The tragedies of imperial Roman playwright Lucius Annaeus Seneca have profoundly influenced the dramaturgical development of European theatre. This book surveys the ways in which Senecan tragedy has been staged from the Renaissance up to the present day. The senecan aesthetic, a theatrical mode that depended more upon vocal dynamics than on visual verisimilitude, treated its public more as audience than as spectators. It flourished while theatre itself remained a fundamentally aural domain. Senecan tragedy was a major resource for neo-Latin university declamation, the blood-soaked revenge trag ... More

The tragedies of imperial Roman playwright Lucius Annaeus Seneca have profoundly influenced the dramaturgical development of European theatre. This book surveys the ways in which Senecan tragedy has been staged from the Renaissance up to the present day. The senecan aesthetic, a theatrical mode that depended more upon vocal dynamics than on visual verisimilitude, treated its public more as audience than as spectators. It flourished while theatre itself remained a fundamentally aural domain. Senecan tragedy was a major resource for neo-Latin university declamation, the blood-soaked revenge tragedies of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, French neoclassical theatre, and the English Restoration stage. But in the mid-eighteenth century, the dual pressures of naturalism and philhellenism began to erode Seneca’s popularity, until Schlegel’s shrill denunciation silenced what he called its ‘frigid bombast’ altogether. The senecan aesthetic, repressed but still present, staged its return in the work of Antonin Artaud, who regarded Seneca as ‘the greatest tragedian of history’. He is certainly one of the most important, most revered, and most reviled. In tracing the history of Senecan tragedy in performance, The Senecan Aesthetic shows how practice, theory, and scholarship have always been interdependent.