Renaissance and Ancient Rome

Renaissance writers of all kinds and at all levels labored in the great shadow of classical antiquity, to which they looked with pleasure and envy to provide models for their own work, whether in philosophy, poetry, politics, or physics. All across Europe, the written remains of antiquity were eagerly mined for their expressive and intellectual resources by a new age of writers and thinkers. One of the chief philosophical and literary voices of the Latin legacy, whose influence was pervasive Europe-wide in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger  − who combined in his career the roles of politician, stylist, philosopher, playwright, satirist, and letter-writer, and who confirmed his prestige to later ages by killing himself on the orders of the tyrannical Emperor Nero in 65 A.D.  In the work of English playwrights of Shakespeare’s time, Seneca’s presence, both direct and indirect, can be observed in different ways at several different levels. Seneca’s was the only body of Latin tragedy that survived for later playwrights to model their work on.  In England, where there was no strong tradition of Greek scholarship and, until very late in the period, little direct access to the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides (though, of course, everyone knew the stories of their work), Seneca was all there was in the way of a prestigious ancient tragedian. But Seneca’s ten plays, which were probably never meant for the stage, did not strongly influence the development of English drama. Though they were translated into bad verse, and admired and imitated by scholarly and aristocratic dabblers in closet playwriting, they never really caught on as examples of how good plays should be shaped in the thriving public theaters for which Shakespeare wrote. Nothing could be further from the oratorical heaviness, deliberate pacing, and constrained demeanor of Seneca’s drama than the mobility and cartwheeling style of, say, Hamlet. 

Seneca’s Influence

Yet if Seneca’s plays were not especially important as formal models, they and other aspects of his work powerfully influenced both the intellectual culture of Renaissance England and the theater within it. First, Seneca’s writings as a whole provided inspiration and authority for a certain style of language that is everywhere in Shakespeare’s plays, especially his early ones ­– an epigrammatic style that couches moral thoughts or lessons in pointed, pithy “sentences” (hence we call the style “sententious”), which are uttered like proverbs to punctuate a character’s speech and drive home its message. Sometimes, as if to telegraph where they derive their prestige, these tags are even given in Latin. The general truth of these bits of wisdom is often set off against the private or particular situation of a speaker in a way that allows us, and him, to take stock of options for action and thought. Thus when in Julius Caesar, Brutus says of Caesar:

He would be crowned.

How that might change his nature, there’s the question.

It is the bright day that brings forth the adder

And that craves wary walking. [Act II, Scene 1]

We can hear him engaging in a specific rhetorical deliberation (a quaestio or question) that uses a proverbial image to bolster and articulate its argument. In providing models for this sort of “pointed” thinking, and for the reception of the whole rhetorical tradition of antiquity onto the stage, Seneca’s work was of prime importance. Second, Seneca’s achievements as a philosopher who had been politically active (indeed at one time he was more or less de facto Roman Emperor), coupled with his Stoical suicide, gave his philosophy a prestige comparable with his literary style. This philosophy was Stoicism, one of the great philosophical systems to survive from classical antiquity. Stoicism proved highly congenial to the Renaissance, so much so that there was hardly an intellectual figure in the period – from Pico della Mirandola to Descartes, from Rabelais to Milton  − who did not absorb and adapt some part of its canon. So it is hardly surprising that Stoicism should also make its appearance on the stage in one guise or another. That aspect of Stoicism relevant here could be summarized as an attempt to translate the archaic image of the aristocratic, self-possessed warrior-hero with his huge sense of honor (like Achilles or Ajax) onto the plane of philosophical logic and rational ethics. Early Stoics, insofar as we can recover their thought, believed that humans should live in harmony with reason, the fundamental ordering principle of Nature, and rejected both encumbering emotional entanglements and the vagaries of Fortune. In contact with the guiding force of the Universe, reason, they could stand against the buffets of the world, both inner and outer. As received by the Romans, who gave these doctrines a strongly ethical cast, the Stoic was to be a model of self-possession: deliberate and rational in action, moderate in feeling, stalwart in adversity, and subservient to nothing “like the historical Cato and Shakespeare’s Brutus. When in Act IV, Scene 3, Messala reports to Brutus that his wife Portia has died, he simply says, “Why, farewell, Portia. We must die, Messala./With meditating that she must die once,/I have the patience to endure it now.” Stoicism offered a picture of the self in disdainful withdrawal from contamination and compromise. Under the tyrannies of the early Roman emperors, who preyed heavily on the Roman aristocracy with its memories of Republican liberty, and in the often dangerous world of the Renaissance court with its competitive and capricious princes, the picture of an inviolable self with its indomitably independent will was especially attractive. The philosophy of proud self-determination and virtuous rigor was a siren song in the “unweeded garden” of Renaissance politics. As Hamlet insists, voicing such an ideal of his friend Horatio (who is “more an antique Roman than a Dane”):

Give me that man
That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him
In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart,
As I do thee. [Act III, Scene 2]

When we find, as we often do, Shakespearean heroes speaking of themselves in the third person, appealing to an image of dignity and resolution that seeks to confirm as their established self-image, it is most often a Stoic posture they are striking: “for Brutus’ tongue/ Hath almost ended his life’s history,” says Brutus, the Stoic.

Yet this same posture also points us towards the other side of the Senecan coin in English Renaissance drama: its provision of a whole repertoire of characters who make the celebration of themselves and their powers into the center of gravity of their play and world. Brutus is not the only one to speak of himself in this way in Julius Caesar: “Know: Caesar doth not wrong, not without cause/ Will he be satisfied.” The flip side of Stoicism’s interest in self-determination was the image of a gargantuan self inflated to dominate the world – just the megalomania of that Imperial tyranny to which Seneca himself succumbed at last. If the Stoic ideal was the will in rational moderation, the Stoic nightmare was that same will run wild, drunk on its own passions.

It is here that we find the key influence of Seneca’s plays on the English Renaissance, not in their formal shape, but in their picturing of “hero-villains” of great emotional power: Medea, Hercules, Atreus, those monsters of inflated will and hyperbolic speech who celebrate their great wrongs in equally great acts of terror in order to express their giant rages. A cavalcade of such personalities passes over the English stage. Marlowe’s outsized cartoons of ambition and anger who, like Tamburlaine, “threaten the world with high-astounding terms; Kyd’s grief-crazed revenger, Hieronimo, who bites out his own tongue rather than reveal and deflate his cause with words; and Shakespeare’s own ghastly figures of anger and deceit, like Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus, and even that “bottled spider” Richard III, all owe some-thing to Seneca’s way of presenting the resolute personality agonizing under extreme conditions. Even Hamlet, though he is an infinitely more complex figure, tangles with the picture of himself in the mould of the Senecan rager as he imagines himself shouting “Bloody, bawdy villain! O vengeance!” at his uncle.

Seneca’s drama and philosophy thus bequeathed two related but quite opposed figures to later dramatists: the one reflective, self-possessed, rational, and concerned with maintaining a willed commitment to virtue in the face of a vile world, the other raging with all its intensity and surging force to convert that world into the shape of its own will. In Julius Caesar we see versions of these two conceptions arrayed against one another in the opposition of Brutus and Caesar, with their very different notions of what relations there should be between the individual personality and the political order. Caesar, “constant as the Northern star,” seeks to make the Roman world his oyster, to dominate it and subject it to his will. Brutus, “the noblest Roman of them all,” acts to preserve liberty of will and independence for each member of the political state. And in Hamlet, Shakespeare will go further still, setting the two opposed versions of Senecan character at odds with one another in various ways within the shifting experience of the central character himself. Rather than simply following models of drama and character offered by classical antiquity, then, Renaissance playwrights, and especially Shakespeare, adapted them, using the analytic power of the public stage to deepen and question the ancient legacy by testing it against other ways of representing thought, feeling, and action. While the prestige of Seneca’s example remained high, his fruitfulness for his English descendants lay as much in challenging as in imitating him. For more on Seneca see “Seneca, a Thinker for Our Times.”

by Tom Bishop, Associate Professor of English, Case Western Reserve University. © NEXUS, 2001. (Tom Bishop also wrote “Shakespeare’s Stage” for Romeo and Juliet and the Renaissance, NEXUS and the Romeo and Juliet Supplement “English Theater.”)

(Note: This supplement is recommended for teachers and advanced students.)

QUESTIONS

1. Name three of Seneca’s plays.
2. Why didn’t Seneca’s plays serve as direct models for Renaissance plays? Scan Act I of Seneca’s Medea, then explain why staging it would probably not engage audiences. “Ten Tragedies of Seneca – Medea.”
3. What aspect(s) of Seneca’s writing did influence Shakespeare and other English Renaissance writers?
4. In your own words, define epigram and aphorism? Cite three examples of aphorisms or epigrams in Seneca’s Medea.
5. Cite three aphorisms or epigrams in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (not including the one quoted in this essay).
6. According to the essay, what are the origins of the word “sententious”? Do your own research and then confirm or refute the claims in the essay regarding the origin of this word.
7. In your own words, give three characteristics of Stoicism, then apply at least two of them to Brutus’ character, providing supporting examples. Cite a passage in Act I in which Brutus is not stoical?
8. Explain the following quotation from the above essay: “Stoicism offering a picture of the self in disdainful withdrawal from contamination and compromise.”
9. According to the essay, what is the “Stoic nightmare?” To which character or characters in Julius Caesar is this term applicable?
10. Explain the last line of this essay: “While the prestige of Seneca’s example remained high, his fruitfulness for his English descendants lay as much in challenging as in imitating him.”

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