There was never any doubt but that this was going to be a significant book on how each epoch, starting in 1486 (p. 12 n. 36), has fashioned its own Seneca. S.’s contribution to Brill's Companion to Roman Tragedy (ed. G.W.M. Harrison [2015]), which forms the basis of Chapters 6 and 7, has been singled out for praise in reviews. Scholars familiar with the breadth of insight and intellectual focus of F. Macintosh, E. Hall and A.J. Boyle will recognise the tradition within which S. works. S.’s fresh look adds much to understanding the swings in the reputation of Seneca and, more broadly, the non-converging tracks of valuation of Greek as opposed to Latin drama.
S.’s book is anchored to two tenets, for which I beg the author's forgiveness if I interpret rather than narrowly paraphrase. Senecan drama is post-Aristotelian; one might even be inclined to consider that Senecan drama is brilliant in part because of its rejection of the canonisation of Aristotle's codification of his observed norms of fifth-century Athenian tragedy. What this has meant for Seneca and for senecan drama (and S. is careful to maintain a distinction between capital and small ‘s’) is that there is an inverse relationship in the regard in which Attic and Roman imperial drama were esteemed. For S., this means that she accepts the Hercules Oetaeus as ‘senecan’ in its aesthetics (p. 2 et passim), but sets aside the Octavia as belonging to a different genre (p. 2). S. makes the argument that senecan characteristics inhabit the Hercules Oetaeus (rhetoric, excess, metatheatricality, delirium, possession, abjection, horror, confinement, sympatheia; each discussed individually pp. 16–38), but not the operatic Octavia or Greek tragedy.
In periods when Aristotelian purging of immoral impulses through catharsis (p. 8), physicality on stage, naturalism or realism come to the fore as production values, Seneca's dramas will recede in popularity, a process that starts with the Jacobeans (Chapter 2.3, pp. 89–98) and accelerates in Restoration drama (Chapter 5, ‘Hypertragedy’, pp. 165–88), culminating with Schlegel and continuing to a lesser degree even now. S. wins her argument in her dispassionate conclusions (pp. 278–9) that caution that the increase in productions of Seneca's plays/senecan drama should not be termed a ‘renaissance’ since it is twinned with an even greater increase in productions of Greek drama (citing APGRD resources). Seneca has hitched a ride on someone else's wave, one that champions (and in some sense re-acts to all antiquity as a monolithic culture) all ancient drama, so S., but perhaps has emotionally found points of contact with the past, like two palms tracing one another on opposite sides of a pane of glass.
The second tenet is that the aurality of Senecan drama privileged his plays in the Renaissance, which placed a premium on the language of verse drama. Quintilian's actio means ‘presentation’, not ‘action’, and so performance of Seneca, not a favourite of Quintilian, was well suited to the sixteenth-century academic cursus which followed closely the Institutio oratoria (Chapter 1, ‘The Open Book’, pp. 39–69). S. side-steps the performance question, but observes that Seneca's language delivers its power in oral-to-aural transmission; a sedentary Seneca consumed as a manuscript or a text can never be satisfying. Shakespeare and his contemporaries understood this (Chapter 2.1–2, pp. 71–88), as did Garnier, Corneille and their contemporaries (Chapter 3, ‘Nourished on Blood’, pp. 99–133) that devastating words with gestures could be more chilling than violence itself. Once motion, costume and settings became important, what Aristotle termed opsis (for which he had little patience while Seneca pays compliment to the popularity of pantomime), the theatre moved in new directions. The distance between Racine and his contemporaries and Corneille, as demonstrated by S. (Chapter 4, ‘The Great Repression’, pp. 135–63) is greater than between Seneca and Corneille. Knots on a similar line of descent apply equally to Seneca, Shakespeare and Dryden (Chapter 5, esp. pp. 174–80). Sentimentalism (sympatheia, esp. pp. 35–8) of the 1700s led to a ‘Seneca Censored’ (Chapter 6, pp. 189–217) in which Schlegel was able to pronounce Seneca ‘unperformable’. Seneca had few champions: Kleist's unsympathetic, unhellenic inhumanity (pp. 216–17) ran counter to eighteenth-century aesthetics. In the following century, by their failure, the senecan dramas of Shelley and Artaud proved that the audience remained unfriendly to what Seneca represented of the ancient achievement in drama (Chapter 7, ‘Signalling through the Flames’, pp. 219–42).
Relevance, realism, subjectivity of modern productions (Chapter 8, ‘Seneca in ‘68’, pp. 243–71) has substituted Rezitationsdrama with Rezeptionsdrama. In this, Seneca's modern detractors, privileging ‘originality’, lose sight of how original Seneca must have been to his own age. S. properly highlights that Seneca's brilliance partially is in how his language would have been common and ordinary for his times, but inhabited a dense diction (p. 277). Even more so, his time was one when conversions of orchestras in theatres for combat assured that the ‘fourth wall’ could never be breached again. Seneca's genius was to make a language that was unGreek in ways of which Horace, a self-styled ‘Roman Pindar’, would have approved and to place it on a stage whose performance space would have been much smaller than the Greek stage. He grasped the opportunity to create an Agamemnon that worked in that space, as Aeschylus did for his, and also a Phaedra whose structure reflects Roman realities layered on top of what was inherited from Euripides.
This book is an excellent addition to the other studies so far published in the Classical Presences series of Oxford University Press. S.’s tracking of multifarious (so much an improvement on ‘nefarious’) Senecas fits well with J. Ker's 2009 The Deaths of Seneca, also by the same press. Readers of Brill's Companion to Seneca (2014) will be aware instantly of how far S. has moved the debate forward.
