It was under the direct influence of the Renaissance, viewed primarily, in England as elsewhere, as a revival of classical studies, and in connexion with the growing taste in university and cognate circles of society, and at a court which prided itself on its love and patronage of learning, that Influence
of Seneca.English tragedy and comedy took their actual beginnings. Those of comedy, as it would seem, preceded those of tragedy by a few years. Already in Queen Mary’s reign, translation was found the readiest form of expression offering itself to literary scholarship; and Italian examples helped to commend Seneca, the most modern of the ancient tragedians, and the imitator of the most human among the masters of Attic tragedy, as a favourite subject for such exercises. In the very year of Elizabeth’s accession—seven years after Jodelle had brought out the earliest French tragedy—a group of English university scholars began to put forth a series of translations of the ten tragedies of Seneca, which one of them, T. Newton, in 1581 collected into a single volume. The earliest of these versions was that of the Troades (1559) by Jasper Heywood, a son of the author of the Interludes. He also published the Thyestes (1560) and the Hercules Furens (1561); the names of his fellow-translators were A. Neville, T. Nuce, J. Studley and the T. Newton aforesaid. These translations, which occasionally include original interpolations (“additions,” a term which was to become a technical one in English dramaturgy), are in no instance in blank verse, the favourite metre of the dialogue being the couplets of fourteen-syllable lines best known through Chapman’s Homer.
The authority of Seneca, once established in the English literary world, maintained itself there long after English drama had emancipated itself from the task of imitating this pallid model, and, occasionally, Seneca’s own prototype, Euripides.[1] Nor can it be doubted that some translation of the Earliest English tragedies.Latin tragic poet had at one time or another passed through Shakespeare’s own hands. But what is of present importance is that to the direct influence of Seneca is to be ascribed the composition of the first English tragedy which we possess. Of Gorboduc (afterwards re-named Ferrex and Porrex), first acted on the 18th of January 1562 by the members of the Inner Temple before Queen Elizabeth, the first three acts are stated to have been written by T. Norton; the rest of the play (if not more) was the work of T. Sackville, afterwards Lord Buckhurst and earl of Dorset, whom Jasper Heywood praised for his sonnets, but who is better known for his leading share in The Mirror for Magistrates. Though the subject of Gorboduc is a British legend, and though the action is neither copied nor adapted from any treated by Seneca, yet the resemblance between this tragedy and the Thebais is too strong to be fortuitous. In all formal matters—chorus, messengers, &c.—Gorboduc adheres to the usage of classical tragedy; but the authors show no respect for the unities of time or place. Strong in construction, the tragedy is—like its model, Seneca—weak in characterization. The dialogue, it should be noticed, is in blank verse; and the device of the dumb-show, in which the contents of each act are in succession set forth in pantomime only, is employed at once to instruct and to stimulate the spectator.
The nearly contemporary Apius and Virginia (c. 1563), though it takes its subject—destined to become a perennial one on the modern stage—from Roman story; the Historie of Horestes (pr. 1567); and T. Preston’s Cambises King of Percia (1569–1570), are somewhat rougher in form, and, the first and last of them at all events, more violent in diction, than Gorboduc. They still contain elements of the moralities (above all the Vice) and none of the formal features of classical tragedy. But a Julyus Sesyar seems to have been performed, in precisely the same circumstances as Gorboduc, so early as 1562; and, four years later, G. Gascoigne, the author of the satire The Steele Glass, produced with the aid of two associates (F. Kinwelmersh and Sir Christopher Yelverton, who wrote an epilogue), Jocasta, a virtual translation of L. Dolce’s Giocasta, which was an adaptation, probably, of R. Winter’s Latin translation of the Phoenissae of Euripides.[2] Between the years 1567 and 1580 a large proportion of the plays presented at court by choir- or school-boys, and by various companies of actors, were taken from Greek legend or Roman history; as was R. Edwardes’ Damon and Pithias (perhaps as early as 1564–1565), which already shades off from tragedy into what soon came to be called tragi-comedy.[3] Simultaneously with the influence, exercised directly or indirectly, of classical literature, that of Italian, both dramatic and narrative, with its marked tendency to treat native themes, asserted itself, and, while diversifying the current of early English tragedy, infused into it a long-abiding element of passion. There are sufficient grounds for concluding that a play on the subject of Romeo and Juliet, which L. da Porto and M. Bandello had treated in prose narrative—that of the latter having through a French version formed itself into an English poem—was seen on an English stage in or before 1562. Gismonde of Salerne, a play founded on Boccaccio, was acted before Queen Elizabeth at the Inner Temple in 1568, nearly a generation before it was published, rewritten in blank verse by R. Wilmot, one of the performers, then in holy orders; G. Whetstone’s Promos and Cassandra, founded on G. Cinthio (from which came the plot of Measure for Measure), followed, printed in 1578; and there were other “casts of Italian devices” belonging to this age, in which the choice of a striking theme still seemed the chief preoccupation of English tragic poets.
From the double danger which threatened English tragedy in the days of its infancy—that it would congeal on the wintry heights of classical themes, or dissolve its vigour in the glowing heat of a passion fiercer than that of the Italians—Ingleso Italianato è un diavolo incarnato—it was preserved more than by any other cause by its happy association with the traditions of the national history. An exceptional position might seem to be in this respect occupied by T. Hughes’ interesting tragedy The Misfortunes of Arthur (1587). But the author of this play—in certain portions of whose framework there were associated with him seven other members of Gray’s Inn, including Francis Bacon, and which was presented before Queen Elizabeth like Gorboduc—in truth followed the example of the authors of that work both in choice of theme, in details of form, and in a general though far from servile imitation of the manner of Seneca; nor does he represent any very material advance upon the first English tragedy.
Fortunately, at the very time when from such beginnings as those just described the English tragic drama was to set forth upon a course in which it was to achieve so much, a new sphere of activity suggested itself. And in this, after a few more or less tentative efforts, English dramatists very Chronicle histories.speedily came to feel at home. In their direct dramatization of passages or portions of English history (in which the doings and sufferings of King Arthur could only by courtesy or poetic licence be included) classical models would be of scant service, while Italian examples of the treatment of national historical subjects, having to deal with material so wholly different, could not be followed with advantage. The native species of the chronicle history, which designedly assumed this name in order to make clear its origin and purpose, essayed nothing more or less than a dramatic version of an existing chronicle. Obviously, while the transition from half historical, half epical narrative often implied carrying over into the new form some of the features of the old, it was only when the subject matter had been remoulded and recast that a true dramatic action could result. But the histories to be found among the plays of Shakespeare and one or two other Elizabethans are true dramas, and it would be inconvenient to include these in the transitional species of those known as chronicle histories. Among these ruder
- ↑ Latin “academical” plays directly imitated from Seneca, but of unknown date, are Solymannidae (or the story of Solyman II. and his son Mustapha), and Tomumbeius (Tuman Bey, sultan of Egypt, 1516); yet others exhibit his influence.
- ↑ ”Supposes” and “Jocasta,” ed. J. W. Cunliffe.
- ↑ His Palamon and Arcyte (produced in Christ Church hall, Oxford, in 1566) is not preserved; or we should be able to compare with The Two Noble Kinsmen this early dramatic treatment of a singularly fine theme.
