The Complete Plays of Jean Racine: Volume 5: Britannicus

By Jean Racine

This is the fifth volume of a projected translation into English of all twelve of Jean Racine’s plays. Geoffrey Alan Argent’s translations faithfully convey all the urgency and keen psychological insight of Racine’s dramas, and the coiled strength of his verse, while breathing new vigor into the time-honored form of the “heroic” couplet.

Complementing this translation are the Discussion and the Notes and Commentary—particularly detailed and extensive for this volume, Britannicus being by far Racine’s most historically informed play. Also noteworthy is Argent’s reinstatement of an eighty-two-line scene, originally intended to open Act III, that has never before appeared in an English translation of this play.

Britannicus, one of Racine’s greatest plays, dramatizes the crucial day when Nero—son of Agrippina and stepson of the late emperor Claudius—overcomes his mother, his wife Octavia, his tutors, and his vaunted “three virtuous years” in order to announce his omnipotence. He callously murders his innocent stepbrother, Britannicus, and effectively destroys Britannicus’s beloved, the virtuous Junia, as well. Racine may claim, in his first preface, that this tragedy “does not concern itself at all with affairs of the world at large,” but nothing could be further from the truth. The tragedy represented in Britannicus is precisely that of the Roman Empire, for in Nero Racine has created a character who embodies the most infamous qualities of that empire — its cruelty, its depravity, and its refined barbarity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: PSUPress
• Release date: Jul 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9780271065335

Jean Racine

Jean Racine, né le 22 décembre 1639 à La Ferté-Milon et mort le 21 avril 1699 à Paris, est un dramaturge et poète français. Issu d'une famille de petits notables de la Ferté-Milon et tôt orphelin, Racine reçoit auprès des « Solitaires » de Port-Royal une éducation littéraire et religieuse rare.

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The Complete Plays of Jean Racine

The Complete Plays of Jean Racine

Volume 5: Britannicus

Translated into English rhymed couplets with critical notes and commentary by

GEOFFREY ALAN ARGENT

THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

UNIVERSITY PARK, PENNSYLVANIA

All Rights Reserved

CAUTION: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that performances of BRITANNICUS (Play) are subject to royalty. This Play is fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America and of all countries covered by the International Copyright Union (including the Dominion of Canada and the rest of the British Commonwealth), and of all countries covered by Universal Copyright Convention, the Pan-American Copyright Convention, the Berne Convention, and of all countries with which the United States has reciprocal copyright relations. All rights, including professional and amateur stage rights, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio broadcasting, television, video or sound recording, and all other forms of mechanical or electronic reproduction, such as CD-ROM, CD-I, DVD, information storage and retrieval systems, and photocopying, are strictly reserved.

All inquiries concerning any of the aforementioned rights should be addressed to Patrick H. Alexander, Director, Penn State University Press, 820 N. University Drive, USB 1, Suite C, University Park, PA 16802, www.psupress.org.

Please Note

After having received permission to produce this Play, it is required that the translator GEOFFREY ALAN ARGENT be given credit as the sole and exclusive translator of the Play on the title page of all programs distributed in connection with performances of the Play and in all cases where the title of the Play appears for purposes of advertising or publicizing the production. The name of GEOFFREY ALAN ARGENT must appear on a separate line immediately beneath the title line and in type size equal to 50 percent of the size of the largest letter of the title of the Play and the acknowledgment should read

JEAN RACINE’S BRITANNICUS

Translated into English Rhymed Couplets by GEOFFREY ALAN ARGENT

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data will be found in the back of this book.

FOR

Leslie Eric Comens

DIO, CHE NELL’ALMA INFONDERE AMOR VOLESTI E SPEME, GIURIAMO INSIEM DI VIVERE E DI MORIRE INSIEME.

TREUE TRINK’ ICH DEM FREUND. FROH UND FREI ENTBLÜHE DEM BUND BLUT-BRÜDERSCHAFT HEUT!

AND

IN THIS BICENTENNIAL OF THEIR BIRTH, TO

Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901)

AND

Richard Wagner (1813–1883),

FOR THE PRICELESS TREASURES THEY HAVE BEQUEATHED TO US

CONTENTS

Translator’s Note

Britannicus: Discussion

Racine’s Dedication

Racine’s First Preface

Racine’s Second Preface

Britannicus

Britannicus: Notes and Commentary

Appendix A

Appendix B

Bibliography

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

This translation of Britannicus, Racine’s fifth play, is one of a series that, when complete, will offer in English translation all twelve of Racine’s plays (eleven tragedies and one comedy), only the third such traversal since Racine’s death in 1699. This traversal, in addition, is the first to be composed in rhymed iambic pentameter couplets. My strategy has been to reconceive Racine in that pedigreed indigenous English verse form in order to produce a poetic translation of concentrated power and dramatic impact. After all, as Proust observes, the tyranny of rhyme forces good poets into the discovery of their best lines; and while subjected to that tyranny, I took great pains to render Racine’s French into English that is incisive, lucid, elegant, ingenious, and memorable. For I believe that the proper goal of a translation of a work of literature must be, first and foremost, to produce a work of literature in the language of the target audience. For a considerably more expansive discussion of my approach to translation, as well as a vigorously, rigorously argued rationale for my decision to employ rhymed couplets, I direct the interested reader to the Translator’s Introduction that appears in Volume I of this series, devoted to my translation of Racine’s first play, The Fratricides.

This translation is based on the definitive 1697 edition of Racine’s theater as it appears in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition of 1980, edited by Raymond Picard. The 1697 text represents Racine’s final thoughts on this play. The divergences between the first edition (1670) and the last are, with three exceptions, relatively inconsequential. Most of them involve minor textual emendations that Racine made for his later editions, all of which represent clear, if subtle, improvements over the earlier versions. All three of the noteworthy changes occur in Act V (and indeed I devote a note to each). The first involves Racine’s deletion of eight lines for Britannicus that originally preceded line V.i.56. I have consigned these lines, translated into rhymed couplets, to note 12 for Act V, where, in addition, I expatiate on several cogent reasons for deleting verses that do no service either to Britannicus or to Britannicus. The second significant change, a more consequential one, in that it restructures the second half of Act V, involves Racine’s removal of an entire, albeit brief, scene, signaled by the reappearance of Junia, who has, to say the least, an awkward moment when she encounters Nero after Britannicus’s murder. Again, I offer this scene, comprising all of twelve lines, as well as the original version of the last few lines of the prior scene and the first few lines of the following scene (all for Agrippina) — which Racine had to modify when he jettisoned the intervening scene — translated into rhymed couplets, in note 31 for Act V. That this intrusive scene was an undoubted miscalculation on Racine’s part was soon recognized by Racine himself, notwithstanding his having at first, in the face of criticism from friend and foe alike, defended its dramatic necessity with much vehemence but little cogency in his first preface, for, soon after the first edition was published, he discreetly removed the scene, ensuring that, in the subsequent editions of 1676, 1687, and 1697, it would never again rear its ugly head. (See the seventh paragraph of Racine’s first preface for his specious defense of this scene and note 11 for my refutation thereof.) The third change of any significance occurs in V.vi, in Agrippina’s final denunciation of Nero, where Racine replaces a single, entire line (a rare occurrence among Racine’s emendations); the original line can be found in note 38 for Act V, where I comment on the greater gain and the lesser loss involved in the line substitution.

Of far greater significance, however, than this single-line rewrite and those two deletions of Racine’s, which I have implemented in conformance to the 1697 edition, is the momentous and unprecedented reinstatement I have presumed to make of an eighty-two-line scene between Burrhus and Narcissus that, although of unquestionable authenticity, has never appeared in any English-language edition of Britannicus (I can only speak to the high unlikelihood of its having appeared in any non-English translation), but which Racine originally intended should open Act III, where, in my translation, it is to be at long last found. Commensurate with the momentousness of this reinstatement, I have provided both a brief discussion of the provenance of this scene and an (I hope) irresistibly persuasive rationale for its inclusion in this fifth volume of what I trust will become a reference edition in English of Racine’s theatrical oeuvre. That expansive discussion/rationale, being both too unwieldy and too important to be relegated to a mere footnote, may be found as Appendix B.

The translations of Racine’s dedication and his first and second prefaces are my own, as are the translations of passages from the critical commentaries in the Picard and Forestier editions that appear in the Discussion and the Notes and Commentary. In my own critical commentaries, when I refer to a play or a character, I use the title or name as it appears in my translations. It should be noted, however, that where any other commentators (writing in English) retain the French spellings, I have respected that preference and beg the reader to pardon the discrepancies.

Speaking of discrepancies, I should note, now that this traversal is nearly halfway toward completion, that the extremely alert reader may begin to notice occasional (and inevitable) discrepancies between lines of verse from any particular play, as cited in earlier volumes, and the revised and (one hopes) improved versions of those verses as they appear in the volume devoted to the complete translation of the play in question. I like to think that so astute a reader would find such discrepancies more interesting than irritating, so I shall not beg her or him to pardon them.

I have preserved the scene divisions as they are given in the Pléiade edition (each new scene marking the arrival or departure of one or more characters) and have, likewise, listed the characters participating in each scene just below the scene number. I have, in addition, furnished these translations with line numbers (every fifth line being numbered, and the numbering beginning anew for each scene), for ease of reference for readers and actors and to enable me to cite passages precisely in the Discussion and the Notes and Commentary. Be it noted that these line numbers do not conform to those of any French edition, the Picard, for example, providing no line numbers at all and the Forestier using unbroken numbering from beginning to end; besides, I have found it necessary once or twice to expand one of Racine’s couplets into a tercet, or even two of his couplets into three, a procedure that would vitiate any line-for-line correspondence.

I thought it might also be helpful, having myself struggled to disentangle the complex familial relationships among the characters in Britannicus, to provide the reader with a genealogical chart (to be found as Appendix A), beginning with Augustus and his wives and tracing their descendents down to Nero and Britannicus; and in order to better clarify those interrelationships, I have judiciously pruned the family tree to show only those boughs, branches, and twigs that have any bearing on the play, that is, to include only those family members who appear in the play or are referred to therein (thirteen in all), and only such additional relatives (seven of them) whose inclusion on the tree is necessary in order to connect the dots, so to speak (for example, Drusus the Elder and Antonia, Claudius’s parents).

The Discussion is intended as much to promote discussion as to provide it. The Notes and Commentary, in addition to clarifying obscure references and explicating the occasional gnarled conceit, offer, I hope, some fresh and thought-provoking insights, such as are occasionally vouchsafed the sedulous translator. But whatever the merit of the ancillary critical material, I believe that the enduring value of these volumes will reside in the excellence of the translations. New approaches to studying Racine will undoubtedly be discovered and developed, opponent schools of thought will continue to clash, arguments may be challenged or overturned, but I am hopeful that the value of these translations will prove indisputable.

I would like to express my warmest thanks to my great friend Adrian Ciuperca, my go-to person (along with his wife, Mioara Canciu) for all things cybernetic, who has done such a beautiful job producing the elegant family tree (now flourishing as Appendix A) that I should really have labeled it Appendix A+.

All that remains (and it is much) is to acknowledge the unflagging support and assistance of Leslie Eric Comens, who has, for the purposes of the present volume, done the unthinkable: succeeded in inculcating in me a genuine interest in history — and Roman history no less (stopping short, however, of cajoling me into reading Tacitus and Suetonius in the original Latin), which has had the gratifying effect of rendering the Discussion and the Notes and Commentary at once so erudite and so entertaining. And, once again, Leslie has acted as the Sixtus Beckmesser (a benign one, of course) to my Hans Sachs: as Merker, immer bei Sachs, enthusiastically noting all my many Fehler (fortunately he permits me more than sieben), but just as eager to acknowledge that ein Lied von Sachs, das will was bedeuten (a song by Sachs, that counts for something!).

BRITANNICUS: DISCUSSION

I

Among those plays of Racine that are based on real-life events and people, Britannicus is by far the most deeply anchored in historical data, that data being chiefly furnished by Tacitus’s The Annals of Imperial Rome. Indeed, Racine professes that when he wrote the play he had been so steeped in reading that excellent historian, that there is hardly a striking effect in my tragedy for which he did not provide me with the idea. But just as he would rework the raw material of Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis to his own purposes, adding characters (principally Eriphyle), refashioning events, and creating virtually new portraits of several of the Greek playwright’s characters, so, too, in Britannicus, Racine has ingeniously transformed Tacitus’s raw reportage into a complexly plotted drama with, in this case, one key character (Junia) created virtually out of whole cloth, alliances among the historical characters realigned, and, most important, Tacitus’s turbulent, eloquent, but hardly edifying account provided with a subtle but powerful tendentious underpinning. John Campbell (130) cites the view of Jean Rohou, who, in what he calls ‘the Machiavellian conflict recounted by Tacitus,’ finds that Racine substitutes ‘a moral antinomy absent from his sources’ (‘L’anthropologie pessimiste’ 1529). But how could it be otherwise? Racine had a context within which to place the events Tacitus describes: for him they do not compose a story, but a history. The decline and fall of the Roman Empire was a concept unknown to Tacitus and Suetonius, but was a received moral artifact for Racine’s age, just as it still is for anyone reading or seeing Britannicus today.

For The Annals of Imperial Rome paints an unrelievedly grim picture of the movers and shakers of the ancient Roman Empire. (Suetonius’s account, in The Twelve Caesars — consulted more sparingly by Racine — with its almost Grand Guignol approach, occasionally bordering on the surreal or the absurd, may strike the reader, depending on his or her point of view, as rendering the horrors described either more horrific or more hilarious.) Such shafts of light as illumine the pervasive gloom are purely editorial: spontaneous expressions of sympathy, or considered moral sententiae provided by Tacitus himself. 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 inculpatory remark or action of Britannicus’s, and even, in his Act IV scene with Nero, express[ing] with impunity the contempt in which his all too authentically 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,