Several recent monograph studies have returned to the question of ‘Seneca in performance’, either by rehabilitating the dramaturgical potential of the text (Kohn (2013), reviewed in JRS 104 (2014), 330–1) or by exploring aesthetic affinities with Roman pantomime (Zanobi (2014), reviewed in JRS 105 (2015), 443–4). In this wide-ranging study, Helen Slaney takes a different tack, forsaking attention to original dramaturgical context to focus instead on a (deliberately small-s) ‘senecan’ performance history. She argues that by identifying and then tracing a ‘senecan aesthetic’ — an aesthetic that stresses the power of staged rhetoricity, and one that positively exploits the disjunctive relationship between voice and body — Senecan tragedy can be positioned as the originator of a ‘theatre of affect’, a dramatic form different from, but no less valid than, the more naturalistic ‘theatre of mimesis’ whose roots lie in Greek tragedy. In a diachronic analysis ranging from the sixteenth century to the present day, encompassing England, France and Germany, and examining a wide variety of performance contexts, S. traces a fascinating tale of decline and fall in Seneca's tragic influence in the face of the rise of naturalistic theatre, and at the same time makes a convincing case for a new performance history in counter-balance: the history of a senecan ‘theatre of affect’.

S. begins with early modern Europe, the undisputed zenith of Seneca's popularity, and her argument — that the intense senecanism of sixteenth-century England in the spheres of education and on the private stage is superseded by a more diffuse engagement with Seneca in the public theatre — is uncontroversial. But S. also pays close attention to translation, academic drama and Inns of Court productions, identifying key performance similarities which recuperate the mannered rhetoricity of academic drama and offer new approaches to engaging with problematic on-stage violence in the public theatre. Switching focus to France, S. sketches a similar transition from coterie to public theatre in plays which exhibit a brutal ‘réalisme sénéquien’, from the Cléopâtre captive of Étienne Jodelle in 1553 to Corneille's Médée in 1635. And in a fine close reading of Racine's Phèdre, S. charts the devastating impact of neoclassical theory on Seneca's reputation, arguing that Racine's disavowal and suppression of his debts to Seneca is emblematic of a broader silencing of the playwright under the new ‘Règles du théâtre’ that advocate naturalism in acting, the classical unities and ‘decency’ in subject-matter.

Returning to Restoration England, S. pinpoints a distinct turning point in the reception history of Seneca, who now exists in far more spectral form. Nathaniel Lee, engaging in a competitive ‘rhetoric of amplification’ with Seneca but also exploiting new visual techniques to shock and horrify, is the star of this new seventeenth-century senecan ‘hypertragedy’. But over the long eighteenth century, technical innovations in staging and lighting, together with important social factors (the rise of the bourgeoisie as tastemakers and the reinvention of the playhouse as showcase for polite morals) sap the passionate monsters of Senecan tragedy of their power, reducing Medea and Clytemnestra to merely vulnerable protagonists of ‘pathetic-tragedy’. Turning to Germany, S. shows how Seneca's star is eclipsed further with the rise of the philhellenist movement and the condemnation of Senecan drama as ‘unplayable’.

For S. the third major moment of crisis for Senecan reception arrives with the experimental theatre of the twentieth century. S. examines Antonin Artaud's exercise in ‘théâtre de la Cruauté’ (his 1935 production of Shelley's 1819 gothic melodrama Cenci, for S. already a senecan play) and attributes the failure of the play squarely to Artaud's decision to depart from Shelley's highly rhetoricized verse-drama. While followers of Artaud like Peter Brook did re-invest in vocally affective strategies in addition to celebrating the somatic power of performance and offering the audience a deliberately ‘assaultive’ experience, for S. in the end the story of Seneca in the twentieth century is one of ‘what-might-have-been’. Late twentieth-century mediations such as Caryl Churchill's 1994 Thyestes (a colloquializing ‘domestic’ horror), or the ‘in-yer-face’ new brutalism of Phaedra's Love by Sarah Kane (1997) on S.’s template are hardly ‘senecan’ at all, given that they are not driven by intensive figured speech. And despite the resurgent popularity of revenge tragedy and a steady trickle of contemporary productions of Seneca, S. ends with a rather pessimistic opinion about the fate of affective verse-drama and the rôle of Seneca in the twenty-first century.

In a book of such scope, there are inevitable costs at the level of depth, and S. is at times guilty of trying to do too much at once. Some tantalizing lines of enquiry are under-developed (among other things the notion of ‘intertheatricality’ rather than ‘intertextuality’, or the ‘musicality’ of Seneca, often asserted but not fully explained). Not every critical reading S. offers will command assent. Yet this book is full of fascinating case-studies, is never less than thought-provoking and displays an unusual breadth of expertise. In addition to offering ‘traditional’ classicists — that is to say, for the most part, readers of Seneca — a new interpretative approach to the tragedies, this volume should also constitute a significant contribution to classical performance reception studies.