“English Seneca: Heywood to Hamlet.” The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature. Ed. Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. 472–87. (original) (raw)
Related papers
2016
This chapter surveys the reception of Senecan tragedy in sixteenth-century England, particularly in the 1560s. The chapter addresses traditions of transmission and translation, the place of Seneca in mid-sixteenth century literary culture, approaches to translation and adaptation, critical reception, and the influence of the mid-sixteenth century translations on later sixteenth- and seventeenth-century dramatists.
Ramus
Did Sophocles or Seneca exercise a greater influence on Renaissance drama? While the twenty-first century public might assume the Greek dramatist, in recent decades literary scholars have come to appreciate that the model of tragedy for the Renaissance was the plays of the Roman Seneca rather than those of the Athenian tragedians. In his important essay on Seneca and Shakespeare written in 1932, T.S. Eliot wrote that Senecan sensibility was ‘the most completely absorbed and transmogrified, because it was already the most diffused’ in Shakespeare's world. Tony Boyle, one of the leading rehabilitators of Seneca in recent years, has rightly said, building on the work of Robert Miola and Gordon Braden in particular, that ‘Seneca encodes Renaissance theatre’ from the time that Albertino Mussato wrote his neo-Latin tragedy Ecerinis in 1315 on into the seventeenth century. The present essay offers a complement and supplement to previous scholarship arguing that Seneca enjoyed a status ...
There is no doubt that the rise of the Greek drama, as evident in the classical writings of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, had left a predominant impact on the Elizabethan writings of comedies. However, it was the tragedies that stood supreme. Yet, their appeal to the mass Elizabethan audience for their brutal images displayed on stage would not have been emotionally captivating had it not been for the Roman classic works of Ennuis and Seneca which paved the way for an era ever destined for genius minds in the theatrical world. Imitated by the Italian and French literary works, the Senecan tragedies, in particular, had indeed inspired the Elizabethan theatre, for they were widely modeled by some great Elizabethan dramatists. Hence, this paper is an attempt to revisit the historical writings of Seneca and observe his artistic vision of staging tragedies as adapted and projected in Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy.
Seneca Rediscovered: Recovery of Texts, Redefinition of a Genre
in Eric Dodson-Robinson (ed.), Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Senecan Tragedy. Scholarly, Theatrical and Literary Receptions, Leiden-Boston, Brill , 2016
Between the first century A.D and the medieval era, Seneca’s tragedies had no great relevance and were soon largely forgotten, like most Latin classic texts. It was not until the 13th Century that the first manuscripts reappeared and circulated in northern Italy and in France, emerging as the main – and, at the time, only – model of ancient tragedy. They would maintain this status for over three centuries. Within the European tradition, Seneca’s plays thus acquired a relevance that they had not had (and could not have had) in antiquity. Three people had an essential role in their rediscovery and in the development of the later tradition: Lovato Lovati and Albertino Mussato from Padua, and the English Dominican friar Nicholas Trevet. Lovato correctly identified and analysed the tragic meters used by Seneca, while Mussato first tentatively composed a “Senecan” play, Ecerinis, that resorted to both tragic and epic forms, and was not meant to be staged; Trevet wrote the first commentary of the entire body of Seneca’s tragedies. Both Mussato’s and Trevet’s readings of Seneca’s works were strongly prejudiced by medieval ideas about tragedy, which, being based solely on poor and indirect information, had greatly distorted the genre’s original features. The few medieval attempts to restore literary form to comic and tragic plots had resorted to elegiac meter within narrative settings somewhat removed from those of the ancient texts. Ideas about theatrical performances in Greece and Rome were distinctly confused. Both Mussato’s compositional experiment and Trevet’s analysis represent two extraordinary attempts to reinvent the ancient genre, by projecting onto it the prejudices and conventions of a culture as yet ignorant of Classical dramatic forms. Such a complex weave of medieval and ancient culture, after some experimentation in Latin during the 15th Century, was to shape the basic modern theatre forms elaborated in the different European languages.
There is no doubt that the rise of the Greek drama, as evident in the classical writings of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, had left a predominant impact on the Elizabethan writings of comedies. However, it was the tragedies that stood supreme. Yet, their appeal to the mass Elizabethan audience for their brutal images displayed on stage would not have been emotionally captivating had it not been for the Roman classic works of Ennuis and Seneca which paved the way for an era ever destined for genius minds in the theatrical world. Imitated by the Italian and French literary works, the Senecan tragedies, in particular, had indeed inspired the Elizabethan theatre, for they were widely modeled by some great Elizabethan dramatists. Hence, this paper is an attempt to revisit the historical writings of Seneca and observe his artistic vision of staging tragedies as adapted and projected in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy.
Matthew Gwinne’s Nero (1603): Seneca, Academic Drama, and the Politics of Polity
Canadian Review of Comparative Literature. 40, 1, p. 16-33 18 p., 2013
Broadly speaking, J.W. Cunliffe's narrative of the role of Senecan influence in the early modern period still holds good today, positing as it does a reception history moving from performance, to the influential 1550s translations, to a final phase of Senecan contact in the mature vernacular dramaturgy of the Elizabethan age, where Senecan drama plays an important (but more limited role) in inspiring the Renaissance revenge-tragedy model. Though it may be difficult to isolate 'Seneca' in the melting-pot of other literary influences, from the medieval de casibus tradition to tragedies being produced on the continent, it is clear that Senecan tragedy makes a special contribution to the bloodthirsty, spectacular and rhetorically-daring theatre of the late Tudor age. 1 In its movement from production, through translation, to creative reconfiguration, and working from dependency to independence, from Latin to English, and from private to public, such a reception-model for 'Seneca in English' offers a satisfying arc of progression that fits with the broader story of a Renaissance literary culture, challenging and surpassing norms of what had previously been considered Classical 'perfection'.