What's Seneca to Him? Senecan Shakespeare

Although for Scaliger Seneca was even greater than Euripides, it has often been acknowledged that Romantic writers have bequeathed us a negative legacy that has debased him as second-rate, imitative, and inauthentic compared to Greek authors. Such harsh criticism has distorted for centuries “our understanding of Shakespeare’s engagement with Senecan tragedy”, so much so that “even if Shakespeareans now acknowledge Seneca to be important for early modern tragedy we remain unlikely to see his influence as an especially robust or interesting one” (Perry 2021, 2). If T.S. Eliot inaugurated an interpretation of the linkage between Seneca and Shakespeare through interest in inwardness and self-dramatisation, the foregrounding of the self (or of Braden’s “autarkic selfhood”, 1985) is made possible only by situating this experience within the playworld, in spaces visualising and framing the surfacing of unconscious desires and repressed passions beyond plot structures. By focusing on questions of authorial construction, appropriation, domestication, but also ‘improvement’ and expansion, this issue engages with these different threads of confluences, aware of, and dallying with, perspectival mobility about what constructing Senecan Shakespeare may mean.