“Seneca cannot be too heavy”: some thoughts on Seneca’s horror plays

Seneca (ca 4 BC – AD 65) was influenced by the ancient Greeks, and he himself influenced Shakespeare and the Elizabethans. For someone like me, he is unavoidable, so last month I read his Phaedra, and now read some more. 

The verdict? I love Shakespeare; I love the ancient Greeks; I don’t like Seneca. 

1/ Medea, adapted from Euripides’s play, is a closet drama, meaning that it’s meant to be read rather than seen onstage. And you can tell it wouldn’t work very well onstage, unless heavily edited: there are too many long speeches, some extremely long; much of the play doesn’t feel particularly dramatic. But I didn’t find it enjoyable to read either (though perhaps Emily Wilson is partly to blame). Compared to the Euripides play, it is more violent and sensationalist; Seneca’s Medea is more brutal, less conflicted, killing her own children in front of their father; Jason appears less despicable; the nurse and the chorus don’t seem to have much sympathy for Medea; the play as a whole is cruder. 

Elizabethan playwrights probably enjoyed the savagery and violence though. 

The interesting thing about reading Seneca is that I realise even though the Athenian playwrights deal with horrific, disturbing subjects, their plays are not just violent and sensational. They’re a lot subtler, more sophisticated and profound than Seneca and the revenge plays of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans—Hamlet, or Shakespeare in general, is obviously an exception, but Titus Andronicus is also a crude, ridiculous play, nothing like Shakespeare’s mature plays. 

I didn’t even like Euripides’s Medea, compared to his other plays, but it’s subtler and more nuanced than Seneca’s version. 

2/ Oedipus is adapted from Oedipus the King by Sophocles (also known as Oedipus Rex or Oedipus Tyrannus). Coleridge thinks the Sophocles play is one of the three best plots in the world (the others are Tom Jones by Fielding—I agree!—and The Alchemist by Ben Jonson). I doubt anyone would say that about the Seneca play.

The brilliance of the Sophocles play is in the way the plot unfolds, the way the characters gradually discover the horrible truth—Jocasta is to know before Oedipus—the tension arises because of something that has already happened, not something that is happening. The myth—a man kills his father and marries his mother—is sensational and disturbing, but Sophocles seems to be more interested in questions about fate and human agency. At the same time, he develops the character of Oedipus so that you can see why Oedipus is in the position he’s in: because he is imperious and even hot-tempered, he killed a man on the road, who turns out to be his father Laius; because he is intelligent and resourceful, he defeated the Sphinx and got awarded the queen of Thebes, who happened to be his mother. 

You don’t get any of that in the Seneca play. The plot is awkward; they summon back the spirit of the dead Laius and he names the killer (how stupid is this?); Seneca seems to delight in gory detail (do we need all that gory description of the sacrifice? why does he expand and exaggerate Oedipus’s blinding?); the chorus, for some reason, sings a few times about Bacchus and the horrific death of Pentheus, adding to the gruesome quality of the play; Seneca also changes Jocasta’s death, making it melodramatic and also reducing the nobility of her character as we see in the Sophocles play; I don’t mind that Jocasta dies onstage, but don’t like that she dies in front of Oedipus—no, worse than that, it is ambiguous and suggests that Oedipus might help kill Jocasta; the whole thing is just sordid. 

And that’s just the impression I’ve got from reading Seneca: it’s hard to explain, but his characters just don’t have the nobility we see in the Greek plays; even in the case of Phaedra, both Euripides’s Phaedra and Racine’s Phèdre have a nobility that Seneca’s character lacks. 

I read Oedipus in E. F. Watling’s translation, which felt more poetic than Emily Wilson’s translation of the same play and Medea. 

(On a side note: I wrote in my blog post about Shakespeare and the Greeks that Shakespeare didn’t depict tension that arises because of something that already happened, as we see in Oedipus the King. That is not entirely true, or rather, Shakespeare doesn’t write an entire play about that, but he does do it in the final scenes of Othello—tension arises as Emilia and then Othello realises what he has done, and what Iago has done). 

3/ Thyestes is another fabula crepidata, which is a Latin play with Greek subjects. There are however no extant Greek plays about the myth, so nothing to which to compare Seneca’s play. 

To be honest, there are interesting passages in the play. 

“MINISTER You do not fear your people’s disapproval?

ATREUS Of the advantages of monarchy

The greatest is that subjects are compelled

Not only to endure but to approve

Their master’s actions.

MINISTER                        Men compelled by fear

To praise, may be by fear compelled to hate.

He who desires to win sincere approval

Will seek it in the heart, not on the tongue.

ATREUS A moderate man may win sincere approval;

It takes a strong man to enforce feigned praise.

Men must be made to want what they dislike.

MINISTER Let the king want what’s right, who will oppose him?

ATREUS The king who binds himself to want what’s right Sits on a shaky throne.” 

(Act 2) 

(translated by E. F. Watling) 

Now that is Seneca the philosopher, Seneca the statesman, Seneca the emperor’s advisor. 

In terms of language and imagery, there are many striking passages: 

“FURY […] Nor shall the heavens

Be unaffected by your evil deeds:

What right have stars to twinkle in the sky?

Why need their lights still ornament the world?

Let night be black, let there be no more day.

Let havoc rule this house; call blood and strife

And death; let every corner of this place

Be filled with the revenge of Tantalus!...” 

(Act 1) 

Or: 

“ATREUS It is. My heart is shaken with a storm

Of passion that confounds it to its centre.

I am compelled, although I know not whither,

I am compelled by forces.… Hear! the earth

Groans from its depths; the sky is clear, but thunder

Rumbles, and from the house there came a crash

As if the roof were falling; and our gods,

Shaken, have turned their backs on us. So be it!

Let a black deed be done, which gods above

Will fear to see.” 

(Act 2) 

Reading these plays, especially Thyestes, I can see the influence of Seneca on Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights: the 5-act division, the use of (bombastic) rhetoric, the fascination with evil and taste for extreme violence. All the lurid, gruesome scenes I have seen in 16th-17th century English revenge plays—a character bites off his own tongue and spits it out, a villain kisses and gets killed by a poisoned skull, someone appears onstage with a bloody heart on a dagger, and so on—all seem to trace back to the spectacle of violence and gory detail in Seneca. The pie in Titus Andronicus is a direct reference to Thyestes and—look at all the horrible murders in that play—I can see why someone would say it looks like an attempt to out-Seneca Seneca.

However, as I wrote back then, there’s nothing to the revenge plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries—nothing but spectacle—and very often those plays leave a bad taste in my mouth afterwards because the characters are all monstrous and bestial, and the same could be said about Seneca’s plays. Out of the four I’ve read, Thyestes is the most horrific—Atreus takes revenge on his own brother Thyestes by roasting Thyestes’s children and feeding them to him—it is repulsive. 

I think I’ve got enough of Seneca.