This was yet to come. Meanwhile, another revival that began life as a student production followed in 1988: this was Matthew Warchus’s debut as a director at the Edinburgh fringe in 1988. The production had its first inception in the rehearsal room at Bristol University Drama Department, where it was one of the individual choices Warchus made as a student director.

Thus between 1973 and 1988, Sejanus had as many different productions as it had had over the previous 250 years. That these were university productions is significant, for from the 1960s onwards the play’s bleak portrayal of Machiavellian politics had made it a popular subject of study in University English departments in Britain and America, where, as Lerner suggests, the play’s theatrical potential became obvious. A staged reading of the play at the new Globe theatre followed on 9 November 1997, and on 6-9 June Seb Perry directed another student production at Merton College, Oxford.

Then in 2005 came the most significant and almost certainly the most accomplished revival since the King’s Men had first staged it. This was the RSC production directed by Greg Doran as part of the ‘Gunpowder Season’, performed at the Swan in Stratford, the People’s Theatre in Newcastle, and the Trafalgar Studios in London. It was in general very well received by the press, Paul Taylor (The Independent, 29 July 2005, p. 50) and Michael Billington (The Guardian, 28 July 2005, p. 28) praising both play and production particularly highly. By cutting about a quarter of the play as it was printed in 1605, and reducing the number of characters, particularly of Sejanus’s time-serving followers, Doran greatly eased the demands on the audience’s patience made by the long and accurate versions of Tacitus in which Jonson took such pride. That the play still lasted for two and a half hours raised again the question of whether the published quartos, especially of Jonson, do represent the plays as performed originally. The RSC production was fast-paced, but it would still have taken almost three and a half hours to perform the quarto version uncut, ignoring the music which Jonson indicates was played between acts at the Globe. Whatever happened in 1603, language still remained at the centre of the play in Doran’s version, but it was balanced by an unexpected dramatic pace that foreshadows (as so much else in the play) that of Volpone and The Alchemist.

Though presented as part of the Gunpowder Season, intended to point towards drama’s engagement with contemporaneous political events, the setting was resolutely Roman throughout, played on a bare, colonnaded stage, and usefully contextualized by opening with the funeral of Germanicus (not a part of Jonson’s play), rather as some productions of Richard II open with the death of Woodstock. This specificity paradoxically helped clarify the wider issues at stake, allowing the audience to universalize them more willingly than if they were given overt nudges about the topicality of disinformation, burning of books, show trials, or toppling statues. Strong ensemble playing, reminiscent of the best years of the RSC, helped establish the atmosphere of fear, envy, and corruption (also political constants) which Jonson’s verse, full of images of disintegration and vulnerability, establishes from the outset. Surrounded by spies in his service, and yet nervous of being observed himself, William Houston, as Sejanus, dominated the stage throughout, presenting a convincing combination of hubristic ambition and sinister sexuality, the typically Jonsonian links between which were rather simplistically underlined by having Sejanus meditating on the delights of power while buggering the eunuch Lygdus. There were fine performances too from Barry Stanton, who invested the ruthless but fearful Tiberius with a geniality that was the more disturbing because apparently based on James Robertson Justice, and from James Hayes as the patrician Sabinus, whose convincingly anachronistic republican dignity was no match for Sejanus’s Machiavellian schemes to entrap him and his fellow Germanicans.

In The Prince Machiavelli had used Sejanus as an object lesson in the dangers of advancing favourites too far, and though he is missing from Jonson’s list of sources and marginalia, Machiavelli dominates the play almost as much as does Tacitus. This production brought out the amorality and hypocrisy of princely statecraft well, especially in the scene in act two in which Tiberius and Sejanus discuss their strategy against the Germanicans. Curiously, the moment at which Sejanus loses the trust of Tiberius in a parallel scene in act three was underplayed. As Sejanus betrays his ambition by seeking a marriage into the imperial family, Tiberius, the master of considered and deceptive speech, responds with a surprised grunt. On that “H’mh?” the whole play pivots; of the many inflections that could be given to it, Stanton’s was among the more mundane. The growing but largely hidden conflict that emerges between the two from this point, however, anticipating that between Volpone and Macro, gathered threatening pace in this production, culminating in the Senate scene in which the ‘long letter’ sent by Tiberius brings about Sejanus’s fall.