ABSTRACT
Tragic Seneca undertakes a radical re-evaluation of Seneca's plays, their relationship to Roman imperial culture and their instrumental role in the evolution of the European theatrical tradition.
Following an introduction on the history of the Roman theatre, the book provides a dramatic and cultural critique of the whole of Seneca's corpus, analysing the declamatory form of the plays, their rhetoric, interiority, stagecraft and spectacle, dramatic, ideological and moral structure and their overt theatricality. Each of Seneca's plays is examined in detail, locating the force of Senecan drama not only in the moral complexity of the texts and their representations of power, violence, history, suffering and the self, but the semiotic interplay of text, tradition and culture.
The later chapters focus on Seneca's influence on Italian, English and French drama of the Renaissance. A.J. Boyle argues that tragedians such as Cinthio, Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Webster, Corneille, and Racine owe a debt to Seneca that goes beyond allusion, dramatic form and the treatment of tyranny and revenge to the development of the tragic sensibility and the metatheatrical mind.
Tragic Seneca attempts to restore Seneca to a central position in the European literary tradition. It will provide readers and directors of Seneca's plays with the essential critical guide to their intellectual, cultural and dramatic complexity.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part |12 pages
Prologue
chapter |10 pages
The Roman Theatre
part |125 pages
Senecan Tragedy
chapter |17 pages
The Declamatory Style
chapter |25 pages
Ideas Made Flesh
chapter |28 pages
The Body of the Play
chapter |27 pages
The Palimpsestic Code
chapter |26 pages
The Theatricalised Wor(l)d
part |69 pages
Seneca and Renaissance Drama
chapter |26 pages
Seneca Inscriptvs
chapter |26 pages
Ideology and Meaning
chapter |15 pages
The Metatheatrical Mind
part |8 pages
Epilogue