Senecan tragedy

Senecan tragedy is a body of ten 1st century (A. D.) dramas, of which eight were written by the Roman Stoic philosopher and politician L. Annaeus Seneca (Seneca the Younger). Rediscovered by Italian humanists in the mid-16th century, they became the models for the revival of tragedy on the Renaissance stage. The two great, but very different, dramatic traditions of the age - French Neoclassical tragedy and Elizabethan tragedy - both drew inspiration from Seneca.

Seneca's plays were reworkings chiefly of Euripides' dramas and also of works of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Probably meant to be recited at elite gatherings, they differ from their originals in their long declamatory, narrative accounts of action, their obtrusive moralizing, and their bombastic rhetoric. They dwell on detailed accounts of horrible deeds and contain long reflective soliloquies. Though the gods rarely appear in these plays, ghosts and witches abound. In an age when the Greek originals were scarcely known, Seneca's plays were mistaken for high Classical drama. Senecan tragedies tended to include ideas of revenge, the occult, the supernatural, suicide, blood and gore. The Renaissance scholar Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484-1558), who knew both Latin and Greek, preferred Seneca to Euripides.

French Neoclassical dramatic tradition, which reached its highest expression in the 17th-century tragedies of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, drew on Seneca for form and grandeur of style. These Neoclassicists adopted Seneca's innovation of the confidant (usually a servant), his substitution of speech for action, and his moral hairsplitting.

The Elizabethan dramatists found Seneca's themes of bloodthirsty revenge more congenial to English taste than they did his form. The first English tragedy, "Gorboduc" (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, is a chain of slaughter and revenge written in direct imitation of Seneca. (As it happens, "Gorboduc" does follow the form as well as the subject matter of Senecan tragedy: but only a very few other English plays - e.g. "The Misfortunes of Arthur" - followed its lead in this.) Senecan influence is also evident in Thomas Kyd's "The Spanish Tragedy" and Shakespeare's "Hamlet": both share a revenge theme, a corpse-strewn climax, and ghosts among the cast, which can all be traced back to the Senecan model.