Four Tragedies and Octavia

by Seneca

  One might have expected that the form and style adopted by the first translator, and almost unanimously followed by his successors,1 would have set a pattern for the revival of classical tragedy in English dress on the English stage. But, in fact, the fourteen-syllable rhymed couplet of these translations, though it survived in such plays as Preston’s historical thriller Cambyses (1570), did not, in general, set an example for the theatre – fortunately. The form was more suitable for ballad and narrative verse (and so has some success in the narrative speeches of the plays). The length of line is the outcome of the difficulty of translating Latin sentences into as few English words, but its use, together with the rhyme and the preference for a monosyllabic Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, tended towards expansion of the already verbose original – verbose, that is, in content, though structurally concise.

  The translators were: Jasper Heywood (Troas, Thyestes, Hercules Furens), Alexander Neville (Oedipus), John Studley (Agamemnon, Medea, Hercules Oetaeus, Hippolytus), Thomas Nuce (Octavia – in ten-syllable rhymed couplets). Their versions appeared between 1559 and 1567, and in 1581 they were published (with some revisions) in a collected edition by Thomas Newton, who added his version of Thebais.1 None of these translators was a professional dramatist; they were scholars, college fellows, divines. It would probably not occur to them to study the theatrical technique of their originals or of their translations – although they would have been familiar with scholastic performances of classical plays. Carried away by the exuberance of their own ‘fourteener’ verses, they were tempted to enlarge and embroider descriptive passages, to introduce additional speeches or omit what seemed superfluous. Here is Heywood’s apology:

  Now as concerninge sondrye places augmented and some altered in this my translation. First forasmuch as this worke seemed unto mee in some places unperfite, whether left so of the Author, or parte of it loste, as tyme devoureth all thinges, I wot not, I have (where I thought good) with addition of myne owne penne supplied the wante of some thynges, as the firste Chorus, after the first acte begynninge thus, O ye to whom etc. Also in the seconde Arte I have added the speache of Achilles Spright, rysing from Hell to require the Sacrifice of Polyxena, begynning in this wyse, Forsaking now etc. Agayne the three laste staves of the Chorus after the same Acte: and as for the thyrde Chorus which in Seneca beginneth thus, Quae vocat sedes? for as much as nothing is herein but a heaped number of farre and straunge Countries, considerynge with my selfe, that the names of so manye unknowen Countreyes, Mountaynes, Desertes, and Woodes, shoulde have no grace in the Englishe tounge, but bee a straunge and unpleasant thinge to the Readers (except I should expound the Historyes of each one, which would be farre to tedious), I have in the place thereof made another, beginninge in this manner, O Jove that leadst etc. Which alteration may be borne withall, seynge that Chorus is not part of the substance of the matter.

  Heywood may easily be forgiven for boggling at the geographical chorus of Troades 814, but he omits to mention that his substitute is partly a translation of a chorus in Phaedra.1 His introduction of the ghost of Achilles is typical of a tendency which was to persist in the professional theatre; Seneca, it is sometimes said, was responsible for the Elizabethan dramatists’ addiction to ghosts; in fact, there are only two ghosts in his dramatis personae – Tantalus in Thyestes, and Thyestes in Agamemnon; or three, if we count Agrippina in Octavia. Other apparitions, as those of Achilles and Hector in Troades, and Laius in Oedipus, play an important part in the story, but remain off-stage. The Elizabethans used their ghosts more freely, but often more subtly, as (apart from the obvious examples in Shakespeare) in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. This begins with the arrival of a ghost from Hades, but his role is not merely to create an atmosphere of awe and menace; he is on the contrary an amiable and rather puzzled ghost, brought by Revenge to witness the punishment of his murderers, having as yet no clear idea of the depth of the conspiracy against him, which is to be revealed in the action of the play, as much to his enlightenment (as he sits watching) as to that of the audience.

  To return to our Elizabethan translations, there is no certainty that any of them were acted, though it is likely that some of them were, in view of the translators’ connexion with the universities and, in the case of Neville and Studley, with the Inns of Court. That the professional dramatists (and their audiences too) were as well acquainted with Seneca in Latin as in translation is shown by their fondness for quotation from the original.1 At any rate, the ‘fourteener’ made little impression on the stage; it appears on occasions, as in the masque in Cymbeline, V. 4:

  No more, thou thunder-master, show thy spite on mortal flies…

  But Shakespeare also found it fair game for parody in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

  But stay, O spite! But mark, poor knight, what dreadful dole is here!

  Eyes, do you see? How can it be? O dainty duck, O dear!

  Thy mantle good, what, stained with blood! Approach, ye Furies fell!

  O Fates, come, come, cut thread and thrum; quail, crush, conclude, and quell!

  It may be conceded, however, that some measure of variety and individual voice was achieved by the translators. There is vigour in Heywood’s version of the Agamemnon-Pyrrhus dialogue (Appendix I. 1, 2, 3), and descriptive power in Neville’s Oedipus (8, 9) – the more remarkable when it is known that it was written in the translator’s sixteenth year, he being then already a B.A. of Cambridge. Studley revels in the Stygian invocations of Medea (11), but he can vary his line from the monosyllabic

  If ghost may here be given for ghost, and breath may serve for breath (14)

  to the surprisingly concise

  Lo, I enjoy my father’s gift; O solitariness! (16)

  From their own knowledge of Seneca, and by imitation of one another, the dramatists filled their plays with a Senecan flavouring. An example of the perpetuation of a ‘tag’ may be seen in the following sequence of variations on a theme. Seneca wrote (Agamemnon, 116): per scelera semper sceleribus tutum est iter (‘the safe way through crime is by [further] crimes’ – a somewhat woolly epigram in the first place, meaning ‘the safe way to get away with, or cover up, crime…’). Studley’s translation:

  The safest path to mischiefe is by mischiefe open still.

  T. Hughes, The Misfortunes of Arthur1 (1587):

  The safest passage is from bad to worse.

  Marston, The Malcontent (1604):

  Black deed only through black deed safely flies.

  (to which the next speaker replies: ‘Pooh! per scelera semper sceleribus tutum est iter!’)

  Shakespeare, Macbeth (1605):

  Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.

  B. Jonson, Catiline (1611):

  The ills that I have done cannot be safe

  But by attempting greater.

  Webster, The White Devil (1612):

  Small mischiefs are by greater made secure.

  Massinger, The Duke of Milan (1620):

  One deadly sin, then, help to cure another!

  And beside the picking of Seneca’s brains1 by quotation and imitation, the general tone of Senecan rhetoric was infused into English drama, even in contexts where it was least appropriate. Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603) is an example of a ‘thriller’ of bourgeois life, with the least possible resemblance in form or setting to classical tragedy. Servants indulge in such homely talk as:

  Fie, we have such a household of serving creatures! Unless it be Nick and I, there’s not one amongst them all can say boo to a goose –

  and the gentlemen’s blank verse can be relaxed and naturalistic:

  Choose of my men which shall attend on you,

  And he is yours. I will allow you, sir,

  Your man, your gelding, and your table, all

  At mine own charge; be my companion.

  Yet the injured Master Frankford, being told of his wife’s infidelity, has classical rhetoric at his command:

  Thou hast kill’d me with a weapo
n whose sharpen’d point

  Hath prick’d quite through and through my shiv’ring heart:

  Drops of cold sweat sit dangling on my hairs,

  Like morning’s dew upon the golden flowers,

  And I am plung’d into a strange agony…

  and, discovering the culprits in flagrante delicto:

  O God! O God! that it were possible

  To undo things done; to call back yesterday!

  That Time could turn up his swift sandy glass,

  To untell the days, and to redeem these hours!

  Or that the sun

  Could, rising from the west, draw his coach backward,

  Take from the account of time so many minutes,

  Till he had all these seasons call’d again,

  Those minutes, and those actions done in them,

  Even from her first offence; that I might take her

  As spotless as an angel in my arms!

  It was all to the good; the language of Elizabethan drama would not have reached its height of poetic eloquence without the infusion of the classical voice–the Ovidian mythology and the Senecan rhetoric. It is not necessary to see direct borrowing from the Latin in every reminiscent line or phrase; the voice and the manner became naturalized in the English theatre; the invocations, hyperboles, geographical similes and mythological parallels, proliferated out of the compost-heap. When Shakespeare wrote

  Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood

  Clean from my hand?…

  he may not have known that he was producing another version, perhaps the best yet, of a figure employed twice by Seneca and before him by Sophocles.1 A passage in Thyestes (267 ff.) may have run through many variations before it became Lear’s

  I will do such things–

  What they are yet I know not – but they shall be

  The terrors of the earth.

  The parallels are so frequent that the translator of Seneca must have the, curious feeling that he is trying out English constructions which Shakespeare and Marlowe will later improve upon.

  To turn from the language to the form and subject-matter of English tragedy is to find a different and more complex process at work. The campaign for the revival of classical form in drama brought the forces of academic classicism into conflict, and a losing battle, with the vigorous though formless and rudely equipped tradition of the popular theatre, with its rambling episodic histories, its serio-comic moralities, and later its Italianate romances and English domestic crime-plays. The scholar-playwrights, looking beyond the merely linguistic possibilities of the classical style, became fascinated with the formal conventions of the Senecan drama and (supported by the Aristotelian precepts) took its austere ‘unities’ of time and place to be the ideal conditions of tragedy. In which they misunderstood the nature of those conventions. Reduced to literal terms, the action of Thyestes, for example, would seem to take place on one spot and within a continuous space of time limited to a few hours. But, in fact, the action is placeless and timeless; it presents a series of pictures: the menace of an ancestral curse – the diabolical spite of Atreus – the stoical resignation of Thyestes in exile – the deceptive hospitality of Atreus – the horror-climax of the murders (described) and the banquet (enacted). It does not matter where, or at what intervals of time, these scenes are set – nor what happens between them to link one with another (and no one asks how Thyestes remained unaware of the atrocious rite performed with full ceremony at Atreus’s court). Nevertheless, the craze for ‘unity’ took hold of the academic mind, despite its impracticability when literally applied. When the classical manner was adopted for an English historical tragedy, in Gorboduc,1 the first notable attempt of the kind, the result was a drama recalling the Senecan features of static declamation, symmetrical conflict, choral commentary, and narrated action (but shirking the horrific climax), yet diffusely spread over a passage of years and diversified with dumb-shows to supplement the action and point the moral. For this reason it drew only qualified approval from Sir Philip Sidney,2 to whom the play seemed

  full of stately speeches and well-sounding Phrases, climbing to the height of Seneca his style, and as full of notable morality… yet very defectious in the circumstances: which grieveth me, because it might not remain an exact model of all Tragedies. For it is faulty both in Place and Time, the two necessary companions of all corporal actions…. But if it be so in Gorboduc, how much more in all the rest? where you shall have Asia of the one side, and Afric of the other, and so many other under-kingdoms, that the Player, when he cometh in, must ever begin with telling where he is.

  Experiments continued, the scholastic coteries producing their translations and imitations, and translations of imitations,1 and the dramatists drawing upon Seneca for the enrichment of their verse and elaboration of their incidents, but showing no inclination to confine their plot-structure within the classic frame or to re-tell the oft-told classical myths. The defence of the unities continued to be maintained in the studies of the academicians, and was upheld by some of the more classically erudite playwrights such as Ben Jonson. Echoes of the controversy were to be heard until the next century, when Pope, for the opposition, gave his opinion that ‘to judge of Shakespeare by Aristotle’s rules is like trying a man by the laws of one country, who acted under those of another’; and Samuel Johnson took the commonsense view that if you can imagine the stage to be ‘Rome’ for the duration of the play, you can just as easily imagine it to be ‘Rome’ at one time and ‘Egypt’ at another in the course of the same play.

  In the meantime the popular theatre, remaining on the whole faithful to its preference for straggling narrative plays, was learning to use what it could of the classical example: first, as we have seen, the flamboyance and rotundity of the classical language; next, the machinery of tragic spectacle, the ghosts and horrific incidents – with the difference that in Seneca the atrocity is the end and climax to which the whole play points, in the Elizabethan tragedy-chronicle it is an added relish, to be expected anywhere, at the beginning, middle, or end of the story. As for the view that Seneca’s ‘atrocities’ themselves prove the plays to be unactable and never intended for acting, it must surely be noticed that the Elizabethans were no less brutal and rather more resourceful in their exploitation of horror, and even in our own day the ‘unactable’ Titus Andronicus has been staged with artistic power and dignity. Would the spectacle of the dismembered corpse of Hippolytus have been too great a shock for Romans accustomed to the atrocities of the amphitheatre? The Elizabethans had equally strong stomachs; but only in the full flowering of the masterpieces of Marlowe, Jonson, and Shakespeare, does the infusion of Senecan blood into English drama mean not merely a new tone of voice and a new repertoire of bloodshed but a new life and soul. ‘Unity’, as a technique of play-construction, was Seneca’s gift to the classical French drama, but not to ours; yet the kind of unity, or concentration of theme, that turned the humdrum ‘tragicall histories’ into immortal tragedies, can be traced to the Roman discipline. Out of the welter of battle-scenes and cut-throat feuds emerged the introspective studies of Revenge, Jealousy, Ambition – the passions of Hamlet, Othello, or Macbeth, and the use of ‘histories’ to exhibit the problems of political power, the corruption or the loneliness of kingship. These are the kind of topics which lie at the centre of the austerely formal, and at first sight almost inhuman, tragedies of Seneca. Atreus is an autocrat maddened by lust for revenge, Thyestes a disillusioned king with a nostalgia for peace; Theseus a self-confident husband and father blundering into an awful outrage against his son; Agamemnon (in Troades) a conqueror chastened by his own success, vainly protesting against vindictive reprisals. Seneca decorates his plays with mythological garnishing, his characters apostrophize the Gods and his choruses muse upon Fate, but what really interests him, and what brings life to his otherwise frigid reproductions of Greek masterpieces, is the exploration of the human conscience, of man’s need to know and justify his own motives. This atti
tude of introspection was the link which Seneca provided between the fatalistic superhumanity of the ancient, and the humanism of the modern drama, and which made possible the fusion of classical uniformity with romantic multiformity in the Elizabethan theatre.

  It would not be difficult to trace the progress of these influences in the art of Shakespeare alone. In the early poems the profusion of rhetorical ornament outruns restraint;1 the first historical plays include experiments in Senecan declamatory or reflective monologue, and use violent action as a recurring and cumulative assault on the spectator’s sensibilities (not, as in Seneca, the culmination of the drama; Titus Andronicus is the classic example of the distortion of the classical tragedy of revenge, drawing heavily by quotation, imitation, and reproduction, on ancient precedents, but creating only an extravaganza of atrocious deeds with no unifying shape or theme; it would have horrified Seneca.) The early comedies brought refinement of the verbal instrument and a firmer control of dramatic form. With the ‘Roman’ plays came perhaps a deeper understanding of the stoic attitude of self-questioning and the search for a solution of the conflict between reason and passion. And in the greatest tragedies the form, the instrument, and the theme – each owing something, however unconsciously, to the example of Seneca – cohered at last into a perfect whole; but yet not so perfect as to tidy up all the loose ends or exclude the superfluities and irrelevances which make the Elizabethan drama of life a different thing from the Roman sculptured monument of death.