Seneca's Drama

Norman T. Pratt

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781469639574
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria antica e classica

With insight and clarity, Norman Pratt makes available to the general reader an understanding of the major elements that shaped Seneca's plays. These he defines as Neo-Stoicism, declamatory rhetoric, and the chaotic, violent conditions of Senecan society. Seneca's drama shows the nature of this society and uses freely the declamatory rhetorical techniques familiar to any well-educated Roman. But the most important element, Pratt argues, is Neo-Stoicism, including technical aspects of this philosophy that previously have escaped notice. With these ingredients Seneca transformed the themes and characters inherited from Greek drama, casting them in a form that so radically departs from the earlier drama that Seneca's plays require a different mode of criticism. "The greatest need in the criticism of this drama is to understand its legitimacy as drama of a new kind in the anicent tradition, " Pratt writes. "It cannot be explained as an inferior imitation of Greek tragedy because, though inferior, it is not imitative in the strict sense of the word and has its own nature and motivation." Pratt shows the functional interrelationship among philosophy, rhetoric, and "society" in Seneca's nine plays and assesses the plays' dramatic qualities. He finds that however melodramatic the plays may seem to the modern reader, Seneca's own career as Nero's mentor, statesman, and spokesman was scarcely less tumultuous than the lives of his characters. When the Neo-Stoicism and rhetoric of the plays are charged with Seneca's own tortured, passionate life, Pratt concludes, "The result is inevitably melodrama, melodrama of such energy and force that it changed the course of Western drama." Originally published in 1983. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

1. ORIENTATION

Criticism still has some distance to go in understanding the nature of Senecan drama and consequently the nature of its impact upon later drama. A very profitable approach to these matters can be shown by differentiating the basic themes in a Greek tragedy and a Shakespearean play. So we can get our bearings by seeing what Seneca departed from and where he led.¹

Oedipus the King and King Lear are highly comparable. Both are filled with the theme of seeing and not-seeing expressed in language and action throughout. Beneath this parallelism, however, the vision resulting in each case is quite different in orientation and nature, and the differences are significant in relation to fundamental changes that took place in Seneca.

When Oedipus sees the truth, what does Sophocles lead us to see? In Knox's analysis, the final vision is of a paradox. “The Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles combines two apparently irreconcilable themes, the greatness of the gods and the greatness of man, and the combination of these themes is inevitably tragic, for the greatness of the gods is most clearly and powerfully demonstrated by man's defeat. . . . Sophocles’ tragedy presents us with a terrible affirmation of man's subordinate position in the universe, and at the same time with a heroic vision of man's victory in defeat.”² The two sides of the paradox are starkly laid against each other, incapable of any real resolution.

Such logical conflict is disturbing enough under any circumstances, but the paradox has unique force in this drama because the relationship between divine power and human power is shocking. In one terrible sense, this relationship is compatible, for it is finally revealed that the gods and Oedipus are not in conflict at all. Rather, they are working “together” for the revelation of the same truth. The superiority of the gods is demonstrated by having the hero's status crushed under the weight of pollution brought down upon himself by his own supreme effort.

In another way, the relationship between divine and human greatness is discordant and rasping. The sense of irrationality is greatly intensified by the very rationality of Oedipus’ search for the polluted one: investigating, remembering, tracking, cross-questioning, applying all his energetic intelligence.³ Sophocles’ art engrosses us in the unfolding of evidence and the exercise of logic. And what does this searching intelligence finally reveal? The ignorance of man and the unfathomable order of the gods.

The hostility of the world where Oedipus’ experience takes place may be accounted for partially in terms of ritual. Some years ago it was the fashion to emphasize the ritual origin of Greek tragedy and to analyze its form and meaning in ritualistic terms. To be sure, one of the few things that we can come close to knowing about the origin is that a major source was choral song performed in worship of Dionysus, a divinity of fertility or, more accurately, liquid nature: “not only the liquid fire in the grape, but the sap thrusting in a young tree, the blood pounding in the veins of a young animal, all the mysterious and un-controllable tides that ebb and flow in the life of nature.”⁴

It has been proposed that the origin of Greek tragedy had no connection with Dionysus but came about through the creative acts of Thespis and Aeschylus.⁵ However, as important as these creative acts were, there are too many bits and pieces of data associating tragedy and Dionysus⁶ to explain away, no matter how difficult it may be to put the evidence together intelligibly.⁷ For one thing right on the surface, Athens was a strongly traditional society, and the mere fact that drama was performed at Dionysiac festivals points to a more than artificial connection.

There is much that we do not know about this matter. The skein of available evidence is scanty and tangled. Yet it seems clear enough from data concerning such fertility rites and from the evidence of the plays themselves that Greek tragedy received from ritual—like Dionysiac ritual—a conception of nature: nature as a complex of forces bringing health or disease to plants and animals. The purpose of such ritual was to effect a harmony between the powers of nature and individual living things or social organisms: to avert destructive impurities, to achieve life-nourishing purity.

The view that these dramas are founded on and conditioned by ritual has contributed considerable illumination, as well as much distortion when carried to extremes. For example, Francis Fergusson's analysis of Oedipus is built on the following ideas:

The Cambridge School of Classical Anthropologists has shown in great detail that the form of Greek tragedy follows the form of a very ancient ritual, that of the Eniautos-Daimon, or seasonal god.

It is this tragic rhythm of action which is the substance or spiritual content of the play, and the clue to its extraordinarily comprehensive form.⁸

It is unjust to be captious about this approach, for it has succeeded in revealing fresh implications and in reminding us that we are dealing not merely with literary masterpieces but with dramas rooted in communal ritual. However, to use a well-worn example, serious distortion results from viewing Oedipus as a ritual scapegoat through whom the impurities of the city are exorcised. It is a major aspect of the drama that impurity and abnormality in the family of Laius have brought upon Thebes a taint that must be removed. This aspect must be recognized if we are to understand the role of Apollo the purifier. However, at the end of the tragedy we are left not with a purified Thebes but with a suffering tragic hero and the mystery of his experience. There is a great difference in level of maturity between the plays themselves and the ritualistic concepts by which these anthropologists and their followers analyze the texts. The fifth-century dramatist shows himself far more sophisticated than such analysis represents him to be. In the case of Oedipus, ritual archetype is transformed to tragic view.

Even so, the conditions ensuring health in nature and society, namely, the purity of the family and the sanctity of blood relationship, have been violated. Apollo by his nature must reveal the corruption, and in one dimension the self-blinding is a sacrifice performed by the king as both the source of the taint and the responsible agent of the community. These features carry the imprint of a ritual view of man's environment. That is, the world is potentially ever a hostile place where the uneasy relationship between man and nature may develop impurity, and the only recourse is some kind of sacrificial purification.

Such is the character of the unstable world revealed to us by Sophocles in the intensity of Oedipus’ suffering. It is a radically dualistic world. It contains the good king Oedipus seeking rational answers. But it is also a mad world of accident and coincidence: where a Corinthian shepherd takes an infant from a Theban shepherd; where Oedipus consults the oracle because of an insult by some drunken Corinthian; where the paths of father and son meet at a crossroad; where the lone survivor of Laius’ band is the same Theban shepherd; where the son arrives in Thebes at a time of great crisis; where the queen is the marriage-prize for the one who solves the crisis; where the same two old shepherds survive, the only two men who can connect the foundling with the house of Laius and with Corinth. These coincidences are the marks of an arbitrary world where crucial things just happen. Oedipus is trying to make sense in a world that does not make sense. He is in a divinely ordered system where his rational purpose is disastrously turned against him by the force of capricious circumstance. The divine order brings disorder to human experience.

If in this fashion we can say that Oedipus transmits the picture of disorder in nature, Shakespearean criticism is in substantial agreement that King Lear expresses the theme of nature in disorder. The terms “disorder in nature” for Sophocles and “nature in disorder” for Shakespeare are only superficial catch phrases, but they show a contrast between two types of tragedy, radically different in their conceptions of evil. In Oedipus nature itself wounds human life. Suffering is built constituently into the makeup of how things are, above and beyond man's influence upon what happens. The unique power of this Greek tragedy lies in its intense and bare concentration upon the imperfection of the world, or rather its imperfectibility. In Lear nature itself is not defective, but only part of it, the human dimension. Nature is flawed through man who has the “ability to achieve salvation” and the “liability to damnation,” in Heilman's language.⁹ Shakespeare's world is theoretically perfectible, and suffering is caused by a falling-off from what might have been. No such formulation of Oedipus’ case is possible.

Lear does not have the concentrated power achieved by Sophocles— this was gone forever with the end of Greek tragedy—but it is unmatched in poetic richness and range of insight. These qualities emerge from a mighty moral struggle between two sets of characters ranged about Lear and Gloucester, in fact, two groups of six each: the essentially evil Goneril, Regan, Burgundy, Cornwall, Oswald, and Edmund; and the essentially good Cordelia, France, Albany, Kent, the Fool, and Edgar.¹⁰ The two groups live by different sets of values belonging to two kinds of nature. It is a commonplace of Shakespearean interpretation to recognize that “nature” is the dominant idea and metaphor of the drama.¹¹

Critics analyze the moral struggle in various terms. One scholar finds the key in the interlocking of two doctrines current in Elizabethan times, those associated with Hooker and with Hobbes.¹² In the former, the traditional view of sixteenth-century Christianity, nature is benign, “an ordered and beautiful arrangement, to which we must adjust ourselves.” In Hobbes, man is bedeviled, torn in the conflict between the irreconcilable forces of reason and passion. Characteristically, the views of both Hooker and Hobbes can be squared with both Christianity and Stoicism, for these two traditions were strongly fused in Elizabethan religious and philosophical thought. This scholar goes on to show the dramatic consequences of these ideas; for example, “Cordelia embodies the [ordered and beautiful] Nature which Edmund denies to exist, and which Lear—although he believes in it—cannot recognize when it is before him.”¹³

Another critic, regarding Uar as a Stoic play, finds a similar opposition between the ordered harmony of Stoicism and Edmund's egocentric, Epicurean view of nature:

The divergent points of view toward nature and the gods are sharply drawn, with the proponents of “Nature” and of Stoicism radically differing. On the one hand, blind nature, controlled only by fortune and chance; on the other, a nature governed by gods who represent a law of retributive justice.

In the end, it is a true Stoic world, and justice has been dispensed.¹⁴

Other interpretations are less philosophical but show the dramatic and poetic workings of the same kind of conflict. Heilman's This Great Stage is a landmark in analyzing the terms and figurative patterns used to express both destructive force and spiritual illumination. In various forms, “nature” is a giant metaphor for both moral order and the falling-away from moral order. Others find that the drama is centered around the religious theme of the acquisition of spiritual vision: the storm buffeting Lear conveys at once the blackness of passion that has come upon the king and the flashes of the vision emerging in him.¹⁵ According to another interpretation, Shakespeare has used the setting of Lear's pre-Christian world to examine the moral and religious ideas under attack from the rationalism of his day and to show, without the authority of revealed religion, that the values of patience, fortitude, love, and charity can emerge from within man himself. The poet “shows us his pagan characters groping their way towards a recognition of the values traditional in his society.”¹⁶

Particularly impressive is the analysis by Campbell. Uar is a morality play taken outside the strictly Christian tradition and transformed into the magnificent tragedy of “a completely unstoical man” who finally achieves spiritual vision compounded of “Stoic insight and Christian humility.” What is more, Lear's illumination comes about through a sequence of experiences recognized as the path to wisdom in the Stoic thought of Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. This moral philosophy was a major influence upon thought in the England of Shakespeare's time. Therefore Stoic ideas loom large in what Lear comes to understand: the values of resignation to the will above man, humility in human relationships, and willing obedience to destiny. The thought of King Lear is thus a product of grafting Renaissanee Stoicism upon traditional Christian piety.

Such an interpretation works well in giving account of the play dramatically. As Campbell goes on to show, the king initially breaks the cardinal Stoic principles of right behavior. The kingship is important to him for its trappings. He must have his proper retinue. In rejecting Cordelia and banishing Kent, he violates all reason and is addicted to anger—temporary insanity in Stoic terms. Self-knowledge and self-control are quite beyond him.

The search for sanity and truth begins. Lear is helped along the way by his companions Kent and the Fool, both of whom Campbell connects with the Cynic-Stoic tradition brought to the Elizabethans by Roman satire. By their blunt and searching comments, the plain-speaking Kent and the wise Fool stimulate the king to strip off superficiality and to see more deeply into the fundamental human needs of protection and compassion.

However, Stoicism is not adequate to answer the questions raised by the dramatist. The tragedy does not end in a mere victory over passion nor, certainly, in conventional tranquillity and unperturbability. Perhaps Shakespeare instinctively saw the psychological naiveté of Stoicism. For him, passion is overcome not by reason but by the greater and purer passion of “utter devotion to the eternal blessings of the spirit,” as Campbell puts it.¹⁷ The suffering of Lear in the storm has Stoic meaning: after being subjected to the storm of unreason within himself and the storm of discord in the elements of nature, he is chastened and led to recognize the humanity shared with his fellows. But the experience is purgatorial also in a Christian sense and reaches the level of salvation: having passed through the storm, he is ready to receive Cordelia's love fully and to return it fully. The final result is not the negative indifference of Stoicism but the active healing force of unselfish love. In the final scene where Lear enters with Cordelia dead in his arms, the agony of loss yields to the ecstasy of redemption, and Lear's heart bursts in the joy of it.

For the contrast between Lear and Oedipus, we must note one common feature of all these Shakespearean interpretations: the keen sense of loss and waste left to us at the end is linked with the not...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Orientation
• 2. Introduction to the Drama
• 3. Philosophy
• 4. Philosophic Al Drama
• 5. Declamation
• 6. Rhetorical Drama
• 7. Reality and the Drama
• 8. Melodrama
• Short Titles
• Notes
• Index