Seneca

“ Shakespeare, almost alone, has at his best succeeded in substituting for the gods and fate the inevitable results of human character and the moral law, in presenting the worst deeds of his leading figures as less the results of free intention than of futile efforts to deliver themselves from the web of circumstance which their first crimes or follies have woven about them—the whole career of Macbeth, for example, being the necessary outcome of his attempt to get free of the difficulties and dangers brought upon him by the murder of Duncan. ”

“ Classical tragedy had, then, as we can readily see, a prestige to which hardly anything in literature corresponds at the present day. The statesman who should today wish to influence his sovereign to an important course of action would doubtless be puzzled to find any form of literature—academic or unacademic—appropriate to the task in dignity and authority.
It is not strange, therefore, that classical tragedy, the tragedy of the schools and the learned societies, must be taken seriously into account in estimating the forces which shaped the drama of the popular stage. ”

“ In the second place, we ordinarily believe that a tragedy should have five acts, and many of us can draw a diagram to prove it. Shakespeare and his fellows seem to have been dominated by the same theory, difficult as they sometimes found it to observe. The sacred unities, dominant so long in Italian and French tragedy, though never observed in any English play more notable than Addison's Cato, we have learned to disregard and even to decry, though such an attitude in the Elizabethan age awakened the censure of Philip Sidney and doubtless required some hardihood or even recklessness. ”

“ To Seneca and the false Aristotle created by the humanists from the Poetics, the precepts of Horace, the definitions and maxims which sifted down through the encyclopaedists of the Middle Ages, and the example of Seneca, not only the men of the Renaissance but even we of today owe some of our most cherished ideas concerning tragedy. First of all, perhaps, is the belief that tragedy must end unhappily. The Greeks—whether creators or critics—had no such theory. It was enough for Sophocles and Aristotle that tragedy should be serious in theme and dignified in characters and in language. ”

“ Our generation, busied above all things with making a living or with accumulating wealth, regards the scholar as, with the poet and the artist, the most unpractical and useless of men at best, tolerated as an ornamental creature whom society can afford to keep if it does not have to pay him more than it pays a butler or a chauffeur. ”

“ We are apt to forget that, in the spacious days of great Elizabeth, learning, especially classical learning, had a value, an importance, a dignity, which not even the most academic of us now feels it to have. ”

“ But, says some modern classical scholar, granting that these early dramatists were university men or men, like Kyd and Shakespeare, not trained in the universities but all the more zealous to match their productions with those which bore the official mark of classical scholarship, why should Seneca, a second-rate Roman tragedian, be continually cited in connection with classical influence instead of Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides, the supreme masters of ancient tragedy, and Aristotle, the unique expositor of the theory of the drama? ”

“ Aristotle is, indeed, often cited as the ultimate authority, but, although the voice may be the voice of Aristotle, the opinions are usually those of Scaliger or Minturno or Robortelli or Castelvetro, opinions which reduced to inviolable laws what Aristotle had merely stated as observed practices, and which supplemented these rules by others drawn from the plays of Seneca, who was, according to these critics, the most majestic, the most tragic, the most perfect of the ancient tragedians. ”

“ But the religious element in the tragedy of Aeschylus and Sophocles radically modifies the character and tone of the most poignant, and repulsive themes and situations. When Seneca took the most difficult of Greek themes and, following the lead of Euripides, cast away the over-ruling, compulsive dominance of the Greek theocracy, he produced melodrama. Most moderns have been either content to follow him or compelled to do so for lack of the ability to create striking situations without the aid of villains of melodramatic criminality. ”

“ We are likely to regard the non-professional performances as having no more significance for the history of the drama than amateur performances at the present day by dramatic clubs and college societies. ”

“ It is well known also that the most successful writers for the public stage in the years just preceding Shakespeare's advent, the years that determined the forms and the methods of the popular drama, were educated at the universities, and, however clearly they may have recognized the necessity of supplying to the populace story, action, the raw material of life and philosophy, cherished as an ideal the Senecan interest in situation, the Senecan love for broad description, for introspection and reflection, for elaborate monologue, and catchy sententiousness. ”