Valentinian (play)
Valentinian is a
(r. 455), Valentinian's short-reigning successor.Date, source, performance
Scholars date the play to the 1610–14 period. As he did with
Plot
Fletcher portrays Valentinian as a lustful and rapacious tyrant, comparable to the King in The Maid's Tragedy. His empire is decadent and collapsing, his soldiers mutinous. Valentinian rapes the virtuous Lucina; she then commits suicide. Lucina's husband, the upright soldier Maximus, devotes himself to obtaining revenge against the emperor, though his friend Aecius tries to dissuade him. Maximus finally succeeds as Valentinian dies a painful and drawn-out death by poison. Maximus is crowned by the Roman Senate for overthrowing the tyrant, only to die himself soon after.
(Curiously, the play was published with an Epilogue suited to a comedy – an apparent print-shop blunder.)
After 1660
Like many plays in Fletcher's canon, Valentinian was both revived and adapted during the
A setting by Robert Johnson of the song "Care charming sleep," the text of which is adapted from a sonnet by John Daniel, dates from about the time of the original production. The 1684 adaptation featured music composed by Louis Grabu.
Critical responses
Critics generally do not place Fletcher's play in the first rank of the English Renaissance theatre's tragedies; the play has been criticized for "its disunity of plot, structural faults, and support of tyranny...."[3] But the play has been considered influential on the Restoration tragedy that followed.
Modern critics have discussed the play's politics and sexual violence.[4][5]
References
- E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 Volumes, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1923; Vol. 3, p. 229.
- ^ Arthur Colby Sprague, Beaumont and Fletcher on the Restoration Stage, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1926; pp. 165–78.
- ^ Terence P. Logan and Denzell S. Smith, eds., The Later Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists: A Survey and Bibliography of Recent Studies in English Renaissance Drama, Lincoln, NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1978; p. 34.
- ^ Gordon McMullan, The Politics of Unease in the Plays of John Fletcher. Amherst, MA, University of Massachusetts Press, 1995; pp. 95–8.
- ^ Karen Bamford, Sexual Violence on the Jacobean Stage, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000; pp. 100–6.