SOURCE: Kastan, David Scott. “Nero and the Politics of Nathaniel Lee.” Papers on Language and Literature 13, no. 2 (1977): 125-35.

[In the following essay, Kastan argues that Nero is one of the earliest dramas to find fault with the political solutions initiated by the English Restoration.]

Many critics of Restoration tragedy have commented on the political dialogue that took place on the London stage following the discovery of the Popish Plot. Surprisingly, however, few have been willing to recognize any significant political content in the drama before 1678. George Whiting summarizes the common opinion when he acknowledges that “the theatres of London were involved in the political activity growing out of the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Bill in the last years of Charles II's reign.”¹ But this assumption, which finds a political concern in Restoration tragedy only after 1678, needs to be reconsidered in light of the intense political sensitivity of the age. The Popish Plot was but the culmination of the dissension that followed quickly upon the heels of the Restoration euphoria.

Nathaniel Lee seems to have felt keenly the betrayal of the Restoration promise, yet among his critics only Frances Barbour has noticed a clear political intent in the plays written prior to 1680.² Even John Loftis, disposed by the very nature of his study to discover topical meanings, finds only that “innuendo in Lee's early plays may or may not have been intended as a criticism of Charles's personal failings. …”³ Yet the political significance of Lee's early plays appears less problematic than Loftis suggests. Lee's monarchs display characteristics remarkably apposite to Charles. They sacrifice the governing of the state to their ungoverned passions; and, revealingly, the political doggerel of the 1670s levels the same charge at the English king. Rochester irreverently writes of his monarch that “his sceptre and his p———k are of a length, / And she may sway the one who plays with t'other.”⁴ In the face of a corrupt and self-indulgent court, the paeans of the Restoration soured. Panegyric turned to satire. John Lacy asks, “Was ever prince's soul so meanly poor / To be enslaved to ev'ry little whore?” (426). Charles's life of lustful excess became the primary focus of the swiftly growing ranks of the disenchanted. John Freke, in “The History of Insipids” (a poem often attributed to Rochester), writes:

Our Romish bondage-breaker Harry
          Espoused half a dozen wives;
Charles only one resolves to marry,
          And other men's he never swives.
Yet hath he sons and daughters more
Than e'er had Harry by threescore.

“All agree,” Freke adds, “'tis a lewd king” (244, 249).⁵

Against this background of political dissension, the actions of Lee's dissolute and despotic Nero must appear no less as evidence of an intended political application than as proof of the playwright's desire for sensational effects.⁶ The use of a plot drawn from classical history obviously does not argue against the claim of topical consciousness, for Lee's practice reflects the dominant seventeenth-century conception of historiography that finds the essential dignity of history in its ability to serve as a clarifying mirror for the present by providing appropriate parallels from the past.

But the historical parallels that one draws depend, of course, upon one's political vantage point. Royalists often found analogues of the reign of Charles II in the lawful rule of the biblical David;⁷ while those opposed to the court found them in the decadence of Rome. Like the author of “Further Advice to a Painter,” Charles's opponents found it easy to imagine “in one scene London and Rome” (164). The “Second Advice to a Painter,” written following the Dutch attack on Chatham Harbour in 1667, contains an instruction to “let the flaming London come in view, / Like Nero's Rome …” (36-37). The parallel becomes a glass in which the vices of the present age are exposed for recognition and amelioration, as in the “Fourth Advice,” where the poet offers an explicit comparison between Charles and Nero, focusing again upon the libidinous behavior of the Stuart monarch:

As Nero once, with harp in hand, survey'd
His flaming Rome and, as that burn'd, he play'd,
So our great Prince, when the Dutch fleet arriv'd,
Saw his ships burn'd and, as they burn'd, he swiv'd.

[146]

Seen in this context, Lee's Nero becomes almost explicitly a political play. I do not wish to suggest, however, that it functions as an allegory depending upon a rigid scheme of political typology, but rather that Lee's play has a foundation in the controversies regarding sovereignty that the failure of the Restoration settlement had engendered. The correspondences that do exist between contemporary politics and the classical subject matter of Nero are implicit parallels of situation rather than explicit parallels of character.⁸

Lee fully exploits the correspondence that most had been conditioned to see between Nero's Rome and Restoration England, but he does so with an aim that transcends showing, in Milton's phrase (with reference, however, to Charles I), “how like Nero Charles was.”⁹ Lee's interests are political, but they find their expression in conceptual rather than in exclusively personal terms. Nero's monstrous willfulness raises the issue of the royal prerogative that was the central political question of the reign of Charles II. The restored monarch sought at every turn to affirm the principle and practice of royal sovereignty. “He did not think he was a king,” writes Burnet, “as long as a company of fellows were looking into all his actions, and examining his ministers as well as his accounts.”¹⁰ From 1664 with the repeal of the Triennial Bill to the prorogued Parliaments of 1671-1673, Charles systematically moved to free himself from Parliament and to establish absolute rule. John Ayloffe, in a bitter satire on the Cabal, imagines Shaftesbury urging the king to “let other kingdoms see / Your will's your law: that's absolute monarchy” (195).¹¹

Even with his less than single-minded pursuit of “absolute monarchy,” Charles very nearly succeeded in centralizing power in the crown. He was for a time able to quiet the growing fears of absolutism by invoking divine sanctions of kingship and by assuring the populace that their protection lay precisely in such absolutism. The crown held, in Lord Guilford's words, that “a King is above ambition, and it will be easy to obtain justice from one who hath almost all he desires.”¹²

In Nero, however, Lee creates a ruler who mocks Guilford's assurance. Nero's first act, the sentencing of his mother Agrippina to death for her imagined hand in a plot against the throne, reveals the vulnerability of a state to the tyranny of unquestioned royal power. Britannicus appeals, if not for justice, for mercy for Agrippina, but is rebuffed by Nero: “But why, with you, do I capitulate? / My word's an Oracle, and stands her Fate” (1.1.92-93).¹³

Whatever hints exist in the classical histories to justify Nero's decision¹⁴ are eliminated in Lee's play, presumably to emphasize the unmotivated evil of Nero's actions. Nero callously commands that Agrippina “shall die,” while members of his court helplessly protest her innocence. But none is led to oppose Nero's “black intent” and Britannicus, even in the face of the matricide, affirms the doctrine of obedience that Royalists had traditionally advanced in England: “when e're I rise against that Sacred head / In thought, may loads of Thunder strike me dead. / You are my Master, and Rome's Emperour” (1.1.107-9).

Conservative Englishmen looked upon opposition to any ruler as a violation of the oftimes invoked injunction of Romans 13:1-2, which asserts that obedience to earthly powers is necessitated by their origin in the ordinance of God. This appeal to Divine Right was a recurring theme of the restored monarchy. David Ogg points out how carefully Charles “availed himself of the religious sanctions with which the Divine Right school surrounded the throne; he confirmed these sanctions by the assiduity and success with which he touched for the King's Evil, and no one could have worn more gracefully than did he the halo with which Anglican devotion sanctified the royal head.”¹⁵

The insistence upon the holy union of God and King, implicit in Britannicus's reference to Nero's “Sacred Head,” had been a commonplace of English political theory since the Reformation. Non-resistance was seen as being incumbent upon all individuals from both theological and secular perspectives. Samuel Parker maintained pragmatically that “the miseries of Tyranny are less, than those of Anarchy; and therefore 'tis better to submit to the unreasonable Impositions of Nero, or Caligula, than to hazard the dissolution of the State.”¹⁶

Yet events of the 1640s culminating in the beheading of Charles I attest that the doctrine of obedience had been rejected, or at least radically redefined, by a large percentage of the English populace. Parliamentarians argued that a tyrant had, by virtue of his failure to fulfill his sworn contract with his people, repudiated the role of King that properly demanded obedience.¹⁷ Milton, speaking for the proponents of contractual monarchy, held that “the power of Kings and Magistrates is nothing else, but what is only derivative, transferr'd and committed to them in trust from the People”; and having established the source of monarchical power, he defines a King as one “who governs to the good and profit of his people, and not for his own ends.”¹⁸

As Milton considers the basis of royal authority to be derivative, he must conclude “that it is Lawfull, and hath been held so through all ages, for any, who have the Power, to call to Account a Tyrant, or wicked King, and after due conviction, to depose, and put him to death.”¹⁹ In Nero it is Drusillus who echoes the assumptions of the regicides when he suggests that “some noble Roman should / Dare to be glorious, dangerously good, / And kill this Tyrant” (2.1.17-19).

Nero is, indeed, presented as the paradigm of the tyrant, explicitly rejecting the responsibilities of monarchy. “Let plegmatic [sic] dull KINGS, call Crowns their care: / Mine is my wanton” (1.2.137-38). In Milton's terms, he rules solely “for his own ends.” The rant that most critics have recognized (and condemned) in the play must be seen as contributing to this characterization. It is primarily Nero who speaks the much-abused fustian, and the stylistic excess is clearly designed to echo the “riot” of his throne.

Appropriately, the imagery of the sun, traditionally associated with kingship, is held to be unsuitable for the tyrant. Sylvius speaks of the Roman court as “a full Orb / Of matchless Glory, where your Emperor / Rules, like the Sun, and gives each noble, warmth.” But Otho answers, “Nothing appears, alas, as heretofore; / The darkness of his horrid vices, have / Eclips'd the glimmering rays of his frail virtue” (1.1.40-45). The sun of the monarchy is “eclips'd,” and Rome is plunged into darkness.²⁰ Unlike “Great Julius and Augustus” whose “glory shines now they are gone. / Because, with us, like Stars their virtues shone” (1.2.29-30), Nero holds that “Virtue's the greatest crime” (4.1.80), and his “black impieties” dominate the court.

Britannicus's madness, precipitated by Cyara's ironic masquerade that she is dead, is his inevitable response to this world that he believes to be totally emptied of goodness. His anguished cry, “O GODS! Devils! Hell, Heaven and Earth” (3.1.71), issues from his realization that Nero's evil blankets every sphere. If Cyara is dead, the last bright lamp of virtue that might have illumined the black court of Rome has gone out:

The Canopy of Heav'n is hung with Sable;
The Sun, like a great mourner, drives her Hearse,
Wrap'd round with clouds; each Star withdraws
His Golden head, and burns within his socket.
The whole cope is dark, black, dismal,
And mourns the sudden loss of fair Cyara.

[3.1.121-26]

Perhaps anomalously, Petronius, wooing Poppea for Nero, calls the Emperor “a flame, whose matchless splendor drowns the Stars” (3.2.3), but the flame is of the fire of lust and casts no light. Poppea quickly learns that “nothing agrees with Love so well as Night; / Hush'd, and in darkness hid …” (5.3.63-64). And Drusillus translates the iterative imagery of light and darkness into explicitly political terms by recognizing that the killing of Nero is the only way of “forcing a day, and making black night shine” (2.1.20). The corruption of Nero has so befouled the Empire that light cannot enter the world again until the tyrant is deposed.

In this context Britannicus's madness, caused by his vision of unrelieved suffering, becomes symbolic of the disorder of the Roman state: his mental disease mirrors the political dis-ease that infects the heart of the Empire. The correspondence between the internal condition of Britannicus and the situation of Rome is explicitly urged in the juxtaposition of the final scene of act 4 and the opening of the fifth act. At the end of act 4, Nero, goaded by the ghost of Caligula, decides to set fire to the city (a fire that itself would enforce a parallel between London and Rome):²¹

Nothing but flames can quench my kindled Ire:
Blood's not enough; Fire I'le revenge with fire.
Fierce as young Phaeton I will return:
Great ROME, the World's Metropolis, shall burn.

[4.4.55-58]

The parallel becomes unmistakable as Britannicus enters, at the beginning of the fifth act, “burning” with the fire of deadly poison. “I burn, I burn,” he cries, “Fire, fire, I'm all one flame, fly, my friends fly, / Or I shall blast you; O my breath is Brimstone, / My Lungs are Sulphur, my hot brains boil over” (5.1.1-3).

The reason for Lee's insistence upon this correspondence of body and state is not difficult to find. Britannicus suffers the fate of the nation because he is, in a very real sense, the embodiment of the nation. The historical Britannicus was poisoned several weeks before his fourteenth birthday in A.D. 55, thirteen years before the events with which Lee's play purports to deal.²² The violent distortion of the historical data leads William Van Lennap to conclude despairingly that Lee “could scarcely deal with historical facts and misrepresent them more completely”;²³ but Lee's “misrepresentation” should be seen more as a signal of artistic intent than evidence of historical ignorance. Racine had, in the second preface to his Britannicus, declared that “the age of Britannicus was so well known that it was not permitted me to depict him other than as a young prince who had much spirit, much love, and much sincerity, ordinary qualities in a young man.”²⁴ Lee's decision to depart from such “well known” facts can best be explained by his desire to capitalize upon the extreme aptness of the name, with its deliberate suggestion of “Britain.”²⁵ The fact is that Britannicus suffers, as Britain herself suffers in 1674, for the political failures of the monarchy.

But if Britannicus is to be identified with the political fate of England, his destruction must therefore betray a deep pessimism. No answers to Lee's agonizing questioning about the nature of sovereignty appear in this play or in any other of the tragedies written prior to 1680. In Nero he presents a tyrant and the two polar responses to tyranny that had been defined in the political dialogue of the preceding thirty years. Yet neither the loyalism of Britannicus nor the proximate republicanism of Drusillus emerges as a viable response to Nero's murderous tyranny. To suffer the tyrant is to consent to the rape of the state; to oppose him is to substitute chaos for despotism.

Confronted with the evils of the court and the political dilemma, Plautus's cry is understandable. “[W]here is Astrea fled? / Foul vice Triumphs, trampling on Virtues head” (2.3.90-91). Astraea, goddess of Justice, is absent from the moral landscape of Nero, but the mythological explanation for the ascendancy of vice in the corrupt political world of the Roman court is not without contemporary sting. The audience of Lee's play would certainly remember that Dryden had hailed Charles's return in Astraea Redux (1660). The restoration of the English king is seen by Dryden to reinstitute a time of peace and justice. As the epigraph to his panegyric, Dryden chooses the famous line of Virgil's fourth Ecologue: Iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna—“now the Virgin [i.e., Astraea] returns, the reign of Saturn returns.” Lee, however, perhaps sobered by the ensuing fourteen years, sees no evidence in Restoration England that the Golden Age has come again. His text is implicitly Ovidian rather than Virgilian. In the Golden Age, writes Ovid, under the rule of Saturn, men were virtuous and lived according to the laws of nature; but by degrees men degenerated to evil, and the age of gold became an iron age. Piety was vanquished, and the virgin Astraea, the last of the immortals, fled the earth—terras Astraea reliquit.²⁶

Astraea's flight heralds the origin of politics. Justice no longer resides on earth, and civil law becomes necessary to restrain man's sinfulness. The very nature of politics, rather than any specific form of it, occasions Lee's political pessimism. Like Antony Ascham, Lee seems to understand that all laws “grow out of vices, which makes all governments carry with them the causes of their own corruption.”²⁷ In Nero Lee sees the terrible threat of arbitrary rule, but he offers no easy alternative. Any form of government is an imperfect, though an imperative, response to our fallen condition. Thus, even in his repudiation of the course of the English monarchy after the restoration, Lee never reflects the arrogance of one like the embittered Freke who could write:

Of kings curs'd be the power and name,
          Let all the earth henceforth abhor 'em;
Monsters which knaves sacred proclaim
          And then like slaves fall down before 'em.
What can there be in kings divine?
The most are wolves, goats, sheep, or swine.

[251]

Rather than any historically necessitated theory of sovereignty, Lee advances a limited and pragmatic conception. In The Rival Queens Lysimachus asks Alexander, “To whom does your dread majesty bequeath / The Empire of the World?” Alexander's curt reply is an important element in Lee's understanding of proper kingship: “To him that is most worthy.”²⁸ But the nature of royal worth is, of course, difficult to determine. Lee certainly does not hold with Dryden's King Boabdelin that “tis true from force the noblest title springs”;²⁹ nor with Caesario in Gloriana that by mere fact of royal birth he is “the World's lawfull Heir” (184). Alexander revealingly has commented not upon the source, but rather upon the use of sovereignty. For Lee, worthiness resides only in those few who, as Seneca instructs Nero, “do well and noble acts Atchieve” (1.2.48). The primary responsibility for the monarch is to obey the dictum of Britannicus to “make right use of pow'r” (1.1.110). Yet Nero and, by suggestion, Charles conceive of power only as a vehicle for satisfying private lust rather than public need.

It might be objected that the triumphant entrance of Galba into Rome in the final scene of Nero belies my discussion of Lee's cautious political pessimism. But the ending of the play should be read with care, for finally the sense of restoration in Lee's play is slight. The ending is conventional and unconvincing, yet perhaps this is as it should be. Galba is welcomed in ways that too nearly recall Nero's tyranny:

Let's to the FORUM haste, and there proclaim
A mighty donative in Galba's name.
With all the Pomp ‘Oth’ Court his Camp wee'll meet,
And his approach with Joyful shoutings greet:
Proclaim him Emperour with Trumpets Sound
While he, now made a God, shall scorn the ground,
And, on our shoulders ride, with Lawrels Crown'd.

[5.3.242-48]

Galba's rule may prove no better than Nero's, for the essential question about the royal prerogative has not been resolved. Galba is proclaimed a god as Nero deified himself,³⁰ and what is certain is that the nature of the monarchy has not changed. The state would again be at the mercy of a willful and coercive ruler should Galba “scorn the ground” in a sense different from that which Piso intends.

But there is a second, more compelling reason why the ending of Nero cannot be viewed as being properly restorative. Suetonius, the classical source for the events of the final years of Nero's reign, emphasizes the instability of Galba's seven-month rule, noting that “many prodigies in rapid succession from the very beginning of his reign had foretold Galba's end.”³¹ His entrance into Rome, like that of Charles into London, was indeed hailed by the admiring populace, but also like the English king, he did not succeed in bringing peace to the land. Following the death of Nero, four men, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and Vespasian, struggled for control for almost a full year. During this period, as the seventeenth-century historian Edmund Bolton writes, Rome had “to suffer a Nymphidivs, a Galba, an Otho, a Vitellivs, and all the bloudy confusions inseperable to sidings for the imperiall garland … nothing being tolerable, during that whole space of time, but onely the shortness of it.”³² Finally in December of A.D. 69, it was Vespasian, and not Galba, who prevailed and succeeded in restoring order to the badly shaken Empire. Only then, as H. H. Scullard writes, could Rome “once more believe in herself and in her future.”³³

But Lee, at least in 1675, is decidedly pessimistic about the future of Restoration England. The tragic tonality of Nero is a reflection of Lee's political thought: no Vespasian appears to grant a final vision of political ideality because nothing in the experience of seventeenth-century England suggested such a possibility. The failure of the monarchy in the England of Charles II, as in Nero's Rome, raised again the hateful spectre of political disorder. With the memory of one revolution fresh and the possibility of another growing, it was easy to conclude that “Time, and dark Chaos, will devour us all” (4.3.22).

Notes

1. “Political Satire on the London Stage,” Modern Philology 28 (1930): 29. See also Allardyce Nicoll, “Political Plays of the Restoration,” Modern Language Review 16 (1921): 224-42; George W. Whiting, “The Condition of the London Theatre 1679-83: A Reflection of the Political Situation,” Modern Philology 25 (1927): 195-206.

2. “The Unconventional Heroic Plays of Nathaniel Lee,” University of Texas Studies in English 20 (1940): 109-16.

3. The Politics of Drama in Augustan England (Oxford, 1963), p. 15.

4. Poems on Affairs of State, ed. George deForest Lord, vol. 1, 1660-1678 (New Haven, 1963), p. 424; further references are to this edition and are cited by page within the text. Lee, it should be remembered, dedicated Nero to the irrepressible Rochester.

5. Charles is known to have had at least thirteen illegitimate children by eight mistresses. See Maurice Ashley, Charles II (London, 1971), pp. 144-54. The attribution of the poem to Freke is made by Frank Ellis, “John Freke and The History of the Insipids,” Philological Quarterly 44 (1965): 472-83.

6. The usual estimation of Lee's Nero is that it is one of a group of “crude, undigested melodramas, depending upon violent action and bloody show for their shock effect.” See John Harold Wilson, A Preface to Restoration Drama (London, 1965), p. 64.

7. Bernard Schilling, Dryden and the Conservative Myth (New Haven, 1961), pp. 268-71.

8. See John Wallace, “Dryden and History: A Problem in Allegorical Reading,” ELH 36 (1969): 265-90; and David M. Veith, “Concept as Metaphor: Dryden's Attempted Stylistic Revolution,” Language and Style 3 (1970): 197-204.

9. Defence of the People of England, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 6 vols. (New Haven, 1966), vol. 4, pt. 1, ed. Don M. Wolfe, p. 451.

10. Gilbert Burnet, The History of My Own Time, ed. Osmund Airy (Oxford, 1897), pp. 2, 3.

11. See also J. H. Plumb, The Origins of Political Stability: England 1675-1725 (Boston, 1967). Plumb calls 1668 “that vital year of decision in which Charles II must have decided to move more determinedly along the path towards arbitrary government” (p. 17).

12. As quoted in David Ogg, England in the Reign of Charles II, 2d ed., 2 vols. (Oxford, 1956), 2:451.

13. The Tragedy of Nero, in The Works of Nathaniel Lee, ed. Thomas B. Stroup and Arthur L. Cooke, 2 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J., 1954), 1:29. All references to Nero are cited from this edition and identified by act, scene, and line in parentheses following the quotation.

14. Tacitus, for instance, emphasizes Agrippina's desire to consolidate power for herself. The Annals of Tacitus, Books XI-XVI, trans. George Gilbert Ramsay (London, 1909), pp. 122, 178.

15. England in the Reign of Charles II, 2:451-52.

16. A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie (London, 1670), p. 215.

17. The restored Monarchy sought emphatically to deny the “damnable doctrine” that civil authority derives from the people. Clarendon felt that the last vestiges of the “late rebellion could not be destroyed until ‘the King's regal and inherent power and prerogative should be fully avowed and vindicated …’” (Ogg, p. 450).

18. Complete Prose Works of John Milton (New Haven, 1962), vol. 3, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes, p. 202.

19. Ibid., 3:202.

20. 1.1.44; 2.1.2; 2.1.20; 2.3.134; 4.1.120; 5.1.74; passim.

21. Caligula's ghost threatens Rome with “raging Plagues” as well as with fire, which would have inevitably suggested to Lee's audience the terrible plague and fire of 1666.

22. The Annals of Tacitus, pp. 130-33.

23. “The Life and Works of Nathaniel Lee Dramatist” (Dissertation, Harvard University, 1933), p. 72.

24. Britannicus, trans. Eric Vaughn (San Francisco, 1962), p. 8.

25. “Britannicus” was an eponymous epithet given to Tiberius Claudius Germanicus by his father Claudius after the invasion of Britain by Claudius in A.D. 44.

26. Metamorphoses, 1:149-50. See also Francis Yates, “Queen Elizabeth as Astraea,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 10 (1947): 27-82.

27. Of the Confusions and Revolutions of Governments [sic] (London, 1649), p. 77.

28. The Works of Nathaniel Lee, 1:280. Alexander's bequest to the “most worthy” is, of course, reported in Lee's source. Quintus Curtius writes in his De Rebus Gestis Alexandri Magni (Paris, 1678), EEe2^r, “Quaerentibusque his cui relinquerit regnum, respondit, ei qui esset optimus” (10.4.5).

29. The Conquest of Granada, Dryden: Dramatic Works, ed. Montague Summers 6 vols. (1932; rpt. New York, 1968), 3:37.

30. “I am a GOD; my self I Canonize” (1.2.28).

31. Suetonius, trans. J. C. Rolfe (Cambridge, Mass., 1914), p. 219. Tacitus' account, as is well known, breaks off in the sixteenth book, carrying the narration only to A.D. 66.

32. Nero Caesar, or Monarchie depraued (London, 1623 [for 1624]), 203^v.

33. From the Gracchi to Nero (London, 1959), pp. 330-32.