The Power of Theatre in the Time of an American Nero
By Marcia Eppich-Harris
The presidency of Donald Trump has inspired an incredible amount of critical writing, including speeches, biographies, tell-all books, and socio-political criticism.[1] What all these texts cannot do that the theatre can is bring people together to meditate on our political world, regardless of their partisan leanings. For instance, in 2016, within weeks following the election, then Vice-President-elect Mike Pence famously saw Hamilton on Broadway and enjoyed it—despite the progressive character of the show. (The crowd reportedly booed Pence.[2]) The freedom to examine politics exists in theatre in ways that cannot be replicated in nonfiction or journalism, and yet, as in the Pence/Hamilton case, even those who are being criticized by plays can still enjoy them. The fact that the Hamilton cast addressed Pence directly after the show, and that Pence stopped and listened, are moments that would never be inspired by, say, John Bolton’s book titled The Room Where It Happened, a name that recalls a pivotal song in Hamilton.
As both a literary scholar whose specialization is Shakespeare and a creative writer, I am prone to think about Trump in Shakespearean and theatrical dimensions. I am certainly not the only person to do so. Stephen Greenblatt’s book Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics (2018) makes oblique references to Trump as it works through Shakespeare’s major and minor league ne’er-do-wells, although never naming the forty-fifth president explicitly. James Shapiro’s Shakespeare in a Divided America (2020) discusses the controversial Public Theatre production of Julius Caesar (2017) in which the eponymous character is dressed like Trump, including a wig, and is assassinated by women and people of color. A more classical version of Julius Caesar was produced in the summer of 2017 by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon. In fact, the RSC’s season in 2017 consisted of entirely Roman subjects—a feat not attempted there since 1971. While the RSC productions did not attempt to connect with Trump in their staging, a full-page picture of Trump and Obama in the program for Julius Caesar made clear that the season linked the political present to the theatrical past, as we are often prone to do. (Famous twentieth century examples include Orson Welles’s Caesar, which commented on fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, and Laurence Oliver’s 1944 film version of Henry V, aimed at bolstering British morale in the war.) In 2017, I was preparing to teach an honors class about Shakespeare’s Roman and History plays, so I was deeply engaged with Shakespeare’s historic subjects, and of course, the major influences on his writing. It occurred to me after seeing their productions of Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra that what was missing from the RSC Roman season was a tribute to the first-century Stoic philosopher and dramatist, Seneca, whose work influenced Shakespeare’s tragedies and histories. Seneca was an important political figure in ancient Rome, too. He had been the tutor and chief advisor to the emperor Nero in the hopes that his Stoic philosophy would rub off on him. Ultimately, Seneca’s attempts to harness Nero failed.
I decided after that RSC season that I wanted to write about Seneca and Nero. I had taught Seneca’s plays in my Humanities classes, and I knew some of the history behind his relationship with Nero. I started a leisurely bit of research on the pair, reading James Romm’s book, Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero (2014), and reading all of Seneca’s tragedies. When the anonymous op-ed “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration” was published in the New York Times (September 2018), I could not stop thinking of how that senior official in the Trump administration seemed very much like Seneca—at least in the way they described themselves. The germ of an idea was planted in my mind. But it wasn’t until Tuesday, September 24, 2019, when Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced that an impeachment inquiry would commence against Trump, that I knew what I wanted to write. I opened a new file on my computer and started an allegorical play about modern America, starring Seneca and Nero. Thus, the writing of my play Seneca and the Soul of Nero began.
I don’t always have such a clear path to inspiration when I write, but in my mind, Seneca and Nero were the perfect historical and allegorical characters to represent the presidency and ambivalent administration of Donald Trump. I felt that Trump’s narcissism, and his Romanesque hedonism, matched strongly with Nero’s. The anonymous op-ed writer[3] described almost exactly the sort of position Seneca occupied in Nero’s reign. The op-ed stated, “We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous. But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of the republic.”[4] The writer went on to describe Trump’s leadership style as “impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective,”[5] a description that could certainly be applied to Nero. Seneca, like the anonymous writer, constantly tried to temper Nero’s worst instincts without success. Despite the anonymous writer’s reassurances that there were adults in the room who were virtuously fighting for America, Trump continued his erratic governance, with more cabinet member departures than any of the former five presidents, according to the Brookings Institute,[6] as well as attempts to defund the Postal Service—possibly to interfere with the 2020 election in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. With government officials from Rex Tillerson and John Kelly to more recently Dr. Anthony Fauci desperate to quell Trump’s legally and morally questionable moves over the past four years, I have been continually reminded of Seneca’s failed attempts to stop Nero’s worst instincts.
That said, I will admit that I am far more sympathetic to Seneca than I am to any Trump official, partly because of the distance of time and partly because Seneca had fewer choices in his political system than we have in America. Nero was only a teenager when he ascended to the imperial throne, aided by his mother, Agrippina, who assassinated her husband, Claudius, to put Nero in power. There was no democratic election, Nero ascended through murder, and he was not the first nor last to do so. Agrippina had recalled Seneca from exile[7] to be Nero’s tutor when he was a young teen and made him Nero’s chief advisor. Agrippina’s recall and appointment meant Seneca owed the family, and with a family that killed its own, one needed to be carefully compliant. So while Seneca’s insider status in Nero’s reign has similarities to Trump’s insiders and cabinet members, the stakes were far higher for Seneca—a matter of life and death. For that, as I’ve said, I felt sympathy was warranted.
Meanwhile, I felt that the anonymous writer’s presentation of the alternative, virtuous Trump lackey was a pseudo-attempt at presenting a Stoic martyrdom to the world. Our pop psychology definition of “stoicism”—a repression of emotions—is a very shallow understanding of the philosophy indeed. While it is true that in the Stoic tradition, according to the Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy, the “ideal agent has no emotions,” it is also true that “The ideal agent has ‘good feelings’ of wishing (which replaces desire), caution (which replaces fear), and joy (which replaces pleasure).”[8] What Seneca shows in his writing, and I try to show in my representation of Seneca as a character, is that his utmost concerns are living ethically and using reason to improve the self so that one may become virtuous. My own introduction to Stoicism was through Shakespeare’s admiration for and complication of the philosophy in his Roman plays, particularly in Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra.[9] But as I learned more about Stoicism from reading Seneca’s philosophical works and dramas, I realized that my own philosophical leanings happened to coincide strongly to Seneca’s, despite Shakespeare’s warnings. It was through reading Seneca that I was inspired to think much more deeply about Stoicism.
However, when faced with the Shakespearean caveat that Stoic ethics cannot shield a person from an unethical tyrant, one must wonder if it pays to be ethical? And yet, the Stoics would say seeking virtue is its own reward. In other words, it matters that you seek to be virtuous, even if you do not always succeed. Compare this noble concept of virtue seeking with the flagrantly unethical Trump administration and the chaos that has resulted from Trump’s tactics, and one can see the appeal of a philosophy that, as Ryan Holiday writes, advises its followers to “Take obstacles in your life and turn them into your advantage, control what you can and accept what you can’t.”[10] For the novice Stoic, Seneca’s writings, both philosophical and dramatic, are an excellent gateway. He is often didactic in his approach and asks the reader to follow his example in using reflection and reason in the quest for self-improvement. In his treatise, On Anger, Seneca gives a prescriptive example of how one should deal with her shortcomings:
I pass the whole day in review before myself, and repeat all that I have said and done: I conceal nothing from myself, and omit nothing: for why should I be afraid of any of my shortcomings, when it is in my power to say, "I pardon you this time: see that you never do that anymore?”[11]
The idea that self-improvement is something that needs to be addressed routinely shows that emotional regulation and self-care were practices that Seneca struggled with himself, but one’s failings are not something to dwell on, Seneca says—you can do better next time. Seneca’s one-day-at-a-time mentality feels progressive and modern to me and suggests that failure is not the end of any given situation. And yet, Seneca’s attempts to influence Nero to take a more virtuous path failed, and ultimately led to Seneca’s death. In the course of my play, Seneca nevertheless persists until his death—not only because he believes it is his Stoic duty to mentor Nero, but also because he cares for him, thinking of him as a son.
Seneca and the Soul of Nero opens on the day that Claudius dies and Nero, in effect, becomes emperor. Seneca and Nero are in the midst of studying the Curse of the House of Atreus, a cautionary tale about family, murder, and revenge that Seneca writes about in two of his tragedies—Thyestes and Agamemnon. In my mind, I see Nero and Seneca sitting together, as in the statue by Eduardo Barrón (1904). Nero is impetuous, but charming, and he and Seneca have a friendly banter between them that occasionally tilts toward danger:
Nero: Philosophy, psh! You do not like to laugh, Master Seneca.
Seneca: I laugh at you every day!
Nero: (Joking) To your peril, my friend.
Seneca: (Playing along) I have no doubt.[12]
While Seneca and Nero tease each other amiably, and Nero has no idea that he will become emperor within minutes, the purpose of the scene is to set up the tension in their relationship. From the beginning of the play, you see that while Seneca and Nero are close, as teachers and students sometimes are, the power balance between them is always askew, in this case with the student rather than the teacher having the political upper hand. I see this sort of tension play out in the Trump administration—from when Trump, a political novice, demanded loyalty from James Comey to his infamous telephone call with Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine. Nero’s murders of his support system, including his mother, Agrippina, his first wife, Octavia, his second wife, Poppaea Sabina,[13] and the ordered suicide of Seneca, mirror Trump’s dismissal of members of his administration who were once avid supporters, such as Jeff Sessions, Reince Priebus, and John Bolton, among many others.
In writing historical fiction, a writer frequently takes liberties with causation and timing of events in order to tell a good story. Shakespeare, for instance, telescoped time constantly in his history plays, collapsing several years into one play and only portraying events that illuminate specific themes. In most cases, Shakespeare used the politically correct version of a character (politically correct for his time) and illustrated them in a way that would please the reigning monarch, and the censors, whether that portrayal was true to historic fact or not. Both Prince Hal and Richard III are good examples of Shakespeare towing a party line, regardless of the historical accuracy (or inaccuracy) of his sources. In my play, I collapsed several years into two hours, and in doing so, I had to make choices about what to portray, using episodes that showed causal relationships between events in order to make a point. I selected scenarios that I felt would show a strong connection between current events and Nero’s reign, as well as juxtapose Stoic virtue and narcissistic villainy. For instance, Tacitus reports that Nero killed his then pregnant second wife, Poppaea Sabina, by kicking her to death during a tantrum.[14] This event happened in 65 CE, after the great fire of Rome and Seneca’s forced suicide. However, I changed the order of these events for the sake of social commentary. In my play, Nero kills Poppaea Sabina, then in revenge for his own mistake, he punishes Rome by having it set on fire, destroying the city while he mourns in Antium, keeping Seneca, who had asked to retire and was denied, at his side. In the next scene, the Pisonian conspiracy is unveiled and Seneca is swiftly condemned to suicide. My point in portraying events this way was to allegorically represent Trump’s impeachment. His own misbehavior caused Trump an incredible number of personal and political headaches, including impeachment, but more significantly, his actions punished America for electing him. The Senate’s acquittal suggested to me that the America I had believed in—where politics could be set aside to address a moment of clear wrongdoing—had been unequivocally lost, or perhaps never existed in the first place. What virtue, if any, is extant in America? Perhaps a Stoic like Seneca can inspire us to seek it out in ourselves.
I am not the only person to equate Trump with Nero or to bemoan a lost sense of virtue. Although I started writing my play long before it was published, a book titled American Nero: The History of the Destruction of the Rule of Law, and Why Trump Is the Worst Offender was published just before Trump’s impeachment trial. As the Washington Post reported, the book centers around the “icy, granular detail, of what has happened to constitutional democracy in three short years, and all that we have absorbed, integrated and somehow moved beyond. In some sense, then, it stands less as a unified argument than as a scrapbook of things that no longer horrify us.”[15] In retrospect, several months later, no one could have predicted that Trump’s worst failure was yet to come as the Covid-19 pandemic spread throughout the nation. Ironically, a month after the impeachment trial concluded, on March 9, 2020, #NeroTrump was trending on Twitter after Trump retweeted a meme of himself playing a violin with a fire burning in the background, captioned, “My next piece is called. . . Nothing can stop what’s coming.”[16] Trump wrote in his tweet, “I don’t know what this means, but it sounds good to me.” Critics jumped on Trump, as former FBI Assistant Director and NBC News contributor, Frank Figliuzzi did: “It means that playing golf while Americans die during an uncontained epidemic makes you look like the Emperor Nero fiddling while Rome burned. The fact that neither you nor your social media director understand this meme and retweeted it makes you even more oblivious than Nero.”[17] Continuing the analogy, Bernie Sanders, in his speech at the Democratic National Convention, said in regard to Trump’s handling of the pandemic, “Nero fiddled while Rome burned; Trump golfs. His actions fanned this pandemic, resulting in over 170,000 deaths and a nation still unprepared to protect its people.”[18]
In all, it took about seven months to complete Seneca and the Soul of Nero, although I had been mulling over the idea for some time. For me, writing about Seneca was cathartic, especially knowing that his position in Nero’s court must have felt like climbing a mudslide. But writing this play also reminded me that the arts, especially theatre, have a crucial place at the political and historical table. In Seneca and the Soul of Nero, every major character dies with no Horatio left to tell their stories or mourn them. To me, it was important that every character died, not because I’m morbid, but because I wanted to show the totality of the destruction wrought by Nero’s pathology. If we were forced to endure another four years of Trump in the White House, I believe the American republic would also suffer a similar calamity. This is why writers need to document the cycles of political history in the arts in order to remind ourselves of what we’re capable of as human beings, both for good and ill.
As a demonstration of this belief, I wrote two different scenes in my play in which Seneca is writing tragedies in an attempt to teach Nero. In writing both scenes, I felt an intimate connection to Seneca that collapsed the 2000 years between our historical moments. At heart, both Seneca and I are teachers, and we both believe in trying to do the right thing, working toward self-improvement despite inevitable failures, and honoring reason and virtue. I can relate to Seneca’s desire not to give up on Nero, as a teacher so often does not want to give up on her wayward students. Nor do I want to give up on America. Yet, in the greater scope of history, we often do not learn the lessons our teachers tried to get across. Playwrights, therefore, must not cease to engage creatively with history, politics, and philosophy. It is our duty to cut through the grind of endless partisan chatter. The art that we create in this era can last longer than the tell-all books of fired cabinet members. And as with Shakespeare’s and Seneca’s works, our contemporary plays will have something to tell future generations about our past and their present simultaneously.
[1] See, for instance, David Frum’s Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic (2018), David Cay Johnston’s It’s Even Worse than You Think: What the Trump Administration is Doing to America (2018), Omarose Manigault Newman’s Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House (2018), Bob Woodward’s Fear: Trump in the White House (2018), Cliff Sims’s Team of Vipers: My 500 Extraordinary Days in the Trump White House (2019), Anonymously published A Warning, Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig’s A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America (2020), John Bolton’s The Room Where It Happened (2020), among many others.
[2] CNN reported that “Pence said he did notice the booing, but it didn't spoil the show. ‘My daughter and I and her cousins really enjoyed the show. Hamilton is just an incredible production, incredibly talented people. It was a real joy to be there,’ Pence said. ‘When we arrived we heard a few boos, and we heard some cheers,’ he said, ‘I nudged my kids and reminded them that is what freedom sounds like.’” Eric Bradner, “Pence: ‘I wasn’t offended’ by message of ‘Hamilton’ cast” CNN, November 20, 2016. https://www.cnn.com/2016/11/20/politics/mike-pence-hamilton-message-trump/index.html, accessed August 17, 2020.
[3] “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration” The New York Times, published September 5, 2018; accessed August 14, 2020 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/opinion/trump-white-house-anonymous-resistance.html
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, “Tracking Turnover in the Trump Administration” (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute, August 14, 2020) accessed August 16, 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/research/tracking-turnover-in-the-trump-administration/
[7] According to Romm, Seneca was accused of adultery with Caligula’s sister, Livilla, as a matter of political expediency. Claudius’s wife, Messalina, wanted both Livilla and Agrippina to be removed from Rome so that she could consolidate her own power over the emperor. Seneca happened to be a convenient man to accuse of adultery with Livilla, as they had a close relationship. He was sentenced to death for his supposed crime. However, Claudius commuted the sentence to exile in Corsica. See James Romm, Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero (New York: Vintage Books), 25-28.
[8] Katja Vogt, “Seneca” 3.3 The Therapy of Emotions, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Palo Alto, Stanford UP, 2020) https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/seneca/#SenSto
[9] Shakespeare suggests in both Brutus’s and Antony’s failures and suicides in the two aforementioned plays that Stoicism fails to neutralize Machiavellian realpolitik, however attractive the tenants of Stoicism are.
[10] Ryan Holiday, “Stoicism: Practical Philosophy You Can Actually Use” Blog post, Ryan Holiday: Meditations on Strategy and Life. June 17, 2014, accessed October 27, 2020. https://ryanholiday.net/stoicism-a-practical-philosophy-you-can-actually-use/
[11] Seneca, On Anger, section 36, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Of_Anger/Book_III#XXXVI.
[12] Marcia Eppich-Harris, Seneca and the Soul of Nero, unpublished manuscript, Act 1, scene 1, p. 4.
[13] Poppaea Sabina is the historical name for Nero’s second wife. I use the name Sabina in order to distinguish her from Seneca’s wife, Pompeia Paulina. In the theater, the names might easily be confused.
[14] Tacitus, Annuals of Imperial Rome, Book XVI – A.D. 65, 66, translated by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodbribb (Pantianos Classics, 2017), 245.
[15] Dahlia Lithwick, “Defending the Rule of Law in the Trump Era,” The Washington Post, March 20, 2020, accessed August 17, 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/defending-the-rule-of-law-in-the-trump-era/2020/03/19/7dfac5d0-618a-11ea-845d-e35b0234b136_story.html
[16] According to The Hill, the tweet was originally posted by White House social media director, Dan Scavino, on March 8, 2020.
[17] Twitter, https://twitter.com/FrankFigliuzzi1/status/1236793534964883456
[18] Bernie Sanders, transcript of speech to Democratic National Convention, August 18, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/08/18/903398536/watch-bernie-sanders-speech-to-the-democratic-national-convention?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=politics&utm_term=nprnews&utm_source=facebook.com&fbclid=IwAR2Zj084P_-bX_XP4O448VwvNUK-mc943sI8zK3Un5E-JJLFAW3Ta6Bcr1g, accessed August 19, 2020. As of October 20, 2020, there have been more than 220,000 deaths from Covid-19 in the United States.
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Marcia Eppich-Harris received her PhD in Shakespeare and Dramatic Literature from Marquette University, and she taught literature, writing, and Humanities for fifteen years. Her scholarship focuses on both Shakespeare and twenty-first century playwrights. Marcia is a founding member of the Indiana Playwrights Circle (IPC) and is the discussion leader for IPC's weekly Scene Nights. Marcia's playwriting and fiction are influenced by the literature and history of the ancient Greeks and Romans, the Medieval period, and the Renaissance. In both her scholarship and her creative writing, she explores gender roles, politics, the arts, and culture. She lives in Indianapolis, Indiana.