The Senecan Aesthetic

Alongside the works of the better-known classical Greek dramatists, the tragedies of Lucius Annaeus Seneca have exerted a profound influence over the dramaturgical development of European theatre. The Senecan Aesthetic surveys the multifarious ways in which Senecan tragedy has been staged, from the Renaissance up to the present day: plundered for neo-Latin declamation and seeping into the blood-soaked revenge tragedies of Shakespeare's contemporaries, seasoned with French neoclassical rigor, and inflated by Restoration flamboyance. In the mid-eighteenth century, the pincer movement of naturalism and philhellenism began to squeeze Seneca off the stage until August Wilhelm Schlegel's shrill denunciation silenced what he called its "frigid bombast." The Senecan aesthetic, repressed but still present, staged its return in the twentieth century in the work of Antonin Artaud, who regarded Seneca as "the greatest tragedian of history." This volume restores Seneca to a canonical position among the playwrights of antiquity, recognizing him as one of the most important, most revered, and most reviled, and in doing so reveals how theory, practice, and scholarship have always been interdependent and inseparable.

Thinking about sensory experiences and evaluating human artifacts is an important part of Western European cultural and intellectual history. This book investigates from different perspectives the origins of this practice and the rich discourse of aesthetic value in classical antiquity.

Pantomime was arguably the most popular dramatic genre during the Roman Empire, but has been relatively neglected by literary critics. Seneca's Tragedies and the Aesthetics of Pantomime adds to our understanding of Seneca's tragic art by demonstrating that elements which have long puzzled scholars can be attributed to the influence of pantomime. The work argues that certain formal features which depart from the conventions of fifth-century Attic drama can be explained by the influence of, and interaction with, this more popular genre. The work includes a detailed and systematic analysis of the specific pantomime-inspired features of Seneca's tragedies: the loose dramatic structure, the presence of “running commentaries” (minute descriptions of characters undergoing emotional strains or performing specific actions), of monologues of self-analysis, and of narrative set-pieces. Relevant to the culture of Roman imperial culture more generally, Seneca's Tragedies and the Aesthetics of Pantomime includes an outline of the general features of pantomime as a genre. The work shows that the influence of sub-literary-genres such as pantomime and mime, the sister art of pantomime, can be traced in several Roman writers whose literary production was antecedent or contemporary with Seneca's. Furthermore, the work sheds light on the interaction between sub-literary genres of a performative nature such as mime and pantomime and more literary ones, an aspect of Latin culture which previous scholarship has tended to overlook. Seneca's Tragedies and the Aesthetics of Pantomime provides an original contribution to the understanding of the impact of pantomime on Roman literary culture and of controversial and little-understood features of Senecan tragedies.

Composed in early imperial Rome by Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Stoic philosopher and tutor to the emperor Nero, the tragedy Medea is dominated by the superhuman energy of its protagonist: diva, killer, enchantress, force of nature. Seneca's treatment of the myth covers an episode identical to that of Euripides' Greek version, enabling instructive comparisons to be drawn. Seneca's Medea has challenged and fascinated theatre-makers across cultures and centuries and should be regarded as integral to the classical heritage of European theatre. This companion volume sketches the essentials of Seneca's play and at the same time situates it within an interpretive tradition. It also uses Medea to illustrate key features of Senecan dramaturgy, the way in which language functions as a mode of theatrical representation and the way in which individuals are embedded in their surrounding conditions, resonating dissonantly with the principles of Roman Stoicism. By interweaving some of the play's subsequent receptions, theatrical and textual, into critical analysis of Medea as dramatic poetry, this companion volume will encourage the student to come to grips immediately with the ancient text's inherent multiplicity. In this way, reception theory informs not only the content of the volume but also, fundamentally, the way in which it is presented.

Perry reveals Shakespeare derived modes of tragic characterization, previously seen as presciently modern, via engagement with Rome and Senecan tragedy.

Ancient tragedy has played a well-documented role in contemporary theatre since the mid-twentieth century. In addition to the often-commented-upon watershed productions, however, is a significant but overlooked history involving classical tragedy in experimental and avant-garde theatre. Postdramatic Tragedies focuses upon such experimental reinventions and analyses receptions of Greek and Roman tragedy that come under the banner of 'postdramatic theatre', a style of performance in which the traditional components of drama, such as character and narrative, are subordinate to the immediate, affective power of more abstract elements, such as image and sound. The chapters are arranged into three parts, each of which explores classical reception within a specific strand of postdramatic theatre: text-based theatre, devised theatre, and theatre that transcends the usual boundaries of time and space, such as durational and immersive theatre. Each offers a semiotic and phenomenological analysis of a particular case study, covering both widely known and less studied productions from 1995 to 2015. Together they reveal that postdramatic theatre is related to the classics at its conceptual core, and that the study of postdramatic tragedies reveals a great deal about both the evolution of theatre in recent decades, and the status of ancient drama in modernity.

Plays and translators: Octavia, Kelly Cherry * Hercules Oetaeus, Stephen Sandy * Oedipus, Rachel Hadas * The Phoenician Women, David Slavitt * Hercules Furens, Dana Gioia. Are there no limits to human cruelty? Is there any divine justice? Do the gods even matter if they do not occupy themselves with rewarding virtue and punishing wickedness? Seneca's plays might be dismissed as bombastic and extravagant answers to such questions—if so much of human history were not "Senecan" in its absurdity, melodrama, and terror. Here is an honest artist confronting the irrationality and cruelty of his world—the Rome of Caligula, Claudius, and Nero—and his art reflects the stress of the encounter. The surprise, perhaps, is that Seneca's world is so like our own.

Hercules is a tragedy of great theatrical, poetic, and cultural value. Written probably at the intersection of the principates of Claudius and Nero, it addresses central issues of early imperial Rome, even as it speaks profoundly to our times. Among its concerns are violence and madness; imperatives of family and self; Rome, identity and place; the nature of virtue; the longing for immortality; the theatre of rage; and the empire of death. The play is dramatically innovative, spectacular, and arresting: from its fiery, monumental god-prologue (the only one in Senecan tragedy), through meditative soliloquies, impassioned speeches, trenchant dialogue, a failed wooing scene with an impressive after-life in Tudor drama, a stunning entrance for Hercules and his captured hellhound, Theseus' ecphrastic narrative of the hero's infernal 'labour', to a familicidal madness scene and an emotionally turbulent, non-violent finale, in which the instinct for self-punitive suicide is thwarted by the claims of kinship and the acceptance of intolerable suffering. The whole is bound together by some of Seneca's most affective choral lyrics, as intellectually engaging as they are emotionally potent. Hercules is A. J. Boyle's sixth, full-scale edition for OUP of a play by or attributed to Seneca. It offers a comprehensive introduction, newly edited Latin text, English verse translation designed for both performance and academic study, and a detailed exegetic, analytic, and interpretative commentary. The aim has been to elucidate the text dramatically as well as philologically, and to locate the play firmly in its contemporary historical and theatrical context and the ensuing literary and dramatic tradition. As such, its substantial influence on European drama from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries is given emphasis throughout; this and the accessibility of the commentary to Latinless readers make the edition particularly useful to scholars and students not only of classics, but also of comparative literature and drama, and to anyone interested in the cultural dynamics of literary reception and the interplay between theatre and history.