Seneca, Lucius Annaeus

Senecae Tragoediae

      Florence: Philippi de Giunta, 1506. Octavo, 6.4 x 4 inches. a-z8, &8, A-D8. (Lacking the final blank, D8). This is a large, fresh copy, with some intermittent blotchiness here and there on some leaves. It is bound in full sixteenth century Italian parchment. The Prince of LichtensteinOs bookplate is pasted inside the front board and the bookplate of the Biblioteca Senequiana of Buenos Aires is facing it. . OSenecan tragedy is a body of ten first century dramas, of which eight were written by the Roman Stoic philosopher and politician Lucius Annaeus Seneca. 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: French Neoclassical tragedy and Elizabethan tragedy, both drew inspiration from Seneca.#11;OSenecaOs plays were reworkings chiefly of EuripidesOs 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, SenecaOs 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. The Elizabethan dramatists found SenecaOs 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. Senecan influence is also evident in Thomas KydOs OThe Spanish TragedyO and ShakespeareOs OHamlet.O Both share a revenge theme, a corpse-strewn climax and ghosts among the cast, all of which can be traced back to the Senecan model.O (EB) #11;