The Complete Plays of Jean Racine. Jean Racine
a product of his loss of Junia’s face, however lovely, than of his loss of face, tout court). There is no other Racinian character, however cruel, depraved, manipulative, misguided, or brutal (Roxane, Hermione, Pyrrhus, Phaedra, Agamemnon, Eriphyle, and Athaliah come immediately to mind) from whom we so thoroughly, so unthinkingly, so involuntarily, withhold our sympathy. (Of course, Nero’s cause is not helped by his manifesting no compensatory, let alone redeeming, traces of goodness, or even kindness. In fact, other than in Burrhus’s no doubt expediently exaggerated reminiscences in IV.iii of Nero’s erstwhile benignity, the play shows no good side of him at all, the only other reference to Nero’s benignity being an instance of dramatic irony: Junia declares with relief, toward the end of their first meeting, just before he reveals the full extent of his monstrous design, that “on your goodness, Sire, I’ve ever relied” [II.iii.139].) By contrast, even in Tacitus’s account, where his extravagant debauchery and heinous acts of cruelty are laid out far more expansively than in this play, there are moments when the pathetic side of Nero’s nature does manage to elicit some sympathy.
In Narcissus’s case, while it is true that we are never given any real explanation for his actions (his four-line soliloquy that closes Act II [II.viii.11–14] offers no more than the briefest glimpse into his motives), any more than we are for those of Shakespeare’s Iago, with both villains, we are privy to their machinations, if not to their motivations. Except for the last scene of Act I, which Racine deliberately couches in such a way as to manipulate the audience into misreading the relationship between Narcissus and Britannicus as that of, on the one hand, the sympathetic, wise, and concerned mentor, and, on the other, his justifiably trusting charge, so that Narcissus’s apparent volte-face shortly after the beginning of Act II will induce the greatest shock and revulsion in the audience (who can, however, mere minutes later, reread Narcissus’s duplicitous advice and Britannicus’s gullibility correctly) — except for that scene, there is not a single moment during the play when we are unaware of Narcissus’s intentions and strategies: he has no hidden agenda. In Nero’s case, his entire agenda is hidden: we can only guess at his motives and his plans. He jealously keeps his own counsel until such time as, his plans having fully ripened, he is ready to spring some new outrage upon an unsuspecting victim, or upon the world at large. That is why Agrippina and Albina spend the entire first scene puzzling over, and exchanging views about, Nero’s character and his intentions.
Usually, the first scene of a Racine play is devoted to exposition, filling in the audience on “the plot thus far”; here, what is most conspicuously exposed — or, rather, posed — is the huge riddle that is Nero. Even Agrippina, his own mother, has no idea what game he is playing, and sums up her hopeless “cluelessness” when she poses those highly significant questions: “What does he want? What moves him: love or hate?” (I.i.55). Compare, for example, the opening scene of Andromache, where Pylades attempts to apprise Orestes about the current disposition, both mental and relational, of the other three protagonists, Hermione, Pyrrhus, and Andromache: ambivalent though their feelings may be, fluid and fluctuating though their interrelationships may be, we (and Orestes) are left with a satisfyingly coherent sense of the status quo as the play opens. Moreover, in Britannicus, the “opacity” of Nero’s character, as presented in the opening scene, is never further illumined as the play proceeds, which is why there is such disagreement among critics about such crucial questions as the following: Is Nero already Racine’s “monstre” at the beginning of the play, or does he grow into the role? Is Nero still under the influence of Agrippina, his mother, and is the play, then, about his freeing himself from that influence (which no one disputes that he has done by the end of the play)? Is Nero truly in love with Junia, or does he merely wish to believe he is? And if neither, what is his interest in her? Do Nero’s intentions and feelings toward his stepbrother, Britannicus, actually waver during the course of the play, as they certainly ostensibly do, or has it been his intention all along to eliminate him, and if so, why? As one can see, all these vexed questions center on Nero, the enigma; but enigmas can be solved, and if Nero never shows his hand, that is not to say that the play itself does not provide us with a sufficient number of clues to enable us to find convincing answers to the questions just posed. By contrast, all the other principal characters are perfectly “legible”: we are never in any doubt as to what they are thinking and feeling. Any misconceptions about Nero’s relationships with Agrippina, Britannicus, and Junia — and they are widespread — must stem from Nero’s inscrutability.
IV
In our attempt to penetrate Nero’s “opacity,” let us first focus on the question of Nero’s “monstrosity,” to use a term. In this regard, one should mention the view of William J. Cloonan, who, in Racine’s Theatre: The Politics of Love, argues that Nero is the fully formed monster from the beginning of the play and that, having already overcome those obstacles he enumerates to Narcissus (“My mother’s tirades and Octavia’s tears, / Seneca, Burrhus, Rome! Three virtuous years!” [II.ii.89–90]), Nero, in his successive confrontations with Narcissus, Junia, Burrhus, Britannicus, and Agrippina, does not really interact with any of these characters, but simply acts, as if he were in a play-within-a-play with them, a play of which he is the writer, the director, and the star. Cloonan is of the opinion that in Nero’s confrontations with the other characters, the latter are nothing better than his dupes, that Nero’s apparent candor is nothing but lip service, time-serving accommodations rehearsed and regurgitated on cue. As this Discussion will make abundantly clear, I am in complete agreement with him about this. Nor am I the first to invoke a comparison with Richard III: certainly, Racine’s Nero proves, during the course of the play, that he can smile, and murder whiles he smiles (as his blasé response to Britannicus’s death demonstrates), and frame his face to all occasions (as the yet-to-be-crowned Richard of Gloucester confides to us in Henry VI, Part 3). One difference, however, is that Nero, being afforded no substantive monologue, has no opportunity to wink at the audience to let them in on his secret, to proudly apprise them of his hidden agenda, his ulterior strategies, his covert connivances. It is left up to the actor portraying Nero to suggest how much Nero relishes the duplicity, the theatricality of his own performance. On the other hand, at certain key moments (notably his abduction of Junia, his blackmailing of her, and his murder of Britannicus), Nero, not content merely to “let the mask drop,” feels the need to flaunt his evil nature, to unsheathe the claws of the monster, as it were, in order to demonstrate his limitless power; indeed, the flaunting is the point: the crimes themselves are almost incidental.
In light of Racine’s famous phrase (employed in both prefaces) to describe his presentation of Nero’s character in this play, “monstre naissant” (that is, a monster in the process of being born), one might bear in mind that, biologically and psychologically speaking, a monster must always have been a monster, ab ovo, and, conversely, a monster in its embryonic stage cannot grow into something harmless and benign. Already at the beginning of the play, then, one might say that the monster that is Nero is a “foetus accompli.” Certainly, Racine makes sufficiently clear in his two prefaces that his view of Nero is of someone irredeemably evil. Statements such as these, from his first preface: “For my part, I thought that the very name of Nero connoted something worse than cruel,” “One need only have read Tacitus to know that if for a time he was a good emperor, he was always a very wicked man,” “I must confess that the idea of Nero being a good man had never occurred to me,” and “It seems to me that sufficient instances of cruel behavior slip out to prevent one’s mistaking his character” (in regard to this last remark, see note 28 for Act II) leave no room for doubt. And the following statements, from his second preface, written six years later, confirm that, on this point at least, his views had not altered: “Nor, however, do I represent him as a virtuous man, for he never was one,” and “It proves that Nero was already vicious, but that he dissimulated his vices.” In short, one must conclude that any appearance of goodness in Nero is merely the concealment of evil.
Nonetheless, even if we are convinced that Nero’s character does not develop during the course of the play, that what he is exposed as at the end is what he has been all along, we may still judge Racine successful in representing the development, the maturation, of this monster, since, effectively, Nero reenacts that progression during the course of the play. For,