them to ruin. At the mercy of the evil, scheming Hagen and the selfish Gunther and Gutrune, Siegfried, like Britannicus, falls victim to forces he cannot control or understand; both are treacherously murdered (Siegfried is, literally, stabbed in the back) by people whom they have been beguiled into trusting, but who, under the guise of friendship and reconciliation, plot against them. Further coincidences abound. Both are killed at parties: Britannicus at Nero’s celebratory fete, Siegfried at a hunting party organized by Hagen; both murderers glibly fabricate plausible explanations, which they deliver with the utmost brazen insolence, Nero matter-of-factly proclaiming that Britannicus’s apparent death throes are nothing more than a temporary indisposition, Hagen announcing that Siegfried was gored by a wild boar. More appropriately to their heroic stature, Brünnhilde and Junia both choose self-immolation, as a redemptive gesture intended to vindicate the power of love over the love of power, both, in some sense, passing through fire: Brünnhilde exultantly riding her steed into the purifying flames of Siegfried’s funeral pyre, Junia, more symbolically, sacrificing herself to “the precious flame... that glorifies the Gods to whom Rome prays” (V.fin.sc.30–31). But whereas the closing pages of Wagner’s magnum opus clearly signal, as a sequel to the Twilight of the Gods, the dawn of a new moral order (or the instauration of the unsullied, nature-based world evoked at the beginning of the cycle), uncorrupted by gold, greed, and self-aggrandizement, the end of Britannicus projects a much darker future: in fact, the Twilight of the Good.
XIII
Earlier, in discussing Britannicus’s conspicuous lack of any noble, let alone heroic, qualities, I raised the following question: What purpose is served by Nero’s ridding himself of such an unthreatening rival? The answer to this will become clear when we investigate Nero’s “agenda” in this play, for Nero’s strategy is a two-pronged one. I have already demonstrated that Nero’s supposed battle royal with Agrippina is really hardly more than a series of skirmishes whose victor is never in doubt. Nero’s hostilities against Britannicus and Junia, however, are at the heart of the play. Unlike Nero’s interactions with Agrippina, which, after all, alter nothing, Britannicus’s death and Junia’s defeat change everything. For what is the ultimate outcome of the play, the significant transformation that has occurred? Yes, Nero has finally been revealed as a fully formed monster, but that, as I have argued, is not a transformation. What has also become manifest by the end of the play — far more significantly — is that Nero is now, finally, omnipotent. A monster can be kept caged, after all; without Nero’s limitless power, then, his monstrous nature would have consequences far less grave, less far-reaching, than what is so frighteningly portended by Burrhus’s famous final line: “Please heav’n this prove the last of Nero’s crimes!” (V.fin.sc.53). Now, in what does Nero’s omnipotence consist, but in his power to obtain or to destroy whatever he wants? In Nero’s case, how better to establish, to indisputably demonstrate, that omnipotence than by obtaining that which is most inaccessible (Junia) and by destroying that which is most inviolable (Britannicus)?
Let us first examine this latter aspect of Nero’s strategy in an attempt to answer the question reiterated at the top of this section. When Nero, speaking of Britannicus, says, “As long as he lives, I half live, at best” (IV.iii.13), the significance of his avowal is not that Britannicus threatens his life or prevents him from living fully, that while Britannicus lives he leads a stunted, deprived existence — he is emperor, after all (indeed, as Junia reminds him, “All that you see conduces to your pleasure; / The enchanted days glide by in even measure” [II.iii.125–26]). Its true import is that by the very act of killing Britannicus, Nero announces that as emperor he is released once and for all from any constraints, moral or pragmatic, thus realizing the full potential (in both senses: possibility and potency) of that role, that is, someone free to flout every received dictate of society and morality, to live — and rule — in obedience to his will alone. Speaking of free, one might argue that the less real the threat Britannicus poses, the less justification for his removal that a concern for Nero’s safety can provide, the more his murder must be considered as an acte gratuit on Nero’s part (like Raskolnikov’s), meant to prove a point, the act itself being the end, not the means to an end. And for that purpose Nero has chosen his victim with supreme cunning: the murder of Britannicus — young, innocent, defenseless, boyishly endearing, the son of the emperor Claudius, formerly affianced to Junia (in Racine’s version), in love with and loved by her, and, lastly, sheltered under Agrippina’s wing — must appear from every point of view as egregiously horrific, inexcusable, and unforgivable. And that is not to consider the manner of his murder. And by manner, I do not mean the actual convulsive workings of Locusta’s poison, however frightful, but rather, the “staging” (certainly, le mot juste) of the murder.
Consider the events that bring Act III to a tumultuous conclusion. First, Nero discovers Britannicus and Junia in what he could justifiably claim was a compromisingly intimate situation; then, the hostility between the stepbrothers escalating, their confrontation ends with a heated stichomythic exchange, Britannicus’s final contributions to which Nero might well construe as an act of lèse-majesté; indeed, as a provisional discipline, Nero orders his guards to place Britannicus and Junia (separately) under house arrest. In short, Nero finds himself in the advantageous position of having at his disposal several plausible pretexts for punishing Britannicus — and not by a gentle reprimand. But just when he would appear to have the upper (whip) hand, Nero deliberately divests himself of all pretexts for murdering Britannicus. His reason for doing so may be deduced from a suggestive remark Racine makes about Nero in his second preface: “What we have here is a monster being born, but who dares not declare himself, and who seeks pretexts for his wicked actions.” It follows, then, that if Nero has reached the point where he not only does not seek pretexts for his wicked actions, but goes out of his way, by his ostentatious reconciliation with Britannicus, to invalidate them, we can assume he does so in order to “declare himself.” (Forestier [1422–23] suggests that, “in defining... the characteristics traditionally attributed to youth, [Racine, in his first preface] would have it understood that there is in these ‘qualities’ much that would push his hero to make a tragic error.” But Britannicus makes no “tragic error,” not even by being himself.)
Another aspect to consider, which will further clarify Nero’s motives, is that, had Nero’s true purpose been to rid himself of Britannicus for pressing political or personal motives, and not merely to advertise his assumption of unconditional power, he surely could and would have chosen a more discreet way of doing so, one that would have cast no suspicion on himself. Here, on the contrary, Nero has staged Britannicus’s murder with the clear intention of being caught virtually in flagrante delicto. For none of the guests believe for a moment — nor does Nero expect them to — that he had no hand in Britannicus’s death, any more than they could have been expected to believe, in the immediate wake of Britannicus’s violent death throes, that these were merely the mild and momentary manifestations of a long-standing but not life-threatening complaint, as Nero casually explains to the appalled onlookers. (Indeed, Nero would undoubtedly have been frightfully disappointed if his “audience” had failed to appreciate, for example, his artful touch of having placed the virulent concoction in a “loving cup” meant to signalize his reconciliation with Britannicus. One can easily imagine Nero saying to himself, minutes before Britannicus’s demise, “I can’t wait to see the expression on their faces!”) Such calculatedly ingenuous deportment on Nero’s part is meant to proclaim, with utmost insolence, not his innocence, but his impunity.
XIV
Turning our attention now to the other half of Nero’s campaign, his attempt to possess himself of Junia, we must first of all recognize the complexity of the character that Racine has created in Junia and the multiple purposes she serves in the drama. (Racine was to create, with equally amazing ingenuity, another such multipurpose character in Iphigenia’s Eriphyle, unconstrained as he was, in that case, by considerations of faithfulness to his source play, Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis, since Eriphyle does not appear in it — or anywhere else for that matter — and, in the present case, by considerations of historical
