that marriage having actually been arranged by Agrippina, who Nero justly anticipates will be furious at seeing “the sanctity of knots she’s tied” (II.ii.114) desecrated. Finally, Nero also could expect to encounter resistance from Burrhus, who, although he attempts to rationalize Nero’s abduction of Junia to the outraged Agrippina, trying to pass it off as a dynastically prudent political move, will later roundly lecture Nero about the impropriety of his alleged amorous interest in Junia.
Clearly, then, before having cast his eyes on Junia, Nero was well aware of those peculiar attraits (charms) of Junia’s that rendered her the ideal object for his purposes — that she was, to appropriate the romantic phrase, “the one.” And those charms, we shall find, form a far more convincing body of evidence to corroborate my view than any that we will be able to discover to support the view that, after catching a brief glimpse of Junia upon her arrival at the palace, Nero determined that she was, in the romantic sense, “the one.”
XVII
Of course, it would be helpful for our present purposes if Nero were given a soliloquy that would settle the question of whether he is really in love with Junia or not. But, after all, would that not strike at the heart of Nero’s interest as a character, namely, that, as mentioned earlier, he is a “riddle”? On the other hand, who knows but that such a soliloquy would draw yet another veil of inscrutability over him, since, as C. M. Bowra (32) observes, he is “a man... so corrupted by falsehood that he himself does not always know whether he means what he says or not.”
It is noteworthy that none of the four principal characters in this play is given a soliloquy. (Nero has one brief moment when he talks to himself [III.x.1–5], which is not, however, strictly speaking, a soliloquy, since, although Nero is unaware of his presence, Burrhus overhears him; in any case, it is as unrevealing as it is brief. Oddly enough, Narcissus and Burrhus are granted soliloquies, but in each case it is, again, only a single, brief, inconsequential one.) Interestingly, Nero and Junia are denied soliloquies, but for diametrically opposed reasons, as befits their position as protagonist and antagonist. In Nero’s case, it is because, in communing with himself, there would be a chance — when he is not lying to himself — that he might reveal what is actually going on in his mind, which is clearly exactly what Racine wishes to avoid: he wants us never to be able to trust anything Nero says, nor, for that matter, does he want us to be able to mistrust with certainty anything he says.
In Junia’s case, she has no need for a soliloquy, or, rather, the audience has no need for her to deliver one, since one of her most salient characteristics — along with her courage, her virtue, and her empathy — is her honesty: she always speaks her mind, regardless of who is there to listen. By the same token, she is given no confidant. Of course, her having been abducted so suddenly, in the middle of the night, would explain why she has none, but if there had been some need for her to have one, it would hardly have been impossible for Racine to have devised some plausible explanation for her having an attendant in tow. The point, in any case, is that Junia has no need of a confidant, the dramatic purpose of a confidant being to enable the protagonist to divulge to the audience information, feelings, or plans that it would be ill-advised or even dangerous to reveal to any or all of the other characters, an irrelevant consideration for someone like Junia, who is uncompromisingly honest, even, as we have seen, when being so is not in her own interests.
There is another, far more telling reason for Nero’s not being accorded a soliloquy, namely, that soliloquies are usually reserved for characters who inwardly waver: characters caught in a dilemma (usually hopeless), torn between two options whose advantages and drawbacks they find themselves constantly in need of assessing and reassessing. (Hermione, Roxane, and Agamemnon are three such who come immediately to mind. In regard to the first, for example, Richard Wilbur observes in the Introduction to his translation of Andromache that Hermione “can credibly pass in some thirty lines through six shifts of attitude toward Pyrrhus” [Andromache, xiv].) Clearly, for someone like Nero, who, first of all, is utterly untroubled by the moral implications of his actions, and, second, has had, from the opening of the play, a set purpose that he has relentlessly and undeviatingly pursued, a soliloquy would be inappropriate and unnecessary. There is no question here of a character in conflict with himself, of any battles being waged, of any soul-searching or soul-wrestling (as one sees in Agamemnon), only after which, capitulating to his evil genius, would he finally determine to kill Britannicus.
Since Nero is granted no intensely introspective soliloquy, the only evidence available to us concerning the true nature of his feelings for Junia must be gleaned from what he says — reveals would be going too far — to Junia and, more significantly, from the way he treats her. Later, when we analyze the lengthy scene of their first meeting, we will scrutinize his behavior toward Junia, and that will prove revealing, but for now I would just offer a small but telling observation based on a brief, selected verbal comparison of Nero’s Act II scene with Narcissus and his subsequent scene with Junia. In the former, Nero, most conspicuously, uses the flamboyant “idolâtre” (idolize, which I translate as “adore,” II.ii.12) to describe what he feels for Junia, having decided that the just-uttered “aime” (love) could not do justice to such a passion; and during the course of that scene, the word “love” in its various forms (“amour,” “aime,” “aimer”) is used thirteen times, and of those thirteen, eight refer to his feelings for Junia. By contrast, in his scene with Junia, the word “love” appears seven times, and of those seven, regardless of who is speaking, six of them refer to Junia’s love for Britannicus or his love for her; only once does Nero use the word in regard to his feelings for Junia, and there it is almost lost in the midst of the climactic rhetorical peroration that closes his marriage proposal:
Weigh well this boon that Caesar would bestow,
Worthy the lengths that love has made me go,
Worthy those eyes, too long concealed from view,
Worthy the world which claims you as its due.
(II.iii.75–78)
The word “désirs” (desires), one should also mention, is used twice (by Junia), once to refer to Britannicus’s love for her and once to refer, with no amorous implication, to Nero’s wishes, which she galls Nero by declaring “are always so consistent with hers [that is, your mother’s]” (as the French for II.iii.36 literally translates). These statistics would certainly suggest that Nero’s professions of his love for Junia are more effusive when he is conveying his putative passion to Narcissus than when he is speaking directly to Junia. Nor can this reticence by any means be attributed to his being tongue-tied at seeing her tête-à-tête for the first time, since his elaborate marriage proposal (and I use the word “elaborate” advisedly, since, as I mention elsewhere, he probably spent much of the previous night working on it, and then, undoubtedly, rehearsing it) and its prefatory narrative about his attempt at matchmaking on her behalf — each of them a rhetorical tour de force — are delivered with eloquent aplomb.
XVIII
Aside, then, from a judicious sprinkling of amorous expressions in his conversation with Narcissus (expressions conspicuously absent from his discourse when in Junia’s presence), we are left with Nero’s torrid account (bordering on a reenactment) of his momentous first view of Junia to provide some verbal corroboration of his love for her. And I think that it is precisely in this famous, overwrought reliving of the genesis of his love for Junia that we will find the most convincing evidence of that love’s being an extravagant figment.
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