Shakespeare's Roman plays and their background

Plays that dealt with the History of Rome were frequent on the Elizabethan stage, and all portions of it were laid under contribution. Subjects were taken from legends of the dawn like the story of Lucretia, and from rumours of the dusk like the story of Lucina; from Roman pictures of barbarian allies like Massinissa in the South, or barbarian antagonists like Caractacus in the North; as well as from the intimate records of home affairs and the careers of the great magnates of the Republic or Empire. But these plays belong more distinctively to the Stuart than to the Tudor section of the period loosely named after Elizabeth, and few have survived that were composed before the beginning of the seventeenth century. For long the Historical Drama treated by preference the traditions and annals of the island realm, and only by degrees did “the matter of Britain” yield its pride of place to “the matter of Rome the Grand.” Moreover, the earlier Roman Histories are of very inferior importance, and none of them reaches even a moderate standard of merit till the production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in 1600 or 1601. In this department Shakespeare had not the light to guide him that he found for his English Histories in Marlowe’s Edward II., or even in such plays as The Famous Victories of Henry V. The extant pieces that precede his first experiment, seem only to be groping their way, and it is fair to suppose that the others which have been lost did no better. Their interest, in so far as they have any interest at all, lies in the light they throw on the gradual progress of dramatic art in this domain. And they illustrate it pretty fully, and show it passing through some of the main general phases that may be traced in the evolution of the Elizabethan Tragedy as a whole. At the outset we have one specimen of the Roman play in which the legitimate drama is just beginning to disengage itself from the old Morality, and another in which the unique Senecan exemplar is transformed rather than translated to suit the primitive art of the time. Then we have several more artistic specimens deriving directly or indirectly from the French imitators of Seneca, which were the most dignified and intelligent the sixteenth century had to show. And lastly we have a specimen of what the Roman play became when elaborated by the scholar-playwrights for the requirements of the popular London stage.

A survey of these will show how far the ground was prepared for Shakespeare by the traditions of this branch of the drama when he turned to cultivate it himself.

1. APPIUS AND VIRGINIA.
THE TRANSLATION OF OCTAVIA

The crudest if not the earliest of the series is entitled A new Tragicall Comedie of Apius and Virginia, by R. B., initials which have been supposed with some probability to stand for Richard Bower, who was master of the Chapel Royal at Windsor in 1559. It was first printed in 1575, but must have been written some years before. A phrase it contains, “perhaps a number will die of the sweat,” has been thought to refer to the prevalence of the plague in 1563, and it may be identified with a play on the same subject that was acted at that time by the boys of Westminster. At any rate several expressions show beyond doubt that it was meant for representation, but only on the old-fashioned scaffold which was soon to be out-of-date. Its character and scope belong too, in part, to a bygone age. The prologue proclaims its ethical intention with the utmost emphasis:

It is written in commendation of chastity and rebuke of vice:

No Moral Play could be more explicit in its lesson, and the Moral Play has also suggested a large number of the personages. Conscience, Justice, Rumour, Comfort, Reward, Doctrine, Memory, are introduced, and some of them not only in scenes by themselves, but in association with the concrete characters. Occasionally their functions are merely figurative, and can be separated from the action that is supposed to be proceeding: and then of course they hardly count for more than the attributes that help to explain a statue. Thus, when Appius resolves to pursue his ruthless purpose, he exclaims:

and the quaint stage direction in the margin gives the comment: “Here let him make as thogh he went out, and let Consience and Justice come out of[3] him, and let Consience hold in his hande a Lamp burning, and let Justice haue a sworde and hold it before Apius brest.” Thus, too, another stage direction runs: “Here let Consience speake within:

And he answers: “Whence doth this pinching sounde desende?” Here clearly it is merely the voice of his own feelings objectified: and in both instances the interference of the Abstractions is almost wholly decorative; they add nothing to the reflections of Appius, but only serve to emphasise them. This however is not always the case. They often comport themselves in every respect like the real men and women. Comfort stays Virginius from suicide till he shall see the punishment of the wicked. Justice and Reward (that is, Requital) summoned by the unjust judge to doom the father, pronounce sentence on himself. In the end Virginius enters in company with Fame, Doctrina, and Memory.

Other of the characters, again, if more than general ideas, are less than definite individuals. There is a sub-plot not at all interwoven with the main plot, in which the class types, Mansipulus, Mansipula, and their crony, Subservus, play their parts. With their help some attempt is made at presenting the humours of vulgar life. They quarrel with each other, but are presently reconciled in order to divert themselves together, and put off the business of their master and mistress, hoping to escape the punishment for their negligence by trickery and good luck. But we do not even know who their master and mistress are, and they come into no contact with either the historical or the allegorical figures.

The only personage who finds his way into both compartments of the “Tragicall Comedie” is Haphazard the Vice, who gives the story such unity as it possesses. His name happily describes the double aspect of his nature. On the one hand he stands for chance itself; on the other for dependence on chance, the recklessness that relies on accident, and trusts that all will end well though guilt has been incurred. In this way he is both the chief seducer and the chief agent, alike of the petty rogues and of the grand criminal. To the former he sings:

To Appius’ request for advice he replies:

His distinctive note is this, that he tempts men by suggesting that they may offend and escape the consequences. In the end he falls into the pit that he has digged for others, and when his hap is to be hanged, like a true Vice he accepts the contretemps with jest and jape.

Yet despite the stock-in-trade that it takes over from Morality or Interlude, Appius and Virginia has specialties of its own that were better calculated to secure it custom in the period of the Renaissance. The author bestows most care on the main story, and makes a genuine attempt to bring out the human interest of the subject and the persons. In the opening scene he tries, in his well-meaning way, to give the impression of a home in which affection is the pervading principle, but in which affection itself is not allowed to run riot, but is restrained by prudence and obligation. Father, mother, and daughter sing a ditty in illustration of this sober love or its reverse, and always return to the refrain:

There is some inarticulate feeling for effect in the contrast between the wholesomeness of this orderly family life and the incontinence of the tyrant who presently seeks to violate it. And the dramatic bent of the author—for it is no more than a bent—appears too in the portraiture of the parties concerned. The mingled perplexity and dread of Virginius, when in his consciousness of right he is summoned to the court, are justly conceived; and there is magnanimity in his answer to Appius’ announcement that he must give judgment “as justice doth require”:

Similarly, the subsequent conflict in his heart between fondness for his daughter and respect for her and himself is clearly expressed. And her high-spirited demand for death is tempered and humanised by her instinctive recoil when he “proffers a blow”:

But the most ambitious and perhaps the most successful delineation is that of Appius. At the outset he is represented as overwhelmed by his sudden yearning. Apelles, he thinks, was a “prattling fool” to boast of his statue; Pygmalion was fond “with raving fits” to run mad for the beauty of his work, for he could make none like Virginia. Will not the Gods treat him as they treated Salmacis, when Hermophroditus, bathing in the Carian fountain near the Lycian Marches, denied her suit?

This, we may suppose, is intended for a mad outbreak of voluptuous passion, “the nympholepsy of some fond despair”; and, as such, it is not very much worse than some that have won the applause of more critical ages. It may suggest the style of the Interlude in the Midsummer-Night’s Dream, or more forcibly, the “King Cambyses’ vein” that was then in vogue (for Preston’s play of that name, published about a couple of years later than the probable date when this was performed, is in every way the nearest analogue to Appius and Virginia that the history of our stage has to offer). But in comparison with the normal flow of the Moralities, the lines have undoubtedly a certain urgency and glow. And there are other touches that betray the incipient playwright. Appius is not exhibited as a mere monster; through all his life his walk has been blameless, and he is well aware of his “grounded years,” his reputation as judge, and the value of good report. He is not at ease in the course he now adopts; there is a division in his nature, and he does not yield to his temptation without forebodings and remorse.

But he always comes back to the supreme fact of his longing for Virginia:

And there are the potentialities of a really powerful effect in the transition from his jubilant outburst when he thinks his waiting is at an end:

to his misgivings when he sees the old man is unaccompanied:

And immediately thereafter the severed head is displayed to his view.

Nor was R. B., whether or not he was Richard Bower, Master of the Chapel children, quite without equipment for the treatment of a classical theme, though in this respect as in others his procedure is uncertain and fumbling in the highest degree. The typical personages of the under-plot have no relish of Latinity save in the termination of the labels that serve them as names, and they swear by God’s Mother, and talk glibly of church and pews and prayer books, and a “pair of new cards.” Even in the better accredited Romans of Livy’s story there are anachronisms and incongruities. Appius, though ordinarily a judge, speaks of himself as prince, king or kaiser; and references are made to his crown and realm. Nevertheless the author is not without the velleities of Humanism. He ushers in his prologue with some atrocious Latin Elegiacs, which the opening lines of the English are obliging enough to paraphrase:

In the same way there is throughout a lavish display of cheap boyish erudition. Thus Virginius, reckoning up his services to Appius, soliloquises:

We are here indeed on the threshold of a very different kind of art, of which, in its application to Roman history, a sample had been submitted to the English public two years previously in the Octavia ascribed to Seneca.

The Latin Tragedy, merely because it was Latin, and for that reason within the reach of a far greater number of readers, was much better known than the Greek at the period of the Renaissance. But apart from its advantage in accessibility, it attracted men of that age not only by its many brilliant qualities but by its very defects, its tendency to heightened yet abstract portraiture, its declamation, its sententiousness, its violence, its unrestfulness. It had both for good and bad a more modern bearing than the masterpieces of Hellenic antiquity, and in some ways it corresponded more closely with the culture of the sixteenth century than with our own. It was therefore bound to have a very decisive influence in shaping the traditions of the later stage; and the collection of ten plays ascribed to Seneca, the poor remainder of a numerous tribe that may be traced back to the third century before Christ, furnished the pattern which critics prescribed for imitation to all who would achieve the tragic crown. And if this was true of the series as a whole, it was also true of the play, which, whatever may be said of the other nine, is certainly not by Seneca himself, the poorest of them all, with most of the faults and few of the virtues of the rest, Octavia, the sole surviving example of the Fabula Praetexta, or the Tragedy that dealt with native Roman themes. The Octavia, however, was not less popular and influential than its companions, and has even a claim to especial attention inasmuch as it may be considered the remote ancestress of the Modern Historic Play in general and of the Modern Roman Play in particular. It inspired Mussato about 1300 to write in Latin his Eccerinis, which deals with an almost contemporary national subject, the fate of Ezzelino: it inspired the young Muretus about 1544 to write his Julius Caesar, which in turn showed his countrymen the way to treat such themes in French. Before eight years were over they had begun to do so, and many were the Roman plays composed by the School of Ronsard. Certainly Seneca’s method would suit the historical dramatist who was not quite at home in his history, for of local colour and visual detail it made small account, and indeed was hardly compatible with them. And it would commend itself no less to men of letters who, without much dramatic sympathy or aptitude, with no knowledge of stage requirements, and little prospect of getting their pieces performed, felt called upon honoris causâ to write dramas, which one of the most distinguished and successful among them was candid enough to entitle not plays but treatises. It is worth while to have a clear idea of the Octavia from which in right line this illustrious and forgotten progeny proceeded.

The date of the action is supposed to be 62 a.d. when Nero, who had for some time wished to wed his mistress, Poppaea Sabina, and had murdered his mother, partly on account of her opposition, divorced his virtuous wife, his step-sister Octavia, and exiled her to Pandataria, where shortly afterwards he had her put to death. The fact that Seneca is one of the persons in the piece, and that there are anticipatory references to Nero’s death, which followed Seneca’s compulsory suicide only after an interval of three years, sufficiently disposes of the theory that the philosopher himself was the author.

The text accepted in the sixteenth century suffered much, not only from the corruption of individual expressions, but from the displacement of entire passages. Greatly to its advantage it has been rearranged by later editors, but in the following account, their conjectures, generally happy and sometimes convincing, have been disregarded, as they were unknown to Thomas Nuce, who rendered it into English in 1561. In his hands, therefore, it is more loosely connected than it originally was, or than once more it has become for us; and something of regularity it forfeits as well, for the dislocated framework led him to regard it as a drama in only four acts. Despite these flaws in his work he is a cleverer craftsman than many of his colleagues in Senecan translation, whose versions of the ten tragedies, most of them already published separately, were collected in a neat little volume in 1851.[17]

An original “argument” summarises the story with sufficient clearness.

This programme the play proceeds to fill in.

In the first act Octavia, unbosoming herself to her nurse, relieves her heart of its woe and horror. She recounts the misfortunes of her house, the atrocities of her lord, his infidelities to her, her detestation of him. The nurse is full of sympathy, but admonishes her to patience, consoling her with assurances of the people’s love, and reminding her of the truancies that the Empress of Heaven had also to excuse in her own husband and brother:

The chorus closes the act with a variation on the same themes, passing from praises of Octavia’s purity and regrets for the ancient Roman intolerance of wrong, to the contrasted picture of Nero’s unchallenged malignity.

The second act commences with a monologue by Seneca on the growing corruption of the age, which is interrupted by the approach of his master in talk with the Prefect. His words, as he enters, are:

Seneca remonstrates, but his remonstrances are of no avail; and in a long discussion in which he advocates a policy of righteousness and goodwill and the sacredness of Octavia’s claims, he is equally unsuccessful. The act, to which there is no chorus, concludes with Nero’s determination to flout the wishes of the people and persist in the promotion of Poppaea:

The third act is ushered in with one of those boding apparitions of which the Senecan Tragedy is so fond. The shade of Agrippina rises, the bridal torch of Nero and Poppaea in her hand:

She bewails her crimes on her son’s behalf and his parricidal ingratitude, but vengeance will fall on him at last.

As she disappears, Octavia enters in conversation with the chorus, whom she dissuades from the expression of sympathy for her distress lest they should incur the wrath of the tyrant. On this suggestion they denounce the supineness of the degenerate Romans in the vindication of right, and exhort each other to an outbreak.

In the fourth act, Poppaea, terrified by an ominous dream of Nero stabbing her first husband, and of Agrippina, a firebrand in her grasp, leading her down through the earth, rushes across the stage, but is stayed by her nurse, who soothes and encourages her, and bids her return to her bridal chamber. Yet it seems as though her worst fears were at once to be realised. The chorus, acknowledging the charms of the new Empress, is interrupted by the hurried arrival of a messenger. He announces that the people are in uproar, overthrowing the statues of Poppaea, and demanding the restitution of Octavia. But to what purpose? The chorus sings that it is vain to oppose the resistless arms of love. It is at least vain to oppose the arms of Nero’s soldiers. Confident in their strength he enters, breathing forth threatenings and slaughter, and expectant of a time when he will exact a full penalty from the citizens:

Dreaming of the future conflagration, he is dissatisfied with the prefect, who tells him that the insurrection has been easily quelled with the death of one or two, and meanwhile turns all his wrath against the innocent cause of the riot. The play does not, however, end with the murder of Octavia. She informs the chorus that she is to be dispatched in Agrippina’s death-ship to her place of exile,

And the final song of the chorus, with a touch of dramatic irony, wishes her a prosperous voyage, and congratulates her on her removal from the cruel city of Rome:

There could be no greater contrast than between Appius and Virginia, with its exits and entrances, its changefulness and bustle, its mixture of the pompous and the farcical; and the monotonous declamation, the dismissal of all action, the meagreness of the material in the Octavia. And yet they are more akin than they at first sight appear. Disregard the buffoonery which the mongrel “tragicall comedie” inherited from the native stock, and you perceive traits that suggest another filiation. The similarity with the Latin Play in its English version is, of course, misleading, except in so far as it shows how the Senecan drama must present itself to an early Elizabethan in the light of his own crude art. The devices of the rhetorician were travestied by those who knew no difference between rhetoric and rant, and whose very rant, whether they tried to invent or to translate, was clumsy and strained. Hence the “tenne tragedies” of Seneca and the nearly contemporary Mixed Plays have a strong family resemblance in style. In all of them save the Octavia the resemblance extends from diction to verse, for in dialogue and harangue they employ the trailing fourteen-syllable measure of the popular play, while in the Octavia this is discarded for the more artistic heroic couplet. In this and other respects, T. N., as Nuce signs himself, is undoubtedly more at his ease in the literary element than others of the group; nevertheless he is often content to fly the ordinary pitch of R. B. This is most obvious when their performances are read and compared as a whole, but it is evident enough in single passages. The Nurse, for example, says of Nero to Octavia:

These words might almost suit the mouths of Appius and his victims.

But leaving aside the affinities due to the common use of English by writers on much the same plane of art, the London medley is not immeasurably different from or inferior to the Roman Praetexta, even when confronted with the latter in its native dress. In both the characterisation is in the same rudimentary and obvious style, and shows the same predilection for easily classified types. There is even less genuine theatrical tact in the Latin than in the English drama. The chief persons are under careful supervision and are kept rigidly apart. Nero never meets Octavia or Poppaea, Poppaea and Octavia never meet each other. No doubt there are some successful touches: the first entrance of Nero is not ineffective; the equivocal hopefulness of the last chorus is a thing one remembers: the insertion of Agrippina’s prophecy and Poppaea’s dream does something to keep in view the future requital and so to alleviate the thickening gloom. Except for these, however, and a few other felicities natural to a writer with long dramatic traditions behind him, the Octavia strikes us as a series of disquisitions and discussions, well-arranged, well-managed, often effective, sometimes brilliant, that have been suggested by a single impressive historical situation.

2. THE FRENCH SENECANS

These salient features are transmitted to the Senecan dramas of France, except that the characterisation is even vaguer, the declamation ampler, and the whole treatment less truly dramatic and more obviously rhetorical; of which there is an indication in the greater relative prominence of monologue as compared with dialogue, and in the excessive predilection for general reflections,[36] many of them derived from Seneca and Horace, but many of them too of modern origin.

At the head of the list stands the Julius Caesar of Muretus, a play which, even if of far less intrinsic worth than can be claimed for it, would always be interesting for the associations with which it is surrounded.

Montaigne, after mentioning among his other tutors “Marc Antoine Muret,” que le France et l’Italie recognoist pour le meilleur orateur du temps, goes on to tell us: “J’ay soustenu les premiers personnages ez tragedies latines de Buchanan, de Guerente et de Muret, qui se representerent en nostre college de Guienne avecques dignité: en cela, Andreas Goveanus, nostre principal, comme en toutes aultres parties de sa charge, feut sans comparaison le plus grand principal de France; et m’en tenoit on maistre ouvrier.”

The Julius Caesar written in 1544 belongs to the year before Montaigne left Bordeaux at the age of thirteen, so he may have taken one of the chief parts in it, Caesar, or M. Brutus, or Calpurnia. This would always give us a kind of personal concern in Muret’s short boyish composition of barely 600 lines, which he wrote at the age of eighteen and afterwards published only among his Juvenilia. But it has an importance of its own. Of course it is at the best an academic experiment, though from Montaigne’s statement that these plays were presented “avecques dignité,” and from the interest the principal took in the matter, we may suppose that the performance would be exemplary in its kind. Of course, too, even as an academic experiment it does not, to modern taste, seem on the level of the more elaborate tragedies which George Buchanan, “ce grand poëte ecossois,” as Montaigne reverently styles his old preceptor, had produced at the comparatively mature age of from thirty-three to thirty-six, ere leaving Bordeaux two years before. It is inferior to the Baptistes and far inferior to the Jephthes in precision of portraiture and pathos of appeal. But in the sixteenth century, partly, no doubt, because the subject was of such secular importance and the treatment so congenial to learned theory, but also, no doubt, because the eloquence was sometimes so genuinely eloquent, and the Latin, despite a few licenses in metre and grammar, so racy of the classic soil, it obtained extraordinary fame and exercised extraordinary influence. For these reasons, as well as the additional one that it is now less widely known than it ought to be, a brief account of it may not be out of place.

The first act is entirely occupied with a soliloquy by Caesar, in which he represents himself as having attained the summit of earthly glory.

Let others at their pleasure count their triumphs, and name themselves from vanquished provinces. It is more to be called Caesar: whoso seeks fresh titles elsewhere, takes something away thereby. Would you have me reckon the regions conquered under my command? Enumerate all there are.[37]

Even Rome has yielded to him, even his great son-in-law admitted his power,

and whom he would not have as an equal, he has borne as a superior.[38]

What more is to be done?

My quest must be heaven, earth is become base to me.... Now long enough have I lived whether for myself or for my country.... The destruction of foes, the gift of laws to the people, the ordering of the year, the restoration of splendour to worship, the settlement of the world,—than these, greater things can be conceived by none, nor pettier be performed by me.... When life has played the part assigned to it, death never comes in haste and sometimes too late.[39]

The chorus sings of the immutability of fortune.

In the second act Brutus, in a long monologue, upbraids himself with his delay.

Does the virtue of thy house move thee nought, and nought the name of Brutus? Nought, the hard lot of thy groaning country, crushed by the tyrant and calling for thine aid? Nought the petitions in which the people lament that Brutus comes not to champion the state? If these things fail to touch thee, thy wife now gives thee rede enough that thou be a man; who has pledged her faith to thee in blood, thus avouching herself the offspring of thine uncle.[40]

He raises and meets the objections which his understanding offers:

Say you he is not king but dictator? If the thing be the same, what boots a different name? Say you he shuns that name, and rejects the crowns they proffer him: this is pretence and mockery, for why then did he remove the tribunes? True, he gave me dignities and once my life; with me my country outweighs them all. Whoso shows gratitude to a tyrant against his country’s interest, is ingrate while he seeks to be stupidly grateful.[41]

And his conclusion is

The sun reawakening to life saw the people under the yoke, and slaves: at his setting may he see them free.[42]

To him enters Cassius exultant that the day has arrived, impatient for the decisive moment, scarce able to restrain his eagerness. Only one scruple remains to him; should Antony be slain along with his master? Brutus answers: