SCENE I
SCENE.—NERO'S private chamber. Enter NERO hastily and perturbed, followed by SENECA, BURRUS, and TIGELLINUS, his privy-councillors.
BURRUS. Caesar, still glides the dead Britannicus
About the palace, and his memory
Your mother, Agrippina, uses: makes
Out of his ghost a faction for herself.
She grows a public peril; much you owe
To her, but more to Rome; from Antium
She rages disappointed to and fro.
Me for your army you hold answerable,
But can no longer if you suffer her
To lure the legions from their loyalty.
Her creatures whisper to your sentinels,
Corrupt your officers, inflame your guards.
A sullen silence on the camp is fallen,
A word, and it will roar in mutiny.
TIGELLINUS. Everywhere steal her agents and her spies,
Gliding through temples, baths, and theatres;
Possess all angles, corners, noonday halts,
And darknesses; they flit with casual poison
Softly; the city secretly is filled
With murmurs, lifted eyebrows, and with sighs.
The mischief's in the very blood of Rome
Unless the sore that feeds it is cut out.
NERO. Why, I myself have visited the fleet
With Anicetus: sullen droop the sails
Or flap in mutiny against the mast.
Burdened with barnacles the untarred keels
Drowse on the tide with parching decks unswabbed,
And anchors rusting on inglorious ooze.
All indolent the vast armada tilts,
A leafless resurrection of dead trees.
The sailors in a dream do go about
Or at the fo'c's'le ominously meet.
Should any foe upon the sea-line loom
They'll light with ease upon an idle prey.
And yet I felt the grandeur of stagnation
And the magnificence of idleness.
BURRUS. She hath seduced the breast-plates and the sails.
NERO. [Distracted.] Here I pronounce her exile.
TIGELLINUS. Whither then?
ANICETUS. To Britain send her. There for Claudius
I fought; a melancholy isle, alone,
Sundered from all the world; and banned by God
With separating, cold, religious wave,
And haunted with the ghost of a dead sun
Rising as from a grave, or all in blood
Returning wounded heavily through mist.
Her rotting peoples amid forests cower,
Or mad for colour paint their bodies blue.
There in eternal drippings of the leaf
Or that dead summer of the living fly,
And by the eternal sadness of the surf,
Ambition cannot live, hope cannot breathe.
Even the fieriest spirit there will rust
Or gutter like a candle in the rain.
To Britain send her.
TIGELLINUS. Never isle remote
On the sad water, never desert sand
In trembling flame, nor rock-built prison-house
Shall tame her: there's the danger, that she lives.
While she hath life, it is no matter where,
While she hath breath, no other dares to breathe,
Not Caesar, even!