As one reads Sejanus, it is important to understand the political context in which the play was written. Many scholars have understood it as an attack on James I’s rule. In fact, at the time it was produced, Ben Jonson was brought before the king’s Privy Council on suspicion of treason because of this play.

The play was first performed in 1603, only two years after James I took over the rule of England from the deceased Elizabeth I (uniting England and Ireland and Scotland, where James I had already ruled since 1567). From the start, James made clear his intent to be a more dictatorial monarch than Elizabeth had been. Elizabeth I had had to carefully carve out a constituency, relying heavily on Parliament to support her legitimacy. She did so because she had two strikes against her: first, she was a female monarch at a time when titles generally passed through the male line, and second, the Roman Catholic world understood her as the illegitimate offspring of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn.

Elizabeth tread very carefully, knowing how fragile her grip on power was, but James I had none of her constraints. He was male, and he was descended from Henry VIII’s sister, who never had any divorce issues, so his legitimacy was not contested. Coming to the throne in a more secure position and heavily influenced by the currently popular doctrine of the divine right of kings, James moved aggressively to assert monarchial power, ruffling many feathers in the process. He asserted, for example, that Parliament did not derive its power from common law, independent of the monarch, but served solely the king. People were also concerned that James’s court was corrupt, influenced by flatterers and favorites who did not have the best interests of the country at heart. For such reasons, James I angered and alarmed people, including a group which Jonson was a part of that was influenced by the Roman writer Tacitus. Tacitus had criticized the tyranny of the emperor Tiberius, which Jonson’s group saw as a parallel figure to James and, of course, the emperor in Sejanus.

This was a time of censorship, and James tightened existing controls over free speech. Therefore, it was impossible to stage plays or write literature directly critiquing the king. Jonson, therefore, turned to Roman history to strike blows at the current regime and to warn against tyranny, flattery, and corruption by implying parallels between the tyrant Tiberius and James. For example, the play could easily be describing how worried contemporaries viewed James as the play describes Tiberius:

But, when his grace is merely but lip-good

And that no longer, then he aires himself

Abroad in public, there, to seem to shun

The strokes, and stripes of flatterers, which within

Are lechery unto him, and so feed

His brutish sense with their afflicting sound,

As, dead to virtue, he permits himself

Be carried like a pitcher by the ears,

To every act of vice: this is a case

Deserves our fear, and doth presage the nigh

And close approach of blood and tyranny.

In other words, when a monarch, be it Tiberius or James, lies to the public while succumbing to flatterers and his own evil impulses, people should be worried that violence and tyranny are soon to follow.

We can’t be surprised that James’s censors caught on to what Jonson was up to, but fortunately for Jonson, his reputation as a scholar and antiquarian obsessed with Roman history allowed him to avoid larger consequences than interrogation.