Phaedra (or Hippolytus) by Seneca

1/ I have always been intrigued by Seneca’s influence on Shakespeare and other Elizabethan playwrights, so my curiosity about other versions of the Hippolytus/ Phaedra myth is a good excuse to pick up Seneca. Hence the big jump from Greece of the 5th century BC to Rome of the 1st century. 

Funnily enough (at least to me), the time gap between Sophocles or Euripides and Seneca is slightly bigger than that between Shakespeare and us. 

2/ Seneca’s Phaedra and Euripides’s Hippolytus are quite different, though if I’m not mistaken, Seneca’s play might be closer to the Greek myth and Euripides is the one making changes to the story.

In Seneca’s play, Phaedra is responsible for her own actions, lusting after her stepson and confessing to him her feelings—Seneca removes both Aphrodite and Artemis (here Venus and Diana) from the story—Hippolytus is still devoted to Diana and vowing chastity, but she doesn’t appear. 

The nurse is instead the voice of reason and morality and there’s a long scene in which she chastises Phaedra: 

“NURSE […] Why, my poor mistress, why are you resolved

To heap fresh infamy upon your house,

With sin worse than your mother’s? Wilful sin

Is a worse evil than unnatural passion;

That comes by fate, but sin comes from our nature.

You think, because your husband’s eyes are closed

To all this upper world, that you are free

To sin without fear?” 

(translated by E. F. Watling) 

She is in the right, but in Seneca’s depiction she’s a tedious moralising character. One interesting bit is her denial of gods:  

“NURSE: That love is god

Is the vile fiction of unbridled lust

Which, for its licence, gives to lawless passion

The name of an imagined deity.

[…] Vain fancies

Conceived by crazy minds, they are all false!” 

An atheist in a play written in ancient Rome? 

The thing that saves her from being a two-dimensional character is that she’s the one to come up with the rape allegation: 

“NURSE Now all the evil is exposed. What then?

Shall resolution faint or fail? Not so.

We must prefer a counter charge against him,

Take up the case ourselves and prove him guilty

Of violation. Crime must cover crime.

The safest shield in danger is attack.

When the offence is private, who shall say

Which of us sinned and which was sinned against?” 

3/ The play is full of long speeches, full of rhetoric, which is clearly an influence on Elizabethan playwrights including Shakespeare. Just look at the scene between Phaedra’s nurse and Hippolytus for example. All rhetoric, which makes me realise that there’s not much of that in ancient Greek plays at all. 

“NURSE […] Why – if from our life

We banish Venus, who replenishes

And recreates our dwindling stock, the earth

Will soon become a desert, drear and ugly,

The sea a dead sea, where there are no fish,

The sky will have no birds, the woods no beasts,

The air will be a place where nothing moves

Except the passing winds…”

The nurse is persuading Hippolytus to leave his vows to Diana and “seize pleasure”, which makes me think of Shakespeare’s sonnets 1-17. 

Seneca expands on Hippolytus’s hostility towards women: 

“HIPPOLYTUS […] Mothers, defying nature’s law, destroyed

Their infants ere they lived. Stepmothers –

What can one say of them? – wild beasts

Have more compassion. Woman, say what you will,

Is the prime mover of all wickedness;

Expert in every evil art, woman

Lays siege to man; for her adulteries

Cities have burned, nation made war on nation,

Multitudes perished in the fall of kingdoms.” 

Not very likeable, is he? Euripides’s Hippolytus may be a bit irrational and self-righteous in his vows of chastity, but mostly comes across as indifferent to women and all the troubles that come with romance. Seneca’s Hippolytus is a misogynist. 

“HIPPOLYTUS I hate them all; I dread, I shun, I loathe them.

I choose – whether by reason, rage, or instinct –

I choose to hate them. Can you marry fire

To water? Can ships safely sail the quicksands?

Can Tethys make the sun rise in the west?

Can wild wolves smile on does? No more can I

Consent to have a tender thought for woman.”

Rhetoric. 

4/ Whereas Euripides creates a tragedy of three people (Phaedra, Hippolytus, Theseus), Seneca focuses on Phaedra, creating a scene of her offering herself to Hippolytus and getting rejected; removing the two scenes between Hippolytus and his father Theseus, including the one in which Theseus confronts Hippolytus and the accused tries to defend himself in vain; moving Phaedra’s suicide to the end, after Hippolytus’s awful death. In Euripides’s play, Phaedra’s suicide is about shame; in Seneca’s, about guilt. 

It is an interesting play. Some of you may prefer Seneca’s portrayal of Phaedra as a shameless, lustful, wicked woman, but all three characters are more unpleasant—if not downright repulsive—in his play, and I find Euripides’s play much more moving and tragic. 

Addendum: This is a good essay comparing treatment of character in the two plays.