The Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford has an interesting, Roman-themed line-up this year; this Telegraph article makes much of the modern political (post-9/11) resonances/motivations. Yesterday the RogueClassicist brought up the production of Ben Jonson's Sejanus: His Fall--about which, back in the fall, the Guardian guessed that it had not been staged for 400 years. But there's also a play by a lesser-known:
Philip Massinger's Believe What You Will (1631) tells of a Middle Eastern leader - Antiochus of Carthage - who, emerging from hiding to be with his people, is pursued by a Roman empire whose emissary warns the state that harbours him that it faces certain destruction. Sound familiar?
Doran, who's directing Ben Jonson's notoriously dense, difficult tragedy Sejanus: His Fall (1603) - set in the corruption-stewed court of Roman emperor Tiberius - finds the parallels between then and now intriguing:
"What happens around that potentially catastrophic event of the gunpowder plot is a sense of disintegration. That's why these plays resonate today. The Jacobean period is the age in which things turned sour and that feeling of dislocation began to be expressed in the writing, through black comedy, through a very bleak, nihilistic view of the world and a need to elude censorship by reaching for metaphor."
The "history" of this one seems to revolve around Antiochus III fantastically taking refuge in Carthage (rather than Hannibal taking refuge with him)--but then, I'm having trouble finding a text of the play other than the 1907 facsimile of the autograph copy of (what I think is the same play as they are now producing with a modernized title) Believe As Ye List [or rather, You, as appears on the title page], which I'm not going to read for the purpose of this post...But this does kind of pique my interest. Massinger appears to have used Roman or Roman-related settings frequently--and apparently somewhat inspired by Sir Walter Raleigh's anti-Roman characterizations in the latter's History of the World...Further, Bartleby.com gives us the Cambridge History of English and American Literature on our play:
Believe as you List, against which the censor had entered his veto in order to avoid giving offence to the Spanish government, was licensed a few months later, in May, 1631, in a revised shape, the poet having made it acceptable by changing the costume of his dramatis personae. Instead of the Portuguese king deposed by Spain, Massinger introduced a fabulous Asiatic king Antiochus, deposed and pitilessly persecuted by Rome. After this change, the censor found nothing smacking of recent political changes in the play; and this proves that he did not think of the possibility of another political interpretation, since suggested by S. R. Gardiner. According to this view, Massinger’s play had a very real meaning indeed, being intended to mirror the fate of the unfortunate brother-in-law of Charles I, Federick V, elector Palatine and titular king of Bohemia, who, at that time, was a landless fugitive persecuted by his powerful enemies, just as Massinger’s dethroned Antiochus was by the Romans. Prusias, king of Bithynia, who, against his own inclinations, is forced to give up his guest to his enemies, is said to represent Charles himself, who refrained from actively assisting his brother-in-law; Flaminius, the Roman ambassador, is the Spanish ambassador, intriguing against Frederick at the English court; Philoxenus, the king of Bithynia’s counsellor, who made common cause with Rome, is the lord treasurer Weston, who used his influence with the king in the Spanish interest; and, finally, the kind queen of Bithynia, who tried in vain to save the hapless fugitive, is Henrietta Maria, queen of England, who cordially disliked Weston.
Some years after the publication of Gardiner’s ingenious hypothesis, the main source of Massinger’s plot was discovered in the French historian Pierre Victor Palma Cayet’s account of the fate of the Portuguese pretender, known as the false Sebastian. A detailed comparison led to the result that the dramatist found the prototypes of all his chief characters in Cayet’s work, with the sole exception of the nameless wife of Prusias. It is quite possible, however, that her introduction was caused by the same need of the dramatist which made him add two amatory incidents to his plot: he wanted some female characters to brighten a political story which offered him only male personages. Gardiner’s assumption that the dramatist, when he made his Antiochus a fugitive, must have been thinking of Frederick’s wanderings, because there was nothing similar to be found in the Sebastian story, is refuted by an examination of Massinger’s source. Cayet gives a detailed account of the wanderings of the Portuguese impostor and tells how, flying before the persecutions of the Spaniards, he came first to Venice in the hope of being acknowledged and protected by the republic, and afterwards to the court of the grand duke of Florence, who, by the pressure of Spain, was finally obliged to deliver the pretender into the hands of his enemies. Also, the surprising fact already alluded to, that, at the end of the English drama, we hear only of the imprisonment, not of the death, of the hero, is explained by the circumstance that Cayet, when penning his account, was not yet aware of the final execution of the pretender.
The decisive influence of the French chronicler on Massinger’s plot is not to be questioned; nevertheless, it is possible that the dramatist was reminded by some of the circumstances of the Sebastian story of the sad fate of the German prince and the vacillations of the English king, and that, induced by his personal and political sympathies, he did his best to surround Antiochus and his friends with a poetical nimbus. His fugitive, certainly, is no impostor, but a man of kingly bearing. Gardiner observed that the two Herberts, the brothers William and Philip, were opposed to Weston, trying to counterbalance his influence by means of the queen: and the introduction into Massinger’s play of the nameless queen of Bithynia and the part taken by her in its action remain the only substantial arguments in favour of the historians’ political interpretation.
And, more recently, a 1996 article by David Cope entitled "Censorship and Representation in The Stuart Era: Three Roman Plays" which deals with both Massinger's and Jonson's plays is online (html here thanks to Google; MS Word doc here). Charles Salas has an interesting article on Raleigh in the Journal of the History of Ideas 57 (1996) 195-215: "Ralegh and the Punic Wars." Ok, well, that's enough for the time being...
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