Theatre and Culture in Early Modern England, 1650-1737 by Gill Catie;

Author:Gill, Catie;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

Just before he rapes Lucina, Valentinian asserts his commitment to hedonism and total freedom from moral restraint:

Force,

Of all powers, is the most generous.

For what it gives, it freely does bestow

Without the after-bribe of gratitude.

I’ll plunge into a sea of my desires

And quench my fever, though I drown my fame,

And tear up pleasure by the roots. (IV, 2, 223–9)

Rochester’s play depicts a more anarchic world than Fletcher’s, with an absence of moral absolutes which emerges most clearly in the changed characterization of Maximus. Fletcher’s Maximus, corrupted by revenge and ambition after his wife’s death, is cut down at the moment when he is about to seize the throne, poisoned, as was Valentinian. His death illustrates a moral principle at work in the universe. ‘My deed is justice’ claims his killer, Eudoxia, wife to Valentinian, a character whom Rochester omits.35 But for Rochester’s Maximus, the main result of his wife’s death is to cast him into a theological abyss. In a new speculative speech on the problem of evil, written in five-line stanzas to mark it out from the rest of the text, Maximus tries at length to rationalize his situation, and decides that there is no way to reconcile what has happened to Lucina and himself with the existence of a benevolent deity. Addressing God, he concludes:

’Tis therefore less impiety to say

Evil with you has co-eternity

Than blindly taking it the other way,

That merciful and of election free

You did create the mischiefs you foresee. (IV, 3, 367–71)

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