Decoding Senecan Innovation to Tragic Genre Tropes through Anagrams, the Failure of Passion

76 Pages·2014·0.51 MB·English

Decoding Senecan Innovation to Tragic Genre Tropes through Anagrams, the Failure of Passion-
Restraint, and a Broken Play

by

Christian Brady

B.A., Middlebury College, 2012

Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

in

The Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies

(Classics)

The University of British Columbia
(Vancouver)

October 2014

© Christian Brady, 2014
ii
Abstract

In this thesis, I show how changes to conventional tragic structure and stories—like the number
of acts, the victor of the passion-restraint scene, or the characters’ foreknowledge about future
actions in the play—affects the play’s content, influence outcomes, and shape characters’
worldviews.
In Hercules Furens, I examined how the Caesars’ darling hero Hercules manages to upset
the tragic plot in two ways: by failing to properly express his motivations for falling into
madness (in other plays explained explicitly by god characters) and failing to die honorably in
just self-punishment. The play profiles a hero with divine lineage, whose power is suddenly
rendered questionable by a coup in Thebes, and a town full of people who are similarly skeptical
about the extent of their hero’s powers.
Phaedra, in contrast, turns the lens away from the deeds of the hero and to the collateral
damage wrought against the family in the process. The dissolution of the house of Theseus and
the transmogrification of Phaedra into an incestuous, adulterous mother, are prompted by the
Nurse’s hyperconscious remarks about the barriers to bad behavior. The Nurse ultimately
undermines her own advice and instructs Phaedra on how to get away with crimes without being
held morally accountable. In Phaedra, the failure of the passion-restraint scene rapidly catalyzes
action on the part of the play’s protagonist.
Phoenissae’s multiple stylistic idiosyncrasies signal a unified artistic vision that Tarrant
implies is diluted through the process of adaptation in the other Senecan tragedies. In this play,
characters’ heightened knowledge about their future allows them to formulate advice for their
children with a high degree of ironic self-referentiality.
What unites the three plays discussed throughout this thesis is the heightened level of
consciousness that characters have about their own stories and the dramatic tropes of telling their
story, and further, the ultimately skeptical conclusions that are implied by these unifying
principles: the failure of reason to contain passion, the impotence of the world-conqueror, the
tragic inevitability of fratricidal war.
iii
Preface

This thesis is original, unpublished, independent work by the author, Christian Brady.
iv

Table of Contents
Abstract.........................................................................................................................................ii
Preface ……………………………………………………………………….………………………………………………... iii
Table of Contents……………………………………………………………………….…………………………………. iv
List of Abbreviations……………………………………………………………………….…………………………….. V
Introduction...................................................................................................................................ii
Critical Reception of Seneca: Orienting Issues....................................................................................1
Seneca and Stoicism..............................................................................................................................2
Performing Seneca?..............................................................................................................................3
Innovating Tragic Genre Expectation...................................................................................................4
Chapter 1 - A Wrong in Whose World?: The Failure of Passion-Restraint in Phaedra and
Innovations on the Type Scene.....................................................................................................9
Defining the Passion-Restraint/Reason Scene Trope in Tragedy.....................................................13
Passion-Restraint Scenes in Senecan Drama and Phaedra................................................................17
Chapter 2 - The Curse of Consciousness: When Characters Know Their Own Legend in
Hercules Furens...........................................................................................................................27
Critical Reception to the Protagonist’s Ambiguous Characterization in Hercules Furens............31
Metathetic Formations and the Ambiguity of Hercules....................................................................40
Chapter 3 - Theban Poetics: Teaching the Lessons of Tragedy from Within One in
Phoenician Women.......................................................................................................................47
The Completeness Question.................................................................................................................52
Hyperconscious References to Tragic Tropes in the PW..................................................................56
Conclusion....................................................................................................................................61
Selected Bibliography..................................................................................................................63
Appendix.......................................................................................................................................65
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v
List of Abbreviations

Abbreviations for the plays are as follows:

Ag = Agamemnon
HF = Hercules Furens
Med = Medea
Oed = Oedipus
Pha = Phaedra
PW = Phoenician Women
Thy = Thyestes
TW = Trojan Women
1
Introduction

The introduction will cover the broad outlines of the thesis, that Senecan drama in small ways
and large subverts audience expectations about tragic conventions. These conventions include
expectations about the protagonist’s clear broadcasting of his intentions to the audience, the
hero’s symbolic or actual death at the end of the play, the outcome of the passion-restraint scene,
and the use of metatheatrical references to the tragic genre itself. I will begin by discussing
generally the state of our knowledge about Roman tragedy and Seneca’s central place in it,
Seneca’s relationship with Stoic philosophy and the critical perspectives on performance of his
plays. The thesis will focus on three plays, Hercules Furens, Phaedra, and the Phoenissae, and
includes in the appendix a list of word counts for relevant words in Senecan drama.

Critical Reception of Seneca: Orienting Issues

Roman Drama: What We Know
What we don’t know about tragedy is just as important as what we do know: for instance, every
example of tragedy is lost during the period of about five hundred years between the Attic
tragedies of the 5th century and Seneca. What is known is that tragedy persisted in Athens in the
4th c. and then migrated to Alexandria in the 3rd c. At the same time in early republican Rome,
Roman dramatists were at work creating Latin adaptations of Greek originals, much in the same
way that Roman comedy developed. By the Augustan age, however, the goal of Roman
tragedians was to create original content rather than adaptations though they followed 5th c.
conventions such as the use of iambic trimeter and the structural framework of the five-act play.
Imperial writers like Seneca followed in this manner as well. Accius (170-86 BCE) was the last
professional tragedian, at which point the writing of tragedies was so widespread among upper
class gentlemen, even Julius Caesar and Augustus are said to have written plays. Writers of other
genres dabbled in tragedy, including Varius Rufus and Ovid.1
Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4-65 CE) seems to have fallen into the category of upper class
gentlemen playwrights. Born in Spain and brought up in the Roman elite, Seneca served as the
personal tutor to the young prince Nero, and then as his advisor and speechwriter from 54-62

1
Fitch 2002, 14-15.
2
when Nero rose to power. An adept politician and talented playwright, Seneca was also a leading
philosophical thinker in Rome (more on this below in “Stoicism and Seneca” below).

Seneca and Stoicism
Seneca himself was a—self proclaimed—eclectic thinker and artist.2 Yet, up until the
second half of the 20th century, various scholars had written off Senecan drama as either a mere
distillation of Stoic orthodoxy or an unimaginative, inept translation of Greek originals.3 William
H. Owen described the situation well, characterizing Senecan criticism as being preoccupied
with “rhetoric and the influence of Stoicism,” saying,

Yet caught between these two forces, both looking toward a strong tradition outside the poet,
Seneca himself as a creative writer seems often to vanish among his influences. The surface of
verbal style has so bemused many critics that they assume a fundamental emptiness in content,
while for others these curious plays have seemed merely a pseudo-dramatic camouflage disguising
unashamedly prosaic, philosophic, pedagogic, or historical impulses. These approaches, therefore,
in attempting to relate Seneca to his tradition, may easily lose sight of the remarkable individuality
with which he approached conventional diction and Stoicism (292).

Since the resurgence in his reputation in the 1980s scholars have argued that Seneca was
artistically competent and have evaluated his art on its own merits rather than as a fungal growth
of some (more dominant) philosophical agenda on Seneca’s part. Thus I will try to do the same,
by explaining the motivations for characters’ actions and decisions without making explicit
reference to Stoic philosophy, except where it is entirely necessary in order to explain a possible
solution to a problem in the text that cannot be easily explained otherwise.

2
In the introduction to her expansive concordance of Senecan prose, A.L. Motto describes Seneca as an intellectual
pragmatist, cf. Ep. 12.2, Epicurus’s words as “common property” (Ep. 8.8), “‘Ede,’ inquis, ‘auctorem.’ Ut scias
quam benigni simus, propositum est aliena laudare; Epicuri est aut Merodori aut alicuius ex illa officina. Et quid
interest quis dixerit? Omnibus dixit” (he says it for all of us) Ep. 14. 17-18. For just a small sampling of the
academic literature that treats Seneca as a literary rather than philosophical artist: CJ Herington (1966) is chiefly
responsible for recovering Seneca’s reputation as a dramatist; W.H. Owen "Commonplace and Dramatic Symbol in
Seneca's Tragedies" (1968); Anna Lydia Motto, Seneca, TWAS 268. (1973), xix–xx; R.J. Tarrant, "Senecan Drama
and Its Antecedents" (1979); Fitch, "Pectus O Nimium Ferum: Act V of Seneca's Hercules Furens" (1979) and
Seneca’s Hercules Furens (1987); Shelton, Seneca’s Hercules Furens (1978); Anna Lydia Motto and John R. Clark,
“Maxima Virtus in Seneca’s Hercules Furens,” Classical Philology 76, no. 2 (1981): 101–17; Thalia Papadopoulou,
“Herakles and Hercules: The Hero’s Ambivalence in Euripides and Seneca,” Mnemosyne 57, no. 3 (2004): 257–83.
In “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca,” Eliot cheerily describes Seneca as the artistic equivalent of the
magpie, gathering up shiny material from any and everywhere to make his tragic nest. Eliot’s interest is in Seneca as
“the literary representative of Roman stoicism” (131). Eliot, Selected Essays.
3
N.T. Pratt TAPA 79 (1948) and B. Marti, TAPA 76 (1945) 216-45. Beare, The Roman Stage (1955); Ogilvie,
Roman Literature and Society (1980); see Owen for a full bibliography of Seneca's 20th century detractors,
“Commonplace and Dramatic Symbol in Seneca’s Tragedies,” 291.
3
Performing Seneca?
In M.D. Grant’s 1999 article “Plautus and Seneca: Acting in Nero’s Rome,” Grant nicely
summarizes a wide swath of the scholarship over the last six decades on the controversial issue
of how or if Senecan drama was performed:

Anyone who has ever read the tragedies of Seneca must have wondered at the intention of the
author. In the absence of any external evidence for their staging this is not surprising. W. Beare
argues for declamation before a select audience who would have appreciated the sparkle of the
rhetoric. G. E. Duckworth, whilst stressing that presentation on stage cannot be proved, suggests
tentatively that they were at least written with an eye to performance. C. D. N. Costa holds out for
solo virtuoso recitals, with perhaps extracts or a few scenes being performed. F. Ahl recalls the
emperor Domitian's enactment forbidding plays to be presented anywhere except indoors, and thus
the large houses of the aristocracy may have been home to tragic theatre. V. Sorensen feels that a
public performance of Seneca's tragedies would have been a notable public occasion, and with his
ample means to fund such events, Seneca may have been trying to entice a large audience towards
4
the benefits of Stoic philosophy.

M. Frank identifies Léon Herrmann as the major early proponent of stage performance of Seneca
in the 20th century,5 and cites Otto Zwierlein as the most persuasive argument for public
recitation rather than performance in Die Rezitationsdramen Senecas (1966). Frank describes
how in more recent years, the case for recitation has become complicated. For instance, delivery
of certain performative aspects of the tragedy would seem to lose their effect from a single poet
or actor’s reading. “There is no external evidence to suggest that Seneca’s plays were performed
in the theatre in his lifetime,” Frank writes, though contemporary sources indicate that Roman
tragedy was performed in the Augustan period, e.g. Varius’ Thyestes, Pomponius Secundus (a
tragic playwright contemporary to Seneca).6 By Vespasian’s time (ruled 69-79 CE), the
playwright Maternus seemed to have performed his plays chiefly as recitations.7 Frank says that
with relation to the issue of performance or recitation and Seneca, “the only external evidence
there is, is too slight to be conclusive” (citing Quintilian’s Inst. 8.3.31), but concludes,

The question which has vexed scholars for nearly two centuries has concerned the method of
presentation intended by Seneca when he wrote his plays. Recently Hine has observed that ‘one
must get away from intentionalist talk of writing “for the stage” or “for reading”, because in all
probability Seneca simpy thought in terms of writing tragedies’. And tragedy was, by definition, a
stage play. This does not mean that at all periods tragedies were presented on the stage or

4
M. D. Grant, “Plautus and Seneca: Acting in Nero’s Rome,” Greece & Rome (Second Series) 46, no. 01 (1999):
27–33.
5
Léon Herrmann, Le Théâtre de Sénèque (Paris 1924).
6
Plin. Ep. 7.17; Tac. Ann. 11.13.
7
Tac. Orators 2.1-3.3.
4
exclusively on the stage; recitation was clearly a popular alternative and was perhaps more
popular than theatrical performance at certain times. 8

On the issue of the performance of Seneca I am largely agnostic as to whether the plays were
staged or read aloud to large or small audiences, because the form of performance would not
diminish or change the expectations an audience would have for the genre conventions of
tragedy. For reasons that will become apparent, I am partial to the notion that audiences and
readers would have been closely engaged with the plays on a phonic level (see discussion of
metathetic formations in the Hercules Furens chapter), but I do not think that examples of
performance in Senecan reception can explain performance practices in Seneca’s own time
(discussed at length in the Phoenissae chapter).

Innovating Tragic Genre Expectation
Senecan drama is particularly sensitive to the genre expectations of tragedy and oftentimes
reverses a key element of a tragic play in order to subvert the audience’s expectations based on
their familiarity with conventional stories (Hercules or Oedipus) and storytelling techniques like
the passion-restraint scene or the five act rule. These dramatic conventions came to define the
tragic genre and became built in to the construction of plays. Conventional passion-restraint
scenes gives character’s time, generally early on in the second act, to articulate their major
problems and to wax poetic about their moral worldviews while sparring with an equally
intelligent proponent of an opposing ethical philosophy. The structural framework of the
conventional five-act play gives the audience a blueprint for pacing the action and the arc of
characters and their problems. The title character’s conventionally early appearance on stage
gives the audience time to develop a familiarity with the protagonist and build an ethical
paradigm for understanding their actions. When these conventions are tampered with and the
audience’s expectations are disrupted, as they are in Senecan drama, the effects are dramatic.
There are lots of different variables to manipulate and play with within the tragic genre’s
tropes. The rigid Attic tragic structure sets up a number of audience expectations about the
progression of action and inaction throughout the play. Delays in the appearance of key
characters delays the audience’s ability to assess the moral issues at stake, and these delays and

8
For a subsequent bibliography, cf. Marica Frank, Seneca’s Phoenissae (BRILL, 1995) 37-39. Hine’s review of
Fantham, Pratt, Boyle, Zwierlein, Tarrant, Bishop, and Henry and Henry) in JRS 77 (1987), 256-8.
5
chronological disruptions leave the play in ethical limbo. Even passing references to tropes of the
tragic genre from the characters themselves can complicate the audience’s understanding of a
scene, or add an extra layer of metaphoric parallels between the story and the artist’s program.
For instance, Hercules’s demand to know the “author of this savage destruction,” (saevae cladis
auctorem indica, 1166) opens up a parallel between Hercules the hero and the role of the artist or
poet; when Jocasta warns her sons who are about to take arms against one another, “Now your
father should come to mind, by whose judgment punishments are sought even for a mistake,”
(occurat tibi / nunc Oedipus, quo iudice erroris quoque / poenae petutntur, 554-55), I will show
later, she is alluding as much to the concrete exemplum of their father’s actions as to the generic
exemplum of the tragic storyline. Tragedy is a well-tilled genre by the time of Seneca and his
adaptations reflect new interests and anxieties in the early Roman Empire.
The disruption of genre conventions of Attic tragedy in Seneca’s adaptations reflects
Roman anxieties about the morality of force (Hercules Furens), the sophistication of Romans’
darkest desires to rationalize bad behavior (Pha.), and the double-edged nature of common
Roman values like pietas and virtus when they come into conflict with one another or compete
for primacy (Pho.). Structural and plot deviations from Greek tragic conventions in Senecan
drama reflect an artist and society grappling with new cultural and moral problems and adapting
old stories to discuss those problems.
This thesis will address those issues through an examination of three Senecan tragedies,
featuring very different protaganists, in the following order:

Chapter 1
A Wrong in Whose World?: The Failure of Passion-Restraint in Phaedra and Innovations on the
Type Scene.

This chapter will examine how the reversal of an outcome from a passion-restraint (in this case
featuring Phaedra and her nurse) scene transforms a common rhetorical battle with potentially
little implications for the plot into a major scene that catalyzes later action of the play. Each
Senecan play takes the passion-restraint scene in a different direction with some general rules
that others have noted, like the tendency for characters to confront tyrants in the scene directly