Hannibal and Scipio - Structure and Theme

Structure and Theme

Nabbes structures his play so that each of the five Acts has a different setting — Capua; Syphax's court; Utica; Carthage; and Bithynia. "Nabbes organizes events...in order to present a series of contrasts — between Hannibal and Scipio, Syphax and Masinissa, continence and lust, public duty and private passion — which constitute variations on his main theme of the nature of human virtue." Through this pattern of contrasts, Nabbes constructs "a play with two protagonists, one tragic and one epic;" when Hannibal dies, Scipio is forced to realize the limits of his quest for military glory and turn toward the "contemplative virtues" of philosophy. Nabbes's play anticipated the heroic drama to come during the Restoration, though the heroic play "lacks both Nabbes's formal restraint and his Neoplatonic philosophy."

Nabbes's preoccupations in the play are philosophical and moral; he did not attempt to apply a political slant to the work, to comment on the contemporary political scene of his day. Later writers would not exercise the same restraint. In the later seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, the Punic Wars would become the preferred metaphor for the prevailing political situation; in England, the long-standing competition with France was analogized in Punic-War terms — with England as victorious Rome. The great critic Samuel Johnson would eventually complain that he was sick of hearing about the subject; "he would be rude to anyone who mentioned the Punic Wars...."