Senecan tragedy, body of nine closet dramas (i.e., plays intended to be read rather than
performed), written in blank verse by the Roman Stoic
philosopher Seneca in the 1st century AD.
Rediscovered by Italian humanists in the mid-16th century, they became the models for the revival of tragedy on the
Renaissance stage. The two great, but very different, dramatic traditions of the age -
French Neoclassical tragedy and Elizabethan
tragedy - both drew inspiration from Seneca.
Seneca's plays were reworkings chiefly of Euripides' dramas and also of works of
Aeschylus and Sophocles. Probably meant to be recited at
elite gatherings, they differ from their originals in their long declamatory,
narrative accounts of action, their obtrusive moralizing, and their bombastic rhetoric. They dwell on detailed accounts of
horrible deeds and contain long reflective soliloquies. Though the gods rarely appear in these
plays, ghosts and witches abound. In an age when the Greek originals were scarcely known, Seneca's plays were mistaken for high
Classical drama. Senecan tragedies tended to include ideas of revenge, the occult, the supernatural, suicide, blood and gore. The
Renaissance scholar Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484-1558), who knew both Latin and
Greek, preferred Seneca to Euripides.
French Neoclassical dramatic tradition, which reached its highest expression in the 17th-century tragedies of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, drew on Seneca for form and
grandeur of style. These Neoclassicists adopted Seneca's innovation of the confidant (usually a servant), his substitution of
speech for action, and his moral hairsplitting.
The Elizabethan dramatists found Seneca's themes of bloodthirsty revenge more congenial to English taste than they did his
form. The first English tragedy, Gorboduc (1561), by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, is a
chain of slaughter and revenge written in direct imitation of Seneca. (As it happens, Gorboduc does follow the form as
well as the subject matter of Senecan tragedy: but only a very few other English plays - e.g. The Misfortunes of Arthur - followed its lead in this.) Senecan influence is also evident
in Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and
Shakespeare's Hamlet: both share a revenge theme, a
corpse-strewn climax, and ghosts among the cast, which can all be traced back to the Senecan model.
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia
Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public
domain.
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