In the 1560s Seneca’s plays were popular among a circle of poets, translators, and playwrights associated with the Inns of Court and universities. That Seneca was popular among such writers makes sense. As H. B. Charlton observes, it was the ‘natural bias of law students looking to state services for their future’ (1946: 163). For this circle consisted of ambitious young men who wanted to obtain positions in the government as secretaries, ambassadors, and Members of Parliament. Such men shared their writing with each other and with national leaders in order to form social and professional connections with one another and potential patrons. Their work with Seneca illustrates the social function of their creative activities. Such translations and adaptations helped authors to connect with other participants in this literary and social community, and to address issues that were important to them in contemporary political affairs.
Prefaces to two of the translations indicate how such works helped such authors to form literary and social connections. The clearest instance is the Preface to Thyestes, in the dream vision in which Seneca visits Heywood to ask him to translate the play. Initially, in response to this request, Heywood refuses, telling the tragedian to look for a translator among the writers at the Inns of Court, where he says, ‘Minerva’s men and finest wits do swarm’. He then praises numerous authors, who are associated with the Inns: Thomas North, Thomas Sackville, Thomas Norton, Christopher Yelverton, William Baldwin, Thomas Bludeville, William Bavand, Barnabe Googe, and a ‘great number more’ whom he does not have space to name (1982: 81-104). As we saw above, the Preface authorizes Heywood, and this passage does so especially. Later in the Preface, at the insistence of Seneca, Heywood agrees to translate the play. This passage helps to validate that decision, suggesting that Heywood is a better translator than even those authors whom he praises here. At the same time, the passage facilitates social networking. When he translated Thyestes, Heywood was a fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, but he was about to become a member of Gray’s Inn, one of the Inns of Court. The Preface uses flattery to develop links with the social group that he was about to join.194
Although not written by him, the prefatory matter in John Studley’s Agamemnon functions in a similar way. The translation begins with poems by fellow Senecan translators Thomas Newton and Thomas Nuce, as well as other writers, who praise Studley and compare his translation with the work of contemporary authors, including Heywood, Thomas Phaer, Barnabe Googe, Arthur Golding, and Richard Edwards (1566a: f8v-A1r). Like Heywood’s Preface, the poems link Studley to the current literary scene at the schools, which included Studley’s friends, who commend him in their verses, as well as those other contemporary translators, poets, and dramatists to whom he is compared in the poems themselves.
Even as such works established literary and social connections, they also gave authors an opportunity to develop their interests in contemporary political affairs, providing stories which allowed them to consider and comment on those general political questions raised by Seneca concerning tyranny and kingship. Thus, for example, Heywood uses Troas as a form of ambiguous political commentary. The play details the fates of Hecuba and other women of Troy in the aftermath of the Trojan war. Heywood made several changes to the play in order to enhance the presentation of the Trojan queen as a victim of fortune, for instance by adding a chorus at the end of Act 1 on the ephemeral nature of power (B2v-B3v). Such changes enhance the theme of the transience of political authority in the play. Yet he then dedicated the play to Elizabeth, who had just come to the throne, possibly in order to urge the new queen to be merciful and just by reminding her of her own susceptibility to reversals of fortune (Winston 2006b: 46).
In addition to translating Seneca, contemporary authors also produced original plays which incorporated Senecan elements. These include Sackville and Norton’s Gorboduc (1562), Richard Edwards’s Damon and Pithias (c.1565), and the multi-authored Gismund of Salerne (1568). Such plays also facilitated the political thinking and involvement of those who wrote and watched them. Gorboduc provides an especially striking example of this pattern, since it raises general questions about governance (specifically about tyranny and the role of counsel) and, unusually for the drama of the period, also comments explicitly on the specific issue of the succession.
Performed at the Inner Temple, one of the Inns of Court, and later for the Queen at court, Gorboduc is the story of an ancient British king who divides his realm between his two sons, Ferrex and Porrex. The decision ignites a disastrous civil war, which ends with the deaths of Gorboduc, his queen, Videna, and both Ferrex and Porrex. As they wrote, Sackville and Norton drew on a number of literary traditions, including medieval drama (a source for the dumb shows between acts) and de casibus poetry, which depicts the falls of kings and nobles (a source for the Chorus’s speech on Gorboduc as a mirror, or lesson, for rulers). Seneca was an important influence too, inspiring the five-act structure, the use of a chorus between acts, and the long declamatory speeches. The tragedies also seem to influence particular moments: Queen Videna’s opening speech recalls Octavia’s at the opening of Octavia, and Gorboduc’s speech on the fate of the Trojans and their descendants recalls one by Hecuba in Troas (P. Davis 2003: 89).
Critics have long agreed that the play addresses the succession. The topic is raised implicitly in the opening act, where Gorboduc overrides primogeniture, establishing a new principle of succession, divided rule. But the play comments explicitly on the topic in a famous speech at the end in which Gorboduc’s adviser Eubulus (a name meaning ‘wise counsellor’) describes the best way to deal with succession: the monarch and parliament should work together to establish a legitimate line to the throne, and ‘set the state in quiet stay’ (Norton and Sackville 1971: 5. 2. 71). The comment was unambiguously relevant to the succession question, since much of the controversy concerned how much individual or joint power the Queen, her Privy Council, or her Parliament had to decide the issue. Moreover, we know that the play was viewed as a comment on the topic, since a viewer of the first performance noted in his journal that ‘many thinges were saied for the Succession to putt thinges in certenty’
(Winston 2005: 25). Sackville and Norton clearly picked up on the combination of drama and political commentary in Seneca, using the tragedies as a precedent for offering political admonition in their play.
Perhaps the most subtle and striking aspect of the influence of Seneca on the works of the 1560s has less to do with their form or content than with their political orientation. In general, the translators and dramatists are concerned with the tribulations of rulers (as opposed to their subjects), that is, with the attitudes and dilemmas of leaders, like Atreus (as opposed to the concerns and reactions of their people, like the Chorus). One telling example of this orientation comes from a non-dramatic work from the period, a version of the Thyestes story that appears in Thomas Cooper’s mythological appendix to his dictionary of 1565. The story emphasizes Atreus’ perspective: Thyestes, ‘aspyrynge’ to be king, ‘committed adu-outrie [adultery] with the wife of his elder brother Atreus, who therefore slue the children of Thyestes, and causynge them to be rosted, made his brother to eate them unwares’ (1565: S4v). Cooper portrays only the point of view of Atreus, not that of Thyestes. Atreus’ acts are revenge, the consequence of Thyestes’ violation of familial bonds.
While never so explicit, the tendency of plays in the period to focus on rulers (rather than subjects) is evident in subtle and pervasive ways, for instance, in the tendency to dedicate the translations to the Queen and members of her Privy Council, as though the plays are especially relevant to the nation’s leaders. But this orientation is also evident in subject matter, which focuses on the concerns of rulers and their counsellors—their susceptibility to fortune, their problems with succession, and the like. Thus, Damon and Pithias presents a tyrant who is transformed into a good king when he witnesses the friendship of Damon and Pithias. Gismond of Salerne presents the turmoil of a king who forbids his daughter to marry. We even see this orientation in plays like Thomas Preston’s Cambises (c.1560), George Gascoigne’s Jocasta (1566), and Thomas Pickering’s Horestes (1567), where the influence of Seneca is considerably less apparent. Even these plays seem to display an interest in rulers, in the transformation of a good king into a tyrant (Cambises), in the circumstances in which one can depose a king, and specifically in the scandal over the deposing of Mary, Queen of Scots, following her suspected affair with the Earl of Bothwell and the murder of Henry Darnley (Horestes), and in the psychological trauma of a deposed and disgraced king (Jocasta).Such an orientation towards rulers is fitting. For the most part, the writers in this period were educated men who were concerned about and, in many cases, sought to obtain places at court and in the government. They used their plays to demonstrate their critical engagement with and sympathy for the concerns of the ruling elite. This orientation is all the more notable since the dramatists of the later Elizabethan period are drawn far more (albeit not exclusively) to the other set of issues raised by Seneca, the way that the actions of rulers affect their subjects.
10 For a discussion of Horestes and Mary, Queen of Scots, see Philips (1955) and K. Robertson (1990).
World History
