Status Updates From Sejanus, His Fall: by Ben J...

This is bringing me back to an Ancient Rome art history class I almost failed and I am not happy about it.

p.12/277. Further into intro

Wow, what a play. It's difficult because this is more like a novel. I can understand the difficulty of staging this. The audience has to know decades of Roman history to make this make sense. Fantastic monologues in here. Absolutely a new favorite play. The ending suffers in pacing, but I don't mind how much of an epic this is. Sejanus' fall and Caligula's rise.

What the what? How does this drama work? I can understand how proud Sejanus dismisses the ominous auguries or the senate's support of him right up to when the tables are turned. But what is happening with the multiple exits of the consul Regulus? And really, the antihero undone by a lengthy letter from an absent emperor? Followed by Sejanus' brutal treatment, worse for his family, and Caligula rules next? WTF Jonson!

In the ages since I studied ancient Rome, I still recall Caligula became emperor after Tiberius, yet the play presents him as barely there while his brothers Nero and Drusus Junior get all the advancement. Of course, as the plot twists tighter and tighter, any character whom Fortune raises is doomed, and I am surprised that mouthy Arruntius has survived so long into Act IV. Spies must have deaf ears for stage asides.

Things start to get messy in a familiar tragic way as outspoken citizens are punished in Tiberius' court. Lots of shout-outs to familiar plays like Julius Caesar and perhaps Coriolanus. Lepidus emerges as a voice of reason, overlooked as his ancestor in Antony and Cleopatra. A fine pedigree of Roman plays Jonson brings to mind, the most pertinent in this act being Titus Andronicus.

Wonder why so many characters condemn Roman spies, since everyone seems to know the plots laid by everyone else. Hardly the master of subtly, Sejanus seems intent on eliminating everyone who stands in the way, which is pretty much every character introduced in Act I, and the some. Tiberius must have something up his purple sleeve, yet I am not surprised if at least a dozen or so Roman know of it before Sejanus falls.

A messy and naughtier world than one would see at most present-day Renaissance fairs, this play starts off with malicious gossip, bodily functions and hints of infidelity, all gathered from classical sources. Strange that many factions on-stage, all plotting within earshot of each other, so I wonder if there is some dramatic tension to follow. One memorable line: "Ambition makes more trusty slaves than need" (p. 50).

Not sure what it is about Jonson that I don't much care for, but it becomes apparent in the introduction to this play (the first thing of his longer than a masque I have ever read) that he strives to have his plays both ways: artistic renditions of actual history that also tragically point out the faults of present-day tyranny. It also seems that he went out of his way to please and slyly critique the educated elite.