Four Tragedies and Octavia (3 page)

Nor did Seneca, we may be quite sure, have anything like public performance in mind when he wrote his adaptations of Greek tragedies. To appreciate the purpose and achievement of this rather curious branch of Latin literature, so far as we can from the isolated group of specimens available to us, we must first remember that Roman drama, such as it was, grew up in social and artistic conditions far different from those which produced the drama of Athens. The practical, busy cosmopolitanism of the rising republic took kindly to the comic legacy of the declining Greek theatre, but, though tragedies were translated and imitated from the same period onwards, the diffuse Roman society and the increasingly sophisticated Roman mind could never recapture the singleness of spirit which in a Greek city-state found expression in the ritual of tragedy. In its comparatively short season of flowering, Greek tragedy itself had moved from the religious intensity of Aeschylus,
through the more humane art of Sophocles, to the sceptical rationalism of Euripides; and it was here that Roman tragedy began, where the Greek left off. In Euripides the Romans found their example of drama used as a medium for the exercise of the human voice and brain in debate, in the opposition of conflicting interpretations of the mysteries of life, and the art of picturesque and exciting narrative. They found also examples of the creation of types of character corresponding to human experience, the autocrat and his obedient or recalcitrant minister, the poor at the mercy of the rich, the woman rebellious against the mastery of man or pitifully bruised and bereaved by the cruelties of man's world; and they found those useful adjuncts to drama, the ghost arising to threaten or foretell calamity, and the confidant, usually known as ‘Nurse', to console or advise the distraught heroine. The Roman devotion to rhetoric found a stimulating example in Euripides; his lines were quotable, and his
sententiae
appealed to the Roman artist in verbal dexterity. Consequently, although Seneca, and presumably others unknown to us, took the subjects of their tragedies widely from the whole field of Greek drama, their adaptations reflect the manner of Euripides more nearly than that of Aeschylus or Sophocles. At the same time, the form of drama was changing; the synthesis of dramatic dialogue and choral song in a single poetic structure was falling apart, until the function of the chorus lingered on only as a conventional ornament contributing nothing to the theme of the play. This development was accompanied by a modification of the form of the theatre itself, when the reduction of the circular
orchestra
to a semicircle or less, together with the increasing elaboration of the architecture of the stage, transferred the emphasis from the poetic ritual of the chorus to the display of ‘acting' on the stage. Some doubt must remain as to what sort of
theatre would accommodate Cicero's ‘six hundred mules'; but probably the larger amphitheatres were used for a debased form of pageant-tragedy.

With these considerations in mind, by what criteria should we judge the value of the Senecan tragedies as drama? The historical question as to whether they were in fact ever ‘performed' is not of great importance and involves in any case only a hair's-breadth distinction of terms. If they were ever ‘recited', without the book, in dialogue form by two or more persons, to however private an audience, and on however simple a stage, then they were ‘performed' in all essential meanings of the term and in a sense which must be perfectly intelligible to a modern playgoer with experience of the infinitely wide range of technique, from the most realistic to the most imaginative or ‘abstract', that the theatre can accommodate. It was only the influence of the realistic theatre of the nineteenth century, and early twentieth, that drove critics to the conclusion that Senecan drama not only was never acted but never could be – and this, oddly enough, despite the example of the equally ‘unrealistic' Greek tragedies, not to mention the whole history of English poetic drama. Thus the stagecraft of Seneca has been dismissed as impracticable for no better reason than that he represents persons talking in a way in which no living person ordinarily talks, and suggests events which could not literally take place before the eyes of an audience (such as the sacrifice in
Oedipus
). On such grounds Professor Beare
¹
finds that ‘the internal evidence… shows that the author has not visualized the actions of his characters. The usual technique of bringing characters on or taking them off is ignored' – so it is by many modern dramatists, if by usual is meant the technique of Pinero or Shaw – ‘We often realize that a person is conceived as
present only by the fact that a speech is put into his mouth; we cannot tell when he leaves the stage except by the fact that no more words are attributed or addressed to him' – of course, there are no stage directions,
¹
but a stage-director could supply them; and this surely suggests that the author
did
visualize the presence or absence of his characters, though he may have sometimes omitted to supply clues for the reader.
²
‘A long speech,' Professor Beare continues, ‘is attributed to Clytaemnestra (
Agamemnon
, 108–24), yet it appears from the remarks of the other person present
³
that Clytaemnestra has been silent; the speech must therefore represent her thoughts' (why not? ‘Look how our partner's rapt!'
Macbeth
, 1. 3).

It is not by such an approach that we can appreciate what Seneca was trying to do. ‘Action' in the realistic sense is not the mainspring of his technique; it could be described as the illusion of action evoked by words – or, if that is no more than a definition applicable to all drama, let us call it the creation of dramatic tension by words with the
minimum of visual aid. As long ago as 1927, T. S. Eliot
¹
noticed that ‘Seneca's plays might be practical models for the modern “broadcasted” drama'. Where in other writers action, or activity in the prosecution of the plot, might be looked for, Seneca will cheerfully suspend the action for the recital of a monologue which may be quite inappropriate, on any realistic basis, to the time and situation, but entirely relevant to the character of the speaker or his mood at that moment in the drama. In the application of this technique, Seneca's choice of dramatic speech is confined to a very narrow range; almost the only alternative to monologue (in which the speaker delivers his thoughts with equal freedom either with or without regard to the presence of any other person on the stage) is the formal ‘stichomythia' – a line-for-line fencing match between two opponents. Not only do these styles of speech recur persistently but their subject-matter also tends to be repeated, so that certain speeches or dialogues might almost be transposable from one play to another. There is the ‘simple life' speech (
Phaedra
, 482 ff.,
Thyestes
, 446 ff.,
Octavia
, 377ff.); the ‘haunted grove' speech (
Thyestes
, 204 ff.,
Oedipus
, 530 ff.); the ‘king must be obeyed' dialogue (
Thyestes
, 204 ff.,
Oedipus
, 509 and 699 ff.,
Octavia
, 440 ff.).
²
The speeches of the messengers, usually to report the culminating atrocity or disaster, fall into a stereotyped pattern – the description of the place, the horror of the act, the stoical courage of the sufferer; and the isolation of the speech as a narrative almost detached from the action becomes the more conspicuous when the messenger, as in
Thyestes
, begins with a detailed description of the place, which must have been perfectly well known to those whom he is ostensibly addressing.

Seneca's use of the Chorus is for the most part flaccid and unconvincing. A traditional farrago of mythology – the labours of Hercules, the loves of Jupiter, escapades of Bacchus, and torments of the damned in Hades – is served up in slightly varied forms, at more or less appropriate occasions. Yet at its best the Senecan chorus supplies examples of his best writing, in the concise lapidary style for which the Latin language is so perfect an instrument – and translation so unsatisfactory a substitute. These peaks occur when the author, restraining his exuberant verbosity and the habit of using all the possible synonyms of one word (wrath, anger, rage, ire; fear, terror, dread – to do the best we can in English) in close proximity, or quoting a string of mythological examples for one idea, brings himself to say one thing only and say it simply – as in the ode on death in
Troades
, 371 ff., the reflections on fate in
Oedipus
, 980 ff., or the thirteen lines on humble life in
Thyestes
, 391 ff.
¹
It may be noticed, however, that such passages of philosophical reflection are often inconsistent with the attitudes adopted, even by the Chorus itself, in the main current of
the play. If death is the end of all, and the legends of Hades no more than idle fictions, to what purpose is all the harping on the tortures of Tantalus and Tityos, and whence come the ghosts to disturb the lives of men on earth? If fate is immutable and inevitable, why should the violence of tyrants and murderers be shown as the effective cause of tragic disasters?

If we look among the idiosyncrasies of Seneca's tragic style for ‘faults', we can find plenty: excess of rhetoric, irrelevance, iteration, banality, bathos (how could he have passed that line where Oedipus, blindly groping for his final exit, with Jocasta lying dead beside him, pauses to say ‘Mind you don't fall over your mother'!). Such lapses are the by-product of the labour of striving to extract the utmost effect from the spoken word; and in the effectiveness of the spoken word was all that mattered in Seneca's conception of drama. He was not a constructor of tragic plots; his plays are not concerned with the moral conflict between good and good which is the essence of ‘true' tragedy; he only recognizes the power of evil to destroy good. He does not delay or complicate the issue by any moral dilemma exhibiting the conflict of justifiable but mutually incompatible ambitions; his tragedy is simply a disastrous event foretold and anticipated from the start, and pursued ruthlessly to its end. But nothing can be more horrifyingly final than the Senecan tragic climax. The swift and merciless destruction of Hippolytus, as the result of his father's hasty verdict, with no word spoken between them, has a more awful grandeur than the same event in Euripides' play, where the father and son confront each other in a forensic wrangle over the issue.

With their strong individuality of style, but limited range of dramatic invention, the plays of Seneca, on their arrival in renaissance England, made a powerful but
superficial impression. As plays, and models for plays, on the boards of the theatre, they soon dropped dead; but their language, flamboyant with every rhetorical ornament, remained as a compost-heap to enrich the soil of English dramatic verse for a couple of generations.

*

The first printed edition of Seneca's tragedies came from the press of Andreas Gallicus at Ferrara in 1474. Others followed during the next hundred years from all the leading continental presses. Translation or imitation has been traced as far back as 1315, when a tragedy in the classical manner,
Eccerinis
, was produced by Albertino Mussato for the University of Padua. The introduction of the texts into English schools and universities must have been accompanied almost simultaneously by their appearance in acted form, but the earliest identifiable landmark is the performance of
Troades
at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1551, and of
Oedipus
and others in the next few years. For the decisive impact of Senecan tragedy on the vernacular theatre we must note two events in the years 1559–61: Jasper Heywood's translation of three plays, and the performance of
Gorboduc
, the first original blank-verse tragedy on an English theme; to which we may add, for its importance in the history of English blank verse, the Earl of Surrey's translation of the
Aeneid
.

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: