ABSTRACT
Mario Domenichelli traces the course of a long tradition which has offered manifold examples of tragic structures marked with a strong Senecan character. He also examines the subsequent theoretical debate over the modules of the tragedic style which took place among the humanists and theatre historians of the Renaissance. The translation of Seneca His Tenne Tragedies by Thomas Newton in 1581, collected in a quarto volume, published by Thomas Marsch, marks an important date from which a long Senecan tradition began in England, starting with Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex, written by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, and followed by Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, the most popular and influential of Elizabethan revenge tragedies. Domenichelli charts the structural characteristics of Seneca’s poetics of horror in both themes and style, along the temporal arc of the revenge play tradition on the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline stage, while pointing to the stage violence and corrupted evil characters of such dramatists as Chapman, Webster, Marston, Tourneur, and Middelton.
