Four Tragedies and Octavia

Four Tragedies and Octavia Read Online Free PDF

Book: Four Tragedies and Octavia Read Online Free PDF
Author: Séneca
which is to be revealed in the action of the play, as much to his enlightenment (as he sits watching) as to that of the audience.
    To return to our Elizabethan translations, there is no certainty that any of them were acted, though it is likely that some of them were, in view of the translators’ connexion with the universities and, in the case of Neville and Studley, with the Inns of Court. That the professional dramatists (and their audiences too) were as well acquainted with Seneca in Latin as in translation is shown by their fondness for quotation from the original. 1 At any rate, the ‘fourteener’ made little impression on the stage; it appears on occasions, as in the masque in
Cymbeline
, V . 4:
    No more, thou thunder-master, show thy spite on mortal flies…
    But Shakespeare also found it fair game for parody in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
    But stay, O spite! But mark, poor knight, what dreadful dole is here!
    Eyes, do you see? How can it be? O dainty duck, O dear!
    Thy mantle good, what, stained with blood! Approach, ye Furies fell!
    O Fates, come, come, cut thread and thrum; quail, crush, conclude, and quell!
    It may be conceded, however, that some measure of varietyand individual voice was achieved by the translators. There is vigour in Heywood’s version of the Agamemnon-Pyrrhus dialogue ( Appendix I . 1 , 2 , 3 ), and descriptive power in Neville’s
Oedipus
( 8, 9 ) – the more remarkable when it is known that it was written in the translator’s sixteenth year, he being then already a B.A. of Cambridge. Studley revels in the Stygian invocations of Medea ( 11 ), but he can vary his line from the monosyllabic
    If ghost may here be given for ghost, and breath may serve for breath ( 14 )
    to the surprisingly concise
    Lo, I enjoy my father’s gift; O solitariness! ( 16 )
    From their own knowledge of Seneca, and by imitation of one another, the dramatists filled their plays with a Senecan flavouring. An example of the perpetuation of a ‘tag’ may be seen in the following sequence of variations on a theme. Seneca wrote (
Agamemnon
, 116):
per scelera semper sceleribus tutum est iter
(‘the safe way through crime is by [further] crimes’ – a somewhat woolly epigram in the first place, meaning ‘the safe way to get away with, or cover up, crime…’). Studley’s translation:
    The safest path to mischiefe is by mischiefe open still.
    T. Hughes,
The Misfortunes of Arthur
1 (1587):
    The safest passage is from bad to worse.
    Marston,
The Malcontent
(1604):
    Black deed only through black deed safely flies.
    (to which the next speaker replies: ‘Pooh!
per scelera semper sceleribus tutum est iter
!’)
    Shakespeare,
Macbeth
(1605):
    Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.
    B. Jonson,
Catiline
(1611):
    The ills that I have done cannot be safe
    But by attempting greater.
    Webster,
The White Devil
(1612):
    Small mischiefs are by greater made secure.
    Massinger,
The Duke of Milan
(1620):
    One deadly sin, then, help to cure another!
    And beside the picking of Seneca’s brains 1 by quotation and imitation, the general tone of Senecan rhetoric was infused into English drama, even in contexts where it was least appropriate. Thomas Heywood’s
A Woman Killed with Kindness
(1603) is an example of a ‘thriller’ of bourgeois life, with the least possible resemblance in form or setting to classical tragedy. Servants indulge in such homely talk as:
    Fie, we have such a household of serving creatures! Unless it be Nick and I, there’s not one amongst them all can say boo to a goose –
    and the gentlemen’s blank verse can be relaxed and naturalistic:
    Â Â Choose of my men which shall attend on you,
    And he is yours. I will allow you, sir,
    Your man, your gelding, and your table, all
    At mine own charge; be my companion.
    Yet the injured Master Frankford, being told of his wife’s infidelity, has classical rhetoric at
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