SOURCE: Hogan, A. P. “Imagery of Acting in The Roman Actor.” The Modern Language Review 66, No. 2 (April 1971): 273-81.

[In the following essay, Hogan discusses Massinger's thematic use of actors, acting, plays, and theater in The Roman Actor.]

In theatrical tradition, The Roman Actor is merely a showcase for Paris's oration to the senate—Kean toured with this scene alone as a tour-de-force in 1822—and critics too have assumed that the actor, Massinger's heroic self-portrait, is the absolute centre of the play.¹ But one need only review the disgruntled comments of T. S. Eliot, T. A. Dunn, and others to realize, in their disappointment, the impossibility of reading The Roman Actor as a mere frame for one short scene.² Recently, critics such as C. A. Gibson and Peter Davison, anxious to avoid the pitfalls of such negativism, have preferred to view the play as an artistic whole composed of many parts; and their results have been both positive and provocative.³ But Gibson and Davison have both emphasized political motifs to the point of fostering a new error: they have disparaged Paris and over-valued Caesar. The real key to The Roman Actor, as I hope to show in this study, is neither an anti-Puritan ars poetica nor an essay on divine right, but a thoughtful, dramatic analysis of that passionate power lust which drives men to script their own roles in life and compel the outside world to play supporting parts.

Paris is a professional thespian of some rectitude—a kind of everyman-on-stage—who forgoes the moral clarity of his theatre for a murky court where everyone acts a role under the sinister direction of Rome's greatest actor, Domitian. Sucked in by his own passions and by the power of those around him, Paris becomes a pawn of princely players, those omnipotent and ruthless actor-managers who force reality to body forth their own desires. But role-playing fortified by power proves as illusory as the actor's ideal of an innocent and moral art: Caesar, having destroyed Paris, similarly falls prey to providential forces which themselves direct the world according to the script of Justice. In this way, by literalizing the old adage, ‘Life is a stage’, Massinger gives metaphoric form to his theme of passion and creates ‘the most perfit birth of my Minerua’⁴—his finest tragedy and a unified work of art.

Act I opens in a theatre as empty as ‘great Roome vnpeopl'd’ (I.1.12) because its audience is at court, flattering Caesar or pursuing ‘Pleasures of worse natures’. Members of the troupe stand idle, lamenting the fact that, although they ‘with delight joyne profit’ and

                                                                                          on the Stage
Decipher to the life what honours waite
On good, and glorious actions, and the shame
That treads vpon the heeles of vice

(I.1.21)

they are neglected, deprived of applause and reward. Immediate and decisive polarities are here being drawn: art, virtue, and honour adhere to the stage, while politics, vice, and shame thrive at court.

However, as often happens with the early schematization of a Massinger tragedy, the seeming absolutes are qualified and re-evaluated throughout the play. For one thing, art itself is not simple. The day's bill was to have been ‘Agaves phrensie / with Pentheus bloudie end’, but Euripides's grim fable of a king dismembered by his own crazed mother for opposing the divine orgies of Dionysius was not, in Renaissance thought, a myth to illustrate the actors' ideal of their art. Some commentators thought Pentheus a heretic, justly punished; others glossed the story as the triumph of chaos over order.⁵ The point is small and easily lost, yet it is important to our understanding of the whole tragedy: Paris defines drama as the depiction of virtue rewarded and vice put to shame, yet his own repertory contains a play which may be interpreted either as the just punishment of evil or as the destruction of virtue by an unnatural but omnipotent vice. Similarly, his own role on the great stage of Caesar's court cannot be arbitrarily labelled but must be weighed and analyzed in terms of its total character.

When the actors are drawn from the seeming moral clarity of their theatre to defend themselves before the senate on a charge of libel, Paris urges his colleagues to carry their virtue to this new stage: having ‘personated in the Scaene / The ancient Heroes … being to act our selues, / Must doe it with vndaunted confidence’ (I.1.51). Their art should have taught them two Stoic principles: to behave with perfect honour and to treat fortune as a kind of fiction. Paris's doctrine is undoubtedly correct, but the actor's normative voice is undercut by the revelation that he craves ‘glorie, and to leaue our names / To after times’ (I.1.31), an ambition he pursues by cherishing his favour with the ‘grace, and power’ of Caesar. The Renaissance approved of fame, but the virtuous Stoic, the Cato or Cicero, treats honour solely as a by-product of his sole, true end, virtue.⁶ And Paris, by seeking and preserving Domitian's protection, reveals that he is not so indifferent to fortune as he would like to appear. The senate's malevolence first draws the actor to court, but his own ambition, symbolized by his willingness to serve a savage tyrant, is the element which destroys him.

To clarify this point, Massinger permits three virtuous senators to precede Paris's arrival at court with a candid evaluation of Caesar, who ‘does not blush, or start to stile himselfe … Great Lord, and God’ (I.1.106-8). Equally anxious to play its part, the senate ‘Decrees him divine Honours’ (I.1.111); and, in the face of so much ominous fantasy, ‘To be vertuous / Is to bee guilty’, and honest citizens must eschew ‘actiue’ for ‘passiue fortitude’ (I.1.78, 117). Clearly, Paris's dream of honourable glory at court is naive.

The next scene then illustrates the kind of play-acting which Caesar demands from his subjects. Parthenius, the Emperor's man, and Domitia, wife of the senator Lamia, slide through a graceful and depraved version of the Annunciation to demonstrate, in a miniature drama, their relationship with the ‘Lord, and God’ of Rome. Kneeling before the astonished lady, Parthenius, like Gabriel, bids her to be unafraid and to rejoice in the favour of her king:

vnderstand with ioy he that commands
All that the Sunne giues warmth to, is your seruant.
Be not amaz'd …

(I.2.3)

Soon ‘all the beauties of the earth’ shall ‘bowe to you’, and ‘Senators shall take it for an honour’ to ‘kisse these happie feete’ (I.2.12-14). Mary's glad cry that ‘henceforth all generations shall call me blessed’ can be heard, perverted, in these lines. Similarly, the Virgin's surprise that ‘God … has regarded the lowness of his handmaiden’ recurs in Domitia's query as to why ‘Caesar (Our God on earth)’ should ‘cast an eye of fauour / Vpon his humble handmaide’ (I.2.19). Finally, Lamia's wife protests that the Emperor's plan is impossible—not, like Mary, because she ‘knows no husband’, but because ‘You know I haue a husband’ (I.2.40). The allusions are unmistakable. And Parthenius's final words cap the parody: ‘When power puts in its Plea the lawes are silenc'd’ (I.2.44). If this is an example of the kind of acting which Domitian's court is expert in, then Paris is taking his naive view of drama to a very sophisticated stage.

The next scene gives the actor his famous speech on the nature of his art—prologued, significantly, by Aretinus's aria to Caesar's ‘vertues, and remarkeable graces’ (I.3.8). All of the smooth performances which we have witnessed qualify in advance Paris's assumption that ‘The whole world’ is a stage for the proclamation of innocence and that drama functions analogically as a particularized mirror for general truths. The stage, he says, reforms vice by revealing its horror and fosters ‘actiue vertue’ through models of perfection. In theory, these ideas are unimpeachable; their origins lie in Heywood's Apology and, even more important, in Sidney's Defence. But Paris is now in Caesar's world, where acting is a tool for advancement and survival: moral ideals are simply unrealistic.

The rest of the tragedy illustrates this fact, and the first hint comes when Paris's oration, for all its emotional appeal, is not the power which saves the actors from conviction. In The Duke of Milan, Massinger permitted us to see Sforza's real virtue save him from Charles's anger; but he omits a similar display of potent goodness in The Roman Actor because, in Caesar's world, the only source of power is Caesar: Paris's rescue must come from him.

Domitian's every appearance throughout the first four acts is a set piece scripted and directed by himself; and in his first, a triumphant return from the wars, he imperiously condemns his hapless prisoners, then announces grandly that he is ‘aboue / All honours you can giue me. And the stile / Of Lord, and God … is deseru'd’ (I.4.34-7). Then he raises Domitia to join him, ‘Iuno’ to his ‘Iupiter’. That Paris's release stems from the same display of godlike power suggests that the actor, like the new Empress, is a creature of Domitian's will. And Paris, it should be noted, accepts this role without a murmur: unlike the virtuous senators, he never condemns Caesar's tyranny, and his great speech, for all the ‘actiue vertue’ we ever see in Paris, remains a rhetorical set piece of his own devising, a moral stance which bears no real commitment to the good.

This reading of Act I should demonstrate how brilliantly structured The Roman Actor is. Each scene prepares for and qualifies the next; and, contrary to the common assumption that Paris and Domitian enter into a significant relationship only in Act II, or even in Act III,⁷ the architectural metaphor of acting unites the two protagonists from the beginning of the play.

The next two acts explicitly probe the moral value of the stage in a corrupt world while further exploring the nature of Domitian's grim charades. Informed by Aretinus that the senators ‘murmure at your triumphs as meere Pageants’—mere plays—and ‘tax your iustice’ as ‘tyrannie’ (II.1.117), the Emperor plans their destruction. By refusing to accept his version of reality, they have labelled his reinterpretation of society a lie, a fiction. Moreover, just as they refuse to play their allotted roles and accept his script as true, they insist upon glossing his acts as sins in a morality drama: his execution of one Paetus Thrasea, a philosopher, is to them the murder of ‘Vertue her selfe’ (l. 121).

Domitian begins the purge by blocking out the condemnation of Lamia. ‘Crueltie with some scorn’ (II.1.175) is more effective than cruelty alone, so he scripts a sequence in which he first praises Lamia's generosity in giving up his wife, then, when the Empress sings on cue at her window, professes to realize that the senator could never really relinquish such beauty if he understood it and so condemns him to death for ‘treason’ (II.1.235). However, after bringing off this little scene, Domitian reveals something outside the scope of his plan. He admits (l. 239) that Lamia's death frees him from ‘feares’, thereby indicating that his persecution of those who oppose his role-playing is compulsive: their rebelliousness threatens his absolute control over reality.

Contrasted with Caesar's performance is Paris's attempt to display the moral function of drama by using the stage as a ‘mirror’ in which Parthenius's avaricious old father may ‘see his owne deformity, and loath it’ (II.1.99). The actor's playlet, contrasted with Domitian's, is good in intent but a failure in action. Philargus happily recognizes (l. 297) that he and the fictive miser ‘were fashion'd in one mould’ and urges the Emperor to protect the usurer from ‘theeues’. The only real effect of Paris's morality piece is to draw Domitia's attention to himself, thereby actually lending some credence to the Puritan complaint against plays as occasions of sin. Its only other accomplishment is to inspire Caesar with the desire to play physician, too: ‘Wee'l cure him …’ (II.1.424). When Philargus refuses to change, Domitian can only perfect his part by executing the old man: ‘thou shalt neuer more / Feele the least touch of auarice’ (l. 437). Paris as doctor had a true desire to heal the sick but no real power over intractable human nature; Caesar, on the other hand, can employ irresistible force to alter his patient, but only by perverting the substantial meaning of a physician's role. Moral drama fails for want of power; Domitian's charade illustrates the divorce between acting and virtue in the real world.

But the Emperor's success is simultaneously his failure, too, since the patient dies. This note is caught up again and developed in Domitian's next set piece, in which he discovers that even a prince can act his part in vain. Since even the ‘glorious constellations’ wait upon ‘The actions of Kings, and Emperours’ (III.2.36-9), Caesar decides to demonstrate his infinite sovereignty by making Rusticus and Sura, the Stoic senators, condemn their own souls to hell:

I'll afflict your soules
And force them groaning to the Stigian lake
Prepar'd for such to howle in, that blaspheame
The power of Princes, that are Gods on earth.

(III.2.54)

It is a god's prerogative to damn the guilty, and Domitian wishes to play this role.

But the senators refuse to honour his script. Like Thrasea, ‘that pure vntainted soule’ (III.2.63) who is one of heaven's true stars, they are fortified by ‘graue Philosophie’ and beyond the power of ‘such as thou, that haue no hopes / Beyond the present’ (III.2.99-105). They can laugh at their tormentor. And Domitian, his performance spoiled, begins to disintegrate:

                                                                                                    I was neuer
O'recome till now. For my sake rore a little,
And show you are corporeall …
                                                                                                    By Pallas,
It is vnkindly done to mocke his furie
Whom the world stiles omnipotent.

(III.2.83)

It then occurs to him that ‘I am the guiltie man, and not the Iudge’; in reality, their roles are reversed.

That Rusticus and Sura incorporate elements from outside Caesar's artificially limited version of the truth is also reflected in the image which the senators present on stage, bound back to back as a ‘double fac'd Janus’ (III.2.119). Domitian has created this image, but he cannot control its wealth of meaning. For Janus symbolizes the transcendent power of virtue which, surveying both past and future, dominates fortune;⁸ and the senators obviously possess more real power through their fortitude than Caesar does through force. Moreover, Janus is an emblem of providence—God's power over fortune⁹—and Rusticus and Sura, who promise to return for just revenge, suggest that they are affiliated with cosmic design. Finally, in their resemblance to that ‘pure vntainted soule’, Thrasea, the martyrs add to their multilevelled image the Neoplatonic interpretation of bifronted Janus as perfect, integrated man, man allied to the angels.¹⁰ The very complexity of the symbol demonstrates the vast and varied meanings of any event, the multiplicity of reality, which will not yield to any man's script.

However, Domitian manages to suppress his fears. With the senators dead, he seeks comfort in Domitia, the ‘liuing fountaine’ from which ‘I could renue the vigor of my youth, / And be a second Verbius’ (III.2.125). The Emperor's words recall Philargus's belief that his ‘deare golden heape … does renew, / My youth, and vigor’ (II.1.48), drawing attention to the fact that Caesar, increasingly dependent upon his wife in the latter part of the play, is functioning much like the miser, whose obsession destroyed him. Philargus, with his symbolic name and monomaniacal avarice, was an obvious figure from morality drama. Caesar is much more complex, yet, in the moral world of The Roman Actor as a whole, his role is analogous: he too is compelled to exemplify vice and warn against it. Ultimately, the Emperor cannot determine his own part or the interpretation which the audience may place upon him. A greater playwright, the providence which brings all things to justice, and the agent of that providence, Massinger, script his role.

But the vehicle of Caesar's downfall is Domitia. Rusticus and Sura have already eluded control, and now, almost immediately after, a new, rival stage-manager is emerging in the figure of Domitian's ‘Iuno’, who, asked to soothe her lord, presents a play which she herself has chosen. Domitia has always professed to believe herself a creature of the imperial will—‘I am yours …’ (II.1.261)—but her subsequent activities suggest that she really considers her power an independent and inalienable right. Nevertheless, she is his device. When he elevated her above all other women, the act seemed to him a proof of his own omnipotence, not hers: ‘This tis to be a Monarch when alone / He can command all, but is aw'd by none’ (I.4.84). Again, when he calls her more perfect than the ‘motion of the Spheares’ (II.1.227), her divine attributes spring from his poetic fancy: Lamia's crime is not blasphemy against his wife's divinity, but ‘treason’ against his lord (II.1.235). For her to usurp Caesar's stage, as she does with ‘Iphis and Anaxarete’, is a highly dangerous coup.

Domitia's play is a romantic piece of wish-fulfilment, in which Paris as neglected lover permits her to indulge in fantasies about how much more tenderly she would treat him, were he hers. Like Philargus, she too loses sight of the fictive nature of the proceedings and rises to save ‘Iphis’ from suicide. People whose roles are synonymous with their identity, as Domitia's is, or the miser's, easily become confused about the objectivity of art. Life is art, to everyone in The Roman Actor. The other point about this play within the play is that no moral is intended by the actors or taken by the audience: Paris has become a court performer, pandering to the pleasure of titled ladies. There is something of the prostitute about him. And, again, this state of affairs corroborates Puritan fears: The Second and Third Blast of Retraite from Plaies and Theaters (1580) warns that a woman, seeing a ‘passioned louer … so martyred’ by an unfeeling mistress, may incline ‘to foolish pittie’ and allow ‘that pittie to be extended vpon’ her own suitor.¹¹ Misused drama is a terrible thing.

Emboldened by the assumption that her own role of earthly divinity is real. Domitia openly courts Paris, informing him that ‘The meanes to kill, or saue, is not alone / In Caesar circumscrib'd … Thou must, thou shalt’ submit (IV.2.16-17). His impersonated excellence must be part of his own being, and she urges him to avow this marriage between part and player: ‘as vessels still pertake the odour / Or the sweete pretious liquors they contain'd …’ (l. 36). Paris, of course, denies that there is any mystique about him: he alone, of all Rome's many actors, disavows the theory that men make their own identities out of self-determined roles:

… all my borrowed ornaments put off,
I am no more, nor lesse, then what I was
Before I enter'd.

(IV.2.50)

Fact and fantasy are not one, he says: art should mirror moral truths, not apotheosize the artist. Paris's doctrinal purity, as usual, however, falls short of his performance. He himself has complaisantly assumed any role assigned him at court, moral or otherwise, and his entrance in this very scene was marked by a long speech full of courtly phrases, an oration which could only be delivered with some noticeably magniloquent gestures (IV.2.22-30).

Paris does love virtue. But, because goodness is a means to him rather than an end, he interprets life in terms of the parts which it provides him. The Empress's demands inspire him to play honour's martyr:

Yet to dye innocent, and haue the glorie
For all posteritie to report that I
Refus'd an Empresse to preserue my faith
To my great master, in true iudgement must
Show fairer then to buy a guilty life,
With wealth, and honours. 'Tis the base I build on …

(IV.2.91)

But his virtue is not founded on true integrity, and he is easily seduced into a more pleasant role: ‘Thou art now my Troyan Paris / And I thy Helen’ (l. 103). Domitia succeeds in fusing part with player—uncannily reflected in the identical names—by leading her lover into the role of an adulterer.

But Caesar is watching from the wings, and, since a powerful prince need not follow another man's script, he breaks in on his wife's fantasy and rings the curtain down. However, as he himself cannot deny, she has acquired sufficient power of her own to compel her husband to play ‘Menelaus’ to her Helen (IV.2.105). He realizes with a shock that this ‘power / Her beautie still holds o're my soule’ (IV.2.141) will not let him destroy her. He cannot control the roles which he makes others play: she sneers that he has ‘compell'd’ her to the part of ‘strumpet’ and must accept the fact that she will betray him, too (IV.2.135-6).

This loss of omnipotence leaves Caesar prey to ‘Perpetuall vexation … rob'd … of / All rest, and peace’ (IV.2.163, 155), a recurrence of the ‘feares’ he experienced during the senators' lifetime. Meanwhile, Paris lies prostrate at his feet, collapsed like a puppet deprived of its strings. Surprisingly, the desperate Emperor does not vent his frustration on Domitia's manikin but treats him (in this sole extended scene between the two protagonists) with an unwonted tenderness. However, the truth is that Caesar is again preparing a role. He calls for a performance of ‘The False Servant’, a tragedy which re-enacts the one they have just played out in real life. The Emperor takes the part of the ‘iniur'd Lord’ (IV.2.222) and, when he should stab his adulterous retainer in show, he kills Paris with a genuine sword. ‘I have forgot my part. But I can doe’ (l. 282): life, for once, is not a play but a painful and serious reality; and a wronged husband, functioning as man and not as god, must personally execute his vengeance.

However, as I suggested above, Caesar's act simultaneously permits him to seize a new role in a new drama. ‘The False Servant’, by allowing him to present himself as magnanimous judge upon an erstwhile beloved follower, renews his lofty stance as a godlike force beyond the petty confines of such a degrading passion as revenge. The striking scene in which Domitian applauds the fallen actor then becomes, not a true indication of Paris's desert, but a set piece designed to display the divine pity of the ‘Lord, and God’. The ignoble frenzy of a cuckolded husband gives way, with great technical mastery on Caesar's part, to the dignified pathos of a tragic situation.

Then Paris's death becomes a very ironic thing. The glory for which he longed is his at last; but it derives from the tyrant's script, not from a triumphant career on stage. Rusticus and Sura snatched their greatness away from Domitian by playing the part of Virtue; Paris's future renown, on the other hand, like his success at court, is a gift from Caesar, reward for his pliability. Consequently, Massinger's Roman Actor is more a victim than a hero. He should be played with charm, but not with force of character; for his whole passage upon the stage of life nowhere illustrates, save in rhetoric, the potency of ‘actiue vertue’.

Davison, pursuing his theme of divine right, integrates Act V by showing how Domitian's death rings down the curtain on another ‘Roman actor’—a prince whose hedge of divinity disappears when he transmutes it into a mere role designed to serve his appetites.¹² I have been arguing for a somewhat different theme, the nature of power in disordered minds and the compulsive drive for total domination of one's environment; and, from this point of view, the last act does not merely analyse divine right; it mirrors and climaxes Caesar's whole relationship with reality, just as Act IV does for Paris.

Domitia taunts the Emperor with his impotence, ‘a bondman to / His violent passions and in that my slaue’ (V.1.48); and he realizes that, unless he frees himself from this Frankenstein he has created, ‘I am lost / Nor am I Caesar’ (l. 81). Identity itself demands her death. This imperative drives the Emperor to ‘free mee of my doubts, and feares’ (l. 98) by placing Domitia's name on a proscription list. She has become as dangerous as the senators and must suffer the same fate. Then, bolstering his new-found independence by condemning a ‘Wizard’ who has dared to predict the hour of his death, Caesar feels secure enough to lie down and fall asleep.

However, this act, which is supposed to demonstrate the ruler's peace of mind, actually exposes his impotence instead. As soon as he is unconscious, Domitia and Parthenius steal the proscription list, a prologue to rebellion. In a parallel action, the ghosts of Rusticus and Sura abscond with an image of Minerva, Domitian's ‘Patronesse … (Whose Statue I adore of all the gods)’ (II.1.236). The presence of both sets of enemies indicates the interlocked political and spiritual defeats to come. And the disappearance of Minerva makes a particular, symbolic comment on Domitian's state. Throughout the play, the Emperor's devotion to the goddess of wisdom has had its obviously ironic side: the man who seeks power in evil can never be truly wise. But, as the dictionaries note, Minerva is also the deity of ‘all good arts and sciences’.¹³ Massinger calls The Roman Actor ‘the most perfit birth of my Minerua’ because both mature thought and genuine artistry have fused in its production. And, in a similar manner, Domitian's many references to Minerva evoke his craft as well as his inverted wisdom. She figures in his condemnation of Lamia and of Philargus, and he pleads with Rusticus and Sura ‘by Pallas’ to ‘rore a little’ and be damned. Again, it is because Minerva is ‘mine owne and sure’ (III.2.31) that Caesar is above ‘This many headed monster’ (III.2.34), public opinion: his art preserves him in his independence. Lastly, he calls upon ‘great Minerua’ to ‘vindicate thy votarie’ (V.1.95-6) by helping him escape Domitia: his art must restore him to his absolute power, his stage mastery of life. Nothing can really harm him ‘till thou / Wisest Minerua … dost foresake me’ (V.1.148): his craft, which is his wisdom, keeps reality at bay.

Consequently, the theft of Minerva is important. In Dio Cassius, she leaves the tyrant of her own accord:¹⁴ for agents of providence to steal her points to the collapse of Caesar's illusory power; and, from this point on, the Emperor, whose ability to script his own role has been sliding gradually out of his hands, is totally at the mercy of forces beyond his comprehension. Something of this is revealed to Domitian himself, who awakens to find ‘Caesar by Caesar's sentenc'd … Minerua cannot saue him’ (V.1.197). Minerva's loss, ironically, affords him a moment of true wisdom. He averts self-knowledge, however: although he has divined that distant thunder heralds God's punishment for ‘my blasphemies’ (V.1.208), he tells his guard that the gods ‘from their enuie / Of my power and greatnesse heere, conspire against me’ (V.1.282). His passionate desire to believe himself essentially safe leads him into accepting the conspirators' assertion that the hour predicted for his death is past: he wanders away from his soldiers and is slain.

Just as Paris declined into victimization as court service embroiled him in immoral drama, Domitian's career depicts a steady loss of power. His earlier scenes, despite an increasingly intransigent attitude on the part of other people, were all set pieces, scripted and directed by himself. Paris's execution represented an almost heroic attempt on Caesar's part to reassert his absolute control and create his own identity through art. But Act V, in which the Emperor is almost always present on stage, illustrates how the egoist is engulfed by forces beyond his comprehension. The scope of the drama grows wider and wider, incorporating both natural and supernatural elements, ghosts and storms, until Domitian's sleep—supposedly the symbol of his security—actually visualizes his total helplessness. Like Paris prone before his master's feet, Caesar slumbering before Domitia and Parthenius represents the impossibility of fusing role-playing with life.

Guillaume du Vair, the prominent Renaissance Neo-Stoic, called life a ‘comodie, where wee may not chuse what part we will play, but onely looke that we play that parte well which is giuen vs in charge’. If God ‘the Poet bid vs play a kings part, we must take care that we doe it well, and so if he charge vs with the porter or clowns part, we must doe it likewise’.¹⁵ Paris evoked this same concept in Act I when he referred to fortune as a play, the scenes of which are transient and insignificant as long as every man acts well. But all the characters in The Roman Actor, except the Stoic senators, lose sight of this idea. Rather than see life as a stage on which reason directs and providence casts the parts, Domitian and his wife attempt to script and direct existence as their own pride dictates. Reality and fantasy merge; and the virtuous detachment which du Vair recommends as a kind of play-acting becomes the total subjectivity of mummers who see no ‘Poet’ beyond themselves.

Notes

1. See, for example, B. T. Spencer, ‘Philip Massinger’, Seventeenth-century Studies, edited by Robert Shafer (Princeton, 1933), pp. 3, 6.

2. T. S. Eliot, ‘Philip Massinger’, Selected Essays, third revised edition (1958), p. 212; T. A. Dunn, Philip Massinger: The Man and the Playwright (1957), p. 65; and L. G. Salingar, ‘The Decline of Tragedy’, The Age of Shakespeare, Pelican Guide to English Literature, edited by Boris Ford, Volume II (1955), pp. 429-40 (p. 436), all deplore the disunity of a play which tries to integrate an ars poetica into a political tragedy.

3. C. A. Gibson, ‘Massinger's Use of His Sources for The Roman Actor’, AUMLA: Journal of the Australian Universities' Language and Literature Association, No. 15 (1961), 60-72; Peter H. Davison, ‘The Theme and Structure of The Roman Actor’, AUMLA, No. 19 (1963), 39-56.

4. The Roman Actor, edited by William Sandidge, Jr (Princeton, New Jersey, 1929), epistle dedicatory. All quotations are from this edition.

5. Commentators on the Bacchantes, such as Gaspar Stibilinus, Euripides Poeta tragicorum princeps (Basel, 1562), p. 475, tended to condemn Pentheus as an ‘impius’ king. But, according to Pierre Bersuire, Ovide Moralisé en Prose, edited by C. de Boer (Amsterdam, 1954), Book 3, Chapter 15. ‘Pantheus … nous signifie chacun homme religieux qui est de bonnes meurs, de saincte conversacion et de vie chaste et honneste, et qui mesprise les delices et vanitez mondaines’ (p. 129). Natale Conti, Mythologiae (Lyon, 1605), pp. 492-3, preserved Bersuire's opinion. The double tradition is neatly expressed in George Sandys, Ovid's Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologized and Represented in Figures (1632), pp. 111-12; Pentheus tries to uproot idolatry but is destroyed by the forces of chaos, while he is also ‘an implacable tyrant; hating religion, and suppressing it in others …’.

6. See, for example, Guillaume du Vair, The Moral Philosophie of the Stoicks, translated by Thomas James (1598), pp. 66, 74-5, 82.

7. Davison (p. 42) suggests Act II; Dunn (p. 66) Act III.

8. Andreas Alciati, Emblemata (Antwerp, 1577), p. 116; Stephen Bateman, The Golden Booke of the Leaden Gods (1577), p. 9; George Wither, A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne (1635), p. 138.

9. Thomas Nabbes, Microcosmus: A Morall Maske (1634), has a character called Janus who defines himself as ‘the figure of Eternal Providence’. Wither, Collection of Emblemes, associates Janus with God, who ‘Beholds, at one aspect, all things that are, / That ever shall be, and that ever were’ (p. 138).

10. See Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, second edition (1968), pp. 201-2, 230, for a discussion of the Neoplatonic Janus as defined by Pico della Mirandola, Commento, II, 25.

11. Quoted in The English Drama and Stage under the Tudor and Stuart Princes, edited by W. C. Hazlitt (1864), pp. 142-3.

12. ‘The Theme and Structure of The Roman Actor’, pp. 51-2.

13. Thomas Cooper, Thesaurus Linguae Romanae & Britannicae (1578); F. Ambrosius Calepinus, Dictionarium Septem Linguarum (Venice, 1625), p. 203; also Conti, pp. 300-2.

14. Roman History, with English translation by Ernest Cary, Loeb Classical Library, 9 vols (1914-27), VIII. 317, 355 (Book 67).

15. Moral Philosophie, p. 80.