“Justice shall never heare ye, I am justice”: absolutist rape and cyclical history in John Fletcher’s The Tragedy of Valentinian

摘要

The Tragedy of Valentinian (1610–1614), a solo work by John Fletcher, is a sophisticated study in the implications of divine right monarchy and its dangerous potentialities. The relationship between divine right and political justice lies at the heart of the play. The king embodies the law, but justice is not identified with it: justice is rather the equitable application of the law. Lucina’s rape by the Roman emperor Valentinian takes place because of political arrangements that allow impunity and unaccountability to the monarch on the grounds of divine sanction. Absolutism is represented as part of a patriarchal mindset, so the rape is a sexual as well as a political crime. Linguistic and perceptual chaos ensues as a result of absolutist subjectivity: Valentinian’s rhetoric of divine right is exposed as a fiction at the service of expediency. Throughout, the play interweaves the language of theology, which treats monarchical power as divine and therefore unlimited, with the language of politics, evoking justice and the law to suggest the necessity of limitations at a political level. The numerous references to historical precedents and personages indicate that forms of belief, including divine right, tend to set historical patterns from which it is impossible to escape. The conclusion to the play denies closure, suggesting that as long as the political order relies on divine right absolutism, history is bound to repeat itself.