Valentinian (play)
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Valentinian is a Jacobean stage play written by John Fletcher, a revenge tragedy based on the life of the Roman emperor Valentinian III (r. 425–455), and originally published in the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647. The play dramatizes the story of Valentinian, one of the last Roman emperors in the western Roman Empire and last ruler of the conjoined Valentinianic–Theodosian dynasty, as recorded by the Late Antique Greek historian Procopius. His assassin in the play is based on Petronius Maximus (r. 455), Valentinian's short-reigning successor.
Scholars date the play to the 1610–14 period. As he did with Monsieur Thomas, another play of the same era, Fletcher used the second part of the novel L'Astrée by Honoré D'Urfé, as one of his sources; and Part 2 of Astrée was first published in 1610. The play was performed by the King's Men; the cast list added to the play in the second Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1679 mentions Richard Burbage, Henry Condell, John Lowin, William Ostler, and John Underwood. Since Ostler died in December 1614, Valentinian must have been written and staged between those two dates.[1]
Plot
Fletcher portrays Valentinian as a lustful and rapacious tyrant, comparable to the King in The Maid's Tragedy. His empire is decadent and collapsing, his soldiers mutinous. Valentinian rapes the virtuous Lucina; she then commits suicide. Lucina's husband, the upright soldier Maximus, devotes himself to obtaining revenge against the emperor, though his friend Aecius tries to dissuade him. Maximus finally succeeds as Valentinian dies a painful and drawn-out death by poison. Maximus is crowned by the Roman Senate for overthrowing the tyrant, only to die himself soon after.
(The play was published with an epilogue suited to a comedy—an apparent print-shop blunder.)