Jean Racine: Britannicus: A Tragedy. In Compete Plays. Volume I. Samuel Solomon translation. New York: Random House, 1967.

 

Note: This play was performed at Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan, on February 13th and 14th, 2020. Director George Angell presented it in the format used by the French in the seventeenth century: a dramatic reading, with no costumes, props, or stage action—rather like a scholastic disputation, albeit one with a plot. Aside from historical accuracy, the merit of this staging is that it assists the audience in concentrating on the playwright’s words without the distraction of ‘stage business.’ 

 

Roman Emperor Nero was the last of the Julian-Claudian dynasty, the first dynasty to rule Rome after the destruction of the republic. Great-grandson of Augustus, his father was Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus. His mother was Julia Agrippina (Agrippina the Younger), daughter of Germanicus Caesar (head of Rome’s German-based legions, and, according to Tacitus, “a young man of unaspiring heart” and “wonderful kindness”). She was also sister of the notorious Caligula, who may be said to have had none of his father’s virtues. After the death of her first husband Agrippina married the Emperor Claudius, an arrangement that didn’t prevent her from taking a lover, Pallas, who not incidentally served as the imperial treasurer. Nero’s birth name was Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus; he was adopted by the Emperor Claudius at wife Agrippina’s request. Although distinguished tutors—the Stoic philosopher Seneca and the Praetorian prefect Sextus Africanus Burrus—their sober instructions had little effect on the young prince, who, as the Roman general and historian Suetonius puts it, “so far degenerated from the noble qualities of his ancestors that he retained only their vices, as if these alone had been transmitted to him by natural inheritance.” Claudius’ bloodline son, Britannicus, was the son of Claudius’ previous wife, Messalina. The slightest acquaintance with Roman imperial politics, or indeed with hereditary monarchies generally, more than suggests that this looks like trouble. Sure enough, Suetonius suspects that Messalina may have wanted the child murdered in order to eliminate a possible rival to her own son. For her part, Agrippina persistently schemed to elevate her son over Britannicus—never stopping at crimes, including murder, so to do. He was indeed crowned emperor in 54 A.D. at the age of seventeen.

In his second, 1676 preface to the play, Racine tells his readers “I had copied my characters from the greatest painter of antiquity, namely from Tacitus,” who recounts the events of Rome during the rule of the early emperors in his Annals. As always, Racine’s language is precise. He copied his characters from a painter in words, a portraitist. He takes liberties with Tacitus’ chronology. He has noticed Tacitus’ assessment of the effects of Rome’s regime change from republic to monarchy under the Caesars. By the time of the Augustus’ vile successor, Tiberius, “How few were left who had seen the republic!” “The state had been revolutionized, and there was not a vestige left of the old sound morality.” Tiberius, also called Nero, “was of mature years, and had established his fame in war” by the time he ascended to the throne, “but he had the old arrogance inbred in the Claudian family, and many symptoms of a cruel temper, though they were repressed, now and then broke out.” In fact he had “no thought, but of wealth, hypocrisy, and secret sensuality”—a ‘career arc,’ as it were, the second Nero would follow. Suetonius writes that upon being crowned, Gnaeus Nero “declared he would rule according to the principles of Augustus,” who on balance was a man of virtue. And many of Nero’s early acts as emperor were “beyond criticism,” others “deserving of no slight praise.” “Little by little, however, as his vices grew stronger, he dropped jesting and secrecy and with no attempt at disguise openly broke out in the worst crime.” Racine’s play begins before that happened: “I have always thought of him as a monster,” Racine tells his readers; “but here he is a budding monster.”

Accordingly, the first scene opens with Agrippina and her lady-in-waiting, Albina, indeed a woman of ‘whiteness’ or chasteness. It is morning, and Agrippina wants to speak with the emperor as soon as he arises. She worries that Nero intends to make some unseemly move against his potential rival, Britannicus, and senses a change in her son’s way of ruling: “Weary of men’s love, he demands their fear.” Innocent Albina protests that Nero has governed Rome “like a father,” with “all the virtues of Augustus old,” just as he had promised to do. Mother knows better. “True, he began where great Augustus ended,” as the benevolent ruler of a vast empire, but if he attacks his step-brother he will “end just how Augustus had begun,” in civil war. “In vain he shams: I read upon his face / The dark, wild humours of his savage sires, / Uniting with their fierce and stubborn blood / The pride of all the Neros born of me.” She recalls brother Caligula’s tyrannical reign, whose “first fruits” were sweet. What is more (and here she shows herself Neronian) “What matters it to me if, after all, / Nero, more persevering in his good, / Should one day leave behind a model rule?” Even if Albina is right, “Have I placed in his hands the helm of State / To steer it as the Senate’s whim directs?” No mixed-regime, limited monarchy for her. “Let him be, if he must, the people’s father; / But let him not forget I am his mother.” She would rule Rome through him. Agrippina is a formidable ‘republican mother’ gone wrong; she embodies republican motherhood under tyranny, now itself tyrannical. A revolution or regime change might not occur if the ethos of an old regime has not declined, but the new regime may well reinforce whatever virtues (or in this case vices) that conduced to the revolution.

What specifically has alarmed Agrippina? Although married to the virtuous Octavia, daughter of Claudius, Nero has arrested Junia, an niece of Augustus who loves Britannicus. “What does he want?” Mother wants to know. “What drives him? Hate or love?” Does he intend to harm the betrothed couple, or “rather is it not perhaps his spite / To punish them, because I lend them aid?” True, she prevented Britannicus from ascending to “the throne he should have won / By right of blood,” and I schemed successfully to block Britannicus’ intended marriage to Olivia. But now she wants to keep Britannicus around as a sort of insurance policy, in case her unloving and ungrateful son turns against her. “I must hold the balance,” since “I would soon fear him, were he not / To fear me any more.” “I see my honors rise, my credit fall. / No, no, gone is the time when Nero, young, / Sent me the prayers of an adoring Court; / When he left all affairs of State to me, / When at my word the Senate would assemble / Within the palace, where, behind a veil, / Invisible and present, I became / The almighty spirit of that mighty body. / At that time still unsure of Rome’s support, / Nero was not yet drunken with his greatness.” Therefore, let us “ask him how he justifies her capture. / Let’s try to pierce the secrets of his soul.” Having tasted the joys of divinelike invisibility, divinelike presence, and divinelike absolute power, Agrippina needs divinelike omniscience. Racine describes “my tragedy” as in part “the fall of Agrippina,” who will learn that ‘divinelike’ is not the same as divinity.

Nero’s Praetorian former tutor , now adviser Burrhus enters, to be greeted by Agrippina’s accusations. “How long do you intend to hide the Emperor?” Alluding to Burrhus’ counterpart, she demands “Must Seneca and you fight for the honor / Who will be first to wipe me from his mind?” She charges them with wanting to usurp her rightful place as the one who “should rule the State.” “Nero is a child no more. Should he not reign?”—that is, under the firm maternal guidance. “Must he see nothing but through your eyes?” when it is only right that his mother should rule him right down to his perceptions. She can teach him virtues as well as soldierly Burrhus and philosophic Seneca, to wit, “instruct him what reserve / Between himself and subjects to preserve”—an allusion to Nero’s already well-developed propensity to exhibit himself before the vulgar in singing contests, chariot races, and other public spectacles. Burrhus rejoins that he did not “promise to betray your son, / To make of him a puppet Emperor.” “He’s no more son, but master of the world. / I must account for him to all the Empire,” serving “his fame.” “Nero is his only law” (true enough): “He has only to follow his forefathers: / To prosper, he need only be himself” and not to “grow old still to be a child” under Mother’s rule.

As is her wont, Agrippina cuts to the chase. Why has Nero detained Junia? She has committed no crime, Burrhus explains, but “You know, by right of her imperial rank, / Her husband may become a rebel prince.” Nor is it right that “Augustus’ niece should wed unknown to Nero.” This means that “Britannicus may not lean on my choice,” Agrippina rightly remarks, convinced that Nero does this only “to spite me” by proving to Britannicus and Junia that “his mother’s promises exceed her power,” “To frighten all the world into remembering / No more to think the Emperor is my son.” We’ll see about that, her tone more than suggests.

It should be needless to say that Burrhus’ urgings to “Forget the sad task of eternal censor” and to “show a mother’s love” fall on ears deafened by libido dominandi. Britannicus enters with Tiberius Claudius Narcissus, formerly a courtier under Claudius (the one who ordered the execution of the Emperor’s murderous and slatternly previous wife, Messalina). Initially he had distrusted Britannicus, assuming that the son might take his mother’s demise the wrong way. But when Agrippina charged him with “avarice and peculation” (Tacitus writes) Narcissus allied himself with the rightful heir. To Britannicus’ exclamations and declamations against the emperor’s arrest of his beloved, Agrippina snaps, “I do not rely on empty anger / To keep my word to you and save my promise.” She will wait for him at her lover Pallas’ house, should Britannicus wish to seek her practical counsel. Britannicus quite understandably wonders if he should trust her “as judge between her son and me,” a woman his father, Claudius, “married, to his ruin”—an allusion to the distinct possibility that Agrippina had her first husband poisoned. Narcissus coolly estimates the matron’s soul as unfilial: “No matter, Like you she is feeling outraged.” Therefore, “Unite your troubles; bind your interests.” This brings Britannicus back to seeming prudence. Recalling that his father trusted Narcissus, and that he’s proven trustworthy to himself, too, he asks him to speak to their friends, to “find out if this fresh storm” may have aroused their courage, and if he can expect their help. Also, reconnoiter the palace to see how well-guarded Junia is. “Meanwhile, I’ll seek out Nero’s mother / At the house of Pallas, like you, father’s freedman” and now treasurer of the imperial court. “I’ll see, incite and follow her, and try, / Under her wing, higher than she to fly!”

Racine introduces Nero at the beginning of Act II. He assures Burrhus that he will ignore his mother’s “taunts” and “whims.” “But I will not ignore nor suffer more / The insolent official who dares feed them;” Pallas, he supposes “has poisoned her with his advice” and “daily leads Britannicus astray” as well. “I’ll tear him from both” by sending him into exile. All of this suggests that Nero either lacks the stomach to ruin his mother and step-brother or seriously misreads their characters. Dismissing Burrhus and the guards, he then confides to Narcissus that he ‘loves’ Junia—”stirred by a curious desire,” as he rightly puts it—and “she must be my wife.” “I loved the very tears I caused to flow” and thus “plunged into my latest passion.” It is her “virtue, novel at my Court” (he accurately remarks) “whose shy persistence high inflames my love,” a curious desire indeed. He asks if Britannicus does indeed love her, too, and Narcissus tells him that “You may be sure he loves her,” although “Love often comes before the age of reason”—an observation at least as applicable to Nero as to Britannicus. When he learns that Junia loves Britannicus in return, Nero vows that “Nero will not be jealous unavenged.” To the soul of the tyrant, love for another is an injustice, an outrage, a punishable crime, just as to the soul of the mother-tyrant and tyrant-mother her son’s disobedience is an injustice, and outrage, and a punishable crime. Narcissus plays on the tyrant’s soul. “What need Nero fear?” The splendor of your throne will surely open the girl’s eyes.” Thus prepared, if you “command she love you” then “you will be loved.” A tyrant might readily be persuaded that he can be loved upon command. And while you are at it, bring your mother to heel: “Are you afraid?” Surely not, sire, as you’ve “just exiled Pallas, in his pride, / Whose impudence you realize she sustains.”

But, “laying bare to you my soul,” Nero admits that when “I’m in her sight, / Whether I dare not yet deny the power of / Those eyes, where I have so long read my duty; / Or whether, mindful of so many boons”—her many crimes and manipulations on his behalf—”I tender her in secret all she’s given, / My strength against her I in vain assemble.” She frees himself “from this servitude” as a weak man can only do, by avoiding her. Assuring Nero that “Britannicus completely trusts me,” he advises Nero to exile him. Nero has other plans. Rather, he tells his co-conspirator to invite Britannicus to come and see her: “I have my reasons, and you may be sure / I’ll sell him dear the joy of seeing her.” Be sure to add that I know nothing of this, that he will be seeing her without my knowledge or command. After Narcissus leaves, he meets unsuspecting Junia, who is looking for Octavia. He announces that she will marry him, assuring her with no false modesty that “I would name to you a greater hero, / If any name stood higher here than Nero.” He even offers her a syllogism. “Claudius destined you to wed his son; / But this was at a time when he expected / Some day to name him heir of all the Empire. / The gods have since pronounced. You, therefore, should / Bow to their will and choose both love and empire.” Don’t worry about Octavia, who has given him no child and heir. Rome “repudiates Octavia and unties / A marriage knot that Heaven declines to bless.”

Junia wants none of this. Having “lost all her nearest kin” as a child (the list of those poisoned or impaled in imperial power-struggles is long), she retired to a secluded life, wherein she “aimed at virtues that befit her woes,” virtues of the private life. Why would I wish to “pass sudden from this deep obscurity / Into a rank exposed to all the world, / Whose brilliance I may not at all sustain, / Indeed, whose majesty another fills?” Nonsense, Nero replies: “I’ll speak for you: you’ve only to agree,” adding with the tyrant’s characteristic appeal to fear, “The empty glory of a rash refusal / You may regret.” To her continued demurral, Nero, like his mother, speaks directly. “Let us be speak out plain and drop the veil;” Octavia’s brother, Britannicus, “most concerns you,” not Octavia herself. True, Junia admits. “I love Britannicus; to him was pledged / When the Empire was to follow on our marriage,” and now when it will not, she loves him still. This only makes Nero want her more: “These tears are just the pleasures that I covet, / For which all else but him would pay the forfeit.” He tells her of Britannicus’ impending visit, but then tells him that she can only save her betrothed by pretending not to live him, to “dismiss him.” And your emperor will be “watch[ing] you from the start,” invisible as his mother was at the Senate, all-seeing and all-hearing as a god. “Without fail, his doom shall be the fees / Of any sign or gesture meant to please.”

In her parley with Britannicus, Junia hints, “You are in a place full of [Nero’s] mighty presence,” but her manly, unsubtle beloved doesn’t take the hint, instead thinking that she has indeed thrown him over for Nero. After his departure she tells Nero, “You’ve been obeyed. Let me at least shed tears / Now that his eyes no longer will be witness.” Nero will later tell Narcissus, “She loves my rival, as I’m full aware, / But I will seek my joy in his despair,” a despair he commands Narcissus reinforce in his next conversation with the man he is betraying. Alone, Narcissus reveals where his true loyalty lies. “A second time, Narcissus, Fortune smiles,” he tells himself. (The first time was when Agrippina plucked him from obscurity in a military encampment to make him her son’s co-tutor). “Why hesitate before her wanton wiles?” Fortuna, that woman, must be mastered with force, the student of ancient Rome, Machiavelli, teaches. “Come, to the bitter end, her favors cherish; / To make me happy, let poor wretches perish!” The regime of tyranny teaches, ‘Every man for himself.’

Act III begins with Burrhus giving Nero a hard-headed, soldierly assessment of Agrippina’s actual strength. Quite apart from his emotions, based on a potent mixture of fear, gratitude, and guilt, Burrhus points to his mother’s allies. “Agrippina still should make you fear. / Rome and your soldiers too her sires revere; / They see in her Germanicus, her father,” the noble leader of the legions in Germany. What is more, she knows this too, and will act on that knowledge. “She knows her power—and you know well her courage,” as the Praetorian calls her iron ambition and ruthlessness. By your actions, “you yourself are holstering her anger / In furnishing her arms against yourself” by scheming to rid yourself of Octavia and marry Junia. “Stay away from” that girl for a few days. “Be sure, however much one seems to love, / One loves not if one wishes not to love.” Yes, but Burrhus, the emperor replies, you are a military and political man. “Believe me, love’s a very different science,” and “perhaps it would be unfair” to “drag your virtue rare” down to it. With that, he leaves his tutor. The problem is rather not that Burrhus has mistaken the nature of love as that Nero has. He claims to understand all the sciences, including the public sciences of politics and soldiery, the private science of love. But he has only succeeded in mixing them up, expecting to win love by command, fear, and coercion. In his passions for rule and for love, the tyrant confuses the two, perverting both.

Burrhus now delivers his soliloquy, which differs from that of Narcissus on every point. “Nero lays bare his inmost soul. / This savagery you thought you might control / Is ready to break loose from your weak bond. / To what excesses it may spread beyond!” Unlike Narcissus, he doesn’t know what to do, and also unlike him, he appeals to the gods. As for philosophy, “Seneca, whose counsels might go home, / Knows not this peril, far detained from Rome.” He sees Agrippina, and somehow supposes that his “great good luck sends her to me.” Not so: she rebukes him, alleging that he has flattered Nero’s passions, “mak[ing] his heart / Disdain his mother and forget his wife!” Burrhus presses on, urging calm, but “in vain you make me hold my tongue.” “Heaven leaves me force enough to avenge my fall,” bringing the army to bear on Nero and his enemies. Burrhus simply replies, “they will not believe you, Madam.” Instead, he predicts, they will report her to Nero. After he leaves, Albina proves no more persuasive. “If I do not soon snap this fatal bond” between Nero and Junia, Agrippina calculates, “My place is filled and I become a cipher. / Till now Octavia, with her empty title, / Powerless at Court, could be ignored by it.” But if Nero marries Junia, she will “wield the influence both of wife and mistress,” a fatal combination to the tyrant-mother, were it even remotely descriptive of Junia’s actual character.

When Britannicus comes into her presence, he quite correctly points out that she “made too certain of my fall” to help him now, as “I have no more a friend; your wise precautions / Have long since suborned or removed them all.” Ever undaunted, and indeed in all likelihood pleased to have rendered Britannicus without any allies but herself, Agrippina tells him to leave everything to her. “I’ll harass Nero from all sides. Good-bye!” You need only one ally, if I am she. Narcissus then approaches Britannicus, testing to see if he has fallen for the Neronian ruse. He has. “I believe [Junia] criminal and false.” And yet, and yet, “In spite of her betrayal, my staunch heart / Excuses, justifies and worships her.” Not liking the sound of that, Narcissus asks, “who knows if the wanton, from her cloister, / Did not contrive to trap the Emperor,” fleeing him “in order to be caught,” “tempt[ing] the Emperor with the glorious sin / Of conquering where none else dared to win.” Even now, he suggests, “She is accepting her new lover’s vows,” taking cruel advantage of the lad-emperor. Thus he attempts to detach Britannicus from Junia and attach him to Nero, the better to further his own ambitions. But his speech only makes Britannicus want to see this enormity for himself. He will return to the palace.

There he confronts Junia, who can now tell him that “Nero, while listening, ordered me to feign” her rejection. She urges him to get away, to “shun his sight.” “My heart will tell you more some happier day. / A thousand little secrets it will beat.” Alerted by Narcissus, Nero interrupts, answering Britannicus’ words of defiance not with matching personal courage, of which he is incapable, but with a threat to bring down the power of “the Empire and the State” upon his enemy’s head, weights he boasts control of. He has Britannicus placed under arrest in Octavia’s suite, ordering Junia to return to her apartments in the palace. He then confides to Burrhus his intention to have his mother killed, whom he mistakenly blames for this “odious trick.” Overriding Burrhus’ protestations (“What, Sire? A mother? Without hearing?”), he tells him he will arrest him if he does not “take charge of her.”

This central, pivotal act of the play shows how tyranny induces tyrannical men and women to make mistakes. Their passions, and especially their passion to rule, ruins their ability to rule. What they take for prudence is folly. They misread the characters of those they expect to rule, and when their misreading issues in failure they can only bring down violence. They careen toward their destruction, and Rome’s.

In Act IV Agrippina confronts Nero. He reminds him that he owes the emperorship to her, and to her agent, Pallas, who (in her version) convinced Claudius to adopt her son, giving him the name “Nero.” She herself pushed Claudius’ own son, Britannicus, aside, having “exhausted” Claudius “with my clamor.” I “drew to you the people’s and the soldiers’ hearts, / Who, mindful once more of their former love, / Preferred in you Germanicus, my father.” When Claudius on his deathbed understood her plot and “cried out his concern for his own son,” it was too late: “His guards, his house, his bed, were in my power.” Again at her behest, Burrhus put in place the last element, persuading the Praetorian guard to back you. Yet this same Burrhus, allied with Seneca, have been “souring you, / Giving you lessons in ingratitude,” while “young voluptuaries… pander shamelessly to all your pleasures.” And here lies the problem: Nero indeed has no shame. Assuring Mother of his “grateful memories,” he quite accurately replies that “You previously—if I dare plainly speak— / Have only worked, in my name, for yourself.” “But Rome demands a master, not a mistress.” He goes so far as to accuse her of plotting to replace him with Britannicus, a charge she vehemently denies (“What honors, rank, could I expect from him?” And why would he not have me prosecuted for her many crimes committed on her son’s behalf?) “You cannot gull me, I see all your tricks. / You are a thankless knave and always were one. / Right from your infancy my love and care / Have but extracted feigned caresses from you.” This extracts an equally feigned concession to her demands, which include, letting her “have access to you night and day.”

Later Nero confides to Burrhus that he intends to kill Britannicus. His tutor again is genuinely shocked. “Have you thought in whose blood you’ll be wading? / Is Nero tired of reigning in all hearts? What will they say of you? What are you thinking?” What Nero is thinking is that public opinion is nothing. “Chance” or Fortuna gives us the love of the people one day, takes it away the next. “Slave to their wishes, tyrant of my own, / Merely to please them do I wear the crown?” Burrhus reminds him that up to now he has ruled virtuously. “Is it not enough for your desires / The public weal should be your highest good?” If you murder your rival “You’ll light a flame that cannot be extinguished. / Feared by the whole world, you will fear each man, / Will ever punish, ever trembling plan, / And as your foe your every subject scan.” But surely it is not enough for Nero’s desires to make the public weal his highest good. He tells Burrhus to summon Britannicus to the palace.

He then consults the Machiavellian Narcissus. Here is where Racine shows the complexity of his Nero’s soul. Nero was on the verge of becoming a cartoon monster, not a real one. He tells Narcissus, “I do not wish to pursue the plan.” Ever-ready with a well-placed lie—or is it a lie?—Narcissus tells him that Agrippina has boasted in public of her sway over Nero. “Do you insist I choose the tyrant’s path,” Nero asks, “That Rome, erasing all marks of esteem, / Should leave me but the name of poisoner?” and a fratricidal one at that. Narcissus repeats Nero’s own argument to Burrhus. The people are fickle, and they are easily intimidated; as subjects of a longstanding tyranny, “they’ve been adapted to the yoke.” “Sentence the brother and renounce the sister” and the people will condemn them both. Nero still resists, recalling Burrhus’ arguments. “I wish no more to break my word to him / And gave his virtue arms against myself. / Against his arguments my courage sticks, / And when he speaks to me my conscience pricks.” There was of course no such notion as conscience in ancient Rome, until Christianity. Nero speaks more like a modern ruler; Racine writes for his contemporaries, and perhaps above all for contemporary absolute monarchs.

Narcissus persuades him, finally, by alleging that Burrhus, and not only Burrhus but “all of them,” “have but one thought: / They fear this blow will end their influence.” Free yourself of “these proud masters.” (Pride is always damnable—in others.) “Are you unaware of all they whisper? / ‘Nero,’ they hint, ‘was not born to the Throne; / He only says and does what he is told, / His mind controlled by Seneca, his heart / By Burrhus.” And his quest for popularity is “unworthy of a Caesar.” Convinced that the youth has freed himself from his childish fear of his mother, Narcissus works on his vanity and his youthful desire for freedom to sever himself from his teachers. He positions himself to be the last teacher Nero will ever need, the proto-Machiavellian adviser of the new Roman prince. If Nero experiences the decidedly unclassical pangs of conscience, a decidedly unclassical advisor appears to dissolve his reservations. “Let’s see what we must do,” Nero decides. “Must”: the appeal to necessity is often strongest when other passions reinforce it.

Racine begins Act V with Britannicus revealing himself to his beloved Junia as a wishful thinker par excellence. An invitation to Nero’s palace, with the dangled prospect of reconciliation, gulls him entirely. Sensible Junia isn’t so sure, but Britannicus has convinced himself that Agrippina has pushed her son to it, as “She felt my ruin would her fall provoke.” But can his apparent change of heart, so sudden, be real? Yes, because Nero either “open hates or hates no more.” Junia has the better insight: “Do not judge his heart, my lord, by yours.” Such ‘mirror-imaging,’ as it came to be called in the twentieth century, remains endemic in social and political relations. One may recall how frequently citizens of republican regimes misread the intentions of tyrants, simply because they assumed that everyone is pretty much the same, despite differences of regime and ‘culture.’ This goes for regime shifts within the same country, too. As Tacitus already knew, the republican virtues had disappeared along with the republic.

Britannicus is also afflicted by a form of pride. Whether Nero proves “true or false” in his friendship, he tells Junia, “he dare not, by a cowardly blow, / Become the people’s and the Senate’s foe.” He determines to act as if the remaining vestiges of Roman republicanism were still strong. He even imagines that Narcissus was ashamed of Nero’s shamefulness. When Junia persists in doubting, he closes the matter by wondering why she distrusts his judgment.

Agrippina arrives, shoos Britannicus off to the palace, and assures Junia that her son’s “heart is free of any wickedness” but rather it is “our foes”—Agrippina’s rivals for influence, Burrhus and Seneca—”who have taken mean advantage of his kindness.” Her analysis is of course the exact opposite of the truth, as it’s Narcissus who has usurped the place of the tutors she had hired. It is a wise mother who knows her son: “He asked my aid in great affairs of State / On which depends the universe’s fate.” This being so, she wishfully imagines, “Rome soon will know her Agrippina again!” The would-be goddess of the known universe has spoken; surely her son has obeyed.

No. The next news out of the palace is that Britannicus has died by poisoning. Nero denies to his mother that he had anything to do with it (“for the blows of Fate I cannot answer”), but Agrippina isn’t entirely a fool, and threatens her son the revenge of the Furies after the death she sees impending for herself. She finally makes a prophecy that will prove true: “To the basest tyrants shall your name / Through all the ages spell the basest shame.” Any remorse for her own hand in this remains foreign to her soul. She ignores the sharp point of Burrhus’ description of her son at the scene of his crime: “Nero turned not a hair as he [Britannicus] lay dying. / His listless eyes already have the hardness / Of a tyrant raised in crime from infancy.”

In the final scene, Albina reports that Junia has undertaken the Roman equivalent of escaping to the safety of a nunnery. She has declared before the statue of Augustus that she will become a Virgin of the Gods, and in this vow the people, witnesses to it, shielded him from Narcissus, who attempted to drag her back to the palace. The aid Britannicus falsely expected for himself came for his beloved, instead. Racine was later punished by Louis XIV by expressing sympathy for the sufferings of the French owing to their monarch’s foreign wars. One suspects he harbored some of Tacitus’ republican or at least popular sympathies. King Louis might so have suspected.

To Burrhus suggestion that Nero might kill himself in sorrow over Junia’s escape, Agrippina snarls, “‘Twill serve him right.” Even now, wishful thinking born of vanity rules her: “Let’s see if his remorse will make him change / And wiser counsels will prevail with time.” Burrhus answers, completing the rhyme of the couplet and ending the play, “Pray Heaven this were his one and only crime!”

Everyone in Racine’s audience knew otherwise. Suetonius records that he would indeed have his mother murdered—Burrhus and Seneca, too—although he would indeed be “hounded by his mother’s ghost and by the whips and blazing torches of the Furies.”

Racine has written a Hamlet for the regime of Louis XIV’s absolute monarchy:  mother and the son, also queen and prince, locked in a death-spiraling embrace. But here the prince has become the emperor by the beginning of the action. Hamlet’s tutor hides behind the curtain, dies by Hamlet’s sword, and is pronounced not wise but an old fool by the prince. Here, the prince and emperor seeks the godlike knowledge of invisible witnessing; he doesn’t get killed for it, but is indeed a fool. He is irresolute, like Hamlet, and conscience almost makes a ‘coward’ of him. Not only was he his own fool but he would become his own killer, dying after Rome had turned against him. Racine’s Nero was Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Polonius combined. And King Louis? Racine has written an admonitory tragedy for French monarchs and the aristocrats they have gathered around them. He has shown them what their souls are becoming.

Edith Wharton: The Cruise of the Vanadis. With photographs by Jonas Dovydenas. London: Bloomsbury, 2004.

 

It helps to have a yacht.

Married for three years and still in their twenties, the Whartons didn’t own a yacht, but they could afford to charter one, sharing expenses and adventures with its owner, Teddy’s cousin, James Van Alen. From Marseilles they went across to Algiers, where the steam-powered Vanadis was anchored. In the company of a crew of sixteen, eighty-two days later they disembarked in Dalmatia, at Ancona, having visited Malta, Syracuse, and many port cities and towns on the Greek islands and mainland. Vanadis was a Norse goddess who engaged in sorcery, bringing it to earth—a female Hermes, although in some respects less helpful, lacking any other arts. Mrs. Wharton came from the north, too, but with no mumbo-jumbo in hand.

Touring poses a problem for one so intelligent as Edith Wharton. Here today, gone tomorrow, what’s really the point of ‘seeing the sights’? You won’t stay long enough to know anyone, to learn the language and the way people think. You can’t ‘do science,’ either. About all you can collect are impressions and anecdotes.

This tells, early in the book, where adjectives expressing generalities pop up too much. Of the fifteen or so occasions she deploys “picturesque,” a dozen occur in the first half. (“Surrounded by the first Arabs we had ever seen,” she can only stammer that they were “startlingly picturesque,” for example.) Same for “beautiful,” “pretty,” and “brilliant.” She’s a bit at a loss for words, a condition more remarkable in Edith Wharton than it is in you or I. For a time, she’s at sea in more ways than one.

She overcomes the difficulties as she goes along. She does it with an exact knowledge of botany and of history, along with the powers of perception and of ironic observation the readers of her then-future novels have come to expect. She seldom writes “flowers”; she writes asphodels, anemones, sweet alyssum, wild geranium, snapdragon, scarlet and yellow vetches. It helps to have convenient means of transportation; it also helps to know what you’re looking at, when you get there.

She invariably exercises her own judgment. Looking at the interior of the Cathedral of Monreale, in Palermo, she finds it lacking in “depth and variety of color: it seems to me that for this bright climate it is too much lighted.” She adds: “Of course I know that in saying this I am running counter to the opinion of the highest authorities; but this Journal is written not to record other people’s opinions, but to note as exactly as possible the impression which I myself received.”

As early as Algiers, she remarks the very recent “reality of Christian slavery in Africa”; “even in 1816 three thousand still remained to be released by Lord Exmouth when he destroyed the fleet of the Algerine pirates,” who had attracted the unfavorable attentions of the Jefferson and Madison administrations, only a few years before that. She notices that French imperial rule over Tunis has had much effect on the Tunisians; despite the mission civilisatrice, “nothing can be conceived more purely Oriental than the Bazaars” there. And even where the mission has left its mark, it hasn’t been altogether civilizing: “a suite of state apartments, furnished in the worst European taste of forty years ago,” was “adorned with the usual number of clocks with which Eastern potentates love to surround themselves.”

Malta, too, disappointed. The Knights of St. John landed there, after heroic deeds elsewhere, and much of what they had built was gone. “The Cathedral of St. Paul, which was not built until the close of the 17th century, is as tawdry and ugly as only a church of that epoch can be, and contains, as far as I know, no traces of the earlier cathedral built by the Norman masters of Malta in the 12th century. The fact is that, although the Hospitallers are so intimately associated with Malta, that their very name has been replaced by that of the island, they did not come there until the day of decadence, their own, as well as that of art and architecture. The romance of their history must be sought in the old heroic days of Jerusalem and Acre, while at Rhodes the order reached its highest pitch of dignity and honour. When the silver trumpet sounded the retreat of Christianity and civilization from the coasts of Asia Minor, the true power of the order began to wane,” and by the time they had arrived at Malta they’d “already begun to lose sight of the object for which they were fighting, and were gradually changing from the protectors of pilgrims into something little better than the pirates with whom they contended.”

She knows that tyrants ruled ancient Syracuse. The “Ear of Dionysius” was a cavern carved in the quarry where prisoners worked; the ruler could listen to any confidences exchanged by his enemies, and had a room at the other end of the “Ear” to enable him to monitor them in comfort. As an arbiter in her own right, Mrs. Wharton judges the ancient architecture superior to the modern; it was “sad to note how brutally the Christian adapter handled his materials.” If the decadence of the Knights of Malta instanced what her older contemporary, Matthew Arnold, called Christendom’s melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, its advance in early modern times was no unmixed blessing, at least when it came to taste in design. And even before that, she laments, Syracuse saw the defeat of the Athenian army. Gliding over the Mediterranean, she sides with ancient Athens, more often than not.

And while she has a place in her heart for the romance of knighthood, she is no Romantic. She dislikes ruins. At the Temple of Concord in Girgenti, built in the Doric style, she finds that “its glory has departed.” “How the architect would have shuddered to think that his raw masses of sandstone would remain exposed to the eyes of future critics?”—the marble facing having cracked and fallen off. On to Greece, the centerpiece of her journey.

She oversleeps while the yacht passes the southern cliffs of Santa Maura, “from which Sappho is supposed to have thrown herself into the sea.” Mrs. Wharton prefers the sea for travel, leaving its use for self-destruction to less well-governed souls. Nor are modern Greeks at times any better at self-government. In Zante, not only are men often miserly, they are so “much absorbed in local politics” that “any person who is dying is afraid to receive the Sacrament from a priest of the opposing party, lest poison be administered.” Foreign politicians prove less worrisome but no more helpful; at the next port, she finds that the men at the English Consul’s office “had very little information to give us, either about Milo, or the rest of the Aegean.” She falls back on learning firsthand, enjoying the holiday costumes of the local women, the “Eastern hospitality” of one of “the chief magnates” of the village (complete with glasses of wine that “reminded us of the ‘sweet wine’ so popular with the heroes of the Odyssey“), and the stern necessity of never violating a point d’honneur by offering material recompense to one’s host. And while the occasional literary allusion occurs to her, “in fact the lack of books about this part of the world, though at times an annoyance, lends an undeniable zest to travelling and makes the approach to each island as thrilling as a discovery.”

In 1888, in Greece, Americans found themselves as much tourist attractions themselves, among local folk, as the sights were for Americans. As she dines with magnates, “the rest of the population looked in at the open door,” and when departing Trypiti on a donkey, at “every window, door, balcony and house-roof” “eager gazers” watched as she “rode triumphantly down the village street.” Yet the Greeks are hardly bumpkins, at least uniformly, when left to themselves. “While other islands, an afternoon’s sail away, still doze in medieval calm, Syra, placed by accident in the route of the steamer lines, palpitates with the responsibilities of modern life”—”a great source of pride to the modern Greeks, but very uninteresting to the traveler who has hoped in sailing eastward to leave the practical realities of life behind. Syra is a hard, ugly place, like all ambitious centres of traffic.” On occasion, even the less ‘evolved’ Greek places repel. “The people of Amorgo have a very bad reputation throughout the Aegean and are accused of making piratical excursions to the neighboring islands, for the purpose of carrying off sheep and goats; but they are very mild and civilized-looking compared with the Astypalians, whose “savage-looking faces,” “narrow and dirty streets,” and generally “unsavory” population leave Mrs. Wharton “uncomfortably reminded of the old days when the Greek islands were not as safe as they are now.”

Rhodes reminds her again of the Hospitallers, who “for centuries defended Christendom against the Ottoman” and sheltered pilgrims heading for Jerusalem. “But Europe failed them in their need, and having in turn been driven by the Turks from Jerusalem and Acre, they were obliged to take refuge in Cyprus in the thirteenth century.” From there they were transferred to Cyprus, where “their rule was an enlightened one for that age, and the Rhodians were happy under their protection” until 1522, when the Ottomans expelled them. “The Street of the Knights is long and narrow, and the fine facades of the houses are broken and defaced by the wooden lattices built out by the Turks.” Indeed, “everything has been done which barbarians could devise to destroy these once beautiful houses,” which Mrs. Wharton nonetheless finds “far finer and more suggestive of the Knights in their crowning day of strength than the debased late Renaissance Auberges of Malta.” Nature does better, as Rhodes has “the most beautiful climate in the Mediterranean.”

Nature also blessed Patmos, “deeply indented with bays and fjords.” Although home to the Monastery of St. John the Divine and to “the small church built over the cave where he is supposed to have seen ‘a door opened in Heaven,’ the Hegumenos interfered with the spiritual impression of the site when he offered to show the Whartons the body of St. John in exchange for a substantial fee. “We found some excuse for declining.” Eastern hospitality extended by the Greek Consul assuaged the rub, with no compensation expected.

“The most beautiful island in the Aegean,” Mytilene proves “from end to end… a blossoming garden.” Embroideries shown off by the elderly aunt of their guide feature Turkish “coloring and design”; Mrs. Wharton remains alert to the blending of Greece and Turkey, ancient, Christian, and modern. They obtain a letter of introduction from the Mytilene archbishop to the First Man of Mount Athos, where the existing monastery dates back to the tenth century, built on ruins from Constantine’s time. The First Man supervises two classes of monks: the Coenobites, who sharing “all things in common,” and the Idiorrhythmics, who “preserve a great measure of independence, take their meals apart, and even maintain their private servants if they choose.” The latter way of life “is much less strict, and more popular among the richer monks,” whereas the Coenobites “are a rough and illiterate set.” “In some of the monasteries all the monks are Greek, in others Slavonic and Russian; and Russico, the Russian monastery, is said to be in the present day a hot-bed of Russian political spies.” Plus ça change…. Annoyed by the rule that no women may set foot on Mount Athos, “I ordered steam up in the launch, and started out on a voyage of discovery, determined to go as near the forbidden shores as I could.” She did discover one thing: the shore was guarded by alert and energetic monks, who “clambered hurriedly down the hill to prevent my landing, and with their shocks of black hair and long woolen robes flying behind them… were a wild enough looking set to frighten any intruder away.” The men in her party were quite welcome, however, and viewed “all the marvelous eikons set with uncut rubies, sapphires and emeralds,” the frescoes, and the illuminated manuscripts housed in the shrine, including a “book of rules which was written for the artists of the Greek Church in the very beginning of Byzantine art by Dionysius of Agrapha.”

Modern Athens, “a white, glaring town,” has “the neat, proper air of a German Residenz, incongruously overshadowed by the Acropolis.” If “the King’s Palace is not a thing of beauty,” the Academy of Sciences building, a modern imitation of Ionic architecture, “shows how perfectly suited Greek architecture was to the Greek climate and landscape, and how grotesque are the classic reproduction in northern countries, with their smoke-blackened columns and weather-beaten sculptures.” One suspects that Mrs. Wharton would not have been altogether surprised, although repelled, by the depredations of the Germans in the next century. Be this as it may have proved, “whatever else of interest Athens contains is so subordinated to the Acropolis, that it is after all but a perfunctory glance one casts at the sculpture of the theatre of Dionysius, the exquisite columns of the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, or even the treasures of the Museums.” “Perhaps on a second visit to Athens one might recover one’s sense of proportion. I hope some day to find out.” Athens is the only place about which she suggests such an intention.

The Whartons then left Greece, stopping at Montenegro (its independence still threatened by the Turks), where the men “all looked bored and discontented, and no wonder, for unless they are fighting they have nothing to do.” “How they manage to live there without being driven to suicide is a mystery,” although they seem too unpoetic to indulge any such Sapphic impulses. At Dalmatia, the Whartons bade farewell to the crew, which greeted the bonus they were offered as no affront to Eastern hospitality.

“The cruise, first to last, was a success.” And so is the journal, showing, as it does, how to tour with grace and wit.

 

William Shakespeare: The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Performed at the Michigan Shakespeare Festival, July 13, 2019.

 

What is a gentleman? Are these two Veronese gentlemen true gentlemen? Why Veronese gentlemen, and not gentlemen from some other city? Why bring them to Milan?

And while we’re at it, Shakespeare concludes his comedy with a reconciliation scene that we now find utterly implausible, even for a comedy. What was he thinking? Is the fault in the stars, in the brilliant Shakespearean constellation, or in ourselves?

In the 1590s, when Shakespeare wrote, Verona was ruled by commercial-republican Venice. It may have been known as a city of romance; Shakespeare set Romeo and Juliet there, and it has surely been known as such ever since. So, gentlemen of Verona may be expected to be looking for love, for girls happily to wed. For gentlemen, marriage matters politically; aristocratic households not only possess wealth, they rule. Good marriages perpetuate aristocratic regimes, bad marriages ruin them. All regimes concern themselves with the problem of continuity, with the transfer of authority from one generation to the next. Monarchies see dynastic struggles and fear imbecile heirs to the throne, and in the American republic young Lincoln lectured schoolboys on “the perpetuation of our political institutions, as the founding generation passed from the scene.

Milan has another regime, under another imperial ruler. Conquered by the Romans in the third century BC, Milan served as capital of the Western Roman Empire, beginning in third century AD. There the Emperor Constantine issued the Edict of Milan in 313, granting religious toleration throughout the empire and thereby enabling Christianity to spread unimpeded. The Roman aristocracy would need to adjust to the new religion, now, just as the modern European aristocracy would need to adjust to commerce and democracy, centuries later.

In modern times, the Christian ruler of Milan, Ludovico il Moro, committed a notorious mistake. Needing an ally against rival, ever-squabbling Italian city-states in the 1490s, when other enterprising Italians were sailing the ocean blue for the New World, he called the king of France Charles into Italy. In 1500, Charles VII returned, this time to stay and to rule—an example of misguided policy by a Christian Italian prince Machiavelli would later deplore. In 1525, Hapsburg Spain took over, and in Shakespeare’s time Milan was part of the Holy Roman Empire.

For centuries, Roman gentlemen knew exactly who they were, and what a gentleman was. But if the Empire becomes holy, at least in name, possibly in aspiration and even a bit in fact, what is a gentleman then, and who is one? ‘We democrats’ of later modernity miss the point of the play if we do not see that it’s about those questions, about aristocracy, the regime that claims to be the rule of the few who are best, men and women who claim the right to rule on the basis of their excellence—whether of virtue (as in Aristotle), ‘birth’ (social rank), wealth, or some combination thereof. In modernity, aristocracy often founds its claim on knowledge or expertise, calling itself ‘meritocracy’; traditionally, another sort of learning, learning in the liberal arts, enhanced a young man’s eligibility for positions of authority. Christians are numbered among ‘the elect’—a new sort of aristocracy, chosen not on the basis of virtues natural or conventional but by God, gratuitously.

Given these cross-cutting, sometimes contradictory claims to rule by self-styled aristocrats, what is a young gentleman of Verona to do, and to think? Proteus, named for the classical world’s legendary changeling, who wrestled with Odysseus, intends to stay in his native city, close to his honorable beloved.  Valentine, whose name means “as one containing valor,” has no beloved. He prepares instead for an odyssey, intending to leave Verona, “To see the wonders of the world abroad” (I.i.6). Valentine criticizes love as a dubious investment of sentiment (“If haply won, perhaps a hapless gain”) and intellect (“a folly bought with wit, / Or else a wit by folly vanquished”) (I.i.32-35). If Valentine is an Odysseus and Proteus a Proteus, they will square off, someday (and Homer’s readers won’t put their money on Proteus). Now, however, they part as friends, agreeing to correspond. Proteus thinks Valentine seeks not so much the wonders of the world as honor, traditionally the aristocrat’s passion par excellence, the ruling passion of the noblest minds, as Publius would call it, nearly two centuries later. For the moment, Proteus’ mind is closed to wonder, his love for Julia having “metamorphis’d” him (he soliloquizes, recalling his Ovid), causing him to “neglect my studies, lose my time, / War with good counsel, set the world at nought,” making his “wit with musing weak, heart sick with thought” (I.i.63-69). His immediate worry is Julia’s failure to answer his most recent missive.

Julia asks her lady-in-waiting, Lucetta (“light”), if she would “counsel me to fall in love” and, if so, with which of her suitors. Lucetta recommends Proteus but has “no reasons” for her recommendation “but a woman’s reason; I think him so because I think him so” (I.ii.23-24). This unilluminating counsel fails to impress Julia; Proteus “has never moved me” because in “little speaking [he] shows his love but small” (I.ii.29). Lucetta then produces the letter, which Julia pretends to scorn but delights in, tears up, then attempts to reassemble. Lucetta isn’t fooled, knowing that her mistress has made up her mind. But Julia’s initial concern will prove just.

Proteus’s father, Antonio, also receives advice from a servant, or rather from his brother, a priest, who conveys it through his servant. Why does his lordship allow Proteus to stay at home, “While other men, of slender reputation, / Put forth their sons to seek preferment out,” whether to war, to voyages of discovery, or to “the studious universities” (I.iii.5-10). Antonio confesses to having thought the same thing: His son “cannot be a perfect man,” a man with a just claim to rule, without “being tried and tutor’d in the world: / Experience is by industry achiev’d, / And perfected by the swift course of time,” which his son is now wasting in Verona, Venice’s subordinate, while his friend Valentine is off (as servant Panthino reminds him) to the Holy Roman Emperor’s court in Milan (I.ii.20-23). When Proteus enters, reading Julia’s return letter, he lies to his father about its sender, telling him it’s from Valentine. This only confirms Antonio’s intention to send Proteus to the imperial city; after all, he will be reuniting the young man with his friend. In lying, Proteus tells himself, “I shunn’d the fire for fear of burning,” only to drench himself “in the sea, where I am drown’d” (I.iii.78-79). This hard lesson will not prevent him from lying many more times, however, with Protean abandon.

At the Duke’s palace in Milan, Valentine’s servant, Speed, baits his master, who has reversed his opinion of love, having fallen for the Duke’s daughter, Silvia. Valentine has been so profoundly “metamorphosis’d” by love that “I can hardly think you my master” (II.i.26-27). For his own sport, Speed takes up Valentine’s former critique: “If you love her, you cannot see her” because “Love is blind” (II.i.61-63). With both Lucetta and Speed, the servant attempts to moderate a young boss. Valentine differs from Julia, however, because he makes no attempt to deceive him respecting his correspondence with Silvia; he chaffs Speed right back. Having no need of maidenly modesty, he has no need of maidenly secrecy. The crucial question will be whether an ‘Ovidian’ metamorphosis effected by love is merely ‘Protean,’ or does it instead bring out the nature of the lover, a nature that can remain faithful, unchanging?

Being a maid, Silvia does have need of a ruse. Valentine has been gazing at her at table, and no woman in the world who isn’t blind as Love wouldn’t notice such behavior.  She has charged him with writing a letter to her (supposed) beloved, and she has come to tell him that “I would have had them writ more movingly” (II.i.117). She will permit him to revise and resubmit. “O excellent device!” Speed exclaims (II.i.128); the lady flirts well, having “taught her love himself to write unto her lover,” whom he now sees to be Valentine (II.i.156)—as he explains to his uncomprehending, disbelieving, love-tortured master. Is his servant in earnest but wrong, in earnest and right, or deliberately wrong and still baiting him, as his wont? Love is a chameleon, as Speed now and Valentine soon will remark, living on air (as chameleons were said to do)—that is to say, on hope—and changing colors in its blushes, its excitation, its jealous rages.

Changeling Proteus implausibly pledges his constancy to Julia and then heads to Milan, where Valentine lauds his character to the Duke when told of his impending arrival. Proteus, Valentine avers, is a man of ripe judgment and “all good grace to grace a gentleman” (II.iv.70). So trusting, he does not hesitate to tell Proteus of his beloved, to extol her beauty and saintliness, and to introduce her to him. Between now and the flirtation over the letter, Speed has been proven correct; the couple are betrothed, and plan their elopement. Proteus now has other plans, having instantly conceived a passion for Silvia. His love, “like a waxen image ‘gainst a fire / Bears no impression of the thing it was. / Methinks my zeal to Valentine is cold, / And that I love him not as I was wont. / O! but I love his lady too much…” (II.iv.197-201). As for Julia, he has “quite forgotten her” (II.iv.191)—a Proteus of love, indeed. “If I can check my erring love, I will; / If not, to compass her I’ll use my skill” (II.iv.209-210). It doesn’t take him long to logic-chop his way to the latter course. He even concludes his ‘reasoning’ with a prayer, a prayer to Love: “Love, lend me wings to make my purpose swift, / As thou has lent me with to plot this drift” (IV.vi.42-43). Back in Verona, meanwhile, Julia tells Lucetta that Proteus’s “words are bonds, his oaths are oracles, / His love sincere, his thoughts immaculate,” and so on (II.vii.75-76). She plans to disguise herself as a man and run off to Milan to be with him. Sensible Lucetta doubts her mistress’s faith to be well-placed but, loyal herself, will not betray her plan.

Proteus easily frustrates the elopement by disclosing Valentine’s plot to the Duke, who banishes the plotter. The Duke would marry his daughter to the wealthy Thurio, a Thor in name only—vain, cowardly, and blustering, a Thor of big thunder and small hammer, despised by prudent Silvia. For his part, Proteus offers ‘friend’ Valentine mock-moderate advice: “Cease to lament for that thou canst not keep” (III.i.241); trust to time. Write to Silvia and send your letters through me, as I shall deliver them faithfully. As it happens, Proteus’s servant, Launce, has formed a better estimate of Proteus than Valentine has done; “I am but a fool, look you, and yet I have the wit to think my master is a kind of a knave” (III.i.261-262). He suspects his master of being willing to launce, a lot.

In this comedy, then, it is usually the case that the servants are smarter than their masters and mistresses. Even Launce’s dog, subordinate of a subordinate, routinely outwits his master, puts him to shame, induces his master to serve him. [1] This is Christianity ill-conceived, a Christianity in comical abdication of political responsibility, mock-Christian misrule. Who, then, are the true aristocrats? How will the aristocrats-by-convention improve themselves, become worthy of the authority they claim?

The Duke isn’t doing so well, in that regard. His purpose as an aristocratic father with an eligible daughter is to choose a worthy suitor and so to continue his line, assuring that his family will continue to rule in the next generation. He too trusts Proteus, asking him his counsel on how to make Silvia forget Valentine and love Thurio. Proteus is more than happy to oblige, and to use what there is of the Duke’s prudence for his own advantage and against the Duke’s intention. Slander Valentine, the would-be Machiavel thoughtfully advises, “with falsehood, cowardice, and poor descent— / Three things that women highly hold in hate” (III.ii.32-33). Yes, but I cannot deliver such a message, the Duke calculates; it must come from the one “she esteemeth as his friend” (III.ii.37). Needless to say, Proteus promises to undertake the task, adding that he shall praise Thurio in the bargain, as Thurio himself is the first to suggest. The Duke and Thurio can trust Proteus, the Duke explains, because Proteus is “already Love’s firm votary / And cannot soon revolt and change [his] mind” concerning his lovely Julia (III.ii.58-59). That Proteus has already revolted and changed his mind, that his quick betrayal of Valentine proves him capable of doing just that, does not occur to the Duke or to Thurio. Milan’s rulers are misfits, aristocrats in name only. As for Proteus, he puts his faith in the power of poetry to persuade Silvia, and again the Duke concurs: “Much is the force of heaven-bred poesy” (III.ii.72). Proteus knows that not all poesy need be heaven-bred, but he does trust in its power; he trusts in what he knows to be human artifice, not in nature and not in God. Shakespeare also knows that not all poesy is heaven-sent, and wants his hearers to know it. He also knows the power of some poetry, but prefers to use it to illuminate and not to deceive. Hilariously, he has dolt Thurio choose to write the sonnet.

A natural aristocrat will find his way to rule in nature itself. So we see when Valentine, self-exiled from Verona and banished from Milan, meets a gang of outlaws in a forest on the frontiers of Mantua. To win their esteem, along with his own and his servant’s safety, he tells them a prudent if not noble lie—that he was banished for killing a man, although “without false vantage or base treachery,” there being honor among killers as well as thieves (IV.i.29). Suitably impressed, upon learning that Valentine also possesses a useful knowledge (foreign languages) as well as the requisite virtù, they will have him for their king. “Some of us are gentleman,” one of their number explains, outlaws only because they committed murder and “such-like petty crimes” in “the fury of ungovern’d youth” (IV.i.44-45). It should be remarked that aristocratic regimes that fail to govern their youth, whether in love or in anger, cannot last long. Valentine agrees “to make a virtue of necessity” (as one outlaw puts it); in return, they will “do thee homage, and be rul’d by thee, / Love thee as our commander and our king,” albeit upon pain of death if he demurs (IV.i.62, 66-67). Judging that these new outlaw-allies may be more honest than some of those he has known in civil society, Valentine consents, “Provided that you do no outrages / On silly women or poor passengers” (IV.i.71-72). Of course not. Being gentlemen manqué, “We detest such vile base practices” (IV.i.73).

As Proteus’s servant serves, doglike, a dog, so (Proteus admits), “spaniel-like,” the more Silvia “spurns my love / The more it grows and fawneth on her still” (IV.ii.14-15). Thurio arrives beneath Silvia’s room, where the Duke has confined her, with sonnet in hand and musicians in his train. Julia is there, too, disguised as a boy, listening to the preposterous serenade. Proteus’s betrayal stands exposed after Thurio gives up and Proteus makes another try at winning Silvia. More lies follow: Julia is dead, so he’s free to court another; Valentine is, too, so Silvia is equally free. After her scornful rejection, he begs for her picture as a consolation, which she promises to send in the morning, “loath” though she is “to be your idol” (IV.ii.124).

Rid of him, she spins a counterplot with her friend Eglamour, whose name Shakespeare has borrowed from a hero of a medieval romance. Sir Eglamour of Artois is a Christian Hercules, performing heroic deeds in a story of courtly love that, counter to convention, leads to marriage and family. A good name, indeed, and Silvia knows him as “a gentleman”—”valiant, wise, remorseful [i.e., compassionate], well accomplished” (IV.iii.11-13). Like Julia, she would escape her father’s injustice and seek her beloved. She will need no protective disguise, as Julia did, because Eglamour consents to accompany her, although this will put him at odds with the Duke. His compassion or pity, consonant with both nature and Christianity, brings him to agree to guard her. Apart from Valentine, he is the only real gentleman in the play, although, being human and no demi-god, he will defend her in a less-than-Herculean way.

Disguised Julia calls herself “Sebastian,” recalling the saint martyred after attempting to persuade the Roman Emperor Diocletian from persecuting Christians. “Sebastian” means “be ashamed,” and Proteus, who doesn’t recognize her in disguise, shows no more shame at his betrayals than the Emperor did at killing saints.  Having judged his own dog-serving servant unreliable, he asks her to deliver a ring to Silvia, which of course is the same ring Julia had given to him at the time they pledged mutual fidelity. Unlike Proteus, who uses deception to betray his friend, Julia will faithfully offer the ring to Silvia. “I am my master’s true confirmed love, / But cannot be true servant to my master / Unless I prove false traitor to myself. / Yet will I woo for him but yet so coldly / As, heaven it knows, I would not have him speed” (IV.iv. 98-102). Silvia unwitting proves more faithful to Julia than Proteus, plotting, saying, “Tell him from me, / One Julia, that his changing,” Protean, “thoughts forget, / Would better fit his chamber than this shadow,” the picture of herself that he wants her to exchange for the ring, which Silvia rejects because her finger “would not do his Julia so much wrong” (IV.iv.133). “Sebastian” reveals herself not as Julia but as Julia’s servant, whom Silvia accordingly rewards with a token of respect for her loyalty. Having proved herself good and faithful, Julia also proves vulnerable to a touch of jealousy; left with the picture of Silvia, she supposes herself no less lovely than her rival, concluding that Love is indeed “a blinded god” (IV.iv.193). In judging, justice is blind to persons; in pursuing, Love is blind to judgment. To found a just regime, men and women will need to learn to love prudently and to judge justly, forming families aristocratic in the natural sense of the word, the rule of those best by nature, as guided by God. Before leaving in search of Valentine, Silvia goes to confession.

Before Thurio left Silvia, Proteus told him to meet him the next morning at St. Gregory’s well. It is an unwittingly ironical choice, as St. Gregory was the man who sent Christian missionaries to England, where they led the Anglo-Saxons to conversion. Proteus intends no such holy purpose, but his mission will soon come to an end. By the next day, the Duke has discovered Silvia’s escape, correctly guessing that she’s left in search of Valentine. All parties will soon converge in the forest, in nature, outside the city and its conventions, where a re-founding of the Milanese regime may occur rightly, by the light of natural justice.

An outlaw intercepts Silvia; Eglamour’s disappearance will remain unexplained, and he will not return. However things may have gone, the outlaw faithfully brings the lady to his captain, even assuring her: “Fear not, he bears an honorable mind, / And will not use a woman lawlessly” (V.iii.12-14). His fidelity to his promise not to harm women will serve him well, in the end. Valentine already knows that his men “love me well; yet I have much to do / To keep them from uncivil outrages” (V.iv.16-17). But he hides, seeing intruders in the forest.

They are not strangers. Proteus, Julia/Sebastian are with Silvia, whom Proteus has seized from the outlaws; hoping to put her in his debt, he insists that they “would have forc’d your honor and your love” (V.iv.21). “How like a dream is this I see and hear!” Valentine thinks; like Proteus, he prays to Love, not for swiftness in the execution of a plot, as Proteus had done, but for exactly the opposite, for the “patience to forbear awhile” (V.iv.26-27). Valentine’s love is Christian, agapic not erotic: “Agape suffereth long and is kind; agape envieth not, agape vaunteth not itself” (I Corinthians 13:4). Christian love is patient, not protean,. Christian love enables not only the innocence of doves but the prudence of serpents. In terms of the names in the play, “Speed” is a servant for Valentine, a person under his rule; Proteus imagines speed a virtue, and his servant is a clown.

Fortified with this loving patience, Valentine listens as Silvia laments her misery in having been rescued by “false Proteus,” exactly the sort of man to whom she would never want to be obliged (V.iv.35). He listens as she adds, “O, heaven be judge how I love Valentine, / Whose life’s as tender to me as my soul!” (V.iv.36-37). And he hears his beloved reveal not only her faithful heart but her clear mind, as when Proteus complains of “the curse in love” (Love’s final answer to his evil, impatient prayer), that “women cannot love where they’re beloved,” she rejoins with crushing logic that “Proteus cannot love where he’s beloved!”—in Verona, by Julia (V.iv.43-45). The Protean soul contradicts itself by rending its faith “into a thousand oaths,” by committing perjury, by saying two opposite things at once (V.iv.48). “Thou has no faith left now, unless thou’st two, / And that’s far worse than one,” making him a “counterfeit,” a false double, “to thy true friend!” (V.iv.50-53). This reduces Proteus first to appealing to convention masquerading as nature (“In love, / Who respects friend?”); when Silvia refutes this (“All men but Proteus”) he threatens to “love [her] ‘gainst the nature of love—force ye”—the very act he had begun by praising himself for saving her from (V.iv.50-54). Unblessed or even cursed by nature, or by the goddess Love, he would treat her as Machiavelli urges the prince to treat the protean, faithless lady Fortuna, to master her by force. “I’ll force thee to yield to my desire” (V.iv.59). The source of Proteus’s proteanism is the disorder of his soul, which he has turned in precise contradiction to its natural order. His reason serves his desires, and when reasoning fails to get him what his desires want, he resorts to spiritedness, to angry threats of force. Since (as Socrates observes in the Republic) the desires or appetites are foolish and inconstant counselors, he constantly bends himself out of shape.

Valentine, whose soul is so ordered that his reason contains his valor, now puts that virtue to use, commanding Proteus to “let go that rude uncivil touch” (V.iv.60). In the wild, natural forest, outside civil society, his mind and heart command civility, speech over touch. Machiavelli teaches that one learns best not through hearing or faith, not through seeing or reason, but through the sense of touch—touch, which caresses or annihilates, mastering Fortuna. Valentine doesn’t need force to defeat the astonished Proteus; he need only address him as “Thou common friend, that’s without faith or love” (V.iv.63). Common: That is to say, he reveals Proteus as a commoner, not an aristocrat at all, unworthy of ruling anyone because incapable of ruling himself as a human being should do, if fully human. “Proteus, / I am sorry I must never trust thee more, / But count the world a stranger for thy sake. / The private wound is deepest” (V.iv.68-71). Valentine’s own status as a ruler crumbles if civil and even personal friendship disintegrates. Aristocracy requires the virtues of courage, moderation, justice, prudence, fidelity in friendship and in love. For an aristocrat to be a counterfeit, aristocratic in convention, in title or appearance only, ruins aristocracy, makes the world itself a stranger, which is to say a foreigner, not merely an illegal but a natural alien. Machiavellianism alienates nature, and in so doing destroys not only conventional aristocracy, the political balance-wheel between ‘the one,’ the prince, and ‘the many,’ the commoners, but destroys the real, natural aristocracy upon which every conventional aristocracy must finally rely.

Here is where ‘we democrats’ misunderstand the ending of the play. Proteus, for all his faults, retains an element of aristocracy in his soul. He has attempted to play the leonine and vulpine prince, but he still has a core of virtue that his would-be virtù cannot quite smother. He can still feel shame, the reverse side of the honor that is the ruling passion of the true aristocrat’s mind. Confronted by the outraged friend he has betrayed, he admits that “My shame and guilt confounds me” (V.iv.74). Instead of offering battle he asks for forgiveness. Only in a soul formed and informed by natural right and Christian or agapic love can this response make sense. The same is true of Valentine’s response:

Then I am paid;

And once again I do receive thee honest.

Who by repentance is not satisfied

Is nor of heaven nor earth, for these are pleas’d;

By penitence th’ Eternal’s wrath’s appeas’d.

And, that my love may appear plain and free,

All that was mine in Silvia I give thee.    (V.iv.78-83)

If God forgives penitent sinners, and if nature does, too, why should humans not forgive? Is Proteus’s sudden show of shame and guilt, along with his repentance and humble request for forgiveness, only another shape-shifting, soon to be forgotten by him? Is Valentine’s immediate reversal of his distrust, his natural (that is, rational) and Christian forgiveness implausible, or even a ruse, a deeper Machiavellianism? Unlikely: This is a comedy, and Shakespeare does not intend to appeal to the supposed realism of Machiavellians or democrats, but to the realities of natural right and Christian grace, which Tocqueville identified as the democratizing gift of an aristocratic society. The resulting democratic society yet stands in need of aristocratic guidance, Tocqueville added.

But what of Julia, still disguised as Sebastian? Overwhelmed by all of this, she covers and reveals herself by stepping out of the shadow of her disguise, as Valentine had stepped out of the shadows of the forest. She too rebukes Proteus, invoking his shame at his own commonness, baseness, vulgarity. Behold the woman:

Behold her that gave aim to all thy oaths,

And entertain’d ’em deeply in her heart.

How oft has thou with perjury cleft the root!

O Proteus, let this habit make thee blush!

Be thou asham’d that I have took upon me

Such an immodest raiment—if shame live

In a disguise of love.

It is the lesser blot, modesty finds,

Women to change their shapes than men their minds.  (V.iv.101-110)

The root of nature, the heart, will be cleft by the many-minded, self-contradictory man. The relation of heart to mind, of morality to reason, deranged, ought to shame not only an aristocrat but a man as such.

And so it does. Proteus admits “’tis true” (V.iv.110). Inconstancy is the original sin, the “one error that fills [man] with faults,” making him “run through all th’ sins” (V.iv.111-112). To run: to be impatient, to hasten, to change senselessly, to be ruled by the desires. “What is in Silvia’s face but I may spy / More fresh in Julia’s with a constant eye?” (V.iv.114-115). That is, constancy of heart is the indispensable condition of clarity of mind, of the reasoning mind whose exercise shows men human, and makes aristocrats just. At this, Valentine again intervenes. With right relations restored, he proposes reconciliation of both the friends and the lovers. Proteus and, crucially, Julia agree to the covenant. What Christian aristocrats of the Tudors’ English regime once understood and accepted as plausible, at least in an instructive stage comedy, we modern democrats, we petty Machiavels, do not. Were they the deluded ones, or are we?

As for Valentine and Silvia, there remains the matter of her father, the Duke, who now blunders in, accompanied by thundering arch-blunderer Thurio. Upon seeing Silvia, Thurio claims her as his own, but Valentine proves the more valorous of the two (no hard thing), threatening to thrash him if he touches her, and the false Thor instantly decides that only a fool “will endanger / His body for a girl that loves him not” (V.iv.133-134). The Duke has prudence enough to recognize the obvious: “The more degenerate and base art thou / To make such means for her as thou hast done / And leave her on such slight conditions.” (V.iv.136-138) No true aristocrat, Thurio. Therefore “by the honour of my ancestry”—in the name of his aristocratic lineage—”I do applaud thy spirit, Valentine, / And think thee worthy of an empress’ love” (V.iv.139-141). Valor is the spirit of the true aristocrat, and the Duke now sees that he needs to re-found his regime by ending Valentine’s banishment but much more, to “Plead a new state in thy unrivall’d merit” (V.iv.144). This new state, this new regime, will find support in the man he now addresses as Sir Valentine. “Thou art a gentleman, and well-deriv’d; / Take thou thy Silvia, for thou has deserv’d her.” (V.iv.146-147). The Duke of Milan has clearly stated what a gentleman really is, and it is on this true perception, made possible by a reformed because dis-illusioned heart, that the renewed and more truly aristocratic regime will rest.

Valentine’s first act as a co-ruler of that regime is to reincorporate its remaining repentant scapegraces, the outlaws who preceded him in banishment. They are, he tells the Duke, “men endu’d with worthy qualities,” deserving now of forgiveness, having become “reformed, civil, full of good, / And fit for great employment, worthy lord” (V.iv.154-157). The Duke immediately pardons both them and Valentine, telling his future son-in-law to “Dispose of them as thou know’st their deserts” (V.iv.158-159). Clear-sighted, because virtuous, Valentine knows them because he is clear-sighted, and will then be able to exercise the virtue of justice wisely—justice and wisdom being the virtues of the ruler par excellence, the virtues needed in politics. The Duke then proposes an extraordinary ‘royal progress’ back to Milan—extraordinary because they shall proceed “with triumphs, mirth, and rare solemnity” (V.iv.161). The circumstance makes celebration of victory understandable enough, but how can mirth and solemnity combine? Only in comedy: the high seriousness of tragedy has no mirth, but comedy treats of “high” or noble things with a happy ending, an ending whereby all the elements that might make for tragedy are harmonized as a graceful spirit and the rule of reason over hearts corrected by grace take hold among the rulers of the political community. Comedy is aristocracy gone right, tragedy aristocracy gone wrong. Too much democracy will form souls that blink uncomprehendingly at both.

There is even a hint of philosophy to come. Valentino introduces the Duke to Julia, still in boy-disguise. “I think the boy hath grace in him; he blushes,” the Duke observes, happily noting an aristocratic sense of shame in the supposed lad (V.iv.165). Valentine warrants him “more grace than boy,” and when the Duke asks what that could mean he promises to tell the story in the return, triumphant, trip (V.iv.166), promising in addition that the Duke will “wonder” at the tale (V.iv.169). Before embarking on his odyssey, Valentine had said he intended to see the wonders of the world abroad; Proteus had supposed Valentine’s motive to have been the quest for honor. Valentine has seen the wonders and found honor, as well. As for Proteus, it will be, just Valentine remarks in his final act of justice, Proteus’s act of penance will be to hear “the story of your loves discovered” (V.iv.171).

After that, Valentine promises, the regime will be re-founded on the two marriages, re-founded on “One feast, one house, one mutual happiness!” (V.iv.174). Love and friendship, sundered by the chaotic soul of Proteus, and a sundered aristocratic regime, nearly ruined by the overbearing and imprudent father-Duke, will both achieve reunion on the only stable foundation for private and public good, fidelity. Henceforth the private fidelity of marriage and the public fidelity of justice will reinforce one another, securing the truly human purpose, happiness.

 

Note

1. See II.iii.1-29 and IV.1-36.