Thou hast devourd thy sonnes - some notes on Seneca's horror plays

My Seneca reading in March:

Medea, tr. Frederick Ahl

The Trojan Women, tr. E. F. Watling

Thyestes, tr. Jasper Heywood

Hercules Furens, tr. Heywood

The Madness of Hercules, tr. Dana Gioia

The plays themselves are all from the mid-1st century, perhaps written when Seneca was in political exile and had time to kill.  The Heywood translations are form the 16th century, pre-dating Shakespeare and so on, and are landmarks in the history of English theater and poetic translation.  The other translations are more recent; the Gioia is brand new.

It is Gioia’s fault that I have delayed this post for so long.  His new translation includes a 57 page essay on Seneca that is the best thing I have ever read on the playwright, even better than the great T. S. Eliot essay that precedes the 1927 edition of Seneca: His Tenne Tragedies, the 1581 anthology that so strongly influenced English theater.  Gioia is clear, efficient, and worst of all thorough.  He even has insightful things to say about Eliot’s essay.  The translation is also good.  He kinda discouraged me from writing anything.  Just read him.  You’ll have to buy a copy of the book, since it is from a little publisher, Wiseblood Books, that most libraries won’t know.  They also just published Marly Youmans’s strange, beautiful new poetic fantasy Seren of the Wildwood.  Buy them together!

So what is my simple thumbnail Seneca like?  Let’s see.

He adapted Greek plays, themselves all adaptations.  Mostly Euripides.  Seneca minimizes the characters and moves the chorus into a new role, providing thematically-related songs that connect the five acts.  He has five acts; that is also new.  Sometimes, The Trojan Women being a good example, structure and function of the play is not so different than the Greek original, nor so different than modern ideas of dramatic structure.  But sometimes Seneca is more radical.

Thyestes is the appalling story of King Atreus feeding his two nephews to their father, his brother King Thyestes, a classical horror story, one of the many curses underlying The Oresteia.  In Seneca’s version, in the first act the fury Maegera incites Tantalus, himself a monster, to curse his nephews, Thyestes and Atreus.  Tantalus and Magera are never seen again.  Most of the rest of the play is essentially a series of monologues.  This is static rather than dramatic.  Anti-dramatic. The main characters barely meet until the end, when Atreus displays for his brother the heads of his devoured children.

ATREUS: Thou hast devourd thy sonnes and fykd thy selfe with wicked meat.

THYESTES: Oh this is it that sham’de the Gods and day from hence did dryve

Turn’d back to east, alas I wretche what waylinges may I geve?  (p. 90)

Then there’s some gruesome stuff about severed heads and hands and rolling bowels.  Note the rhyming fourteen syllable lines, an innovation of Heywood’s that did not catch on.

However cruel Euripides was, Seneca is crueler.  Medea murders her two children onstage.  If you have ever wondered why Shakespeare wrote Titus Andronicus, this is the answer: he was imitating and perhaps even trying to outdo Seneca.

The entire English revenge tragedy tradition is founded in this way on Seneca, although my understanding is that Italian theater absorbed Seneca first and some of the English gore is actually borrowed from Italian theater, so Senecan but at second-hand.

Meanwhile, French theater dropped the murdered children and kept the anti-drama, keeping the motionless full-act monologues.  Please see Mary Sidney’s outstanding 1592 translation of Robert Garnier’s Marc-Antoine (1578) or The Hebrew Women (1583), with the warning that as drama they are tedious.  Soon enough Jean Racine will figure out how to fill the static structure with emotional and poetic intensity.  Hard to believe that the pure Phèdre and the sloppy, mad Titus Andronicus both derive from the same source.

I mentioned that Seneca’s Medea kills her children onstage, but that is false because there was no stage.  Seneca’s plays were not performed in that sense.  Yet the act of reading, for Seneca and his peers, meant reading aloud – meant having a slave or servant read aloud to him – and thus any reading was a kind of performance.  It is easy to imagine groups of friends gathering to hear talented servants read the plays.  Still, there would be no masks or dragon chariots hanging from cranes or severed heads or murdered children.  All of that would be in the text and the imagination.  The Italians, and Shakespeare, putting that onstage, were distorting Seneca.

Elizabethan plays are crammed with paraphrased quotations of Seneca.  I won’t go into that.  There are books, as they say, entire books, some of which are just catalogues of the quotations.  Reading for the sententiae is probably lost to most of us today.

Nevertheless I enjoyed my return to Seneca, to the extent that his horrors are enjoyable, and hope to read them again someday.  Maybe I will try Emily Wilson’s recent translation.  I will certainly reread Dana Gioia.

This concludes my little Roman play project.  Thanks to anyone who read along or commented.

The endlessly adaptable plays of Plautus - I’ll make it into a comedy with some tragedy mixed in

The plays of Plautus are the foundation of Western comedy.  That they are based on the plays of Menander and the other Greek New Comedy writers was irrelevant, since all of those texts were soon lost.  Plautus (and his successor Terence) carried the stage traditions, the character types, and the jokes into the future.

I read five Plautus plays over the last five weeks.  A play a week seemed like a natural pace.  Amphitryon, Miles Gloriosus (The Braggart Soldier), Pseudolus, Rudens (The Rope), and The Menaechmus Twins, all from the late 3rd and early 2nd century BCE.  Plautus’s plays are also the beginning of Roman literature, the oldest surviving complete works.  The great age of Roman literature (Catullus, Virgil, Lucretius, etc.) is 150 years in the future.  Always curious what is saved and what is not.

How Plautus loves twins.  Separate them at birth and the confusions of their later meeting is all the comedy he needs.  And the play ends when the twins finally meet on stage.  Young Shakespeare turned The Menaechmus Twins into The Comedy of Errors, but added a second set of twins, likely borrowed from Amphitryon, to double the fun.  I have wondered if he was deliberately trying to outdo Plautus.

Revisiting these plays, and having read a lot more plays since I last read Plautus, Amphitryon looks like the star of the bunch.  Jupiter “seduces” Alcmena by appearing as her husband, a general who should be at the front but has returned home for one night just for the sex.  Mercury, disguised as the general’s servant, guards the door.  When the general and his servant return home early, sour comedy ensues as the gods openly torment the humans for laughs.  It all works out, since Jupiter impregnates Alcmena with Hercules, and anyway these are gods so what can you do?

Jean Giraudoux titled his 1928 version Amphitryon 38, putting the question in the title: why another Amphitryon, among the most adapted plays in history.  I’ve read versions by Molière and Heinrich von Kleist.  These versions both at least suggest that part of the comedy of Amphitryon, the abuse of power by the ruler, is not all that funny.  Even Plautus’s Mercury, in a prologue, first calls the play a tragedy, and when the audience groans “turn[s] it from a tragedy to a comedy without altering a line” (3, tr. Lionel Casson):

I’ll make it into a comedy with some tragedy mixed in.  After all, with kings and gods appearing in it, I don’t think it would be right to make it pure comedy.  (3)

But even the more typical comedies, with their young couple in love and loyal slave tricking the grumpy father who is keeping them apart, the purest of comedies, have their sour moments, particularly the way women are treated as property.  And these are the stories where love triumphs over money, fantasies that hint at some of the miseries of ordinary Roman life.

But no one, outside of a university Classics department, would now perform a Plautus play as such.  They are perfect for adaptation, which is what 20th century playwrights have dome with them.  Pump up the female characters, update the jokes, add new songs, and you have The Boys from Syracuse and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.  You have Amphitryon 38, and then 39 and 40.

In February I will read several plays by Terence, more elegant (I am told) and sophisticated (he invents the double plot) than popular Plautus.  Please try one if he sounds interesting.

Please read the Roman plays with me (although not all of them) - Plautus, Terence, Seneca

Roman plays, a sampling, readalong #1.

Fresh off the Greek plays, I want to revisit some of the surviving Roman plays to remind myself what they are like.  Twenty-six comedies and ten tragedies have survived.  I read about half of them long ago and plan to reread fewer than that.

My idea is that I will organize by writer.

Plautus.  Twenty comedies barley survived of the more than a hundred he wrote.  We were down to a single manuscript in the 8th century.  His plays often have little gaps in them, scenes that the mice ate.  The plays are hard to date, but Plautus died in 184 BCE, so late 3rd century to early 2nd. These are actually the earliest surviving complete Roman texts, so for us the beginning of Roman literature.

If you glance at modern translations of Plautus’s plays you will quickly see which are the most famous titles.  The Manaechmus Twins and Amphitryon lead directly to Shakespeare.  Shakespearists should read those two and immediately revisit The Comedy of Errors.  Molière also has an Amphitryon – there are so many versions of Amphitryon – and Plautus’s The Pot of Gold is the basis of Molière’s The Miser.  Miles Gloriosus / The Braggart Soldier is one fans of Falstaff should not miss.  Pseudolus stars the archetypal cunning slave, the center of an endless number of plays, eventually softened into the clever servant.

I think I will stick to these: Pseudolus, The Braggart Soldier, The Pot of Gold, The Manaechmus Twins, and Amphitryon.  I will skip two I have read before, Rudens / The Rope and Casina. I am trying to restrain myself.  I have other things to do.  But it would likely be rewarding to read all twenty.

Terence.  Six comedies by Terence, written between 166 BCE and 160 BCE, the year the young playwright died – or at least disappeared – on the way to Greece where he was looking for Greek plays to pillage.  All of the Roman playwrights reworked Greek plays, the comedians looting Menander and his peers.  Menander typically took two New Comedy plays and combined the plots.  None of the Terence plays or the surviving Plautus plays match with the extant Menander, so we have no idea how original the Romans were.

Terence is sophisticated compared to the populist Plautus.  His Latin is apparently especially elegant, for all the good that does me.  I do not think Shakespeare directly adapted a Terence play, but he and his peers often quote or parody Terence.

It would be easy enough to reread all six plays, but I will try to stick with The Girl from Andros, his first play, written when he was nineteen, The Mother-in-Law, The Self-Tormentor and The Eunuch.  Chosen based on distant memory.

Seneca.  Perhaps not the Stoic philosopher, but I will assume that it is.  He wrote eight plays in the mid-1st century, none of them meant for any kind of performance.  I believe they are all imitations of Euripides.

Elizabethan and Jacobean theater are suffused with Seneca.  Most important, perhaps, are the gruesome Thyestes and the grisly Medea, along with Phaedra and Hercules Furens.

With the Romans we can read Elizabethan translations, a kind of fun unavailable with the Greeks.  The 1581 Seneca: His Ten Tragedies is the place to look.  I read Hercules Furens in this collection; it is astounding(-ly horrible).

Pseudo-Seneca and the Other Pseudo-Seneca.  Octavia is a unique specimen, a play about contemporary events starring Emperor Nero, Empress Octavia and, um, Nero’s advisor Seneca.  If Seneca did write this, he deserves a lot of postmodern credit, but I remember the play as having more historical than literary interest.

I do not know much about Hercules Oetaeus except that it is likely an imitation of Seneca – in fact in places something of a collage of other Seneca plays – and is twice as long as any of the other plays, longer than any Greek play, too.  I’m skipping it, I guess.

 

My idea is to read roughly a play a week but to write about them once a month.  So, Plautus in early February, Terence in early March, and Seneca in early April.

If you are interested in looking at any of these plays, please let me know if some other scheme would be more suitable.

I sometimes feel like I need to apologize for the Roman plays (thus emphasizing their influence, for example), pale silver imitations of their Greek betters.  But I read Amphitryon a couple of days ago and enjoyed it immensely.  No wonder it is rewritten so often.  It’s a great play.  It got me excited to read more Plautus, certainly, and more Romans.