The Complete Plays of Jean Racine. Jean Racine
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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.
IX
Britannicus’s downfall, no less than Agrippina’s, has taken place before the play opens, but he will fall still farther during the course of the play: in fact, he will fall to his death. Nero’s murder of Britannicus and, later, of Agrippina, are so well documented in the accounts of Tacitus and Suetonius that it would certainly have been surprising if Racine had chosen not to treat of at least one of those events in 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.
X
Britannicus’s disclosure to Narcissus of his seditious activities is but one instance of the consistent gullibility that marks his character and that at times comes close to reducing him to a comic dupe (à la Tartuffe’s Orgon). Georges Forestier (1438) suggests as a possible reason for Racine’s suppressing eight lines’ worth of such egregious credulity in the first scene of Act V (see note 12 for Act V for the deleted lines) that “he tried to attenuate to some extent the excessive characteristic blindness of the prince with regard to his confidant.” But there is no denying that in virtually every scene in which Britannicus appears he is bested