Volume 2 / Part 1 — FALL OF SEJANUS.
Reading edition
Act I.
'Arruntius'. The name Tiberius, I hope, will keep, howe'er he hath foregone The dignity and power. 'Silius'. Sure, while he lives. 'Arr'. And dead, it comes to Drusus. Should he fail, To the brave issue of Germanicus; And they are three: too many (ha?) for him To have a plot upon? 'Sil'. I do not know The heart of his designs; but, sure, their face Looks farther than the present. 'Arr'. By the gods, If I could guess he had but such a thought, My sword should cleave him down, &c.
The anachronic mixture in this Arruntius of the Roman republican, to whom Tiberius must have appeared as much a tyrant as Sejanus, with his James-and-Charles-the-First zeal for legitimacy of descent in this passage, is amusing. Of our great names Milton was, I think, the first who could properly be called a republican. My recollections of Buchanan's works are too faint to enable me to judge whether the historian is not a fair exception.
Act ii. Speech of Sejanus:—
Adultery! it is the lightest ill I will commit. A race of wicked acts Shall flow out of my anger, and o'erspread The world's wide face, which no posterity Shall e'er approve, nor yet keep silent, &c.
The more we reflect and examine, examine and reflect, the more astonished shall we be at the immense superiority of Shakspeare over his contemporaries:—and yet what contemporaries!—giant minds indeed! Think of Jonson's erudition, and the force of learned authority in that age; and yet in no genuine part of Shakspeare's works is there to be found such an absurd rant and ventriloquism as this, and too, too many other passages ferruminated by Jonson from Seneca's tragedies and the writings of the later Romans. I call it ventriloquism, because Sejanus is a puppet, out of which the poet makes his own voice appear to come.
Act v. Scene of the sacrifice to Fortune. This scene is unspeakably irrational. To believe, and yet to scoff at, a present miracle is little less than impossible. Sejanus should have been made to suspect priestcraft and a secret conspiracy against him.