Jean Racine: Britannicus: A Tragedy. In Compete Plays. Volume I. Samuel Solomon translation. New York: Random House, 1967.
Note: This play was performed at Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan, on February 13th and 14th, 2020. Director George Angell presented it in the format used by the French in the seventeenth century: a dramatic reading, with no costumes, props, or stage action—rather like a scholastic disputation, albeit one with a plot. Aside from historical accuracy, the merit of this staging is that it assists the audience in concentrating on the playwright’s words without the distraction of ‘stage business.’
Roman Emperor Nero was the last of the Julian-Claudian dynasty, the first dynasty to rule Rome after the destruction of the republic. Great-grandson of Augustus, his father was Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus. His mother was Julia Agrippina (Agrippina the Younger), daughter of Germanicus Caesar (head of Rome’s German-based legions, and, according to Tacitus, “a young man of unaspiring heart” and “wonderful kindness”). She was also sister of the notorious Caligula, who may be said to have had none of his father’s virtues. After the death of her first husband Agrippina married the Emperor Claudius, an arrangement that didn’t prevent her from taking a lover, Pallas, who not incidentally served as the imperial treasurer. Nero’s birth name was Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus; he was adopted by the Emperor Claudius at wife Agrippina’s request. Although distinguished tutors—the Stoic philosopher Seneca and the Praetorian prefect Sextus Africanus Burrus—their sober instructions had little effect on the young prince, who, as the Roman general and historian Suetonius puts it, “so far degenerated from the noble qualities of his ancestors that he retained only their vices, as if these alone had been transmitted to him by natural inheritance.” Claudius’ bloodline son, Britannicus, was the son of Claudius’ previous wife, Messalina. The slightest acquaintance with Roman imperial politics, or indeed with hereditary monarchies generally, more than suggests that this looks like trouble. Sure enough, Suetonius suspects that Messalina may have wanted the child murdered in order to eliminate a possible rival to her own son. For her part, Agrippina persistently schemed to elevate her son over Britannicus—never stopping at crimes, including murder, so to do. He was indeed crowned emperor in 54 A.D. at the age of seventeen.
In his second, 1676 preface to the play, Racine tells his readers “I had copied my characters from the greatest painter of antiquity, namely from Tacitus,” who recounts the events of Rome during the rule of the early emperors in his Annals. As always, Racine’s language is precise. He copied his characters from a painter in words, a portraitist. He takes liberties with Tacitus’ chronology. He has noticed Tacitus’ assessment of the effects of Rome’s regime change from republic to monarchy under the Caesars. By the time of the Augustus’ vile successor, Tiberius, “How few were left who had seen the republic!” “The state had been revolutionized, and there was not a vestige left of the old sound morality.” Tiberius, also called Nero, “was of mature years, and had established his fame in war” by the time he ascended to the throne, “but he had the old arrogance inbred in the Claudian family, and many symptoms of a cruel temper, though they were repressed, now and then broke out.” In fact he had “no thought, but of wealth, hypocrisy, and secret sensuality”—a ‘career arc,’ as it were, the second Nero would follow. Suetonius writes that upon being crowned, Gnaeus Nero “declared he would rule according to the principles of Augustus,” who on balance was a man of virtue. And many of Nero’s early acts as emperor were “beyond criticism,” others “deserving of no slight praise.” “Little by little, however, as his vices grew stronger, he dropped jesting and secrecy and with no attempt at disguise openly broke out in the worst crime.” Racine’s play begins before that happened: “I have always thought of him as a monster,” Racine tells his readers; “but here he is a budding monster.”
Accordingly, the first scene opens with Agrippina and her lady-in-waiting, Albina, indeed a woman of ‘whiteness’ or chasteness. It is morning, and Agrippina wants to speak with the emperor as soon as he arises. She worries that Nero intends to make some unseemly move against his potential rival, Britannicus, and senses a change in her son’s way of ruling: “Weary of men’s love, he demands their fear.” Innocent Albina protests that Nero has governed Rome “like a father,” with “all the virtues of Augustus old,” just as he had promised to do. Mother knows better. “True, he began where great Augustus ended,” as the benevolent ruler of a vast empire, but if he attacks his step-brother he will “end just how Augustus had begun,” in civil war. “In vain he shams: I read upon his face / The dark, wild humours of his savage sires, / Uniting with their fierce and stubborn blood / The pride of all the Neros born of me.” She recalls brother Caligula’s tyrannical reign, whose “first fruits” were sweet. What is more (and here she shows herself Neronian) “What matters it to me if, after all, / Nero, more persevering in his good, / Should one day leave behind a model rule?” Even if Albina is right, “Have I placed in his hands the helm of State / To steer it as the Senate’s whim directs?” No mixed-regime, limited monarchy for her. “Let him be, if he must, the people’s father; / But let him not forget I am his mother.” She would rule Rome through him. Agrippina is a formidable ‘republican mother’ gone wrong; she embodies republican motherhood under tyranny, now itself tyrannical. A revolution or regime change might not occur if the ethos of an old regime has not declined, but the new regime may well reinforce whatever virtues (or in this case vices) that conduced to the revolution.
What specifically has alarmed Agrippina? Although married to the virtuous Octavia, daughter of Claudius, Nero has arrested Junia, an niece of Augustus who loves Britannicus. “What does he want?” Mother wants to know. “What drives him? Hate or love?” Does he intend to harm the betrothed couple, or “rather is it not perhaps his spite / To punish them, because I lend them aid?” True, she prevented Britannicus from ascending to “the throne he should have won / By right of blood,” and I schemed successfully to block Britannicus’ intended marriage to Olivia. But now she wants to keep Britannicus around as a sort of insurance policy, in case her unloving and ungrateful son turns against her. “I must hold the balance,” since “I would soon fear him, were he not / To fear me any more.” “I see my honors rise, my credit fall. / No, no, gone is the time when Nero, young, / Sent me the prayers of an adoring Court; / When he left all affairs of State to me, / When at my word the Senate would assemble / Within the palace, where, behind a veil, / Invisible and present, I became / The almighty spirit of that mighty body. / At that time still unsure of Rome’s support, / Nero was not yet drunken with his greatness.” Therefore, let us “ask him how he justifies her capture. / Let’s try to pierce the secrets of his soul.” Having tasted the joys of divinelike invisibility, divinelike presence, and divinelike absolute power, Agrippina needs divinelike omniscience. Racine describes “my tragedy” as in part “the fall of Agrippina,” who will learn that ‘divinelike’ is not the same as divinity.
Nero’s Praetorian former tutor , now adviser Burrhus enters, to be greeted by Agrippina’s accusations. “How long do you intend to hide the Emperor?” Alluding to Burrhus’ counterpart, she demands “Must Seneca and you fight for the honor / Who will be first to wipe me from his mind?” She charges them with wanting to usurp her rightful place as the one who “should rule the State.” “Nero is a child no more. Should he not reign?”—that is, under the firm maternal guidance. “Must he see nothing but through your eyes?” when it is only right that his mother should rule him right down to his perceptions. She can teach him virtues as well as soldierly Burrhus and philosophic Seneca, to wit, “instruct him what reserve / Between himself and subjects to preserve”—an allusion to Nero’s already well-developed propensity to exhibit himself before the vulgar in singing contests, chariot races, and other public spectacles. Burrhus rejoins that he did not “promise to betray your son, / To make of him a puppet Emperor.” “He’s no more son, but master of the world. / I must account for him to all the Empire,” serving “his fame.” “Nero is his only law” (true enough): “He has only to follow his forefathers: / To prosper, he need only be himself” and not to “grow old still to be a child” under Mother’s rule.
As is her wont, Agrippina cuts to the chase. Why has Nero detained Junia? She has committed no crime, Burrhus explains, but “You know, by right of her imperial rank, / Her husband may become a rebel prince.” Nor is it right that “Augustus’ niece should wed unknown to Nero.” This means that “Britannicus may not lean on my choice,” Agrippina rightly remarks, convinced that Nero does this only “to spite me” by proving to Britannicus and Junia that “his mother’s promises exceed her power,” “To frighten all the world into remembering / No more to think the Emperor is my son.” We’ll see about that, her tone more than suggests.
It should be needless to say that Burrhus’ urgings to “Forget the sad task of eternal censor” and to “show a mother’s love” fall on ears deafened by libido dominandi. Britannicus enters with Tiberius Claudius Narcissus, formerly a courtier under Claudius (the one who ordered the execution of the Emperor’s murderous and slatternly previous wife, Messalina). Initially he had distrusted Britannicus, assuming that the son might take his mother’s demise the wrong way. But when Agrippina charged him with “avarice and peculation” (Tacitus writes) Narcissus allied himself with the rightful heir. To Britannicus’ exclamations and declamations against the emperor’s arrest of his beloved, Agrippina snaps, “I do not rely on empty anger / To keep my word to you and save my promise.” She will wait for him at her lover Pallas’ house, should Britannicus wish to seek her practical counsel. Britannicus quite understandably wonders if he should trust her “as judge between her son and me,” a woman his father, Claudius, “married, to his ruin”—an allusion to the distinct possibility that Agrippina had her first husband poisoned. Narcissus coolly estimates the matron’s soul as unfilial: “No matter, Like you she is feeling outraged.” Therefore, “Unite your troubles; bind your interests.” This brings Britannicus back to seeming prudence. Recalling that his father trusted Narcissus, and that he’s proven trustworthy to himself, too, he asks him to speak to their friends, to “find out if this fresh storm” may have aroused their courage, and if he can expect their help. Also, reconnoiter the palace to see how well-guarded Junia is. “Meanwhile, I’ll seek out Nero’s mother / At the house of Pallas, like you, father’s freedman” and now treasurer of the imperial court. “I’ll see, incite and follow her, and try, / Under her wing, higher than she to fly!”
Racine introduces Nero at the beginning of Act II. He assures Burrhus that he will ignore his mother’s “taunts” and “whims.” “But I will not ignore nor suffer more / The insolent official who dares feed them;” Pallas, he supposes “has poisoned her with his advice” and “daily leads Britannicus astray” as well. “I’ll tear him from both” by sending him into exile. All of this suggests that Nero either lacks the stomach to ruin his mother and step-brother or seriously misreads their characters. Dismissing Burrhus and the guards, he then confides to Narcissus that he ‘loves’ Junia—”stirred by a curious desire,” as he rightly puts it—and “she must be my wife.” “I loved the very tears I caused to flow” and thus “plunged into my latest passion.” It is her “virtue, novel at my Court” (he accurately remarks) “whose shy persistence high inflames my love,” a curious desire indeed. He asks if Britannicus does indeed love her, too, and Narcissus tells him that “You may be sure he loves her,” although “Love often comes before the age of reason”—an observation at least as applicable to Nero as to Britannicus. When he learns that Junia loves Britannicus in return, Nero vows that “Nero will not be jealous unavenged.” To the soul of the tyrant, love for another is an injustice, an outrage, a punishable crime, just as to the soul of the mother-tyrant and tyrant-mother her son’s disobedience is an injustice, and outrage, and a punishable crime. Narcissus plays on the tyrant’s soul. “What need Nero fear?” The splendor of your throne will surely open the girl’s eyes.” Thus prepared, if you “command she love you” then “you will be loved.” A tyrant might readily be persuaded that he can be loved upon command. And while you are at it, bring your mother to heel: “Are you afraid?” Surely not, sire, as you’ve “just exiled Pallas, in his pride, / Whose impudence you realize she sustains.”
But, “laying bare to you my soul,” Nero admits that when “I’m in her sight, / Whether I dare not yet deny the power of / Those eyes, where I have so long read my duty; / Or whether, mindful of so many boons”—her many crimes and manipulations on his behalf—”I tender her in secret all she’s given, / My strength against her I in vain assemble.” She frees himself “from this servitude” as a weak man can only do, by avoiding her. Assuring Nero that “Britannicus completely trusts me,” he advises Nero to exile him. Nero has other plans. Rather, he tells his co-conspirator to invite Britannicus to come and see her: “I have my reasons, and you may be sure / I’ll sell him dear the joy of seeing her.” Be sure to add that I know nothing of this, that he will be seeing her without my knowledge or command. After Narcissus leaves, he meets unsuspecting Junia, who is looking for Octavia. He announces that she will marry him, assuring her with no false modesty that “I would name to you a greater hero, / If any name stood higher here than Nero.” He even offers her a syllogism. “Claudius destined you to wed his son; / But this was at a time when he expected / Some day to name him heir of all the Empire. / The gods have since pronounced. You, therefore, should / Bow to their will and choose both love and empire.” Don’t worry about Octavia, who has given him no child and heir. Rome “repudiates Octavia and unties / A marriage knot that Heaven declines to bless.”
Junia wants none of this. Having “lost all her nearest kin” as a child (the list of those poisoned or impaled in imperial power-struggles is long), she retired to a secluded life, wherein she “aimed at virtues that befit her woes,” virtues of the private life. Why would I wish to “pass sudden from this deep obscurity / Into a rank exposed to all the world, / Whose brilliance I may not at all sustain, / Indeed, whose majesty another fills?” Nonsense, Nero replies: “I’ll speak for you: you’ve only to agree,” adding with the tyrant’s characteristic appeal to fear, “The empty glory of a rash refusal / You may regret.” To her continued demurral, Nero, like his mother, speaks directly. “Let us be speak out plain and drop the veil;” Octavia’s brother, Britannicus, “most concerns you,” not Octavia herself. True, Junia admits. “I love Britannicus; to him was pledged / When the Empire was to follow on our marriage,” and now when it will not, she loves him still. This only makes Nero want her more: “These tears are just the pleasures that I covet, / For which all else but him would pay the forfeit.” He tells her of Britannicus’ impending visit, but then tells him that she can only save her betrothed by pretending not to live him, to “dismiss him.” And your emperor will be “watch[ing] you from the start,” invisible as his mother was at the Senate, all-seeing and all-hearing as a god. “Without fail, his doom shall be the fees / Of any sign or gesture meant to please.”
In her parley with Britannicus, Junia hints, “You are in a place full of [Nero’s] mighty presence,” but her manly, unsubtle beloved doesn’t take the hint, instead thinking that she has indeed thrown him over for Nero. After his departure she tells Nero, “You’ve been obeyed. Let me at least shed tears / Now that his eyes no longer will be witness.” Nero will later tell Narcissus, “She loves my rival, as I’m full aware, / But I will seek my joy in his despair,” a despair he commands Narcissus reinforce in his next conversation with the man he is betraying. Alone, Narcissus reveals where his true loyalty lies. “A second time, Narcissus, Fortune smiles,” he tells himself. (The first time was when Agrippina plucked him from obscurity in a military encampment to make him her son’s co-tutor). “Why hesitate before her wanton wiles?” Fortuna, that woman, must be mastered with force, the student of ancient Rome, Machiavelli, teaches. “Come, to the bitter end, her favors cherish; / To make me happy, let poor wretches perish!” The regime of tyranny teaches, ‘Every man for himself.’
Act III begins with Burrhus giving Nero a hard-headed, soldierly assessment of Agrippina’s actual strength. Quite apart from his emotions, based on a potent mixture of fear, gratitude, and guilt, Burrhus points to his mother’s allies. “Agrippina still should make you fear. / Rome and your soldiers too her sires revere; / They see in her Germanicus, her father,” the noble leader of the legions in Germany. What is more, she knows this too, and will act on that knowledge. “She knows her power—and you know well her courage,” as the Praetorian calls her iron ambition and ruthlessness. By your actions, “you yourself are holstering her anger / In furnishing her arms against yourself” by scheming to rid yourself of Octavia and marry Junia. “Stay away from” that girl for a few days. “Be sure, however much one seems to love, / One loves not if one wishes not to love.” Yes, but Burrhus, the emperor replies, you are a military and political man. “Believe me, love’s a very different science,” and “perhaps it would be unfair” to “drag your virtue rare” down to it. With that, he leaves his tutor. The problem is rather not that Burrhus has mistaken the nature of love as that Nero has. He claims to understand all the sciences, including the public sciences of politics and soldiery, the private science of love. But he has only succeeded in mixing them up, expecting to win love by command, fear, and coercion. In his passions for rule and for love, the tyrant confuses the two, perverting both.
Burrhus now delivers his soliloquy, which differs from that of Narcissus on every point. “Nero lays bare his inmost soul. / This savagery you thought you might control / Is ready to break loose from your weak bond. / To what excesses it may spread beyond!” Unlike Narcissus, he doesn’t know what to do, and also unlike him, he appeals to the gods. As for philosophy, “Seneca, whose counsels might go home, / Knows not this peril, far detained from Rome.” He sees Agrippina, and somehow supposes that his “great good luck sends her to me.” Not so: she rebukes him, alleging that he has flattered Nero’s passions, “mak[ing] his heart / Disdain his mother and forget his wife!” Burrhus presses on, urging calm, but “in vain you make me hold my tongue.” “Heaven leaves me force enough to avenge my fall,” bringing the army to bear on Nero and his enemies. Burrhus simply replies, “they will not believe you, Madam.” Instead, he predicts, they will report her to Nero. After he leaves, Albina proves no more persuasive. “If I do not soon snap this fatal bond” between Nero and Junia, Agrippina calculates, “My place is filled and I become a cipher. / Till now Octavia, with her empty title, / Powerless at Court, could be ignored by it.” But if Nero marries Junia, she will “wield the influence both of wife and mistress,” a fatal combination to the tyrant-mother, were it even remotely descriptive of Junia’s actual character.
When Britannicus comes into her presence, he quite correctly points out that she “made too certain of my fall” to help him now, as “I have no more a friend; your wise precautions / Have long since suborned or removed them all.” Ever undaunted, and indeed in all likelihood pleased to have rendered Britannicus without any allies but herself, Agrippina tells him to leave everything to her. “I’ll harass Nero from all sides. Good-bye!” You need only one ally, if I am she. Narcissus then approaches Britannicus, testing to see if he has fallen for the Neronian ruse. He has. “I believe [Junia] criminal and false.” And yet, and yet, “In spite of her betrayal, my staunch heart / Excuses, justifies and worships her.” Not liking the sound of that, Narcissus asks, “who knows if the wanton, from her cloister, / Did not contrive to trap the Emperor,” fleeing him “in order to be caught,” “tempt[ing] the Emperor with the glorious sin / Of conquering where none else dared to win.” Even now, he suggests, “She is accepting her new lover’s vows,” taking cruel advantage of the lad-emperor. Thus he attempts to detach Britannicus from Junia and attach him to Nero, the better to further his own ambitions. But his speech only makes Britannicus want to see this enormity for himself. He will return to the palace.
There he confronts Junia, who can now tell him that “Nero, while listening, ordered me to feign” her rejection. She urges him to get away, to “shun his sight.” “My heart will tell you more some happier day. / A thousand little secrets it will beat.” Alerted by Narcissus, Nero interrupts, answering Britannicus’ words of defiance not with matching personal courage, of which he is incapable, but with a threat to bring down the power of “the Empire and the State” upon his enemy’s head, weights he boasts control of. He has Britannicus placed under arrest in Octavia’s suite, ordering Junia to return to her apartments in the palace. He then confides to Burrhus his intention to have his mother killed, whom he mistakenly blames for this “odious trick.” Overriding Burrhus’ protestations (“What, Sire? A mother? Without hearing?”), he tells him he will arrest him if he does not “take charge of her.”
This central, pivotal act of the play shows how tyranny induces tyrannical men and women to make mistakes. Their passions, and especially their passion to rule, ruins their ability to rule. What they take for prudence is folly. They misread the characters of those they expect to rule, and when their misreading issues in failure they can only bring down violence. They careen toward their destruction, and Rome’s.
In Act IV Agrippina confronts Nero. He reminds him that he owes the emperorship to her, and to her agent, Pallas, who (in her version) convinced Claudius to adopt her son, giving him the name “Nero.” She herself pushed Claudius’ own son, Britannicus, aside, having “exhausted” Claudius “with my clamor.” I “drew to you the people’s and the soldiers’ hearts, / Who, mindful once more of their former love, / Preferred in you Germanicus, my father.” When Claudius on his deathbed understood her plot and “cried out his concern for his own son,” it was too late: “His guards, his house, his bed, were in my power.” Again at her behest, Burrhus put in place the last element, persuading the Praetorian guard to back you. Yet this same Burrhus, allied with Seneca, have been “souring you, / Giving you lessons in ingratitude,” while “young voluptuaries… pander shamelessly to all your pleasures.” And here lies the problem: Nero indeed has no shame. Assuring Mother of his “grateful memories,” he quite accurately replies that “You previously—if I dare plainly speak— / Have only worked, in my name, for yourself.” “But Rome demands a master, not a mistress.” He goes so far as to accuse her of plotting to replace him with Britannicus, a charge she vehemently denies (“What honors, rank, could I expect from him?” And why would he not have me prosecuted for her many crimes committed on her son’s behalf?) “You cannot gull me, I see all your tricks. / You are a thankless knave and always were one. / Right from your infancy my love and care / Have but extracted feigned caresses from you.” This extracts an equally feigned concession to her demands, which include, letting her “have access to you night and day.”
Later Nero confides to Burrhus that he intends to kill Britannicus. His tutor again is genuinely shocked. “Have you thought in whose blood you’ll be wading? / Is Nero tired of reigning in all hearts? What will they say of you? What are you thinking?” What Nero is thinking is that public opinion is nothing. “Chance” or Fortuna gives us the love of the people one day, takes it away the next. “Slave to their wishes, tyrant of my own, / Merely to please them do I wear the crown?” Burrhus reminds him that up to now he has ruled virtuously. “Is it not enough for your desires / The public weal should be your highest good?” If you murder your rival “You’ll light a flame that cannot be extinguished. / Feared by the whole world, you will fear each man, / Will ever punish, ever trembling plan, / And as your foe your every subject scan.” But surely it is not enough for Nero’s desires to make the public weal his highest good. He tells Burrhus to summon Britannicus to the palace.
He then consults the Machiavellian Narcissus. Here is where Racine shows the complexity of his Nero’s soul. Nero was on the verge of becoming a cartoon monster, not a real one. He tells Narcissus, “I do not wish to pursue the plan.” Ever-ready with a well-placed lie—or is it a lie?—Narcissus tells him that Agrippina has boasted in public of her sway over Nero. “Do you insist I choose the tyrant’s path,” Nero asks, “That Rome, erasing all marks of esteem, / Should leave me but the name of poisoner?” and a fratricidal one at that. Narcissus repeats Nero’s own argument to Burrhus. The people are fickle, and they are easily intimidated; as subjects of a longstanding tyranny, “they’ve been adapted to the yoke.” “Sentence the brother and renounce the sister” and the people will condemn them both. Nero still resists, recalling Burrhus’ arguments. “I wish no more to break my word to him / And gave his virtue arms against myself. / Against his arguments my courage sticks, / And when he speaks to me my conscience pricks.” There was of course no such notion as conscience in ancient Rome, until Christianity. Nero speaks more like a modern ruler; Racine writes for his contemporaries, and perhaps above all for contemporary absolute monarchs.
Narcissus persuades him, finally, by alleging that Burrhus, and not only Burrhus but “all of them,” “have but one thought: / They fear this blow will end their influence.” Free yourself of “these proud masters.” (Pride is always damnable—in others.) “Are you unaware of all they whisper? / ‘Nero,’ they hint, ‘was not born to the Throne; / He only says and does what he is told, / His mind controlled by Seneca, his heart / By Burrhus.” And his quest for popularity is “unworthy of a Caesar.” Convinced that the youth has freed himself from his childish fear of his mother, Narcissus works on his vanity and his youthful desire for freedom to sever himself from his teachers. He positions himself to be the last teacher Nero will ever need, the proto-Machiavellian adviser of the new Roman prince. If Nero experiences the decidedly unclassical pangs of conscience, a decidedly unclassical advisor appears to dissolve his reservations. “Let’s see what we must do,” Nero decides. “Must”: the appeal to necessity is often strongest when other passions reinforce it.
Racine begins Act V with Britannicus revealing himself to his beloved Junia as a wishful thinker par excellence. An invitation to Nero’s palace, with the dangled prospect of reconciliation, gulls him entirely. Sensible Junia isn’t so sure, but Britannicus has convinced himself that Agrippina has pushed her son to it, as “She felt my ruin would her fall provoke.” But can his apparent change of heart, so sudden, be real? Yes, because Nero either “open hates or hates no more.” Junia has the better insight: “Do not judge his heart, my lord, by yours.” Such ‘mirror-imaging,’ as it came to be called in the twentieth century, remains endemic in social and political relations. One may recall how frequently citizens of republican regimes misread the intentions of tyrants, simply because they assumed that everyone is pretty much the same, despite differences of regime and ‘culture.’ This goes for regime shifts within the same country, too. As Tacitus already knew, the republican virtues had disappeared along with the republic.
Britannicus is also afflicted by a form of pride. Whether Nero proves “true or false” in his friendship, he tells Junia, “he dare not, by a cowardly blow, / Become the people’s and the Senate’s foe.” He determines to act as if the remaining vestiges of Roman republicanism were still strong. He even imagines that Narcissus was ashamed of Nero’s shamefulness. When Junia persists in doubting, he closes the matter by wondering why she distrusts his judgment.
Agrippina arrives, shoos Britannicus off to the palace, and assures Junia that her son’s “heart is free of any wickedness” but rather it is “our foes”—Agrippina’s rivals for influence, Burrhus and Seneca—”who have taken mean advantage of his kindness.” Her analysis is of course the exact opposite of the truth, as it’s Narcissus who has usurped the place of the tutors she had hired. It is a wise mother who knows her son: “He asked my aid in great affairs of State / On which depends the universe’s fate.” This being so, she wishfully imagines, “Rome soon will know her Agrippina again!” The would-be goddess of the known universe has spoken; surely her son has obeyed.
No. The next news out of the palace is that Britannicus has died by poisoning. Nero denies to his mother that he had anything to do with it (“for the blows of Fate I cannot answer”), but Agrippina isn’t entirely a fool, and threatens her son the revenge of the Furies after the death she sees impending for herself. She finally makes a prophecy that will prove true: “To the basest tyrants shall your name / Through all the ages spell the basest shame.” Any remorse for her own hand in this remains foreign to her soul. She ignores the sharp point of Burrhus’ description of her son at the scene of his crime: “Nero turned not a hair as he [Britannicus] lay dying. / His listless eyes already have the hardness / Of a tyrant raised in crime from infancy.”
In the final scene, Albina reports that Junia has undertaken the Roman equivalent of escaping to the safety of a nunnery. She has declared before the statue of Augustus that she will become a Virgin of the Gods, and in this vow the people, witnesses to it, shielded him from Narcissus, who attempted to drag her back to the palace. The aid Britannicus falsely expected for himself came for his beloved, instead. Racine was later punished by Louis XIV by expressing sympathy for the sufferings of the French owing to their monarch’s foreign wars. One suspects he harbored some of Tacitus’ republican or at least popular sympathies. King Louis might so have suspected.
To Burrhus suggestion that Nero might kill himself in sorrow over Junia’s escape, Agrippina snarls, “‘Twill serve him right.” Even now, wishful thinking born of vanity rules her: “Let’s see if his remorse will make him change / And wiser counsels will prevail with time.” Burrhus answers, completing the rhyme of the couplet and ending the play, “Pray Heaven this were his one and only crime!”
Everyone in Racine’s audience knew otherwise. Suetonius records that he would indeed have his mother murdered—Burrhus and Seneca, too—although he would indeed be “hounded by his mother’s ghost and by the whips and blazing torches of the Furies.”
Racine has written a Hamlet for the regime of Louis XIV’s absolute monarchy: mother and the son, also queen and prince, locked in a death-spiraling embrace. But here the prince has become the emperor by the beginning of the action. Hamlet’s tutor hides behind the curtain, dies by Hamlet’s sword, and is pronounced not wise but an old fool by the prince. Here, the prince and emperor seeks the godlike knowledge of invisible witnessing; he doesn’t get killed for it, but is indeed a fool. He is irresolute, like Hamlet, and conscience almost makes a ‘coward’ of him. Not only was he his own fool but he would become his own killer, dying after Rome had turned against him. Racine’s Nero was Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Polonius combined. And King Louis? Racine has written an admonitory tragedy for French monarchs and the aristocrats they have gathered around them. He has shown them what their souls are becoming.
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