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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 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 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.

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)

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 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 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 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 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.

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 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, 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 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.

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 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, 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.

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 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:

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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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.

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, 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 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, “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 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.

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 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 (“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 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 matter-of-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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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.”

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 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 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)

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 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 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 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 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.

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 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.

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