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English Seneca: a Preamble1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

B. R. Rees
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The influence of Seneca's tragedies is now a commonplace: it was Seneca, not Aeschylus, Sophocles, or even Euripides, who provided the classical models for Renaissance and Elizabethan Tragedy. To quote the considered judgement of a distinguished English scholar, the late H. B. Charlton: ‘Seneca's influence on the serious drama of most of Western Europe is almost immeasurable.… In effect, the Latin dramatist founded a tradition which at least until the 19th century passed through Europe in secure and often undisputed triumph.’ The precise extent of his influence and the ways in which it was exercised are matters which are still in dispute, and I cannot hope to say anything new about them in the space at my disposal. What I hope to do, however imperfectly, is to try to look at Seneca through the eyes of those on whom he made his first impact in England and to examine in retrospect the sources of his appeal to dramatists in the second half of the sixteenth century: why was it that he came to be described as ‘our Seneca’ even by one who was able to recognize the superiority of the Greeks, as those who were most influenced by the Roman were not?

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Type
Research Article
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Greece & Rome , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , October 1969, pp. 119 - 133
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1969

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References

page 119 note 2 As the bibliography on the subject of Senecan influence is very extensive, I have limited myself to essential and immediately relevant references. The following works of general interest may profitably be consulted: Cunliffe, J. W., The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy (London, 1893)Google Scholar, reissued by Archon Books, Hamden, Conn., 1965; Lucas, F. L., Seneca and Elizabethan Tragedy (Cambridge, 1922)Google Scholar; Charlton, H. B., The Senecan Tradition in Renaissance Tragedy (Manchester, 1946)Google Scholar, a reprint of the introductory essay in The Works of Sir William Alexander, ed. Kastner and Charlton (1921)Google Scholar; Eliot, T. S., ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translations’, in Selected Essays (London, 1948), 65–105Google Scholar, also the introductory essay in Seneca His Tenne Tragedies (Tudor Translations, 2nd series, 1927)Google Scholar; Godley, A. D., ‘Senecan Tragedy’, in English Literature and the Classics (Oxford, 1912), 228–47Google Scholar; Les Tragédies de Sénêque et le théâtre de la Renaissance, ed. Jacquot, Jean (Paris, 1964).Google Scholar

page 119 note 3 Charlton, , op. cit., Introd. xvii.Google Scholar

page 119 note 4 viz. Roger Ascham.

page 120 note 1 ‘Seneca and the Elizabethans: a case-study in “Influence”’, in Shakespeare Survey 20 (1967), 17–26Google Scholar. Cf. Baker, Howard, Induction to Tragedy (Louisiana, 1939Google Scholar, reissued by Russell and Russell, New York, 1965), chapter iii, and Ure, P. W., ‘On Some Differences between Seneca and Elizabethan Tragedy’, in Durham University Journal (1948).Google Scholar

page 120 note 2 Jacquot, Jean, op. cit. 307.Google Scholar

page 120 note 3 The Senecan references are to the Loeb edition for convenience.

page 121 note 1 William Shakespeare's Small Latine and Lesse Greeke (Urbana, 1944), ii. 559.Google Scholar

page 121 note 2 ‘Shakespearian Imagery and Senecan Imitation’, in Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies (Washington, 1948), 33–54.Google Scholar

page 122 note 1 The most recent account of the background of Seneca is in Mendell, C. W., Our Seneca (Archon Books, 1968)Google Scholar, chap, ii; a shorter account will be found in Watling, E. F., Seneca: Four Tragedies and ‘Octavia’ (Penguin Books, 1966), Introd.Google Scholar

page 123 note 1 By Pastore-Stocchi, Manlio in Jacquot, Jean, op. cit. 25.Google Scholar

page 123 note 2 See Brooke, C. F. T., The Tudor Drama (London, 1912)Google Scholar; Boas, F. S., University Drama in the Tudor Age (Oxford, 1914)Google Scholar and An Introduction to Tudor Drama (Oxford, 1933)Google Scholar; Clemen, W., English Tragedy before Shakespeare (Methuen, 1961), trans. Dorsch, T. S..Google Scholar

page 124 note 1 See, for example, Craig, Hardin, ‘Shakespeare and the History Play’, in Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies, 55–64.Google Scholar

page 125 note 1 For many of the comments which follow I am indebted to Spearing, E. M., The Elizabethan Translations of Seneca's Tragedies (Cambridge, 1912)Google Scholar, and de Vocht, H., Jasper Heywood and his Translations of Seneca (Louvain, 1913).Google Scholar

page 130 note 1 G. B. Harrison in his Penguin edition of the play, 15.

page 131 note 1 For a full account see Bowers, F. T., Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy (Princeton, 1940, reissued as a paperback, 1966).Google Scholar

page 132 note 1 A Warning for Faire Women (1599).Google Scholar

page 132 note 2 In Classical Drama and its Influence, ed. Anderson, M. J. (London, 1965), 121.Google Scholar

page 133 note 1 For a less crude analysis of the philosophical influence of Seneca on Elizabethan tragedy see Craig, Hardin, ‘The Shackling of Accidents’, in Philological Quarterly xix (1940), 1–19Google Scholar, and cf. Gilbert, A. H., ‘Seneca and the Criticism of Elizabethan Tragedy’, in PQ xiii (1934), 370–81Google Scholar, and Eliot, T. S., ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’, in Selected Essays (London, 1948), 126–40.Google Scholar