The answer is yes, and two kinds of evidence from the period allow us to arrive at this conclusion. The first is direct, consisting of comments explicitly about Seneca and the import of his works. The second is circumstantial, that is, evidence that indirectly suggests knowledge of and attitudes about the ancient writer. Both sorts show that Seneca’s plays were important for a number of reasons. Elizabethan translators and dramatists were drawn to Seneca’s style and the morally improving nature of the tragedies, but they also found the political situations in the tragedies compelling.
Contemporary comments on Seneca’s works tend to focus on two main qualities: his writing style and the morally improving character of his treatises and plays. To be sure, in 1565 Thomas Cooper lumped Seneca together with his father, describing them both only vaguely as ‘two great learned men’ (P6r). Yet most comments are far more specific, praising Seneca especially for his style and morality. In his translation of Troas, Heywood describes Seneca as ‘the flowre of all writers’ and ‘so excellent a writer’ (1559: A3v-A4r), and in the Preface to Thyestes, he notes that Seneca has a ‘woondrous wit and regall stile’ (1560: *5v). John Studley, in his translation of Medea, describes Seneca as ‘pearlesse Poet’ (1566b: A1v), and Thomas Newton refers to Seneca’s ‘peerelesse sublimity and loftinesse of style’ (A3v).
According to contemporary writers, Seneca’s style facilitates his ultimate goal, which is to inculcate virtue. Thus, Arthur Golding observes of Seneca’s De beneficiis (1578): ‘His sentences are short, quick, and full of matter; his wordes sharpe, pithie, and unaffected; his whole order of writyng grave, deepe, and severe; fitted altogether to the reforming of mennes myndes, and not too the delyghting of their eares’ (*2v). The tragedies, in particular, teach virtue. Alexander Neville tells readers to observe ‘what is ment by the whole course of the Historie [i. e. the tragedy]: and frame thy lyfe free from suche mischiefs, wherwith the worlde at this present is universally overwhelmed’. He continues: ‘Onely wysh I all men by this Tragicall Historie (for to that entent was it written) to beware of Synne: the ende wherof is shamefull and myserable’ (A5r-6r). Likewise, W. Parker writes of Agamemnon:
This tragedy of worthy Seneca,
Whose sawes profound (who so theron do loke)
To vertues race do shew a ready way.
(Studley 1566a: f8r)
Some readers must have thought that Seneca’s subjects (incest, murder, cannibalism) did not inculcate virtue, but Thomas Newton argues that the tragedies must be read correctly:
I doubt whether there bee any amonge all the Catalogue of Heathen wryters, that with more gravity of Philosophicall sentences, more waightynes of sappy words, or greater authority of sound matter beateth down sinne, loose lyfe, dissolute dealinge, and unbrydled sensuality: or that more sensibly, pithily, and bytingly layeth downe the guerdon of filthy lust, cloaked dissimulation and odious treachery; which is the dryft, wherunto he leveeth the whole yssue of ech one of his Tragedies. (A3v-A4r)
Seneca’s tragedies inculcate virtue in those who read them, encouraging them, in Newton’s words, to ‘beat down sin, loose life, and dissolute dealing’. Yet Renaissance authors were well aware of the political aspects of Seneca’s career as well as his works. Later writers likely knew his biography from the Tacitus’ Annals, a history of the reigns of the emperors Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero, written c.116 and first published in England in 1598. Thus, in his Advancement of Learning (1605), Francis Bacon refers to his biography, describing the counsellor who ‘after he had consecrated that Quinquennium Neronis [the five years of Nero’s minority] to the eternall glorie of learned Governors, held on his honest and loyall course of good and free Counsell, after his Maister grew extreamely corrupt in his government’ (2000: 18). Earlier authors may have known Tacitus from manuscript sources or by reputation, but even if they did not, they were aware of Seneca’s career. Arthur Golding describes him as a ‘somtyme Courtyer, and also a Counseller of the greatest state in the worlde’ (1578: *2r). Such awareness came from works like Octavia, a play by a later Roman imitator of the tragedies, which was published in a translation by Thomas Nuce in 1566. The plot concerns Nero’s divorce from Octavia and stars Seneca himself as an oppositional counsellor to the emperor. Critical of Nero, the play clearly associates Seneca’s career with his drama. For this reason, Elizabethan authors—who thought Octavia was by Seneca—may well have taken the play as a signal that this and the other tragedies should be read as forms of political observation and admonition.
At least one author explicitly read Seneca’s tragedies in just this way. In 1601 Sir William Cornwallis published Discourses upon Seneca the Tragedian, a commentary on the political guidance implicit in lines from the plays. To give just one example, the first quotation in Discourses comes from Act 3 of Oedipus. Echoing the sentiment of Atreus in Thyestes, Oedipus says to Creon:
Odia qui nimium timet regnare nescit: regna custodit metus. (Air)
(One unduly afraid of being hated is incapable of ruling; a throne is safeguarded by fear.)
(Seneca ii. 78-9)
Commenting on this line, Cornwallis argues that rulers of necessity inculcate fear in their subjects, since ‘out of subjects feare groweth Princes saftie’ (Air). Even so, how the prince creates fear leads either to tyranny or to good government (Aiv-Air).
For Cornwallis, Seneca’s plays offer advice to princes and magistrates. It is likely that early translators and dramatists read the tragedies in a similar way. For instance, early Elizabethan translators dedicated their plays to Elizabeth or members of her Privy Council.191 To be sure, authors frequently dedicated their works to members of the nobility. That said, that the tragedies were dedicated exclusively to the most powerful people in England suggests that the translators viewed the plays as relevant in some way to the political situations encountered by such figures. The first Senecan-style drama in English, Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton’s Gorboduc, reinforces this view. Gorboduc tells a story from ancient British history in order to urge Elizabeth and Parliament to resolve the succession question, the debate over who should next inherit the throne.192 That Sackville and Norton would have used both ancient history and Senecan forms for this purpose suggests that they were copying a link they associated with the Seneca’s tragedies, the use of stories from the distant or mythological past to address contemporary political issues.
All told, Elizabethan translators and dramatists appreciated Seneca’s style and moral sensibilities, but they knew the political nature of Seneca’s plays and, as we shall see in more detail below, used him as a model to write their own works that, like Seneca’s, could address contemporary political concerns. It is worth asking why writers were so explicit about their appreciation of Seneca’s style and morality but said so little about his politics. It is possible that Seneca’s plots and themes were so obvious or so provocative that authors were deliberately circumspect about this aspect of his works. Whatever the reason for such silence, Elizabethans found the political situations depicted in the tragedies relevant to their own day.
Yet beyond such general claims about the writers’ interest in Seneca’s style, morality, and politics, it is difficult to be more specific about Elizabethan attitudes, since the extent and character of the engagement with the drama altered over time. As we have seen, there was considerable interest in his tragedies in the 1560s and the 1580s and 1590s, while in the 1570s little attention was paid to his work.193 In addition, the two phases of active interest in Seneca were different in a number of ways. In the 1560s the translation and adaptation of Seneca was confined to a relatively elite group, students at the universities and Inns of Court. Moreover, these men tended to rework Seneca in an extensive way, producing complete translations or extended imitations of his works. In the 1580s and 1590s, on the other hand, the interest in Seneca was more popular, developing among the dramatists for the private and public stage. Yet such dramatists engaged with the tragedian’s work in a less comprehensive way, tending as they did to imitate or adapt only specific lines, scenes, or characters in their plays.
In a way, the waxing and waning of interest in Seneca is readily explained. As Gordon Braden has argued, his plays represent a certain autarchic style of selfhood (characterized by its will, self-sufficiency, and ambition), and it was this style of selfhood that Renaissance authors found compelling, since they too faced the possibility of absolute rule. Under Elizabeth, such fears were most intense in the early and later years of her reign, when earlier her marriage policy and later her old age heightened concerns about the succession. At these times, the Queen’s refusal to settle the issue, despite the urgings of her counsellors and subjects, raised the spectre of autocracy, of a ruler who, like Atreus or Nero, refuses to take counsel. In such periods, the issues in the tragedies and in Seneca’s life were relevant indeed.
Nevertheless, in order to understand other changes in the reception of Seneca, we must look at each phase on its own. The authors and dramatists in each phase had different aims and, in general, wrote for different sorts of audience; the way such writers engaged with Seneca’s works changed accordingly. As we shall see, one of the most significant differences concerns the aspect of Seneca that writers found most intriguing, those parts that focused on the rulers or those that focused on the ruled. As we saw earlier, Thyestes is indicative of Seneca’s tragedies in the way that it develops two perspectives on kingship. The early and later Elizabethans each developed one of these perspectives. While there are exceptions, early Elizabethans tended to address the psychology of rulers, and the later Elizabethan dramatists tended to deal with the dilemmas of those around a king cum tyrant, people who must try to understand and respond to a corrupt leader.
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