The Complete Plays of Jean Racine. Jean Racine

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ snide and circumstantial account of Nero’s detractors’ animadversions suggests he himself holds his master,” as I remark in note 53 for that act. But, in reality, for the most part, Nero could as well address to Narcissus the same remark he offers Burrhus (in an entirely different connection): “You tell me nothing my heart doesn’t know” (III.ii.17), for Nero needs no urging or advice to carry out his long-planned schemes (as I shall discuss at length) and only pretends, when it suits his purpose, to be ambivalent or irresolute. Odette de Mourgues (110) declares that, during the Act V banquet, after Britannicus has been poisoned, at the moment when “Narcisse’s personality disintegrates in a sneer of triumphant glee” (“His perfidious joy he couldn’t contain,” as Burrhus later reports [V.v.27]), “the opacity of the monster is now the privilege of Néron.” By “opacity” she means the inscrutability of a character’s motives, hence, an inability on the audience’s part to fathom what is going on in the character’s mind at any point; this is in contrast to the “transparency” with which she believes Racine endows his leading characters (but not, generally speaking, their confidants), a transparency that, contrariwise, by allowing the audience to see into those characters’ minds, renders them sympathetic to the audience, whatever their character flaws. But opacity, I would argue, has always been a characteristic of Nero’s, indeed, perhaps his defining characteristic. And, following de Mourgues’s own line of thought, it is this attribute that offers the most convincing explanation for the utter absence of sympathy we feel for Nero, from his first appearance to his very last (where his above-mentioned chagrin is a product, not of any pitifully thwarted love, but of his thwarted will, and less a product of his loss of Junia’s face, however lovely, than of his loss of face, tout court). There is no other Racinian character, however cruel, depraved, manipulative, misguided, or brutal (Roxane, Hermione, Pyrrhus, Phaedra, Agamemnon, Eriphyle, and Athaliah come immediately to mind) from whom we so thoroughly, so unthinkingly, so involuntarily, withhold our sympathy. (Of course, Nero’s cause is not helped by his manifesting no compensatory, let alone redeeming, traces of goodness, or even kindness. In fact, other than in Burrhus’s no doubt expediently exaggerated reminiscences in IV.iii of Nero’s erstwhile benignity, the play shows no good side of him at all, the only other reference to Nero’s benignity being an instance of dramatic irony: Junia declares with relief, toward the end of their first meeting, just before he reveals the full extent of his monstrous design, that “on your goodness, Sire, I’ve ever relied” [II.iii.139].) By contrast, even in Tacitus’s account, where his extravagant debauchery and heinous acts of cruelty are laid out far more expansively than in this play, there are moments when the pathetic side of Nero’s nature does manage to elicit some sympathy.

      In Narcissus’s case, while it is true that we are never given any real explanation for his actions (his four-line soliloquy that closes Act II [II.viii.11–14] offers no more than the briefest glimpse into his motives), any more than we are for those of Shakespeare’s Iago, with both villains, we are privy to their machinations, if not to their motivations. Except for the last scene of Act I, which Racine deliberately couches in such a way as to manipulate the audience into misreading the relationship between Narcissus and Britannicus as that of, on the one hand, the sympathetic, wise, and concerned mentor, and, on the other, his justifiably trusting charge, so that Narcissus’s apparent volte-face shortly after the beginning of Act II will induce the greatest shock and revulsion in the audience (who can, however, mere minutes later, reread Narcissus’s duplicitous advice and Britannicus’s gullibility correctly) — except for that scene, there is not a single moment during the play when we are unaware of Narcissus’s intentions and strategies: he has no hidden agenda. In Nero’s case, his entire agenda is hidden: we can only guess at his motives and his plans. He jealously keeps his own counsel until such time as, his plans having fully ripened, he is ready to spring some new outrage upon an unsuspecting victim, or upon the world at large. That is why Agrippina and Albina spend the entire first scene puzzling over, and exchanging views about, Nero’s character and his intentions.

      Usually, the first scene of a Racine play is devoted to exposition, filling in the audience on “the plot thus far”; here, what is most conspicuously exposed — or, rather, posed — is the huge riddle that is Nero. Even Agrippina, his own mother, has no idea what game he is playing, and sums up her hopeless “cluelessness” when she poses those highly significant questions: “What does he want? What moves him: love or hate?” (I.i.55). Compare, for example, the opening scene of Andromache, where Pylades attempts to apprise Orestes about the current disposition, both mental and relational, of the other three protagonists, Hermione, Pyrrhus, and Andromache: ambivalent though their feelings may be, fluid and fluctuating though their interrelationships may be, we (and Orestes) are left with a satisfyingly coherent sense of the status quo as the play opens. Moreover, in Britannicus, the “opacity” of Nero’s character, as presented in the opening scene, is never further illumined as the play proceeds, which is why there is such disagreement among critics about such crucial questions as the following: Is Nero already Racine’s “monstre” at the beginning of the play, or does he grow into the role? Is Nero still under the influence of Agrippina, his mother, and is the play, then, about his freeing himself from that influence (which no one disputes that he has done by the end of the play)? Is Nero truly in love with Junia, or does he merely wish to believe he is? And if neither, what is his interest in her? Do Nero’s intentions and feelings toward his stepbrother, Britannicus, actually waver during the course of the play, as they certainly ostensibly do, or has it been his intention all along to eliminate him, and if so, why? As one can see, all these vexed questions center on Nero, the enigma; but enigmas can be solved, and if Nero never shows his hand, that is not to say that the play itself does not provide us with a sufficient number of clues to enable us to find convincing answers to the questions just posed. By contrast, all the other principal characters are perfectly “legible”: we are never in any doubt as to what they are thinking and feeling. Any misconceptions about Nero’s relationships with Agrippina, Britannicus, and Junia — and they are widespread — must stem from Nero’s inscrutability.

      IV

      In our attempt to penetrate Nero’s “opacity,” let us first focus on the question of Nero’s “monstrosity,” to use a term. In this regard, one should mention the view of William J. Cloonan, who, in Racine’s Theatre: The Politics of Love, argues that Nero is the fully formed monster from the beginning of the play and that, having already overcome those obstacles he enumerates to Narcissus (“My mother’s tirades and Octavia’s tears, / Seneca, Burrhus, Rome! Three virtuous years!” [II.ii.89–90]), Nero, in his successive confrontations with Narcissus, Junia, Burrhus, Britannicus, and Agrippina, does not really interact with any of these characters, but simply acts, as if he were in a play-within-a-play with them, a play of which he is the writer, the director, and the star. Cloonan is of the opinion that in Nero’s confrontations with the other characters, the latter are nothing better than his dupes, that Nero’s apparent candor is nothing but lip service, time-serving accommodations rehearsed and regurgitated on cue. As this Discussion will make abundantly clear, I am in complete agreement with him about this. Nor am I the first to invoke a comparison with Richard III: certainly, Racine’s Nero proves, during the course of the play, that he can smile, and murder whiles he smiles (as his blasé response to Britannicus’s death demonstrates), and frame his face to all occasions (as the yet-to-be-crowned Richard of Gloucester confides to us in Henry VI, Part 3). One difference, however, is that Nero, being afforded no substantive monologue, has no opportunity to wink at the audience to let them in on his secret, to proudly apprise them of his hidden agenda, his ulterior strategies, his covert connivances. It is left up to the actor portraying Nero to suggest how much Nero relishes the duplicity, the theatricality of his own performance. On the other hand, at certain key moments (notably his abduction of Junia, his blackmailing of her, and his murder of Britannicus), Nero, not content merely to “let the mask drop,” feels the need to flaunt his evil nature, to unsheathe the claws of the monster, as it were, in order to demonstrate his limitless power; indeed, the flaunting is the point: the crimes themselves are almost incidental.

      In light of Racine’s famous phrase (employed in both prefaces) СКАЧАТЬ