power has shifted decisively from mother to son. The “disgrace of Agrippina” can be thought of as one of the chief subjects of Britannicus only if we take the phrase as denoting a product, not a process, since that disgrace is as fully accomplished at the outset of the play as Nero’s maturation into a “monstre” is. And it is Agrippina herself who most eloquently bears witness to this fact. For Racine’s portrayal of Agrippina not only confirms that her bark is worse than her bite: it is a portrait of a woman far more prone to whimpering than to barking. When she leaves the stage toward the end of Act I, she may assure Britannicus that she is determined to acquit herself of the pledges she has made to him, uttering these lines, darkly suggestive of game-changing developments: “I’ll say no more. To Pallas’ house repair, / If you’d hear further; I’ll await you there” (I.iii.17–18); but, shortly afterward, Narcissus, who certainly has the right of it, reports to Nero that “your enemies, stripped of hopes that have proved vain, / At Pallas’ house now helplessly complain” (“pleurer leur impuissance”: literally, to bewail their impotence, II.ii.3–4). Much of Agrippina’s discourse is devoted to complaining about her waning powers and worrying about further incursions thereon. Yes, every so often she will attempt to assert her illusive authority, but no more convincingly than does Britannicus, when he indulges in boyish bravado. (See Section IX of the Discussion below.) And far more consistently, Agrippina appears — or rather, presents herself — as someone whose “wonted sway / Has weakened swiftly with each passing day” (I.i.111–12), and the sharpest glimpse we get of that “wonted sway” is now merely a bitter memory for her:
Those days are past when Nero would report
The heartfelt wishes of his doting court,
When, my hand guiding the affairs of state,
The senate, at my call, would congregate.
Then, veiled but present, I would play my role:
That august body’s all-controlling soul.
(I.i.91–96)
Now it is Nero who is “veiled but present,” either literally, as in the famous eavesdropping scene (II.vi), or, indirectly, through his network of spies, as Britannicus attests:
My so-called friends, who trade in treachery,
Observe my moves with assiduity;
Chosen by Nero for this enterprise,
They search my soul, whose secrets Nero buys.
(I.iv.25–28)
And Britannicus’s avowal to Narcissus, several lines later (in another dose of Racinian irony), that “my heart’s emotions he, like you, can trace” (I.iv.31), should prompt us to consider the likelihood that Agrippina herself has also served as Narcissus’s unsuspecting dupe, for, while they never share a one-on-one scene on stage, she ruefully confesses to Burrhus in the penultimate scene, “You I condemned, Narcissus had my ear!” (V.vii.2).
VII
Even in Agrippina’s dealings with Junia and Britannicus, although she tries, with bustling officiousness, to play the role of protectress, benefactor, and wise mentor, adopting a grandly patronizing tone with both of them, confidently reiterating to Britannicus her promises of assistance (“Whate’er your enemies do, / I shan’t revoke the vows I’ve sworn to you” [III.vi.23–24]) and smugly reassuring Junia (“Dismiss your fears, for all has been arranged. / I’ll answer for a truce sworn ’neath my eye” [V.iii.12–13]), her confidence rings hollow when judged in the context of her earlier, self-deprecatory remarks, such as “To shame me, Nero wants the world to know / That what I promise I cannot bestow” (I.ii.126–27) and “On Agrippina’s aid who’d think to call / When Nero makes my ruin known to all?” [I.ii.152–53]. And let us not overlook the fact that her above-cited declaration to Britannicus is uttered in the immediate wake of the near-hysterical anxiety she displays (III.v.8–21) to Albina, her confidant, when confronted with the prospect of her position’s being usurped by Nero’s new love interest (namely, Junia). In her intercourse with Burrhus, on the other hand, while she may throw it in his face that he is a nonentity “whose ambition I could have let rot / In some vile legion or some distant spot, / Obscure, unhonored, and at last forgot” (I.ii.26–28) and that she is “Wife, daughter, sister, mother of your kings!” (I.ii.30), he is the one who adopts the patronizing tone toward her, whether patiently calming her as if she were a petulant child, offering her counsel from his position of more privileged knowledge, or solicitously advising her, for her behoof, how to deal with Nero. And her haughty insistence on his inferior status only makes her position seem even more ignominious when we hear her complaining, variously, to Albina, that “where once my help was needed, / Now Seneca’s or Burrhus’ words are heeded” (I.i.113–14), to Burrhus, that “like a wall, ’twixt him [Nero] and me you’re thrust” (I.ii.17), and to Nero, that “Burrhus has dared to lay his hands on me!” (IV.ii.108). Indeed, the very opening of the play presents Agrippina in a most humiliating position — and that, before a word of dialogue has been exchanged; for we see her impatiently waiting outside Nero’s door, as if she were a flunky (a reasonable paraphrase of the French’s untranslatable “à titre d’importune” [I.ii.15], as she herself describes her situation to Burrhus when she accosts him at the beginning of the next scene). So abject is the Agrippina whom we meet when the curtain rises that even her servant is more concerned for her mistress’s self-respect than she is, scolding her, “la mère de César” (the mother of the emperor, line 4), for wandering about the palace with no retinue and waiting outside her son’s door until he awakes. (Perhaps it is a recollection of Albina’s almost scandalized outburst that stings Agrippina into some renewed, if momentary, sense of her own exalted position when she, in turn, reminds Burrhus in the next scene [I.ii.30] that she is “la mère de vos maîtres” [the mother of your masters].)
And when we carefully examine her one-hundred-plus-line tirade in the fourth act (only in Mithridates do we find one of equal length, where it is also a parent, Mithridates, addressing, in his case, two sons), even that turns out to be less epic than episodic. This “great ‘confession,’ ” as George Dillon calls it (and who confesses but a suppliant?), “gives us a decade of Roman history (condensing books XII and XIII of the Annals) in a style as stringently documentary as its original, much of it literally translated from Tacitus” (Dillon, 60). Here, then, there is nothing like Mithridates’ thrilling narrative of his flight to safety after the defeat of his army or his stirring rhetoric as he unveils his plans to march on Rome (“It’s not, sons, at the world’s periphery / That Roman fetters weigh most heavily; / No: rousing close to home the fiercest hate, / Your greatest enemies, Rome, are at your gate” [Mithridates III.i.64–67]), nor anything like Clytemnestra’s impassioned tirade in defense of her daughter Iphigenia (“Shall this cruel priest, urged by a crueler crowd, / Lay criminal hands on her and be allowed / To rend her breast and, by his probing art, / Consult the heav’ns in her still-heaving heart?” [Iphigenia IV.iv.137–40]) — in its noble ferocity, the verbal equivalent of a lioness protecting her cub. In contrast to those speeches, there is very little of the dramatic about Agrippina’s “big moment,” being neither a gripping narrative nor a theatrical outburst; it can hardly even be called an argument, except in the archaic sense of a résumé of “the plot thus far.” It is only in the last fifth of her speech that she begins to work up a head of steam, and even then the subject of her harangue is, again, her humiliating ill treatment at Nero’s hands. And that the imperious, impassioned denunciation we might have expected at this point should prove to be such a spiritless, not to say spineless, recital of her machinations on Nero’s behalf may lead us to conclude that it was a deliberate strategy on Racine’s part not to allow us to witness the earlier confrontation between Nero and Agrippina that must have taken place sometime between III.vi and III.ix (as I explain in note 31 for Act III),
