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INTRODUCTION vii

Sources of Senecan Influence on English Drama.

Tendencies of Senecan Influence as felt by English Drama.

Direct Borrowings from Senecan Tragedies.

MEDEA 1

THE DAUGHTERS OF TROY 45

INTRODUCTION

SOURCES OF SENECAN INFLUENCE ON ENGLISH DRAMA

The interest of English students in the dramas of Seneca lies in the powerful influence exerted by them upon the evolution of the English drama, and these translations have been undertaken in the hope that they may be found useful to English students of English drama.

Though all the tragedies ascribed to Seneca are not by the same hand, yet they are so far homogeneous that in considering them as a literary influence, one is not inclined to quarrel with the classification that unites them under a single name. For the present purpose, therefore, no time need be spent in the discussion of their authorship or exact date, but we may turn at once to look for their appearance as agents in the development of the modern, serious drama. In this relation it is hardly possible to overestimate their determining influence throughout Europe. Perhaps it may have been owing to the closer racial bond between the Romans and the French that while the Senecan influence upon the drama in France was so overmastering and tyrannical, in England the native spirit was stronger to resist it, and the English drama at its best remained distinctively English, the influence exercised over it by the Senecan tragedies being rather formative than dominant.

"May this be true, or doth the Fable fayne, When corps is deade the Sprite to live as yet? When Death our eies with heavy hand doth strain, And fatall day our leames of light hath shet, And in the Tombe our ashes once be sat, Hath not the soule likewyse his funerall, But stil do wretches live in thrall?

"Or els doth all at once togeather die? And may no part his fatal howre delay, But with the breath the Soule from hence doth flie? And eke the Cloudes to vanish quite awaye, As danky shade fleeth from the poale by day? And may no iote escape from desteny, When once the brand hath burned the body?"

In Sherburne's translation of 1702 the same lines are rendered as follows:--

"Is it a Truth? or Fiction blinds Our fearful Minds? That when to Earth we Bodies give, Souls yet do live? That when the Wife hath clos'd with Cries The Husband's Eyes, When the last fatal Day of Light, Hath spoil'd our Sight And when to Dust and Ashes turn'd Our Bones are urn'd; Souls stand yet in nead at all Of Funeral, But that a longer Life with Pain They still retain? Or dye we quite? Nor ought we have Survives the Grave? When like to Smoake immixed with skies, The Spirit flies, And Funeral Tapers are apply'd To th' naked Side, Whatere Sol rising does disclose Or setting shows," etc.

It is also interesting to compare Sherburne's version with the earlier one in the famous passage which closes the chorus at the end of the second act of the Medea; Newton's edition gives the lines as follows:--

"Now seas controulde doe suffer passage free, The Argo proude erected by the hand Of Pallas first, doth not complayne that shee, Conveyde hath back, the kynges unto theyr land. Eche whirry boate now scuddes about the deepe All stynts and warres are taken cleane away, The Cities frame new walles themselves to keepe, The open worlde lettes nought rest where it lay; The Hoyes of Ind Arexis lukewarme leake, The Persians stout in Rhene and Albis streame Doth bath their Barkes, time shall in fine outbreake When Ocean wave shall open every Realme, The Wandering World at Will shall open lye, And Typhis will some newe founde Land survay Some travelers shall the Countreys farre escrye, Beyonde small Thule, knowen furthest at this day."

As given by Sherburne these lines are:--

"The passive Main Now yields, and does all Laws sustain, Nor the fam'd Argo, by the hand Of Pallas built, by Heroes mann'd, Does now alone complain she's forc'd To Sea; each petty Boat's now cours'd About the Deep; no Boundure stands, New Walls by Towns in foreign Lands Are rais'd; the pervious World in 'ts old Place, leaves nothing. Indians the cold Araxis drink, Albis, and Rhine the Persians. Th' Age shall come, in fine Of many years, wherein the Main M' unloose the universal Chain; And mighty Tracts of Land be shown, To Search of Elder Days unknown, New Worlds by some new Typhys found, Nor Thule be Earth's farthest Bound."

That the influence of Seneca's plays upon the English stage came very directly may be seen from the facts known concerning their long popularity, and the consideration in which they were held as literature, whether in the original or in translation. But their influence was exerted not only by direct means; the revival of learning in Europe brought with it a general revival of the Latin influence, and England in borrowing from Italy and France borrowed indirectly from Rome. Among the English translations made in the time of Elizabeth from French and Italian authors, we find the names of dramas modelled closely after Seneca, and intended in their English dress for presentation on the English stage; thus indirectly also was Senecan style and thought perpetuated in the English drama.

TENDENCIES OF SENECAN INFLUENCE AS FELT BY ENGLISH DRAMA

It would hardly be possible to find a stronger contrast than that between these Senecan tragedies and the early English drama as it existed in moralities and miracle plays before the classic influence made itself felt. With perhaps the single exception of "The Sacrifice of Isaac," which in its touching simplicity is truly dramatic, the moralities and miracle plays are little more than vivid narrative in which events of equal magnitude follow one another in epic profusion; the classic unities of time and place are unknown, and, so far as unity of action is observed, it is epic unity rather than dramatic. The characters are little more than puppets that pass across the stage, moved by no single inward spring of action, but determined in their movements by outward forces or temporary emotions.

In contradistinction to this epic profusion of inchoate external action, we find the authors of the Senecan tragedies choosing for their material only the closing portion of the myth which is the basis of their drama, and centring the little action they admit around the crisis of a soul's life, the real subject of their drama being some spiritual conflict. This introspectiveness, this interest in spiritual problems and soul processes, we find in the English drama only after it has come under the Senecan influence, and it is found in its most exaggerated form in those dramas which are most closely modelled after the Senecan pattern. While the first effect of this influence was to lessen the dramatic interest, it is only as the interest in the spiritual life is added to the wealth of external action that the English drama finds any true principle of dramatic unity. How far the stirrings of the Reformation aided in the development of this interest in soul problems is a question that the student of dramatic literature cannot ignore, but which is outside the present inquiry.

The consciousness of the importance to dramatic art of an inner spiritual theme as a central formative principle led to the nicer differentiation of character,--to the evolution of true dramatic personages from the puppets of the earlier drama, through a deeper inquiry into the inward springs of action.

The centralizing of the visible presentation around a spiritual theme brought about several secondary changes in English drama. The narrowing of the field of action necessitated the description of past and passing actions, which, though not admitted on the stage, were necessary to the understanding of the drama; this led to the introduction of the stock character of messenger and of the long descriptive monologues so familiar in the classic drama. The widening of the interest in the spiritual conflict necessitated the objectifying of that conflict, and led to the introduction of the stock character of confidant, also well known to the Greek and Roman drama, and to the further introduction of long and passionate soliloquy.

In the later development of the five-act division the chorus falls away, and the act division becomes not formal but organic, and coincides with the structural divisions of introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, and catastrophe; this has now become the rule for the form of the modern serious drama.

Besides the centralization of the external action around an inner spiritual theme and the fixing of the structural form, other less fundamental results of the Senecan influence are evident in the sixteenth and seventeenth century English drama. The Senecan tragedies belong to the age of the Julian successors of Tiberius,--an age when reason had lost its control, when changes were wrought by intrigue, cunning, and brute force; when vicissitudes of fortune and enormities of conduct were witnessed with the same curiosity which is excited by a fascinating drama, and with something of the same apathy, even when the spectator himself was concerned in the exhibition. The effect of this upon the Senecan tragedy was to expand the limits of what the dramatic proprieties permitted to be represented on the stage, to give in place of dramatic action brilliant and lurid rhetoric only, and to replace a true philosophy by a stoic fatalism.

The tragic and lurid realism of action and description which especially differentiate Seneca from the Greeks found its way into England by a double stream; that is, not only directly from his dramas, but also through the channel of contemporary Italian tragedy, a tragedy which Klein in his "Geschichte des Dramas" describes as a horrible caricature of the Senecan tragedy, where the pity and fear of the Greeks are turned to shuddering horror and crocodile tears. The result is seen in the riot of bloodshed and lust of the so-called tragedy of blood. What Mr. J. A. Symonds says of Marlowe's "Tamberlane" is true of this entire school: "Blood flows in rivers, shrieks, and groans, and curses mingle with heaven-defying menaces and ranting vaunts. The action is one tissue of violence and horror." Even Shakespeare reflects this influence, and in "Hamlet," "Lear," and "Macbeth," we still find this bloody and sensational tendency, though it is purified of its worst extravagances.

We have spoken of the two characters of messenger and confidant which modern drama owes to the nobler Senecan influence; it is to the less admirable influence of his sensational realism that we owe the introduction of supernatural agencies,--of witches, ghosts, and apparitions; these are often little more than stage machinery: in Shakespeare, however, we find them transmuted into powerful adjuncts to the dramatic effect; compare the ghost of Tybalt, that appears to Juliet when she takes the sleeping potion, with that of Medea's brother, that appears to Medea in the last act of the Senecan tragedy of that name; note, too, the use of the ghost in "Macbeth," in "Julius Caesar," and in "Hamlet."

The stoic fatalism which runs like a dark thread through these tragedies of blood is, in the English as in the Senecan tragedy, the natural concomitant of all this sensational horror, and is evident in the texture of the dramas and the character of the personages, and in original as well as in quoted passages.

DIRECT BORROWINGS FROM SENECAN TRAGEDIES

We need give but little space to remarks upon the extent to which English dramatists borrowed directly from the Roman tragedies, for such borrowings were of far less moment in the evolution of the modern drama than the more fundamental imitation of form and structure already noted; their chief interest indeed lies outside the scope of dramatic study, and is to be found in the fact that they serve to mark English sympathy for certain phases of Roman thought.

The adornment of new tragedies by portions borrowed from Seneca calls into use most frequently the phrases which are the expression of a dark and hopeless philosophy. The fatalism referred to in preceding lines as characterizing the Elizabethan tragedies of blood had a strong hold upon the English mind from a much earlier date. One need not wonder that the thought which colored so early a poem as Beowulf, and which came to the surface in the conscious philosophy of a later time to re?nter literature in the works of Alexander Pope, should have attracted the attention of Englishmen of the sixteenth century when they found it in a writer of such literary prestige and philosophic renown as Seneca.

A careful reader of Seneca will recognize the borrowings of English dramatists the more readily as such borrowings follow closely not only the thought but the language of the original.

Mr. John W. Cunliffe, in his monograph on "The Influence of Seneca on English Tragedy," has given a careful and detailed comparison with their originals of Senecan passages in "The Misfortunes of Arthur." In a less detailed way he indicates the borrowings of other English authors; on pages 25, 26 of his book we find:--

"Seneca had written in the 'Agamemnon,'

'Per scelera semper sceleribus tutum est iter.'

This is translated by Studley:--

'The safest path to mischiefe is by mischiefe open still.'

'The safest passage is from bad to worse.'

'Black deed only through black deed safely flies.'

'Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.'

'The ills that I have done cannot be safe But by attempting greater.'

'Small mischiefs are by greater made secure.'

'All my plots Turn back upon myself, but I am in, And must go on; and since I have put off From the shore of innocence, guilt be now my pilot! Revenge first wrought me; murder's his twin brother: One deadly sin then help me cure another.'"

"Uncertain way of gain! But I am in So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin."

The student will surmise that phrases of Seneca can be traced through much of English tragedy, and that a careful reader is likely to have little difficulty in bringing together passages inspired by the Roman tragedies.

A full comparative study of the structural form of the Senecan and of the early English regular drama will be found in Rudolf Fischer's "Kunstentwicklung der Englische Trag?die." Symonds in his "Shakespeare's Predecessors," and Klein in his "Geschichte des Dramas," also touch on the debt of the modern drama to the Roman tragedies.

In the translations that follow, I have endeavored without doing violence to English idioms to give a strictly literal translation of the Latin originals, using as my text the edition of F. Leo. I wish to express my indebtedness to Prof. Albert S. Cook, and to Drs. Elisabeth Woodbridge and M. Anstice Harris, for criticism of the translation, not only with reference to its fidelity to the original, but also with regard to its English dress.

MEDEA

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