But if you heed your flatterers’ advice,
You’ll find your course career from vice to vice.
(Britannicus IV.iii.37–40)
Absolute power can intoxicate,
And fawning, flattering voices fascinate...
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And thus, from snare to snare, abyss to abyss,
Corrupting your pure heart, your pristine youth,
They’ll make you, in the end, despise the truth,
Painting fair virtue as a frightful thing.
(Athaliah IV.iii.85–86, 95–98)
And in the following exchange, in which Agrippina and her confidante, Albina, exchange views about Nero, they might be speaking of Joash, another boy whose “soul has been well taught”:
albina
His conduct proves his soul has been well taught.
For three years now has he done anything
That does not promise Rome a perfect king?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
agrippina
I’m not unjust: his virtues I’ve commended;
But, though he starts where great Augustus ended,
I fear his future may undo his past.
(Britannicus I.i.24–26, 31–33)
Even more telling is Mathan’s warning to Athaliah, “Within this temple a monster’s being bred” (II.vi.3), for we should observe that the original French, “Quelque monstre naissant dans ce temple s’élève“ (Some budding monster is arising in the temple), features the very phrase (“monstre naissant”) that Racine employed in his preface to Britannicus to describe Nero, whom, in that play, he was trying to depict, not as a full-blown monster, but as a budding monster: “Je l’ai toujours regardé comme un monstre. Mais c’est ici un monstre naissant” (I have always regarded him as a monster. But here it is a monster being born). For the biblical account of the latter part of Joash’s life, only hinted at in this play, bears out the inadvertent truth of Mathan’s suggestion: the Joash we see in this play is another monster in the bud.
But may we not go further — or rather, nearer? May we not think of Joash as a Mathan-in-embryo? Mathan, too, was educated within the temple and groomed to be a priest of the Hebrew faith. Undoubtedly, he too was glib in rehearsing God’s Holy Writ. His description of himself traces the arc of Joash’s life as well:
Raised as a priest of this God they revere,
Mathan, perhaps, might still be serving here,
If thirst for power and love of luxury
Could have endured His strict authority.
(III.iii.67–70)
For, according to the Bible, it will be the future high priest Zachariah’s rebuke of Joash for his licentious ways, and his attempt to recall him to obedience to “His strict authority,” that will provoke Joash to have him killed. Mathan’s recollection of “the quarrel that arose / ’Twixt the high priest and me... / When I aspired to claim the censer’s care” (III.iii.71–73) may even remind us of what seemed at the time to be Joash’s touching pride when he mentioned one of his “pleasures”: “Sometimes I offer / To the high priest the salt or incense coffer” (II.vii.57–58). In short, then, this child, who has been eulogized throughout the play, is finally exposed as being no better than Mathan, who, according to Tobin, is “the object of the most damaging epithets in Racine’s theater” (Tobin, 155).
There is one further nexus to note between Mathan and Joash. In Jehoiada’s admonition to Joash (“Brought up far from the throne, you’re unaware / Of the envenomed charms that wait you there” [IV.iii.83–84]), there is an echo of Josabeth’s earlier excoriating denunciation of Mathan: “You, seated on a pestilential throne, / Where falsehood reigns and its foul poisons spread” (III.iv.54–55), words that unwittingly foreshadow the downfall of Joash, whom we see, at the conclusion of the play, conspicuously, tellingly, seated on the throne of temporal power. And, in turn, Josabeth’s description recalls an earlier representation of the throne and its perils, for Jocasta (in The Fratricides) might be foretelling the history of the throne of Judah when she offers this warning to her son Polynices:
A throne that’s always been a perilous pit:
Crime festers there and lightning threatens it.
Your father and all those who wore the crown
No sooner mounted it than were cast down.
(The Fratricides IV.iii.184–87)
Hence, we can observe that Racine’s preoccupations remained fairly constant from his first play to his last: in terms of the virulence of the human passions (their own and others’) against which Racine’s monarchs must contend (almost always succumbing to their own) — the heartlessness and the hatred, the vindictiveness and the vice, the fanaticism and the folly — there is not much to choose between the throne of Thebes and the throne of Judah.
ix
Taking one last survey of these three pivotal scenes, we can observe that, whereas in the middle scene Joash represents himself, so to speak, in the two outer scenes (symmetry again) it is Athaliah who does so for him, and, in both, she represents him as anything but the blameless, harmless, helpless child the other characters take him for. In the first, she recognizes in him the dagger-wielding boy of her dreams — in other words, as a murderer. In the second, she foresees him as an apostate, destined to defame God’s altar. Since that defamation will be a consequence of Joash’s ordering that Zachariah be stoned to death in the temple courtyard, her second depiction of him is, again, as a murderer. Viewed in the context of these two equally premonitory flanking scenes, Joash’s recital of his catechism in the central scene seems to ring hollow, like the mouthings of a canting hypocrite.
From the anxious point of view of one living in today’s terrorized world, however, it might be more comforting to believe that Joash recites the lessons he has learned without any conviction than to believe he has taken to heart the lessons of his foster parents, lessons that can only conduce to a perpetuation of the blood feud devastating the house of David. From that point of view, Athaliah’s sarcastic comment (“I’m charmed to see the schooling that he’s had” [II.vii.75]) registers as somewhat chilling. Indeed, it is hard to avoid considering the following reasonably accurate recrimination that she directs at Josabeth as a timely (for us) condemnation of the inveterate inculcation of unthinking hatred and prejudice that is so rife today:
His memory’s accurate: in his replies
Jehoiada’s spirit and yours I recognize.
The freedom that I’ve given you you use
To infect these children with your venomous views.
Their fury and their fear you cultivate;
You’ve made my name the object of their hate.
(II.vii.87–92)
Certainly there is enough of a hint of the fanatic in the following pronouncements of Joash to validate Athaliah’s accusation:
God wants our love, and He
Will, soon or late, avenge all blasphemy;
In the Lord’s strength the orphan can confide;
He humbles the proud and smites the homicide.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Mine reigns alone in fearsome majesty,
While yours, madame, is