The Senecan Model of Tragedy By Jacob Spencer Senecan tragedy is the body of nine closet dramas(i.e.

, plays intended to be read rather than performed) in blank verse by the Roman philosopher Seneca in the 1st century ad. Rediscovered by Italian humanists in the mid-16th century, they became the models for the revival of tragedy on the Renaissance stage. The two great, but very different, dramatic traditions of the ageFrench Neoclassical tragedy and Elizabethan tragedyboth drew inspiration from Seneca. Senecas plays were reworkings chiefly of Euripides dramas and also of works of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Probably meant to be recited at elite gatherings, they differ from their originals in their long declamatory, narrative accounts of action, their obtrusive moralizing, and their bombastic rhetoric. They dwell on detailed accounts of horrible deeds and contain long reflective soliloquies. Though the gods rarely appear in these plays, ghosts and witches abound. In an age when the Greek originals were scarcely known, Senecas plays were mistaken for high Classical drama. The Renaissance scholar J.C. Scaliger (14841558), who knew both Latin and Greek, preferred Seneca to Euripides. French Neoclassical dramatic tradition, which reached its highest expression in the 17th-century tragedies of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine,, drew on Seneca for form and grandeur of style. These Neoclassicists adopted Senecas innovation of the confidant (usually a servant), his substitution of speech for action, and his moral hairsplitting. In closing, the importance of the influence exercised by Senecan tragedy upon the development of the Elizabethan drama is now generally admitted. The extent of this influence has been demonstrated by J. W. Cunliffe in his Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy, and by R. Fischer in Kunstentwicklung der englischen Tragodie. It affected both the substance and the form of the drama. The division into five acts, and the introduction of the Chorus, as inGorboduc, The Misfortunes of Arthur, and Catiline, may be taken as examples of the influence of Seneca on the form of the Elizabethan drama, whilst in regard to matter and treatment Senecan influence was yet more important.