In his essay on Seneca, T.S. Eliot used the Hercules Furens (= HF) as his example to illustrate ‘this curious freak of non-theatrical drama’.Footnote 1 Even though Senecan scholarship has by and large moved away from his indictment, the sense that the attention seems to be directed away from the stage points to the play's unique dramaturgy. The surest indicator of this reverse orientation is the conspicuous absence of Hercules himself for much of the play. Hercules is (or wishes to be) permanently ‘elsewhere’. His entrance is delayed for a long time; once home, he rushes offstage after a few lines to kill Lycus. He returns onstage only to be attacked by madness, and is drawn inside the palace again to kill his wife and sons. When his madness abates, he falls asleep onstage; on waking, he longs for a place beyond the known world (and underworld) and finally exits into exile. This article proposes a closer examination of the semiotics of space, especially the symbolic value of the offstage. Seneca is constantly drawing attention to the pull towards the stage perimeter and the unseen offstage, characterizing the cosmic nature of Hercules’ conflict with Juno and questioning the hero's place in the world as the son of an immortal father.
The debate around the staging of the tragedies has been a constant feature of Senecan scholarship, from theories of Lese- or Rezitationsdrama to those advocating actual or at least feasible performance. Kohn's recent Dramaturgy of Senecan Tragedy is the most ambitious attempt yet at taking the plays at their dramatic face-value. Building on the works of Sutton and Taplin (for Greek tragedy), Kohn argues that consideration of the staging adds meaning to the plays, and makes detailed dramaturgical suggestions.Footnote 2 The positions in this debate seem polarized; still, the nature of the tragedies as dramatic texts invites some consideration of their spatial dimension even when just reading them.Footnote 3 The work of Schmidt on space and time in Seneca's tragedies offers a compromise that applies to readers as well as to spectators.Footnote 4 Schmidt argues that Seneca creates the impression of space through description or implication; in addition, the space becomes semantically charged (‘semantisiert’) by symbolic association. As an example, he cites the manner in which the offstage of Phaedra (the woods) serves as an alternative dramatic world (‘Gegenwelt’) to the stage symbolizing the world of Phaedra, the Nurse and Theseus that Hippolytus rejects.Footnote 5 This approach can be usefully adapted to HF, a play that configures the onstage and offstage as conceptual categories of the natural and the supernatural worlds, and thus relates the stage division to the central themes of transgression and displacement.
It appears altogether probable that Seneca envisioned the stage before his mind's eye when writing the plays. Littlewood shows Seneca using the metaphor of the stage in his philosophical writings. In a discussion about the figurative meaning of the stage, Littlewood points out that ‘the artificiality of Seneca's dramatic worlds plays well with the philosopher's insistence that the external world is an illusion. The stage is used repeatedly in Seneca's philosophical prose as metaphor for the unreality of existence outside the confines of the philosopher's mind.’Footnote 6 The extreme reduction of the world to the strictly delimited space of the stage inverts conventional notions of illusion and reality and shows the complex layering that happens before Seneca's mind and eye. This sovereign worldview deliberately recalls the divine perspective of epic. In the HF, it is invoked to great effect by Seneca's Juno, as we shall see.
The appeal of Senecan tragedy to the mind's eye is central to the argument by Kugelmeier, a recent proponent of the ‘recitation theory’ first proposed by Zwierlein.Footnote 7 Kugelmeier adduces the visually evocative descriptions and ekphraseis, a hallmark of Senecan style, as proof that the tragedies were composed free from the material constraints of the stage.Footnote 8 While consideration of the plays’ visual rhetoric is important, it does not necessarily follow that the stage becomes irrelevant. In fact, Kirichenko has proposed a moderate synthesis of both sides of the debate. Seneca's rhetoric of viewing (‘Rhetorik des Sehens’), he argues, functions as an intensifying and contrasting foil to the action of the stage.Footnote 9 Thus in HF, Theseus’ descriptions of the horrors of the underworld pale in comparison to the actions of Hercules himself in the central mad scene. Ekphrasis and spectacle are linked by double aemulatio, suggesting that the moral dimension of Hercules’ central act goes not only beyond the scope of the stage but also beyond the imagination.Footnote 10
While remaining agnostic on the issue of actual performance or recitation, this article proposes that Seneca's use of stage conventions, especially in the movements of the characters, enhances the understanding of the central themes of the play that are consistently coded in spatial terms. The stage, whether actual or visualized, is central to this argument.Footnote 11 The different layers of visible and invisible space, reality and illusion, centre and offstage, constriction, expansion and transgression all characterize Hercules’ relationship to his family and his conflict with Juno.
The difficulty of distinguishing between illusion and reality is omnipresent in HF, especially in its central mad scene, verbalized by Amphitruo as reluctant spectator. Already in the Euripidean version of the myth, the irruption of madness is represented by a radical disruptive dramaturgy.Footnote 12 The play falls into two pieces, with the first coming to a happy but premature closure when Hercules has killed the tyrant Lycus. The appearance of Lyssa and Iris (Eur. HF 815–73) signals the onset of Hercules’ madness (Eur. HF 889–1015) and its clear supernatural causation. In comparison, Seneca's version smoothes out the dramatic structure to achieve greater cohesion and relegates the supernatural to the prologue spoken by Juno. This change has led scholars to seek the cause of Hercules’ madness primarily in his own excessive character. According to this strain of interpretation, his megalomaniac desire for domination of the universe tips over into madness, creating its own deluded reality.Footnote 13
This psychological interpretation has proved dominant, as Hercules manifests classic symptoms of uncontrolled anger, destroying all around him, and it seems to be confirmed by verbal echoes from Seneca's philosophical prose. Juno's anger as cause of the madness is seen as an instance of double motivation, paying lip service to the mythological tradition of tragedy.Footnote 14 While this interpretation appears plausible, especially given Seneca's interest in individual psychology, it needs to be rebalanced by the actual experience of space in the play with its constant reference to the supernatural. After all, Hercules is no ordinary mortal but a hero who has made his fame through breaking the boundaries of human existence. He is, by definition, a larger-than-life frame-shattering character.Footnote 15 It is also important to keep in mind the various categories of space, namely its physical, figurative and abstractly verbal dimensions. Despite the violence of Senecan rhetoric, speech is not all-powerful. The sobering effect of reality is conveyed by the physical environment of the stage. Hercules’ megalomaniac verbal excesses, matching his aim of dominating the heavens in the mad scene, are twisted into pathetically impotent and limitless grief, when he realizes that he belongs nowhere in his final speech (Schreirede).Footnote 16 Juno's presence at the outset of the play and the suddenness of the attack at its centre,Footnote 17 likewise, suggest a backdrop and an arena for their conflict that is much bigger than the actual visible set. It is my contention in this paper that Seneca's emphasis on the offstage allows him to create two simultaneous dramatic worlds, the realist stage perceived by the mortals and the wider frame of the supernatural suggested by the offstage. These two dramatic worlds suggest the latent split in the hero's identity between divine and human.Footnote 18
Paying attention to the edges of the stage might appear counterintuitive, since the stage is traditionally the focus of the action. Such a change in perspective, however, is particularly appropriate to HF with its pronounced emphasis on the world and the cosmos beyond the stage and the hero's legendary ability to clear his path. The play has an odd dramatic structure, with the extreme anticipation of Hercules’ entrance orienting the attention away from the stage. It lists even more towards the offstage, as Juno's unique prologue and the central mad scene draw attention to the stage perimeter. Seneca uses the offstage to imply the cosmic struggle between Hercules and Juno, connoting the offstage as a supernatural realm. Juno's prologue provides the conceptual frame for the struggle between the natural and the supernatural worlds. This clash is made visible in the central scene of Hercules’ madness that shows the stage divided by the simultaneous messenger speech of Amphitruo and the ravings of Hercules. Afterwards, as the hero becomes aware of what he has done, he is increasingly stuck onstage to the point of aporia, in direct contrast to his earlier facility in crossing the underworld. He has nowhere to hide. Only Theseus’ offer of exile in Athens opens a way towards the offstage, which is now transformed into a human realm of expurgating gods and men.
The dynamic tension between stage and offstage is of course a key component of ancient tragedy. Bremer has suggested that messenger speeches had been part of Greek tragedy from the beginning, and speculates that they are remnants of narrative that invited the audience to imagine a space.Footnote 19 This imaginary space is no void but a projection that contextualizes the action and setting of the stage. Just as the action on stage is set in Thebes, the notion of the offstage, implying the surrounding landscape, reinforces the illusion of place. The power of this projected space also allows for anything that cannot be materially represented onstage. Apart from the practical concerns of staging, this notion also extends the projected space to include the supernatural, claiming contact between the mortal and the immortal worlds.Footnote 20 Thus the surrounding offstage creates a context that reverberates with the play's action.
In an analysis of the Euripidean Heracles, Rehm reads the spatial dimension of the play, especially the destruction of the palace, as a symbol of Hercules’ perverted homecoming, contrasting it with Odysseus’ reinstatement at the head of his household in the Odyssey.Footnote 21 While the Euripidean model differs from the Senecan tragedy, Rehm's method provides a precedent for interpreting the stage semantically. A crucial difference, however, lies in the emphasis on the dimensions of the offstage. In Euripides, the closed palace represents a near extra-scenic space that is incorporated into the stage as the ekkyklēma is rolled out and the palace lies in ruins (Eur. HF 1028–38).Footnote 22 In Seneca, the offstage remains intangible and immaterial to the end, suggesting a contact zone between mortal and immortal.
I. JUNO'S PROLOGUE
The dramatic structure of the Hercules Furens highlights these demarcations, not least in the bookending of the two exiles at its beginning and at its end. The tragedy begins in an otherworldly atmosphere with a prologue spoken by Juno. The audience is presented with the powerful presence of the single goddess onstage, whose soliloquy it is privileged to overhear. The setting at night means that this vision will disappear at dawn. Seneca thus divides the scene sharply from the rest of the play; while Juno's continuing presence is implied for the audience, the characters in the play are unaware of her appearance. Juno's onstage presence therefore functions on a different level from the rest of the play. Her appearance is a glimpse behind the curtains, as it were, to demonstrate the divine motivation of the action. Seneca clearly meant the audience to understand the references to the Virgilian and the Ovidian intertexts; in putting Juno onstage he effectively reproduces the divine apparatus of epic.
Juno herself points out that she is out of her element. She is expelled from the heavens (caelo pulsa, 4) and thus forced to descend to earth (tellus colenda est, 5). Commentators have pointed out Seneca's allusion to Juno at the opening of the Aeneid.Footnote 23 Given the status of Virgil's epic, Seneca might have intended Juno as an allusion incarnate, so to speak, transporting her into his tragedy and exiling her from the exalted heights (and power) of the epic Olympus. Seneca's play with the Virgilian intertext not only responds to Virgil's rhetorical question (tantaene animis caelestibus irae? Verg. Aen. 1.11), but also, ironically, puts Juno in Aeneas’ position as an exile. Juno's displacement is accentuated by the fact that her appearance onstage seems to be unique in ancient tragedy.Footnote 24 The stage is thus unfamiliar territory in more senses than one, and her turning to the stars casts her as an exile, who tries to orient himself in a new place.Footnote 25
Pointing to the stars above—that is, offstage—Juno configures the stage as earth (tellus) in contrast to the heavens (caelum) and thus introduces Hercules’ conflict with her.Footnote 26 Even though she mentions Thebes in passing (Thebana tellus, 20), she does not establish the setting of the tragedy as such. Set at night, the stage is reduced to a physically indeterminate no-man's-land, and reveals a cosmic antagonism between mortal and immortal, earth and sky. The opposition of the two realms is repeated throughout the play.Footnote 27 Verbal deictics (hinc 6, 8, 14; illinc 10) stand in as pointers to an imagined map and give the illusion of the sky. The revelatory look behind the scenes shows the cosmic dimension of this conflict and the supernatural world of the offstage uniquely revealed at night.
The fact that Juno's goddess character is a theatrical illusion and the stars an offstage projection metafictionally plays with the stage as a stand-in for the world as a whole. Behind the theatrical illusion of Thebes hides a second stage, which will fade from view (iam rara micant | sidera, 125) but not disappear. Juno's presence is implied throughout the play;Footnote 28 the supernatural stage will break through in Hercules’ hallucination of the constellations, in a deliberate visual echo of the prologue. Juno's self-identification as exile thus describes her ambiguous stance, present but invisible to the human community. At the same time, the focalization through Juno makes the audience equal to the divine spectator, with the ethical problems that this voyeuristic stance entails. Not only does he see the stars that she projects, he also sees them with her eyes, guided through her focalization.
The prologue of Juno contextualizes the play in the cosmic struggle between Juno and Hercules. Her implied presence throughout the play marks her as both the metatheatrical dramatist who sets the plot in motion and reveals the tricks of the stage after which she joins the audience as spectator. This puts her in the bad company of other sadistic creators in Senecan tragedy, such as Medea and Atreus,Footnote 29 but the creation of this particular theatrical world is especially chilling. Unlike the projected stage-world that describes a real location, Juno's projection extends the offstage worlds to include the underworld and the heavens in an omniscient supernatural worldview. Hercules’ struggle with Juno occurs on this virtually limitless (off)stage as violently hyperbolic language threatens to create cosmic upheaval.
II. THE ONSTAGE OFFSTAGE
Juno is the first in a line of characters to portray Hercules in absentia. His actual entrance is delayed until line 591, and he almost immediately departs to kill Lycus after only a brief exchange with Amphitruo at 639, returning at 893. After the slaughter of his wife and children he falls into a sudden sleep at 1042, remaining visible on stage (as a present absence, or virtual exit) only to wake disorientated at the beginning of the next act (1138). Moreover, his absences create potentially awkward dramatic situations as narrating characters take centre stage. Seneca inverts the messenger scenes in the Euripidean version: Act III has Hercules killing Lycus offstage while Theseus tells Amphitruo about the underworld, while Act IV dramatizes the killing of Hercules’ wife and children, told by the messenger in Euripides, in a mixture of onstage narration by Amphitruo and offstage action and speech by Hercules.Footnote 30 Seneca's innovation therefore loses the natural motivation and makes Hercules’ presence or absence onstage inherently problematic and unsettling.
Hercules’ feat of crossing the underworld forms the thematic backdrop of the play and has direct implication in the configuration of dramatic space. Hercules’ absence is ambiguous; he is ‘in the underworld’, which Lycus, for one, takes as a euphemism for ‘the dead’ (animosne mersus inferis coniunx facit?, 422).Footnote 31 His appearance onstage both proves his continued existence and establishes the offstage as a cosmic dimension. His return is not from foreign lands but from a different ontological dimension. When he immediately departs to kill Lycus, Theseus’ narration of the underworld establishes continuity with Hercules’ earlier feats. While the underworld may be located in the dramatic space-stage left whence Hercules enters,Footnote 32 it is paradoxically the exit into the palace that symbolizes the inescapability of death. The exits of Lycus, Megara and the children are all final. Up until the end of the play, Hercules is the only character who moves freely between the offstage and the onstage worlds,Footnote 33 and exits not into death but into exile. Seneca thus conceives the stage in fundamental dimensions: the offstage leads to the underworld and the heavens, while the stage shows the limited reality of the mortals’ world. For the mortal characters in the play, the stage is their world, while the underworld and heavens can only be perceived figuratively. The exchange between Megara and Lycus centres on the paradox of Hercules’ domination of the underworld and aspiration to the heavens. For Lycus, Hercules’ absence proves that Hercules is dead; for Megara, the two realms are mutually sustaining since they are supernatural. Before Lycus’ appearance, Megara had been losing faith (demersus ac defossus et toto insuper | oppressus orbe quam uiam ad superos habet?, 317–18); in the dialogue, however, she assumes the rhetorical gestures of philosophical and figurative possibilities of the supernatural. Thus for Megara, the heavens and the underworld form a continuity that defies empirical space (inferna tetigit, posset ut supera assequi, 423; nullo premetur onere, qui caelum tulit, 425), while for Lycus there are only two modes of being: onstage (alive) or offstage (dead). This realist view seems to be borne out through the domination of the stage by Lycus in this act, as he restricts the space of Amphitruo and Megara to its physical reality.Footnote 34 In fact, Lycus’ entrance at the beginning of the act may be construed as a false entrance, bringing the wrong character onstage. Megara's quasi-prayer, emerge, coniunx (279), directed at Hercules offstage, is followed by a marriage proposal from Lycus (359–71). Thus the intense expectation of Hercules’ entrance is not only delayed but also ironized through the entrance of Lycus.
Hercules’ actual entrance (592) is announced by an earthquake (520–3), and then the chorus (524–91) marks the transition from the offstage space as directly out of the underworld. The chorus thus metaphorically accompanies Hercules’ re-emergence as they also accompany his entrance in Act IV. When Hercules begins to speak, he directs his first words not to the characters onstage but to the invisible divine spectators (quisquis ex alto aspicit | terrena, 600). His awareness of the divine audience comes out in the address to every god to cover the face and in the direct challenge to the implied presence of Juno (hoc nefas cernant duo, 603). Like Juno, he thus perceives the world in opposition to the heavens, a macrocosmic view that momentarily obscures the details of the specific stage-location, Thebes. His prayer, like the later one to Jupiter, isolates him from his surroundings and acknowledges only Juno and himself as the players (qui aduexit et quae iussit, 604). Only later does he recognize the shrine and his family (616–17). While the delayed recognition in itself is not unusual, Hercules’ immediate rush offstage (637) betokens a sense of alienation, a stark contrast to the happy homecoming of Hercules in Euripides’ play.
III. OFFSTAGE AND THESEUS
Hercules appears only very briefly before he rushes off after he hears about Lycus. He comments on his own cameo appearance, when he grimly predicts that Lycus will be the messenger of his own death in Hades (nuntiet Diti Lycus | me iam redisse, 638–9). Hercules’ passing appearance onstage thus contributes to the impression of a mirroring offstage underworld. Hercules emerges just after Lycus leaves. Lycus’ exit from the stage is permanent and signals the end of his life, while Hercules’ entrance proves that he has overcome death. Hercules’ words sarcastically parody the revolving door of messenger speeches, as Lycus will announce to an offstage audience that Hercules is back (onstage). The highly compressed me iam redisse reverses their roles, in that Hercules has come back, not to the underworld (which should not be seen twice) but to displace Lycus from Thebes and re-establish his rule. The daring dramatic metaphor that makes Lycus the messenger of his own demise to Dis absorbs both Hercules’ killing and Lycus’ death in the almost hermetically sealed offstage, dismissing it as peripheral to the action.
In Hercules’ absence, Theseus tells Amphitruo about the underworld.Footnote 35 The dramatic oddity of inserting this lengthy imaginative piece here comes from Hercules’ extreme efficiency in killing Lycus. In a rapid acceleration of narrative time, Theseus sums up the killing in three tempora, making it happen before Hercules returns (si noui Herculem | Lycus Creonti debitas poenas dabit. | lentum est ‘dabit’: dat. hoc quoque est lentum: ‘dedit’, 642–4). None of the other figures moves from the stage, and Theseus, cast here as messenger, is the only one who can report from the underworld. The extremes of underworld and heavens dominate the play, in the first half those of the underworld, in the second half the distorted vision of the heavens. Thus Theseus’ report covers up a necessary absence with the narration of another absence, a detailed landscape picture of the underworld. Put into the context of the underworld, Lycus’ death is a tyrannicide, which is justified by the underworld itself.
It has been pointed out by various commentators that Seneca's underworld draws inspiration from its Virgilian model.Footnote 36 All the more curious then might be the constellation of Theseus and Amphitruo instead of the more natural pairing of Hercules and Amphitruo. In Virgil, the explication of the underworld serves to connect father and son, and by extension the generations of Romans to come.Footnote 37 By comparison, Hercules’ absence feels like avoidance. Theseus’ account of the underworld ostensibly covers up but may also accentuate the son's absence and the ambivalence of their relationship. The triangle of divine Jupiter, mortal Amphitruo and Hercules recurs throughout the play, just as Theseus, Amphitruo and Hercules seem to form a triangle of human connection. For Amphitruo, eager to hear about his son's glorious deeds, this vicarious experience of the fabled world must suffice. By coding Hercules’ absences in this way, the offstage marks a different ontological category for Hercules, who breaks the mould, and for the other mortal characters that are contained on the stage.
The deflection of the offstage action at this point is dramaturgically difficult. As Hercules kills Lycus in the offstage, Theseus and Amphitruo talk at length about the underworld. Theseus’ conviction that Hercules will easily accomplish the tyrannicide may account for the relative calm of this scene; none the less, a sense of incongruity remains. What is unusual is not the relegation of the violence offstage but the dramatized pause in the action. Theseus’ account of the underworld resembles a messenger speech, but contains material extraneous to the plot of the tragedy. Meanwhile, nobody but Hercules is witness to what happens offstage, while Theseus and Amphitruo turn from the tyrannicide to some entertainment (quae fuit durum pati | meminisse dulce est. fare casus horridos, 656–7). What is more, Theseus’ account, like all messenger speeches, is ecphrastic, asking his interlocutor, and by extension the audience, to imagine a scene that cannot be seen onstage. If we account for the mental acrobatics required in this scene, we notice three layers of spectacle: (a) the offstage killing of Lycus by Hercules that is screened physically by (b) the onstage tableau of Amphitruo and Theseus, who are themselves dissociated from their surroundings by (c) the projection of Theseus’ narrative.
It is easy to dismiss the stage itself in this line-up, since the verbal projections seem to claim all the attention. If we picture Theseus and Amphitruo onstage, however, the ekphrasis of the underworld becomes more complicated. Not only do we look over Amphitruo's shoulder as he pictures the underworld, we also look at him trying to make sense of it. Fowler emphasized the importance of focalization in ekphrasis, in a narrative epic context, when Aeneas looks at the pictures at Dido's temple (Verg. Aen. 1.453–93).Footnote 38 In the context of this tragedy and its emphasis on spectacle, Amphitruo's desire to picture his son's achievements is ominous. Theseus and Amphitruo together construct a misdirecting ekphrasis while Hercules kills behind the scenes. Amphitruo's ambivalent stance as spectator comes out more clearly later in the play where Hercules admits that he has crossed the line in making his father watch, not just imagine (cernere hunc docui nefas, 1264).
Theseus’ ecphrastic narrative and Amphitruo's desire to imagine express not only an aesthetic but also a metaphysical attempt to comprehend Hercules. While Theseus’ vision is weak and his mind recoils to speak of the visual horrors he has encountered, Amphitruo's desire for connection with Hercules coincides with a desire to retrace his experience. The dramatized situation of communicating the visual novelty of the underworld shows up the gap between imagining and actually seeing that gets activated in the later mad scene. Amphitruo's desire to know about the underworld marks his natural curiosity as a mortal but also his effort to connect with the divine nature of his son. The intermediary Theseus indulges Amphitruo's fascinated desire to hear about horrors in the knowledge of safety, not unlike the audience who enjoys the tragedy.
Theseus’ reluctance to speak is customary for a messenger and even more fitting here, as he reveals the mystery of the underworld. His eyewitness account affirms the existence of this place, against the Lucretian critique of the underworld as a projection of the human mind.Footnote 39 This renewed association of the offstage with Hercules’ absence again layers the stage world with a backdrop of extra-scenic supernatural space. This is the second time that the audience is made to picture the supernatural and to accept its physical reality. It is ironic that Theseus’ account requires the projection of the human mind to recreate this sense of contextualized reality. For Amphitruo, the existence of the underworld is reassuring in its moral order. Hercules’ absence in order to kill Lycus is motivated and justified by the underworld narrative, where tyrants are punished (735–9). Thus the offstage action and the onstage narrative function as corresponding frames with Hercules dispensing the justice that the underworld scenario mythologizes. The level of abstraction in this scene is remarkable, as if condensing the visual aspect of theatre in an exaggeration of the verbal creation of space. This formally arranged static scene of abstract ekphrasis sets up the later disorder of extra-scenic, imagined and supernatural space in Amphitruo's direct witnessing of Hercules’ madness and killings.
Seneca's messenger scenes are characterized by a high degree of visual immediacy, turning the listener into a virtual spectator of the scene and drawing him in emotionally.Footnote 40 Thus Theseus takes the listener on a virtual katabasis, which is framed by the contrast of darkness and light at the transition from the upper world to the underworld. Kirichenko emphasizes the focalization of the upper world through Cerberus at the end of the narrative. Blinded by the light of day, Cerberus’ reluctance to see the upper world has the effect of ‘alienating’ reality and sets up Hercules’ own later alienation from the upper world as a place worse than hell.Footnote 41 Theseus’ account thus creates the backdrop of hell against which Hercules’ later actions and anguish will be measured.
Hercules’ moment of triumph, the taming of Cerberus, forms the climax of Theseus’ narrative, and is signaled like a set piece of gladiatorial display by Amphitruo (nunc ede nati nobilem pugnam mei, 760). Theseus’ recollection of this event is so clear that the vision of Cerberus seems to stand before his eyes, as emphasized by the use of the deictic ecce (ecce latratu graui | loca muta terret, 793). The highly detailed narrative shows Hercules overcoming the monster in a strategic fight, by beating it with a club, covering it with an adamantine net, and finally chaining it. The dog of hell gets domesticated, displaying the typical, if grotesque, characteristics of a pet dog, as he wags his snaky tail (utrumque cauda pulsat anguifera latus, 812). This display of Hercules’ control and fighting technique prepares the scene for the frenzied attack on his family in which he uses his arms to kill rather than tame his imaginary adversaries.
The vivid description of the underworld is designed to convey its horror, but, as with the frame of this ekphrasis at large, the horror is ultimately overcome and contained. Theseus himself performs a spectator role in the underworld, and enters the picture only when dragging the chained Cerberus into the light of day (818–21). Hercules’ triumph is crowned by an internal audience applauding him and singing his praises (827–9), a closural gesture that is seamlessly taken up by the chorus. The importance of this ekphrasis lies not just in the actual sights but in the sharing of Theseus’ subjective experience as viewer, an ironically proleptic catharsis that prepares the audience for Amphitruo's ordeal. The ekphrasis virtually expands the scene into the imaginary space and then contracts again as we return to the reality of the stage world.
IV. MADNESS ANTE ORA PARENTVM/DEORVM
The central scene of the tragedy, the irruption of madness while Hercules sacrifices, presents the most intricately spectacular and perceptual puzzle. The scene is typically Senecan, with a corrupted sacrifice that an innocent witness is made to watch in all its horror. Unlike other such scenes in which the sacrifice is meticulously directed as an internal spectacle, Hercules’ madness marks his loss of control and thus complicates the interpretation. Hercules’ actions (invisible from the audience but visible from the stage) straddle the offstage where they are performed and the stage where they are perceived.Footnote 42 This inverted orientation of the stage and audience adds a centrifugal aspect in the interpretation of the scene. Unlike Atreus, Medea or other Senecan in-play-directors, Hercules does not stage the killings, but acts in the play of Juno's devising, emphasized by the position of the characters and Hercules’ deluded vision of the heavens.Footnote 43 Hercules’ distorted vision and Amphitruo's distanced spectatorship emphasize the separate dimensions of the two characters. Amphitruo stays onstage and thus in contact with the gruesome reality of the slaughter, while Hercules is out of bounds in both the literal and the figurative sense.Footnote 44 Hercules’ and Amphitruo's exchange of utterances builds the scene by layers of disharmony. Only when Amphitruo willingly enters Hercules’ mad illusion as a sacrificial victim, in his distorted frame of reference, does the madness end. Thus we have a connected but split scene in the stage/offstage.
The movement of the scene follows Hercules from the stage to the offstage in marked physical cues. Hercules’ madness begins suddenly with a changed vision (sed quid hoc? | Phoebus obscuro meat | sine nube uultu, 939–41) that echoes his warnings to the divine spectators at his original entrance (da Phoebe ueniam si quid illicitum tui | uidere uultus, 595–6). Amphitruo follows Hercules’ gaze but cannot see the hallucination (quo, nate, uultus huc et huc acres refers | acieque falsum turbida caelum uides?, 953–4). Hercules then turns to the doors, mistaking them for the access to the heavens (en ultro uocat | omnis deorum coetus et laxat fores, | una uetante. recipis et reseras polum? | an contumacis ianuam mundi traho?, 961–3). As Megara and the children flee inside, he sees the doors close (saeua Tisiphone … portam clausit, 984–6), but then suddenly spies his child that he mistakes for Lycus’ (sed ecce proles … latet, 987), whom he kills from the stage and then moves after him into the offstage, where he suspects hiding places (ceteram prolem eruam | omnesque latebras, 995–6). As he demolishes the palace, Amphitruo is able to see inside (999–1002) and watch the slaughter. At last, unable to continue watching (cernere hoc audes, 1026), Amphitruo makes as if to go inside, his movement immediately rebuked by the chorus (quo te ipse, senior, obuium morti ingeris? | quo pergis amens?, 1032–3).Footnote 45 Before he can do so, Hercules comes onstage again to take up the sacrifice, this time to Juno (tibi hunc dicatum, maximi coniunx Iouis, | gregem cecidi; uota persolui libens, | te digna, et Argos uictimas alias dabit, 1036–8). Amphitruo now enters Hercules’ distorted vision by offering himself as willing sacrifice (1039–42), and thereby breaks the spell.
Amphitruo, the main character onstage, thus turns away from the audience and turns spectator and simultaneous messenger.Footnote 46 Hercules is both invisible to the audience and unreachable in his mad delusion. His madness creates a separate vision, which is overlayed by Amphitruo's mediating ekphrasis of what he sees. Hercules plays to a divine audience behind the scenes. Hercules’ projection of the constellations echoes Juno's prologue and puts him into the context of a supernatural privileged vision.Footnote 47 The stage is thus as it were turned 180 degrees away from the audience, symbolizing Hercules’ absorption in the supernatural world and Amphitruo's helpless efforts to connect to him in this isolation.
Despite the turn away from the audience, the scene is only complete with the involvement of the spectator/reader. Hercules is absorbed in his manic hallucinations, which he is none the less compelled to verbalize, just as Amphitruo describes what he sees.Footnote 48 Both Hercules and Amphitruo see something invisible to the audience, even though Hercules’ vision is ‘unreal’, the vision of a madman.Footnote 49 The audience is once again made to picture the action offstage, but this time the ekphrasis is a composite of Amphitruo's realistic description of Hercules’ actions and Hercules’ deranged interpretation of what he does. Amphitruo calls Hercules’ vision a falsum caelum (954) in an effort to break through the delusion. The echo of the prologue's vision of the sky (6–26) marks the spectator's collaborative role in the spectacle. In the prologue, the supernatural presence of Juno and the projected vision of the constellations set the drama's cosmic frame of reference. That superior knowledge makes it possible to picture a kind of double ekphrasis, both Amphitruo's reality and the seemingly real overlay of Hercules’ mental state.
Comparing Seneca's dramatization to the Euripidean original messenger speech (Eur. HF 910–1015), the importance of space becomes immediately apparent. In Euripides, Hercules’ madness is contained, both literally and figuratively. As usual, the messenger speech occurs after the murder of Hercules’ wife and sons, and is delivered by an anonymous character. Thus the narrative is contained both temporarily and by the distancing focalization of an uninvolved character. Hercules is described as pacing a room, an enclosed space, while fantasizing about travelling through Greece (Eur. HF 953–63). While the report includes some direct speech, Hercules’ madness is deduced from the outside and communicated at one remove to Amphitruo.
If we turn to Seneca, we see that the dramatization of the messenger speech is most prominently marked by onstage space and offstage space. Amphitruo can see from the stage but not move to the offstage, while Hercules roots out and then slaughters his family in total maniacal absorption. Hercules’ offstage is not just a spatial dimension but also a mental dimension. The line demarcating the stage from the offstage forms a quasi-physical barrier, which Amphitruo cannot move, but which he can see, across. Instead of a distanced offstage that is reported, here the offstage and the onstage worlds are linked and problematically porous. Amphitruo's ability to see beyond the stage and to share what he sees simultaneously involves him as a character, not as an anonymous bystander.Footnote 50 He becomes part of the scene by looking into the offstage. The distance between Amphitruo and Hercules in this scene paradoxically forms the basis of their joint suffering as expressed later by Hercules. Amphitruo has seen Hercules in his madness.
Amphitruo's witnessing puts him in a double bind. He cannot bear watching but feels compelled to watch. This moral dilemma of enforced spectatorship is typically Senecan and Neronian.Footnote 51 The helpless passivity of the spectator and the ambiguous need to know what is happening thus project, in an amplified form, the experience of the reader/audience. However, Amphitruo's spectatorship involves him as a character. Finally, unable to restrain himself to passive watching, he offers himself as a scapegoat to Hercules.
If we compare this scene to Theseus’ report from the underworld, we can see how Seneca's intensification of ekphrasis brings the confrontation between word and sight to the limits. Theseus’ narrative was related in philosophical calm on the stage of the self-contained world of mortals at peace. The ekphrasis dialogue onstage obliterated the action offstage that guaranteed this peace (Hercules killing Lycus). Amphitruo's curiosity about Hercules and about the underworld was satisfied. In the mad scene, Amphitruo's direct involvement as a spectator brings him in contact with Hercules’ world, its violence, madness and supernatural horrors. Thus the broken form of the non-communicative dialogue between father and son needs the imagination of the reader to put both sides together. Instead of reported madness and murder, this deconstructed messenger-speech directly involves the reader in the witnessing of Hercules’ madness.
Just as with the supernatural prologue, the superior knowledge of the spectator's response begs the question of another privileged divine audience. The figure of Amphitruo helplessly watching brings to mind his counterpart, Hercules’ divine father, Jupiter, whom he had invoked at the prayer (926–7). Ironically, it is not Jupiter but Amphitruo who is watching. Throughout the play, Amphitruo defines himself as Hercules’ father, while Hercules claims Jupiter as legitimate father.Footnote 52 It is only after the mad scene that Hercules admits to having a mortal father in Amphitruo.Footnote 53 Amphitruo's painful but helpless sympathy in watching Hercules commit the murder of his sons and wife recalls the epic topos of death before the eyes of the father. In the Aeneid, Jupiter consoles Hercules for the death of Pallas alluding to his own response to the death of Sarpedon (Verg. Aen. 10.464–73). The scene articulates the difference between mortal and immortal sympathy, as Barchiesi has shown.Footnote 54 While the parallel is not exact, the idea of Amphitruo witnessing not the grandest but the basest of Hercules’ heroics resonates both with Amphitruo's attempt to comprehend his semi-divine son and with Hercules’ own mortal nature. Amphitruo's desperate attempt to make Hercules recognize his sons (1016–17) also reflects his own inability to reach him in his madness.
Again, the question that is provoked by this relentless focus on spectatorship as well as the visual tableau onstage of the father watching his son from a distance make apparent another absence, that of Jupiter. The echo of Virgil's epic apparatus raises the question not only of Juno's anger but also of Jupiter's pity. Jupiter, not unlike Hercules himself, is the absent father, while Amphitruo gains inverse recognition after Hercules’ unsuccessful Saturnian impulse to topple Olympus. The stage is the territory of Amphitruo who is the only character staying put, while Hercules spends most of the play offstage in heroic and divine ambition. Facing Amphitruo onstage, Hercules comes to terms with his own ambivalent mortal heritage. In the contorted language of perverted sacrifice, Amphitruo offers himself to Hercules as a sacrificial victim, a bold move of religious interference (1039–41; one may compare the exchange on ritual protocol between the two earlier, 918–28). With this gesture, Amphitruo acts within the imaginary space of Hercules’ deranged perception and brings him back to the mortal space of the stage.
V. ONSTAGE OR THE MEANING OF NOWHERE
When Hercules awakes from the sleep following his attack, he does not recognize his surroundings. As he tries to get his bearings, he is convinced that he is far from home, at the edges of the known world (quis hoc locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga? | ubi sum? sub ortu solis, an sub cardine | glacialis Vrsae?, 1138–40). His world is reduced to only two elements, the sky above and the earth underneath him. The body memory of this contact with the earth triggers the return of his memory (certe redimus, 1143), as he looks for his family and his arms and lion-skin as confirmation of his identity. His complete disorientation in space comes with a loss of self, as he believes that Jupiter has created a more powerful twin in a repeat of Hercules’ own conception.Footnote 55
Seneca uses tragic stage-conventions to great effect in order to illustrate Hercules’ confusion. For the theatre audience, the location is self-evident, as it has not changed. In fact, the partial destruction of the palace only reinforces the reality effect. To Hercules, however, the place seems deserted as his perception only gradually, and reluctantly, comes back. His early questions see the stage as a blank canvas, which is composed of only the physical stage without the theatrical projection of a dramatic space. For the audience, the stage is self-evidently Thebes, while Hercules makes the connection only at 1159–63 when he sees his murdered wife and children.
The sense of disorientation is reinforced by the caesura in the play's structure. Kohn suggests that the chorus had left during Hercules’ sleep, singing of the underworld and figuratively accompanying Hercules’ dead children to Hades (1131–6).Footnote 56 When Hercules remembers, the realization of what he has done echoes with the pull of a return to the underworld that is prominent in the first part of the play (redimus). Hercules’ disorientation thus adds a metafictional ironic twist; Hercules, as the viewer knows, has not moved. Thus the continuity of the projected space for the audience (Thebes) plays against Hercules’ struggles to perceive reality. Where earlier he projected distant and even unreal places in his madness, here he is incapable of seeing the stage reality of Thebes. The ‘empty’ stage echoes the prologue's setting, where Juno had predicted Hercules’ madness and the murder of his family, that is, the action until Hercules falls asleep. The aftermath falls outside of these boundaries and reinforces the sense that the mortals are left alone. The stage is now reduced to the only three remaining actors, Hercules, Amphitruo and Theseus.
This intense focus on the stage and the impossibility of leaving, or even seeing beyond the stage into the offstage, restricts the radius of the characters and marks them. Amphitruo symbolizes the stage as his ancestral land throughout the play. He is a mortal and will be buried at Thebes; he is the last of his line, a quintessential survivor and spectator of tragedies, as he claimed at the beginning of the play (ante ora uidi nostra truculenta manu | natos paterni cadere regni uindices | ipsumque, Cadmi nobilis stirpem ultimam, occidere | uidi regium capiti decus | cum capite raptum.—quis satis Thebas fleat?, 254–8). Theseus is a foreigner and will make possible the exit into exile in Athens. In a sympathetic echo, Theseus repays his friend for liberating him from the underworld by offering a way out of this figurative hell. Hercules has spent most of the play offstage, his onstage presence constantly disrupted by a centrifugal urge to be elsewhere. This movement of the title-character has determined the experience of the dramatic space throughout this play, until now. Stuck onstage for the first time, the hero has to face the physical remnants of his destructive excesses.
VI. CORAM GENITORE ET PVBLICO
Hercules’ gradual realization of his deed comes in the dialogue with Amphitruo, whose silence and body-language speak louder than words, and who cannot bear to look at him (cur meos Theseus fugit | paterque uultus? ora cur condunt sua?, 1173–4; quid, genitor, siles, 1176; miserere, genitor, supplices tendo manus | quid hoc? manus refugit, 1192–3;Footnote 57 hoc nostrum est scelus? | tacuere—nostrum est, 1198–9). Hercules turns towards Amphitruo for confirmation (ad uos reuertor, genitor, 1199) and interprets his silence as a guilty verdict. When Amphitruo blames Juno, Hercules addresses Jupiter, his absent divine offstage father to send a signal (nunc parte ab omni, genitor, iratus sona, 1201), eerily echoing Amphitruo's earlier invocation of the absent Hercules (ubicumque es, audi, nate, 520). In the following dialogue both Amphitruo and Hercules admit Jupiter's paternity while wrestling with the question of Hercules’ filial piety towards Amphitruo.
Just as before, Amphitruo seeks to prevent the killing by interceding, pleading his bond with Hercules, despite the ambiguity of his fatherhood (siue me altorem uocas, | seu tu parentem, 1247–8). The distance between them is palpable (semper absentis pater | fructum tui tactumque et aspectum peto, 1256–7). Paradoxically, Jupiter's paternity unites Amphitruo and Hercules (per ius nominis | utrumque nostri, 1246–7) in the experience of a broken filial bond. Hercules’ unanswered appeal to a distant Jupiter mirrors Amphitruo's longing for the absent or unresponsive Hercules.
The confrontation of Amphitruo and Hercules onstage gains potency, when Amphitruo claims his role as Hercules’ father. He warns Hercules of patricide. When Hercules turns the threat against himself, Amphitruo presses on his sense of shame in doing so before his father, which Hercules parries with pointing to the unspeakable things he himself has made Amphitruo watch (1263–4):
The divided lines speak for the confrontation and the mutual intransigence. They also explicitly recall the split-screen effect of the earlier mad scene and Amphitruo's role as spectator. In spite of Hercules’ bitter claim that he made Amphitruo watch the slaughter of the scene, the deliberate threat of repeating such a spectacle onstage, this time with the audience actually seeing the death, marks the difference from the earlier scene. There, the offstage violence coincided with its supernatural motivation and madness as taboo offstage events that should not be seen by the audience.Footnote 58 Here, the threat of Hercules’ killing himself while sane (amisi … etiam furorem, 1261) coincides with the theatrical taboo of showing his suicide onstage.Footnote 59 Thus Amphitruo's question genitore coram? involves the audience,Footnote 60 and contrasts them with the real (Amphitruo) and the implied (Jupiter) fatherly spectator-figures of the offstage action.Footnote 61
The confrontation between Amphitruo and Hercules onstage reinforces the notion of a complete constriction of space. In his speech (Schreirede), Hercules sees no place for himself in the world and helplessly tries to find a place to hide, a place beyond the underworld (si quod exilium latet | ulterius Erebo, Cerbero ignotum et mihi, hoc me abde, Tellus!, 1223–4). In Seneca's Oedipus, a similar desire of alienation is expressed by Oedipus, another Theban character (Oed. 869).Footnote 62 Hercules’ hyperbolic language is not unique, but it resonates with his experience as a world-traveller. Hercules has truly seen all dimensions of the upper world and the underworld, and feels himself excluded from both. The tension of his presence onstage is unbearable; he cannot stay at Thebes because of his pollution, but neither can he return to the underworld. Because of the previous categorization of the underworld as a real offstage space, Hercules is literally stuck onstage.Footnote 63 In a reversal of his earlier expansive civilizing domination of the earth and the underworld, now there is no place for him (ubique notus perdidi exilio locum, 1331).Footnote 64
Theseus responds to Hercules that such a place remains (nostra te tellus manet, 1342). Even though Athens is implied, the ambiguity of the wording retains more universal significance. Seneca's ending cuts short significantly the Euripidean ending, which unites the hero with his Athenian audience via the cult locations of Attica. In Euripides, the welcome of the hero to the city coincides with the dismissal of the audience and with the return from the fictional reality, allowing for a metafictional reflection of the place of the theatre and the audience as constituent actors in the play.Footnote 65 The Senecan version avoids the name of Athens and downplays the Attic dimension. Boyle emphasizes the anachronism in the mention of Rome's patron deity, Gradivus (Mars). In Seneca's time, the Roman Empire has subsumed not only Athens but also all possible places of refuge. There is no way out anymore in the new world-order.Footnote 66
Boyle's pessimistic reading separates the mythical Hercules from the contemporary Senecan audience. It is, however, possible to read the ending in a more conciliatory fashion. Theseus’ offer of exile shows Hercules a way out, because it redefines this space as one of human and immortal communion and expiation. Thus Athens is not just a location but an idea, a space of harmony between mortal and immortal. For a Roman, Athens would also evoke philosophy. Theseus’ inclusive invitation to Hercules to join him in nostra tellus and Amphitruo's acceptance of Hercules’ bloodstained hands may be the first steps towards the consolatory powers of philosophy ([Herc.]: dextra contactus pios | scelerata refugit. [Amph.]: hanc manum amplector libens | hac nisus ibo, pectori hanc aegro admouens | pellam dolores, 1317–21; cf. [Amph.]: nate, manantes prius, | manus cruenta caede et hostili expia, 919–20). For the audience, this exit into an idealized extra-scenic space may also be read as an invitation, collapsing dramatic illusion and real world at the end of the play.
VII. OFFSTAGE EXILE
At the end of Seneca's Medea, Jason bids an ambiguous farewell to his wife, as she escapes: per alta uade spatia sublimi aetheris | testare nullos esse, qua ueheris, deos (Med. 1026–7). The ambiguity of the wording matches that of the moral interpretation of her character and the uncertainty of the offstage metaphysics. Does Jason curse her to some non-mortal limbo or does he resign himself to a world without the gods? Medea's final departure from the stage leaves behind the residual uncertainty characteristic of her persona. The open closure of the tragedy corresponds to the violent undoing of her family ties, once again allowing her free movement and escape. The moral ambiguity of the offstage as the domain of supernatural powers and its isolation from the stage have been analysed for Greek tragedy by Easterling as representing the experience of suffering inflicted by the unknowable gods.Footnote 67 In Seneca's HF, the two dimensions clash in the aspiration and defeat of Hercules. The inclusion of the offstage in the dramatic action, with Hercules’ madness and Amphitruo's witness, literally marks the boundary between mortal and divine, and functions as a symbol for the hero's ambiguous ancestry. At the end of the play, Hercules submits to his ties to Amphitruo, Theseus and his mortal nature. The offstage is now defined in human terms as exile, with Hercules’ cult and promise of immortality downplayed from the Euripidean version. Unlike Medea's flamboyant exit, Hercules walks offstage,Footnote 68 as mortal in his humility as Medea is divine in her arrogance.
For Shakespeare, ‘all the world's a stage | and all the men and women in it merely players’,Footnote 69 inverting the traditional relationship of art and life. For Hercules and Juno, neither the stage nor the world is enough, as Juno states in the prologue nec satis terrae patent (47) and Hercules echoes non satis terrae patent | Iunonis odio (605). As a consequence, Seneca orients the play towards the offstage. Hercules’ prolonged absence from the stage and his fundamentally different perspective on the world in cosmic non-realist terms set him apart from the other characters and suggest that he plays on a separate, larger stage to a divine audience. Throughout the play, the offstage exerts a pull towards the beyond, an indefinable area of sublimity and madness ([Herc.]: in alta mundi spatia sublimis ferar, 958).Footnote 70 In the figure of Amphitruo (who strains to perceive Hercules’ actions, first in the mediated form of Theseus’ narrative, then as direct eyewitness), Seneca has put onstage a double of the spectator, who is privileged to see beyond the stage into Hercules’ otherworldly reality, but also provides a cautionary example of the emotional toll of such proximity. Amphitruo's onstage presence as a spectator emphasizes the divide between audience and stage as well as between father and son, as he watches Hercules offstage, a place that is mentally and physically without boundaries. Where does the stage end and the world begin?
