my call, would congregate.
Then, veiled but present, I would play my role:
That august body’s all-controlling soul.
(I.i.91–96)
Now it is Nero who is “veiled but present,” either literally, as in the famous eavesdropping scene (II.vi), or, indirectly, through his network of spies, as Britannicus attests:
My so-called friends, who trade in treachery,
Observe my moves with assiduity;
Chosen by Nero for this enterprise,
They search my soul, whose secrets Nero buys.
(I.iv.25–28)
And Britannicus’s avowal to Narcissus, several lines later (in another dose of Racinian irony), that “my heart’s emotions he, like you, can trace” (I.iv.31), should prompt us to consider the likelihood that Agrippina herself has also served as Narcissus’s unsuspecting dupe, for, while they never share a one-on-one scene on stage, she ruefully confesses to Burrhus in the penultimate scene, “You I condemned, Narcissus had my ear!” (V.vii.2).
VII
Even in Agrippina’s dealings with Junia and Britannicus, although she tries, with bustling officiousness, to play the role of protectress, benefactor, and wise mentor, adopting a grandly patronizing tone with both of them, confidently reiterating to Britannicus her promises of assistance (“Whate’er your enemies do, / I shan’t revoke the vows I’ve sworn to you” [III.vi.23–24]) and smugly reassuring Junia (“Dismiss your fears, for all has been arranged. / I’ll answer for a truce sworn ’neath my eye” [V.iii.12–13]), her confidence rings hollow when judged in the context of her earlier, self-deprecatory remarks, such as “To shame me, Nero wants the world to know / That what I promise I cannot bestow” (I.ii.126–27) and “On Agrippina’s aid who’d think to call / When Nero makes my ruin known to all?” [I.ii.152–53]. And let us not overlook the fact that her above-cited declaration to Britannicus is uttered in the immediate wake of the near-hysterical anxiety she displays (III.v.8–21) to Albina, her confidant, when confronted with the prospect of her position’s being usurped by Nero’s new love interest (namely, Junia). In her intercourse with Burrhus, on the other hand, while she may throw it in his face that he is a nonentity “whose ambition I could have let rot / In some vile legion or some distant spot, / Obscure, unhonored, and at last forgot” (I.ii.26–28) and that she is “Wife, daughter, sister, mother of your kings!” (I.ii.30), he is the one who adopts the patronizing tone toward her, whether patiently calming her as if she were a petulant child, offering her counsel from his position of more privileged knowledge, or solicitously advising her, for her behoof, how to deal with Nero. And her haughty insistence on his inferior status only makes her position seem even more ignominious when we hear her complaining, variously, to Albina, that “where once my help was needed, / Now Seneca’s or Burrhus’ words are heeded” (I.i.113–14), to Burrhus, that “like a wall, ’twixt him [Nero] and me you’re thrust” (I.ii.17), and to Nero, that “Burrhus has dared to lay his hands on me!” (IV.ii.108). Indeed, the very opening of the play presents Agrippina in a most humiliating position — and that, before a word of dialogue has been exchanged; for we see her impatiently waiting outside Nero’s door, as if she were a flunky (a reasonable paraphrase of the French’s untranslatable “à titre d’importune” [I.ii.15], as she herself describes her situation to Burrhus when she accosts him at the beginning of the next scene). So abject is the Agrippina whom we meet when the curtain rises that even her servant is more concerned for her mistress’s self-respect than she is, scolding her, “la mère de César” (the mother of the emperor, line 4), for wandering about the palace with no retinue and waiting outside her son’s door until he awakes. (Perhaps it is a recollection of Albina’s almost scandalized outburst that stings Agrippina into some renewed, if momentary, sense of her own exalted position when she, in turn, reminds Burrhus in the next scene [I.ii.30] that she is “la mère de vos maîtres” [the mother of your masters].)
And when we carefully examine her one-hundred-plus-line tirade in the fourth act (only in Mithridates do we find one of equal length, where it is also a parent, Mithridates, addressing, in his case, two sons), even that turns out to be less epic than episodic. This “great ‘confession,’ ” as George Dillon calls it (and who confesses but a suppliant?), “gives us a decade of Roman history (condensing books XII and XIII of the Annals) in a style as stringently documentary as its original, much of it literally translated from Tacitus” (Dillon, 60). Here, then, there is nothing like Mithridates’ thrilling narrative of his flight to safety after the defeat of his army or his stirring rhetoric as he unveils his plans to march on Rome (“It’s not, sons, at the world’s periphery / That Roman fetters weigh most heavily; / No: rousing close to home the fiercest hate, / Your greatest enemies, Rome, are at your gate” [Mithridates III.i.64–67]), nor anything like Clytemnestra’s impassioned tirade in defense of her daughter Iphigenia (“Shall this cruel priest, urged by a crueler crowd, / Lay criminal hands on her and be allowed / To rend her breast and, by his probing art, / Consult the heav’ns in her still-heaving heart?” [Iphigenia IV.iv.137–40]) — in its noble ferocity, the verbal equivalent of a lioness protecting her cub. In contrast to those speeches, there is very little of the dramatic about Agrippina’s “big moment,” being neither a gripping narrative nor a theatrical outburst; it can hardly even be called an argument, except in the archaic sense of a résumé of “the plot thus far.” It is only in the last fifth of her speech that she begins to work up a head of steam, and even then the subject of her harangue is, again, her humiliating ill treatment at Nero’s hands. And that the imperious, impassioned denunciation we might have expected at this point should prove to be such a spiritless, not to say spineless, recital of her machinations on Nero’s behalf may lead us to conclude that it was a deliberate strategy on Racine’s part not to allow us to witness the earlier confrontation between Nero and Agrippina that must have taken place sometime between III.vi and III.ix (as I explain in note 31 for Act III), a scene that would surely have presented us with an Agrippina far less meek and retiring (though still powerless), inasmuch as Agrippina herself, aflame with righteous indignation, anticipates it thus: “In vain my guilty son my wrath shall flee, / And, soon or late, he’ll have to hark to me.... My son I shall besiege on every side” (III.vi.25–26, 31).
By contrast, in the scene Racine offers us, Agrippina, for all her verboseness, certainly comes off as the weaker, less worthy adversary. To her whining rehearsal of her wrongs Nero responds with a powerfully argued demonstration that she wields too much power, resorting to the same stratagem of “quoting” Rome’s purported views (“This much-blamed son: what has been his offense? / And has she had him crowned just to obey? / He holds the scepter, then, while she holds sway?” [IV.ii.122–24]) that Narcissus will employ in his scene with Nero later in the act (IV.iv.78–88 — in that case, the cited views being those of Nero’s detractors), and to telling effect, for Agrippina is immediately put on the defensive. It is only when his mother has utterly capitulated (“I’ve done my utmost; it’s enough you reign.... If you desire, take my life too, I pray, / Provided angry Rome, at my demise, / Does not reclaim from you the hard-won prize” [IV.ii.172, 174–76]) that Nero, by now convinced — by Agrippina herself — of her impotence, solicitously inquires, with feigned meekness, “What do you want from me?” (IV.ii.177); and, in reply to the list of demands that his mother rattles off, he responds with an equally prompt and comprehensive obligingness that subsequent events will confirm as highly suspect. (In the very next scene he abruptly informs Burrhus of his fixed intention of doing away with his stepbrother.)
In the last analysis, what was intended as a strategic self-justification, serving both to redeem herself with her son and to remind him of his obligations of due gratitude toward her, proves, ironically, to be a justification for all his recent and future actions: she has demonstrated all too well the efficacy of mendacity, treachery, and machination and the rewards of callousness, cruelty, and, indeed, ingratitude (which is why, when she later accuses him of having murdered Britannicus, he is conveniently able to parry with a thinly veiled accusation of his own: “One would believe, to listen to his wife, / That