The Complete Plays of Jean Racine. Jean Racine
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[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.
XI
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