#108 Sat (10/8/22) - The plays of Seneca

No author exercised a wider or deeper influence upon the Elizabethan mind or upon the Elizabethan form of tragedy than did Seneca. – T. S. Eliot.

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Seneca's plays were widely read in medieval and Renaissance European universities and strongly influenced tragic drama in that time, such as Elizabethan England (William Shakespeare and other playwrights), France (Corneille and Racine), and the Netherlands (Joost van den Vondel).[65] English translations of Seneca's tragedies appeared in print in the mid-16th century, with all ten published collectively in 1581.[66] 

He is regarded as the source and inspiration for what is known as "Revenge Tragedy", starting with Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and continuing well into the Jacobean era.[67] Thyestes is considered Seneca's masterpiece,[68] and has been described by scholar Dana Gioia as "one of the most influential plays ever written".[69] Medea is also highly regarded,[70][71] and was praised along with Phaedra by T. S. Eliot.[69]

 In Robert Graves's 1934 book Claudius the God, the sequel novel to I, Claudius, Seneca is portrayed as an unbearable sycophant.[106] He is shown as a flatterer who converts to Stoicism solely to appease Claudius's own ideology. The "Pumpkinification" (Apocolocyntosis) to Graves thus becomes an unbearable work of flattery to the loathsome Nero, mocking a man that Seneca groveled to for years.

 The play MEDEA by Seneca contains lines which were seen during the European Age of Discovery as foretelling the discovery of the New World, and which were included in Christopher Columbus' Book of Prophecies:

venient annis saecula seris,
quibus Oceanus vincula rerum
laxet et ingens pateat tellus
Tethysque novos detegat orbes
nec sit terris ultima Thule.[12][13]
 
 years and centuries will come
     to whom the ocean binds things
     let it relax and open up a vast earth
     Tethys discovers new worlds
     and let not Thule be the last of the earth.

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