Memoria di Shakespeare. A Journal of Shakespearean Studies

Introduction

Silvia Bigliazzi — 2024-03-06

Shakespeare and the English Seneca in Print: Collections, Authorship, Collaboration, and Pedagogies of Play-Reading

Tara L. Lyons — 2023-12-31

Despite the abundance of scholarship debating Seneca’s influence on Shakespeare, there is no corresponding research on how Seneca’s print transmission informed Shakespeare’s books in print. This essay begins to address this critical gap by turning to two of the earliest multi-play collections printed in England that were devoted exclusively to English plays: Seneca His Tenne Tragedies (1581) and Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623). Of these two collections, Shakespeare’s has received far more critical attention as a book, but when the volumes are juxtaposed, their affinities are striking. Both play collections share a number of analogous organizational, paratextual, and typographic features that helped coalesce the authorial identities of an “English Seneca” and an original “Shakespeare”, respectively. Both collections bear the traces of their producers’ negotiations over the authenticity of the collected texts, the extent of their collaborative production, and the lessons they claimed to teach to early modern English readers. Although the Tenne Tragedies was not a direct bibliographical source for the First Folio, the English Seneca collection may have paved the way for the invention of Shakespeare as “Author” and the consumption of his now-famous First Folio.

Domesticating Seneca

Stephen Orgel — 2023-12-31

From the late seventeenth century, Seneca has had a bad press in England. Heavily rhetorical and declamatory, the plays were repeatedly declared unsuited to the stage. For the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater, however, Seneca was a model for drama, an essential resource. The plays were taught in school, and translations of all ten plays attributed to Seneca appeared between 1560 and 1581. Not only the early Shakespeare, especially Titus Andronicus, but even plays like King Lear and Othello reflect Seneca’s influence. This is largely invisible to us because our way of performing Shakespeare renders soliloquies meditative rather than declamatory, and strives for naturalism rather than stylization.

Seneca’s Metamorphoses, from Chaucer to Shakespeare

Dominique Goy-Blanquet — 2023-12-31

The Roman author of tragedies entered the Italian, French and English stages through the works of jurists. Lawyers, law and judgment played a significant part in his progress through the Middle Ages down to Shakespeare, down to us now through layers of time and critical approaches. How far Seneca influenced the English playwright, from the shrill calls for revenge of the early plays to the later debates on justice, in trial scenes performed before audiences playing judge and jury, that remains the question to be discussed here.

The Dark Side: Seneca and Shakespeare

Robert S. Miola — 2023-12-31

Seneca conducted Shakespeare on a journey through the dark side of human life – rage, madness, tyranny, revenge, and furor. This journey passed through infernal and nightmarish landscapes, per Stygia (“through Stygian regions”), per amnes igneos (“through rivers of fire”), and per scelera (“through crimes”). It introduced protagonists who dare to defy the gods and dislocate the universe by committing evils without precedent and beyond limit (modus). This experience of the dark side furnished Shakespeare (and most of the West) with resources for drama, especially tragedies like Titus Andronicus, Macbeth, Hamlet, Richard III, and Othello. We shall explore Shakespeare’s reception of these resources through three distinct but related modalities – quotation with and without Latin markers; the reimagination of extended passages, characters, and actions; and the refiguration of a convention, the domina-nutrix dialogue.

Seneca Improved: Shakespeare’s Medieval Optimism

Patrick Gray — 2023-12-31

Seneca’s tragedies are tantamount to anti-theodicies, featuring vicious cycles of violence that seem impossible to forestall, enacted by protagonists and antagonists at the mercy of forces beyond their control. Some critics such as Jan Kott try to align Shakespeare with this perspective. In Shakespeare’s plays, however, Senecan pessimism is relatively limited and almost always framed within the opposing conventions of vernacular Christian drama. Expressions of nihilism tend to be undercut by dramatic irony. Shakespeare’s distinctiveness in this regard is more apparent if we compare him to Marlowe, as well as later figures such as Webster. Senecan pessimism takes on new life for these early modern English playwrights as a classical analogue of the despair and abandonment they feel in response to Calvinism, which presents God as pitiless and inscrutable. Shakespeare, by contrast, hews more closely to an older and more optimistic vision of divine justice. Revengers and overreachers are not exultant at the end but instead defeated, deflated, and demoralized, like the Antichrists and Lucifers of medieval cycle plays. Characters have some degree of moral agency, like the protagonists of morality plays. They are offered opportunities for repentance, even if they do not always choose to change their ways. Providence provides quasi-miraculous resolutions. I focus here on Shakespeare’s four main tragedies, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear, as well as his rewriting of key elements of these tragedies in his later tragicomedies: Ophelia as the Jailer’s daughter in The Two Noble Kinsmen, Cordelia as Marina in Pericles, and Othello as Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, as well as Posthumus Leonatus in Cymbeline. Shakespeare’s medieval optimism, already apparent in his earlier tragedies, becomes more pronounced over the course of his career. While his contemporaries became more Neo-Senecan, Shakespeare instead doubled down on his lifelong indebtedness to medieval Christian drama and romance.

“Teach me how to curse”: Senecan Historiography and Octavia’s Agrippina in Richard III

Caroline Engelmayer — 2023-12-31

This article extends explorations of a Renaissance “Seneca available for generic appropriation” (Mayne 2020) by tracing Shakespeare’s receptions of the pseudo-Senecan Octavia in Richard III. As the only complete fabula praetexta (Roman historical drama) to have survived from antiquity, the Octavia offers critics the chance to trace the dramatic resources that an underexplored classical genre offered to early modernity. In the Octavia, an anonymous Flavian tragedy attributed to Seneca in the Renaissance, Shakespeare encountered a historiographical debate – invested in exploring processes of cultural memory and national myth-making – that interrogates the arc of Rome’s past. In Richard III, Shakespeare intervenes in the Octavia’s historiographical clash between Nero, who champions a teleological vision of the peace and stability of imperium sine fine, and the ghost of Agrippina, who locates in the ruling dynasty’s regime a cyclical continuation of Roman wars worse than civil. By reimagining Agrippina in Margaret of Anjou – an unrecognized adaptation – and staging the fulfilment of her Octavian curse, Shakespeare dramatizes the triumph of her cyclical philosophy of history. He discovers in the praetexta an unlikely source of inspiration for female voices from the margins that purge the sins of tyranny and shape the trajectory of a nation’s history.

Juliet Furens: Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as Senecan Drama

David Adkins — 2023-12-31

In what may be Romeo and Juliet’s most frightening moment, Juliet imagines what it might be like to awake in a crypt. Juliet’s nightmarish fantasy reads as Senecan, owing not least to her vision of Tybalt’s ghost, an element that derives ultimately from Bandello. But though Shakespeare’s version of the speech closely follows its sources, where it is original it greatly expands upon their Senecanism, culminating with a memory of Hercules Furens: rather than imagine the dead dismembering her, as in Bandello, Boaistuau, and Brooke, Shakespeare’s Juliet fears that she, like the mad Hercules, will desecrate the bodies of her family, plucking Tybalt’s corpse from its shroud and wielding a human bone as a club. If the play becomes a tragedy with the deaths of Tybalt and Mercutio, it is here that it becomes Senecan tragedy, for the Roman playwright haunts Romeo and Juliet to its end, hence Juliet’s Polyxena-like radiance before death. This essay argues that Romeo and Juliet – a play that rarely appears in discussions of Shakespeare’s reception of Roman tragedy – channels the terror and fury of Senecan personae, but also an attitude toward death that looks beyond Stoic resignation and toward transcendence.

“Like to the Pontic sea”: Early Modern Medea and the Dramatic Significance of Othello III.iii.456-61

Francesco Dall'Olio — 2023-12-31

This article offers a new take on a passage from the ‘seduction scene’ in Othello (III.iii.456-61), where scholarship has often recognized an imitation of a passage from Seneca’s Medea (404-7). It argues that this imitation has a deeper dramatic significance than previously recognized. It connects Othello to a well-established literary tradition founded on the perception of Medea in early modern English literature as a model of foreign, revengeful and powerful femininity. For this reason, her figure was, in Elizabethan prose and theatre, compared to or used as a model for the characterization either of rebellious female characters breaking societal norms to satisfy ‘unnatural’ desires, or for male characters suffering identity, social and/or gender, degradation. The passage in Othello apparently follows the same pattern. However, the context highlights a difference from this tradition, in so far as Othello is only an ambivalently integrated foreigner. The article shows how the imitation of Seneca’s Medea in the seduction scene fits into the dramatic and thematic patterns of Othello, contributing to the recent re-evaluation of continuities between this play and Senecan drama.

“No Lucrece”: The Ambiguity of Rape in The Queen of Corinth

Tommaso Continisio — 2023-12-31

Through the lens of New Historicism, the protagonists of Jacobean drama are deeply entangled in their social milieu, their identities inseparable from the context enveloping them. This entwined existence leaves them adrift, wrestling with an elusive self-definition, and lost in the absence of a recognisable ‘within’. Confronted with the Other, these characters hover on the edge of identity, navigating a liminal space that blurs the boundaries between self and society. Against this backdrop, I propose a reading of The Queen of Corinth, a play presumably written in 1616-1618 by Fletcher, Field, and Massinger. Specifically, I shall attempt to show how Merione, the most important character of the play, reacts to her rape in a way that deviates from the norm, since her courageous solution challenges the prevailing belief that suicide is the sole path to preserve honour. The tragicomic resolution of The Queen of Corinth suggests that the wrongdoer should not meet death but rather be forced to marry the victim of his violence – a change consistent with the spirit of Fletcher and his collaborators. Merione’s decision is a momentary claim of her own self, pushing back against the skewed subjectivity imposed by the male characters’ discourses throughout the play.

Voicing the Unspeakable. Political Dissent in Three Early Modern Plays

Rossana Sebellin — 2023-12-31

This paper explores how the lower classes voice discontent or political dissent in an acceptable balance between insubordination and formal respect of authority in three early modern texts written between the 1590s and the first decade of the 17^thcentury. The plays under analysis are The Life of Jack Straw and Thomas of Woodstock (both anonymous) and Shakespeare’s Richard II, which all deal with the same sovereign and his reign, characterised by three main crises. Despite their distinct approaches, they all address political grievances and present their own interpretations of monarchy, political power and the role of kingship. The comparison shows interesting shifts in the vision of the commonwealth and in the perception of power in a clear progression towards radicalisation in the criticism of the king, which leads to the later Civil War.

Selected Publications in Shakespeare Studies

Editorial Staff — 2023-12-31