Ben Jonson's Sejanus His Fall - Is there not something more, than to be Caesar?

After triumphantly beating up John Marston, Ben Jonson indulged in some Shakespeare envy and wrote a history play, or perhaps a tragedy, Sejanus His Fall (1603), about the soldier who rose to rule the Roman empire, for a few years, under dissolute Emperor Tiberius, before overreaching and being crushed by the next sociopath in line.

I found Sejanus a little dull when I last read it, long ago, and I still do.  Jonson’s blank verse is expert, supple, without, likely against, Marlowe’s bombast, but also then lacking Marlowe’s (or Shakespeare’s, or satirical Jonson’s) surprise.  Jonson’s metaphysics is too rationalist, too political, to create the kind of craziness that makes for great drama.

Perhaps Jonson is too constrained by history.  The action of the fall of Sejanus, in the long last scene, is the reading in the Senate of an ironic letter from Tiberius, first praising and then condemning Sejanus.  This is what historians say happened, so what can you do, but instead of the appearance of weird, perverse Tiberius, we get proper, public letter.  In general, as in a history play but not a tragedy, characters appear and disappear according to what happened, rather than dramatic effect.

Sejanus is a solid Machiavellian villain, but the rational kind, methodically removing his enemies by poison and slander until he achieves everything except the title of Emperor:

Is there not something more, than to be Caesar?

Must we rest there?  It irks, t’have come so far,

To be so near a stay.  (V.1, 88)

My favorite part of the play is when Sejanus is executed and then torn to pieces, offstage, by the mob.  Jonson’s language takes a new grotesque turn:

These mounting at his head, these at his face,

These digging out his eyes, those with his brain,

Sprinkling themselves, their houses, and their friends… (V.6, 118)

Sejanus is practically atomized:

Now torn, and scattered, as he needs no grave,

Each little dust covers a part:

So lies he nowhere, and yet often buried!  (118-9)

A genuinely weird image.  Perhaps it helps that Jonson be satirical in this last act.  The mob is savage, the Senators a pack of corrupt flatterers, the victor over Sejanus no better, and he’ll get his violent end a few years later.  And the ruler after that is Caligula!

It does not help Jonson that Robert Graves wrote a more comical and ironic account of this history in I, Claudius (1934).

Jonson likes animal metaphors.  I enjoyed this one, at the beginning of the play, when Sejanus’s enemies lament that they are not good flatterers:

We have no shift of faces, no cleft tongues,

No soft, and glutinous bodies, that can stick,

Like snails, on painted walls… (I.1, 11)

Lots of anti-flatterer satire.  This line was an earthy surprise:

                    … ready to praise

His lordship, if he spit, or but piss fair,

Have an indifferent stool, or break wind well,

Nothing can ‘scape their catch.  (I.1, 12)

The more of that side of Jonson, the better.

The Oxford Jonson, where I read Poetaster, has Sejanus as well, but I switched to the 1966 New Mermaid for the text and page numbers because I preferred footnotes to endnotes.

In two weeks, Henry Chettle’s The Tragedy of Hoffman, a revenge tragedy about which I know close to nothing.