The Complete Plays of Jean Racine. Jean Racine
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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.
V
In regard to Nero’s dealings with his mother, Agrippina, we should recall Racine’s assertion in his second preface: “My tragedy is no less about the disgrace of Agrippina than about the death of Britannicus.” Racine, often guilty of misleading us about the true nature of his creations, might have observed, with greater accuracy, that Britannicus is (as we shall find) no more about the disgrace of Agrippina than it is about the death of Britannicus. Most commentators seem to take at face value Burrhus’s description of her as “dangerous” (“Sire, Agrippina’s always dangerous” [III.ii.8] — “redoutable” in the French), but does Burrhus himself really find her to be so, or is he just trying to put the fear of god into Nero? His own further intercourse with Agrippina suggests that what he really means by “dangerous” is clamorous. For when they meet two scenes later, in response to her ranting declaration that “your efforts will prove vain to stop my tongue” (III.iv.24) and her wild threats to expose “our common crimes” (III.iv.41), he calmly asserts that “they’ll never credit you” (III.iv.46). It is true that Burrhus tries to convince Nero that Agrippina wields as much influence as she would have Burrhus believe she does (they both invoke the revered and still-potent name of her father, Germanicus: III.ii.10 and III.iv.36), but, just as he tries to soothe Agrippina with specious justifications for Nero’s behavior, while being unable to be reassured by them himself (see note 16 for Act III), he expediently exaggerates Agrippina’s power and resources to Nero in a desperate attempt to place some restraint on what, in his brief soliloquy, he calls “his [Nero’s] wildness, which you thought you could subdue” (III.iii.2), an attempt whose futility he himself instantly recognizes, which, ironically, prompts him to confidently 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.
VI
In investigating the question of Nero’s supposed susceptibility to “the power of eyes [namely, Agrippina’s] / That taught me daily where my duty lies” (II.ii.129–30), it might be instructive to consider, not how others regard Agrippina’s power, or lack thereof, but how she regards it. As Weinberg (113) pointedly observes, “The summary that she gives of what has happened (IV.ii) is the summary of one who thinks that she is — and of one who is — a victim.” Those commentators who concur with Burrhus’s ostensible view that she is “dangerous” usually posit her as Nero’s great opposite in this play, one of two antagonists who vie for control of the empire. (One certainly cannot deny that Nero and Agrippina are the two most conspicuously larger-than-life characters in the play.) But while such a view may be in accordance with the historical facts and events, at least as recounted by Tacitus and Suetonius, the character that Racine creates here is incompatible with such an interpretation. The narrative arc of the play does not trace the progress of the Nero-Agrippina nexus from a state of equilibrium, however precarious, to one in which the balance of power has shifted decisively from mother to son. The “disgrace of Agrippina” can be thought of as one of the chief subjects of Britannicus only if we take the phrase 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