
If you want tragedy, you can find it underground between King's Cross and Russell Square. Don't look for it in Stratford-upon-Avon. Ben Jonson called Sejanus: The Fall a tragedy, and the Royal Shakespeare Company is reviving his 400-year-old flop in what it calls its Gunpowder Season. But there's no gunpowder in Sejanus, and no tragedy either.
My teachers taught me, as Ben Jonson's teachers taught him, that "tragedy" is a classic literary category: a private club so exclusive that it has admitted only a few members in the thousands of years since Aeschylus inaugurated the genre. Quintessentially European, tragedies happen to kings, emperors, princes of Denmark, and guys like the eight globetrotters dining and plotting at our expense at Gleneagles earlier this month. The word tragedy, the guardians of grammar taught me, should never be used of events such as the al-Qaida bombings in London, or the American bombing of an Afghan wedding. Collateral damage is not an aesthetic experience.
Sejanus, by contrast, is a real tragedy because it versifies the poetically just, morally meaningful death of a person with an exotic name famous long ago. You can read all about Sejanus in Tacitus or Suetonius or Machiavelli. You can read Robert Graves's novel I, Claudius (or watch Patrick Stewart play Sejanus in the video of the old BBC series).
Whatever you do, don't read Jonson's Sejanus. Reading it myself, again, I started to wonder: why do I teach this shit? What do the so-called classics have to tell me, or you, that we don't already know? Does reading the past simply prevent us from seeing the present?
Jonson makes it clear why the neocons who provide ideological cover for Bush get off on the classics. I had never understood how anyone steeped in the Greek concept of hubris could applaud the arrogance of Bush's unilateral contempt for everyone's opinion but his own. And how could anyone who has read Thucydides on the disastrous Athenian expedition against Syracuse think that the American invasion of Iraq was a good idea?
But the neocons read the classics the way Jonson did. It's no accident that the word "patriot" in its modern political sense first occurs in Sejanus. It's no accident that Jonson became poet laureate to the absolutist James I. The most praised scene in Sejanus, singled out by TS Eliot among others, equates makeup with murder. Livia epitomises the moral decadence of the Roman empire - and the modern world - by using (horrors!) toothpaste, and then taking a (God forbid) "bath to cleanse and clear" the skin. Naturally, a woman who will descend to such depths of sanitary depravity feels no moral scruples about poisoning her husband. (Imagine what you can expect from Hillary Clinton.)
Eighty years ago, Jonson and the neocons tell us, we were "born free, equal lords of the triumphed world" - but now, after "betraying first our liberties", we have become "slaves" to our own "lusts". In Jonson's play, as in the Republican impeachment of Clinton, a little extracurricular sex is proof of tyranny. The Athenian empire, the Roman empire, the British empire: those were the good old days, when "god-like" white men with moral standards imposed them on women and other barbarians.
Virtue justifies violence. That's the lesson the neocons extract from the classics. Personal self-control legitimises the repression of others, who are less self-controlled than they should be. The fact that Dubya chops wood on his Texas ranch gives him the moral right to imprison anyone without trial, invade countries led by people who mocked his father, and spy on what books you check out of the library.
But this illusion of personal virtue can be maintained only by delegating the necessary violence to other people. Dubya is far and away the most violent man on the planet - responsible for many more deaths than Osama bin Laden - but Dubya lets other people do his killing for him. Imperial virtue always requires distanced violence.
Enter Sejanus. Enforcer-without-portfolio, Sejanus did all the dirty work required to maintain absolute power, so that Tiberius himself could remain imperially aloof, unbloodied, allegedly impartial, "presidential", piously regretting each new atrocity. Both the career of Sejanus and his fall perfectly embody the imperial principle of violence at a distance. Tiberius killed Sejanus with a letter. The letter was not even addressed to a single person, but to a collective representative institution. Consequently, although Tiberius personally decided to eliminate Sejanus, other people did the dirty work of disposing of the man who had been doing his dirty work.
That is why you should not read Sejanus. You need to see it. Only by seeing it can you really appreciate the shocking fact that Tiberius is not physically present in act five. That absence is supremely frustrating for an actor - and for an audience. All the conventions of the theatre make us expect a one-to-one confrontation between adversaries: Macbeth in hand-to-hand combat against Macduff, Richard III v Richmond, George Bush v Saddam Hussein. All the conventions of "tragedy" make us expect some culminating moment of existential clarity.
But Sejanus is no tragedy. At its intermittent best, it delivers - especially in the last act - the first great political cartoon in English. Reading Sejanus is like reading the captions to New Yorker cartoons, without seeing the pictures.
The caption The Fall of Sejanus sounds like an abstract moral metaphor ("the rise and fall of the Roman empire"), an epic catastrophe ("the fall of the twin towers"). What you actually see - or should see, if the RSC has the courage of Jonson's convictions - is comic concrete. Sejanus has his feet kicked out from under him, so that he falls on his arse. His toga is torn off, leaving him partially or completely naked in public. And then the emperor's new henchman "plays with" his beard and nostrils: pulls his beard, probably, and either twists his nose or sticks two fingers up his nostrils and jerks Sejanus around, literally, by the nose.
Reading Jonson, you can appreciate a sentence like "O how ridiculous appears the Senate's brainless diligence", but on stage you can also watch the parliamentary gossip chain, as one man whispers to another the latest rumour, making him swear not to tell anyone else, and the second man immediately whispers it to a third, making him swear not to tell anyone else, and the third immediately ... etc. Reading the text, these speeches are assigned to names, and Jonson and his modern editors scrupulously provide footnotes explaining the historical sources for the speech prefixes. But on stage, grand imperial politics is reduced to comically anonymous bodies in motion.
That's what the theatre can tell us about the past, and what the past can tell us about the present. Jonson's text was printed 400 years ago, but in performance his words set present bodies in motion. As every bereaved person realises - and we are all bereaved, sooner or later - our present is saturated with, and driven by, our past: a classical or fundamentalist or nationalist past, a lost empire, a lost war, a defeated father. We remember the words, or the images, but the bodies are gone. Satirically or tragically, the theatre fuses the absent past and the present body.
In the theatre, you can never forget the bodies.
· Sejanus: His Fall starts previewing at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, on Wednesday. Box office: 0870 609 1110.
