Tragedies of Seneca (1907) Miller/Essay
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
THE INFLUENCE OF THE TRAGEDIES OF SENECA UPON EARLY ENGLISH DRAMA
To appreciate fully the nature and the extent of the influence of Seneca upon English tragedy in the days of Shakespeare and his immediate predecessors, we must bear in mind that the public theaters were not the only places at which plays were then produced. At the universities, at the inns of court (which may be roughly described as combinations of a law school and a very exclusive social club), and at the Court itself plays were an important feature of almost every festival. Even those of us who know these facts are very likely to fail to realize the full meaning of them. 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. 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. 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. To the men of the Renaissance, scholarship and the scholar had a unique and inestimable value. Ordinary business, in their view, enabled man to provide a living; religion taught him how to save his soul; scholarship, the knowledge of the literature and life of the Greeks and the Romans, enabled him to distinguish his life as a man from that of a beast, to approach as nearly as possible to that ideal type toward which they strove, the uomo universale, the perfect gentleman, complete master of his body, of his mind, of his passions. To men of these views and this temper, literature—first, classical literature and then the vernacular literature produced under the stimulus of it—was of supreme importance, and the drama was perhaps the most important form of literature. The value of literature for those who were then trying to transform the world, to rebuild it and themselves nearer to the heart's desire, was of course best recognized by the finest spirits of the age, men like Erasmus, Thomas More, Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney. But it seems to have been felt, though in cruder ways, even by the vulgar. An amusing illustration of this is the little record kept by old Simon Forman, a noted mountebank and quack doctor, in 1610 and 1611. It has preserved for us our earliest notices of performances of Macbeth, Cymbeline, and A Winter's Tale; but this is accidental. The doctor's intention was merely to note for his own guidance such lessons as he learned from the plays presented on the stage. Such benefits were, according to the views of wiser men, to be gained chiefly from comedies; tragedy, and classical tragedy in particular, had a finer, a more permanent value. Tragedy was the voice of the wisest men of the world, the ancients, upon the most serious themes of human life; it not only, as Aristotle had said, purified the mind through pity and terror, it fortified the inner life, and both by example and by sententious maxim prepared man to meet the most subtle attacks of fate, the temptations of success, or the discouragements of failure. Tragedy therefore had a unique value for the Elizabethans, and the performances of classical plays, or those written in imitation of the classics, by the universities or the inns of court, did not fall into the abyss which now receives amateur theatricals.
Failure to take account of the value attached to the lessons and the examples of tragedy may perhaps account for the misunderstanding which exists so widely, even among scholars, in regard to the first tragedy in English, Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex. Everyone knows that this was written in direct imitation of Seneca, and everyone discusses glibly its Senecan features, the bloody theme, the division into five acts, the use of the chorus, the removal of the action from the view of the spectators, the long speeches; but critics are, without exception, offended to the heart by the fifth act, and especially by the two long disquisitions of Arostus and Eubulus. It is, however, no exaggeration to say that the play exists solely for the sake of these speeches. This was not a mere academic exercise. It was a serious attempt by some of the most thoughtful men of England to move the queen, Elizabeth, to a course of action which they regarded as absolutely essential to the welfare of the realm. Other attempts to secure the same end were made by her best statesmen throughout the reign. The failure of this effort was not due to the weakness of the tragedy, but, like the failure of all the rest, to some feature of Elizabeth's character or some circumstance in her life which has not yet been fully and convincingly explained. The purpose of the writers is clear. They wished to persuade Elizabeth to marry and settle once for all the succession to the throne of England. They, in common with all thoughtful and patriotic Englishmen, feared the horrors of an unsettled succession or a divided rule. These they tried to impress upon her mind and heart by examples drawn from the history of Gorboduc and his sons, and by maxims and exhortations presented in the most authoritative form known to them, the form of Senecan tragedy. The occasion chosen was a great festival given by the gentlemen of the Inner Temple, one of the most important and influential of the inns of court referred to above.
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. It is true that the English tragedies in classical or Senecan form were none of them written for the public stage. It is even probable that they would not have been successful upon it. It is a mistake to treat them historically and critically, as if they belonged to the direct line of development which resulted in Faustus and The Spanish Tragedy and Macbeth and Lear and Othello. But none the less the influence of these academic plays was very real and very important.
The ways in which this influence was exercised may be noted, as having some bearing upon the nature and extent of the influence. In the first place, there was in the early days no very rigid line between the academic and the popular performers. The Children of the Chapel Royal were at one time the leading theatrical company in London. When the queen visited Oxford in 1566, there were among the several plays presented by the university, not only the Latin tragedy, Progne, of Dr. James Calfhill, but also the English Palamon and Arcite of Richard Edwards, Master of Her Majesty's Children and the most popular dramatist of his day. Edwards himself trained the students who produced his play, and it was a great success; according to a contemporary report, "certain courtiers said that it far surpassed Damon and Pythias, than which they thought nothing could be better; likewise some said that if the author did any more before his death, he would run mad." Any impressions made upon Edwards by Dr. Calfhill's Progne were doubtless lost to art, as Edwards died before the end of the year; but this was probably not the first occasion on which the Master of the Chapel Children had visited the university in behalf of the drama, and Edwards himself had been both a scholar and a probationary fellow there. Certainly his famous Damon and Pythias shows some evidences of the influence of Seneca.
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. Such were Greene and Peele and Marlowe; and Thomas Kyd, author of that most popular of plays, The Spanish Tragedy, and probable author of the version of Hamlet which held the stage for fourteen years before Shakespeare revised it and gave it a new and a different life, though not bred in either university, was more zealous about his Latin and apparently more influenced by Seneca than the university men themselves.
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? The men of the Renaissance would have had a ready answer. In the first place, they knew very little about the Greek tragedians, or, for that matter, about Greek literature in general; for although the rediscovery of Greek literature was undoubtedly one of the events of that remarkable spurt of the human intellect and spirit which we call the Renaissance, Greek literature and life were, after all, in every country of Europe, far less important than Latin, as models for imitation, as sources of inspiration, as objects which engaged the attention of the moderns and set the pace which they tried to follow. As for tragedy, a few scholars in Italy and France and Germany and England knew Sophocles and Euripides—Aeschylus was almost unknown—but the theory and the practice of tragedy among the classicists were based almost exclusively upon the example of Seneca and the precepts of Horace. 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. That Seneca's majesty seems to critics of today bombast, that his triumph in tragic quality consists in an accumulation of horrors and a consistently unfortunate ending, that his perfection of form is no more than a formal schematism, clear because it is simple and lifeless—all this may be true but is beside the mark. To the best spirits of the Renaissance, whether critical or creative, the ten tragedies which bore the name of Seneca presented the ideal of tragic art toward which modern writers should strive if they would be perfect.
What, then, was the influence of Seneca in England? Two excellent studies of different phases of it have been published, both, unfortunately, less known than they should be.
The purely formal influence, the influence upon dramatic technique and upon composition in the large sense of the term, is the subject of Rudolf Fischer's Die Kunslentwicklung der englischen Tragödie, perhaps the most ingenious and adequate scheme ever devised for the analysis of the technical and compositional features of any form of art. Fischer sees in the history of English tragedy before Shakespeare a steady approximation to the Senecan type. His argument is open to several objections. In the first place, he treats as if they belonged to the same simple line of development plays written for the public stage and the popular taste and those written for special audiences dominated by scholastic ideals. In the second place, as Professor Luick has pointed out, he has disregarded the influence exercised by the original form of the story dramatized upon the dramatic presentation of it. And, furthermore, he, in common with other students of the subject, has proceeded upon the assumption that only tragedy could have had any influence upon tragedy. He has neglected that remark of Ben Jonson's, which phrases the view not of his own time only but of all ages, "The parts of a comedy are the same with a tragedy," and has failed to see that for the structure of English tragedy, Roman comedy and the serious imitations of it by the men of the Renaissance—such as Gnapheus' Acolastus, Macropedius' Asotus and Rebelles, and their anonymous English offspring, The Nice Wanton—are no less important than the example of Seneca himself. But his book is interesting and enlightening as few books on any subject are.
Entirely different problems are dealt with in J. W. Cunliffe's little volume on The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy, a book which, to the regret of many scholars, has long been oul of print, and which the author ought to reprint with such additions as his continued study of the subject may suggest. Mr. Cunliffe is mainly concerned with showing why Seneca appealed to the Elizabethans and with pointing out certain details of theme, of situation, of theatrical effects, and of expression, which the popular playwrights owed to Seneca.
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. 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. The chorus also we have long since abandoned, but Greene and Peele and Kyd and Marlowe and Shakespeare and others of their time used it more than once and with good effect. They even, in some instances, combined with it the ghosts and infernal spirits, which beyond a doubt they owed to Seneca, and made this unearthly chorus, not only the commentator, but in some sense the subtle director of the action. Perhaps the most refined form of this is to be seen in the Ghost in Hamlet, who, though he does not appear technically as Chorus, yet recalls by his original incitement of the action and his later intervention to renew and direct it, as well as by his language and his attitude, the ghosts of Tantalus, Thyestes, Laius, and Agrippina in Seneca, and the spirits of Andrea and Revenge in The Spanish Tragedy. It is perhaps not going too far to find in the dream-setting of Hauptmann's Elga some reminiscence of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew and Greene's James IV, and consequently, in a remote sense, of Seneca's introductory figures, Tantalus, Thyestes, and the rest.
But these matters and the striking resemblances in situation and in utterance cited so abundantly by Cunliffe and by Munroe (Journal of Philology, Vol. VI, pp. 70–79), though they could be increased by many passages in Macbeth and King Lear as well as in the plays of other dramatists than Shakespeare, are after all not fundamental. Some other features that seem fundamental may be noted.
In the first place, although it is doubtless true that the scanty scenery of the Elizabethan stage is largely the excuse and the reason for the long descriptive passages with which the dramatists of that time delighted themselves and delight us, their modern readers, this is perhaps not the whole of the story. There are passages of exposition, of reflection, of pure declamation, equally long as well as equally beautiful. The Renaissance love of talk, of fine language, of eloquentia, may explain this in part; but it is doubtless due in part also to the example of Seneca, who never loses an opportunity for a long passage of description or introspection or reflection or mere declamation—making them indeed for the Chorus when the situation does not allow them to the ordinary dramatis personae.
Then we may note that the thoroughly melodramatic character of Elizabethan tragedy is a natural inheritance from Seneca. Greek tragedy had, to be sure, many melodramatic situations, along with others of a milder type. 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. A few of the French tragedians have had recourse to the method of the Greeks either by reviving the Greek mythology and theocracy or by resorting to Hebrew history for characters whose deeds, however criminal, were necessary parts of a divine plan. 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.
Speculation as to what the English drama might have been if Sophocles instead of Seneca had been its inspiration and its model is idle. The men of the Renaissance did not understand Sophocles; his stage, the mode of production of his plays, his aim, the whole nature of his art, were beyond the scholarship of their day. And it is doubtful whether they could in any event have made so successful a combination of the Greek and the national or mediaeval drama as they made of Senecan tragedy and the dramatic forms they already possessed.
In one thing, at any rate, the English drama was especially fortunate, that is, in the fact that its form and its content were so largely determined by two such remarkable men as Marlowe and Shakespeare. The conditions in France in the sixteenth century were strikingly similar to those in England, except for the number of public theaters. M. Petit de Julleville points out that France as well as England possessed every item of the motley list of dramatic types enumerated by Polonius; and he continues: "Rien n'empêchait alors qu'un Shakespeare naquit en France; les circonstances n'étaient-elles pas merveilleusement favorables? Mais, en dépit de certaines théories, les grands hommes ne paraissent pas tout juste au moment où ils sont nécessaires. Il nous fallait un Shakespeare; il naquit un Alexandre Hardy!"