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"No innocence is safe, When power contests": The Factional Worlds of Caesar and Sejanus Stuart M. Kurland Ben Jonson's first Roman tragedy, Sejanus His Fall, and William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, which preceded it by about four years, are very different plays. Whether Anne Barton is correct in arguing that Jonson's play is "in some ways a reply to Shakespeare's more intuitive, free-flowing treatment of Roman history," critics have tended to focus on the differences between the visions of Rome and its politics offered in the two plays. J. W. Lever, for example, sees Jonson as writing in a tradition that was "less preoccupied than Shakespeare with character as such": Jonson was "more concerned with the political forces at work in history than with virtuous or vicious individuals." And Anthony Miller argues that the two plays "offer strikingly different readings of the workings and destiny of the Roman state": "Sejanus in effect depicts the consequences of the transition from republic to empire which was the subject of Julius Caesar, and in doing so it overturns the [pro-monarchical] assumptions which govern Shakespeare's play."l To understand the different treatments of Roman politics in these plays, I propose to consider them in somewhat different terms, against the background of contemporary English history. I would like to focus especially on the changing mood of the last few years of Elizabeth's reign: the growing climate of intrigue and ill will arising from the rivalry between the Earl of Essex and Robert Cecil, die tensions surrounding Essex's STUART M. KURLAND, author of an article on Henry VIII and reviews on Shakespeare, Jonson, and Renaissance theater, has taught at Hamilton, Emory, William and Mary, and Sl John's (Minnesota) since finishing his Ph.D. at Chicago in 1984. 56 Stuart M. Kurland57 desperate and unsuccessful rebellion, and the uncertainty surrounding the succession—issues that help explain some of the differences we perceive in Jonson's tragedy, notably the emphasis on dynastic concerns that seems to characterize his dark view of political life. Such a project is complicated, of course, by the gaps in our knowledge, despite the connections that have long been perceived , the most important being the clear evidence of Jonson's knowledge of Julius Caesar. Yet, we wonder, whose was "the second pen" involved in the version of Sejanus performed in 1603 (when Shakespeare acted in it)? What contributions did the second author make—and why? How did the acted version differ from the 1605 Quarto? Why did the Quarto include an avowal of the play's loyal intentions (missing from The Argument in the Folio)? And—as if this were not enough to discourage speculation—why exactly was Jonson questioned before the Privy Council regarding Sejanus! This last question is most intriguing, despite our ignorance about the event beyond Drummond's report that Jonson "was 'called before the Council for his Sejanus, and accused both of Popery and of Treason' by Lord Northampton."2 The play's seditious potential is especially interesting when we recall the performance of Richard II commissioned on the eve of the Essex rebellion, for which the Lord Chamberlain's Men were called before the Council. Whatever the case with Richard II (which was printed without the deposition scene until after Elizabeth's death), there is no evidence that the assassination of Caesar enacted on the Globe stage in 1599 encouraged potential traitors or occasioned official concern—unlike Sejanus in 1603. In this essay, it will be possible only to touch on a couple of issues in Caesar, issues that will come to seem more important when we turn to Sejanus. The first is the matter of power and how it is transferred. Obviously, the assassination of Caesar disrupts whatever normal transfer of power might eventually have taken place, but the play never clarifies how such a procedure might operate, either in the republic that Rome was or in the monarchy that Rome would be if Caesar had accepted the crown Antony thrice offers him (and if that acceptance were somehow ratified). The conspirators seem never to have given the matter thought, as if the removal of Caesar's tyranny would...
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