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athaliah: discussion


i

After completing Phaedra, Racine underwent a self-imposed retirement from the theater and only resumed his career as a playwright a dozen years later at the persuasive, if not peremptory, request of Madame de Maintenon, Louis XIV’s morganatic wife, who solicited a play to be performed by the schoolgirls of Saint-Cyr, the school she had recently established for daughters of the impoverished nobility. Instructed to choose a subject without a strong love interest (the schoolgirls’ performance of the too torrid Andromache had convinced their patroness of the necessity for this precaution), and probably considering a biblical subject as most appropriate to the venue, Racine produced Esther, which was successful enough to have induced the king, at his wife’s urging, to demand another. The resultant play, Athaliah, which was to prove his last, finds Racine at the top of his form, more than one critic, both then and now, judging it Racine’s supreme masterpiece.

Unlike the plot of Esther, whose general outline is taken intact from the biblical book of that name, Athaliah’s broad narrative arc (most notably its conflation of the Bible’s accounts of Athaliah and Joash) and all the details of its plot and characterization were fashioned by Racine (who, somewhat misleadingly, labeled the play “a tragedy drawn from sacred scripture”) from the merest hints in the biblical passages relating to its protagonists. Considering that for his last two plays Racine chose biblical subjects and that his earlier abandonment of the theater was partially motivated by a renewed religious fervor, which would have precluded writing plays as too worldly an occupation, we might be disposed to assume that those two plays are in some strong sense “religious” plays, perhaps even meditations on God, faith, and providence. And there are indeed some critics who, however ready they may be to dismiss as irrelevant the role of the heathen gods in Racine’s other plays, regard Jehoiada’s God as an unseen but potent presence in the play under consideration, directing the proceedings and impinging on the action, as does Sultan Amurat in Bajazet. But whereas in that play the sultan’s decree has determined the outcome even before the action commences, here one can make no case for any direct interference by the God so often invoked, any more than one can do for such interference on the part of the Greek gods in The Fratricides or Iphigenia. True, the characters in those plays are ever ready to hold “heaven” (a metonymy for those gods) accountable for the reverses they suffer. In The Fratricides Jocasta instructs her daughter in its malignant ways:


Heav’n’s deadly spite, my child, you little know:

It always grants some easement to my woe;

Alas! just when its aspect seems most fair,

Its deadliest stroke it hastens to prepare.

(The Fratricides III.iii.63–66)


Agamemnon, too, imputes to heaven a watchful and cunning interference in his affairs: “In vain, just heav’n, my prudence has resorted / To schemes which your vindictiveness has thwarted!” (Iphigenia I.v.1–2). But in neither play do the gods actually intrude upon the action. In the denouement of Iphigenia certain manifestations suggest a benign numinous presence:


Scarce had her scarlet blood suffused the ground,

When the Gods’ thunder started to resound;

The winds, then, moved the air to happy song;

With booming voice the vast sea sang along.

The far shore brimmed with breakers, foaming white.

The pyre appeared to set itself alight.

The heavens, flashing lightning, opened wide:

By those blest beams we all felt sanctified.

(Iphigenia V.fin.sc.58–65)


But these can just as easily be explained as meteorological phenomena, and Racine is careful to suggest that it is only one “astonished soldier” who claimed that


Diana, descended from the skies,

Approached the altar in a cloud’s disguise,

And rising with the fires that sought the sky,

Our incense and our prayers bore up on high.

(Iphigenia V.fin.sc.66–69)


And in Athaliah there is no more significant evidence of any supernatural intervention. This laissez-faire policy on the part of the Deity must be all the more striking for an audience who has heard Jehoiada scolding Abner for needing to be reminded of “the spate / Of prodigies that God’s poured forth of late” (I.i.109–10), several of them clearly the result of intercession by a heavenly agent. He seems to promise us the renewal of such miracles:


Abner, mark well, these miracles betray

A God who, as He once was, is today.

He still can show His might when He’s inclined,

His people ever present to His mind.

(I.i.125–28)


But our expectations are belied by the event. The climactic scene of Athaliah features not so much a coup de foudre as a coup de théâtre and seems less the product of providential interference by a benign deity than the triumph of savvy stagecraft on the part of Jehoiada.

ii

In Athaliah, there are two episodes that we would be hard pressed to explain away as having anything but a supernatural basis: Athaliah’s dream and Jehoiada’s prophetic vision. As to the latter, it has no bearing whatever on the action of the play: Jehoiada himself retains no memory of it when he comes out of his trance, and none of the other characters mentions it, alludes to it, or, indeed, gives any sign of its ever having taken place. (The chorus react to it in their act-ending ode, but only to express their puzzlement over this “dark mystery” [III.viii.26]: “Who can explain to us its sense?” [III.viii.23].) And as to the former, one should take note of the fact that the last recurrence of Athaliah’s dream (she has had the same dream three times: “Twice more to this same dream I’ve fallen prey” [II.v.63]) has already taken place before the action of the play unfolds. And, of course, neither Jehoiada’s vision nor Athaliah’s dream is necessarily unearthly in itself; each will be revealed as having been uncannily prophetic only by subsequent events: Athaliah’s dream within a matter of days, when she sees for the first time the very boy of her nightmare serving the high priest in the temple, Jehoiada’s vision only over the course of years (thirty, to be precise, in the case of Joash’s ordering Zachariah to be stoned to death) and even centuries (in the case of the destruction of the temple, the ruin of Jerusalem, and the coming of the Savior).

Whereas the most indubitable intrusion of the supernatural — indeed, the only intrusion — in any of Racine’s other plays, namely, the eruption, toward the end of Phaedra, of the fantastic sea beast, which leads to Hippolytus’s death, can be plausibly read as a “monstrification” of unbridled passion (Phaedra’s “monstrous” love for her stepson), a symbol of its destructive force, Athaliah’s dream lends itself to no such easy interpretation. Granted, within the context of the dream itself, it is not hard to perceive a clarifying nexus between its two apparently disparate halves: “Racine presents two visions clearly seen and described, first of the dead Jezebel, then of the living Joas, and the prophecy of the former is rendered explicit by the dagger thrust of the latter” (Lapp, 182). But if, reluctant to accept Jehoiada’s preemption of God’s role in bringing about Athaliah’s downfall, we would wish to construe this oneiric omen as the sort of God-sent miracle that Jehoiada has led Abner (and us) to believe is forthcoming (after all, as he rebukingly asks Abner, “With miracles was ever age so filled? [I.i.104]); if we would prefer to believe that it is this stratagem by which Athaliah is betrayed (and Joash enthroned), and not Jehoiada’s much deprecated (even by Racine himself) indulgence in some dirty pool (see note 16 for Act V), then we must applaud Him for having cannily foreseen (or artfully predetermined) the lengthy and intricate concatenation of circumstances that would lead from Athaliah’s sudden urge to visit the temple (“To the Jews’ temple I was, by instinct, led: / I thought I’d try to appease their God instead” [II.v.70–71]) to her equally urgent second visit, this time with the idea, not of bearing God gifts, but, rather, of bearing them away (in the form of David’s fabled hoard), the many links of the chain thus coming full circle, beginning and ending at the temple. But is this the form one expects God’s miracles to take? Rather than being dependent on the fluctuating psychological states — however predictable — of those He would manipulate, His miracles are wont to dispense with Jamesian subtlety and go for “high concept” drama, something that screams “blockbuster.” In a matter of fourteen lines, Jehoiada is able to rattle off “the spate / Of prodigies that God’s poured forth of late” (I.i.109–10), an impressive list, ranging from tyrants toppled and personal vendettas gorily gratified, through climate change on an epic scale, to the raising of the dead. Try condensing the convoluted narrative of the “miracle” of Athaliah’s downfall and death — if we insist on believing it a product of divine intervention — into anything less than a completely worked-out “treatment.”

If, on the other hand, we dismiss this episode as being merely uncanny rather than literally numinous, then we are free to regard Athaliah’s tragic end as the (if not inevitable, then certainly plausible) result of a combination of regrettable character flaws, potentially self-destructive in themselves, but craftily exploited by her archenemy, Jehoiada. And, in fact, Athaliah herself, while she professes to have been outsmarted, outmaneuvered, outplayed by an inimical God (“God of the Jews, you win!” [V.vi.24]), makes no mention of her dream’s having formed part of her opponent’s strategy, accusing Him only of having instilled in her breast an arrogant self-satisfaction (better known as hubris) that, by implication, she querulously disclaims as being entirely alien to her nature(!), and of having “played” her, having “set me against myself repeatedly” (V.vi.32). She may credit God with the victory, but it is hard to see Jehoiada as a mere cat’s paw: he seems to be the one pulling the strings. Indeed, when Jehoiada assures Joash, right before the final contest with Athaliah, that “next to you / the exterminating angel stands” (V. iv.9–10), he might well be speaking of himself.

After all, we can perhaps make a more convincing case for her nocturnal visitations being the doing of Baal! After all, they would seem to have been thoughtfully designed to caution her, and quite unequivocally at that, about the boy, warning her, no less “pointedly” than she was stabbed through the heart, that he represented some clear and present danger, a threat to her very life. One might, in that case, be further warranted in believing that it was Baal himself who redirected her footsteps from his own temple to that of the Jews (“I meant to pray to Baal for absolution.... / To the Jews’ temple I was, by instinct, led” [II.v.67, 70]), so that she might encounter this very threatening apparition in the flesh and take necessary measures to safeguard herself against him. Once the encounter has taken place, however, and both deities have retired to the sidelines to await the outcome, it simply comes down, for her, to what Martin Turnell describes as “a head-on collision between a ruthless secular tyrant and an equally or an even more ruthless religious leader who eventually outwits the tyrant” (Turnell, 302).

iii

It would appear, after all, that the presence of God in this play is no more relevant than the presence of “the gods” in Racine’s Greek plays. Rather, it seems likely that Racine, while recognizing the propriety of choosing a biblical subject, in keeping with both the predilections of Madame de Maintenon, who in effect commissioned the work, and the proposed venue for its production, chose one that would nonetheless afford ample scope for his treatment of the subject most dear to his heart — one which had been so from his very first play — namely, unbridled human passion, here manifested variously in a fervent believer, a ferocious tyrant, and a flagitious apostate priest.

Certainly, in his particular choice of the biblical story of Jezebel’s daughter, Racine made no concession to the delicate sensibilities of either the virginal cast or the audience. One is reminded of the distinction Mathan makes between himself and Jehoiada:


And while Jehoiada’s rigorous, rude address

Offended their proud ears’ soft tenderness,

I learned to charm them with my dexterous lies,

Hiding unpleasant truths from all their eyes.

(III.iii.83–86)


Unlike Mathan, Racine has no interest in “hiding unpleasant truths” from our eyes: with its background of blood feuding and wholesale slaughter, the story of Athaliah quite outdoes in violence all his earlier plays, even those dealing with the internecine histories of Oedipus (The Fratricides) and Agamemnon (Iphigenia); nor can Bajazet, set in the heart of the “barbarous” Ottoman Empire, boast a bloodbath on the epic scale of those described in Athaliah (see the second and third passages quoted just below). Indeed, just as in his first play he had chosen the subject that, in the words of his preface, was “the most tragic theme of antiquity,” so at the end of his career he scoured the Bible for this unparalleled tale of dynastic strife and bloodshed, whose pattern of murder and retaliation is so involved that he felt compelled to provide a précis of prior events in his preface. All that need be said about that history here is that the warring factions seem equally bloodthirsty, as the following accounts (by Jehoiada, Josabeth, and Athaliah, respectively) amply demonstrate:


God, who hates tyrants and, in Jezreel,

Swore to destroy Ahab and Jezebel;

God, who then slew their family one by one:

Jehoram first, and then Jehoram’s son;

God, whose avenging arm, withheld a while,

Will once more smite this race, corrupt and vile.

(I.ii.65–70)


The princes lay there, slaughtered savagely;

Goading her henchmen to more butchery,

The barbarous Athaliah, knife in hand,

Pursued the murderous project she had planned.

I suddenly spied Joash, left for dead;

I still can see his nurse, o’ercome by dread:

She’d tried to shield his body with her own.

(I.ii.79–85)


Could I have seen a father slain, a brother;

Seen them from a high turret hurl my mother;

Then — most horrific! — seen them cruelly slay

Eighty young princes in one blood-soaked day?

And why? To avenge my mother’s punishment

Of some vile prophets — raving, impudent.

(II.vii.98–103)


And both factions now seem equally bent on perpetuating the slaughter. Athaliah instructs Mathan to “have all my Tyrian troops prepare to arm” (II.vi.16), and, later, he reports her confident hopes: “We’re ready with our falchions and our fire; / Their temple’s ruin nothing can prevent” (III.iii.40–41). For his part, Jehoiada invokes God to sanction the acts of violence he enjoins his priests and Levites to perform: “With terror God will blight the enemy; / In your foes’ faithless blood bathe fearlessly” (IV.iii.55–56). He even urges them to follow the example of their forbears, those Levites who “shed blamelessly the blood of their next kin / And consecrated their brave hands therein” (IV.iii.61–62). Clearly, he believes that his is a God who will not condone any conscientious objections.

But, providentially (if not miraculously), there appears on the scene a child who may put an end to this generations-long vendetta. In the very opening scene, Abner alludes to this promised descendent of David and Solomon:


We hoped that from their blessed race would spring

A line of kings too long for reckoning;

That over every tribe and every nation

One of them would establish domination,

Eliminate all discord, wipe out war:

One whom the kings of earth would bow before.

(I.i.131–36)


It is this child on whom the play will focus and on whom all the other characters’ thoughts are already bent. For Jehoiada he represents the hopes of his race, and he describes him in the most laudatory terms:


With all our Hebrew princes’ strengths he’s blest,

And shows more wisdom than his years suggest.

(I.ii.11–12)


Joash will move them by his noble grace,

Whence shines anew the splendor of his race.

(I.ii.109–10)


To Josabeth he represents not merely a savior, but a son, on whom she can lavish her inexhaustible maternal feelings. The role she played in rescuing him from near death makes him almost dearer to her than her own children; certainly, he offers fuller scope for her maternal anxieties: “Alas! the perils I once saved him from! / Alas! the perils that are yet to come!” (I.ii.21–22). She can even worry that her loving him too much may itself prove a peril:


Fearing I loved this child more than I should,

I’ve kept away from him as best I could,

Lest, seeing him, my injudicious woe

Might let my secret, with my tears, o’erflow.

(I.ii.27–30)


The chorus, too, take an active interest in this remarkable child; the first half of their lengthy Act II ode is devoted to registering their wonder and singing his praises:


What star have we just seen arise?

What will he be one day, this wise and wondrous child?

By worldly show he’s not beguiled,

He’s proof against pride’s lures and lies,

Nor can his candor be defiled.

(II.ix.1–5)


But see this dauntless boy proclaim

The Lord is God, the Lord is One,

And bring this Jezebel to shame,

Just as Elijah might have done.

(II.ix.8–11)


Even for Abner, who, ignorant of Eliakim’s true identity, believes Joash was murdered years ago, the idea of this boy has remained with him as a painfully vanished hope, but one to which he still clings:


His death, while yet a babe, the Queen contrived.

Can the dead, after eight years, be revived?

Ah! if the Queen, in her blind rage, had erred;

If, of that kingly blood, one drop was spared...

(I.i.141–44)


But it is Athaliah on whom he makes the most striking impression, even appearing to her in the aforementioned dream, before she has actually set eyes on the boy whom, as an infant, she left for dead:


Midst my dismay there met my sight

A young child clad in garments gleaming white,

Such as the Hebrew priests are wont to wear.

The sight of him relieved my crippling care.

But as I stood, reclaimed from misery,

Admiring his sweet, shy nobility,

I suddenly felt a blade, treacherously keen,

Thrust through my heart by this same child I’d seen!

(II.v.50–57)


This oneiric encounter sets the stage, so to speak, for the three confrontations between the reigning queen and the future king; at once the most important and most dramatic scenes in Athaliah, they function as three pillars supporting the edifice of the play. Each of these key scenes has been uniquely and elaborately conceived by Racine.

iv

By the time the action of the play commences Athaliah is already obsessed with this child, as a result of that disturbing dream, which has proved a recurrent one. Her first actual confrontation with the child occurs between Acts I and II, but though the audience never witnesses it, it is reported to us by two participants: first by Zachariah, the son of Jehoiada and Josabeth, and shortly afterward by Athaliah herself. (And, as is the case with many of the récits in Racine’s plays, it loses none of its significance or power by being merely recounted after the fact.)

Before we are vouchsafed Athaliah’s account of their encounter, its impact on her, barely hinted at in Zachariah’s narrative, is signalized by her extraordinary first appearance in the play, which finds her “almost as exhausted as Phèdre in her first appearance. Instead of a self-assured imperial presence, we discover a weary monarch” (Tobin, 153). To what are we to attribute her collapse? Not to her unceremonious dismissal from the temple by Jehoiada — in the opening scene of the play Abner cautions Jehoiada that Athaliah is resolved to brave his opposition and drive him from the temple:


I fear lest Athaliah (to speak plain),

Seeking to oust you from this sacred fane,

Effect her fell revenge on you at last

And shed the forced respect shown in the past.

(I.i.21–24)


Besides, by the time Athaliah appears, we have had Zachariah’s eyewitness testimony concerning what transpired in the temple:


Reaching the court reserved for men,

With head raised high she proudly bustled in

And, on the threshold, seemed prepared to invade

The Levites’ inner sanctum, undismayed.

(II.ii.20–23)


Then, far from being cowed by Jehoiada, though “his eyes flashed with a furious fire” (II.ii.25), or paying any heed to his attempt to ban her from the temple, “the Queen, letting a savage glance shoot out, / Opened her mouth, poised to blaspheme no doubt” (II.ii.30–31). It is only upon her noticing Joash that her effrontery falters:


The words froze on her lips, though, instantly;

Something had daunted her audacity.

Her frightened eyes grew transfixed as she gazed;

By Eliakim, above all, she seemed fazed.

(II.ii.34–37)


It is clear, then, that this temporary weakness on the part of a queen who is nothing if not strong-willed, indeed brazen, and whom Mathan describes as “that enlightened, fearless queen, / So far above her sex’s timid mean” (III.iii.13–14), is solely to be accounted for by her having espied the very child of her nightmares assisting in the rites. Zachariah’s account of the scene continues:


The both of us stood watching that cruel queen;

Our hearts were stricken with the same affright.

The priests, though, quickly veiled us both from sight

And hurried us away.

(II.ii.39–42)


Here is Athaliah’s version, three scenes later, of this “apparition”:


I saw that child who threatens me at night,

Just as, in that dread dream, he met my sight.

I saw him: his same garments, his same gait,

His air, his eyes, in fact, his every trait.

He stood near the high priest, as plain as day;

But soon I saw them spirit him away.

(II.v.78–83)


This double flashback, presented from two vantage points, gives us an almost cinematic view of the event, as if caught by two cameras. No actual representation of this scene could offer the stereoscopic depth provided by this dual narrative. (See my Discussion for The Fratricides, where I argue this point more expansively in reference to Creon’s climactic récit in that play.)

v

The second encounter between Joash and Athaliah, certainly the focal scene of the play, its most original and audacious, has the broad scale, the momentous sense of occasion, of an epic confrontation between good and evil, virtue and corruption. Although no such scene occurs in the Bible, it has its precedents in such famously unequal — or at least apparently so — encounters as David’s with Goliath and Daniel’s with the den full of lions. (It also calls to mind the temptation of Christ in Saint Luke’s gospel.) One might well have misgivings on behalf of a child who is summoned into so daunting a presence as Athaliah’s, especially after having seen her quickly recover from the debilitated state in which she made her first entrance, resuming an implacable, overbearing demeanor which, apart from the momentary accession of pity Joash will engender in her breast later in this scene, she will preserve to the end, becoming ever more brazen, even when she must finally acknowledge defeat. But Joash (like David and Daniel) proves a worthy antagonist for his adversary, their well-matched sparring skills signaled by the prominent use of stichomythia, which by its nature implies a balanced give and take:

athaliah

Have you no better pastimes to enjoy?

I pity the sad state of such a boy.

Come to my palace; see the splendors there.

joash

And in God’s blessed bounty cease to share?

athaliah

I won’t make you abandon Him, you know.

joash

You do not pray to Him.

athaliah

You may do so.

joash

Another god, though, I’d see worshipped there?

athaliah

I serve my god, as you do yours: that’s fair.

Each one is a most puissant deity.

joash

Mine reigns alone in fearsome majesty,

While yours, madame, is a nonentity.

athaliah

With me you’ll taste new pleasures every day.

joash

Like floods the wicked’s pleasures flow away.

(II.vii.61–73)


Joash more than holds his own against even so formidable an inquisitor as Athaliah, as the chorus confirm later, in their commentary on the events of this act: “By worldly show he’s not beguiled, / He’s proof against pride’s lures and lies, / Nor can his candor be defiled” (II.ix.3–5). Indeed, it is Athaliah who is discomfited and, in the end, bested. We are even shocked by the brusqueness of some of his replies:


athaliah

You shall be treated there like my own boy.

joash

Like yours?

athaliah

Yes. Come, speak up now, I implore.

joash

To leave a father whom I love! And for...

athaliah

Continue.

joash

For a mother I’d abhor!

(II.vii.83–86)


Racine was so aware of the startlingly precocious self-possession of this boy that he spends a whole page of his preface justifying it, citing the Greek text of Chronicles, which “has authorized me to make this prince nine or ten years old,” and arguing that the rigorous and early training he would have received in the temple could plausibly have produced such an extraordinarily astute child. (Racine even has recourse to the dryly droll admission that “it was not... the same with the children of the Jews as with most of ours.”) In addition, he takes occasion, practiced courtier that he was, to adduce a “precedent” closer to home: “a prince of eight and a half years, who is today her [France’s] dearest delight, an illustrious example of what a child with natural gifts, enhanced by an excellent education, can accomplish” — the child in question being the Duke of Burgundy, Louis XIV’s grandson.

vi

The third confrontation, which occurs in Act V, is framed by an elaborate stage spectacle. It is rather remarkable that such a spectacle, the most elaborate climactic scene in any of Racine’s plays (in most of which the denouement is revealed in narratives of varying length, those in The Fratricides, Britannicus, Iphigenia, and Phaedra being quite extended), should have been planned for a girls’ seminary, with limited stage resources. Perhaps, then, it is less remarkable that Athaliah, unlike Esther, which had boasted elaborate sets and costumes at its premiere, was, in fact, first produced without costumes or scenery. (Its first fully staged performance was given by the Comédie-Française on March 3, 1716 — shorn, however, of its choral odes and, thus, of its music.) On the other hand, we should also bear in mind that Racine chose to present these events on the stage in Athaliah because they could be so presented: while there are drawn swords and opposed combatants, there is no actual armed conflict, no bloodshed, nor is anyone killed. Athaliah’s death occurs offstage and is reported almost as perfunctorily as Mathan’s, hers being allotted merely a whole line (V.fin.sc.1), his, only a half line (V.vi.24). Still, the very fact that the only staged representation of armed antagonists in Racine’s oeuvre should occur in a “sacred drama” is striking and significant, suggesting that the true nature of this drama, as passionate and violent as any of Racine’s plays, is less spiritual than sanguinary. (Here, even the religious rituals, as Zachariah describes them, bear the trace of blood: “The priests, with blood from this fresh immolation, / Aspersed the altar and the congregation” [II. ii.14–15]; and, later in Act II, after Athaliah leaves the temple, Jehoiada expresses his intention of pouring some “pure blood” — presumably his preferred cleansing agent — over the floor to “wash clean the very stones that bear her tread” [II.viii.11–12].) The chorus duly express their astonishment at this intrusion of worldly violence into the temple:


What spectacle confronts our timid gaze!

Who’d have believed that we would ever see

These deadly daggers and this wicked weaponry,

Here, in this house of peace, so fiercely blaze?

(III.viii.5–8)


To stage such a complex and crucial spectacle, Jehoiada has had to set things in motion as early as the end of Act IV:


— Friends, it is prudent now to separate.

You, Ishmael, must guard the western gate;

You, take the north gate; you, the south; you, east;

Let no one, be it Levite, be it priest,

Disclose, by thoughtless zeal, the plans I’ve laid,

Marching out ere our preparation’s made.

And, last, let each, of one impassioned mind,

Guard to the death the post he’s been assigned.

(IV.v.24–31)


Up to the very moment of Athaliah’s entrance, Jehoiada continues to micromanage the scene:


These crucial orders carefully obey.

Above all, when she enters and walks by,

A calm — complete, profound — must greet her eye.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

You, once this queen, drunk with a foolish pride,

Has passed the temple door and stepped inside,

Let her who ventured in find no way out.

(V.iii.7–9, 14–16)


As the scene plays out, the audience, minutely apprised of the details of the scheme, is kept in a state of anticipatory suspense, waiting for the trap to spring shut. When Joash is finally produced, almost like a deus ex machina, Athaliah’s horror and dismay are twofold as she learns at once that the scion she believed dead is still alive, having been kept hidden in the temple for years, and that the treasure she believed hidden in the temple for years never existed, that, in fact, David’s fabled “treasure” is none other than this very child.

vii

There are other such symmetries to be observed in these three scenes, which bespeak Racine’s ingenuity in the construction of this play. First, in the outer scenes Joash says not a word, while in the central scene, he not only speaks at length, but does so most precociously and eloquently, with a power that ensures that his confrontation with Athaliah will be a dramatic meeting of equals. Second, those outer scenes are both, in some sense, “recognition” scenes. In the first, Athaliah recognizes the child who had stabbed her through the heart in her dream; in the second, she recognizes him as the grandson who will, figuratively, stab her through the heart — that is, who will actually bring about her downfall and death. Athaliah herself points up the symmetry:


Then, let him reign, Your son, Your favorite;

And, to inaugurate his reign, ’twere best

That he should plant a dagger in my breast.

(V.vi.36–38)


The recognition comes complete with the obligatory bodily marking, here a telltale scar left by Athaliah’s failed stabbing: “Yes, Joash lives! To fool myself is vain: / The scars my dagger left are all too plain” (V.vi.25–26).

But there is one further recognition (or, better, a canny precognition) vouchsafed Athaliah, the most telling. Although she has been hopelessly defeated, she can yet find some consolation, some revenge, in recognizing and vindictively proclaiming that this boy, universally admired and now acclaimed as king, will, following in the path of Athaliah herself, prove true to his ancestry and false to his people and his God, as was his father before him:


Hear now his mother’s last wish, as she dies.

Her wish? No! — Athaliah prophesies

That, weary of laws that make his soul repine,

Faithful to Ahab’s blood, which flows from mine,

Shunning his forebears’ influence in vain,

David’s abhorrent scion will profane

Your altar and defame Your majesty,

Avenging Ahab, Jezebel, and me.

(V.vi.39–46)


viii

At this revelation, we might well experience the same horror, the sheer surprise, Athaliah felt in her dream when she envisioned this seemingly innocent boy brutally stab her. Thinking back, however, we may recall that hints of this inevitable apostasy have been dropped earlier. In the first scene of the play, Abner had alluded to the line of David as “this blasted tree” (I.i.139), and this arboreal image is developed later, when Jehoiada considers the possibility that Joash may be corrupted:


Great God, if You foresee that he’ll disgrace

David’s ideals and betray his race,

Let him be as the fruit that, ere ripe, dies,

Or, shaken by harsh winds, all shriveled lies.

(I.ii.119–22)


This hint of Joash’s fall from grace becomes more vivid when Jehoiada, sinking into a divine trance, utters these (at the time) cryptic lines: “How has pure gold become the vilest lead? / What priest lies here on holy ground, struck dead?” (III.vii.45–46). With the aid of hindsight (or if one knows the Bible very well), one can interpret Jehoiada’s words and infer that he foresees that this very youth, the jealously guarded, carefully nurtured, precious scion of David’s line, will in fact become corrupt and order the death of Zachariah, the high priest’s own son and, later, high priest himself, a crime that gains in heinousness from one’s having seen this same Zachariah impersonated on stage as a wholly sympathetic character, full of love and concern for his foster brother, Joash. (John C. Lapp goes too far in asserting that, aside from serving as “a living symbol of the future catastrophe,” the introduction of Zachariah “is quite unnecessary on any other grounds” [Lapp, 62]: Zachariah’s eyewitness account of Athaliah’s intrusion into the temple is, as I discussed in Section IV above, crucial, both to the plot of the play and to Racine’s monumental and original design.) But whether or not these hints would have been picked up by Racine’s audience (not to speak of today’s), Athaliah’s final diatribe provides a fairly accurate prediction of Joash’s ultimate downfall, if we accept the biblical account: “And he did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord, and followed the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, which made Israel to sin; he departed not therefrom” (2 Kings 13:2).

One cannot help being reminded of Agrippina’s visionary denunciation of her son, Nero (in Racine’s Britannicus):


Your rage will work itself up to new rage,

Its course marked with fresh blood at every stage.

But heav’n, worn out by your career of crime,

Will add your death to all the rest, in time.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

In times to come, the mention of your name

Will make the cruelest tyrants blush with shame.

Thus does my heart predict your destiny.

(Britannicus V.vi.38–41, 44–46)


It is chastening to consider that this apparently virtuous child is really just another Nero, seen at a much earlier stage of his development. Such a parallel is pointed up by the similarity of the admonitions Burrhus, Nero’s mentor, and Jehoiada, respectively, give their charges (admonitions that ultimately prove futile):


Your way is clear, nor can you be withstood;

You need but guide your steps from good to good.

But if you heed your flatterers’ advice,

You’ll find your course career from vice to vice.

(Britannicus IV.iii.37–40)


Absolute power can intoxicate,

And fawning, flattering voices fascinate...

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

And thus, from snare to snare, abyss to abyss,

Corrupting your pure heart, your pristine youth,

They’ll make you, in the end, despise the truth,

Painting fair virtue as a frightful thing.

(Athaliah IV.iii.85–86, 95–98)


And in the following exchange, in which Agrippina and her confidante, Albina, exchange views about Nero, they might be speaking of Joash, another boy whose “soul has been well taught”:


albina

His conduct proves his soul has been well taught.

For three years now has he done anything

That does not promise Rome a perfect king?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

agrippina

I’m not unjust: his virtues I’ve commended;

But, though he starts where great Augustus ended,

I fear his future may undo his past.

(Britannicus I.i.24–26, 31–33)


Even more telling is Mathan’s warning to Athaliah, “Within this temple a monster’s being bred” (II.vi.3), for we should observe that the original French, “Quelque monstre naissant dans ce temple s’élève“ (Some budding monster is arising in the temple), features the very phrase (“monstre naissant”) that Racine employed in his preface to Britannicus to describe Nero, whom, in that play, he was trying to depict, not as a full-blown monster, but as a budding monster: “Je l’ai toujours regardé comme un monstre. Mais c’est ici un monstre naissant” (I have always regarded him as a monster. But here it is a monster being born). For the biblical account of the latter part of Joash’s life, only hinted at in this play, bears out the inadvertent truth of Mathan’s suggestion: the Joash we see in this play is another monster in the bud.

But may we not go further — or rather, nearer? May we not think of Joash as a Mathan-in-embryo? Mathan, too, was educated within the temple and groomed to be a priest of the Hebrew faith. Undoubtedly, he too was glib in rehearsing God’s Holy Writ. His description of himself traces the arc of Joash’s life as well:


Raised as a priest of this God they revere,

Mathan, perhaps, might still be serving here,

If thirst for power and love of luxury

Could have endured His strict authority.

(III.iii.67–70)


For, according to the Bible, it will be the future high priest Zachariah’s rebuke of Joash for his licentious ways, and his attempt to recall him to obedience to “His strict authority,” that will provoke Joash to have him killed. Mathan’s recollection of “the quarrel that arose / ’Twixt the high priest and me... / When I aspired to claim the censer’s care” (III.iii.71–73) may even remind us of what seemed at the time to be Joash’s touching pride when he mentioned one of his “pleasures”: “Sometimes I offer / To the high priest the salt or incense coffer” (II.vii.57–58). In short, then, this child, who has been eulogized throughout the play, is finally exposed as being no better than Mathan, who, according to Tobin, is “the object of the most damaging epithets in Racine’s theater” (Tobin, 155).

There is one further nexus to note between Mathan and Joash. In Jehoiada’s admonition to Joash (“Brought up far from the throne, you’re unaware / Of the envenomed charms that wait you there” [IV.iii.83–84]), there is an echo of Josabeth’s earlier excoriating denunciation of Mathan: “You, seated on a pestilential throne, / Where falsehood reigns and its foul poisons spread” (III.iv.54–55), words that unwittingly foreshadow the downfall of Joash, whom we see, at the conclusion of the play, conspicuously, tellingly, seated on the throne of temporal power. And, in turn, Josabeth’s description recalls an earlier representation of the throne and its perils, for Jocasta (in The Fratricides) might be foretelling the history of the throne of Judah when she offers this warning to her son Polynices:


A throne that’s always been a perilous pit:

Crime festers there and lightning threatens it.

Your father and all those who wore the crown

No sooner mounted it than were cast down.

(The Fratricides IV.iii.184–87)


Hence, we can observe that Racine’s preoccupations remained fairly constant from his first play to his last: in terms of the virulence of the human passions (their own and others’) against which Racine’s monarchs must contend (almost always succumbing to their own) — the heartlessness and the hatred, the vindictiveness and the vice, the fanaticism and the folly — there is not much to choose between the throne of Thebes and the throne of Judah.

ix

Taking one last survey of these three pivotal scenes, we can observe that, whereas in the middle scene Joash represents himself, so to speak, in the two outer scenes (symmetry again) it is Athaliah who does so for him, and, in both, she represents him as anything but the blameless, harmless, helpless child the other characters take him for. In the first, she recognizes in him the dagger-wielding boy of her dreams — in other words, as a murderer. In the second, she foresees him as an apostate, destined to defame God’s altar. Since that defamation will be a consequence of Joash’s ordering that Zachariah be stoned to death in the temple courtyard, her second depiction of him is, again, as a murderer. Viewed in the context of these two equally premonitory flanking scenes, Joash’s recital of his catechism in the central scene seems to ring hollow, like the mouthings of a canting hypocrite.

From the anxious point of view of one living in today’s terrorized world, however, it might be more comforting to believe that Joash recites the lessons he has learned without any conviction than to believe he has taken to heart the lessons of his foster parents, lessons that can only conduce to a perpetuation of the blood feud devastating the house of David. From that point of view, Athaliah’s sarcastic comment (“I’m charmed to see the schooling that he’s had” [II.vii.75]) registers as somewhat chilling. Indeed, it is hard to avoid considering the following reasonably accurate recrimination that she directs at Josabeth as a timely (for us) condemnation of the inveterate inculcation of unthinking hatred and prejudice that is so rife today:


His memory’s accurate: in his replies

Jehoiada’s spirit and yours I recognize.

The freedom that I’ve given you you use

To infect these children with your venomous views.

Their fury and their fear you cultivate;

You’ve made my name the object of their hate.

(II.vii.87–92)


Certainly there is enough of a hint of the fanatic in the following pronouncements of Joash to validate Athaliah’s accusation:


God wants our love, and He

Will, soon or late, avenge all blasphemy;

In the Lord’s strength the orphan can confide;

He humbles the proud and smites the homicide.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Mine reigns alone in fearsome majesty,

While yours, madame, is a nonentity.

(II.vii.49–52, 70–71)


Such remarks betray a predilection for violence and intolerance. Roland Barthes describes Joash as “a vindictive child intelligent only in proportion to his native cruelty” (Barthes, 133). While Joash may not actually act on Athaliah’s sardonic suggestion “that he should plant a dagger in my breast” (V.vi.38) and, by doing so, vindicate her dream-vision of him stabbing her through the heart, we may infer that this boy — pious pupil of his paternal pedagogue that he is — would wholeheartedly approve of Jehoiada’s order to “have Athaliah slaughtered like an animal” (Turnell, 308). For a contemporary audience, the indoctrination of such values at so early an age, and the resultant arrogance and religious chauvinism, can only be an unsettling phenomenon.

x

The Complete Plays of Jean Racine

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