Seneca Censored
Seneca Censored
The English theatrical repertoire in the eighteenth century was dominated by plays that appealed to the audience’s sympathies, showing characters experiencing everyday dilemmas rather than debating the fate of mythical kingdoms. Seneca was therefore a less popular choice for translators, and those playwrights who did make use of his works transformed them into sentimental dramas. The increasing prevalence of stage naturalism in combination with the philhellenic movement ultimately led A. W. Schlegel to denounce Seneca as untheatrical: ‘frigid and bombastic’, his characters ‘colossal, misshapen marionettes’. For Schlegel’s contemporary Heinrich von Kleist, however, the marionette represented artistic perfection. Kleist’s hyper-tragedy Penthesilea challenged prevailing views of both classical antiquity and dramaturgical propriety.
Keywords: Schlegel, Kleist, Penthesilea, Stage Licensing Act, Lessing, marionettes, Richard Glover, James Thomson, sentiment, sympathy
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
