death. Athaliah herself points up the symmetry:
Then, let him reign, Your son, Your favorite;
And, to inaugurate his reign, ’twere best
That he should plant a dagger in my breast.
(V.vi.36–38)
The recognition comes complete with the obligatory bodily marking, here a telltale scar left by Athaliah’s failed stabbing: “Yes, Joash lives! To fool myself is vain: / The scars my dagger left are all too plain” (V.vi.25–26).
But there is one further recognition (or, better, a canny precognition) vouchsafed Athaliah, the most telling. Although she has been hopelessly defeated, she can yet find some consolation, some revenge, in recognizing and vindictively proclaiming that this boy, universally admired and now acclaimed as king, will, following in the path of Athaliah herself, prove true to his ancestry and false to his people and his God, as was his father before him:
Hear now his mother’s last wish, as she dies.
Her wish? No! — Athaliah prophesies
That, weary of laws that make his soul repine,
Faithful to Ahab’s blood, which flows from mine,
Shunning his forebears’ influence in vain,
David’s abhorrent scion will profane
Your altar and defame Your majesty,
Avenging Ahab, Jezebel, and me.
(V.vi.39–46)
viii
At this revelation, we might well experience the same horror, the sheer surprise, Athaliah felt in her dream when she envisioned this seemingly innocent boy brutally stab her. Thinking back, however, we may recall that hints of this inevitable apostasy have been dropped earlier. In the first scene of the play, Abner had alluded to the line of David as “this blasted tree” (I.i.139), and this arboreal image is developed later, when Jehoiada considers the possibility that Joash may be corrupted:
Great God, if You foresee that he’ll disgrace
David’s ideals and betray his race,
Let him be as the fruit that, ere ripe, dies,
Or, shaken by harsh winds, all shriveled lies.
(I.ii.119–22)
This hint of Joash’s fall from grace becomes more vivid when Jehoiada, sinking into a divine trance, utters these (at the time) cryptic lines: “How has pure gold become the vilest lead? / What priest lies here on holy ground, struck dead?” (III.vii.45–46). With the aid of hindsight (or if one knows the Bible very well), one can interpret Jehoiada’s words and infer that he foresees that this very youth, the jealously guarded, carefully nurtured, precious scion of David’s line, will in fact become corrupt and order the death of Zachariah, the high priest’s own son and, later, high priest himself, a crime that gains in heinousness from one’s having seen this same Zachariah impersonated on stage as a wholly sympathetic character, full of love and concern for his foster brother, Joash. (John C. Lapp goes too far in asserting that, aside from serving as “a living symbol of the future catastrophe,” the introduction of Zachariah “is quite unnecessary on any other grounds” [Lapp, 62]: Zachariah’s eyewitness account of Athaliah’s intrusion into the temple is, as I discussed in Section IV above, crucial, both to the plot of the play and to Racine’s monumental and original design.) But whether or not these hints would have been picked up by Racine’s audience (not to speak of today’s), Athaliah’s final diatribe provides a fairly accurate prediction of Joash’s ultimate downfall, if we accept the biblical account: “And he did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord, and followed the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, which made Israel to sin; he departed not therefrom” (2 Kings 13:2).
One cannot help being reminded of Agrippina’s visionary denunciation of her son, Nero (in Racine’s Britannicus):
Your rage will work itself up to new rage,
Its course marked with fresh blood at every stage.
But heav’n, worn out by your career of crime,
Will add your death to all the rest, in time.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
In times to come, the mention of your name
Will make the cruelest tyrants blush with shame.
Thus does my heart predict your destiny.
(Britannicus V.vi.38–41, 44–46)
It is chastening to consider that this apparently virtuous child is really just another Nero, seen at a much earlier stage of his development. Such a parallel is pointed up by the similarity of the admonitions Burrhus, Nero’s mentor, and Jehoiada, respectively, give their charges (admonitions that ultimately prove futile):
Your way is clear, nor can you be withstood;
You need but guide your steps from good to good.
But if you heed your flatterers’ advice,
You’ll find your course career from vice to vice.
(Britannicus IV.iii.37–40)
Absolute power can intoxicate,
And fawning, flattering voices fascinate...
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And thus, from snare to snare, abyss to abyss,
Corrupting your pure heart, your pristine youth,
They’ll make you, in the end, despise the truth,
Painting fair virtue as a frightful thing.
(Athaliah IV.iii.85–86, 95–98)
And in the following exchange, in which Agrippina and her confidante, Albina, exchange views about Nero, they might be speaking of Joash, another boy whose “soul has been well taught”:
albina
His conduct proves his soul has been well taught.
For three years now has he done anything
That does not promise Rome a perfect king?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
agrippina
I’m not unjust: his virtues I’ve commended;
But, though he starts where great Augustus ended,
I fear his future may undo his past.
(Britannicus I.i.24–26, 31–33)
Even
