Four Tragedies and Octavia Read Online Free PDF Page B

his command:
    Â Â Thou hast kill’d me with a weapon whose sharpen’d point
    Hath prick’d quite through and through my shiv’ring heart:
    Drops of cold sweat sit dangling on my hairs,
    Like morning’s dew upon the golden flowers,
    And I am plung’d into a strange agony…
    and, discovering the culprits
in flagrante delicto:
    O God! O God! that it were possible
    To undo things done; to call back yesterday!
    That Time could turn up his swift sandy glass,
    To untell the days, and to redeem these hours!
    Or that the sun
    Could, rising from the west, draw his coach backward,
    Take from the account of time so many minutes,
    Till he had all these seasons call’d again,
    Those minutes, and those actions done in them,
    Even from her first offence; that I might take her
    As spotless as an angel in my arms!
    It was all to the good; the language of Elizabethan drama would not have reached its height of poetic eloquence without the infusion of the classical voice–the Ovidian mythology and the Senecan rhetoric. It is not necessary to see direct borrowing from the Latin in every reminiscent line or phrase; the voice and the manner became naturalized in the English theatre; the invocations, hyperboles, geographical similes and mythological parallels, proliferated out of the compost-heap. When Shakespeare wrote
    Â Â Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
    Clean from my hand?…
    he may not have known that he was producing another version, perhaps the best yet, of a figure employed twiceby Seneca and before him by Sophocles. 1 A passage in
Thyestes
(267 ff.) may have run through many variations before it became Lear’s
    I will do such things–
    What they are yet I know not – but they shall be
    The terrors of the earth.
    The parallels are so frequent that the translator of Seneca must have the, curious feeling that he is trying out English constructions which Shakespeare and Marlowe will later improve upon.
    To turn from the language to the form and subject-matter of English tragedy is to find a different and more complex process at work. The campaign for the revival of classical form in drama brought the forces of academic classicism into conflict, and a losing battle, with the vigorous though formless and rudely equipped tradition of the popular theatre, with its rambling episodic histories, its serio-comic moralities, and later its Italianate romances and English domestic crime-plays. The scholar-playwrights, looking beyond the merely linguistic possibilities of the classical style, became fascinated with the formal conventions of the Senecan drama and (supported by the Aristotelian precepts) took its austere ‘unities’ of time and place to be the ideal conditions of tragedy. In which they misunderstood the nature of those conventions. Reduced to literal terms, the action of
Thyestes
, for example, would seem to take place on one spot and within a continuous space of time limited to a few hours. But, in fact, the actionis placeless and timeless; it presents a series of pictures: the menace of an ancestral curse – the diabolical spite of Atreus – the stoical resignation of Thyestes in exile – the deceptive hospitality of Atreus – the horror-climax of the murders (described) and the banquet (enacted). It does not matter where, or at what intervals of time, these scenes are set – nor what happens between them to link one with another (and no one asks how Thyestes remained unaware of the atrocious rite performed with full ceremony at Atreus’s court). Nevertheless, the craze for ‘unity’ took hold of the academic mind, despite its impracticability when literally applied. When the classical manner was adopted for an English historical tragedy, in
Gorboduc
, 1 the first notable attempt of the kind, the result was a drama recalling the Senecan features of static declamation, symmetrical conflict, choral commentary, and narrated