The sense one has in Tacitus of stifling, noxious, irredeemable amorality, of benighted souls meandering through a benighted landscape, is something Racine would capture to perfection in Bajazet, his seventh play. There, all is darkness and aimless wandering. Although none of the principals survives at the end of that play (Roxane and Bajazet are brutally killed, Atalide commits suicide onstage, and the doubtful fate of Akhmet, the grand vizier, is rather a matter of indifference to us), Bajazet, as I wrote in my Discussion for that play, “leaves us with a sense of ignoble waste,” rather than stirring our souls by the evocation of any tragic downfall. In order for there to be a downfall, there must be some height from which to fall, and the protagonists of Bajazet can scarcely be considered upright, let alone of noble stature. The death sentence that impends over Bajazet and Roxane is a correlative rather than a cause of the inevitability of their ignominious fate. But The Fratricides, Racine’s first play, had already demonstrated that a high body count (Racine ruefully admits in his preface that “there is hardly a character in it who does not die at the end”) is no guarantor of profound tragedy. In Britannicus, by contrast, although only Britannicus and Narcissus are dead by the end of the play, one is left with a crushing sense of tragic downfall, of the extinguishing of light and the obliteration of virtue. (Indeed, as I shall demonstrate later, while most would consider the world well rid of Narcissus, even his death is darkly disquieting in a way that resonates with the tragic tone of the play; one might even make the case that the tragic implications of his murder are as far-reaching as those of Britannicus’s.) One of the aims of this Discussion will be to discover whence derives the sense of tragic loss that pervades the whole play, not just its doom-laden ending.
II
As mentioned, only two characters die in the course of the play: Britannicus and Narcissus. (Since both of them die violent, horrific deaths, it follows, given the rigid rule of bienséance [decency or decorum] governing French theater of the time, that the deaths of both are narrated, after the fact, by eyewitnesses — Burrhus and Albina, respectively.) But to suggest that Nero is, in some sense, the only character left standing at the fall of the curtain would be to offer a more accurate description of the outcome. Since, as Bernard Weinberg (126) correctly observes, “Néron is distinguished from the others as the center of an action which he very largely accomplishes through his own volition,” a reasonable inference would be to conclude that it must have been as a result of Nero’s confrontations, conflicts, and interactions with Agrippina, Junia, Britannicus, Burrhus, and even Narcissus that they have been destroyed.
Certainly, although Agrippina, Burrhus, and Junia are still alive at the end of the play, they have all been rendered irrelevant, their lives effectively over, and each wishing for the oblivion of death in her or his own way. Agrippina, having foreseen the loss of what gives her life meaning — her power — resentfully faces her own death:
My place usurped, I’m nothing and no one.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Forsaken, and avoided everywhere...
Albina, such a thought I cannot bear!
(III.v.11, 20–21)
Your hand has shed the lifeblood of your brother,
And I foresee your blows won’t spare your mother.
(V.vi.28–29)
It’s done; now naught can curb his cruelty.
The blow that was foretold will fall on me.
(V.vii.5–6)
Burrhus, too, loses what gives his life meaning — his hopes for Rome and his stubborn but misplaced trust in Nero:
Ah! I’ve no wish to live another day.
If only heav’n, with blessed cruelty,
Had let his newfound fury fall on me;
Or if this horrid deed didn’t adumbrate
A future of misfortune for the State!
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Let him complete his work, madame, and kill
A captious counselor who opposed his will;
For, far from fearing what his wrath may do,
I’d find the swiftest death the sweetest too.
(V.vii.8–12, 19–22)
As for Junia, having lost, in one day, both her love and her freedom — in short, having been virtually destroyed by her contact with Nero and with Rome — she goes off, ostensibly to “seek such solace on Octavia’s breast / As suits my present sorrow and dismay” (see note 31 for Act V), but proceeds instead to enroll herself among the vestal virgins (“Myself I offer to the Immortals’ care, / Whose altars, by your virtue, you now share” [V.fin.sc.22–23]), eschewing human consolation and effectively entombing herself in the temple of Vesta.
In Burrhus’s case, his relationship with Nero is fairly straightforward and does not lend itself to any arcane or controversial interpretations; the above-cited quotations eloquently suggest how Burrhus, “by this assassination left prostrate” (V.v.30), is “dispatched” by Nero. The empire having “placed its rise — or ruin — in my hand” (I.ii.57), Burrhus, realizing his life’s work has been rendered null and void by the unmistakable evidence of his charge’s having irrevocably abandoned every moral precept he had attempted to inculcate, now harbors a death wish, a sincere desire to be put out of his misery.
III
Narcissus’s relationship with Nero, unlike Burrhus’s, is rather complex, a consequence in no small part of his having the unique distinction among Racine’s characters of serving as a full-fledged confidant to two characters, namely, Britannicus and Nero. And of course his dual function, interesting in itself, is made more so, first, by his being by no means a passive confidant and, second, by his consistently offering one of his masters (Britannicus) the very worst possible advice in every situation and the other (Nero) the very worst possible advice in every situation. Before examining Nero’s relationship with Narcissus during the course of the play, I think it worth taking note of how, historically, it ended. Narcissus, who had actually been a staunch partisan of Britannicus (see note 2 for Act II) — presumably unbeknownst to Nero — was already dead at the time of Britannicus’s murder. He had earlier, for health reasons, “retired to Sinuessa, to recover his strength in its mild climate and health-giving waters” (Tacitus, XII, 66). Shortly after Claudius’s death, however, Agrippina, now wielding absolute power, took steps to have this long-standing thorn in her side removed: “Imprisoned and harshly treated, the threat of imminent execution drove him to suicide” (Tacitus, XIII, 1). As Racine, citing Tacitus, notes in his first preface, “Nero bore very ill the death of Narcissus, because this freed slave had a marvelous compatibility with the vices of the prince which still remained hidden.” In Racine’s play, while we cannot know whether Nero feels any regret at the demise of such a resourceful partner in crime, he shows no inclination to intercede on his behalf with the angry mob who take up Junia’s cause, and his chagrin at losing her leaves no room to indulge any grief, let alone guilt, over Narcissus’s death.
To describe Nero’s relationship to Narcissus briefly, they “play” each other. For his part, Narcissus, while he may not act the role of agent provocateur with Nero (as he does with Britannicus: see note 57 for Act I), likes to feel that he is in control, subtly goading Nero, relishing every opportunity of reporting back to Nero the slightest
