Two Tragedies of Seneca

Two Tragedies of Seneca

Medea and The Daughters of Troy

Rendered into English Verse, with an Introduction

By

Ella Isabel Harris

Boston and New York
Houghton, Mifflin and Company
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
M DCCC XCIX

COPYRIGHT, 1898, BY LAMSON, WOLFFE AND COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY ELLA ISABEL HARRIS
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

I
SOURCES OF SENECAN INFLUENCE ON 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.

Before the time of Marlowe and Shakespeare the forces that determined the development of the serious drama in England were practically twofold: one native, emanating from the moralities and miracle plays; the other classic, and found in the tragedies long ascribed to Seneca. These remnants of the Roman drama were known to the English at a very early date, were valued by the learned as the embodiment of what was best in ancient art and thought, and were studied in the Latin originals by pupils in the schools even while the schools were still wholly monastic. During the latter half of the sixteenth century, separate plays of Seneca were translated into English by various authors, and in 1581 Thomas Newton collected these translations into one volume, under the title of "Seneca his Ten Tragedies, Translated into English." After an examination of these translations one can readily understand why Elizabeth felt the need of an English translation of the Latin favorite, and herself essayed to turn them into English verse. In 1702 Sir Edward Sherburne published translations of three of the plays, but the edition of 1581 still remains the only complete English translation. From the edition of 1581 I quote a part of the translation of the beautiful lines on the future life, Troades, Act II., Scene iv.:—

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

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:—

As given by Sherburne these lines are:—

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.

II
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.

This influence exercised by the Senecan tragedies on the material of the English drama had its counterpart in an influence on the outward form,—an influence no less dominant and abiding. The tragedies of Seneca are divided, without regard to their true organic structure, into five acts; these acts are separated by choruses, that bear much the same relation to the acts they separate as does the orchestral interlude of to-day—that is, no real relation; such hard-and-fast division into five parts by choruses unconnected with the action is unknown to the Greek drama. The acts are again divided into scenes, this sub-division being dependent on the exits and entrances of the dramatis personæ, every exit and entrance necessitating a new scene.

The early imitators of Seneca copied their model closely in the arrangement of acts and scenes, and with them, as with Seneca, chorus and act division are wholly unconnected with the action of the drama; "Gorboduc," "Tancred and Gismunda," and "The Misfortunes of Arthur," are the earliest and most faithful English copies of the Latin model. In the Shakespearian drama the adherence to this classic form is less rigid, and the playwright adds or omits the choruses at will: in "Henry Fifth," the chorus not only separates the acts, as in Seneca, but also speaks the prologue; in "Pericles," where Gower speaks the prologue and act interludes, there is also added a lyrical monologue by the same speaker at the opening of the fourth scene of Act IV.; while in "The Winter's Tale" the use of a chorus has dwindled to a single monologue spoken by Time at the opening of Act IV.

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 Cæsar," 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.

III
DIRECT BORROWINGS FROM SENECAN TRAGEDIES

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 reënter 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.'

Thomas Hughes has it, in 'The Misfortunes of Arthur,' I. 4:—

'The safest passage is from bad to worse.'

Marston, in 'The Malcontent,' V. 2:—

'Black deed only through black deed safely flies.'

Shakespeare, in 'Macbeth,' III. 2:—

'Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.'

Jonson, in 'Catiline,' I. 2:—

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

Webster, in 'The White Devil,' II. 1:—

'Small mischiefs are by greater made secure.'

Lastly, in Massinger's 'Duke of Milan,' II. 1, Francisca says:—

'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.'"

On page 78 he quotes the following also from "Richard Third," IV. 2:—

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 Tragödie." 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

MEDEA

ACT I

Scene I

Scene II

Enter Chorus of Corinthian women, singing the marriage song of Jason and Creusa.

ACT II

Scene I

Medea, Nurse.

Scene II

Creon with Attendants, Medea.

Scene III