have believed that we would ever see
These deadly daggers and this wicked weaponry,
Here, in this house of peace, so fiercely blaze?
(III.viii.5–8)
To stage such a complex and crucial spectacle, Jehoiada has had to set things in motion as early as the end of Act IV:
— Friends, it is prudent now to separate.
You, Ishmael, must guard the western gate;
You, take the north gate; you, the south; you, east;
Let no one, be it Levite, be it priest,
Disclose, by thoughtless zeal, the plans I’ve laid,
Marching out ere our preparation’s made.
And, last, let each, of one impassioned mind,
Guard to the death the post he’s been assigned.
(IV.v.24–31)
Up to the very moment of Athaliah’s entrance, Jehoiada continues to micromanage the scene:
These crucial orders carefully obey.
Above all, when she enters and walks by,
A calm — complete, profound — must greet her eye.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
You, once this queen, drunk with a foolish pride,
Has passed the temple door and stepped inside,
Let her who ventured in find no way out.
(V.iii.7–9, 14–16)
As the scene plays out, the audience, minutely apprised of the details of the scheme, is kept in a state of anticipatory suspense, waiting for the trap to spring shut. When Joash is finally produced, almost like a deus ex machina, Athaliah’s horror and dismay are twofold as she learns at once that the scion she believed dead is still alive, having been kept hidden in the temple for years, and that the treasure she believed hidden in the temple for years never existed, that, in fact, David’s fabled “treasure” is none other than this very child.
vii
There are other such symmetries to be observed in these three scenes, which bespeak Racine’s ingenuity in the construction of this play. First, in the outer scenes Joash says not a word, while in the central scene, he not only speaks at length, but does so most precociously and eloquently, with a power that ensures that his confrontation with Athaliah will be a dramatic meeting of equals. Second, those outer scenes are both, in some sense, “recognition” scenes. In the first, Athaliah recognizes the child who had stabbed her through the heart in her dream; in the second, she recognizes him as the grandson who will, figuratively, stab her through the heart — that is, who will actually bring about her downfall and 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)
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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