ABSTRACT
Burning sides and taking sides in the Restoration and the early eighteenth century The previous chapter closed with Thomas Heywood’s nightmarish recollection of the deranged emperor Nero pretending to be Hercules, and turning theatre into murder as he killed the actor he had cast to play Lichas. This image, of the innocent destroyed by the uncontrollable rage of the dangerously powerful, was potent and enduring: when Milton wished to find an analogy for the ‘wild uproar’ made by the vainglorious but defeated angels trashing the landscape of Hell, this was the simile he chose.1 In this instance Milton probably turned to the account of the episode in Book IX of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but he was also thoroughly familiar with the Herculean narratives in the plays of Seneca. Indeed, he almost certainly knew of Nero’s grotesque obsession with the Hercules Furens too. Like many of the regicides and their sympathisers on whose behalf he so eloquently propagandised, Milton quoted the lines from the play (922-4) in which Hercules, ‘the grand suppressor of tyrants’, suggests that the unrighteous king (rex inpia) is the sacrificial victim most pleasing to Jove, but in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649) he offered his own translation as well – ‘There can be slaine / No sacrifice to God more acceptable / Than an unjust and wicked King’ – and when he repeated the quotation in the Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (1651) he also ventured to explain its significance: the words could, he argued, be read as the utterance of ‘the greatest Greek of his time’, or they could represent Seneca’s own opinions, ventriloquised by his most important theatrical character, indicating what both poets and ‘all good men’, even under a monstrous regime like Nero’s, believed ‘should be done with tyrants’.2
