically, that, with the exception of Titus in Berenice, Racine is not very interested in characters who are blessed with natural self-​restraint.) 5. According to Suetonius (“Nero,” 6), “At the age of three Nero lost his father and inherited one-​third of the estate; but Caligula [Nero’s uncle] . . . not only took everything, but banished Agrippina [Caligula’s sister]. . . . However, when Claudius succeeded Caligula, Nero had his inheritance restored to him in full. . . . His mother’s recall from banishment allowed him to enjoy once more the benefits of her powerful influence.” 6. Britannicus was the son of Claudius by his third wife, the infamous Messalina, who, as Suetonius reports (ibid.), “realizing that Nero would become a rival to her son Britannicus, had sent assassins to strangle him during his siesta,” an attempt that was aborted, “people said, by a snake which suddenly darted from beneath Nero’s pillow.” It is interesting to note, then, that years before Nero thought of disposing of his stepbrother, the latter’s mother made the first murderous strike against Nero. Only one passing allusion is made to Messalina in the play that bears her son’s name (in Agrippina’s Act IV apologia), and with good reason: Racine surely did not want to call attention to any bond, especially a consanguineous one, between Britannicus — ​the hero of his play, as Racine originally thought of him — ​and someone who has come down to us as a byword for unbridled licentiousness and depravity, not wishing even to suggest that Britannicus’s mother’s evil propensities might have been passed on, or even served as an example, to her son, along the same lines as the play’s depiction of the relation between Agrippina and Nero, where it is very much telle mère, tel fils. 7. “Fortunate Domitius” is Nero, whose birth name was Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, after his father, Gnaeus Domitius; thanks to Agrippina’s efforts, he was adopted into Claudius’s family and given the family name of Nero. See Appendix A (a family tree painstakingly pruned to delineate only those family interrelationships that are germane to the play).

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Agrippina herself will provide a circumstantial account of her machinations on behalf of her son, at the expense of Britannicus, in her great tirade that opens the second scene of Act IV. Speaking of birth names, Britannicus’s name (whose provenance might forgivably be deemed relevant to an English translation of a play named after him), if not an adoptive one, was in some sense an adopted one, since, two years after his birth, his father, Claudius, having refused the honorific “Britannicus” that the senate had bestowed on him in recognition of his recent conquest of Britain, accepted it on behalf of his son, whose original birth name had been Tiberius Claudius Germanicus. 8. Agrippina almost succeeds in winning our sympathy in this scene, not least owing to astute observations such as this. 9. Racine’s several references to the current duration of Nero’s reign waffle between two and three years, but, “in fact, one year would have been closer to the historical truth,” as Forestier (1425) points out: “Nero, having become emperor in October 54, had Britannicus poisoned in February 55.” 10. The excesses of Augustus’s youth were of a political rather than of a personal nature. The period during which he rose to imperial power, in the turmoil following the assassination of Julius Caesar, necessitated the use of violent force, first, in order to maintain the claims of the Second Triumvirate (Mark Antony, Marcus Lepidus, and Augustus himself, then known as Gaius Octavius) against the waning but tenacious republican opposition, and, second, to safeguard his own claim, once he became emperor, against the numerous plots to overthrow him that plagued the first years of his reign. 11. Suetonius (“Nero,” 5) describes Nero’s father, Gnaeus Domitius, as “a wholly despicable character” and proceeds to relate several incidents that amply warrant such a description. In all fairness, however, we should credit him with some redeeming qualities, namely, honesty and insight, for, when acknowledging his son’s birth, “in reply to friendly congratulations,” he observed that “any child born to himself and Agrippina was bound to have a detestable nature and become a public danger” (“Nero,” 6). 12. The example of Caligula is a particularly cautionary one, since, being the son of Germanicus, he is Agrippina’s brother, hence, Nero’s uncle. And while both Tacitus and Suetonius find Germanicus generally praiseworthy, we can assume that many of Caligula’s and Agrippina’s inherited characteristics had been sloshing about in their shared gene pool. In other words, tel oncle, tel neveu (like uncle, like nephew). 13. Agrippina has just argued that, given Nero’s forebears, his seeming virtue may disguise a corrupt nature, but now she dismisses such concerns as, after all, irrelevant; and here we come to the crux of the matter: in this play, as throughout the history of the Roman Empire, we see the influence of virtue trumped by the desire for power. 14. Suetonius (“Nero,” 8)  relates that, in the immediate wake of Claudius’s death, Nero “visited the Senate House, where he remained until

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nightfall, refusing only one of the many high honours voted him, namely the title ‘Father of the Country,’ and this because of his youth.” 15. In short, as Tacitus (XII, 64) concludes, “She could give her son the empire, but could not endure him as emperor.” 16. Again, we see Agrippina’s expedient inconsistency: here, she sarcastically impugns Nero’s virtue, which she has just made clear (lines 43 –44) is of little concern to her. 17. Ronald W. Tobin (71) poses the very germane question, “the one that is the catalyst for the action of the play: why did Néron have Junie kidnapped?” Tobin suggests that “Néron’s act is at once an adolescent’s symbolic signal of freedom from the mother and a desire to replace one female presence with another.” First and foremost, perhaps, the explanation for Nero’s somewhat abrupt and arbitrary action may be a purely pragmatic one, namely, that Racine needed a catalyst for the action of the play, and, indeed, as Tobin goes on to observe, “Junie plays a significant role in all the oppositions that Racine traces from the first verses.” 18. It seems clear that Racine intended Agrippina to strike a note of genuine remorse in this somewhat tortured outburst: after all, she is speaking to her confidant, not to Britannicus. Another point in her favor. 19. See line 17 and note 7 above. 20. Forestier (1425 –26) provides a helpfully compact précis of this complicated imbroglio: “Octavia, daughter of Claudius and sister of Britannicus, had been betrothed to Lucius Silanus, great-​grandson of Julia, the daughter of Augustus. In order to prevent this marriage and permit Nero ultimately to marry Octavia, Agrippina had Silanus accused of incest with his sister Junia.” It should be noted, however, first of all, that the accusation was very likely false, and, second and more important, that, in any case, Racine’s Junia bears little more resemblance to the historical Junia ( Junia Calvina), who, as Racine asserts in his first preface, “is all but unknown to us,” than in her being Silanus’s sister and a direct descendent of Augustus. 21. Picard (1098) points out that Agrippina demonstrates the same political savvy that Akhmet, the grand vizier in Bajazet, resorts to vis-à-​vis Bajazet, whose cause he has espoused, in taking measures “to assure himself of a support against the very person he is promoting.” See Bajazet I.i.184 –96. 22. Why? Well, according to Suetonius (“Nero,” 35), “There was no family relationship which Nero did not criminally abuse.” To cite one choice example: “There was also his step-​son, Rufrius Crispinus, Poppaea’s child by her former husband. Nero had the boy’s own slaves drown him on a fishing expedition simply because he was said to have played at being a general and an emperor.” 23. Cf. Narcissus’s similar aphoristic observation (about the Roman people) to Nero in Act  IV: “Your cautiousness could cost your empire dear: / If you’re afraid, they’ll think you ought to fear” (IV.iv.49 –50). (In the

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French, the aphoristic quality of the second line stems from the conspicuous, balanced alliteration of the second and last words: “Ils croiront, en effet, mériter qu’on les craigne” [They’ll believe, in effect, that they deserve to be feared].) Also, cf.  Akhmet’s remark about the sultan’s relations with his janissaries (“I have, myself, oft heard them air their view; / As he fears them, so they still fear him too” [Bajazet I.i.43 –44]); and Jehoiada’s warning to Joash not to heed the “fawning, flattering voices” who will try to convince him that kings should be answerable to no one but themselves: “Only to weep, to work, are most men fit, / And to an iron scepter would submit; / If they are not oppressed, they will oppress” (Athaliah IV.iii.86, 92 –94). In every case, whether it’s fear of a mother or fear of the masses, the repression of such fear, Racine seems to say, most often leads to its opposite: relentless tyranny. 24. Tacitus (XIII, 2) reports that “publicly, Agrippina received honour after honour. When the escort-​commander made the customary request for a password, Nero gave: ‘The best of mothers.’ ” 25. That is, even Augustus did not honor his wife Livia as much as you honor your mother. As Forestier (1426) remarks, “The comparison is wholly apt: we know the constant influence Livia (over the course of more than fifty years) exercised over Augustus.” 26. The fasces, a bundle of rods containing an ax whose blade protruded from the top, was borne before Roman magistrates as an emblem of official power; hence, it was a signal and unprecedented honor for Agrippina to be so distinguished. 27. Cf. Agamemnon’s angry retort to Achilles: “I want less valor, more obedience” (Iphigenia  IV.vi.94). (The French for Agrippina’s line reads, “Un peu moins de respect, et plus de confiance”; the French for Agamemnon’s reads, “Je veux moins de valeur, et plus d’obéissance.”) 28. Tacitus (XIII, 5) even mentions one meeting of the senate at which, “although [it] was convened in the Palatine” (presumably to ensure some privacy from Agrippina’s eyes), “a door [was] built at the back so that she could stand behind a curtain unseen, and listen.” 29. Tacitus’s account (ibid.) of this incident is quite different from Agrippina’s: “When an Armenian delegation was pleading before Nero, she [Agrippina] was just going to mount the emperor’s dais and sit beside him. Everyone was stupefied. But Seneca instructed Nero to advance and meet his mother. This show of filial dutifulness averted the scandal.” Racine’s version, instead of showing Nero avoiding the scandalous consequences of Agrippina’s overreaching presumptuousness, presents his action as a deliberate, public act of rudeness, intended to demean his unoffending mother, who was merely going to assume her wonted and rightful position. Although it is impossible to say with certainty whether it is Agrippina or Racine who is rewriting history here, we can surmise, from Agrippina’s agonized

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recollection of what she paints as a near-​traumatic experience, that she is reliving the incident as it happened. Indeed, her account evokes something of the same horror — ​albeit on a far smaller scale, the event described being of far less moment — ​that one finds in Andromache’s recollection of the night Troy fell (“Recall that night, Cephise, that cruel night, / That night that proved for Troy an endless night” [Andromache III.viii.21–22]), or Josabeth’s of the day Athaliah oversaw the slaughter of her own grandchildren (“Alas! I can recall his [ Joash’s] fearful plight: / The horror still afflicts my soul with fright” [Athaliah I.ii.77–78]). In any case, Racine’s version, again, serves to make Agrippina more sympathetic to the audience. 30. Seneca and Burrhus are Nero’s tutors, selected, ironically, by Agrippina herself. Agrippina will rehearse her past history with them both in the following scene with Burrhus and in her Act IV apologia to Nero. 31. Presumably, “a certain pair” are Burrhus and Seneca, whom she darkly alludes to here, although, strangely enough, she has just mentioned them a few lines above in the most matter-of-​fact way. 32. These “orders” must be for the banishment of Pallas, Agrippina’s partisan and, historically, her lover (Tacitus [XII, 65] has Narcissus asserting that “Agrippina’s lover is Pallas”). Racine artfully arranges for Burrhus’s disclosure to be deferred to another time, for were Agrippina to learn the nature of those orders here, her resultant fulmination would preclude the possibility of any such even-​tempered, albeit tense, discourse as makes up the rest of this rather lengthy expository scene. (It is actually Agrippina herself who manages to deflect Burrhus by dint of the lengthy tirade she is about to launch into [lines 14 –43].) And indeed, once she has been apprised of this development, between Acts  II and III, we witness her (in III.iv) positively swoop down on Burrhus in full fury, which lends potent irony to Burrhus’s litotes: “orders apt, at first, to incur your blame” (the French has “an order which might at first have alarmed you”). 33. Forestier (1426) clarifies how this tradition of consular consultations came about: “Learning from the fate of Caesar, assassinated for having wished to have himself crowned king, Augustus retained all his powers while preserving the fiction of a republican regime: the senate continued to sit and two consuls were elected each year.” 34. This explains how Agrippina could have believed that, behind his closed door, Nero was still asleep. It does seem somewhat surprising, however, that she should not have been aware of the existence of this private ingress. 35. Toward the end of the play, when all masks have been dropped, Agrippina bitterly regrets not having trusted Burrhus: “How unjust my suspicions now appear: / You I condemned, Narcissus had my ear!” (V.vii.1–2). But Racine has also encouraged the audience to sympathize with Agrippina and, therefore, to mistrust Burrhus. We too feel that he has ulterior motives in preventing Agrippina from seeing her son, and resent him for it. In that

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context, Burrhus’s smug insistence on his honesty sounds exactly like what a practiced liar would say. In Racine’s Rome, certainly, such professions of veracity would be taken as a certain sign of mendacity. As Junia comments later about the Roman court, “Men’s thoughts and words are worlds apart, my lord! / Between their hearts and tongues how slight the accord!” (V.i.44 –45). (Cf. lines 48 –49 below.) 36. Racine adapted this concise but potent “résumé” from a passage in Tacitus (XII, 42): “She entered the Capitol in a ceremonial carriage. This distinction . . . increased the reverence felt for a woman who to this day remains unique as the daughter of a great commander, and the sister, wife, and mother of emperors.” Racine glosses over the distinction Tacitus makes when he (Racine) has Agrippina call herself the daughter “of your masters” (as the French literally translates), but it is a forgivable dodge, at least on Agrippina’s part, since she may have wishfully considered that, had Germanicus lived but a mere eighteen years longer, he would have succeeded his uncle Tiberius as emperor. 37. Cf. lines 71–74 below and note 40. 38. That Agrippina should include the name of Tiberius among those forebears on whom Nero could profitably model his behavior demonstrates laughably poor discernment on her part, if we are to go by Suetonius’s account of Tiberius’s reign, of which his description of the reaction to the emperor’s death (“Tiberius,” 75)  may serve as a representative example: “The first news of his death caused such joy at Rome that people ran about yelling: ‘To the Tiber with Tiberius!’ and others offered prayers to Mother Earth and the Infernal Gods to give him no home below except among the damned. There were also loud threats to drag his body off with a hook and fling it on the Stairs of Mourning.” Or perhaps Agrippina’s suggestion reflects that indifference to the moral tone of Nero’s reign (provided that he remain under her thumb) that she acknowledged in the prior scene (“What though Nero prove a paragon, / Whose virtue, as a model, will live on?” [I.i.43 –44]). 39. Burrhus cagily, if cravenly, takes advantage of her digression to refrain from telling her about Pallas’s dismissal, which he is, understandably, none too anxious to broach to Agrippina, knowing she will not take the news well. 40. This is, thematically, one of the most telling lines of the play, for here we are not dealing with, essentially, a family tragedy, as in, for example, The Fratricides or Phaedra, but with one of far greater scope, where the son’s character and actions not only affect his immediate circle, but at the same time create a ripple effect, spreading to the very verges of an entire empire, so that, just as his behavior affects that empire, so that empire reflects the moral character (or lack thereof ) of its emperor. 41. Strictly speaking, it was only Seneca whom Agrippina had recalled from exile. In her great Act IV apologia before Nero (IV.ii 46 –49), Agrippina

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takes credit for selecting the estimable and respected Burrhus and Seneca as mentors for her son, to enhance his reputation with the populace, while foisting on Britannicus such advisors as would keep him in line and diminish his eligibility as a potential successor to Claudius. And in Racine’s play, Claudius’s selection of Narcissus as his son’s tutor — ​Claudius mistakenly supposing him to be trustworthy (see III.i.15-18) — ​backfires, since Narcissus, betraying both Claudius and his charge, allies himself with Nero, aiding and abetting him in his plan to murder Britannicus. 42. Burrhus’s words of reassurance, like Albina’s in the previous scene (“Whatever new rank Rome exalts him to, / Not one, but straight your son confers on you” [I.i.79 – 80]), take on an ironic note in the (historical) event, since, after Nero had, with much bungling, finally managed to have his mother disposed of, among the charges he posthumously leveled against Agrippina was that “she had wanted to be co-ruler — ​to receive oaths of allegiance from the Guard, and to subject senate and public to the same humiliation” (Tacitus, XIV, 11). 43. Cf. lines 33 –34 above. Although each of the two interlocutors in this scene professes to believe that it is high time that Nero were allowed to become his own man and to reign in his own right, arguing for his emancipation from the other’s influence, each secretly wishes to retain control over the emperor, but for wholly different reasons, Burrhus altruistically fearing (quite rightly as it turns out) that, left to himself, Nero might become irreversibly corrupted, Agrippina selfishly fearing that she will be deprived of the power she has become so addicted to wielding. 44. Michael Grant, in his translation of Tacitus’s Annals (246n), notes that “the reign of Claudius witnessed an unprecedented increase in the power of the great secretaries of state, ex-​slaves such as Narcissus (Secretary-​ General), Pallas (Financial Secretary), and Callistus (Petitions Secretary),” the very “three freedmen” Burrhus refers to. 45. Famous last words, for, indeed, today will see enacted the tragedy of Rome: the whole of the empire will become “the spoils of one master” (as the French translates), namely, Nero. 46. Forestier (1427) underlines the irony of Burrhus’s optimistic survey with this account of future developments: “Thrasea Paetus, considered by Tacitus as the embodiment of virtue, will receive an order to kill himself; as for Corbulon, who will profit from his military glory only to revolt in the end, he will be assassinated.” 47. Picard (1099) wryly describes Burrhus’s utopian daydream (from which he will be rudely awakened by the end of the play) as “the myth of the good emperor, whose absolute power is in marvelous harmony with the freedom of his people.” 48. Cf. lines 36 –39 above: again, their prescriptions for Nero are theoretically in agreement.

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49. Agrippina’s conclusion (made more explicit as such by the “Ainsi” [Thus] of the French) hardly seems to follow from what Burrhus has just said. But, in truth, Agrippina was probably determined to ignore whatever Burrhus said to her, since, preoccupied by Junia’s abduction, she is undoubtedly itching to express her outrage over it and to hurl blame at someone. 50. See note 20 above. 51. See Appendix A, which makes clear that Agrippina and Junia both descend from Augustus, by various routes. 52. Agrippina’s surmise is amply borne out in the next act, when Junia’s discomfiture and wretchedness at having been forcibly conducted to the palace at Nero’s orders are poignantly dramatized. 53. Burrhus’s concerns, whether originating with Nero or not, are echoed by the latter, in a rather menacing way, in his first encounter with Junia (II.iii.22 –27). Racine refers to Junia as Augustus’s niece, but she was actually his great-​granddaughter. (See the notes for Appendix A.) In Racine’s time, nièce and neveu (nephew) could mean “descendent,” and he uses the latter (in its plural, neveux) in that sense in Junia’s invocation to the statue of Augustus (as quoted by Albina in her lengthy récit [V.fin.sc.18]): “le seul de tes neveux” (the only one of your descendents). 54. These veiled threats will be made more explicit in III.iv. See note 18 for Act III. 55. Here we get a glimpse of the consequences of Agrippina’s waning power, which, historically, manifested themselves only after Britannicus’s assassination. See note 25 for Act III. 56. Agrippina, in her otherwise quite candid Act IV narrative, makes no mention of having actively precipitated Claudius’s death, merely of having kept him virtually a prisoner, with no access to friends or to his son. Tacitus’s version (XII, 66 – 67), however, makes it clear that she had her husband poisoned (see note 22 for Act IV), although Claudius demonstrated the same uncooperativeness in dying that she would later display when Nero attempted to do away with her. There is some extradramatic irony, incidentally, in Britannicus’s mentioning that it was Narcissus who alleged that Agrippina had murdered his father, Claudius, since, according to Tacitus (XI, 37), Narcissus was almost single-​handedly instrumental in the murder of his mother, Messalina. And while on the subject of Britannicus’s parents, one should also cite Tacitus’s account (XI, 38) of Claudius’s reaction to the news of the death of Messalina (the third of his four wives): “Claudius was still at table when news came that Messalina had died; whether by her own hand or another’s was unspecified. Claudius did not inquire. He called for more wine, and went on with his party as usual.” In the account by Suetonius (“Claudius,” 39) — ​never one to be outdone in demonstrating the ever-​surprising blend of the fatuous and the flagitious in the Roman emperors whose lives he chronicled — ​it was as a consequence of Claudius’s

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“truly remarkable . . . scatter-​brainedness and shortsightedness” that “after executing Messalina, he went in to dinner, and presently asked: ‘Why is her ladyship not here?’ ” Either edifying account raises the intriguing question of what sort of emperor Britannicus, with such role models, not to mention genes, would have made, had he succeeded to the imperial throne instead of his stepbrother. 57. Picard (1099) correctly points out that “Narcissus, in this scene as in the rest of the drama, plays, in his relation with Britannicus, the role of agent provocateur and spy for Nero.” This speech, in particular, is the very epitome of the agent provocateur’s MO. (His last speech in the play [V.vi.13 –25] is another perfect example of his natural, irrepressible bent for provocation, for there, he attempts, with his outrageous accusations against Britannicus, to provoke Agrippina’s anger against someone whom he has, by his own agency, permanently placed out of harm’s way.) The last six lines of Narcissus’s speech also serve to demonstrate Racine’s mastery of conveying language’s terrifying potential for deception: to the audience (at this point), as to Britannicus, Narcissus’s advice seems so wise, so well-​meaning. 58. Tacitus (XIII, 15) reports that “it had earlier been ensured that Britannicus’ attendants should be unscrupulous and disloyal.” 59. Here is a case (one of many in his work) where Racine is writing for an audience already familiar with the play or a reader rereading it, since so delicious an example of irony can be fully savored only upon a second viewing or reading. The “like you” is especially delectable. 60. Here, Narcissus proffers what would be genuinely good advice, coming from anyone else. 61. “Narcisse, tu dis vrai” has the pithy, poignant potency of the sobriquet Othello applies to his nemesis: “honest Iago.” Iago is, of course, the master of the plausible lie. 62. Notwithstanding that Britannicus has only just told us that he is basically friendless (later he will accuse Agrippina of having “drawn in or drawn off my former friends” [III.vi.20]), he enjoins Narcissus to sound out “our friends.” Britannicus’s forlorn state comes into sharper focus when we contrast his situation with that of Orestes (in Andromache) or of Bajazet, each of whom has a circle of friends standing by, ready to offer their assistance. (Orestes’ allies manage to rescue him at the end of the play, but Bajazet is not so lucky: his supporters rush to his aid, but too late to save him.) By contrast, no faction friendly to Britannicus ever materializes during the course of the play to dispel the impression consistently created that he is truly desolate.

act ii 1. Tacitus (XIII, 14) recounts that “Nero, exasperated with the partisans of this female conceit [i.e., Agrippina’s presumptuous sense of entitlement],

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deposed Pallas from the position from which, since his appointment by Claudius, he had virtually controlled the empire.” This banishment, darkly hinted at earlier by Burrhus (I.ii.1–3), but only announced here (“For the last time: he must be sent away” [line 17 of this speech]), is what, according to Tacitus, would provoke Agrippina to threaten to take up Britannicus’s cause in retaliation, a characteristically violent reaction that Racine will dramatize so effectively in III.iv, when the brunt of her outrage falls on the hapless Burrhus. In his first preface, Racine declares that “my tragedy does not concern itself at all with affairs of the world at large,” and, indeed, this is the only glimpse we get of Nero acting in his capacity as ruler of the Roman Empire. However, given the motives he adduces for Pallas’s dismissal in this speech, the following line would be more convincing if it read “This step the Emperor’s interests now require.” By the way, what seems to be a sly surmise on Nero’s part (“Were you to visit him, you’d find them there!” [II.i.9]) may be no surmise at all, since Britannicus had apprised Narcissus at the end of Act I (I.iv.51-52) that he was going to meet Agrippina at Pallas’s residence, and Narcissus may well have reported this juicy tidbit to Nero in the interim. (And, in the next scene, when he reports that “your enemies . . . at Pallas’ house now helplessly complain” [II.ii.3-4], that may be a recap.) 2. Just as the opening scene of the play predisposes us to side with Agrippina in the following scene with Burrhus, not yet having seen enough of the latter to know that (mirabile dictu) his integrity is real and that when he says that “lying is something I’ve always abhorred” (I.ii.13), he actually means it, so, in the final scene of Act I, we are led to believe, conversely — ​ not yet having come to understand how gullible and unsuspicious Britannicus is — ​by Britannicus’s reliance on Narcissus and his utter faith in his tutor’s probity, that Narcissus is a concerned and caring mentor to Britannicus, warning him as he does against being too indiscreetly trusting and even seeming barely to suppress an imprecation against whoever could be so vile as to betray Britannicus’s confidences (“What soul so base . . . ? ” [I.iv.32]). What a coup de théâtre, then, on Racine’s part, to let us know, with Narcissus’s very first words in Act II (a mere fifteen lines after the close of Act I — ​a brief enough hiatus for us to register after the fact much of the dramatic irony that Racine has strewn through the earlier scene), that Narcissus is the “leak” (by whom “I’m sold out every day” [I.iv.29]), that, indeed, he is not merely deceitful and treacherous, but maliciously so, vicariously delighting in Nero’s stratagems to undo Britannicus. Historically, be it noted, Narcissus was a staunch partisan of Britannicus, holding the view, according to Tacitus (XII, 65), that “with Britannicus as his [i.e., Claudius’s] successor the emperor has nothing to fear. But the intrigues of his stepmother in Nero’s interests are fatal to the imperial house.” . . . Talking like this, Narcissus would embrace Britannicus and pray he would soon be a man.

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With hands outstretched — ​now to the boy, now to heaven — ​ he besought that Britannicus might grow up and cast out his father’s enemies, and even avenge his mother’s murderers [among whom, according to Tacitus himself, he was, in fact, notwithstanding his partisanship of Britannicus, the most mercilessly determined!]. 3. The question of whether Nero is actually in love has been addressed by many critics. My view, expressed at some length throughout the Discussion, is that he is not, and the nice distinction Nero makes in this line I take to be the first of many hints that support that view. Having declared that his love is eternal, he senses the inadequacy of labeling it merely as “love,” insisting, on second thought, that he “adores” Junia, just to ensure that he is playing the part of lover to the hilt and that any love that he feels will appear worthy of his preeminence as emperor. 4. Nero’s undeniably rapturous evocation of his first sight of Junia conjures up the scene with the theatricality (another hint: see the preceding note) of a Baroque painting, the drama, the chiaroscuro, the sensuality, the violence, all contributing to make it a veritable Caravaggio in verse. (The upward glance of the gleaming tear-​filled eyes and the seminudity may also recall paintings of Mary Magdalene or, more tellingly, female Christian martyrs.) 5. Here, in a reversal of the usual lover-​confidant dynamic, it is the lover who questions whether the beloved is as lovely as he had supposed: hardly the stance of a true lover, who would defend the perfection of the inamorata against any criticism or skepticism. No: again, Nero needs to be reassured that Junia is worthy of his choice, worthy of his own perfection. 6. See I.i.63 – 64 and note 19 for Act I. 7. Later (III.vii.22 –27), Narcissus, with diabolical deviousness, will suggest to Britannicus that Junia’s sequestration may have been a deliberate attempt on her part to stimulate Nero’s passion. 8. Cf. Agrippina’s earlier assertion that “[Nero] well knows . . . that by Britannicus Junia’s adored” (I.i.51–52). 9. Nero condescendingly speaks as if with the wisdom that only age can bring, but he is, after all, only three years older than Britannicus. It is suggestive of Nero’s perverse concept of love that he should regard love’s glances as typically tainted with poison. 10. Nero will make the same minatory point to Britannicus’s face in their hostile confrontation in Act III (III.ix.38 –40). 11. Forestier (1429) points out that “these kings without a crown . . . represent an almost obligatory theme in tragedies with a Roman subject: the Roman emperor, who does not bear the title of king, nevertheless counts these kings (dispossessed of their realms by the Roman armies) among the number of his courtiers.” In Racine’s next play, Berenice, Rome’s abhorrence

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of the title of king (or, in that case, the title of queen) is a crucial element in the plot and a decisive factor in Titus’s ultimate renunciation of Berenice, the queen of Palestine. (“They’ll” at the beginning of this line refers back, in Narcissus’s flattering, gallant, almost loverlike speech, to Junia’s eyes [line 77].) 12. The military imagery (love as a battle) continues in Act  III (III.vii.22 –27). See note 34 for Act III. Here, the victory is ascribed to Junia, but Narcissus, with his usual suave subtlety, assures Nero of his power to charm and of his ultimate victory, making it seem that his courtship will be, literally, a win-​win situation. 13. The tirades and the tears, Seneca, Burrhus, and Rome, are, in fact, the reasons for the three virtuous years. Were it not for those factors, which Nero regards as so many obstacles and hindrances to an untrammeled assertion of his own will, the manifestation of the “monstre” would have occurred significantly sooner. (Likewise, Joash [in Athaliah, Racine’s last play], ever under the watchful eye of Jehoiada, the high priest, reigned for thirty years in utmost piety — ​until the death of Jehoiada, in fact [no coincidence there!] — ​before going to the bad.) 14. Nero may not have been disposed “to watch her weep her woes,” but Tacitus (XIV, 63 – 64) presents us with a most poignant account of Octavia’s suffering, and particularly of her last days and her horrific demise. As opposed to those suffering females who, he writes, had been mature women with happy memories which could alleviate their present sufferings . . . Octavia had virtually died on her wedding day. Her new home had brought her nothing but misery. Poison had removed her father [Claudius], and very soon her brother [Britannicus]. Maid had been preferred to mistress. Then she, Nero’s wife, had been ruined by her successor [Poppaea]. . . . So this girl, in her twentieth year, was . . . hardly a living person any more — ​ so certain was she of imminent destruction. Yet still she lacked the peace of death. The order to die arrived a few days later. . . . Octavia was bound, and all her veins were opened. However, her terror retarded the flow of blood. So she was put into an exceedingly hot vapour-​bath and suffocated. An even crueler atrocity followed. Her head was cut off and taken to Rome for Poppaea to see. Tragically, Nero speaks all too truly when he remarks (line 99) that “Octavia’s virtue leaves the Gods unmoved.” 15. Forestier (1429) deftly clarifies these complex family relationships: “Augustus was married to Scribonia, by whom he had one daughter, Julia. He divorced Scribonia in order to marry Livia. The latter then divorced Tiberius Claudius Nero, by whom she had a son (the future emperor

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Tiberius) and by whom she was expecting another son, Drusus, father of both Germanicus and Claudius and future grandfather of Agrippina. Thus, Augustus’s successors all descended in fact from Livia and her first husband.” However, since I find Forestier’s concluding statement somewhat ambiguous, inadvertently suggesting that, conversely, none of Augustus’s successors could claim direct descent from him, I would direct the reader’s attention to Appendix A, where one can readily confirm that both Caligula and Nero could claim direct descent from Augustus, tracing their genealogy thus: Julia, Augustus’s daughter by Scribonia, his first wife, was the mother of Agrippina the Elder, who was the mother of both the emperor Caligula and of Agrippina the Younger (the Agrippina of Racine’s play), who was herself, of course, the mother of the emperor Nero. See note 49 for Act V. 16. The “his” refers to Augustus. 17. Forestier (1429) again proves most helpful here: “Tiberius, Livia’s son, married Julia, Augustus’s daughter. The debaucheries of the latter led him to repudiate her, with the consent of Augustus, who ended by banishing her himself.” 18. This chilling irony goes far beyond the harmlessly flirtatious gallantry we would take this for in any other context. Junia’s voluntary exile, or indeed any other action or behavior, can be perceived and punished as a crime when the emperor is all-​powerful and answerable to no one. 19. Cf. the expediently political justification Burrhus offers Agrippina in Act I (I.ii.116 –121) for Nero’s abduction of Junia. Here, Nero’s petulance suggests that such concerns are secondary to his wounded sense of his proprietary rights having been violated. 20. Cf. Aricia’s situation in Phaedra. She, too, is “the last of an illustrious family”: “Last issue of a noble, peerless king, / I alone escaped war’s dreadful reckoning. / I lost six brothers, all untimely slain; / The hopes of our great house, alas! how vain!” (Phaedra II.i.55 –58); and she and Hippolytus also fall victim to their doomed love, a love forbidden (albeit for entirely different reasons) by a despotic monarch (in their case, Theseus, Hippolytus’s father). Both heroines manage to avoid the horrific deaths met by their respective lovers; unlike Junia, however, who escapes from Nero’s rapacious designs only to find herself clinging, with desperate futility, to the cold knees of Augustus’s marble effigy, Aricia is welcomed into the warm arms of Theseus with a newfound, paternal love. 21. Since the relationship Racine fashioned between Junia and Britannicus has no basis in historical fact (see Racine’s prefaces), it follows that there was no such long-​standing engagement arranged by Claudius, who did, however, arrange a betrothal between his daughter, Octavia, Britannicus’s sister, and Silanus, Junia’s brother, an engagement that was thwarted by Agrippina’s machinations on Nero’s behalf, with Silanus’s resultant suicide, as Agrippina herself acknowledges (I.i.63 – 64). Cf. lines 59 – 62.

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22. We have already learned from Nero himself that he did not sleep a wink last night. We may now surmise that a not insignificant part of the time he spent “occupied with my new love” (II.ii.33) was devoted to conceiving and composing this elaborate marriage proposal, a masterpiece of rhetoric, which begins with an account of his nobly solicitous search for the ideal husband for her, who, search high and low as he may, turns out to be none other than himself; he then proceeds to devote a judicious and seemly portion of his discourse to assuring her how essential her conjugal consolations would be to a man bearing the onerous responsibility of being emperor, preemptively brushing aside any possible objection on her part that he is already married, and concluding with a powerful peroration that, by dint of the thrice-​repeated “worthy” (“digne”), enforces the general tenor of their marvelously mutual worthiness. What is perhaps most striking about his speech is that, putting aside the fact that, as there is no historical evidence of any relationship at all between Nero and Junia, no such exhaustive search to find her a husband was ever actually undertaken, the play itself offers nothing to refute the obvious assumption that the first section of his proposal is a complete fabrication (“and still I cast my eyes” is rich), a piece of self-​ aggrandizement masquerading as altruistic concern. One wonders if Nero’s utterly factitious search for the perfect husband for Junia was suggested to Racine by the actual search for yet another wife (his fourth) for Claudius to replace the ill-​fated Messalina (Britannicus’s mother), to which Tacitus devotes several pages (XII, 1–4), with each of the leading candidates — ​one of whom being, of course, Agrippina, who alludes to the competition in her great narration of Act IV (IV.ii.9 –14) — ​having her own partisans and plotters. See note 5 for Act IV. 23. In this play, the gods impinge on the characters’ thoughts and actions even less palpably than they do in Racine’s other plays; no one even bothers to pay them the lip service of denouncing them (let alone thanking them), or of heaping blame on them, as do Jocasta (in The Fratricides), Clytemnestra (in Iphigenia), and Phaedra, for example. (Burrhus’s two futile “plût aux Dieux” [see note 6 for Act III] seem only to underscore their impotence.) The reason behind this — ​and this is one of the essential themes of both Britannicus and my Discussion — ​is that, in imperial Rome, it is the emperors who have, in effect, supplanted the gods as the arbiters of destiny, the dispensers of justice, and the capricious, willful agents of mere mortals’ torments. And, indeed, of Suetonius’s “Twelve Caesars,” five were “afterwards deified”: Julius Caesar, Augustus, Claudius, Vespasian, and Titus. 24. Cf. II.ii.97–101. 25. See note 19 above. 26. Nero accurately envisioned the progress of this scene when, during his sleepless night, he imagined that he “sued with sighs, then tried to intimidate” (II.ii.32). Having tried to flatter Junia and entice her with the

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dazzling prospect of shared empery, but with no success, he now resorts to thinly veiled threats. 27. The more his overtures are met with indifference or resistance, the less concerned he is to make a good impression, although one might argue that so damning an admission — ​that he is so callous and selfish that he envies Britannicus his one meager relief from his woes — ​demonstrates a sort of reckless honesty, which even impels him to acknowledge in the next line that anyone else “païrait de sa vie” (would pay with his life — ​more explicitly threatening than my “I’d prove a sterner judge”). 28. Up to this point, all of Nero’s minatory rumbling and grumbling has given only a hint of his malevolence. Now, no sooner does Junia burst out to express her relieved sense of his supposed kindness and clemency than Nero, brutally checking her grateful effusion, disabuses her with a pronouncement brimming with horrors: Britannicus is to be banished, she must convey the news to him herself, and, most cruelly, she must give him to understand that it is she who wishes to send him away, all the while being careful, his life hanging in the balance, not to give any hint of Nero’s jealousy or of her own abhorrence for what she is being made to do. Such a sudden and momentous revelation of both his true nature and his comprehensive plans to punish Britannicus and torture her must count as something of a major peripeteia in the progress of the play. Earlier in this scene (lines 79 – 84), she acknowledged having experienced another reversal: abducted, dragged to the palace by brutish guards, and terrified that she is being punished for she knows not what crime, she suddenly learns that she is being offered the position of empress; now, that reversal is itself reversed, and in a much more nightmarish way. Indeed, in my view, this speech, taken in conjunction with Nero’s next (lines 156 – 61), is the single most horrific utterance in all of Racine, the one most steeped in a frighteningly sophisticated, psychotic evil, compared to which the various threats made by Pyrrhus (in Andromache), Roxane (in Bajazet), and Athaliah seem almost benign. It is important to point out here that Nero’s scheme of blackmailing Junia into sending Britannicus away is by no means inconsistent with his underlying, long-​term goal of killing him, for dispatching Britannicus without torturing him first would be, for Nero, to miss out on half the fun. Once having succeeded in asserting his ascendancy over Junia by forcing her to do the unthinkable, and having thoroughly tormented Britannicus (“I’ll derive my joy from his despair” and “make him pay dear for bliss he knows naught of ” [II.viii.4, 10]), Nero would, in my view, have even less reason to hesitate in his design to banish Britannicus to the afterlife. 29. Chez Racine, the master of the ill-​timed arrival, this is a certain cue for the announcement of Britannicus’s imminent advent. 30. This is one of several, in effect, blackmail situations in Racine. In Andromache, Pyrrhus threatens Andromache with the death of her son,

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Astyanax, if she does not agree to marry him, and Hermione warns Orestes that if Pyrrhus does not die at his hands, she will not marry him; in Athaliah, the title character warns Jehoiada, the high priest, that if he does not turn over his adoptive son, Joash, she will raze the temple; and in Bajazet, the sultaness, Roxane, perhaps not quite grasping the principle of blackmail, informs Bajazet that if he agrees to marry her, she will kill Atalide, the woman he loves — ​hardly an incentive for him to take her to wife. 31. By rights, Nero should be listed among the participants in this scene, concealed behind a curtain though he may be. Certainly, his presence is crucial to the scene. Narcissus, who is also present in this scene, has no speaking lines either, but, not being concealed, he is listed among the cast. What is interesting matter for speculation (for a director, certainly) is whether or not Narcissus is aware that Nero is eavesdropping and observing. After all, Nero did not confide his plans to Narcissus when last they met (in II.ii), only telling him that “I’ve my reasons” (line 149) for arranging their meeting, and hinting that Britannicus will “pay a high price for his happiness” (line 150). In either case, whether Narcissus realizes that Nero is an eyewitness himself, or whether he looks forward to gleefully reporting the juicy details of this tête-à-​tête to Nero later, Narcissus must be relishing (as the audience or the reader must be, albeit in a different sense) every compromising, self-​incriminating word of Britannicus’s. 32. Here we find vestiges of the almost distastefully precious mode of gallantry that mars much of the colloquy between Antigone and Haemon in Racine’s first play, The Fratricides (e.g., II.i.11–32). Britannicus, with typical adolescent self-​centeredness, seems less concerned about the pain Junia might have been in than the pain her suffering has caused him. Martin Turnell (107) observes that “Junie is visibly much more mature than Britannicus,” whom he characterizes as “a sad, abandoned and rather sulky youth.” 33. Nero might well have resented (and punished) such a pointed appeal to Britannicus’s discretion, had this ploy been successful, but it has quite the opposite effect from that intended: it only provokes Britannicus to greater bravado. Of course, it is understandable that Britannicus misses her point, for while this line provides a tang of dramatic irony for the audience (less so, perhaps, in the French, which merely reads, “And the Emperor is never absent from this place”), its blandness, its triteness even, conceals its intended urgency. In the French, by the way, the walls “have eyes,” but in English that phrase might conjure up something surreal, something out of Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête. 34. Cf. Iphigenia’s similarly sudden, unwarranted accession of insecurity, a typically teenage tendency to fear the worst, when Achilles, her beloved, fails to show up at Aulis: “And have the cares of war, in just one day, / Caused love and tenderness to fade away?” (Iphigenia II.iii.38 –39). Cf. line 43 in Britannicus’s next speech.

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35. Lines 25 –26 must really twist the knife in both Nero’s and Junia’s heart! By the end of this brief speech, Britannicus has pretty much pushed every button of provocation. One should note that, if Britannicus speaks true, “Rome itself takes umbrage at his dealings” in spite of Nero’s much-​ vaunted “three virtuous years” (II.ii.90). 36. Junia desperately attempts the same sort of damage control that Atalide must resort to several times when Bajazet’s tactlessness has compromised him with Roxane (“I must, each moment, vigilant and tense, / Give to his words more favorable a sense” [Bajazet i.iv.60 – 61]). Nero, however, has none of Roxane’s willing gullibility. 37. Per Nero’s instructions. 38. Picard (1101) makes the distinction that “it is not a question of sadism — ​which is the voluntary pleasure of making someone suffer whom one has no reason to hate — ​but of jealousy.” Of course he means Nero’s jealousy of Junia’s love for Britannicus. But Tacitus (XIII, 17), treating the death of Britannicus, reports that “a number of contemporary writers assert that for a considerable time previously Nero had corrupted his victim [i.e., Britannicus]. If so, his death might have seemed to come none too soon, and be the lesser outrage of the two.” Thus, another prospect that opens out is that Nero (the historical Nero at least) might just as likely have been jealous of Britannicus’s love for Junia as of Junia’s love for Britannicus (had there been a historical Junia for whom the historical Britannicus had any amorous feelings). 39. That is, Nero, through Narcissus’s agency, would punish Britannicus for the tears the loving Junia will shed on his behalf, tears of which, thanks to Nero’s scheme, Britannicus will (he hopes) have no knowledge.

act iii 1. See Appendix B for an account of the provenance of this scene, as well as my rationale for its reinstatement as the opening scene of Act III, in accordance with Racine’s original intent. Let me mention again here, however (as I do in the Translator’s Note), that this is the first time this scene has appeared in a published English translation of Britannicus. 2. This line (“Pressé du désespoir qui suit la solitude” in the original) has always seemed to me as if it could have come from — ​indeed, has always seemed to distill the essence of — ​Baudelaire’s sequence of “Spleen” poems, and bears a subtle similarity to one particular line from “Spleen II”: “L’ennui, fruit de la morne incuriosité” (Tedium, product of a doleful incuriosity, or, as I translate it in my version of Baudelaire’s poem: “Boredom, begot by dreary apathy”).

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3. In other words: Claudius, knowing how much he had done for Narcissus, expected that Narcissus’s gratitude would urge him to do whatever he could for Claudius’s son (Britannicus). 4. Taken out of context, this caustic, disgruntled reply would seem to mark Narcissus as just your run-of-the-​mill, hypocritical, fawning timeserver. It is just what such a person would say who had been accused of becoming too chummy with the emperor, at the expense of the welfare of his own charge, and his retaliatory accusation that Burrhus has upbraided him out of petty jealousy would be consistent with the mean mindset of such a person. But given the actual context, Narcissus’s response may be seen as much more devious than that. It has to be, for, in fact, Burrhus has come perilously close to suspecting whose side Narcissus is really on (lines 29 –30), and what better way to disarm and divert Burrhus’s suspicions than to confess himself, by the very nature of his response, guilty of a far more venial villainy than betraying Britannicus to Nero, namely, of being the sort of person who, so apt to be motivated by petty jealousy himself, would believe that Burrhus’s rebuke was similarly motivated? For, although Narcissus probably derives some malicious pleasure from accusing Burrhus of being less holy than his holier-than-​thou attitude would suggest, he’s too astute to really believe that that is what provoked Burrhus’s lecture. (Such an assertion on my part is credibly confirmed when we look forward to another instance of Narcissus’s cunning but blatantly false imputation, in that case involving Junia: see III.vii.22 –27 and note 34 below.) And, of course, expert strategist and manipulator that Narcissus is, his ploy works perfectly: Burrhus, distracted from the Nero question, rises to the bait, predictably and promptly castigating Narcissus for judging him by his own deplorable lights. Brilliantly demonstrating Narcissus’s frighteningly ingenious, yet subtle, deviousness, these four lines alone would be enough to warrant the reinstatement of this scene. 5. Strikingly similar comments about “bad counselors,” couched variously as advice, admonition, or accusation, appear conspicuously in several of Racine’s plays. In Athaliah, for example, Jehoiada warns Joash against those counselors whose “fawning, flattering voices . . . corrupting your pure heart . . . [will] make you in the end despise the truth (Athaliah IV.iii.86, 96 –97); and Phaedra denounces her nurse, Oenone, as one of those “vile flatterers” who “cravenly appease / Their princes’ whims and feed their frailties” (Phaedra IV.vi.109 –10). 6. This wish will prove as futile as his later, famous one that ends the play (“Please heav’n this prove the last of Nero’s crimes!” [V.fin.sc.53]), which it somewhat resembles, both beginning with the same invocation to the gods (“Plût aux Dieux qu’en effet ce reproche vous touche!” and “Plût aux Dieux que ce fût le dernier de ses crimes!”). The earlier line, of course, offers a far less highly charged irony than Burrhus’s curtain line.

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7. After Racine excised this scene, this couplet found its way verbatim into Burrhus’s brief soliloquy, two scenes later (III.iii.6 –7), where it fits so neatly into its context that one wonders how it could not have formed part of that scene as well. In any case, I have translated the couplet differently for its later appearance (even resorting to a different end-​rhyme), in order to draw attention away from the duplication. 8. How correct Burrhus’s prediction will prove, he will learn, to his dismay, two scenes further on. 9. Here, Burrhus cautions Nero about the influence Agrippina wields as the daughter of Germanicus; later in this act, Agrippina brandishes the same weapon (that paternal “clout”) when she threatens Burrhus with the exposure of “our common crimes” (III.iv.41), warning him that “they’ll believe Germanicus’s child” (III.iv.36). 10. Forestier (1431) notes that some of Burrhus’s speech (very little, actually) has been adapted (very loosely) from pseudo-​Seneca’s tragedy Octavia. (He cites lines 553 and 564 – 65.) For my part, I was struck by the resemblance, in their tenor at least, between the advice Burrhus proffers in this particular couplet and certain lines of Hamlet’s to his mother, Gertrude, when he tries to persuade her to “go not to my uncle’s bed”: “Refrain to-​ night, / And that shall lend a kind of easiness / To the next abstinence; the next more easy” (Hamlet III.iv.160, 166 – 68). 11. One might take this dictum as representing the view of Racine’s older rival Corneille (and that of his nobler heroes) — ​and the patent futility of such preaching as Racine’s implied critique thereof. Of course, Burrhus’s un-​Racinian pronouncement, however futile, would appear to lose its relevance if one holds the view, as I do, that Nero is not genuinely in love with Junia. In that context, however, Burrhus’s remark takes on a whole new meaning, which, rather than serving as a universal maxim, seems, on the contrary, to have peculiar applicability to Nero’s case, for, in truth, Nero “loves” merely because he “wishes to”: his “love” is entirely an act of volition, a factitious construct that exists to serve other ends. See Section XVIII of the Discussion. 12. Snappy though the rhyme for this line may be, and facetious as Nero’s sally may seem, I wish to assure the reader that my translation is a faithful rendering of the French (“Mais, croyez-​moi, l’amour est une autre science”). Racine’s rhyming word for the prior line is “expérience,” but no such easy transference was available to me, since “experience” and “science” do not constitute an acceptable rhyme-​pair in English. 13. Picard (1101) remarks that “Burrhus takes up and underlines . . . the theme, at once dramatic and tragic, of the monstre naissant, to which the scenes of the preceding act have given all its force.” But Burrhus, having, at the end of the brief opening scene, been banished from the stage for the whole of that act, has not been a witness to any of the truly monstrous

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behavior Nero displays there. Thus, his declaration that “Nero’s true nature is, at last, made plain” is somewhat premature, Nero having only proved himself at this point — ​to Burrhus’s knowledge — ​to be what we might most conveniently describe as “Racinian,” that is, a character unable to master his passions. His exposure, “at last,” as a monstre (in Burrhus’s eyes) will have to wait until his cold-​blooded murder of Britannicus. 14. See III.i.77–78 and note 7 above. 15. Here is Tacitus’s account (XII, 25 –26) of this episode: The adoption of Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus [i.e., Nero] was now hurried forward. Pallas, pledged to Agrippina as organizer of her marriage and subsequently her lover, took the initiative. He pressed Claudius to consider the national interests and furnish the boy Britannicus with a protector [namely, Nero]. “Claudius too ought to provide himself [as Augustus had] with a young future partner in his labours.” The emperor was convinced. Echoing the ex-​slave’s arguments in the senate, he promoted Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus above his own son, who was three years younger. . . . More remarkable was the compliment that the young man received: legal adoption into the Claudian family with the name of Nero. 16. One would never know, from the cool, collected front Burrhus presents to Agrippina’s wild fulminations, that he has just come to the realization that Nero is out of control, that, indeed, he has been worriedly contemplating to what excesses Nero’s wildness might lead. Far from representing a volte-​face to his recent anxiety and anguish, however, his ready rationale for Nero’s behavior, his attempt to downplay the urgency and gravity of the situation, may be seen as a logical continuation of his monologue of the previous scene, since it is his own doubts and fears that he is really trying to reason away, or at least ease. With the hopes he had entertained at the end of the preceding scene that Agrippina would provide some reassurance (“She comes! Good fortune summons her”[III.iii.9]) dashed by the violence of her entrance, and with “Seneca . . . who might assuage my care . . . far from Rome” (III.iii.6 –7), he has no one to rely on for comfort but himself. But Burrhus will find that he is no more able to argue away his own anxiety than he was able to argue away Nero’s professed infatuation. 17. Burrhus’s advice to use “milder means” was adapted by Racine from Tacitus (XIII, 13): “But her violent scoldings only intensified his affection.” There, however, it was Nero’s attachment for a slave girl, Acte, that provoked Agrippina’s fury. 18. As Tacitus makes clear, up to the very moment of Agrippina’s murder (which, though aggressively prosecuted by Nero, was a long time in coming), the balance of power between her and her son (and their respective

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allies) was so precarious that either might have ultimately prevailed. Indeed, Tacitus (XIV, 7) paints a picture of a near-​hysterical Nero, fearing the worst: To Nero, awaiting news that the crime was done, came word that she had escaped with a slight wound. . . . Half-​dead with fear, he insisted she might arrive at any moment. “She may arm her slaves! She may whip up the army, or gain access to the senate or Assembly, and incriminate me for wrecking [the boat Nero had had sabotaged so that his mother should drown] and wounding her and killing her friends! What can I do to save myself ?” 19. Cf. III.ii.9 –10. 20. Carried away by her fury, Agrippina misspeaks: it is only Seneca, not Burrhus, who was recalled from exile; that is made clear later by Agrippina herself, when, in a calmer frame of mind, she is called upon to justify herself to Nero (IV.ii.51–52). See note 41 for Act I. 21. In Tacitus (XIII, 14), from whom Racine borrows heavily here, the sum and substance of Agrippina’s threats (to divulge their “common crimes” and to back Britannicus) are not fired at Burrhus, but are uttered within earshot of Nero: She let the emperor hear her say that Britannicus was grown up and was the true and worthy heir of his father’s supreme position — ​ now held, she added, by an adopted intruder, who used it to maltreat his mother. Unshrinkingly she disclosed every blot on that ill-​fated family, without sparing her own marriage and her poisoning of her husband. “But heaven and myself are to be thanked,” she added, “that my stepson is alive! I will take him to the Guards’ camp. Let them listen to Germanicus’ daughter pitted against the men who claim to rule the whole human race — ​the cripple Burrus with his maimed hand, and Seneca, that deportee with the professorial voice!” Gesticulating, shouting abuse, she invoked the deified Claudius, the spirits of the Silani below — ​and all her own unavailing crimes. I quote this passage at length to give the reader some idea of how selectively, how artfully, Racine made use of Tacitus’s account (quite theatrical in its own right). 22. Tiberius’s mother, Livia, schemed to insinuate her son as her husband Augustus’s heir, supplanting Agrippa, just as Agrippina schemed on behalf of her own son, Nero, to have Claudius disinherit Britannicus in favor of Nero. (See Appendix A for confirmation of Agrippa’s rightful title to the imperial throne.) And Forestier (1433), further pointing the parallel,

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reminds us that “at the beginning of his reign, Tiberius had Agrippa killed, as Nero would have Britannicus killed.” 23. That is, Britannicus and his sister, Octavia, Nero’s wife. 24. Her “rival” is Junia. Racine ingeniously conflates the slave girl Acte (mentioned in note 17), with whom, according to Tacitus, Nero was “deeply in love,” and his own fictionalized version of the historical Junia Calvina (see Racine’s prefaces). Tacitus (XIII, 12) goes on to relate that “Agrippina . . . displayed feminine rage at having an ex-​slave as her rival and a servant girl as her daughter-in-​law. . . . She refused to wait until her son regretted the association, or tired of it.” 25. Agrippina foresees an ostracism that would actually eventuate, but not as a result of her place being usurped by a new love interest of Nero’s; rather, it was as a consequence of her having espoused Britannicus’s cause before his death and Octavia’s after it. Tacitus (XIII, 19), after indulging in a bit of moralizing, touchingly describes the aftereffects of her fall from grace: “People’s veneration of another person’s power is the most precarious and transient thing in the world. Agrippina’s house was immediately deserted. Her only visitors and comforters were a few women, there because they loved her — ​or hated her.” 26. “Heaven’s dire decree” is a reference to “the end which Agrippina had anticipated for years. . . . When she had asked astrologers about Nero, they had answered that he would become emperor but kill his mother. Her reply was, ‘Let him kill me — ​provided he becomes emperor!’ ” (Tacitus, XIV, 9). (Unfortunately, this is an instance of “be careful what you wish for,” since, as mentioned earlier, Agrippina “could give her son the empire, but could not endure him as emperor” [Tacitus, XII, 64].) Agrippina refers to this fatal sentence twice more: to Nero, in their Act IV confrontation (IV.ii.169 –70), and to Burrhus, in the penultimate scene of the play (V.vii.6). 27. This is the second of three scenes that Agrippina and Britannicus share, the first having been the penultimate scene of Act I, the third being their brief encounter in the second scene of Act V, when Agrippina, scolding him good-​naturedly for his dilatoriness, bustles him off to his “reconciliation” with Nero (which proves so fatal). They would seem to be strange bedfellows, given Agrippina’s history of having successfully schemed to have her son usurp Britannicus’s position as Claudius’s heir presumptive (as Britannicus reminds her in his next speech). But in the first two of these scenes, as well as throughout the final act, both before and after Britannicus’s murder, we get the sense that Agrippina takes a genuine interest in his welfare, however much she may, at the same time, be using Britannicus to preserve a balance of power between herself and Nero, as she acknowledges to Albina in the opening scene of the play (lines 67–70). Nothing of Agrippina’s heartfelt concern appears in Tacitus, which is one of the reasons why Agrippina comes across as a much more sympathetic character in this play

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than she does in Tacitus’s account. As for any reciprocal feelings of camaraderie on Britannicus’s part, Tacitus writes that “Britannicus saw through his stepmother’s hypocrisy and treated her untimely attentions cynically” (XII, 26). Some of this surfaces in Racine’s play, Britannicus seeming somewhat taken aback at Agrippina’s proactively protective stance, and understandably skeptical: after their Act I encounter, as soon as Agrippina exits he turns to Narcissus and asks him if she can be trusted; and in the present scene he breaks out in bitter recriminations. Nonetheless, when she reassures him and renews her pledges to help him (lines 21–24 below), we are not disposed to disbelieve her. In regard to these first two scenes, by the way, we should also take due note that Narcissus is present in both of them, saying nothing, but taking in everything, undoubtedly panting to report back to Nero these signs of collusion on their part. 28. Junia is now an “ingrate” in his eyes, thanks to the nefarious charade Nero has staged in the prior act. His sister, as mentioned, is Octavia, Nero’s wife. 29. Tacitus mentions only one Rubellius Plautus, but regales us with a handful of Cornelius Sulla’s, so we are grateful to Forestier (1433) for informing us that the Sulla Racine had in mind here, a son-in-​law of Claudius, and Plautus, Claudius’s nephew, “were members of the imperial family, with some claim to the empire,” which probably explains why “Nero had them both executed in AD 62.” Piso, Forestier tells us, met no happier an end: “He would become the leader of an important conspiracy which planned to assassinate Nero in AD 65: the conspiracy uncovered, he was forced to commit suicide (at the same time as Seneca).” 30. Britannicus seems to read much into Agrippina’s astonished interjection (one is not sure whether she is delighted or dismayed to learn that there is such a groundswell of hostility toward her son), since it triggers such an angry, even vindictive, reply. He concludes that his words have done her an injury, but it appears, rather, that hers have done him the injury. 31. Picard (1102) points out that “here the great scene of Act  IV [he means the epic confrontation between Nero and Agrippina] is announced for the second time.” He omits to mention, however, that Agrippina will have it out with Nero not merely “soon or late” (“tôt ou tard”), but soon and late, for she will not have to wait until Act IV to confront him, and, in fact, must be rushing off at the end of this very scene to corner him (but hardly with the sole view of facilitating a lovers’ tryst), as we learn from Junia two scenes later (“I slipped away / While Agrippina held her son at bay” [III.viii.3 –4]) and from Nero himself two scenes after that (“Agrippina must have come to me / And dragged her discourse out so lengthily / Just to effectuate this hateful plot” (III.x.3 –5]). We do not get to witness that encounter, but we may surmise that her anger could scarce have had time to

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cool when they meet. At their later meeting, by contrast, Agrippina begins the proceedings in a markedly meek and submissive manner (as Burrhus advises her to do right before Nero enters). Indeed, the later meeting is more in the nature of an interrogation: to put it bluntly, Agrippina has been called on the carpet. And it is in that interview that Agrippina truly “drags her discourse out so lengthily”: her opening speech shares the distinction with Mithridates’ opening speech of Act III in the play that bears his name of being the longest in Racine. Certainly, it goes on long enough for her anger, by the end, to have once more worked up a full head of steam. 32. Britannicus is wondering whether Narcissus, who had previously encouraged his intimacy with Junia and reassured him that his love for her was reciprocated, can now be believed when he reports that Junia is unfaithful, if not wanton and treacherous. 33. Cf. II.iii.115 –18. 34. In the opening scene of this act, Burrhus rebukes Narcissus thus: “You calculate my motives by your own” (III.i.43); here, Narcissus outrageously imputes to the candid Junia the same insidious deviousness of which this very imputation proves him to be such a master. One might also take note, again, of the love-as-a-military-​campaign imagery in this speech: “retreat,” “win the Emperor’s hand,” “for glory’s sake,” “lay siege,” and “still-​unconquered.” (The French features “retraite,” “défaite,” “la gloire,” “vaincre,” and “invincible.”) See note 12 for Act II. 35. In the previous scene, Agrippina warned Britannicus, “But heed me: hide from Nero, hide!” (III.vi.32). Unfortunately for Britannicus, he can hide, but Narcissus can run! 36. See note 31 above. 37. This sarcastic, stinging retaliation on the part of the young, outraged lover begins like many a similar outburst in comedies of the period (Tartuffe features several such), but soon escalates to something unambiguously serious and far-​reaching. For Junia is, uniquely, the antithesis of the Roman character as it is depicted in this play — ​ambitious, perfidious, depraved, and cruel — ​and of which Britannicus, temporarily blinded by jealousy as he is, takes her to be the embodiment. 38. Ironically, love has a language of its own, but Britannicus has failed to translate it; rather, it is Nero who has proved the more proficient linguist: immediately after the lovers’ colloquy, Nero comments on what he has witnessed: “The violence of their love was plain to see: / It spoke despite her taciturnity. / She loves my rival — ​all the signs were there” (II.viii.1–3). 39. Cf. III.vi.32. Junia, too, advises him to avoid Nero, which makes Nero’s prompt entrance on the scene practically predictable. (See note 29 for Act II.) And of course he comes upon them “dans les pire conditions” (under the worst possible circumstances), as Picard (1102) puts it.

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40. Cf. Roxane’s realization concerning Bajazet and Atalide: Nay, by my earnest efforts [I] found a way To ensure their happy meeting every day, And, furthering her desires, rushed to confer The sweetest moments ever know to her. (Bajazet IV.iv.7–10)

Although Nero, unlike poor Roxane, has been duped only momentarily, not systematically, we may well imagine his fury upon realizing that his scheme to have Junia convince Britannicus that she no longer loves him has miscarried, to say the least. But Nero being Nero, he is loath to betray any vulnerability, any sense of having been ignominiously thwarted, and his acute discomfiture and jealousy find vent in a spate of mordant irony. 41. Cf. Jocasta’s plaintive plea to her sons in The Fratricides: Are your hard hearts not softened when they see This room which witnessed your nativity? It’s here you two first saw the light of day; Love, kindness, peace are all it should convey. (The Fratricides IV.iii.51–54) 42. Racine resourcefully makes use of an actual incident, reported by Tacitus (XII, 41), that had occurred several years before, during “a meeting between the two boys at which Nero had greeted Britannicus by that name, but Britannicus addressed him as ‘Domitius,’ ” which Agrippina resented as “a contemptuous neglect of the adoption [of Nero by Claudius].” Tacitus does not make it clear whether Britannicus’s indiscretion was malicious or not, but here it is clearly meant as a dig. 43. But Nero, after all, is only three years older than Britannicus. 44. Here begins Racine’s most flamboyant and extended passage of stichomythia. A technique adopted from the classical drama, it consists of rapid-​fire alternating dialogue (usually of single lines, though here Racine has recourse to several exchanges of couplets): a verbal thrust and parry most often employed to focus and intensify the conflict between two characters. In the famous eavesdropping scene in the previous act, Britannicus, with excruciatingly bad timing, proceeded to bad-​mouth Nero politically and to vaunt his own relationship with Junia; here, he takes several further political swipes at Nero and insults his amorous aspirations as well, once again losing no opportunity of putting his foot in his mouth. 45. Cf. Polynices’ similar arrogance of entitlement in The Fratricides: Let the mob love or loathe us at their choice; Blood sets us on the throne, not their blind voice:

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What blood bestows on them they mayn’t reject; A prince they cannot love they must respect. (The Fratricides II.iii.31–34) The people must obey my every hest, Though everything I do they may detest. (The Fratricides IV.iii.58 –59) 46. Cf. II.ii.71–72: the identical conceit. 47. Britannicus’s last jab proves too much for Nero: it has drawn blood. Realizing he has been bested in this war of words, he must resort to force. The power of Roman rhetoric has been supplanted by the more persuasive power of brute force: another aspect of the true tragedy of this play. 48. This prepares us for Junia’s attempt to seek asylum as a vestal virgin, as will be reported in the final scene of the play. 49. In Bajazet (II.ii), Akhmet, the vizier, makes a similar entrance to Burrhus’s: each displays utter consternation at finding his charge (Britannicus in Burrhus’s case, Bajazet in Akhmet’s case) falling victim to the fury of an offended potentate (Nero here, Roxane, the sultaness, in the later play). 50. Junia told Britannicus that she “slipped away / While Agrippina held her son at bay” (III.viii.3 –4), and while Nero may be correct in surmising that Agrippina prolonged their talk in order to enable the lovers’ tête-à-​tête, she had clearly been hell-​bent on confronting her son when we last saw her in III.vi. 51. In Tacitus (XIII, 18), Nero, learning that Agrippina was attempting to curry favor with noblemen and officers in order to organize a party to support her, “withdrew the military bodyguard which she had been given as empress and retained as the emperor’s mother [and] terminated her great receptions by giving her a separate residence. . . . When he visited her there, he would bring an escort of staff-​officers.”

act iv 1. Jocularity would hardly seem a likely constituent of Burrhus’s character, but it is hard to imagine he could be seriously suggesting so implausible an explanation for Nero’s having forcibly detained Agrippina in the palace. Indeed, if one were to place Burrhus’s words in Nero’s mouth, with the single change of possessive pronoun from “his” to “my” (“son” to “mon” in the French), the lines would strongly echo Nero’s earlier, dripping-with-​sarcasm reprimand to Junia: “Perhaps I too am owed such courtesies: / I’ve kept you captive here to enable you / To afford him such a tender interview” (III.ix.4 – 6). 2. Creon (in The Fratricides) makes virtually the same point to Jocasta, about her sons’ alternately occupying the Theban throne: “Madame, one

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cannot share imperial reign; / It’s not a boon one cedes, then claims again” (The Fratricides I.v.17–18). Agrippina’s late husband, Claudius, learned that lesson to his cost, when, having allowed his wife free rein to run the empire, he “opened his eyes at last” and “saw his error,” for he found that (as Agrippina gloatingly recalls in the next scene) “bed, palace, guards were in my power” (IV.ii.61– 62, 65). Of course, Agrippina little suspected at that time that she would one day find herself as helplessly subservient to Nero’s power as Claudius was to hers. 3. Quite a distance indeed, as reflected in the length of this récit: at 108 lines (111 in my translation), it is, along with Mithridates’ opening speech of Act III, as mentioned above, the longest in Racine. (Mithridates’ speech, in fact, literally covers a huge distance, as he, first, thrillingly recounts the perils and travails of his escape to freedom after his army’s defeat at Pompey’s hands, a journey covering hundreds of miles, and then proceeds to lay out his plans to march on Rome.) 4. The sole reference, in the play that bears his name, to Britannicus’s mother, Messalina (and even here, Racine discreetly omits her name, as being a byword for depravity). See notes 6 and 56 for Act I. 5. Tacitus (XII, 1–4) entertainingly recounts the hotly contested competition for the empress’s crown that took place in the immediate wake of Messalina’s untimely demise, each candidate, with her own “backer,” jockeying for the lead. Here is one excerpt (XII, 1): Each cited her own high birth, beauty, and wealth as qualifications for this exalted marriage. The chief competitors were Lollia Paulina, daughter of the former consul Marcus Lollius (II), and Germanicus’ daughter Agrippina (II). Their backers were Callistus and Pallas respectively. Narcissus supported Aelia Paetina. . . . The emperor continually changed his mind according to whatever advice he heard last. 6. About this line, Turnell (111) comments: “This is one of the passages which demonstrate how greatly the simple colourless words and the resulting understatement heighten the effect. When she says ‘Je fléchis mon orgueil, j’allais prier Pallas’ [I curbed my pride, I went to petition Pallas], we know that ‘prier’ means: ‘I gave myself to him in return for a promise to help me into the emperor’s bed and on to his throne.’ He further remarks that “she emerges plainly as the strumpet, ready to barter her body for power and to use the strumpet’s wiles to achieve her end.” 7. Agrippina is the daughter of Claudius’s brother Germanicus. 8. “The senate was seduced” by the obliging Lucius Vitellius, whose heavy-​handed rhetoric and transparently manipulative arguments Tacitus (XII, 5 –7) quotes at length. Here is a sample:

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We agree unanimously, then, that the emperor should marry. The chosen lady must be aristocratic, capable of child-​bearing, and virtuous. Agrippina’s exceptionally illustrious birth is indisputable. She has demonstrated her fertility. [But never would again: Nero remained her only child.] Her morals are equally outstanding. [Of their putative excellence there was to be no further evidence either, one might add.] . . . Marriage to a niece, it may be objected, is unfamiliar to us. Yet in other countries it is regular and lawful. . . . Customs change as circumstances change — ​this innovation too will take root. Apparently, Roman soil proved inhospitable to this particular innovation, however, since, after the senate, at Claudius’s instigation, had legalized future marriages with a brother’s daughter, “only one other seeker after this sort of union is identifiable,” as Tacitus proceeds to inform us, “a knight named Alledius Severus, whose motive was believed to be the hope of Agrippina’s favor.” 9. Cf. I.i.63 – 64 and note 19 for Act I. 10. That being the case, Silanus’s suicide, collateral damage from Nero’s marriage to Octavia, could have been avoided if Agrippina had deemed it sufficient to establish Nero as Claudius’s stepson. Interestingly, Racine seems never to have used the word “beau-​fils” (French for stepson) in any of his plays, even though Phaedra, for instance, would have offered ample opportunity to resort to it, Hippolytus being Phaedra’s stepson. 11. See note 15 for Act III for Tacitus’s account (XII, 25 –26), of which these two couplets provide a faithful précis. 12. It is unclear what past is being recalled, unless it be Livia’s similar machinations on behalf of her son Tiberius (see note 22 for Act III), which resulted in his displacement of Agrippa, the heir apparent, as emperor. 13. According to Tacitus (XII, 41), this alienation from Britannicus of friends, partisans, and former slaves was a consequence of Agrippina’s “appeal” to Claudius, this “appeal” amounting, rather, to her blowing out of all proportion the slight (whether intentional or not) that Britannicus had delivered to Nero in addressing him as Domitius, instead of by his adoptive name of Nero (which incident Racine has dramatized as a deliberately provocative insult in Act III [III.ix.15 –16]). Tacitus reports it thus: “Agrippina complained vigorously to her husband. This was a first sign of unfriendliness, she said, a contemptuous neglect of the adoption, a contradiction — ​ in the emperor’s own home — ​of a national measure, voted by the senate and enacted by the people.” 14. Tacitus’s account of Agrippina’s outraged complaint continues thus, directly from the just-​cited quotation: “Disaster for Rome would ensue, she added, unless malevolent and corrupting teachers were removed. Disturbed

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by these implied accusations, the emperor banished or executed all Britannicus’ best tutors and put him under the control of his stepmother’s nominees.” 15. See note 41 for Act I. 16. Agrippina, clearly on the verge of spontaneously inveighing against her nemeses, Burrhus and Seneca (as she did at length to Burrhus himself in their first encounter [I.ii]), thinks better of it, opting to “stay on point.” 17. See note 9 for Act III. 18. Suetonius (“Claudius,” 43) makes more explicit those regrets on Claudius’s part that even Agrippina herself acknowledges here: “In his last years Claudius made it pretty plain that he repented of having married Agrippina and adopted Nero . . . and presently, meeting Britannicus, embraced him with deep affection. . . . With that, he quoted in Greek . . . : ‘The hand that wounded you shall also heal [you],’ and declared his intention of letting Britannicus come of age because although immature, he was tall enough to wear a gown; adding ‘which will at last provide Rome with a true-​born Caesar.’ ” 19. See note 2 above. 20. Tacitus’s description (XII, 68) of Agrippina’s devious ploy to intercept Britannicus and keep him from his father (“Agrippina, with broken-​ hearted demeanor, held Britannicus to her as though to draw comfort from him. He was the very image of his father, she declared”) strikingly recalls (or, one should say, anticipates) Nero’s maneuver to bar Agrippina from the throne (again, telle mère, tel fils), that game-​changing incident that Agrippina bitterly recounts in Act I (I.i.99 –112). See note 29 for Act I. 21. Cf. the strategically startling placement of this uncharacteristically short but pithy sentence (“Il mourut”) with the similarly situated clause, “Elle est morte” (She is dead), in Agamemnon’s closing speech of the first scene of Act I of Iphigenia, when he tells his servant Arcas, “If into Aulis my dear child should stray, / She’s dead” (Iphigenia I.i.135 –36). 22. What the import of these “damning rumors” was, Agrippina leaves unspoken. But that a briefer account of the circumstances of Claudius’s death than “Il mourut” would be impossible to conceive may suggest that she had something to hide. On this subject, Suetonius (“Claudius,” 44), for once, is rather circumspect: “Most people think that Claudius was poisoned; but when, and by whom, is disputed.” Since Suetonius himself admits, however, that “an equal discrepancy exists between the accounts of what happened next,” and since, furthermore, Suetonius cannot reasonably be expected to have had any specialized knowledge in these matters, I think the reader would be better served by my offering the following expert testimony, at once edifying and entertaining, thoughtfully cited (in a footnote) by Robert Graves, the translator of my reference edition of Suetonius: “Mr. and Mrs. Gordon Wasson’s forthcoming treatise on mushrooms shows pretty conclusively that Claudius was poisoned by an edible boletus cooked

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in the sauce of a very similar poisonous variety; that he then vomited up the poison; that he was poisoned a second time with the juice of the Palestinian wild-​gourd, or colocynth (2 Kings, iv. 40) administered both orally and by enema; and that he was finally smothered.” 23. Tacitus (XII, 68): “Consuls and priests offered prayers for the emperor’s safety. But meanwhile his already lifeless body was being wrapped in blankets and poultices.” 24. Forestier (1435 – 6) points out that “the simultaneity of this announcement is reported by neither Tacitus nor Suetonius” and that Racine borrowed the idea from Tacitus’s earlier account of the exactly parallel circumstances preceding Livia’s simultaneous announcement of Augustus’s death and her son Tiberius’s accession to the imperial throne. But Racine does not merely appropriate Tacitus’s bit of reportage; he ingeniously exploits it, this line serving as a linchpin to anchor Agrippina’s récit, echoing as it does those two earlier, extraordinary, brusque, two-​word statements that she makes in the course of it: “Vous régnez” (You reign, line 5) and “Il mourut” (He died, line 70, discussed in note 21 above). These two line-​ beginning sentences, so conspicuously set off in her speech, function like textual “bullets,” as if to mark the two crucial “points” she wished to raise in her “plaidoyer” (speech for the defense, as Picard [1103] terms it). Together (albeit in reverse order) they offer, in effect, a neat précis, as it were, of her lengthy narrative. And we may presume (as she doubtless hopes Nero will) that, although she makes no explicit claims, she was no less instrumental in bringing about Claudius’s death than she was in machinating, maneuvering, and manipulating to ensure Nero’s succession as emperor, and reasonably expects to win points as much for the one as for the other. (That Nero does indeed make the desired inference is made clear toward the end of the play, when, attempting to deflect attention from his own apparent culpability in Britannicus’s murder, he delivers this stinging rejoinder to Agrippina: “One would believe, to listen to his wife, / That I curtailed the days of Claudius’ life” [V.vi.6 –7], undoubtedly much to her discomfiture, although she ignores the insinuation.) 25. “Senecio was the son of one of Claudius’s freed slaves. As to Otho [a.d. 32 – 69], a voluptuary [“voluptueux,” as in Racine] whom Nero ended by sending away in order to live with his wife, Poppea, he was the second of the three emperors to succeed Nero [reigning for three months, until his death in April] in the course of the year following his [Nero’s] suicide (in AD 68)” (Forestier, 1436). (The Nero-Poppea-​Otho love triangle had rather recently been given immortal operatic treatment by Claudio Monteverdi [1567–1643] in his L’Incoronazione di Poppea [1642], and would be so treated again by George Frideric Handel [1685 –1759] in his Agrippina [1709].) 26. Tacitus (XIII, 6) writes that “in Rome, where gossip thrives, people asked how an emperor who was only just seventeen could endure or repel

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the shock [of an impending Parthian invasion]. A youth under feminine control was not reassuring.” 27. See note 16 for Act III. 28. See note 46 below. 29. As indicated by this line, Burrhus makes his presence known at this point. This is confirmed by his delighted effusions, at the beginning of the following scene, at having witnessed such “an enchanting scene,” featuring “such embraces, such accord” (IV.iii.1, 2). 30. That Agrippina’s list of demands gushes forth so glibly as soon as she is prompted by Nero, would seem to give credence to Narcissus’s report, in his scene with Nero later in this act, that Agrippina had boasted “that it would take one moment, Sire, at most, / For all your outbursts, all your deadly hate, / In modest silence to evaporate” (IV.iv.28 –30). But, while it is possible that she might well have expected some such return on her investment of 108 lines of, doubtless, well-​rehearsed rhetoric, it is unlikely that she would have had both the time and the tactlessness to make such a boast; and on the other hand, nothing is more likely than that Narcissus should have expediently fabricated such an allegation on the spot. 31. The misgivings that Nero’s own glibness arouses in us as he rattles off these concessions will prove well justified by his announcement to Burrhus, at the beginning of the next scene, of his undaunted determination to do away with his stepbrother. In fact, one can almost hear Britannicus’s death knell sound when Nero tells his mother to “bear these joyful tidings to my brother” (line 192), for they ominously echo Nero’s insidious words to Narcissus at the end of their Act II conference, announcing his intention to allow Britannicus to meet with Junia, “This sweet news convey: / He shall see her” (II.ii.147–48), for we have already learned what nightmarish sort of tête-à-​tête he had arranged. (In the French, the echo is even more minatory, owing to the strikingly similar diction: “porte-​lui cette douce nouvelle” [bear him this sweet news] and “portez cette joie à mon frère” [bear this joy to my brother].) One might note, by the way, that Nero’s last line (“Gardes, qu’on obéisse aux ordres de ma mère”) echoes the likewise seemingly propitiatory orders that Eteocles, Jocasta’s son, issues: “Créon, la Reine ici command en mon absence; / Disposez tout le monde à son obéissance” (“Creon, the Queen [i.e., Jocasta] rules here while I’m away; / Make certain, please, that one and all obey” [The Fratricides I.iii.9 –10]). These orders also follow hard upon professions to accommodate certain requests by his mother, but he too has no real intention of making any concessions. 32. Burrhus’s elation may remind one of the similarly premature exulting by Akhmet, the fatuous vizier in Bajazet, who deludedly believes that Bajazet and Roxane, the sultaness, have been reconciled (“Our lovers now have reached a sweet accord. / The storm is over; calm has been restored. / The Sultaness’s anger has subsided” [Bajazet III.ii.1–3]). Burrhus’s delight

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is short-​lived, however, Nero almost immediately disabusing him of his misapprehension. 33. This line (“J’embrasse mon rival, mais c’est pour l’étouffer” [literally, I embrace my rival, but it is in order to smother him]) is Racine’s reworking of a line of Creon’s in The Fratricides, expressing his hope that his two nephews, Eteocles and Polynices (the titular siblings), will kill each other when they meet: “Ils s’étouffent . . . en voulant s’embrasser” ([That] they may smother each other, in wishing to embrace one another). 34. Again, he writhes under the burden of his vaunted “three virtuous years” (II.ii.90). 35. A recurrent theme in Racine’s plays, from his first, The Fratricides (see note 45 for Act III for the relevant four-​line quotation [The Fratricides II.iii.31–34], a speech by Polynices, beginning with “Let the mob love or loathe us at their choice”), to his last, Athaliah ( Jehoiada’s admonition to Joash: “Our sacred laws — ​so they’ll be counseling — / Rule the vile people, but obey the king; / From all constraints, they’ll say, kings should be free; / Their will should be their sole authority; / All else must bow before their majesty” [Athaliah IV.iii.87–91]). 36. Again, compare Jehoiada’s words of wisdom to Joash: “Fawning, flattering voices fascinate. . . . And thus, from snare to snare, abyss to abyss, / Corrupting your pure heart, your pristine youth, / They’ll make you, in the end, despise the truth, / Painting fair virtue as a frightful thing” (Athaliah IV.iii.86, 95 –98). 37. As Forestier (1437) points out, these lines draw upon and conflate two passages from Seneca’s De Clementia (I, 8), including, for example, “For crimes must be sustained by crimes,” which Racine renders as a metaphor in line 42 (“Et laver dans le sang vos bras ensanglantés”). The second passage Forestier cites includes an observation (“The parents and children of those who have been killed, and those near and dear to them, all will take the place of each of them”) that put me in mind of the image of a hydra and, consequently, exposed the flaw in Seneca’s warning: for, after all, didn’t Herakles slay the Lernaean Hydra, and hasn’t many a tyrant been able, finally, to suppress his enemies by dint of brute force, sheer numbers, terror tactics, and threats to kill those very friends and relatives who Seneca says will come to the aid of the tyrant’s victims? Finally, let me offer this intriguing sidebar: when I eventually looked up the passage in Corneille’s Cinna (cited but not quoted by Forestier) that he points out had been inspired by the same passage in De Clementia, what should I find but the following? Ma cruauté se lasse, et ne peut s’arrêter. Je veux me faire craindre, et ne fais qu’irriter; Rome a pour ma ruine une Hydre trop fertile. Une tête coupée en fait renaître mille. (Octave César Auguste in Cinna IV.ii.1163 – 66)

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And here is my impromptu rhymed translation of same: My cruelty palls, and yet cannot abate. Those I’d make tremble I just make irate. Rome has a teeming Hydra, for my woe: For every head cut off, a thousand grow. 38. Again, per Forestier (1437), this rhetorical barrage (lines 55 – 62) was adopted from passages in Seneca’s De Clementia. 39. According to Suetonius’s account (“Nero,” 10), the incident Burrhus’s anecdote recalls was not an isolated one but, rather, a regular routine: “If asked to sign the usual execution order for a felon, he would sigh: ‘Ah, how I wish that I had never learned to write!’ ” By implication, then, he signed them all nonetheless, however regretfully. Tellingly, this episode is embedded, in Suetonius, within the same section that relates how “he recited his own poems, both at home and in the Theatre: a performance which so delighted everyone that a special Thanksgiving was voted him, as though he had won a great victory, and the passages he had chosen were printed in letters of gold on plaques dedicated to Capitoline Juppiter.” And one can imagine that the sycophantic chuckles, if not gasps of admiration, with which Nero’s above-​cited bon mot was greeted so delighted him that he felt obliged to repeat that performance every time he sentenced a petty thief to death, so as not to deprive those in attendance of such an uplifting sample of their emperor’s humanity and wit. 40. Here, Burrhus combines with the open hand of rhetoric and the bent knee of supplication (literally, from the Latin for “kneeling”) this theatrical gesture of self-​sacrifice, and can one be surprised that it succeeds in evoking even Nero’s tears (always on tap for a seasoned actor, who, moreover, would be particularly well qualified to appreciate such a performance)? 41. In the previous scene, Nero, seemingly capitulating to his mother’s complaints and acquiescing to her pleas, places himself in her hands, asking, “Well, then! pronounce. What do you want from me?” (IV.ii.177), and, as mentioned earlier, after she has stated her demands, he apparently agrees to accommodate every one of them. Here, he asks Burrhus, “What would you have?”; but as Burrhus breathlessly runs off “to arrange so sweet an interview,” Nero responds much more tentatively and equivocally, merely announcing that he will await Burrhus and Britannicus in his rooms. As the opening of this scene proved that Nero’s capitulation to Agrippina had merely been an expedient charade and, hence, that he had not been swayed by a single word she said, we may surmise that his more guarded attitude now, his failure to respond to Burrhus’s entreaties with the same ready, explicit, and blanket approval with which he responded to Agrippina’s, may actually hold greater promise of Burrhus’s words having hit home, or at

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least of their having given him some food for thought. For we shall see that certain of the concerns that Burrhus has raised (“In Roman hearts is Nero tired of reigning? / What will men say?” [IV.iii.26 –27]) — ​those, let it be noted, that appeal to Nero’s vanity, to his regard for his reputation, and to his craving for adulation, rather than to his (nonexistent) fraternal feelings, his pity, or his humanity — ​are the very ones that Nero will echo in his upcoming interview with Narcissus (“But then, what would our people say of me? . . . Let Rome strip me of titles and of fame / And honor Nero with a poisoner’s name?” [IV.iv.37, 39 –40] — ​typically, Nero has no misgivings about being a poisoner, only about being branded as one). 42. According to Tacitus (XII, 66), who is far less hesitant than Suetonius (see note 56 for Act I and note 22 for this act) in ascribing Claudius’s death to his wife’s agency, Agrippina had made use of this very Locusta’s services in doing away with her husband (yet again, telle mère, tel fils): Agrippina had long decided on murder. Now she saw her opportunity. . . . But she needed advice about poisons. A sudden, drastic effect would give her away. A gradual, wasting recipe might make Claudius, confronted with death, love his son again. What was needed was something subtle that would upset the emperor’s faculties but produce a deferred fatal effect. An expert in such matters was selected — ​a woman called Locusta, recently sentenced for poisoning but with a long career of imperial service ahead of her. By her talents, a preparation was supplied. 43. Although, on the one hand, Racine exaggerates the barbarity of the actual incident, which did not involve using a human as a guinea pig, on the other hand, it was Nero himself (since the historical Narcissus was dead by this point) who oversaw, with admirable humaneness, the testing of Locusta’s brew, as Suetonius’s edifying account (“Nero,” 33) attests: The drug came from an expert poisoner named Locusta, and when its action was not so rapid as he expected — ​the effect was violently laxative — ​he called for her, complaining that she had given him medicine instead of poison, and flogged her with his own hands. Locusta explained that she had reduced the dose to make the crime less obvious. “Oho!” he said. “So you think that I am afraid of the Julian law against poisoning?” Then he led Locusta into his bedroom and stood over her while she concocted the fastest-​working poison in her pharmacopoeia. This he administered to a kid, but when it took five hours to die he made her boil down the brew again and again. At last he tried it on a pig, which died on the spot; and that night at dinner had what remained poured into Britannicus’s cup.

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44. This conceit, which comes directly from Tacitus (XIII, 15), is repeated in Burrhus’s eyewitness account of Britannicus’s demise (V.v.15). (The French for Narcissus’s line is “Et le fer est moins prompt pour trancher une vie” [And the sword is less swift to sever a life]; the French for Burrhus’s is “Le fer ne produit point de si puissants efforts” [The sword does not produce such powerful results]. 45. In both Racine’s first play, The Fratricides, and his last, Athaliah, a parallel situation occurs, wherein a monarch’s evil counselor is taken aback to learn that his sovereign seems to have relented toward a common enemy. In the earlier play, Creon, uncle and treacherous advisor to Eteocles, king of Thebes, has the following exchange with his nephew, when the latter seems on the verge of ceding the throne to his brother, Polynices. Eteocles: “Creon, my mind’s made up, I say.” Creon: “And thus you abdicate your sovereign sway?” Eteocles: “Whether I do or not shouldn’t trouble you. / Do as I bid” (The Fratricides I.iv.17–20). In this instance, the monarch’s supercilious retort puts the other in his place, as Nero’s retort will do to Narcissus in a few moments (lines 22 –23). In the later play, Mathan, pontiff of Baal, fearing that Athaliah, his queen, seeks some entente with Jehoiada, high priest of the Jews, remonstrates: “Amongst your foes what can you hope to gain? / Dare you approach a temple so profane? / Have you forsworn a hate you held so dear?” (Athaliah II.v.3 –5). In all three cases, the monarch’s inimical attitude is, sooner or later, reassuringly restored. 46. Picard (1103) makes the provocative point that “Narcissus plays upon Nero’s psychology like a seasoned practitioner; he tries three sensitive areas.” First, he attempts to rekindle Nero’s hatred for Britannicus; Nero, however, seems determined to extinguish it. Second, he works on Nero’s jealousy, goading him about Britannicus marrying Junia; Nero sidesteps this issue, still refusing to rise to the bait. “Nero,” Picard continues, “reacts only to the third, when it is a question of Agrippina: one sees to what extent the confrontation of Scene 2 has been a failure for her.” Indeed, one might deem it a foreordained failure. In Section V of the Discussion, I pointed out how little corroboration the play provides for Nero’s allegation to Narcissus that “soon as ill luck propels her [Agrippina] into view . . . it seems, for all my efforts, naught avails: / Astounded by her soul, my own soul quails” (II.ii.128, 133 –34). And so it is here: it is not the mere mention of Agrippina that provokes him, but the realization that Agrippina still believes she can outplay him, and that, hence, she must now believe she has. (We should bear in mind, however, that Agrippina’s “boast” is more than likely a fabrication on Narcissus’s part — ​see note 30 above.) Of course, as I have previously argued, his wholesale surrender to his mother at the end of IV.ii had only been a sham. Nevertheless, it is only at this point that, righteously indignant, he feels he has been given enough justification to plausibly be swayed by Narcissus’s persuasive arguments. As Racine observes in his second preface,

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“What we have here is a monster being born, but who dares not declare himself, and who seeks pretexts for his wicked actions” (italics mine). 47. Here, Nero begins to parrot Burrhus’s admonitions from the previous scene, with the (well-​founded) hope and expectation that Narcissus will know how to expertly counter every one of them and reassure him that he will be able to carry out his plan to murder Britannicus with complete impunity, which is, after all, his underlying telos. 48. Tacitus (III, 66) observes that “this was a tainted, meanly obsequious age. The greatest figures had to protect their positions by subserviency . . . [and] competed with each other’s sycophantic proposals. There is a tradition that whenever Tiberius left the senate-​house he exclaimed in Greek: ‘Men fit to be slaves!’ Even he, freedom’s enemy, became impatient of such abject servility.” 49. In fact, according to Tacitus (XIV, 12), it was after Nero’s unacknowledged murder of Agrippina, in the wake of his round denunciations of his ill-​fated mother (couched in a letter to the senate), that among the sycophantic suggestions that flooded in to commemorate so blessed a riddance was “the inclusion of Agrippina’s birthday among ill-​omened dates.” 50. Here, Nero confesses to the sway Burrhus holds over him, just as, earlier, he had confessed to Agrippina’s sway over him (II.ii.127–134). But neither confession is very credible; Nero never really confesses: he professes. In regard to Agrippina’s professed power over him, I have argued strenuously for its being illusory (see Section V of the Discussion). And Nero’s professed susceptibility to Burrhus’s reasons and rhetoric holds up no better under closer scrutiny. Earlier, Nero himself had somewhat condescendingly advised Burrhus that “I’ll trust your counsel when . . . we must maintain the glory of our arms, / Or when . . . we deliberate . . . on affairs of state: / Then, on your wisdom I’ll place my reliance. / Believe me, though, love’s quite another science” (III.ii.31–36). But would it not be just as valid to add that hate is “quite another science,” that jealousy is, that ambition is, that vindictiveness is — ​subjects about which Nero would undoubtedly be equally unwilling to trust Burrhus’s counsel? Furthermore, moments after Nero has uttered the lines just quoted (in the very next scene), Burrhus himself is obliged to admit that “his wildness, which you thought you could subdue, / Is ready, Burrhus, to break free from you” (III.iii.2 –3). 51. Suetonius has a field day with Nero’s musical, athletic, and thespian pretensions, his richly amusing account (“Nero,” 20 –25) taking up five pages in Robert Graves’s translation. Space considerations must limit my selections to the following fascinating reminiscences: [Nero] conscientiously undertook all the usual exercises for strengthening and developing the voice. He would lie on his back with a slab of lead on his chest, use enemas and emetics to keep

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down his weight, and refrain from eating apples and every other food considered deleterious to the vocal cords. . . . His first stage appearance was at Naples where, disregarding an earthquake which shook the theatre [it collapsed just after the audience had dispersed], he sang his piece through to the end. No one was allowed to leave the theatre during his recitals, however pressing the reason, and the gates were kept barred. We read of women in the audience giving birth, and of men being so bored with the music and the applause that they furtively dropped down from the wall at the rear, or shammed dead and were carried away for burial. . . . Though usually gracious and charming to other competitors, whom he treated as equals, he abused them behind their backs, and often insulted them to their faces; and if any were particularly good singers, he would bribe them not to do themselves justice. On several occasions he took part in the chariot racing, and at Olympia drove a ten-​horse team, a novelty for which he had censured King Mithridates [not to be confused with the title character of one of Racine’s later plays] in one of his own poems. He lost his balance, fell from the chariot and had to be helped in again; but, though he failed to stay the course and retired before the finish, the judges nevertheless awarded him the prize. Droll as these anecdotes may be, they serve to demonstrate the almost surreal lengths of self-​indulgence that imperial omnipotence sanctioned. 52. Tacitus (XIV, 15) describes Nero’s claque (or, rather, squad of bully­ boys): “Now, too, was formed the corps of Roman knights known as the Augustiani. These powerful young men, impudent by nature or ambition, maintained a din of applause day and night, showering divine epithets on Nero’s beauty and voice.” 53. Narcissus’s speech serves his purpose in three ways. First and foremost, it is designed to fan the flames of Nero’s anger, attacking him in another of his most “sensitive areas” (see note 46 above): his vanity. Second, it gives Narcissus an opportunity to vent his pent-​up resentment and envy of Burrhus, by whom we have witnessed him (in the reinstated first scene of Act  III) being lectured in a most patronizing and belittling manner. (Note that Narcissus discreetly camouflages Burrhus among “these prideful masters” [whoever they might be], since we may be certain that Burrhus himself would never have uttered any such slurs against the emperor.) And, third, it allows him to express with impunity the contempt in which his all too authentically snide and circumstantial account of Nero’s detractors’

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animadversions suggests he himself holds his master. (His relish is almost palpable.) 54. At the end of the second scene of this act (Nero’s crucial confrontation with his mother), his words and deportment seem to suggest that he plans to comply with Agrippina’s demands; they certainly give no hint of his intention to have his stepbrother murdered. The end of the third scene (his interview with Burrhus), on the contrary, appears inconclusive, as does that of this scene, whose curtain line is quite open-​ended. In regard to the first of these scenes (IV.ii), we are almost immediately disabused of the false impression Nero has convincingly created, for the following scene has hardly begun before Nero has revealed to Burrhus his murderous designs on Britannicus. In regard to the third of these scenes (the present one), Nero’s apparent indecisiveness will likewise prove to have been a consciously affected pose, for, however equivocal Nero’s last line may be, any hypothetical reluctance that he might have felt to set in motion Britannicus’s assassination must have been so meager and momentary as to be insignificant, given that he was able to overcome it in the brief interval available to him before he would have had to begin working his charms on both Britannicus and Agrippina (flattering and blandishing them into a state of almost imbecile adoration, gushing gratitude, and utter unsuspiciousness), working out the logistics of the actual poisoning, and setting the stage for the elaborate charade of his public reconciliation with Britannicus (see the final paragraph of Section XIII of the Discussion). Thus, we have two contrasting scenes: in the first (IV.ii), Nero makes his intentions as explicit as possible, but it is subsequently revealed that those stated intentions were barefaced lies; in the second (IV.iv), Nero deliberately adopts an air of irresoluteness, but it is subsequently revealed that his intentions were as unshakably decided upon as he had led us to believe, in the earlier scene, his stated intentions were. But, highly contrasted as the conclusions of these two scenes may be in this regard, they are both nonetheless utterly characteristic of Nero, for, in the first case, it is typical of Nero’s vain nature that the less resolved he is to heed someone else’s orders or advice, the more likely he is to pretend that he will, taking narcissistic pleasure in his performance of the part of obedient son or pupil (though perhaps laying it on a bit thick in the florid opening of his acquiescence speech to Agrippina) and delighting, in his quasi-​professional pride, to make his lip service sound convincing; and in the second case, it is likewise characteristic that, conversely, the more resolved he is to heed his interlocutor’s advice, the less likely he is to deign to admit such a demeaning subservience. And, of course, from a more pragmatic viewpoint, Nero’s equivocal exit line allows Racine to keep the audience in suspense throughout most of Act V, although even Britannicus’s genuinely optimistic outlook and Agrippina’s somewhat forced ebullience can do little to dispel the sense of impending doom to which, by contrast, Junia is prey. And, to return once

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again to the second of these scenes (IV.iii), while there is evidence to suggest that certain of the arguments Burrhus raises in the course of his outspoken, impassioned, and heartfelt response to Nero’s brutal revelation make some impression on his charge (see note 41 above), it can also be argued that Burrhus’s words have no decisively dissuasive effect on him (see notes 47 and 50 above). For my part, I cannot believe that the “monstre” that Racine has taken such pains to portray (whether budding or full blown, but in either case certainly a “fleur du mal”) would, after his encounter with Burrhus, suddenly and seriously resolve to cede his claim to Junia, to reconcile with his stepbrother, Britannicus, and to gallantly stand aside and witness their wedding. I remain skeptical about his having contemplated such a course even for a moment. On this question, I entertain the same doubts as Junia raises to Britannicus (“But now, he loved me and swore to seal your fate; / He seeks you out now, while he flees from me” [V.i.28 –29]), and ask, with her, “Can such a change be wrought so rapidly?” (V.i.30). No: I believe that when Nero announces to Narcissus his intention to make those concessions that Agrippina has exacted from him, it is with the sole purpose of goading Narcissus into talking him out of it, that is, providing him with plausible pretexts for his carrying out his real designs, and offering him reassurances that he will not have to answer for any consequences.

act v 1. In the very first sentence of Britannicus’s act-​opening speech, wherein he waxes almost euphoric, dwelling exclusively on the favorable auspices for a new era of understanding between himself and Nero, Racine, in order to subtly undermine that optimistic outlook, has him make use of the key word, “embrace,” which Nero’s recent use (IV.iii.10) has charged with such an ominous connotation (“I’ll clasp my rival, yes — ​until he’s crushed” [literally translated: I embrace my rival, but it is in order to smother him]). The ironic echo sounds sharper in the French, where the two lines end with parallel prepositional phrases, sharing the same rhyme: “pour l’étouffer” (in order to smother him) and “pour m’embrasser” (in order to embrace me). And four lines later (V.i.6), Racine, to reinforce the irony, has Britannicus enthuse over “l’ardeur de nos embrassements” (the warmth of our embraces, which is paraphrased in line 5 of my translation). 2. What Nero really wishes to confirm “in men’s sight” is his newly unrestrained omnipotence, being determined to “go public” with his evil nature by means of an egregiously wicked act, which he implicitly defies anyone to chastise or even challenge. It is a coming-​out party of sorts, to celebrate his accession, not to manhood, but to “monsterhood.”

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3. Britannicus’s amenability to the renunciation of power in favor of love may bespeak his youthful ardor and naïveté, but it also succeeds in making a more epically moral statement, when we bear in mind that that very antinomy of love versus power is the grand, overriding theme of, for example, such a monumental work as Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (the Ring cycle). See Section XII of my Discussion. 4. And here Britannicus pays tribute to her noble preference of love over power (see note 3 above). 5. Cf. II.ii.15 and note the striking similarity between the image and language there (“levant au ciel ses yeux mouillés de larmes” [raising to heaven her eyes moist with tears]) and here (“vos yeux, vos tristes yeux / Avec de longs regards se tournent vers les cieux” [your eyes, your sad eyes, with long glances turn toward the heavens]). See note 4 for Act II and note 50 below. 6. Agrippina confirms her prognostication after Britannicus’s murder (V.vi.28 –29). Her fears are based on the dual realization that, with Britannicus’s death, she will have no one to “maintain the balance . . .’twixt my son and me” (I.i.68, 70), and that his murder will set a precedent for her own. Tacitus neatly sums this up in his account of the immediate aftermath of that murder: “Agrippina realized that her last support was gone. And here was Nero murdering a relation” (XIII, 16). Racine places much more emphasis on Agrippina’s reliance on Britannicus as an ally by suggesting that it was such a consideration that impelled her to broker a peace between her son and her stepson. 7. It is difficult to guess whom Britannicus has in mind when he refers to “our greatest enemies,” those vague but obliging souls whom Agrippina has enlisted to take up Britannicus’s cause. Could they be that “half [of ] the senate” that Britannicus claimed were already “on our side,” including “Sulla, Piso, Plautus [et al.]” (III.vi.11–12) — ​or perhaps the other, more recalcitrant half ? 8. See note 18 for Act I and note 27 for Act III. 9. Cf.  Junia’s earlier remark to Nero: “Doubtless my candor may not be discreet, / But what my heart declares, my lips repeat. / Absent from court, there was no need for me / To master its polite duplicity” (II.iii.115 –18). 10. In my Discussion for Bajazet, I observe about the doomed young lovers of that play that, “having once been drawn into Akhmet’s imbroglio in the Seraglio, Bajazet and Atalide lose their bearings and find themselves ill-​equipped to contend with forces outside their control. In this, they remind one of Britannicus and Junia, stranded in Nero’s corrupt court” (which prompts Junia’s remark). “But Bajazet and Atalide are by no means as pitiable as those two innocents, nor as undeserving of their fate.”

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11. The mutuality of fear between ruler and subjects is a theme Racine touches upon in several other plays, including Bajazet and Athaliah. In the milieu of imperial Rome, sadly, Narcissus has the right of it when he cautions Nero in the last scene of the previous act, “If you’re afraid, they’ll think you ought to fear” (IV.iv.50), for, as he goes on to suggest, the negative is equally true: if Nero shows himself unafraid, the people will think that he has no reason to fear, that is, that what he has done is acceptable, or at least unquestionable. Thus, the answer to the rhetorical question Britannicus poses (line 49) is a resounding no. And far from Nero’s having to “face the people’s and the senate’s hate,” it will rather prove as Narcissus predicted: Renounce the sister, have the brother slain: Rome, greedy for fresh victims, won’t dissent; She’ll find them guilty, though they’re innocent. The birthdays of those siblings you shall see Set down as days of ill-​starred augury. (IV.iv.60 – 64) In regard to Octavia’s fate, see note 14 for Act II; in regard to Britannicus’s, there was even some sense, in the wake of his murder, that it had been a good thing, as Tacitus (XIII, 17)  points out (previously cited in note 38 for Act II). 12. In Racine’s original version, this single line of Britannicus’s was preceded by these eight lines: Him too, madame, would you have me suspect, And to eternal doubts my soul subject? When all my friends forsook me, he did not. My father’s favor you think he’s forgot? Has he done aught to forfeit mine? It’s true Nero sometimes grants him an interview; But can’t he act, without disloyalty, As go-​between ’twixt the emperor and me? There are at least two good reasons for Racine’s having suppressed these lines, and in this case (as opposed to that of the first scene of Act III) I can find no countervailing justification for reinstating them in the main text of the play. Let me put the first reason this way: in response to Britannicus’s very pertinent, but, alas, rhetorical, question regarding whether Narcissus has done anything to forfeit his charge’s goodwill, one might well exclaim, “Hello-o-​o! Did he not, just a few hours ago, viciously calumniate the woman you’re talking to, the woman you love, no less, filling your head with lies, of whose arrant falseness she was, shortly afterward, able to

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convince you by means of a few pointed and well-​deserved rebukes?” One might almost believe that Racine himself had forgotten about that marring inconsistency, only noticing and correcting it in time for the second edition (of 1675), an oversight all the more likely given that Narcissus never apprises the audience (or reader) exactly what is being alluded to in his line to Britannicus, “With all I’ve said, you still believe her true?” (III.vii.10). The second reason is that Britannicus’s guileless enthusiasm and unsuspecting nature are so conspicuously on display in his gushing expressions of faith in humankind and indiscriminate trust in all his acquaintance (and the more saliently so, as they are consistently contrasted with Junia’s fears and suspicions) as to render these lines (in any case, not particularly beautiful, inspired, or dramatic) too insistent on Britannicus’s naïveté, coming dangerously close to making him out a fool. On the other hand, there is one interesting inference to be drawn from Britannicus’s defense of Narcissus when we read this speech with the reinstated first scene of Act III in mind, for Britannicus’s justification of Narcissus’s tête-à-​têtes with the emperor seems so strongly to echo Narcissus’s own self-​justification when confronted by Burrhus that we might well surmise that Britannicus himself has expressed his dissatisfaction to Narcissus about the latter’s spending so much time with Nero and so little with him, and is repeating to Junia the same glib, specious excuses that Narcissus offered him. One final note on this subject. Britannicus, like Eteocles in The Fratricides, dies without ever learning that he has been betrayed and manipulated by his most trusted confidant: in this case, Narcissus; in the case of the earlier play, Creon, Eteocles’ uncle. 13. The crescendo that Racine composes by means of the relentless repetition of “if ” (“si” in French) builds with tremendous rhetorical force to Junia’s last, near-​hysterical surmise. 14. Britannicus remarks to Junia that “Nero thinks to dazzle your eyes with his splendor,” as the French for this line literally translates, but it is Britannicus whose eyes are dazzled by Nero’s glittering promises. 15. These lines touchingly suggest that Britannicus’s “tragic flaw,” if he has one, is, after all, simply his youth, as indeed Racine himself declares in his first preface. Thus, lacking Junia’s maturity and insight, when he, stumbling so close to the truth, actually boasts that, amid the party atmosphere, he will neither see, nor be in touch with, anything but his beautiful princess (“Ne voir, n’entretenir que ma belle Princesse”) — ​that, in effect, he will be blind to what is going on — ​he is merely uttering trite gallantries, too immature to have passed beyond meaningless preciosity to life-​saving perspicacity. 16. Agrippina’s dramatically timely entrance, right on cue with “some summons” for Britannicus, is actually, as is so often the case in Racine, most untimely, since she is, in effect, sending him to his death. 17. Again, the theme of blindness: Agrippina says that “some shed tears have obscured your eyes” (as the French translates literally), and inquires,

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“What trouble has formed this cloud?” But it is Agrippina who, like Britannicus, has been blinded; by contrast, Junia, through her tears, can see the truth. See note 14 above. 18. What a sad lesson it is that Junia has learned in her one day at court! Tacitus (XIII, 16) provides us with a poignant confirmation of the ubiquity of such fear at Nero’s court in his account of Octavia’s reaction to the murder of her brother, at which she was present: “Octavia, young though she was, had learnt to hide sorrow, affection, every feeling.” 19. Picard (1099, 1105) remarks, in regard to this “Enough” (“Il suffit”) and to Agrippina’s earlier one to Britannicus (III.vi.23), that they “express at once impatience and some disdainful superiority.” In my view, it would perhaps be more accurate to say that they display Agrippina’s wonted officiousness, which she herself mentions twice: “On Agrippina’s aid who’d think to call / When Nero makes my ruin known to all?” (I.ii.152 –53) and “The favors I alone used to dispense / Won me men’s loyalty as recompense” (III.v.14 –15). Her confident dismissal of any doubts on the part of her interlocutors also helps her to convince herself that she still wields some power, a power that, while to some extent documented in Tacitus’s account, is utterly illusory within the context of Racine’s play. Also, one might read her “Il suffit” as a reassuring, calming response, bespeaking her genuine concern for both Britannicus and Junia, whom, as she has made clear earlier (I.i.59 – 66), she feels guilty about having wronged. 20. Agrippina’s use of that charged word “embrace” (“Par quels embrassements il vient de m’arrêter!” [By what embraces he just detained me!]) invites one to consider the double entendre of “arrêter”: “arrest” as well as “detain,” as in “votre frère arrêté” (your brother arrested [IV.ii.106]) — ​ just as, in English, detain can mean “arrest” and arrest can mean “detain.” 21. Agrippina takes at “face value” the false expression of “candid kindness, on his [i.e., her son’s] brow displayed.” Theseus (in Phaedra) errs in the opposite direction, mistrusting that same expression on the face of his innocent son, Hippolytus: “Gods! at that noble mien, / Whose eye would not be fooled as mine has been? / Must a depraved adulterer’s brow shine bright / With sacred virtue’s pure, refulgent light?” Unfortunately for Agrippina and Theseus, the answer to Theseus’s next question, “By certain signs shouldn’t it be clear to us / Whose heart is tainted and perfidious?” (Phaedra IV.ii.1– 6), is: Yes, it should be, but it isn’t. 22. Racine displaces this (reported) episode of faux bonhomie and flattering confidence on Nero’s part, now intimate, now portentous, from its even more sinister context in Tacitus (XIV, 4), where, instead of preceding Britannicus’s death, it precedes Agrippina’s — ​or, at least, it was to have done, but Nero’s plot to have Agrippina drowned at sea on her return trip home “foundered,” shall we say, and several more attempts had to be made on her life before one finally “took.” In any case, here is Tacitus’s account

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of their last meeting: “There her alarm was relieved by Nero’s attentions. He received her kindly, and gave her the place of honour next himself. . . . They talked about various things; Nero was boyish and intimate — ​or confidentially serious. When she left, he saw her off, gazing into her eyes and clinging to her. This may have been a final piece of shamming — ​or perhaps even Nero’s brutal heart was affected by his last sight of his mother, going to her death.” Of course, Tacitus’s description of Nero’s “clinging to her,” which Racine adopts, makes more sense in the context of their final encounter than it does in the context to which Racine transplants it. One might argue, however, that Nero realizes that the next time they meet, the Nero that his mother still blindly imagines him to be will be dead, having been supplanted by the “monster” to which the deceased Nero has finally given birth. And, of course, his mother will all too soon be dead to him as well, and not merely figuratively. 23. And what is Agrippina herself doing, in planning to regain her former power and influence, but “preying on a heart too kind”? 24. This line (translated literally: But in this place let us not wait for night), while lending itself to dark, metaphoric meaning, also carries an unusual (for Racine), suggestive hint of the physical environment, a chilling, atmospheric evocation of twilight. The word “nuit” (night) appears eight times in this play (more than in any other Racine play, except Andromache, where it also appears eight times). In Acts I, II, and IV, it is used five times: four times (in I.i, II.ii, II.vi, and IV.ii) in reference to the previous night, that eventful night that witnessed Junia’s abduction (and one which proved a sleepless one for Nero and Agrippina), and once (II.iii) in a purely figurative sense (when Junia speaks of the obscure seclusion from which Nero wrested her). In the first scene of this act, Junia has already evoked the night, in a semimetaphoric way, when she expressed her fears of the plots that Nero might be hiding under the mantle of night. And there will be one last, striking use of “night,” toward the end of Albina’s culminating récit (see note 51 below). Several other Racine plays (The Fratricides, Iphigenia, Athaliah) also begin in the semidarkness of dawn, but only Britannicus ends with a disquieting, foreboding evocation of encroaching night. “Iphigenia,” as I wrote in my Discussion of that play, “begins in the predawn twilight . . . which is soon overtaken by day . . . and ends in a radiant sunset — ​or is it the refulgence of Diana’s benison?” Here, too, Racine apparently felt that an indulgence in the pathetic fallacy was warranted, the better to “shadow forth” the dark night of Nero’s soul that was about to settle upon the Roman Empire. 25. Ingeniously, in fact — ​if we may take Tacitus’s account as fact. (The French, by the way, says, “avec plus de mystère” [with greater secrecy].) I have previously cited Suetonius’s version (see note 42 for Act IV) of Nero’s arrangements to murder Britannicus; here is Tacitus’s (XIII, 15 –16):

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[Nero] could not find a charge against his stepbrother or order his execution openly. Instead, he decided to act secretly — ​and ordered poison to be prepared. Arrangements were entrusted to a colonel of the Guard, Julius Pollio, who was in charge of the notorious convicted poisoner Locusta. . . . His tutors first administered the poison. But it was evacuated, being either too weak or too diluted for prompt effectiveness. Impatient at the slowness of the murder, Nero browbeat the colonel and ordered Locusta to be tortured. They thought of nothing but public opinion, he complained; they safeguarded themselves and regarded his security as a secondary consideration. Then they swore that they would produce effects as rapid as any sword-​stroke; and in a room adjoining Nero’s bedroom, from well-​tried poisons, they concocted a mixture. It was common for young imperial princes to eat with other noblemen’s children of the same age at a special, less luxurious table, before the eyes of their relations: that is where Britannicus dined. A selected servant habitually tasted his food and drink. But the murderers thought of leaving this custom intact without giving themselves away by a double death. Britannicus was handed a harmless drink. The taster had tasted it; but Britannicus found it too hot, and refused it. Then cold water containing the poison was added. Speechless, his whole body convulsed, he instantly ceased to breathe. 26. True to his word (IV.iii.10), Nero, for one last time, “embraces” Britannicus, with deadly effect, although it is the poisoned drink he proceeds to offer him that grips him in the suffocating clench of death. 27. The traditional ritual for ancient “toasts”: the first drops were poured out as an offering to propitiate the gods. 28. See the last sentence of the Tacitus quotation in note 25 above. 29. This hews fairly closely to Tacitus (continuing directly from the last passage cited in note 25): “His companions were horrified. Some, uncomprehending, fled. Others, understanding better, remained rooted in their places, staring at Nero.” Cf. IV.i.13 –14: “As you win his caress or incur his curse, / The court will crowd about you or disperse.” Here, the converse will undoubtedly apply: as the courtiers choose to remain at the party, or rush off horrified, so will they win Nero’s caress or incur his curse. 30. Again, to continue with Tacitus’s account (XIII, 16): “[Nero] still lay back unconcernedly — ​and he remarked that this often happened to epileptics; that Britannicus had been one since infancy; soon his sight and consciousness would return.” Burrhus presumably left the scene of the festivities too early to be aware that, as Tacitus (ibid.) reports, “after a short silence the banquet continued.” Compare the similar indifference with

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which Claudius greets the news of the death (from anything but natural causes) of Britannicus’s mother, Messalina, cited in note 56 for Act I. Here are Tacitus’s pathetic final words (XIII, 17) about Britannicus’s untimely end: “Such was the hurried murder of the last of the Claudians, physically defiled [see note 38 for Act II], then poisoned, right among the religious emblems on the table, before his enemy’s eyes — ​without time even to give his sister a farewell kiss.” 31. In the first edition of Britannicus, there followed a scene of twelve lines devoted to the reappearance of Junia and her awkward encounter with Nero. In his first preface, Racine attempted to justify the existence of this scene against those critics, both friendly and hostile, who had judged it pointless, if not misguided. Methinks, however, that he protested far too much, for, undoubtedly soon realizing that the criticisms were valid and his arguments specious (see note 11 for Racine’s first preface), he deleted the entire scene in subsequent editions. Note that, in excising this scene, Racine had to tweak this line of Agrippina’s, so that its last word would rhyme with the last word of the first line of the following scene. That is, he had to change “Vous verrez si je suis sa complice” (You will see if I am his accomplice), which had rhymed with Nero’s first line in the discarded scene, “De vos pleurs j’approuve la justice” (Of your tears I approve the justice), to “Vous verrez si c’est moi qui l’inspire” (You will see if it is I who urged him [to do this]), in order to have it rhyme with “J’ai deux mots à vous dire” (I have two words to say to you), which had previously rhymed with the last line of the discarded scene, “Je vais par tous les soins que la tendresse inspire” (I shall, by every attention that tenderness inspires). As was the case with the other passage that Racine deleted (eight lines in the first scene of Act V: see note 12 above), I have consigned this malapropos scene, as awkward for the audience as for Junia and Nero (it is hard to say which of the latter two is more discomfited by this rencontre imprévue), to  these Notes. agrippina Here he is now. Judge for yourself. You’ll see If I took part in this conspiracy. Don’t go. Scene vi nero [to Junia]      Your tears are shed quite worthily. But shun a sight so odious, I pray; Even I, shuddering, had to turn away. He’s dead. You would have found out soon or late.

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Thus are our fondest fancies foiled by fate. We’d have drawn closer still, but heav’n said no. junia I loved him, Sire; I frankly told you so. If pity assuages grief, grant my request To seek such solace on Octavia’s breast As suits my present sorrow and dismay. nero Fair Junia, go; I’ll follow right away. You’ll find I shall, by every tender attention . . . Scene vii agrippina Don’t go. I have some things I’d like to mention. 32. This is, one must admit, a rather good zinger on Nero’s part, for, really, is Agrippina in any position to judge a parricide? And, indeed, their respective murders represent perfectly parallel parricides, since Agrippina has murdered Claudius, and now her son (Nero) has murdered his son (Britannicus). 33. One can hardly imagine Nero uttering such a line without a sarcastic sneer on his face, some venom in his voice, and even perhaps the unspoken implication that “you loved his son more than you do me.” In any case, it does confirm what I have pointed out before, namely, that (within the context of Racine’s play, that is) Agrippina’s concern for Britannicus is not feigned. See note 18 for Act I and note 27 for Act III. 34. This vindicates Narcissus’s earlier admonition to Nero (however expedient that admonition was) that “there are no secrets time will not reveal,” but, in the end, it is Agrippina, not Britannicus, who somehow uncovers a secret, namely, that, as Narcissus continues to Nero, “a poison, coming from my hand, / Was ordered and prepared at your command” (IV.iv.14 –16). 35. The audience (or reader) has been “onto” Narcissus since the beginning of Act II, but this is the first time Narcissus, following the example of his master, reveals his true nature to Agrippina and, more particularly, to Burrhus, who, the last time he encountered Narcissus (in the reinstated first scene of Act III), was under the impression, slyly fostered by Narcissus, that they had reached an entente and were henceforth allies, determined to reconcile Nero and Britannicus. Before Burrhus can register his outrage by any indignant outburst, however, Agrippina forestalls him with her own

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dismissive swipe at Narcissus and her more epic and expansive denunciation of her son. 36. Narcissus’s innate gift for impromptu prevarication is once again on repulsive display here. One recalls his allusion to the accusations against Junia with which he had presumably filled Britannicus’s head (“With all I’ve said, you still believe her true?” [III.vii.10]), accusations that, although we never actually hear him utter them, can easily be inferred from Britannicus’s own accusations to Junia in the following scene (III.viii.8 –12, 14 –20), and his ingenious, utterly factitious surmise about Junia (that she deliberately sought to lure Nero to abduct her) that we do hear him foist on Britannicus (III.vii.22 –27). But Agrippina is by no means as gullible as Britannicus, and undoubtedly dismisses such malignant fabrications out of hand. The last five lines of his speech are a masterful blend of archness and sheer insolence. 37. Cf. III.v.22 and see note 26 for Act III. 38. The original version of this line was “Tu te fatigueras d’entendre tes forfaits” (You will grow tired of hearing of your crimes). Racine did well to rewrite this line, whose rhyme is rather weak and whose tenor anticipates somewhat the rest of this speech, especially line 40, which also conjoins the notions of weariness and crime. On the other hand, with its removal is sacrificed Agrippina’s neat antithesis between, essentially, growing weary of your misdeeds and growing weary of my good deeds. Such replacement of a single complete verse, by the way, is rather rare in Racine, certainly less frequent than his wholesale deletion of multi-​line passages. 39. Racine, allowing Agrippina access, so to speak, to the “privileged information” he had from Suetonius’s accounts, was able to place in her mouth a terrifyingly prescient evocation of the workings of Nero’s guilt consequent upon his mother’s murder. According to Suetonius (“Nero,” 34), Nero “was never thereafter able to free his conscience from the guilt of this crime. He often admitted that the Furies were pursuing him with whips and burning torches; and set Persian mages at work to conjure up the ghost and make her stop haunting him.” Racine stopped far short, however, of having her foresee that, among “other more gruesome details,” immediately after having been informed that she was well and truly dead, “Nero rushed off to examine Agrippina’s corpse, handling her legs and arms critically and, between drinks, discussing their good and bad points” — ​ a far less edifying aspect of Nero’s “remorse,” to be sure, but one that may seem more consistent with Racine’s portrait of Nero, on whom Agrippina’s excoriating denunciation-cum-​prophecy makes so little impression that he doesn’t bother to reply, walking off unconcernedly with the belittling and dismissive “Narcissus, follow me” (V.vi.47). There is nothing in the play to suggest that Nero might suffer from the same guilt complex that plagues Mathan (in Athaliah), the apostate Hebrew priest, whose guilt for having opportunistically assumed the tiara of the pontiff of Baal “drives my anger

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to excess” (Athaliah III.iii.102), although for Mathan too, fueled by that anger, “shedding blameless blood was my delight” (Athaliah III.iii.88). 40. Cf.  Burrhus’s warning to Nero in Act  IV: “Old cruelty new cruelty demands:  / In blood you’ll have to bathe your bloodied hands” (IV.iii.41–42). 41. We have to take Agrippina’s word for it that she has paid heed to Narcissus in the past, for we never see any sign of it in this play: up to this point, Agrippina and Narcissus have not exchanged a word; in the only two scenes in which they have appeared together (I.iii and III.v), Narcissus has not spoken, merely being in attendance on Britannicus. 42. “It’s done” (“C’en est fait”) always signals a key moment in Racine’s plays. (In Bajazet, particularly, it occurs conspicuously and repeatedly — ​ eight times in all — ​to mark critical stages in the action: see note 23 for Act I of that play.) In this play, it has already occurred twice: first, when Nero announces to Narcissus that he is in love (II.ii.10), second, when Burrhus announces that Britannicus is dead (V.iv.2 –3). Here it signals what is perhaps the key moment, for Nero has now fully actualized the possibilities of imperial prerogative: he now wields limitless power, and Rome has tacitly agreed to place no restrictions on his will or his whims. 43. Cf. V.vi.29 and see note 37 above. 44. Cf. Abner’s lines about Athaliah’s impending onslaught: “Ah! would it please the Lord . . . that, slaked by Abner’s blood, her cruelty / Might hope to soothe harsh heav’n by killing me!” (Athaliah V.ii.41, 43 –44). 45. Death was to prove neither swift nor sweet for Burrhus. He would die seven years later, but, as with so many deaths during Nero’s reign, “whether natural causes or poison killed him is uncertain,” as Tacitus (XIV, 51) reports, and, again, this may well have been a case of creative impromptu “malpractice” on Nero’s part: “The gradually increasing tumor in his throat, which blocked the passage and stopped his breathing, suggested natural causes. But the general view was that Nero, ostensibly proposing a medical treatment, had instructed that Burrus’ throat should be painted with a poisonous drug. The patient, it was said, had detected the crime, and when the emperor visited him had turned his face away and only answered Nero’s inquiries with the words: ‘I am doing all right.’ ” It is marvelous how the historical Burrhus’s laconic deathbed retort captures perfectly the very character Racine has given us: the stoical soldier, dedicated heart and soul to his country, the concerned guardian of the intractable emperor who has been committed to his charge, and even the longtime tutor, gently scolding his pupil. It conveys the same weary regret and sense of failure that inform this whole speech (lines 8 –22). 46. Although Agrippina’s remark might sound, at first blush, somewhat bloodthirsty, or even betray some wishful thinking (after all, when confronted with the prospect of Nero’s marrying Junia, her reaction was bitter,

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even desperate: “Now someone new has captured Caesar’s heart: / Mistress and wife, she’ll play a potent part. . . . My place usurped, I’m nothing and no one” [III.v.16 –17, 11]), her question is actually both a very reasonable and a very telling one. For, Nero’s plenipotent reign having at last, with his scot-​free murder of Britannicus, been well and truly inaugurated, what other explanation could occur to her for Junia’s being lost to him, for his not being able to “have” her if he wants her, but that she is dead? 47. It would appear that Racine failed to notice (or correct) a small inconsistency here, for Albina reminds Agrippina and Burrhus that they know that Junia hurriedly departed, claiming that she was going to visit Octavia to seek some solace; but the scene in which they were witnesses to Junia’s announcement of her intentions (originally Scene VI) having been cut by Racine after the first edition, they could not, in the standard revised version, have had any knowledge of Junia’s plans or flight. Indeed, her last words to Agrippina, in the revised edition, were that she was going to “run ahead / And rescue him [Britannicus] from such a fate, or share it” (V.iv.4 –5). 48. The vaunted virtue of “Augustus’s old age” (I.i.30) is here memorialized in a monumental effigy, but it is also “marmorealized” into something that is both stone cold and dead, unable to provide any succor or sympathy. Under Nero’s wanton reign, Augustus’s statue is like a fossil of an extinct species. 49. In what way, one might ask? Perhaps it might have been less hyperbolic to have said of Britannicus that, of all Augustus’s descendents, he might have presented the least striking contrast to his great forebear. Junia’s exaggerated encomium may bring to mind the case of Bajazet, of whose noble and heroic qualities, so extolled by Akhmet, the grand vizier, and, indeed, by Racine himself, we can find little evidence in the play that bears his name. Furthermore, there is another aspect of Junia’s plaintive plea at which we feel obliged to raise a cavil. She refers to Britannicus as “le seul de tes neveux” (the only one of your descendents), but, in fact, Britannicus is not a descendent of Augustus. If one consults the genealogical chart I have provided (Appendix A), one can easily confirm that his great-​grandparents were Tiberius Claudius Nero (not to be confused with the emperor Tiberius) and Livia (Livia Drusilla Augusta), whom Augustus married after the two of them had divorced their prior spouses. Thus, Britannicus could trace his lineage back to Augustus’s third wife, Livia, but not to Augustus himself. The closest connection Britannicus could claim to Augustus on the family tree “stems” from his paternal grandmother (Antonia) having been the daughter of Augustus’s sister, one Octavia (not shown on Appendix A). See note 15 for Act II. 50. The image evoked in this couplet derives great potency from the deliberate contrast it provides to two earlier couplets featuring the same juxtaposition of the ocular and the celestial. First, let me quote all three couplets in French (italics are mine):

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Triste, levant au ciel ses yeux mouillés de larmes, Qui brillaient au travers des flambeaux et des armes: D’où vient, qu’en m’écoutant, vos yeux, vos tristes yeux Avec de long regards se tournent vers les cieux? Il marche sans dessein; ses yeux mal assurés N’osent lever au ciel leurs regards égarés; Note that, as indicated by italics, all three couplets conjoin the nouns “yeux” (eyes) and “ciel” or “cieux” (heaven or heavens). Next, be it noted that “yeux” appears in the play seventy-​two times, but the quoted couplets are the only instances in which it appears with “ciel” or “cieux” in the same couplet. The first couplet comes from Nero’s description of Junia’s arrival at the palace: “Tristful, she raised to heav’n eyes moist with tears, / Which glimmered ’gainst the torches and the spears” (II.ii.15 –16); the second is from Junia’s last meeting with Britannicus, who asks her, “And even as I speak, how does it chance / Your eyes, so sad, probe heaven with their glance?” (V.i.21–22). (Although my translation of the third couplet [lines 41–42] does not include the word “heaven,” that word [“ciel”], as one can see, does feature in the French.) How better, then, to mark the antipodal difference between Junia, the embodiment of a heavenly goodness, and Nero, now confirmed for all the world to see, and for all time, as a truly damned soul, not daring to turn his eyes heavenward, than by such a striking “perversion” (Latin: complete turning) of this image? 51. The last occurrence of “nuit” (night) in the play, one final brushstroke of darkness touched in by Racine, to end the play on an aptly somber note. And near the beginning of Albina’s narrative, although Racine does not actually use the word “night,” its two earlier, conspicuous occurrences in this final act (see note 24 above) encourage us to imagine Junia, as Albina “followed in her wake,” slinking stealthily through the shadows of the palace’s moonlit corridors: that “devious route I saw her take” (lines 10, 9). 52. Nero would, indeed, take his own life, but Albina need not have had any immediate fears for such a thick-​skinned egoist’s safety, since it would be another thirteen years before Nero would rid the world of his presence (on June 9, 68). The extant manuscript of Tacitus’s The Annals of Imperial Rome breaks off well before Nero’s death, but Suetonius (“Nero,” 49) describes, with his usual relish, Nero’s typically theatrical, hysterical, and, one must admit, ultimately poignant last hours. Nero, having been finally deserted by the senate in favor of Galba, imperial governor of Nearer Spain, fled Rome to take refuge, at the suggestion of his freed slave Phaon, at the latter’s villa, four miles outside Rome. Here are some excerpts from Suetonius’s account of the events at the villa:

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Finally, when his companions unanimously insisted on his trying to escape [that is, by suicide] from the miserable fate threatening him, he ordered them to dig a grave at once. . . . As they bustled about obediently he muttered through his tears: “Dead! And so great an artist!” A runner brought him a letter from Phaon. Nero tore it from the man’s hands and read that, having been declared a public enemy by the Senate, he would be punished “in ancient style” when arrested. He asked what “ancient style” meant, and learned that the executioners stripped their victim naked, thrust his head into a wooden fork, and then flogged him to death with sticks. In terror he snatched up the two daggers which he had brought along and tried their points; but threw them down again, protesting that the fatal hour had not yet come. Then he begged Sporus [the boy whom Nero had castrated, married in a public ceremony, and treated as a wife] to weep and mourn for him, but also begged one of the other three to set him an example by committing suicide first. . . . Then, with the help of his scribe, Epaphroditus, he stabbed himself in the throat. . . . He died, with eyes glazed and bulging from their sockets, a sight which horrified everybody present. He had made his companions promise, whatever happened, not to let his head be cut off, but to have him buried all in one piece. Galba’s freedman Icelus . . . granted this indulgence. 53. In the French, this line involves a play on words; it also bears an interpretation that relates it both to Agrippina’s earlier quasi-​oracular pronouncement (V.vi.36 –46) and to the last line of the play (see note 54 below). The play on words is Agrippina’s, when, to Albina’s last lines, “Il ne faut qu’un caprice, / Il se perdrait, madame” (It would take but a whim, and he would do himself harm, madame), she retorts, “Il se ferait justice” (He would do himself justice). Regrettably, I was not able to incorporate those phrases (he would do himself harm, he would do himself justice) in my verse translation, but I thought I would at least mark the wordplay in a note. (This exchange between Albina and Agrippina, by the way, is like a miniature episode of stichomythia, Agrippina’s deft repartee, involving a partial repetition of Albina’s line, being typical of such passages; in the quite extended stichomythic exchange between Nero and Britannicus in III.ix, we find, for example: Britannicus: “Nero begins to lose control, I see.” / Nero: “Nero begins to suffer from ennui” [III.ix.30 –31].) More important, Agrippina’s retort recalls her earlier lines: “But heav’n, worn out by your career of crime, / Will add your death to all the rest, in time” (V.vi.40 –41). There, she predicts that heaven will exact its vengeance and impose a condign punishment; here, she seems to suggest that if there is to

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be any punishment, it will have to be self-​inflicted. But, as note 52 makes clear, the operative phrase is “in time,” since Nero’s self-​inflicted punishment (enforced suicide, a famously common eventuality in ancient Greece and Rome — ​think of Socrates, Seneca, Brutus, and Mark Antony) would not occur for another thirteen years, as mentioned. 54. This “wait and see” attitude that Agrippina adopts, bespeaking some residual hope on her part of Nero’s amelioration, seems surprisingly at odds with the dire and definite prognostication (“Thus does my heart predict your destiny”) she delivered two scenes earlier (V.vi.36 –46). Indeed, when this brief colloquy between Agrippina and Burrhus that closes the play is juxtaposed with the first scene of the play, particularly its opening, several revealing features come to light. We can note, first of all, that Nero is the focus of both the very first line of the play (“While sleep seals Nero’s eyes”) and the very last (“Please heav’n this prove the last of Nero’s crimes!”) — ​ which is only fitting, since Nero manifestly is, in  every respect but in being the title character of the play, its central character. Second, and more telling, is the fact that both these flanking remarks about Nero — ​one an assumption, the other a hope — ​prove to be completely unfounded: Nero is, in fact, as the audience soon finds out, wide awake, and his murder of Britannicus, as the audience certainly knows, will be the first, not the last, of his crimes. It is as if Albina’s and Burrhus’s remarks are confirming that, from first to last, Nero is unpredictable and inscrutable. And this is further corroborated by our third and most striking observation, namely, that, as the play opens, we find Agrippina expressing to her interlocutor, Albina, her concern and uncertainty regarding what path Nero will take, and, in the final moments of the play, we find Agrippina and Burrhus expressing their concern and uncertainty regarding what path Nero will take. Have these people learned nothing from the horrors that have transpired since Agrippina’s all-​night vigil at her son’s door (behind which Burrhus was simultaneously in conclave with Nero, but, ultimately, to little purpose)? It is indeed remarkable that, although toward the end of the play Nero has made only the most perfunctory effort to disguise his true nature, no one, apart from Junia, seems to have had his or her eyes well and truly opened, to have experienced what Aristotle referred to as anagnorisis, a discovery (usually by the tragic hero) that proves life-​altering, whether its effects be ruinous or redemptive. It is as if no one has recognized that the “monstre” that was “naissant” is now all too horrifically “vivant.” 55. One need hardly comment, it would seem, on the killing irony of this curtain line. There are, however, two probing observations I would like to offer in regard to this famous exclamation. First, the fact that this line is so strikingly ironic — that, indeed, we are almost incapable of reading it as anything but ironic — ​provides us with a very persuasive argument that the

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tragic action of this play needs to be looked at in a larger context, rather than merely as a family drama, or even as an immediately political one. It must be seen within a vast historical context, within which the ironic meaning of Burrhus’s line stretches out spatially to comprise the entire Roman Empire and temporally to reach several hundred years into the future (and, indeed, back into Rome’s past hundred as well), until the time when that vast empire implodes. Do we ever even stop to consider what utterly other connotation this line would have outside a historical context? If, then ( just to wax hypothetical for a moment), one were to imagine that the subject of this play were so little known to us — ​whether because it was based on a vague myth, or purely imagined, or merely obscure — ​that we were ignorant of what events might succeed the fall of the curtain, what implication would Burrhus’s closing line have? It might very well suggest, or at least leave open the possibility — ​especially coming as it does after Agrippina’s rather equivocal final lines (see note 54 above) — ​that Nero, having rid himself of Britannicus, his rival in love and a threat to his throne, and having been chastened and perhaps even chastised by the loss of Junia, might indeed “désormais suivre d’autres maximes” (henceforth follow other principles, as the French for line 51 translates), might even bear out Burrhus’s earlier hope that “his virtues [might] form a chain: / The years to come like these three come again” (I.ii.95 –96). My second observation, while it also suggests an entirely new reading of the final line of the play (the novelty of the first consisting in its being ahistoric), is, on the contrary, far from being merely hypothetical. Rather, correctly interpreting that line’s deepest meaning allows it to encapsulate the entire theme of the play. Although this reading, like the standard one, implies — ​ indeed, requires — ​a historical context for the correct interpretation of Burrhus’s famous line, it eschews the ironic mode for its transmission, that mode that strong-​arms us into wisely nodding our heads in our knowledge — ​and shaking our heads at poor Burrhus’s lack thereof — ​that, of course, Nero will go on to, literally, set the world on fire in his continued career of debauchery and crime. For is there not some sense, albeit a horrific one, in which Burrhus’s invocation to heaven does not go unanswered: that Nero’s murder of Britannicus will indeed prove to be the last of his crimes? Yes, there is; and that sense is that, after Nero’s deliberately public, demonstrative (both in its more usual sense, and in its secondary sense of “serving to demonstrate”) act of parricide, there is, for Nero at least, no such thing as a crime.* Nero’s first crime will prove to be his last, because crime, as a concept, no longer has any meaning when no punishment can attach to it. “If a tree falls in a forest, and so on,” and if no act that Nero may choose to commit, however heinous, immoral, cruel, or psychotic, can incur the slightest censure or reprimand, let alone condign punishment, can such an act be labeled a crime?

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In a way, it is almost as if Nero has reversed the normal progression of malefaction that Hippolytus adduces in attempting to vindicate himself to his father, Theseus: Some venial crimes always precede the worst. One must transgress the moral order first, Before one can commit atrocities; For, just like virtue, crime has its degrees. (Phaedra IV.ii.59 – 62) Nero having begun by committing a carefully orchestrated, deliberately egregious atrocity, any subsequent crimes he commits would appear as merely venial. (It is, indeed, a reverse case of “in for a penny, in for a pound” — ​ or “in for an as, in for an aureus,” as the Romans used to say.) In this regard, I cannot resist quoting Thomas DeQuincey’s immortal satire, an ironic reversal of Hippolytus’s little disquisition, one that drolly traces Nero’s moral trajectory: “If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing, and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-​breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begun on this downward path you never know where you are to stop. Many a man dates his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time.” Of course, as I have stressed, Nero did think long and hard about the first murder he committed and, indeed, with the very purpose of making sure that, in the sense I have defined, it would be his last crime. And this, Nero’s baleful, invulnerable omnipotence, is both the theme and the tragic message of the play, for the tragedy that Britannicus represents is only incidentally a personal one; one certainly feels for Junia, but less for who she is than for what she represents — ​those moral values to which Nero serves as triumphant antagonist. (Since Britannicus himself represents little more than callow youth, one feels far less for him.) Rather, the play’s tragic implications extend, as suggested above, to the whole corrupt and depraved Roman Empire, which, taking its moral cue from Nero and other emperors of his ilk, will inexorably sink, morally speaking, to its ruin. Suetonius (“Nero,” 37) testifies that “nothing could restrain Nero from murdering anyone he pleased, on whatever pretext,” and further reports the following incident as evidence of the extremes of Nero’s depravity: “He was eager, it is said, to get hold of a certain Egyptian — ​a sort of ogre who would eat raw flesh and practically anything else he was given — ​and watch him tear live men to pieces and devour them. These ‘successes,’ as Nero called them, went to his head and he boasted that no previous sovereign had ever realized the extent of his power.”

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But must we not recognize that the extremes of Nero’s depravity and, at least vicariously, the extent of his power, were conferred on the Roman populace itself by virtue of Nero’s vice, so to speak? Was the sadistic pleasure Nero could take in the Egyptian’s bestial demonstrations any different from that which drew Rome in crowds of thousands to the Colosseum, during hundreds of years of Roman imperium, to witness gladiatorial combats that inevitably resulted in dismemberments, decapitations, and general bloodletting, which, however extreme, could scarcely satisfy the hordes who had come to urge their favorites on to perpetrate them and, in some cases, even to authorize such slaughter themselves by a frenzied referendum, in an appalling parody of democracy? One need not dwell on the Roman practice of throwing Christian men, women, and children, among others, to ravenous lions for the entertainment of the masses in order to reinforce the point. But neither should we forget that such scenes, bearing witness to a wanton disregard for human life, or, what is perhaps worse, to a received view that one of life’s chief boons lay in the pleasure to be derived from depriving someone else of it, were enacted, not merely in Rome, but across the empire, in venues lesser in size but no less Neronian in their cultivated barbarity. And I believe this extrapolation from Nero’s personal depravity to that of the empire at large is imposed by the underlying dramatic structure of the play, which, essentially, tracks Nero’s two-​pronged assault, on Britannicus and on Junia: plotting the murder of Britannicus solely in order to set a precedent, to definitively authorize, in effect, the future legality — ​for the emperor — ​of the ultimate crime, namely homicide; and, in Junia’s case, having failed to crush her in a brutal marriage, as he had the equally virtuous Octavia, forcing her self-​banishment and, by implication, the banishment of the virtue and morality she represents; and thus, by means of these two methodically carried out campaigns, setting the moral and political tone for a huge empire that would reflect such licentiousness and indecency for hundreds of years. It is as if, in the curtain line of Racine’s tragedy, morality, decency, virtue, and integrity were lifting their voices, dirge-​like, and wailing in unison, “Since that fatal blow, [our] wonted sway / Has weakened swiftly with each passing day,” (to borrow Agrippina’s lines about her own waning power [I.i.111–12]). *Taken out of context, Richard E. Goodkin’s observation, in The Tragic Middle (69), about Nero’s murder of Britannicus, that “the ‘first’ crime is indeed the ‘last’ crime — ​and Burrhus’ wish is ironically fulfilled,” might suggest that he had reached a conclusion identical to mine, but such is not the case, as I will explain. Goodkin takes his cue from Creon’s closing lines of Act III of The Fratricides:

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But come. By vain remorse I’m undismayed; Of crime my heart no longer is afraid: They cost us dear, our first iniquities, But those that follow we commit with ease. (The Fratricides III.vi.87–90) In anticipation of the line of argument I will pursue below, let me point out here that Creon’s extrapolated moral may call to mind Pope’s similarly cynical observation about mankind (as I remarked in note 31 for Act III of The Fratricides, apropos of the very verses that Goodkin cites) : Vice is a monster of such frightful mien As to be hated needs but to be seen; But seen too oft, familiar with its face, We first endure, then pity, then embrace. (An Essay on Man, Ep. II, 217–220) Goodkin suggests that Nero, like Creon, “having fully given in to himself,” has become “an amoral being whose ethical sense is entirely extinct . . . a creature . . . whose actions, insofar as they are not based on choice, cannot be considered to be crimes.” It appears to me, incidentally, that Goodkin may be conflating two distinct concepts here. The first, as shadowed forth by both Creon’s speech and Pope’s brilliant metaphoric maxim, is that someone with a criminal disposition (that is, someone disposed to crime) will quickly (or gradually) become inured to the pangs of conscience initially attendant upon the commission of a crime (pangs that may, indeed, have postponed its commission), and may even lose any consciousness of committing one. The second, as suggested by the formula I offered in note 13 for Act III — ​to wit, that a typically “Racinian” character is one who is unable to master his emotions (a formula that, being so central to my understanding of Racine’s plays, crops up regularly in my Discussions and my Notes and Commentaries) — ​is that a criminal is (or becomes) unable to prevent himself from perpetrating a crime (at least, a certain type of crime), and thus, there being no possibility of his choosing whether to act virtuously or villainously, is not after all, in any meaningful sense, guilty of wrongdoing. Hence, “an amoral being whose ethical sense is entirely extinct” may not necessarily feel any disposition, let alone an irresistible urge, to commit a crime, while, conversely, “a creature . . . whose actions, insofar as they are not based on choice, cannot be considered to be crimes” may still have a highly developed and fully functional ethical sense. (The distinction I have pointed out is tellingly, terrifyingly dramatized in Fritz Lang’s great film M [for Mörder, that is, murderer], when the protagonist, Hans Beckert [played with uncanny intensity by Peter Lorre], attempts to explain to the criminal underworld’s

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ad hoc tribunal the tremendous struggles he undergoes, torn between his irrepressible urges to molest and kill children and his tortured awareness of the evil of such acts: “will nicht! — ​muss! — ​will nicht! — ​muss!” [don’t want to! — ​must! — ​don’t want to! — ​must!]: a serial murderer, he cannot help committing these heinous crimes, but his latest he commits with no greater “ease” than he committed his first. He even accuses his accusers of being, unlike him, criminals by choice, and thus, in some sense, more culpable than he.) An instructive way of distinguishing between these related but disparate concepts is to recognize that the first situation set forth above is more concerned with the effect of a crime, the second with its cause. In any case, the fact that Goodkin can find in Creon’s having surrendered to his evil nature a precedent for Nero’s having surrendered to his, opens to question whether Nero’s being no longer able, in Goodkin’s sense (whichever of its two possible readings one adopts), to commit a crime is in any way unique to him, or, indeed, whether the implications of Burrhus’s curtain line could not just as easily apply to any criminal who had either (to cover both aspects of Goodkin’s argument) finally freed himself from the trammels of conscience, guilt, and morality, or, was unable, whether or not he had become thus emancipated, to prevent himself from committing crimes. For that matter, the example of Creon — ​that is, of one man — ​can be multiplied a millionfold to comprise man in its generic sense, as Pope used it in the title of his philosophical poem, An Essay on Man, the passage cited above applying to all men, not just hardened criminals. The real difference between Nero and those criminals consists in the fact that they are still subject to the laws of the land, still liable to being punished for their crimes: in short, such criminals may not feel guilty, but they still are guilty. Not so Nero. From a psychological viewpoint, then, Goodkin is right in believing that Nero, whose psyche is by no means unique in this regard, can no longer perceive any future actions of his, however heinous, as “crimes,” or, if he can so perceive them, that such an awareness no longer registers with him on any moral level. My point, contradistinctively, is that no future action by Nero can be considered (let alone condemned as) a crime by anyone. And it is this aspect, more pragmatic than psychological, of Nero’s emancipation from any concern about either criminality or morality that was to have such epic implications for an empire that would be eternally stigmatized as holding human life and human decency so cheap.

Appendix A: Family Tree of Augustus

Of the twenty historical personages included on this family tree (overleaf ), three appear as characters in Britannicus (Agrippina, Nero, and Britannicus), eight (Augustus, Livia, Tiberius, Agrippa, Germanicus, Claudius, Caligula, and Octavia) are mentioned by name in the play, one (Messalina) is mentioned, but not by name, and one (Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, Nero’s father) is alluded to by Agrippina in the first scene of the play when she speaks of “des fiers Domitius l’humeur triste et sauvage” (I.i.37 — ​literally: the somber and savage disposition of the proud Domitians). One should also note that Nero himself is referred to as Domitius — ​his given name before he was adopted by Claudius — ​twice in the play (I.i.18 and III.ix). The remaining seven historical personages on the family tree are included in order to provide the necessary familial connections. For ease of reference, the names used on this family tree conform to those by which I most commonly refer to these historical personages in the play itself, as well as in the Discussion, the Notes, and Racine’s Prefaces. There are two other historical personages who are germane both to this Augustan family tree and to Britannicus: Junia, who is of course one of its principal characters, and her brother, Silanus, who does not appear in the play but is mentioned therein. Incorporating the genealogy of the historical Junia Calvina, whose name, if not her character or history, Racine adopted for Junia, the young heroine of his play, would have required too much additional space, so I have chosen to provide the relevant data in this note.

a

Agrippina

Germanicus

e Elder

2

Agrippa

1

Nero

Scribonia

Livia

Marcus Vipsanius 2 Agrippa

Tiberius

2

lder

1

Augustus

(as it relates to Racine’s Britannicus)

2

1

Drusus the Elder

Caligula

Agrippina the Elder

Julia the Elder Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus

marriage

41

3 2

Octavia

Agrippina

Germanicus

Tiberius

Augustus

Claudius

Antonia

2

1

2

Nero

Britannicus

Messalina

Livia

(as it relates to Racine’s Britannicus)

APPENDIX A

number of marriage

Partial Family Tree of Augustus

Tiberius Claudius Nero

1

adopted son

1

Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus

Drusus the Elder

Tiberius Claudius Nero

4

Octavia

Claudius

3

Antonia

1

Britannicus

Messalina

number of marriage

marriage

adopted son

son/daughter

Legend:

aPPenDixes

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Junia Calvina was a direct descendent of Augustus, albeit strictly through the female line: Augustus’s daughter was Julia the Elder, who was the mother of Julia the Younger, who was the mother of Aemilia Lepida, who was the mother of Junia Calvina. It is noteworthy, in view of this, that, when one traces the genealogies of three of the four Roman emperors shown on this chart (Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius), one finds, rather remarkably, that, unlike Junia, none of them is actually a descendent, direct or otherwise, of Augustus; they all descend, rather, from Augustus’s third wife, Livia, and her first husband, Tiberius Claudius Nero (not to be confused with his son, the emperor Tiberius). Nero alone can trace his lineage back to Augustus: his mother, Agrippina, was Augustus’s great-granddaughter, again, through the female line. To do Nero justice, then, when he assures Junia that “the husband I’ve in mind [namely, himself ] may place with pride / His ancestors at your ancestors’ side” (II.iii.44 –45), his boast is, genealogically speaking, well-founded. Junia Calvina’s brother, Lucius Silanus, with whom she was (probably falsely) accused of having inappropriate relations, is mentioned several times in the play in connection with his foiled engagement to Octavia and his consequent suicide.

Appendix B: Reinstated Scene (Act III, Scene I) Discussion

As stated in the Translator’s Note, this is the first English translation of Britannicus to reinstate in its proper place the scene between Burrhus and Narcissus that Racine originally intended to open Act III. According to Racine’s son, Louis, in his “Mémoires sur la vie and les ouvrages de  Jean Racine” (Memoirs of the life and works of Jean Racine), this scene was suppressed by Racine at the instance of his close friend, the critic and poet Nicolas Boileau (1636 –1711), before the play was published, and even before it was distributed to the cast. It has come down to us solely in the transcription of the copy Boileau retained that appears in those “Mémoires.” Louis tells us that “these two friends demonstrated an equal eagerness to show each other their works before presenting them to the public, an equal severity in judging one another, and an equal docility [in abiding by the other’s judgment].” Although this scene’s authenticity has never been questioned, posterity seems to have been no less susceptible than the playwright himself to the strictures of the formidable Boileau, since, as mentioned, it is not to be found in any English-​language version of Britannicus (I cannot speak with any authority about non-English-​language versions of the play), and, indeed, in the case of the two most recent Pléiade editions, the scene appears only in the context of the Louis Racine “Mémoires” included in both editions. Apparently, Boileau, as Louis Racine relates (Picard, 32),

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feared that [this scene] would create an unfortunate effect on the spectators: “You will disturb them, he told him [Racine], by showing these two men together. Full of admiration for the one and horror for the other, they will suffer during their colloquy. Is it seemly for the Emperor’s tutor, for this man, so respectable by his rank and his probity, to lower himself by speaking to a wretched enfranchised slave, the most villainous of men? He must despise him too much to come to any understanding with him. And besides, what possible profit could he hope for from his remonstrances? Is it at all possible that they will engender any remorse in Narcissus’s heart? When he [Burrhus] makes known to him [Narcissus] the interest he takes in Britannicus, he reveals his secret to a traitor, and instead of serving Britannicus, he thereby precipitates his death.” Putting aside Boileau’s strictures for the moment, is it not unreasonable that we should continue to suppress a scene written by Racine himself and available in an apparently finished state, a scene that, while it may not be the greatest Racine ever wrote, is certainly not markedly inferior to many others, a scene that, in our very canvassing of Boileau’s criticisms, will prove itself to be anything but devoid of interest, and, finally, one that, while its excision does not disrupt the continuity of the play, can, conversely, be reinserted with no disturbance to the dramatic flow? Indeed, the opening scene of the third act as published opens rather abruptly, whereas the reinstated scene begins with the same “Quoi” (whether punctuated by an exclamation point or a question mark) that begins many a scene in Racine’s plays (for instance, the first scene in this very play) and serves to ease the audience into the dramatic situation. (Certainly, the reinstatement of this scene involves no such logistical challenges, necessitating some tampering with the existing text, as would attend the attempted reincorporation of the eleventh-​hour reappearance of Junia in this play or that of Andromache in the play bearing her name. Nor do these 82 lines betray the still-​uncertain hand that produced the 144 lines in The Fratricides, Racine’s first play, that he wisely chose to cut after the first edition, many of which suffer

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variously from mawkish preciosity, obscurity, overelaboration, and repetitiousness.) One can go through the litany of Boileau’s strictures and, without difficulty, confute each one of them; indeed, they can conveniently serve to point up the strengths of the scene rather than any putative flaws. Let us take the objections Boileau raises in order. First, then: it is ludicrous on the face of it to argue that the audience would suffer during a colloquy between two men, simply because one of them fills them with admiration and the other with horror. Would it not defuse any drama (after all, a succession of confrontations) to require that every colloquy be only between characters equally praiseworthy or equally despicable? One would think that, on the contrary, the very fact that these two are so diametrically opposed argued, ipso facto, for the interest and inclusion of such a scene between them, and even for its thematic potency, since this scene epitomizes a central theme of Racine’s, one especially relevant to a play in which the word of the protagonist (Nero, that is) can never be trusted for a moment, namely, the paradox of the potency and the impotence of the spoken word. For human discourse can be a potent force to influence others, to persuade them, convince them (especially in its latent Latin sense of overcome or conquer), to goad them to action, often of a violent nature; yet it is completely powerless to serve as an inviolable vessel of truth. What sounds like truth may not be so; indeed, often in Racine’s plays, the more convincingly truthful someone’s utterance, the more strikingly plausible it sounds, the more it is to be distrusted, more often than not being exposed later as very far from the truth. Humans have language to communicate, but not a single word they utter carries with it a guarantee of veracity. We can talk for hours with the utmost earnestness and honesty, but nothing we say offers its own surety. Seeing, touching, smelling, and tasting usually present us with verifiable data, but the spoken word, never. (Well, hardly ever.) In the scene in question, for all Burrhus’s honesty (“a soldier’s frankness” [I.ii.48], as he mildly vaunts), it is Narcissus who, hardly uttering a truthful word in the course of their colloquy, not only wields all the power in this scene and is in complete control (as virtually confirmed by his faux humble claim to Burrhus that “you’re in charge: / I listen and say naught”

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[III.i.72]), but, because, unlike Burrhus, he is not bound by his own integrity to speak the truth, and thus has license to say whatever he pleases, actually suggests that Burrhus is lying: “Your true intent, sir, is not hard to read” (III.i.39). Apropos of this line, I refer the reader to note 4 for Act III for a discussion of the short speech it introduces (lines 39 – 42), wherein I remark that, “brilliantly demonstrating Narcissus’s frighteningly ingenious, yet subtle, deviousness, these four lines alone would be enough to warrant the reinstatement of this scene.” Second, if it is unseemly for Burrhus, whose rank is not all that lofty a one (he being, after all, merely a soldier), to consort with Narcissus, how can it be deemed acceptable that the other characters, occupying a far more elevated position in the social scale, should do so? Not only is Narcissus Nero’s closest, most trusted confidant, whom Nero, the emperor, treats with far less condescension than he does Burrhus, but Agrippina as well does not deem herself above confiding in him (as she later affirms to Burrhus, “Narcissus had my ear” [V.vii.2]). (Indeed, it is Burrhus whom Agrippina attempts to treat with insolent condescension in their first scene together.) If one were as squeamish as Boileau, Narcissus — ​who, incidentally, no one apart from Nero realizes is “the most villainous of men” (although Junia has her suspicions) — ​would not be permitted to besmirch a single scene of the play. Third, while Burrhus undoubtedly despises Narcissus, it is because he holds him in such low regard that he feels it necessary to reprimand him, but not, as Boileau would have us believe, with no hope of reforming him, or at least preventing him from fomenting further mischief. For, while Burrhus might not expect to “engender any remorse in Narcissus’s heart,” by the end of the scene he has by no means given up hope for some possible profit from his remonstrances (“How glad I’ll be if I’m proved wrong! / Please heav’n my words such virtue can instill! [III.i.74 –75]) and is indeed fairly confident, or at any rate optimistic, about having won Narcissus over to their common cause, to “reconcile these princes with all speed, / Before the rupture can’t be remedied” (III.i.81– 82); he even says, quite chummily, “Réparons, vous et moi, cette absence funeste” (III.i.79: Let us repair, you and I, this fatal absence [italics mine]). And, finally, as to Burrhus’s revealing Britannicus’s secret to

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a traitor and precipitating his death, Britannicus has shown himself perfectly capable of revealing his own secrets to a traitor (as he has been doing all along) and precipitating his own death, thank you. Another interesting aspect of this scene (further warranting its reinstatement), one to which Boileau might have raised a more reasonable objection (concerned as he was with Burrhus’s demeaning himself by meeting with Narcissus, even for the purpose of reprimanding him), is that it exposes another, less flattering side of the virtuous Burrhus, namely, his faulty judgment, bordering on fatuousness. (In this regard, Burrhus may call to mind Akhmet, Bajazet’s self-​satisfied but blundering vizier, who, however, it must be said, completely lacks Burrhus’s moral core, his inviolable integrity.) An audience might well cringe when Burrhus, condescendingly offering Narcissus the benefit of his counsel, observes about Nero that “he’d be more gratified / To know you’re at Britannicus’s side,” that “to ruin his brother is not Nero’s goal,” and that “Nero himself, his heart touched by your zeal, / Might think such loyal services [i.e., serving Britannicus’s interests] reveal / More than these servile tokens vainly tendered” (III.i.25 –26, 32, 35 –37). Such misconceptions, bespeaking a blindness the audience is certainly, at this stage of the play, in a position to assess, are belittling enough to Burrhus’s stature as a character, but, to make the moment even more cringe-​ worthy, the audience must also be aware that Burrhus’s ill-​founded “insights” are addressed to someone who must be laughing up his sleeve at Burrhus’s complacent ignorance in regard to Nero’s true character. (Perhaps, then, having observed earlier that Burrhus is as incapable of telling a lie as Narcissus is of speaking the truth, I should now qualify that observation by amending the phrase to “incapable of knowingly telling a lie,” for his above-​quoted assumptions about Nero, desperately though he may want to believe them, could not, from an objective point of view, be further from the truth.) And there is one additional bit of (mis)information that Burrhus imparts to Narcissus, strategically placed by Racine in this scene, and a savory example of his trademark irony (whose removal, therefore, represents an unfortunate, if minor, loss): to wit, Burrhus’s assurance that “your master [i.e., Britannicus] has not been exiled” (III.i.34), for only a few minutes before, in the course of Nero’s scene with Junia,

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he apprised her of his intention to do precisely that, namely, have Britannicus exiled: “If his life’s dear to you, send him away. . . . Let him impute to you his banishment. . . . At least by coldness, give the prince to know / That all his prospects here he must forgo” (II.iii.146, 148, 150 –51). Finally, one must concede that there is one slight blemish in this scene, which bespeaks at least one passage to which Racine might not have put the finishing touches. There are two couplets of Burrhus’s that patently contradict each other, and the fact that this discrepancy is made more glaring by the striking similarity in their diction would suggest that Racine, had he retained this scene, might have eliminated or changed one of them. In Burrhus’s opening speech, he recalls to Narcissus, “When Claudius — ​old, infirm, near his last hour — / Left all of Rome in Agrippina’s power” (III.i.11– 12) (“Lorsque de Claudius l’impuissante vieillesse / Laissa de tout l’empire Agrippine maîtresse”: literally, When the impotent old age of Claudius left Agrippina mistress of the whole empire); then, several speeches later, he reminds Narcissus, “Thus, when, no longer fit to rule this land, / Claudius left Rome to writhe beneath your hand” (III.i.45 –46) (“Ainsi lorsqu’inutile au reste des humains, / Claude laissait gémir l’empire entre vos mains”: literally, Thus, when, useless to the rest of mankind, Claudius left the empire to groan between your hands). As one can see, the two clauses are virtual paraphrases of each other, with the salient exception that in the first the empire is entrusted to Agrippina, in the second, to Narcissus. (Both scenarios, in fact, receive some corroboration in the play. Agrippina looks longingly back to those days “when, my hand guiding the affairs of state, / The senate, at my call, would congregate. / Then, veiled but present, I would play my role: / That august body’s all-​controlling soul” [I.i.93 –96]; and Narcissus reminisces to Nero of his glory days when, “myself, decked out with powers but lent to me, / Which Claudius gave me with my liberty,  / A  hundred times, while I, in glory, reigned, / I tried their [the Roman people’s] patience, but it never waned” [IV.iv.55 –58].)

Bibliography

I include in this Bibliography only those works to which I refer in the Discussion or in the Notes and Commentary. There are countless other studies available, in English and French; a helpful selection may be found in the bibliography of Ronald W. Tobin’s Jean Racine Revisited.

primary sources Racine, Jean. Oeuvres complètes. Ed. Georges Forestier. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard, 1999. ———. Oeuvres complètes. Ed. Raymond Picard. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard, 1980.

secondary sources Bowra, C. M. “The Simplicity of Racine.” In Modern Judgements: Racine, ed. R. C. Knight, 24 –48. Nashville: Aurora, 1970. Campbell, John. Questioning Racinian Tragedy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Clark, A. F. B. Jean Racine. New York: Octagon Books, 1969. Cloonan, William J. Racine’s Theatre: The Politics of Love. University, Miss.: Romance Monographs, 1977. De Mourgues, Odette. Racine; or, The Triumph of Relevance. London: Cambridge University Press, 1967. Goldmann, Lucien. Racine. Trans. Alastair Hamilton. London: Writers and Readers, 1956.

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Goodkin, Richard E. The Tragic Middle. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Racine, Jean. Andromache. Trans. Richard Wilbur. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982. ———. Three Plays of Racine. Trans. George Dillon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. Suetonius. The Twelve Caesars. Trans. Robert Graves. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1957. Tacitus. The Annals of Imperial Rome. Trans. Michael Grant. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1956. Tobin, Ronald W. Jean Racine Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1999. Turnell, Martin. Jean Racine: Dramatist. New York: New Directions Books, 1972. Vinaver, Eugène. Racine and Poetic Tragedy. Trans. P. Mansell Jones. New York: Hill and Wang, 1955. Vossler, Karl. Jean Racine. Trans. Isabel McHugh and Florence McHugh. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1972. Weinberg, Bernard. The Art of Jean Racine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Racine, Jean, 1639 –1699. [Plays. English]  The complete plays of Jean Racine  / translated into English rhymed couplets with critical notes and commentary by Geoffrey Alan Argent.    p.   cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “An English translation, in iambic pentameter couplets, of all twelve of seventeenth-​century French playwright Jean Racine’s plays” —​ Provided by publisher. isbn 978-0-271-06406-2 (v. 5 : cloth : alk. paper) 1. Racine, Jean, 1639 –1699 — ​Translations into English. 2. Racine, Jean, 1639 –1699 — ​Criticism and interpretation. I. Argent, Geoffrey Alan. II. Title. pq1888.e5a74 2010 842’.4 — ​dc22 2010014681 Copyright © 2014 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802-1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48 –1992.