JESSICA WINSTON

In the Preface to his translation of Seneca’s Thyestes (1560), Jasper Heywood presents a dream in which the ancient Roman tragedian asks him to translate the play. The Preface works to authorize the translator: Seneca confirms Heywood’s pre-eminent linguistic and literary talents when he handpicks him to ‘revive’ the tragedies, making them accessible for a new country and age (Heywood 1982: 40). Reading through the bobbing fourteeners of the Preface and the translation itself, a modern reader might be tempted to conclude that Heywood was an ambitious writer who was overly confident in his abilities. Yet the early reception of Thyestes, as well as Heywood’s translations of other tragedies by Seneca—Troas (1559) and Hercules furens (1561)— suggests that he had good reason to be hopeful about the impact of his work. His edition of Troas was printed four times between 1559 and 1581, and Thyestes and Hercules furens twice each in the same period.1 Contemporaries praised Heywood for his ‘learned and painefull translation’ (Hall 1581: A2v) as well as his ‘perfect verse’, ‘smouth and fyled style’, and ability to make ‘even Seneca hym selfe to speke in englysh’ (Studley 1566a: f8v, A3v-A4r). Indeed, his translations helped to renew interest in Seneca, so much so that the Roman tragedies became one of the most important influences on the drama of late sixteenth - and early seventeenth-century England.

Prior to 1560, only a few of Seneca’s works appeared in manuscript and print. But beginning with Heywood, considerable interest developed in the tragedies, mainly

' Troas appeared twice in 1559, once in 1562, and again, along with reprints of Thyestes and Hercules furens in Newton’s collection of Senecas His Ten Tragedies in 1581.

Among students at the universities and early English law schools, the Inns of Court, where in just a few years nearly all of Seneca’s tragedies were translated into English.188 Students also put on performances of Seneca and wrote plays, such as Gorboduc (1562) and Gismond of Salerne (1568), which adapted some characteristic features of Senecan tragedy (the five-act structure, revenge-driven plots, lengthy deliberative speeches, quick verbal exchanges, and common characters, such as a chorus, messengers, nurses, and ghosts).189 Moreover, Seneca’s tragedies remained popular later in the century. In 1581 Thomas Newton compiled the Tenne Tragedies, the first complete edition of Seneca’s plays in England. In 1601 Sir William Cornwallis published Discourses upon Seneca the Tragedian, a commentary on political advice inherent in the tragedies. And throughout the 1580s and 1590s playwrights such as Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, John Marston, and Shakespeare adapted elements of Seneca’s drama in their works.

A considerable number of studies have illustrated the importance of Seneca for Renaissance drama (H. Charlton 1946; Braden 1985; Miola 1992), so the fact of such influence need not be documented here.190 Suffice it to say that dramatists in the period imitated and alluded to the plots, characters, rhetorical devices, and lines from Seneca so frequently that one Elizabethan author complained that English playwrights were actually killing Seneca. Contemporary dramatists ‘let blood’ from the classical author, copying his words ‘line by line and page by page’, until he ‘at length’ came to ‘die to our stage’ (Nashe 1966:316).

To be sure, Heywood started something important, helping to develop interest in Seneca’s works by making them accessible for a new generation of readers and writers; however, he was not wholly responsible for the ancient tragedian’s growing popularity. How, then, can we explain the increasing interest in and importance of Senecan drama in the latter half of the sixteenth-century? This chapter addresses this question, making special reference to Thyestes, ‘the most influential of all the tragedies on Elizabethan theatre’ (Fantham 1986: 436). As we shall see, Seneca’s plays were especially popular in the 1560s and the 1580s and 1590s, that is, at the start and end of Elizabeth’s reign (1558-1603). At these times, two related issues, the succession and the potential for monarchic tyranny, were topics of widespread concern. Seneca’s plays develop portraits of kings and nobles as they become tyrants and despots. Such works provided a genre and source that Elizabethan authors could allude to and imitate in order to register their and their audiences’ apprehension about the autarchic potential of the monarch at a time of political uncertainty.

Several critics have noticed the political relevance of Seneca’s works in Renaissance England, and this chapter is especially influenced by Gordon Braden’s Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition (1985), which explores the significance of Seneca’s views on tyranny for Renaissance authors. Still, most studies, including Braden’s, focus only on the later Elizabethan reception of the tragedies, and this chapter contributes to this topic by distinguishing between the early and later phases (the 1560s and the i58os-i59os). Doing so allows us to address some of the similarities and differences in the character and political orientation of the translations and adaptations of Seneca in each one. As we shall see, the political interests of earlier and later translators and adapters of Seneca differed, depending on their backgrounds and intended audiences. In the most general terms, while authors in the earlier phase were drawn to Seneca’s representation of tyrants, later ones were interested in his depictions of the way such rulers affect their subjects. Still, in order to appreciate such differences, we must first look into two topics, Seneca’s tragedies in their own time and views of Seneca in the Elizabethan period, subjects that will provide the background we need to appreciate the politics of Seneca in early and later Elizabethan England.