SOURCE: Armistead, J. M. “Hero as Endangered Species: Sophonisba, or Hannibal's Overthrow. A Tragedy (1675).” In Nathaniel Lee, pp. 43-57. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979.

[In the following essay, Armistead discusses the structure and themes of Nathaniel Lee's most successful foray into the genre of heroic drama, Sophonisba.]

In charting the modulation of high heroic drama into something resembling genuine tragedy, we can hardly afford to overlook Nathaniel Lee's first smash hit. That it usually is passed over suggests that most commentators have uncritically accepted impressionistic or satiric responses to the play—responses like those of the Earl of Rochester, Henry Fielding, and Sir Adolphus Ward, all of whom felt Lee had unforgivably distorted history into an extravaganza of ranting lovesickness. The most recent historian of Restoration drama, Robert D. Hume, continues this negative trend by reiterating the opinions of Dryden and Gerard Langbaine: Lee fails to unify his two plots and sacrifices artistry to please the ladies with emotion-freighted love scenes.¹

Such unsympathetic reactions are not really counteracted by the enthusiasm of Lee's biographer, Roswell G. Ham, the sane pronouncements of Allardyce Nicoll, or the historical perspective of Eugene Waith, for their comments turn out to be misleading, too general, or inconclusive as they regard Lee's artistic achievement. Ham is patently wrong in classifying this play as an exemplar of the “heroic formula” that dramatizes superhuman valor and desperate love ending in “the conflict of great duties.”² And in trying to fasten a positive judgment on Lee's expression of powerful emotions, Nicoll merely perpetuates the impressionism of Langbaine and Fielding.³ To Waith, it is true, we owe provocative insights into Sophonisba's character as Lee interprets it—she combines Jean Mairet's death-defying lover with Pierre Corneille's (and John Marston's) stoically patriotic martyr and thus evokes both pity and admiration. But Waith unhappily confines his attention to the love affairs and mostly ignores “Hannibal's Overthrow” in the military and political sense.⁴

The result is that we so far have no firm sense of the play's controlling theme or structural design, even though Lee himself urges us to notice these aspects above all. First performed in 1675, the play seems to have been revived at Oxford in 1680/81, while the court awaited developments in the parliamentary session called there by the king. Charles had hoped to cool down exclusionist passions in the House of Commons by freeing it from influence by London's fanatical mobs.⁵ Dryden's new Prologue places the play in this politically tense context—“none e're cry'd us down, / But who dislik'd both Bishop and a Crown” (ll. 27-28)—yet Lee's Epilogue scrupulously avoids political innuendo, stressing instead what he finds wanting in earlier responses to the play: its artistry. Just as Charles uses Oxford as a refuge from irrational politics, so Lee is glad to be “Free from the partial Censure of the Town, / Where senseless Faction runs the Poet down” (ll. 5-6) and to rely on “this Learn'd Audience” (l.1) who, knowing the historical and literary originals of his plot and characters, will impartially assess his witty “Copy” and “Crown the Artist with deserved Bayes” (ll. 16-17). In particular, he can expect the scholars, faculty, and courtiers to note his complex adaptation of the “Loves” of Ovid and Catullus and the “Labours” of Aeneas and Achilles (ll. 33-35).

In combination, the Prologue and Epilogue urge the reader to see Sophonisba as a work of art having sympathetic relevance to the established hierarchy of king and bishops. Specifically, we are to be sensitive to Lee's way of ringing variations on earlier versions (in history and literature) of his story and to his use of different kinds of love (Ovidian, Catullan) and valor (Homeric, Virgilian). There is no suggestion here of an heroic formula, no stress on spectacle and emotion for their own sakes, and no special appeal to a feminine audience. In fact, the female characters in the play are mentioned not as emasculating or enchanting sex objects but as inspirers of “Idea's” of different kinds of love (Epilogue, l.23).

No scholar or critic seems to have followed up these implications. Eric Rothstein has come as close to the mark as any by noting that in Sophonisba “heroic self-aggrandizement” is diluted as heroic traits are divided among three leading characters. He also senses that instead of using the action to bring out the established integrity of these heroes and to reconcile private and public commitments, Lee shows his characters responding plausibly to events and learning that man's deepest desires are unrealizable in public life.⁶ What Rothstein suggests here, and what a fresh examination of the play reveals, is that Sophonisba employs heroic conventions to study heroism itself in a context that is relevant to contemporary political life—a context of sociopolitical changes driven by Providence. Thus, Lee's artistry involves, first, selecting and recombining actions, characters, themes, and conventions, from a well-known body of history, romance, and drama and, second, representing these materials in such a way as to comment movingly on the problem of heroic leadership in “modern” life. Furthermore, if Dryden's Prologue is supposed to convey an attitude congenial to Lee, then we can expect this contemporary commentary to be pro-Establishment in some way.

I. PLOT FROM SOURCES

William Van Lennep and Eugene Waith⁷ have mentioned Lee's variations on his sources, but neither attempts to connect the variations—which both allow to be happy ones—to theme and design. A brief summary of the double plot will prepare the way for a new analysis. The first plot line involves Hannibal of Carthage, who vows to continue the war with Rome that his father trained him to prosecute. He regrets, however, the military defections, political delays and chicanery, and his own amorous procrastination, which have turned the tide of battle against him. When his spies return with glowing reports of Rome's splendid legions and when supernatural phenomena portend catastrophe, he orders his priests to consult the gods about prospects. Meanwhile, his mistress, Rosalinda, a Roman lady thought to be Scipio's captive, has persuaded the young and love-sick Massina, nephew to the Numidian king who supports Rome, to help gain her freedom. When they appear in Hannibal's tent, he misinterprets their alliance and orders the youth imprisoned, but he quickly relents when Rosalinda reconfirms her constancy. Massina, however, has been made to understand that she prefers Hannibal's veteran heroism to his youthful passion, and he stabs himself to death in despair. Hannibal regards the suicide as an ominous sign of irrational forces ranged against him and proceeds to interrogate the priestesses about the designs of fate. When they foresee an ambiguous standoff between him and Scipio, but envision Rosalinda's death, Hannibal decides to negotiate a peace, if possible, to delay a climactic battle until the signs are more propitious.

In the parallel plot, Massinissa, king of Numidia, is melancholy about losing his Carthaginian mistress, Sophonisba, to a Numidian rival, Syphax, who now moves against Rome in league with her father, the Carthaginian general Asdrubal. Scipio, Consul of Rome, persuades Massinissa to reassume an heroic posture and to attack Syphax at Cirta, capture Sophonisba, and join the Roman legions against Hannibal at Zama. After killing Syphax in personal combat, Massinissa first grimly and obediently orders Sophonisba bound, but then gives in to her charms as she convinces him she never consummated the marriage with Syphax that her father had commanded. He arranges to marry her immediately, violating both Scipio's orders and his own loyalty to Rome. Upon confronting the newlyweds, Scipio accuses Sophonisba of sorcery and places her under house arrest until he and Massinissa deal with Hannibal.

As the two plots converge, Scipio courteously rejects Hannibal's peace offering and the two armies meet in battle. A series of staccato scenes impressionistically shows that Massinissa's forces push back all but the veteran wing of Hannibal's army, while Hannibal himself nearly defeats Scipio in a duel until reinforcements beat him off. Meanwhile, Rosalinda, dressed as a soldier, is fatally wounded, and when Hannibal finds her, he curses the gods and prepares to resign himself to fate. His aides, however, persuade him to continue as the one heroic prop to a falling kingdom, and he promises a new campaign. Having been victorious on the whole, Scipio now orders Massinissa to bury his unpatriotic and unmanly passion, and Massinissa pretends to obey by having Sophonisba executed. As soon as he is alone with her, however, they pledge eternal love, drink poison, and die in a last embrace. Scipio is thunderstruck by their act and determines to stop the war, retire from public life, and hereafter bend all his waking thoughts to the subject of death.

A potent argument for the play's artistic integrity is that Lee rather deliberately constructs this action by adding his own innovations to elements carefully selected from diverse literary and historical sources. The Massinissa-Sophonisba plot seems inspired mainly by John Marston's The Wonder of Women, or The Tragedy of Sophonisba (c. 1606) and by Jean Mairet's (1634) and Pierre Corneille's (1663) plays, both entitled Sophonisbe. As in Mairet, Lee's Sophonisba pitiably and desperately loves Massinissa; Massinissa kills Syphax and thus avoids a bigamous marriage; and both Massinissa and Sophonisba commit suicide rather than compromise their love. As in Marston and Corneille, Lee's Sophonisba remains consistently true to Carthage and to her own proud freedom from Roman captivity. Additionally, there is an echo of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra in the closing scene, where Sophonisba, disdaining Roman chains, and Massinissa, rejecting worldly acquisitions and status, give all for love. The Hannibal-Rosalinda plot owes a good deal to Roger Boyle's romance, Parthenissa (1654). There “The Story of Izadora and Perolla” tells of a love triangle in which Hannibal vainly attempts to woo Izadora away from her beloved Perolla. In Lee's version, it is just the other way around: Massina (Perolla) tries to win Rosalinda (Izadora) from Hannibal. To Boyle, Lee also seems to owe the scene of confrontation between Hannibal and Scipio, for the equivalent scene in Livy, the historical source for both authors, is not so clearly echoed in Lee's language.

This scene begins the convergence of the two plots, a phenomenon that distinguishes Lee's play from the work of his chief predecessors. The only earlier literary work that unites the two subplots in a meaningful whole is Thomas Nabbes's Hannibal and Scipio (1637, possibly revived 1671), but if Lee knew this play, he owes no apparent debt to its details. Livy, of course, recounts events involving Hannibal as well as Massinissa, Sophonisba, and Scipio, but he records Sophonisba's suicide as occurring before the battle of Zama, and he avoids the kinds of parallels between leaders, heroes, and lovers that Lee chiefly exploits. However, in using Philemon Holland's translation of Livy (1600, with many later printings), Lee may have adapted to his own uses the historian's mention of a certain beautiful and naive nephew of Massinissa (Massina in the play), and he could have transformed the historical Scipio's momentary passion for a young Spanish girl into the fictional Consul's repressed yearning for Rosalinda. Almost certainly, Lee used Livy as his source for the account of Hannibal's previous adventures and for the prodigy in which two suns appear in a blood-red sky amidst lightning and thunder.⁸

II. OF HEROES AND STATESMEN

To examine Lee's design in adapting his sources is to discover a fresh dramatic assessment of the conventional subjects of heroic drama, love and valor. The Hannibal-Rosalinda plot shows the frustration of old-style heroism in an alien sociopolitical environment. The self-indulgent confusion of purpose within Carthage, created by “Pride” (I. i. 73) and the “wicked policy” (I. i. 33) of statesmen like Hanno, has made Hannibal's fatherland unworthy of his patriotism, so that he is thrown back on three deeper motives for heroic strife against Rome: “natural hate to Rome” taught by his father (I. i. 92); “love” for the captive Rosalinda (I. i. 93); and a personal sense of honor that regards martial prowess as innately glorious (one must “perish bravely, though unfortunate,” II. ii. 99). Thus, he is not a civic leader, champion of his country, as G. Wilson Knight would have it,⁹ but rather an isolated powerhouse like the early Almanzor of The Conquest of Granada.

Throughout the play he is described as a natural force contending gloriously with other natural forces. He recalls how “Nature” was startled to see him conquer the Alps (I. i. 10) and rush “torrent like” down to “Romes proud Walls” (V. i. 5-6), and when supernatural omens intimate that fortune is against him, he sees himself as “Earth” thundering “back upon the sky” (II. ii. 106). Rosalinda sees him as “some rowling Whale” that “dashes the frighted Nations from his side” as he becomes both “the Ocean's Lord” and “Tirant of the Land” (III. i. 70-75). By the end of the play he has been deserted not only by Carthage but also, unwillingly, by Rosalinda, whose death in battle confirms the prophecy that fortune now favors Rome. Yet after a brief lament he readily accepts Maherbal's (and Bomilcar's) heroic philosophy that he must exercise, albeit to no earthly purpose, his god-given valor (V. i. 189-96), for it is the cosmically ordained, and therefore “natural,” course of action: honor, says Hannibal, “shall like the Ocean in a Tempest wake. / Wee'l pass new Alpes, new Consuls overthrow” (V. i. 224-25).

The causes of “Hannibal's Overthrow” are both providential or primary—a subject to be touched upon later—and sublunar, or secondary. Among the secondary causes are his pride and his amorous weakness. The first is revealed by his boasting of godlike powers in battle (I. i. 10, 56-58; IV. i. 168-70) and godlike passion in love (II. ii. 21), and by his vows to force either gods or demons to foretell his destiny (III. ii. 170-79; IV. i. 122-28). The second is a recurring theme in his verbal self-recriminations: “I stood almost Immortal Man, / Till Love … / And pointed Beauty through my Armour ran” (III. ii. 116-18, and see I. i. 103-105). It is an important part of Lee's artistic purpose, however, to make Rosalinda oppose the “soft Contagion” (II. ii. 11) she herself has passed to Hannibal. Like the Sophonisba in Marston's play, she reproaches Hannibal for the amorous weakness that prompts jealousy (III. ii. 85-86). She subordinates the kind of transcendent, youthful passion offered by Massina, as well as loyalty to her country (see III. i. 22-23), to a more lasting commitment to “the best and bravest Man in War” and to the immortal glory conferred by such a commitment (II. i. 232-40). In Rosalinda, Hannibal finds a kindred spirit, another devotee of natural prowess and cosmic honor, and he pays her tribute “As Rocks to Seas, or stubborn Oaks to wind” (III. ii. 113). Thus, Hannibal and Rosalinda represent what happens in the world of the play when one gives all for honor in the high heroic sense. Both end by pursuing prowess and glory without the social nourishment to be derived from state or conventional love.

They are contrasted with Sophonisba and Massinissa, another nonpragmatic pair, who give all for love, rather than for honor. If Rosalinda, a Roman lady, scorns country and courtly love, in order to join her civil enemy in seeking martial glory, Sophonisba, a Carthaginian, scorns country and martial honor, in order to join her “official” enemy in seeking a transcendent passion. The effect of Rosalinda's determination is to “save” Hannibal from love in order to promote heroism. But the effect of Sophonisba's determination is to “save” Massinissa from heroism in order to promote love. Both couples, through these higher loyalties, become alienated from social commitments.

Despite her titular prominence, Sophonisba is much less visible (and audible) than Massinissa, Hannibal, or Scipio. She is, as Waith rightly observes, a clearly conceived combination of Mairet's enthusiastic lover (“all one desire,” III. iv. 151) and Corneille's proud individualist (“Bondage is a load I cannot bear,” IV. i. 224). Massinissa, however, is more prominent in the design and is a more complex personality than his mistress. Like Hannibal, he is torn between love and valor, but his ultimate choice is the opposite of Hannibal's. Until feeling Sophonisba's charms, he was an heroic natural force, much like Hannibal, and revelled in his prowess for its own sake. During the Battle of Zama, when he briefly recaptures this lost heroism, he fights like “a Hawke” (V. i. 83) or “as hurricans toss showers, and scatter hail” (V. i. 79). But in general he deteriorates from an heroic force to be reckoned with—“I had a Soul cou'd storms outwear,” I. i. 144—to the victim of both psychological and external tempests: from the moment he held Sophonisba he felt “like a dying man” (I. i. 239), and he now begins to “sink in th' abyss of thought” (III. iv. 107; and see I. i. 156-59, 284-89; II. i. 14), “the Tempest of … mind” (II. i. 132), “Love's tempestuous Sea” of passion (I. i. 316). He becomes increasingly less fit to cope with “New storms of War” (I. i. 263). Throughout this degeneration he expresses his fate in nautical terms, as if Sophonisba were a siren with appeal “as powerful as Circes” (III. iii. 23, 30), and he an Odyssean mariner drowning in her charms (V. i. 413-16). Or he sees himself as a wrecked vessel's merchant-owner, who grasps the one casket of his love and “fearless, shoots himself into the Main” (IV. i. 251-56).

Massinissa's earthly failure is clearly a product of emasculating love, but, as in the case of Hannibal's overthrow, there is also a higher cause—providential design. Sophonisba's enchanting eyes are both earthly snares and “fatal fires” acting on behalf of “crosser Stars (II. i. 14-18). The adverse fate she unwittingly serves involves a larger sociopolitical change that helps account for both Massinissa's and Hannibal's failures as hero-lovers. The nature of this change is sensed by Massinissa in his first dialogue with Menander and Lelius. Under the influence of love-melancholy, he begins to question the virtue of martial heroism. Is it not merely “lust of Power,” “A strong temptation, to do bravely ill” (I. i. 132-33)? And does it not result in senseless carnage that is at least as undesirable as the emasculation consequent to love (I. i. 319-22)? Menander responds that Massinissa has confused the truly “gallant souls Ambition” for “mystick Empire” (I. i. 138, 125) with the bestial and mercenary lust for power that makes empire a mere “Bawd” (I. i. 139). It is the difference, he says, between “Mirth” and “lewdness” in a bride, or between spiritualized self-denial and “Pride” in a “Vestal Virgin” (I. i. 140-41). What Menander is suggesting is that Massinissa is beginning to lose sight of “true” heroism, not only because he is love-blind, but also because there is less and less opportunity for it to emerge in a world increasingly dominated by a more pragmatic and earthly sort of ambition.

This new heroism (and the new world it implies) is fate's main operative in the play. It envelops both Massinissa and Hannibal, preventing either from achieving a vital fusion of high heroism and high love. Its personification is Scipio, the Roman Consul, just as Hannibal personifies old-style heroism and Massinissa old-style love. Scipio's values, and thus the definition of a new wave in the providential history of heroism, are most clearly enunciated in his dialogues with Massinissa. If these values seem less appealing and admirable than the superhuman courage or passion of Hannibal and Massinissa, they are at least not exactly the venal and bestial traits described by Menander. Scipio is not chiefly interested in the “Bawd of Empire”; he does not seek material self-indulgence. Yet his goals are certainly more pragmatic and mundane than those of his antagonists. What he wants to achieve is social and psychological order in the earthly kingdom, and he is not sensitive to the more transcendental aims of heroes and lovers. To conquer kingdoms as a test of personal valor is, he tells Massinissa, “to imitate great Heroes dead” (II. i. 83). Instead, he urges, conquer “for Rome, not for your sake” (IV. i. 281). And as for transcendent love, that is an illusion, mere “passion's heat” (IV. i. 332), just as Sophonisba is not a priceless jewel but rather a witch (IV. i. 367) or the carrier of some contagious mental disease (V. i. 241-42). Better to govern one's passions, “quench th'inglorious ardour of your mind” (II. i. 86-88), and seek the kind of fame that follows upon exemplary self-control, friendship, and the patriotic defense of imperial order. To the love-struck Numidian this is bland fare, and he willfully rejects and misinterprets the way of life it seems to offer:

Let melancholy Monarchs Councel take,
Wed by advice and sullen Nuptials make.
But I prefer [Sophonisba] …
To all the wealth that Earth or Seas can hold,
…
Spight of proud Rome and all her haughty men.

(III. iv. 238-43)

Nevertheless, just as he has seen fate in Sophonisba's attractions, he perceives that Scipio's way is somehow the way of the gods: “O Rome! Oh Heaven: both equally my foes” (V. i. 310). Scipio, likewise, understands that he is carrying forward a providential design—“With me contending against fate you strive” (IV. i. 294)—and if Massinissa sees himself as drowning in a psychological and moral tempest, Scipio compares himself to the “Star fix'd” that commands and controls such earthly disturbances with the irresistibility of destiny (II. i. 99, and see V. i. 39-41).

If Massinissa's tragedy is most fully defined in his verbal exchanges with Scipio, Hannibal's tragedy is delineated as he interprets, with Rosalinda, the full significance of his military “dialogue” with the Roman Consul. In each case, the conclusion is the same: Scipio is heaven's new hero, and Roman order is to become fate's new steward. Of all the characters Hannibal is the most inquisitive about the providential implications of what is taking place. In his opening dialogue with Bomilcar and Maherbal he shares their feeling that time is now ripe for the “Gods” to give a decisive victory to Carthage or Rome, “As each might take up all the care of Heaven” (I. i. 86-91), and he tacitly accepts their nostalgia for “a Time … / When victory on Hills of Heroes sat” (I. i. 59-60). To such old-time heroism, he explicitly contrasts what he calls Scipio's “Civil brav'ry” (II. ii. 36), and he is brought to admit that while “fortune once did on our Genius shine” (V. i. 25), now she seems to have shifted her allegiance to a new kind of leadership. The dying words of Rosalinda are pitiably accurate: “The Roman glory [i.e., Scipio's star] shines too fatally bright” (V. i. 178). In his most pessimistic mood, upon witnessing the love-sick suicide of Massina, Hannibal bitterly resigns himself: “The bus'ness of our life's a senseless thing,” and we are mere “Sport for the Gods” (III. ii. 146-50). But at the play's end he accepts heaven's opposition as perhaps his greatest challenge, an opportunity to display his heroism on its most cosmic and glorious level: “I could the summons meet of hell or Heaven …” (V. i. 204).

Appropriately, it is to Hannibal, the transcendent hero, and not to the pragmatic and temperate Scipio, that the designs of fate are revealed through supernatural omens. As usual, Lee employs his prodigies carefully, making their spectacular effects symbolize key aspects of plot or theme. In Act II Hannibal witnesses two suns, which become two gigantic warriors wearing diamond-studded armor, locked in battle while black demons drum hollow clouds and blow trumpets inlaid with sunbeams. Mountains are buried, household deities sweat, temples drop their garlands, a wolf and wild boar spread carnage through the Carthaginian army, and voices cry “Carthage is fal'n” (II. ii. 56-83 and stage directions). Perhaps the wolf and boar are Carthage's own self-destructive politicians, while the two warrior-suns symbolize the natural opposition that exists between Hannibal's heroic valor and Scipio's civil bravery. The prediction of defeat for Carthage foreshadows the actuality and drives Hannibal to seek more detailed prophecies, a determination that is intensified by what he feels is the senseless death of Massina: thus, he must “know to what good or ill this lifes design'd” and will go “for the great secret to the Gods” (III. ii. 170-79). What he learns there, through the blood-sacrificing priestesses in Bellona's temple, is that Rome will prevail over Carthage, even though Hannibal himself will survive “spight of fortune and fate: / And the Gods that oppose” (IV. i. 50-81). When this fails to satisfy him, he demands further details, this time from the underworld, and is shown a dreadful vision of Rosalinda dying. When events confirm all these predictions, Hannibal readily perceives it—“Dire Goddess of war, / Too true … thy presages” (V. i. 155-56)—and girds himself for the ultimate heroism in combat against fate herself.

III. “MODERN” HEROISM

It should be fairly evident now that Sophonisba is no formulaic heroic play and that its two story-lines are both clearly conceived and well knit into a meaningful whole. Instead of using action and utterance to figure forth some admirable idea of greatness, Lee dramatizes the struggle of alternative kinds of heroism and love to survive the unfolding of a new sociopolitical order. He draws our attention to this central concern when, in the Epilogue, he asks the readers and auditors not to be surprised if he embodies various types of love (from that of Catullus to that of Ovid) and heroism (from Homeric to Virgilian). This approach to characterization was, of course, not unique to Lee, but the distinctive way in which he adapted it to his own ends is interestingly revealed by contrast to Dryden's similar technique in The Conquest of Granada (1670-71). There, Dryden divides heroic traits between the irregular, Herculean greatness of Almanzor and the “correct” heroic virtue of Ozmyn. As the play develops, however, the two heroic types are seen to converge as they approach—in time, place, and attitudes—their ultimate enfoldment by Ferdinand, the idealized hero-king. Thus, like most heroic plays, this one works toward a final definition of “true” heroism, and all the alternatives—including unheroic variations like Zulema, Abdalla, and Abdelmelech—sooner or later become subsumed in the controlling idea, or succumb, usually through death, to its enveloping power. Similarly, the various gradations of love/lust—from Lyndaraxa's Hobbesian desire for power (and Zulema's desire for carnal pleasure), to Almahide's agonized balance of conflicting commitments, to Benzayda's ideally constant devotion—are dramatized to show the definitive emergence of some ideal combination, in love, of Christian and pagan virtues, an ideal the lovers approach in the person of Isabella, the perfect lover-queen.

Not so in Sophonisba. Lee's characters are not choreographed to move symbolically toward some ideal reconciliation of opposite traits. Neither pair of lovers—Hannibal/Rosalinda or Massinissa/Sophonisba—manage to effect a relationship that can grow with the changing times. As the times change, so do the requirements for heroism and love—and with a vengeance. Isabella gains her husband's consent to the proposition that intense love will breed intensely patriotic heroism in the new Christian kingdom. In Lee's play Scipio can agree to nothing of the sort. He discourages Massinissa's amorous passion, and, when he himself once feels moved by a woman's charms (Rosalinda's), his response is to resist with all the self-control of his “yet unshaken Soul” which “No force of War, or Love cou'd ever wound” (III. i. 28-29). Like Ferdinand and his Christian state, Scipio and the Roman order he serves prevail in the world of the play, but this dominance is not achieved, in Scipio's case, by inspiring allegiance in key opponents. The Roman Empire displaces its opposition, and there is no simultaneous fusing of diverse strengths among the combatants and no purging of villainous weaknesses.

This is because Sophonisba is not an heroic play but rather a dramatic paradigm for the tragedy of heroism in the “modern” world. Far more significantly than it looks back to The Conquest of Granada, it looks forward to All for Love (1677); indeed, we may regard it as a source for the later play. To see All for Love as the heir to tendencies in Aureng-Zebe (1675)¹⁰ is perhaps a less instructive exercise than to see it as an adaptation of Shakespeare along lines strongly suggested by Lee's two recent successes, Sophonisba and The Rival Queens (1676/7). As David Vieth has noted, Dryden must have been influenced by the following elements in The Rival Queens: its casting, blank verse, emphasis on a clash of cultures (Persia/Macedonia, Egypt/Rome), and structural focus on a flawed hero (Alexander, Antony) as related to his antithesis (Cassander, Alexas), rival lovers (Statira/Roxana, Cleopatra/Octavia), stoical counsellor (Clytus, Ventidius), and effeminate friend (Hephestion, Dolabella).¹¹ Yet some of these same elements were also present in the earlier Lee play, along with other aspects of theme, characterization, and structure that suggest an even stronger influence on Dryden. As in The Rival Queens, most of the key roles in Sophonisba were played by actors who took equivalent parts in All for Love: Charles Hart, who created both Alexander and Antony, played Massinissa; Thomas Clark, the Hephestion and Dolabella of the later plays, played Massina; Michael Mohun was Hannibal, and later Clytus and Ventidius; and Elizabeth Boutell, the Rosalinda of 1681 (the Oxford revival), was later to play Statira and Cleopatra. Moreover, the clash of cultures is as important in Sophonisba as in the subsequent plays. Massinissa gives up for Sophonisba not only worldly treasures but also his short-lived attempt to manacle his instinctive self, his passionate nature, in service to the Roman virtues of rational self-control and pragmatic relationships. Hence the Africans of the play—Hannibal, Massinissa, Massina, Sophonisba—are repeatedly compared to warm or tempestuous images from physical nature (storms, powerful animals, flames), while the Romans, as represented by Scipio, are imaged as cold, emotionally distant engineers of an “artificial” empire.¹²

Though we see fewer similarities between Sophonisba and All for Love than between Dryden's play and The Rival Queens, there is a qualitatively more significant thematic and structural principle in the earlier Lee play that Dryden makes central to his design. This is the sense of an inexorable, not wholly sympathetic sociopolitical force pressing upon the more passionate characters. In both plays, this force is conceptualized as Rome and is personified by a Roman leader, Scipio or Octavius, whose dominance is felt to be more psychological than martial. In the process of confronting this force, the heroic lovers in both plays—Sophonisba/Massinissa, Cleopatra/Antony—reveal similar sets of attitudes (as mentioned above, p. 49) and reject worldly status and possession in order to achieve transcendent dominion in love.

But here the likenesses, and the apparent debts, cease. Dryden's focus remains fixed with Aristotelian concentration on the agonies and suicides of his two lovers, and his other characters subserve this primary interest. Lee, on the other hand, splits his attention between the heroic lovers, Sophonisba/Massinissa, and the two lover-heroes, Rosalinda/Hannibal. Furthermore, Dryden's narrow focus necessitates keeping Octavius offstage and so transforming him into a concept and a shadowy force, while Lee brings his Roman pragmatist, Scipio, before us and uses him not only to articulate the new heroics that will succeed the “Time … / When victory on Hills of Heroes sat” but also to provide a structural centerpiece. In The Rival Queens, Alexander performs the same structural function, but the dynamics of his position are radically different. Like an old star whose own spent energy collapses inward in a self-destructive catastrophe, Alexander's weakness allows his enemies, whom he has in a sense created, to destroy him. In Lee's Scipio, however, we have a strong central figure, a star on the rise, as he depicts himself (V. i. 41), and the consequence of his confronting opposition in Hannibal and Massinissa is their defeat, not his own. Alexander draws opposition inward like a vacuum; Scipio polarizes and drives away opposed forces as his field of energy expands. Eschewing his dull, calm determination, Rosalinda flees to the camp of Hannibal, the excitingly tempestuous hero; and Massinissa, rejecting Scipio's stoical attitude toward love, moves away to join passions with Sophonisba.

As we watch the concluding battle, in which these three centers of energy come together in a tragic catastrophe, we become provocatively aware that the play offers us no villains, no winners, no losers, no poetic justice. There is something to approve and something to regret in each set of combatants. Rosalinda dies nobly, but we may wish that she had sought fuller development as a lover, instead of giving all for honor. Hannibal is admirably determined to fight on heroically against fate itself, yet we wish pride had not blocked out the prospect of his injecting a little Herculean energy into the new sociopolitical order. Massina pathetically kills himself in a fit of love-melancholy, and we regret that he could not have learned enough Roman stoicism to get through his despair. Massinissa achieves his ethereal palace of love, but we cannot approve his vacillation between an honorable devotion to prowess and a passionate commitment to Sophonisba, and we regret his inability to find an earthly solution to his dilemma. Similarly, our attitude toward Sophonisba is mixed: her self-sacrifice seems both movingly virtuous and pathetically defeatist. Finally, we cannot help but feel repelled by Scipio's cool politics, self-righteously balanced psyche, and verbal assaults on “great Heroes” (II. i. 83) and “storms of Passion” (II. i. 53). Yet the kind of virtue he represents is not unseemly, and it is certainly practical. To maintain an orderly society and to orchestrate the diverse forces of a complex body politic, a sovereign must be self-possessed and capable of basing decisions on reasonable and practical criteria. Such virtues—those of a strong, patriotic manager—are to be respected, if not loved.

The contemporary relevance of these mixed responses, hinted at by Dryden in his Prologue, can be no more than just that: relevance—not specific parallel, allegory, or satire. Yet we may easily imagine that as Charles II watched this play—not only in 1675 when his climactic troubles were brewing as he idled with his mistresses, but also in 1680/1 when he was about to act decisively for a change—he sensed allusions to the present state of England. The alternative forms of heroism and love dramatized by Lee may well have seemed to imply Charles's own choices, and the results of those choices, both personal and public, would then have had their poignancy for the Merry Monarch. What of Massinissa's deadly failure to reconcile amorous passion and participation in the great public developments of his day? Can one become a Scipio without stoically subordinating his love life and his luxuries to patriotic duty? Are the high heroics of Hannibal and his dramatic predecessors merely anachronistic, unrealizable in the modern world?

Scipio's curious closing speech raises these issues to the level of tragic vision:

These unexpected objects [the corpses of Sophonisba and Massinissa] … amaze,
My reason …
…
With Carthage peace wee'l instantly conclud,
…
To Rome our Drooping Eagles … shall steer,
When after tiresome honours wee'l repair
To some small village …
And study not to live, but how to die.

(V. i. 425-34)

The effect of this lament is to shift the audience's attention from the victory of Roman arms and the ascendency of a new form of heroism, to the tragic loss of old-fashioned heroic love and honor. The loss is tragic because this new episode in providential history, this new ice age of Roman imperialism, has created an environment uncongenial to the great dinosaurs of prowess and passion; its gains are matched by losses, and a kind of blandly civilized ecology takes over the once primitively exotic terrain. Rome triumphs, but grand amour is extinct, and the once indomitable Hannibal desperately shakes a clenched fist at fate, while Scipio, with Charles II and the rest of the audience, leaves the theater to “study” the consequences.¹³

Notes

1. See “An Allusion to Horace, the Tenth Satyr of the First Book,” ll. 37-40, in The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. Vieth, p. 122; Henry Fielding, “H. Scriblerus Secundus; His Preface,” The Tragedy of Tragedies; or the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great (London and Dublin, 1731), n. pag.; Adolphus Ward, A History of English Dramatic Literature to the Death of Queen Anne, rev. ed. (London, 1899), III, 408-09; Hume, Development, p. 313; John Dryden, cited by Stroup and Cooke, Works, II, 76; Langbaine, Account (1691), ed. Loftis, II, 325-26.

2. Otway and Lee (1931; rpt. New York, 1969), p. 66.

3. History, I, 723.

4. Ideas of Greatness: Heroic Drama in England (New York, 1971), pp. 236-39.

5. For the historical background of this chapter, I rely chiefly on David Ogg, England in the Reign of Charles II (Oxford, 1955), esp. chs. I, IV-V, VIII-X, XV-XVII, XIX.

6. Eric Rothstein, Restoration Tragedy: Form and the Process of Change (Madison, 1967), pp. 81-85.

7. The best source study is Van Lennep's, pp. 94-120. Waith (pp. 236-39) is more easily accessible but is less thorough.

8. These sources, and other versions of the Sophonisba story, are more fully discussed by Van Lennep.

9. The Golden Labyrinth, pp. 159-60.

10. The view of Arthur C. Kirsch, “The Importance of Dryden's Aureng-Zebe,” ELH, XXIX (1962), 160-74.

11. “Introduction,” All for Love, ed. Vieth (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1972), pp. xxiii-xxv. In reviewing past discoveries of Dryden's literary debts in this play, Vieth, like all other scholars thus far, does not comment on its relation to Sophonisba.

12. For imagery relating to the Africans, see I.i.10, 144; II.i. 14-17, ii.106; IV.i.70-75, ii.92,113, iv.150; V.i.5-6, 79, 83, 224-25. Contrasting imagery associated with the Romans appears in II.i.53, 82-86, 99, 172; III.i.28-29, ii.92; IV.i.281-332; V.i.39-41.

13. This chapter is essentially the same as my article, “Hero as Endangered Species: Structure and Idea in Lee's Sophonisba,” DUJ, LXXI (1978), 35-43. I should note that while Thomas R. Edwards (Imagination and Power [New York, 1971]) does not discuss Lee, his tracing of “the disappearance of heroic man” in public poems indirectly reinforces my argument.

Selected Bibliography

Primary Sources

The Works of Nathaniel Lee. Ed. Thomas B. Stroup and Arthur L. Cook. 2 vols. 1954-55; rpt. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Reprint Corp., 1968.

Secondary Sources

Early Biography and Criticism

Langbaine, Gerard. An Account of the English Dramatic Poets (1691). Intro. John Loftis. Los Angeles: Clark Library, 1971.

Wilmot, John, Earl of Rochester. “An Allusion to Horace, the Tenth Satyr of the First Book.” The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Ed. David M. Vieth. New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1968.

Biography and Criticism: 1800-1900

Ward, A. W. A History of English Dramatic Literature to the Death of Queen Anne. New and Rev. Ed. London: Macmillan, 1899.

Biography: 1900-1978

Ham, Roswell Gray. Otway and Lee: Biography from a Baroque Age. 1931; rpt. New York: Greenwood Press, 1969.

Van Lennep, William. “The Life and Works of Nathaniel Lee, Dramatist: A Study of Sources.” Diss. Harvard 1933.

Criticism and Scholarship: 1900-1978

Armistead, J. M. “Hero as Endangered Species: Structure and Idea in Lee's Sophonisba.” DUJ, LXXI (1978), 35-43.

Hume, Robert D. The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon, 1976.

Knight, G. Wilson. The Golden Labyrinth: A Study of British Drama. London: Phoenix House, 1962.

Nicoll, Allardyce. A History of English Drama 1660-1900. Vol. I. 4th ed. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1952.

Rothstein, Eric. Restoration Tragedy: Form and the Process of Change. Madison, Milwaukee, and London: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1967.

Waith, Eugene. Ideas of Greatness: Heroic Drama in England. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1971.