1Ben Jonson’s Catiline His Conspiracy (c. 1611) is set during the period of the Roman civil wars, centering on the titular conspiracy and its defeat by Cicero. In the play, Jonson takes ideas circulating in the period about Roman society and transforms them in ways that make the play more of a commentary on Jonson’s contemporary England than a reflection of what Jonson’s sources would have told him about Ciceronian Rome. In particular, he changes how the play approaches factional conflict in Rome, and thus the meaning of Cicero’s response to the conspiracy. In doing so, he thus simultaneously contributes to the memory of Cicero and his time while altering that memory in notable ways that conflict with and undercut what his contemporaries would have thought of the Roman state in the late Republican period. Instead, while much of the play comes close to its classical sources, the play as a whole opens itself up for significant topical interpretations by connecting its Rome with Jonson’s England. In particular, I suggest, the play’s depiction of Ciceronian Rome through Catiline, Cicero, and the larger political context comments on the difficulties of empire, with Rome standing as a negative model for early modern England’s own imperial ambitions.
- 1 I rely for this narrative on condensing a wide range of sources, including but not limited to Thoma (...)
2When considering how Jonson’s play contributes to the memory of Ciceronian Rome, we must remember that neither Jonson nor his audience would have begun their engagement with the play from zero. There was a great deal of agreement in early modern England about what had happened in the Roman civil wars and how it had changed the state (though of course different authors drew different lessons from those changes). The period from the conflict between Sulla and Marius in the 80s BCE through the establishment of the Empire after the defeat of Marc Antony by Augustus Caesar in 30 BCE – in particular from the death of Sulla in 78 BCE to the death of Julius Caesar in 44 BCE, including the Catilinarian conspiracy of 63 BCE – was seen in early modern England as a time of major unrest in the Roman state, and particularly of factional division between the followers of Sulla (and later Pompey) and Marius (and later Caesar).1 In early modern England, attention focused on this factional aspect of the conflict, with particular attention to the idea that these factions were “continuall,” running consistently through the entire period (Fulbecke). Political allegiance was understood not in terms of affiliation to the Roman state but to a particular faction as the two sides each tried to gain control of the state.
- 2 All subsequent references to Catiline are from this edition, cited in-line by act, line, and scene.
3Jonson’s Catiline, however, does not ask us to remember Rome this way. One editor has suggested that “Jonson knows, but does not press on us” this factionalism (Ewbank 15), but I think this misses the point: Jonson utterly removes the factionalism from the play. Even the lightly illustrated division that the play does gesture towards is not between the Sullans and the Marians, or the Pompeians and the Caesareans, but between the Senate and the people—a division that was understood by Jonson’s contemporaries to have been central to Roman politics in the earlier period of the republic, not during the civil wars. The Rome of Catiline is free from the division suggested by “organized political parties” or coherent factions (Ewbank 15); it is instead a single unified state menaced by a single conspiracy. Its patrician nobility, and indeed its citizens as a body, are capable of acting with one voice – “the voice of Cato is the voice of Rome” (Jonson 3.1.80)2 – a fact driven home by the use of a Chorus not only to speak that particular line but to interject its thoughts between each act. Catiline and his friends aim at Rome as a unified body, opposing “the commonwealth” and “the whole Senate” (1.1.437). There is no sense of pre-existing division between parties, only between individual rivals for the consulship.
4In order to achieve this transformation of the memory of Rome, the play does not merely omit but deliberately misremembers the factional past outlined above. The first and most obvious moment of such re-remembering comes at the very beginning of the play, when Sulla’s Ghost infuses his spirit into Catiline. The Ghost rewrites Sulla’s own history, flattening all factional difference in order to equate his own spirit with that of “the Gracchi,” “Cinna,” and “Marius” (1.1.21). The Gracchi refer to a pair of brothers who served as tribunes in the 2nd century BCE, during another period of internal unrest; Cinna and Marius, however, were Sulla’s direct adversaries, the consular leaders of the opposing (and losing) faction. By having Sulla’s Ghost invoke them as allies in his possession of Catiline, the play moves definitively away from the factional understanding of the Sullan and immediately post-Sullan period that was current in early modern England, where the division of Rome between the Sullans and the Marians was a fundamental fact of political life, and towards a vision of politics in which all the factions join together to function collectively as a destructive opposition to an imagined central, undivided Rome. If Sulla’s Ghost is intended as a “historical link between preceding events and the play to follow” as Angela Dorenkamp has suggested (211), that link involves reconstructing the preceding history to eliminate the factional differences with which a contemporary audience would have been familiar. The new lesson the Ghost produces out of the past is clear: factional division is not a political norm of the period but a form of “treason” worthy of the greatest enemy of Rome (1.1.26). Rome itself is the collective, undivided entity Catiline invokes in his own first line: “Nor shall thy fate, O Rome, / Resist my vow” (73-74), rather than a state split into parties.
5The play’s other references to the immediately prior and ongoing civil wars produce a similar effect, consistently evoking the characters from the prehistory of faction only to redefine that history. When Catiline attempts to convince Lentulus to join him, he twice mentions Cinna and Sulla as consecutive prior rulers of Rome derived (like Lentulus) from the family of the Cornelii (1.1.140, 268-269). There is no acknowledgement of their history as rivals who fought over the city, or that they ruled consecutively only because Sulla actively overthrew Cinna and Marius. Instead, Catiline echoes the unifying approach taken by Sulla’s Ghost (1.1.272-273). Cicero does later refer to the “late civil war” (3.2.27), but he too does so in a way that immediately erases the history of difference between the two sides, and casts their struggle as a joint attack on the peace of Rome. He speaks of “the commonwealth, yet panting underneath / The stripes and wounds of a late civil war” (3.2.26-27) and once again unites “Marius and Sulla” as a yoked pair responsible for the commonwealth’s woes (3.2.36). In doing so, he recasts their civil war as being against the central “Rome” rather than against each other, de-emphasizing the factional nature of the conflict and rejecting any connection between that war and his own time. Catiline sees Sulla and his opponents positively, Cicero negatively, but both fuse them into a single example, erasing their differences to make them jointly represent the spirit of their age. As I shall explore below, this erasure of historical specificity ultimately leads to a topicality for the play that is less about any particular individual parallel with Jacobean England, and more about the overall sense that Roman history shows a lesson about the dangers of empire more broadly.
6Once established, this vision of the past translates into the present of the play. When the Chorus refers to Catiline and his allies as “proud and factious men” (2.1.369), their factiousness is defined against “the commonwealth” as a whole, not against any opposing faction within the Roman state (2.1.375). This perspective would have been directly contrary to the common early modern English understanding of the Roman civil wars as a continual divide between known, pre-established opposed factions within Rome.
7Jonson’s treatment of the past produces a vision of Rome in which “Rome” is simply the name for what Cicero defends and Catiline attacks. This centralization of political power and significance in Cicero is Jonson’s own addition to the play (Barton 46). In his sources, both classical and early modern, Cicero is important, but only as a central member in a larger “party of virtue” that opposes Catiline, to borrow Blair Worden’s phrase (164). Obviously, Cicero’s own orations emphasize his role, but the other sources from which the play is derived are definite on his role as merely the first among many. In Jonson, and only Jonson, rather than a political situation characterized by the battle between two or more parties, it is clear that Catiline and his co-conspirators are a minority opposing the combined will of the city, embodied in Cicero and supported by Cato and the other loyal senators. The dominant message of Jonson’s play is that Cicero has individually protected “happy Rome,” a unified city-empire over which he is consul, against an insurrection (5.5.190). That Rome remains whole even as Catiline and his allies attack it, centralizing what others had historically read as a decentralized and divided Rome.
8This interpretation of Roman history dominates the play. In creating it, Jonson distorts the memory of Rome that he would have found in his sources as well as in the works of his contemporaries. Jonson relied primarily on Sallust’s account of Catiline’s conspiracy, supplementing it with material from Cicero, Plutarch, and other classical authors as well as the composite account of the Renaissance historian Constanzo Felice (Duffy 24-26; Alyo 83). Both Sallust’s and Felice’s histories firmly place Catiline and Cicero within the factional world of Rome, tracing the history of the wars between Sulla and Marius and drawing the connection between Catiline’s personal hope for gain and Sulla’s institution of the spoils system in Rome (Felice 3v; Sallust 10-11). In making the connection between Catiline and the factional politics of Rome they were joined by a wide variety of sources: from Gasparo Contarini (whom Jonson references in Volpone) and Michel de Montaigne to more obscure authors like Lodowick Lloyd, who wrote prolifically about the civil wars (Contarini 77; Montaigne 147; Lloyd 19v). A good single summary of these various authors’ approach to Catiline’s conspiracy can be found in Levinus Lemnius’ statement that Catiline was “a factious yonker (as Salust reporteth)” – one part of the general ills of a period in constant turmoil through factional division (140v). Although Catiline himself was rarely connected with any one particular faction, his conspiracy was understood to be intimately related to the atmosphere of factional distrust and unrest prevalent in the period – a symptom of the new factional politics of Rome, rather than a cause of the dissolution of an earlier, less factional system. Similarly, Cicero’s opposition to him was also part of this factional byplay, not a unique and centralized defense of a unified Rome.
9This change in Cicero’s role is particularly significant. By the early modern period Catiline had become a watchword in some quarters for violent opposition to the state, and as such while Jonson recontextualizes Catiline’s rebellion he does not depart entirely from contemporary views of the historical figure. Rather, his treatment of Catiline involves siding with a distinct tradition about Catiline present in early modern culture that clashed with the historical texts he otherwise used as sources. This tradition often found expression in debates surrounding the Reformation: thus, there are references to “Luther the traiterous Cateline of our time” (Charke 33), comparisons of the Peasants’ Revolt to the work of “the traitor Catiline” (Frarinus E3r), and accusations that John Knox was “the Cataline of Scotland” (Lecey 29), while John Foxe in turn compared the Marian inquisition in England to “Catilines currishnesse” (4v). Such references draw Catiline out of his time, assuming that their own present “may wel be compared to the time of Catiline” through a direct personal parallel between Catiline and whichever (and however many) persons the author might desire to attack (Averell *2v). Jonson’s Catiline takes from this tradition the idea that Catiline stood as a unique traitor undermining the security of an otherwise unified Roman state.
10Jonson differs from the above tradition, however, in his use of Cicero. In the tradition that castigated Catiline, Cicero was notably absent; Catiline was himself a catastrophe, but the Roman state he threatened was not headed by any single individual, and Cicero is rarely even mentioned. This is perhaps unsurprising, since the purpose of the above quotes is typically to impugn an individual opponent, rather than to contrast them with anyone in the role Jonson reserves for Cicero. But Jonson does have such a role for Cicero, which means that he combines the anti-Catilinarian position with one that also makes Cicero the singular hero opposing the destructive nature of Catiline.
11In doing so, Jonson therefore departs from both the histories and the vein of anti-Catilinarian rhetoric in the Reformation treatises. Unlike Catiline, Cicero was clearly defined in early modern sources as a part of the factional picture – including his ongoing opposition to the Caesarean party that emerged from the Marians, an opposition that ultimately led to his death. Perhaps the most obvious of these examples is North’s translation of Plutarch’s Life of Cicero, which takes a particular interest in how Cicero’s life speaks to the Sullan/Marian divide and its role in reshuffling the offices of the Roman state (917-918). But North’s Plutarch is merely the most explicit of the early modern texts that saw Cicero as part of this factional world – which is unsurprising, given that the early modern English saw the entire period through this factional lens, as described above. Jonson’s alterations to Cicero’s role thus stand out as uniquely significant. As Gesine Manuwald has noted, in the play Jonson gives us Cicero as an exemplar of particular political responses rather than drawing a historical portrait of the man himself (56). By taking Cicero and making him a representative of this undivided Rome, one who stands singularly (and quasi-monarchically) for the state, Jonson decontextualizes him from the larger factional situation and attempts to alter how he had been remembered in the period.
12Ironically, even as Jonson turns deliberately away from the factional view of Catiline, Cicero, and their period, he keeps large portions of the action and even individual speeches from his sources (Harris 273, 276-277). As a result, despite the accuracy of the speeches and events themselves, their meaning is changed, and so too is the play’s memory of Rome. The major result of this is to make Ciceronian and Catilinarian Rome more amenable to topical application in Jonson’s own time. It is not for nothing that critics have frequently read Jonson as making topical allusions. The most common of these is in relation to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and Jonson’s Catholic associations, a topic which has been dealt with at such length that it is arguably its own subfield of Jonson studies (De Luna; Lake 163-189; Worden 158; Cetin 173-197). But beyond that, there are certainly other potential topical resonances in the early sixteenth century (Kim 163-165), and even later seventeenth-century audiences saw lessons in Catiline for the preservation of the kingdom in their own time as well (Bland 382). The detail of which topical resonance is meant is ultimately less significant, in this context, than the fact that the play generates so many topical resonances.
13The reason for this insistent topicality is Jonson’s presentation of the Roman state, and particularly Cicero’s place in it. The unified Roman state Jonson constructed in his play bears substantially more resemblance to the England of the seventeenth century than to the Rome it purports to remember. This is a Rome primed to serve as an example; while there is a formal Roman consular election, the actual government of the state quickly becomes concentrated in one man’s hands – Cicero’s – with occasional appeals to the Senate, and the unified Roman state has few characteristics that seem particular to this place or time. Even the consular election strongly recalls the process of what Mark Kishlansky called “parliamentary selection” in early modern England (10, 15, 17-18). Ironically, while Kishlansky uses the consular election in William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus as an example of this process at work in drama, the Cicero-Caius Antonius election described in Catiline’s third act is actually closer to his model: two candidates are selected, representing two slightly different interest groups, various power brokers ensure the result, and the people themselves serve primarily to produce the “universal concourse” of assent (3.1.31). This means that even one of the most seemingly purely Roman elements in Catiline, the consular election, has roots in the early modern period.
14The presence of such connections does not mean that interpreting Catiline is as easy as saying that Catiline is Guy Fawkes, or that Caesar represents closet Catholics secretly supportive of the Gunpowder Plot. Rather, it suggests that the topical resonances of Catiline are heightened as a result of how Jonson asks us to remember Rome, and particularly Cicero as its central actor, orienting the play towards an easier recognition of the correspondence between historical example and seventeenth-century contemporary context. Despite its close relationship to its sources, Catiline “invites an allegorical and moral interpretation,” just like his earlier Sejanus, and particularly a topical one (Sherman 124). The play is well suited to act as an example, and specifically an example for its early modern English audience, because the play’s Rome looks more like early modern England than, historically speaking, it should.
15This increase in topical resonance carries over to other aspects of the play as well, and particularly to the play’s sense of Roman history. As Inga-Stina Ewbank has suggested, “Jonson’s characters are not so much individuals with psychological depths as figures illustrating a historical process” (9) – a historical process of a much longer duration than Catiline’s conspiracy, and one frequently invoked for topical application in early modern England. That historical process is the decline of a certain set of Roman values (Norland 70). The political processes of Catiline look like the early republican period of Rome, when they look like Rome at all, because they highlight (particularly in Cato and Cicero) certain political virtues of honor, honesty, and dedication to the state that were thought to belong to that earlier period. Where those virtues fail, on the other hand, the corruption presented looks like an even later period; as Blair Worden rightly observes, the play’s Senate and its failings reflect an early imperial theme present in Tacitus, as well as in Jonson’s other Roman tragedy, Sejanus (153). So, where the play engages with the changes in those values within the state, it distances itself in both directions from the historical particularity of the period it purports to depict.
16In other words, Jonson’s efforts towards topicality reduce the play’s specificity regarding its Roman time period. Rather than engaging only with the Rome of the late republic, the emphasis on virtue and vice produces echoes of the early republic and the early empire as well, diffusing any particular sense of Rome across a broad swath of history. In giving us a Rome devoid of established parties and factions, but containing the vices and virtues of Catiline and Cicero, Jonson gives us a Rome that is not localized to its particular time and place. Instead, the play illustrates the overall historical process of the decline of Rome by de-historicizing itself from the individual moment in which it is set. The removal of the historical events from their surrounding context in turn simplifies and encourages the process of reading those events in a more topical light – especially in this case because the decline of Roman virtue was frequently invoked in the early modern period as a general model for the connections between moral and political change (Osmond 105-109; Starn 5-6; Burke 146). Jonson thus engages with Rome as a moral and allegorical object more than a historical and memorial one, even as the details of events remain rooted in the sources he consulted. At the same time, then, that the play is connecting its Rome to early modern England, it is generalizing that Rome, inducing the sense that early modern England is similar not to any specific Rome but to Rome in general, across its entire history.
17I would suggest that one possible product of this dual effect of allegorizing early modern England to Rome while simultaneously diffusing the sense of which particular Rome functions in the allegory is to make “Rome” here stand in more generically for empire, and to invite audiences to consider early modern England’s own incipient empire as a potential parallel to Rome’s. The play is well aware that Rome is not merely a city but a geopolitical powerhouse; although the formal empire of Augustus merely looms in the future history of the characters, Cicero already refers to “this city and this empire” (4.2.392). It is no accident that critics have read the play as existing in a world “more imperial than republican” (Ewbank). I suggest that Jonson did this precisely in order to allow the play to speak to the idea of an English empire. By taking Rome as a historical whole, rather than representing a more individuated and differentiated late Republican Rome in particular, and by then connecting that Rome to Jonson’s own England, the play ends up connecting early modern England to imperial Rome, just as Worden has noted Sejanus doing. The fact that both of Jonson’s Roman tragedies have this common focus, in turn, suggests that we should take it seriously as a Jonsonian interest.
18Examining the play with this in mind, I suggest, shows us a very critical presentation of empire indeed, with significant implications for the play’s use of Cicero. This is most clearly visible in Cicero’s inability or unwillingness to deal with Julius Caesar and his connections to Catiline’s conspiracy. Caesar’s presence in the play brings with it the shadow of future change, as many critics have observed (Echeruo 351, 354; Warren 60; McGinnis 207-209; Alyo 99-101; Moore 94). Because Catiline recasts factional struggles over the control of the Roman state into existential war for the state’s survival, the stakes of those future changes are heightened, and Cicero’s failure to deal with Caesar becomes disastrous, precisely because it leads to empire (Lovascio 212). Empire is simultaneously foreshadowed by Cicero’s centralization of the state and the threat against which the state (imagined as the Republic) is most vulnerable. This reflects a narrative of Roman decline common in the early modern period – a decline based on “social and moral disintegration” that ultimately undermines the republican ethos of the state and replaces it with the mores of the Empire (McGinnis 197). This narrative often relies, as it does here, on the ideal of a unified pre-imperial Rome, a “state” that “prevails for a time over its enemies,” here by Cicero’s efforts (McGinnis 184). Catiline exists in the world of this narrative, one in which the “moral decadence” of Rome only produces political change through a cataclysmic revolution that is almost realized in Catiline’s revolt and is finally brought to fruition by the triumphs of Caesar and his successors (Alyo 25). Thus, while the play represents Rome as imperial, and Cicero as a centralizer of authority, it also sees the empire that ultimately resulted from these changes as a danger. The memory of Cicero here is therefore a two-edged sword, on the one hand exalting the heroic savior of the state and on the other seeing that very salvation as producing a longer-term danger. This in turn suggests that even though Jonson presents Cicero’s intervention as good, the play may well be advocating more topically against the early modern impulse towards imperialism, seen here as a threat to the very foundations of the state. Cicero’s centralization of the state into his own hands is thus both a source of connection between the play’s Rome and the early modern period and, due to its implied connection to the fall of the Republic, a cautionary example of how dangerous the temptation to empire may be.
19In this, we may see parallels with other early modern theatrical texts that create space for anti-imperialist rhetoric, even though we know from our vantage point in the future that the English (and later British) empire did come into being. The most obvious of these is Jonson’s own Masque of Blackness. Although many critics have identified this masque as gesturing towards “Britain-as-future-empire” (Hutson 243) through its depiction and dismissal of blackness, it is worth noting, as Onyeka Nubia recently has, that the character of Niger, whose “words offer a contrary perspective” about the value of blackness (33-34), is not directly contradicted in the masque itself. Like the ambiguous depiction of Ciceronian power, then, this may be a case where what seems at first glance to be a pro-imperial depiction has hidden depths that are not so positive; certainly, it asks us to consider whether the masque, like the play, may be deliberately approaching the topic in a different way than its audience might have expected. As in Catiline, this element of the masque is drawn from Jonson’s treatment of classical sources (Pucciarelli 69), which is suggestive regarding Jonson’s mode of engagement with such sources for political lessons, as we shall see below. In both cases, then, we see Jonson working with material his audience would have been familiar with (the Roman state, notions of blackness) and producing a classically-inspired piece with potentially surprising implications.
20Beyond Jonson’s own works, we might also look for a degree of similar concern about the value of imperial ambitions in plays by other playwrights. To do so generally would go beyond the scope of this paper, but one brief example from Jonson’s contemporary, William Shakespeare, might help illuminate what we see in Catiline more fully. We have seen how Jonson invokes specific classical historical moments in Catiline only to use them in a way that makes them more generally applicable to Rome as an imperial example. In The Tempest, we can see Shakespeare doing something similar with geography, rather than history: the play is clearly set in the Mediterranean, as Jerry Brotton has most notably argued, through particular geographical references, but where it is exactly is never specified. This very lack of specificity, in turn, has permitted a much greater engagement with the play’s depiction of American empire than might otherwise be the case: as Imtiaz Habib has pointed out, the general reception of the play has emphasized the “obviousness of its racial-colonialist discourse,” which has been interpreted primarily in an American context (207). Rather than seeing this as a problem, a “‘Bermuda pamphlets’ syndrome” that has led critics astray (Stanivukovic 9), I argue that we see here a deliberate effort, just as in Catiline, to invoke multiple layers of reading at once in service of a message that critiques the early modern English rush to imperialism. As Daniel Vitkus has suggested, The Tempest shows us “aristocratic characters who fail to sustain any empire-building projects” regardless of whether we consider those projects to be American or Mediterranean (7). Reading in this way, we can see in both Catiline and The Tempest a common technique: a mode of engagement that empowers this sort of overtly topical reading by reducing the play’s historical or geographical specificity without removing it entirely.
21In Jonson’s case, this approach may be derived from his own close relationship with classical models of scholarship. Katharine Maus, among others, has convincingly demonstrated the degree of Jonson’s debt to Roman moral thought. Jonson saw himself as following Roman examples in how he portrayed the world in his works, particularly as regarded the use of satire and historical examples for moral and political instruction. The classical authors Jonson preferred stressed the importance of exemplary history that relied on actual, verifiable events from which to work (Norland 69). Jonson was not alone among Renaissance authors in stressing this classical approach to exemplary history, but he was particularly attached to it (Dorenkamp 211; Echeruo 354-355; Kim 18-20). The need to simultaneously provide an accurate narrative of historical events and a story primed for contemporary application leads logically enough to the kind of historical drama we see in Catiline, a play in which, as Bruce Boehrer has suggested, Jonson “takes exceptional care to remain accurate to his historical source-materials” but must “detach himself from the larger points of view those source-materials embody” (99). Boehrer here compares the different exemplary models that he finds in Jonson and his sources, but the point remains valid when we expand it to consider Jonson’s approach to introducing exemplarity into the story in the first place. In order to make his historical narrative speak to his own time in the way he wished it to, Jonson altered not the events but the political context in which they occur. Paradoxically, Jonson’s own close intellectual associations with the classics may be what led him to misremember Ciceronian Rome in Catiline.
22In doing so, Jonson engages in what we might call his typical approach to classical events. As he more famously did in his Sejanus, in Catiline he strictly adhered to the sequence of events in the historical record, while placing those events in the unexpected context of a minimally divided state reminiscent of early modern England itself. Jonson gives us Roman events in an early modern English world, with a clear desire to inspire contemporary application of the lessons therein – even if what the lessons themselves might be has been a matter of some debate over the years, from Catholicism and treason to (as I suggest here) empire. Jonson is ultimately less concerned with an accurate memory of Ciceronian Rome in context than with what can be done with a version of that memory in his own time.