Writing in the late 1580s, Thomas Nashe complained that too many playwrights were copying Seneca’s plays. Referring to English editions of the tragedies and the now lost drama Hamlet, he grumbles: ‘English Seneca read by candle light yeelds many good sentences, as Blood is a begger, and so forth; and if you intreate him faire in a frostie morning, he will affoord you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of Tragical speeches’ (1966: 315). Nashe exaggerates the extent to which Elizabethan dramatists copied Seneca’s ‘sentences’ and ‘speeches’, but it is true that there are lots of allusions to the tragedies in the drama of the latter part of the sixteenth century, most commonly in paraphrases of his lines and adaptations of his speeches, especially in the popular revenge tragedies like Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (late 1580s), Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta (1589-90), Shakespeare and Peele’s Titus Andron-icus (1592), Shakespeare’s Hamlet (c.1601), and John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge (1602). Indeed, underscoring this influence, at least two revengers, Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy (Act 1, scene 13) and Antonio in Antonio’s Revenge (Act 2, scene 2) carry copies of Seneca with them on stage (P. Davis 2003: 93,106).Yet the influence of Seneca in these two decades differs from that of the 1560s. In the main, dramatists allude to and imitate the tragedies in less extensive, more sporadic, more tactical ways, using specific lines and speeches to develop characters or situations. Thus, in The Spanish Tragedy, as Hieronimo contemplates the need to revenge the murder of his son, he repeatedly quotes Latin lines from Seneca’s plays, citing Clytemnestra in Agamemnon, Andromache in The Trojan Women, and Oedipus in Oedipus (P. Davis 2003: 93-5). Such quotes help to convey changes in his character, suggesting that he is trying to become as emotionally overwrought as the figures in Seneca’s plays.
More importantly, the plays of the late 1580s and 1590s have a different political orientation. Certainly some tragedies, such as Marlowe’s Tamburlaine (c.1587) or Shakespeare’s Richard III (c.1593), portray Atreus-like figures who rise quickly to power and focus on the psychology, as well as the daring schemes and gloating triumphs, of tyrants. Many more plays, however, appear more concerned with those people who, like the Chorus in Thyestes, must react to and negotiate a world dominated by corrupt leaders. This is again especially true of the revenge tragedies and figures like Hieronimo in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, who revenges the murder of his son when he feels that the legal system, which he helps to administer, will not help him; or Barabas in The Jew of Malta, who begins a vengeful killing spree when he is treated unjustly by the rulers of Malta; or Hamlet in the play of that name, who contemplates revenge when he discovers that his deceptive uncle Claudius has secured the throne by murdering the former king. Indeed, Andrew Hadfield argues that Shakespeare likely wrote Hamlet with the histories of ancient Rome and ‘their representations of the tyranny and cruelty of imperial Rome very much in the forefront of [his] mind’ (2003: 571).
Such differences from the 1560s are understandable. The playwrights of this period wrote for the public and private stage, in other words, in a competitive market that catered to larger and more varied audiences than those at the universities, the Inns, and the court in the 1560s. In this market, dramatists looked to Seneca for inspiration, for lines, speeches, characters, and plots that would draw audiences to their plays. More importantly, these dramatists were not amateur authors, but professional writers who aimed to entertain playgoers, a group of people who in the main suffered from the decisions of the powerful but did not have much say in political decisions. Such playwrights and audiences, therefore, were more likely to be interested in figures like Hieronimo, Hamlet, or Antonio who have to make sense of and respond to the corrupt regimes in which they find themselves, often at the cost of becoming mad themselves.
To be sure, when he translated Thyestes, aiming to ‘revive’ Seneca’s reputation, Heywood could not have predicted how important the tragedies would become. But the plays obviously spoke to a range of authors, readers, and audiences across the period. As Emily Wilson writes of the current resurgence of interest in Seneca among classicists: ‘He is a writer for uncertain and violent times, who forces us to think about the differences between compromise and hypocrisy, and about how, if at all, a person can be good, calm or happy in a corrupt society under constant threat of death’ (2004: 4). Just as now, in the Elizabethan period Seneca filled a need among readers and audiences across the social spectrum: the need for a fictional space in which to consider in a general way important political questions about kingship, counsel, tyranny, and subjugation. His tragedies resonated with Elizabethans since they offered what seemed a gripping analysis of autocracy. It is a form of rule that is so personal, so opposite to convention, that rulers who govern this way are successful, at least at first and because their eccentric behaviour bewilders, confounds, and even maddens their subjects.
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World History
