SOURCE: Loftis, John. Introduction to Lucius Junius Brutus, by Nathaniel Lee, edited by John Loftis, pp. xi-xxiv. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967.

[In the following excerpt, Loftis examines the stage history of Lucius Junius Brutus, focusing on the play's anti-monarchical themes, which caused the work to be banned by royal order.]

The first edition of Lucius Junius Brutus, the only one to appear in Lee's lifetime, is a quarto printed for Richard and Jacob Tonson in 1681: it was recorded in The Term Catalogues for Trinity Term (June) of that year.¹ …

Although able critics have praised Lucius Junius Brutus warmly,² it had a very short original run, and it was never again performed in London (though it was revived briefly in Dublin in 1738, according to The Dublin News-Letter, April 22 to 25). Produced by the Duke's Company acting in the Dorset Garden Theatre early in December, 1680, it was presented only a few days before it was suppressed by the Lord Chamberlain. We know little about the production except what can be inferred from the names of the actors printed with their roles in the dramatis personae of the first edition. Thomas Betterton, then at the height of his powers, played Brutus, and he may be assumed to have given the role an appropriate dignity. His wife played Lucrece, and it is probably significant that a woman of her reputation for virtue should have had the part. Elizabeth Barry, appropriately enough for the actress who had earlier distinguished herself as Roxana in Lee's The Rival Queens, had the passionate role of Teraminta; and opposite her in the role of Titus was William Smith, one of the company's most accomplished actors. The comedian James Nokes had the part of Vinditius, a circumstance assuring us that the character (who, as will be argued below, is intended to represent Titus Oates) was portrayed in a broad and comic fashion. With actors of such talents performing in it, there is reason enough to believe the assertion made much later in The Poetical Register that the audience received the play “with great Applause.”³

The Lord Chamberlain's order of suppression, dated December 11, 1680, cites the play's political offences: “Whereas I am informed that there is Acted by you a Play called Lucius Junius Brutus … wherein are very Scandalous Expressions & Reflections vpon y^e Government these are to require you Not to Act y^e said Play again.”⁴ Testimony as to how many days the play had run is conflicting. Charles Gildon, writing in 1703 in the preface to The Patriot, his adaptation of Lucius Junius Brutus, says that it was acted only three days before it was silenced “as an antimonarchical play, and wrote when the nation was in a ferment of Whig and Tory as a compliment to the former.” Yet the entry for the play in The Term Catalogues says that it ran six days before it was prohibited, a statement supported by a manuscript note of William Oldys asserting that John Boman the actor told him it ran that long.⁵ The stronger evidence would thus suggest six days.

Although Lucius Junius Brutus was never again acted in London, it provided the basis for an independent play, Gildon's The Patriot of 1703, which, despite the fact that its setting is Renaissance Italy, takes over half its lines from Lee.⁶ Gildon explains in his preface that he first revised Lucius Junius Brutus by merely removing from it all passages reflecting on monarchy. When the Master of the Revels refused to license it, Gildon substituted Cosmo de Medici for Brutus as protagonist, a change made possible by a parallel between their careers, and this time the play was licensed, though even with its reduced political voltage Gildon took care to provide it with a prologue disclaiming anti-monarchical principles.

When Lucius Junius Brutus is read with knowledge of the political events of 1680, it is easy enough to understand why it was not permitted on the stage once its import was understood. Like other seventeenth-century Englishmen, Lee had looked to Roman history for illustration of his political beliefs, and he had found events he could reinterpret as a commentary on the English constitutional crisis precipitated by the Popish Plot. The play could scarcely have been permitted at any time during Charles II's reign, and least of all in December, 1680, two years after Titus Oates' allegations about a Jesuit plot to murder the king had plunged the nation into turmoil, a time when the fate of the Exclusion Bill had not yet been determined, only three months before the Oxford Parliament with its threat of revolution. Lee cannot have been unaware that he was writing anti-Catholic propaganda. His play is a part of the literature of the Popish Plot, containing, in the episodes of the conjuration against the new Roman republic, a loosely allegorical version of the Plot as it was envisioned by the Whigs.

The play is, by implication, a statement of the Whig constitutional position during the Exclusion controversy, the more significant because of its date, eight years before the Revolution and a decade before the publication of Locke's Two Treatises on Government. Lee's subject, Brutus' expulsion of Tarquin and the establishment of the Roman republic, was a precedent often cited in the seventeenth century by theorists who advocated a form of government with powers divided among a chief of state, an aristocracy, and the people; for many seventeenth-century theorists it provided, as modern scholarship has demonstrated, an example of the superiority of a “mixed” form of government (i.e., government in which there is a division of powers) over a “pure” form of government such as absolute monarchy.⁷ In dramatizing the career of Brutus, Lee associated himself by implication with such seventeenth-century “classical republicans” as John Milton; and that he did so with knowledge of the relevant issues in political theory is implied by his allusion in his dedicatory epistle to Machiavelli's Discorsi sopra la Prima Deca di Tito Livio. Machiavelli was one of the most influential expositors of the classical theory—expressed by Polybius and Cicero, among others—of the instability of a pure form of government in contrast with the stability of a mixed government.⁸

A play about a revolution that had as its result the substitution of a republic for a monarchy, Lucius Junius Brutus is a celebration of constitutionalism; the king's violation of constitutional principles provides a justification for the revolution, in Lee as indeed earlier in the historians of Rome. Brutus accuses Tarquin, in his inflammatory speech over the dead body of Lucrece, of

Invading fundamental right and justice,
Breaking the ancient customs, statutes, laws,
With positive power and arbitrary lust;
And those affairs which were before dispatched
In public by the fathers, now are forced
To his own palace, there to be determined
As he and his portentous council please.

(II.i.179-185)

Livy had described Tarquin's violation of the senate's constitutional rights:

Hic enim regum primus traditum a prioribus morem de omnibus senatum consulendi solvit, domesticis consiliis rem publicam administravit; bellum, pacem, foedera, societates per se ipse, cum quibus voluit, iniussu populi ac senatus, fecit diremitque. Latinorum sibi maxime gentem conciliabat, ut peregrinis quoque opibus tutior inter cives esset, neque hospitia modo cum primoribus eorum, sed adfinitates quoque iungebat. Octavio Mamilio Tusculano—is longe princeps Latini nominis erat, si famae credimus, ab Ulixe deaque Circa oriundus—ei Mamilio filiam nuptum dat perque eas nuptias multos sibi cognatos amicosque eius conciliat.⁹

No very lively imagination is required to see the relevance of all this to Stuart policy, to that of Charles I as well as that of Charles II, both of whom circumvented Parliament and cultivated a foreign power, France, by matrimonial alliance as well as by other means. At the time the play was performed, Charles II was receiving large subsidies from Louis XIV, which in limited measure freed him from dependence on Parliament.¹⁰ The play repeatedly comments on constitutional issues. Brutus' exposition to the senate of the need for a monarch to limit himself by law has an inescapable application to Restoration politics:

Laws, rules, and bounds, prescribed for raging kings,
Like banks and bulwarks for the mother seas,
Though 'tis impossible they should prevent
A thousand daily wracks and nightly ruins,
Yet help to break those rolling inundations
Which else would overflow and drown the world.

(III.ii.11-16)

At a time when the Stuart conception of the royal prerogative was in dispute, a resounding declamation of such lines would have sounded like a Whig manifesto. In the absence of contemporary records, we may only guess at the excitement produced by Betterton's dignified and rhetorical delivery of them.

Lee's attack on the Catholics in Lucius Junius Brutus is blunt and direct. The conjuration, led by priests who employ a religious ritual resembling a Catholic mass to intimidate their superstitious followers, conveys some notion of the fears which haunted the Whigs during that troubled era. Tiberius' sadistic account, early in Act IV, of the conspirators' plans for taking over Rome sounds like a rendering of current talk about the Jesuits' plans for taking over London. The conspirators' objective is to overthrow a constitutional government and re-establish an absolute monarchy; their plans, as they are subsequently revealed in captured documents, resemble the alleged program of the Popish Plot:

The sum of the conspiracy to the king.
It shall begin with both the consuls' deaths,
And then the senate; every man must bleed,
But those that have engaged to serve the king.

(IV.i.255-258)

The plot is frustrated by a crafty and persistent informer, Vinditius (mentioned by both Plutarch and Livy), apparently representing Titus Oates, for the two resemble each other not only in the supposed service to their respective nations but also in their unamiable characteristics of self-importance and ambition. “Why, what, they'll make me a senator at least,” says Vinditius (IV.i.218-219), “And then a consul,” in what sounds like a satirical reference to Titus Oates' expectation of a bishopric. All this is enough to have satisfied that Restoration fondness for crypto-history to which Dryden appealed a few months later in his Tory poem Absalom and Achitophel.

The political theme of Lucius Junius Brutus, which points on the one hand back to the Interregnum, to Cromwell and John Milton, and on the other forward to the Revolution, to William III, Nicholas Rowe, and Joseph Addison, provides an illuminating contrast to that of Dryden's great political poem.¹¹ Dryden's frightened horror at mob violence is not unlike Lee's at royal tyranny. Dryden's emotional veneration for monarchy would soon become obsolete; Lee's conception of constitutionalism in a government of divided powers would soon be generally accepted, though the anti-monarchical and republican implications of the play provided difficulties even after the Revolution. Thus, although we find Lee's play again forbidden in the first years of the eighteenth century, we encounter in the 1730's two more, though much inferior, dramatizations of Brutus' defiance of Tarquin, William Bond's The Tuscan Treaty; Or, Tarquin's Overthrow (Covent Garden, 1733) and William Duncombe's Junius Brutus (Drury Lane, 1734), and both of them point a political moral similar to Lee's. This political moral is all but inevitable in any sympathetic rendering of the story of Brutus, appearing to some extent even in Voltaire's French tragedy on the subject.

Even in Livy the story has political implications. Looking to the remote past, Livy found examples of antique Roman virtue and fortitude—Lucrece's resolution not to outlive the loss of her chastity; Brutus' subordination of paternal affection to the needs of the state—and he described them with a didactic purpose. Like his contemporaries Virgil and Horace he enjoyed the personal friendship of the Emperor Augustus, and like them he gave literary expression to political ideals the Emperor found congenial.¹² The veneration for Rome in her history that animates the first Decade of Ab Urbe Condita, it has been noted, resembles the veneration for the Roman past, quasi-religious in character, that permeates the Aeneid.¹³ And thus the generations of Englishmen who liked to think of themselves as Augustans could find in Livy, especially in his first ten books, examples of idealized conduct that confirmed their conception of ancient Rome. Livy's Romans of the monarchy and early republic, above all, perhaps, Brutus, who bridged the two periods, provided for the English Augustans, as they had for the Romans who were Livy's contemporaries, classic examples of heroic virtue.

Here, in the adaptation and naturalization of a group of Roman heroes, is a major component of English “Augustanism.” Insofar as the term was more than merely an evaluative one of self-congratulation, it implied an admiration for and an emulation of the personal and literary standards and achievements of Virgil and his contemporaries. In Lucius Junius Brutus Lee gives us one of the most satisfactory renderings of a Roman myth turned to English uses. Employing the historians as intermediaries, he takes on the ideological coloration of the Roman Augustan Age—and turns it to the service of the Whigs.

The vehement Whiggism of Lucius Junius Brutus notwithstanding, Lee's two later plays, The Duke of Guise (1682), in which he collaborated with Dryden, and Constantine the Great (about 1683), are Tory in bias. His early plays had been largely free of politics, at most glancing in innuendo at the licentiousness of Charles II. But in Caesar Borgia of 1679 he had taken as subject a notorious despot, using him in an arraignment of Catholicism and tyranny alike, and this during the excitement over the Popish Plot; and probably it was at about the same time that he wrote the dramatization of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, The Massacre of Paris, which was not permitted on the stage during Charles' reign. His conversion to the Tory position in 1682 thus represented a complete change in his political allegiance. Perhaps he was influenced by his friend and collaborator Dryden, who also moved in a conservative direction; perhaps both of them merely changed with the nation, which during 1681 experienced a revulsion from Whig extremism. In any event The Duke of Guise resembles Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel in its political theme, with sixteenth-century France rather than ancient Israel providing the vehicle for allegory: the title character, an unprincipled political adventurer, represents the Whig candidate for succession, the Duke of Monmouth, and he is more harshly treated than is the Absalom of the poem. It was in the following year, 1683, so far as we can determine, that Lee wrote Constantine the Great, which includes an idealized rendering of a character representing the Duke of York and a condemnatory one of a character representing the Whig Earl of Shaftesbury.¹⁴ All this is testimony to the completeness of the Tory victory.

Lucius Junius Brutus is less systematically allegorical than these two later plays, each of which has characters that resemble historical persons and a plot that parallels historical events. Apart from the conjuration which suggests the Popish Plot and the character Vinditius who resembles Titus Oates, little in Lucius Junius Brutus can be considered specifically allegorical. Its relevance to politics is thematic: the celebration of constitutionalism and the denunciation of royal tyranny; and this is inherent in the choice of subject. Any English play about Lucius Junius Brutus had to be a Whig play. Because allegory was unnecessary to make the political point, the play could have a focus on the career of its historical protagonist; and thus it could be more than merely a party piece to be interpreted with the aid of a key. Both The Duke of Guise and Constantine the Great suffer from the cleverness of their sustained parallels with historical events. By contrast Lucius Junius Brutus retains its integrity as a tragedy, possessing a political theme merely as a complicating and enriching dimension.

However important for the play Livy's Ab Urbe Condita may have been, Lee drew on other accounts of Brutus, fictional as well as historical.¹⁵ He apparently consulted The Roman Antiquities of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, as would appear from his use of distinctive words that seem to be translations from that author; and he certainly consulted Plutarch's life of Valerius Publicola. The sacrificial scene early in Act IV, in which the conspirators pledge themselves in human blood to the conjuration while Vinditius (Vindicius) looks on from hiding, derives in some detail from Plutarch—though Livy also includes an account of Vindicius' spying. (We may indeed wonder if the aptness of the episode to current talk about secret meetings of Jesuits might not have attracted Lee to the subject.) And as Lee implies in his dedicatory epistle, he read Machiavelli's comments on Livy's account of Brutus, presumably taking from Machiavelli the conception of Brutus' exemplary judgment on his sons as necessary to the firm establishment of the Roman constitution.¹⁶

Still, it was not to the historians or political theorists that he turned for his principal elaborations on Livy's story but to a writer of historical fiction, Madeleine de Scudéry, whose Clelia (to use the English title of the translation he probably read) includes a long, romanticized version of Brutus' life from his boyhood to the execution of his sons. Lee had frequently looked to the French romances, and particularly those of Madeleine de Scudéry, for his subjects; his plays provide impressive testimony to the impact on Restoration drama made by French romances. In several plays he used episodes from the lives of famous people of antiquity—Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Augustus Caesar, among others—and characteristically he used the French romances as supplements to the ancient historians, feeling no more reluctance than the French writers from whom he borrowed to depart from and elaborate on historical record. Thus in Lucius Junius Brutus he follows Madeleine de Scudéry in introducing a love affair to complicate a son's conflict of loyalties, though he departs from the French love plot in important particulars; and he does not follow Mlle. de Scudéry in depicting Brutus as once having been in love with Lucrece. Yet he may have expected his audience to know about the relationship as described in Clelia. The extended and detailed account of Brutus in the romance, which was widely read in London at the time Lee was writing, enabled him to assume a knowledge of events in Brutus' life not explained in the play: the reason, for example, why Brutus had assumed the disguise of stupidity (to protect himself from Tarquin, who had killed his brother and father and confiscated their property). In his frequently elliptical exposition, Lee wrote as though he was dramatizing well-known events, and so indeed he was except that many details are to be traced to Madeleine de Scudéry's historical fiction rather than to the classical historians. The major events and much of the moral and political interpretation of them are present in the historians; the emotional amplification derives in considerable measure from the French romance.

Livy and Madeleine de Scudéry are Lee's principal sources, and from both of them, as Professor Van Lennep demonstrated with precision, he borrowed specific detail. Yet if he followed their versions of the Brutus story, we may be sure that he also had in mind the great examples of Shakespeare's and Jonson's Roman plays Julius Caesar and Catiline, to both of which he refers in his dedication. One of the central set speeches of Lee's play, Brutus' oration over the body of Lucrece, contains in its opening line (II.i.139) an echo of the most famous speech in Shakespeare's play, Mark Antony's funeral oration for Caesar (III.ii.79 ff.). Perhaps too the prodigies that Titus sees (cf. IV.i.144 ff.) after he has pledged himself to the conspiracy derive from the prodigies that foreshadowed Shakespeare's Caesar's death (II, ii, 13 ff.). Lee's version of the conspiracy in favor of Tarquin sounds like accounts of Catiline's conspiracy, the dramatic version in Jonson's play as well as the versions in Cicero and Sallust. Lee may also have drawn suggestions from Otway's very different Roman play, Caius Marius, his reworking in a classical setting of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. In particular, the depiction of the relationship between Brutus and Titus, the father loving the son and yet demanding the sternest obedience from him, resembles the parallel relationship between Caius Marius and his son in Otway's play. Throughout Lucius Junius Brutus there are verbal echoes of earlier drama, especially Shakespeare.¹⁷ Tiberius' account of Brutus' courting the crowd (III.i.31-44), for example, would seem to derive from Richard II, from the Duke of York's account of Bolingbroke's passage through London (V.ii.7-21). And probably the impetuosity of Lee's dramatic verse owes something, in an indefinable way, to the stylistic example of Shakespeare.

Lee's dramatic verse is fluent, and it is untainted by the emotional frigidity which was endemic in neoclassical tragedy. Yet Lee's undoubted power to evoke passion is liability as well as asset. His notorious and recurrent fault is bombast: extravagance of emotion, expressed in tirades carried on in superlatives. His characters are often at the top of their voices. In Lucius Junius Brutus the fault is less in evidence, and partly because the ideal of Roman decorum dominates the play. Its success derives finally from the sustained grandeur of the tragic hero, Brutus, in whom a sense of duty enforces a suppression of private emotion. The Roman conception of decorum contributes to the stylistic as well as thematic achievements. Lee could not dramatize Brutus' ability to control his responses in the face of overwhelming calamity without imposing restraint on his dramatic verse. Climactic scenes are notable not for the frenzy that so often appears in Lee's other plays but for a quiet dignity. Brutus' response to the devastating news that his son Titus has compromised himself is impassive and meditative, to the extent that observers are at first misled about his intentions. Only gradually does he reveal his resolution that Titus must die, and this in spite of personal and even official intercessions in the son's behalf.

This example of restraint does not prevent other characters from expressing emotion luxuriantly. Titus is in this regard a conspicuous offender. He and his father divide between themselves some of the traditional qualities of the tragic hero. The role properly belongs to Brutus, the title character, whose legendary virtue provides the principal theme of the play; he dominates the action, and he is the center of interest. Yet it is Titus who has a tragic flaw—his uncontrollable love for Teraminta—that leads him to crime and finally to death; he rather than his father undergoes the tragic agony: sin, repentance, expiation. He would seem to be the good but imperfect man described by Aristotle as the most appropriate protagonist for tragedy. Brutus' exemplary nature precludes the human weaknesses that precipitate tragic events. Yet because he is the father of Titus he must suffer for Titus' faults, and in fact attention is focused in the catastrophe on Brutus rather than on his son, who becomes little more than the agent by which the father's devotion to duty can be demonstrated.

There are difficulties in the interpretation of the character of Titus. We are asked by implication to extend him our sympathy and to consider him as in a qualified sense admirable. Yet he shows remarkably little fortitude or perception. He violates a most solemn oath to his father in rejoining Teraminta after promising not to do so; and he promptly, it would appear half inadvertently, enters into a conspiratorial relationship with the deposed tyrant. These are grave crimes: understandable perhaps as the acts of an inexperienced and passionate youth, driven to the more serious crime of treason by fear for the safety of his wife, but still grave crimes. It was not unreasonable that the death penalty should have been imposed for the act of treason. The extenuating circumstances are less apparent to the reader than they seem to be to the Romans who plead with Brutus to spare his son. Brutus indeed shows fortitude in performing his duty and sentencing his son to death; but still—and this fact is obscured in Titus' self-congratulation and in the general amazement at Brutus' inflexibility—he was merely exacting a normal and expected punishment for high treason. The execution of Titus may represent an act of exemplary justice, but it is no judicial murder. In Livy the punishment is considered exemplary, severe but not unjust; and it is the exemplary (i.e., worthy of providing an example) nature of the punishment that Machiavelli emphasizes in his commentary on Livy. The sons of Brutus are guilty, and their father presides at their deserved execution. There is no ambiguity in Livy's implied evaluation of either son, and there is no sentimentality in the treatment of the episode. We find it difficult to respond as Lee demands to the plight of Titus; and we are intermittently repelled by the luxuriance of his passionate language. Lee lacked the discrimination to expunge occasional mawkish passages, with the result that some very bad lines remain.

Yet if the action involving Titus leads to emotional excess, it does not lead to a divergent line of action. Unlike the love plot in Addison's Cato (a play with important thematic similarities to Lucius Junius Brutus), this one is neither structurally nor thematically irrelevant. Titus' love for Teraminta provides an indispensable motive for the treasonous act that brings in its wake the exemplary punishment, the climactic event of the play. His divided allegiance, to his father and to his wife, parallels the divided allegiance of his father, to Rome and to his sons. The failure of Titus to make the right choice accentuates the nobility of his father's choice.

If structurally sound in this respect, the play has nevertheless been criticized for a breach in the unity of action. When Charles Gildon early in the eighteenth century prepared his adaptation of the play, he not only removed the passages that were dangerous politically and changed the locale to Renaissance Italy, but he also eliminated the scenes devoted to the rape of Lucrece, beginning his dramatic action after the expulsion of Tarquin.¹⁸ He considered Lee's play to be faulty, as he explains in his preface, in its double focus: “First, the old play has plainly two distinct actions, one ending with the death of Lucretia, the other with the confirmation of the liberty of Rome by the death of the sons of Brutus and the other conspirators.” The judgment is understandable, but it is one that would have more force to a neoclassical formalist critic than to a modern one. There are indeed two separate climactic events in the play, both famous events in early Roman history, but movement from the one to the other is rapid (though not rapid enough for the unity of time to be observed), and the later is causally related to the earlier. The rape of Lucrece leads to a revolt against Tarquin and the establishment of the Roman republic; a conspiracy against the republic is crushed and the conspirators punished in an act of justice which emphasizes the establishment of a rule of law. Lucrece and Brutus provide parallel examples of Roman inflexibility. If the dramatic action has a considerable complexity and magnitude, it is coherent enough, and it consistently serves the needs of the historical and political themes.

The emotional range of the play is broad, encompassing patriotism and family affection as well as sexual love; and the intellectual range, encompassing a theory of constitutional government, is even broader. Lee's themes hold a certain permanent interest, not limited by their relevance to the excitement created by the Popish Plot. We may understand more fully why Englishmen of his generation and the next liked to think of themselves as Augustans as we read this rendering of the moral and political ideals of Augustan Rome.

Notes

1. Edward Arber, ed., The Term Catalogues (London, 1903), I, 451: “Trinity Term, 1681. [June] Lucius Junius Brutus, Father of his Country. A Tragedy, acted at the Duke's Theatre for six days; but then prohibited. Written by N. Lee. Quarto. Price 1s.”

2. Cf. Roswell Gray Ham, Otway and Lee (New Haven, 1931), pp. 151-154; G. Wilson Knight, The Golden Labyrinth (New York, 1962), pp. 165-167.

3. Giles Jacob, The Poetical Register (1719), I, 162 (cited in William Van Lennep, “The Life and Works of Nathaniel Lee; A Study of the Sources” [unpublished dissertation, Harvard University, 1933], p. 452).

4. P.R.O., L.C. 5/144, p. 28 (quoted from Allardyce Nicoll, A History of Restoration Drama, 1660-1700, 4th ed. [Cambridge, 1952], p. 10 n.).

5. MS. note in a copy of Gerard Langbaine, An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (1691), in the British Museum (cited in Van Lennep, p. 452).

6. Thomas B. Stroup and Arthur L. Cooke, eds., The Works of Nathaniel Lee (New Brunswick, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, 1954, 1955), II, 317.

7. Zera S. Fink, The Classical Republicans: An Essay in the Recovery of a Pattern of Thought in Seventeenth Century England (Evanston, Ill., 1945), pp. 6-7.

8. Ibid., pp. 10-11; Leslie J. Walker, ed. and trans., The Discourses of Niccolò Machiavelli (New Haven, 1950), Introduction, I, 136-137.

9. Ab Urbe Condita I.xlix.7-9, trans. B. O. Foster (Loeb Library), I, 172-173: “For this king was the first to break with the custom handed down by his predecessors, of consulting the senate on all occasions, and governed the nation without other advice than that of his own household. War, peace, treaties, and alliances were entered upon or broken off by the monarch himself, with whatever states he wished, and without the decree of people or senate. The Latin race he strove particularly to make his friends, that his strength abroad might contribute to his security at home. He contracted with their nobles not only relations of hospitality but also matrimonial connections. To Octavius Mamilius of Tusculum, a man by long odds the most important of the Latin name, and descended, if we may believe report, from Ulysses and the goddess Circe, he gave his daughter in marriage, and in this way attached to himself the numerous kinsmen and friends of the man.”

10. Cf. David Ogg, England in the Reign of Charles II (Oxford, 1963), II, 598-602.

11. Cf. John Loftis, The Politics of Drama in Augustan England (Oxford, 1963). For discussion of the political theme of Absalom and Achitophel, see Bernard N. Schilling, Dryden and the Conservative Myth (New Haven, 1961).

12. Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution (Oxford, 1960), pp. 317-318.

13. P. G. Walsh, Livy: His Historical Aims and Methods (Cambridge, 1961), pp. 10-11.

14. Arthur L. Cooke and Thomas B. Stroup, “The Political Implications in Lee's Constantine the Great,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, XLIX (1950), 506-515.

15. My discussion of the sources of Lucius Junius Brutus is heavily indebted to William Van Lennep's review of the subject (see note 3, above), pp. 452-523.

16. Cf. Machiavelli, Discorsi sopra la Prima Deca di Tito Livio, in Opere, ed. Mario Bonfantini (Riccardo Ricciardi Editore, Milano and Napoli), pp. 134-137, 316-317 (Book I, Chap. xvi; Book III, Chap. iii).

17. The Shakespearian influence in Lee is examined at length by Anton Wülker, Shakespeares Einfluss auf die dramatische Kunst von Nathaniel Lee (Emsdetten, 1933).

18. Voltaire's Brutus, which is independent of Lee's and Gildon's plays, also begins after the expulsion of Tarquin.