While yours, madame, is a nonentity.
athaliah
With me you’ll taste new pleasures every day.
joash
Like floods the wicked’s pleasures flow away.
(II.vii.61–73)
Joash more than holds his own against even so formidable an inquisitor as Athaliah, as the chorus confirm later, in their commentary on the events of this act: “By worldly show he’s not beguiled, / He’s proof against pride’s lures and lies, / Nor can his candor be defiled” (II.ix.3–5). Indeed, it is Athaliah who is discomfited and, in the end, bested. We are even shocked by the brusqueness of some of his replies:
athaliah
You shall be treated there like my own boy.
joash
Like yours?
athaliah
Yes. Come, speak up now, I implore.
joash
To leave a father whom I love! And for...
athaliah
Continue.
joash
For a mother I’d abhor!
(II.vii.83–86)
Racine was so aware of the startlingly precocious self-possession of this boy that he spends a whole page of his preface justifying it, citing the Greek text of Chronicles, which “has authorized me to make this prince nine or ten years old,” and arguing that the rigorous and early training he would have received in the temple could plausibly have produced such an extraordinarily astute child. (Racine even has recourse to the dryly droll admission that “it was not... the same with the children of the Jews as with most of ours.”) In addition, he takes occasion, practiced courtier that he was, to adduce a “precedent” closer to home: “a prince of eight and a half years, who is today her [France’s] dearest delight, an illustrious example of what a child with natural gifts, enhanced by an excellent education, can accomplish” — the child in question being the Duke of Burgundy, Louis XIV’s grandson.
vi
The third confrontation, which occurs in Act V, is framed by an elaborate stage spectacle. It is rather remarkable that such a spectacle, the most elaborate climactic scene in any of Racine’s plays (in most of which the denouement is revealed in narratives of varying length, those in The Fratricides, Britannicus, Iphigenia, and Phaedra being quite extended), should have been planned for a girls’ seminary, with limited stage resources. Perhaps, then, it is less remarkable that Athaliah, unlike Esther, which had boasted elaborate sets and costumes at its premiere, was, in fact, first produced without costumes or scenery. (Its first fully staged performance was given by the Comédie-Française on March 3, 1716 — shorn, however, of its choral odes and, thus, of its music.) On the other hand, we should also bear in mind that Racine chose to present these events on the stage in Athaliah because they could be so presented: while there are drawn swords and opposed combatants, there is no actual armed conflict, no bloodshed, nor is anyone killed. Athaliah’s death occurs offstage and is reported almost as perfunctorily as Mathan’s, hers being allotted merely a whole line (V.fin.sc.1), his, only a half line (V.vi.24). Still, the very fact that the only staged representation of armed antagonists in Racine’s oeuvre should occur in a “sacred drama” is striking and significant, suggesting that the true nature of this drama, as passionate and violent as any of Racine’s plays, is less spiritual than sanguinary. (Here, even the religious rituals, as Zachariah describes them, bear the trace of blood: “The priests, with blood from this fresh immolation, / Aspersed the altar and the congregation” [II. ii.14–15]; and, later in Act II, after Athaliah leaves the temple, Jehoiada expresses his intention of pouring some “pure blood” — presumably his preferred cleansing agent — over the floor to “wash clean the very stones that bear her tread” [II.viii.11–12].) The chorus duly express their astonishment at this intrusion of worldly violence into the temple:
What spectacle confronts our timid gaze!
Who’d have believed that we would ever see
These deadly daggers and this wicked weaponry,
Here, in this house of peace, so fiercely blaze?
(III.viii.5–8)
To stage such a complex and crucial spectacle, Jehoiada has had to set things in motion as early as the end of Act IV:
— Friends, it is prudent now to separate.
You, Ishmael, must guard the western gate;
You, take the north gate; you, the south; you, east;
Let no one, be it Levite, be it priest,
Disclose, by thoughtless zeal, the plans I’ve laid,
Marching out ere our preparation’s made.
And, last, let each, of one impassioned mind,
Guard to the death the post he’s been assigned.
(IV.v.24–31)
Up to the very moment of Athaliah’s entrance, Jehoiada continues to micromanage the scene:
These crucial orders carefully obey.
Above all, when she enters and walks by,
A calm — complete, profound — must greet her eye.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
You, once this queen, drunk with a foolish pride,
Has passed the temple door and stepped inside,
Let her who ventured in find no way out.
(V.iii.7–9, 14–16)
As the scene plays out, the audience, minutely apprised of the details of the scheme, is kept in a state of anticipatory suspense, waiting for the trap to spring shut. When Joash is finally produced, almost like a deus ex machina, Athaliah’s horror and dismay are twofold as she learns at once that the scion she believed dead is still alive, having been kept hidden in the temple for years, and that the treasure she believed hidden in the temple for years never existed, that, in fact, David’s fabled “treasure” is none other than this very child.
vii
There are other such symmetries to be observed in these three scenes, which bespeak Racine’s ingenuity in the construction of this play. First, in the outer scenes Joash says not a word, while in the central scene, he not only speaks at length, but does so most precociously and eloquently, with a power that ensures that his confrontation with Athaliah will be a dramatic meeting of equals. Second, those outer scenes are both, in some sense, “recognition” scenes. In the first, Athaliah recognizes the child who had stabbed her through the heart in her dream; in the second, she recognizes him as the grandson
