Sejanus His Fall

• 1. Introduction

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  Sejanus His Fall arrived in 1603 from the pen of Ben Jonson, a play about one of the most dangerous men ever to serve a Roman emperor. Lucius Aelius Sejanus was the favourite of Tiberius, and Jonson built a tragedy around his destruction. What happened when that play reached a live audience at the Globe Theatre was memorable for all the wrong reasons. And the trouble did not stop at bad reviews. Someone in power decided the play amounted to a promotion of "popery and treason", and Jonson was hauled before the authorities to answer for it. How does a tragedy set in ancient Rome become a political threat in the London of James I? Who was Jonson's unnamed co-author, whose work he later described as the product of a "happy genius"? And why did it take more than three centuries for the play to be staged again after its humiliating debut?

• 2. Hissed Off the Stage

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  The King's Men first performed Sejanus His Fall in 1603, most likely at court during the winter of that year. When they brought it to the Globe Theatre in 1604, the reception was brutal. Contemporary witnesses, including Jonson himself, recorded that the cast was met with heckles and hisses. The 1604 performance was, in the blunt phrase preserved by those witnesses, "hissed off the stage".

  Park Honan noted an unexpected consequence for the most famous actor in that company. William Shakespeare had acted in Sejanus, and Honan argued that the later Roman works Shakespeare wrote carefully avoided what he called Jonson's "clotted style, lack of irony, and grinding moral emphasis". The experience of playing in a failed Roman tragedy seems to have shaped how Shakespeare approached his own.

  The published cast list in Jonson's 1616 folio names the principal actors in order: Richard Burbage, Augustine Phillips, William Sly, John Lowin, William Shakespeare, John Heminges, Henry Condell, and Alexander Cooke. Which parts any of them played is not recorded. David Grote examined the puzzle and concluded the list probably combines two separate productions, because John Lowin had not yet joined the King's Men when the first production went up. Grote nonetheless offered his best guesses. Burbage, a celebrated over-reacher in the Richard III manner, almost certainly played the title role of Sejanus. Heminges was the likely candidate for Silius, whose noble suicide occupies the core of the first three acts. Condell, the more military figure, probably took the Guards Captain Macro.

  The casting of Tiberius itself is a small mystery. Phillips had spent years playing dissolute men and seemed the natural fit, yet Jonson's own hint points to Shakespeare in that role. With Shakespeare as Tiberius, Grote suggested, Phillips would have directed his rhetorical skills instead at Arruntius, a character given to indignant speechmaking. Grote also proposed that Samuel Crosse, William Sly, and Robert Armin took the roles of Lepidus, Terentius, and Sabinius. Scholar John-Mark Philo later suggested that Shakespeare's experience with the play's failure may have fed directly into the writing of Othello, also composed in 1603 and performed by the same company.

• 3. The Question of Treason

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  In the winter of 1618-19, Jonson told his friend William Drummond something he had been carrying for years. The Earl of Northampton, he said, was his "mortal enemy". Jonson had beaten one of the Earl's servants, and Northampton had responded by bringing Jonson before the Privy Council on an accusation of "Popery and treason" based on Sejanus. No one knows exactly what in the play, or in its performance, triggered the charge.

  Several theories have circulated about the source of suspicion. One holds that Sejanus's fall mirrored the fate of the Earl of Essex, who had been executed in 1601. That parallel was not unique to Jonson's play: Samuel Daniel was summoned before the Privy Council in 1604 because his play Philotas was thought to reflect the "dangerous matter of the dead Earl of Essex".

  Philip Ayres, a modern editor of Sejanus, argued for a different target. He suggested the play was read as a parallel to the 1603 trial of Walter Raleigh, who had been convicted of conspiring with Spanish Catholics to murder James I in a plot known as the Main Plot. That connection would explain how a play set in ancient Rome could attract the accusation of promoting "Popery". A third possibility was the play's central theme itself: the dangers that come when a monarch rules through favourites. In the years 1603-1605, James I was acutely sensitive to such criticism, given the conspiracies already mounted against him and with the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 still ahead. Jonson expert James Loxley noted that, whatever the cause, "no action was taken, as far as we know".

• 4. The Unnamed Co-Author

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  When Jonson published Sejanus in 1605, he placed an epistle at the front addressed "To the Readers" and made a candid admission. The book the reader held, he wrote, "in all numbers, is not the same with that which was acted on the public stage, wherein a second pen had good share". He had chosen, he explained, to replace the other writer's work with his own "weaker (and no doubt less pleasing)" verses rather than let a "happy genius" be robbed of credit by Jonson's own "loathed usurpation".

  That phrase, "happy genius", has drawn speculation ever since. Shakespeare had acted in the play, and his name appears in the cast list. Some have read Jonson's warm language as a hint that Shakespeare was the unnamed collaborator. Another candidate is George Chapman, who contributed a commendatory poem when the play was published and was actively collaborating with Jonson at the time. Jonson's very next play after Sejanus was Eastward Ho, co-written with Chapman and John Marston. The original staged version of Sejanus, which might have settled the question, has not survived.

• 5. In Print and in the Margins

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  Edward Blount entered Sejanus His Fall in the Stationers' Register on the 2nd of November 1604. On the 6th of August 1605, Blount transferred his copyright to Thomas Thorpe, who published the play that year in quarto form (catalogued as STC 14782), printed by George Eld.

  The published text carried something unusual: dense marginal notes citing the play's historical sources. Jonson told his readers that these sources were "all in the learned tongues, save one, with whose English side I have little to do". It was a pointed display of classical scholarship, a writer insisting that his tragedy was grounded in serious historical research. The epistle "To the Readers" opened the volume, followed by commendatory verses from George Chapman, Hugh Holland, a poet identified as 'Th. R.' (generally taken to be Sir Thomas Roe), John Marston, William Strachey, one 'Everard B.', and two poets who signed as 'Cygnus' and 'Philos'.

  The identity of 'Cygnus' remained unsettled for centuries. In 2023, the scholar Chris Laoutaris identified 'Cygnus' as William Shakespeare, adding another layer to the question of how deeply Shakespeare was entangled with this play. A 1616 folio edition also carries Jonson's Epistle to Lord Aubigny, in which Jonson once again acknowledged that Sejanus had been a failure at the Globe.

• 6. Three Centuries in the Dark

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  After the Globe Theatre disaster of 1604, Sejanus His Fall disappeared from the stage entirely. No record of any performance survives between that year and 1928, a gap of more than three centuries.

  William Poel staged a revival in 1928. To make the play workable, Poel cut it by roughly a quarter, aiming, in the words of modern editor Philip Ayres, to "get away from the 'literary' 1605 published version to the 'hidden' stage play". It was an attempt to recover the shape of what audiences had actually seen, buried under Jonson's revisions.

  The Royal Shakespeare Company staged the play in 2005, more than four hundred years after its first performance. Then, during the COVID-19 pandemic, New York City's Red Bull Theatre brought Sejanus His Fall to a new kind of audience. On the 17th of May 2021, director Nathan Winkelstein produced a livestream presentation via YouTube featuring Tamara Tunie as Sabinus, Laila Robins as Tiberius Caesar, Denis O'Hare as Sejanus, Keith David as Silius, Manoel Felciano as Natta, Matthew Rauch as Drusus, Stephen Spinella as Eudemus, and Emily Swallow as Livia, among others from Broadway and US television. A play that had been hissed off the stage in 1604 found, through a pandemic-era screen, its widest audience in four hundred years.