Seneca
[Boyer looks at Medea and Thyestes, Senecan plays in which the principals are cast as "villain-heroes," and he examines the possible influence of such characterization on Elizabethan drama.]
The influence of Seneca on Elizabethan drama has been carefully though not exhaustively studied, so that there is general agreement as to the fact, if not the extent of his influence. To Seneca is usually attributed the introduction of the ghost and the chorus, the division of the play into five acts, as well as the introduction of various themes, such as revenge. It is the question of themes and the manner of treating them that concerns us here. All of Seneca's themes are violent and sensational. It is true that with the exception of Octavia they are taken from Greek sources, but owing to the manner of treatment they radiate anything but a Greek atmosphere. In the selection of characters, Seneca is faultless. Even Aristotle might be said to approve his choice, for the Greek critic remarks: "The best tragedies are founded on the story of a few houses—on the fortunes of Alcmaeon, Œdipus, Orestes, Meleager, Thyestes, Telephus, and those others who have done or suffered something terrible." But in the general management of his subjects, Seneca makes many of these tragedies not terrible, but shocking, horrible, revolting; hence they do not produce tragic pleasure. Revenge is, indeed, the impelling force which drives many of Seneca's characters to their monstrous deeds; but revenge is not, as some critics maintain, always represented by him as a sacred duty, as it came to be later on in Elizabethan drama, in the Hamlet type of play, for instance. It may be the death of a relative for which vengeance is sought, and the revenge may be associated with some supernatural force, as e.g. the ghost. But the ghost, in Thyestes at any rate, does not appear to urge Atreus to revenge as a sacred duty; on the contrary, it urges him to revenge that both he and Thyestes may suffer for their wickedness and that of their ancestors. The revenge itself is represented as sinful; it is undertaken for personal injuries, and is born of malice rather than of duty.
In thus representing faithlessness, cruelty, murder, revenge, and lust as governing the hearts and minds of men in high places—even in his appeal to magic and the supernatural—Seneca offered themes both familiar and pleasing to the audiences of the Elizabethan theatre. At the same time Seneca stood for antiquity, and his name, technic, and moralizing passages exerted a paramount influence with the classicists. Now among the plays of this authoritative and highly appreciated dramatist we find two that clearly suggest the villain-hero type, viz. Medea and Thyestes. Considering the remarkable influence of Seneca upon the Elizabethan drama in general, it would not be at all surprising if his influence extended to the shaping of the villain-hero type in particular.
Seneca follows Euripides in making Medea a villain as well as the heroine, but in the process he transforms her into a monster. In the first part of the Greek play, all our sympathy is awakened for Medea. We despise Jason. It is not until the heroine contemplates revenge that our sympathy is in the least abated. We could almost forgive her for an open murder of her enemies. When she contemplates the murder of her children, however, she begins to appear monstrous; but this feeling again merges into pity when we see how she suffers at the thought of losing them. Moreover, Euripides seeks to lessen the horror of the deed by laying stress upon the fact that Medea is killing her children to keep them from being killed by her enemies. But when she actually murders them, and triumphs in the car above Jason's head, rejoicing in her victory over him, and showing no signs of mother-pity, our aversion once more masters us. Nevertheless, the feeling that we carry away from a perusal of the play is one of mingled pity and aversion in which the former is fully as powerful as the latter.
In Seneca's tragedy the effect is quite different. Medea herself opens the play with a blood-curdling soliloquy, calling upon the powers above and below to damn for ever Jason, Creon, and Creüsa:
… and ye
Whose aid Medea may more boldly claim, thou
world
Of endless night, th' antipodes of heavenly realms,
Ye damned ghosts, thou lord of hades' dark domain,
Whose mistress was with trustier pledge won to thy
side—
Before ye all this baleful prayer I bring: Be near!
Be near! Ye crime-avenging furies, come and loose
Your horrid locks with serpent coils entwined, and
grasp
With bloody hands the smoking torch; be near as
once
Ye stood in dread array beside my wedding couch.
Upon this new-made bride destruction send, and
death
Upon the king and all the royal line! But he,
My husband, may he live to meet some heavier
doom;
This curse I imprecate upon his head; …
This dire curse at once alienates sympathy. We get the impression that Medea is an evil woman, and this impression becomes fixed, for the act is closed by the chorus immediately following this soliloquy. Medea does not tell of her own wrongs until Act II; and when she there enumerates the crimes she has been guilty of for Jason's sake, the cruelty of the deeds swallows up the reason for them. In Act III, in a conference with Jason, she learns that he loves his children, but she only makes use of this discovery to inflict brutal punishment. In Euripides, her children are to be banished, and she seeks to have them protected. In Seneca, the children are safe in the father's hands, which makes her slaughter of them the more revolting. In the fourth act she appears chanting horrible incantations, and herself steeps the bridal gifts in the brew that is to make them fatal. Finally, in the fifth act, she slays her children before the audience, and exults in the suffering of Jason. Her own hesitation over killing the children is scarcely touched as a motive. The result is that she becomes an extremely unsympathetic protagonist. The effect of the combination of villain and protagonist is disappointing; the emotions called forth are as untragic as Aristotle predicted.
In the tragedy of Thyestes the murderer Atreus appears as the villain. The mere fact that he is a murderer, however, does not make him a villain. We must remember that the wilfulness of the act is as important as the act itself. With the exception of Medea, none of the classical criminals seems to be acting altogether voluntarily. Thyestes suffers because he is the son of a doomed house; and even Atreus is inspired by the Ghost of Tantalus, who in turn is driven on by the Fury to do his allotted part. But in the case of Atreus this motive is lost sight of in his horrible cruelty and exultation in torture. He is one of the most monstrous creations in dramatic literature. As he prepares his brother's children as a feast for the parent, and glories in his wickedness, he is actually loathsome. With him we may fairly say it is crime for crime's sake.
Atreus. … 'Tis sweet to note
The father's frantic grief when first he sees
His children's gory heads; to catch his words,
To watch his colour change; to see him sit,
All breathless with the shock, in dumb amaze,
In frozen horror at the gruesome sight.
This is the sweet reward of all my toil—
To see his misery, e'en as it grows
Upon his soul.
Atreus is, in fact, the paragon of villains; the question is whether he is also the hero. The play is named after Thyestes, and, according to the Greek conception of the gods punishing evil from generation to generation until the original sin had been balanced by the punishment, the fate Thyestes meets with in this tragedy for the sins of his ancestors would doubtless have made him the protagonist in the estimation of a Greek audience. For Thyestes and Atreus were the sons of Pelops who was served as a dish to the gods by his father Tantalus; and from Atreus sprang Agamemnon who was killed by his wife. This whole family was so submerged in crime, and was so well known to the Greeks, that the tragic end of any one of them would have made that one the protagonist in their eyes. It is to be said also for Seneca's tragedy that the audience is informed by narration of the evil deeds committed in the past by Thyestes against his brother. But Thyestes is repentant, and has already suffered for his past sins by poverty and banishment when he is introduced to us. Consequently we are inclined to sympathize with him. When Tantalus and the Fury have retired after a prologue called Act I, Atreus appears in soliloquy and at once becomes the centre of interest. We hope that his scheme to entice his brother back will not be successful; we are most interested in him from beginning to end, because we wish him to fail in everything which he attempts; we are so filled with loathing and hatred for him mat we have little or no feeling, not even of pity, left for anyone else. It is not the effect of his machinations upon Thyestes as a hero with whom we are in sympathy that is the centre of interest, but his own frightful crimes, his colossal wickedness, his conflict with moral law. Moreover, he has the chief acting part and speaks the greatest number of lines, so that he may reasonably be classed as the hero according to our definition.
Unless the Elizabethans were thoroughly familiar with Greek legendary history and the Greek idea of retribution, as well as with the classic method of presenting merely the culmination of an action, they must have been much impressed by the preponderating part played by the criminals. Consider for a moment the startling nature of the Senecan themes:
Œdipus is guilty of incest, and gouges out his own eyes; Clytemnestra commits adultery, and murders her husband; Medea slaughters her own children, and hurls them down to her husband from the housetop; Atreus makes his brother drunk at a banquet, and serves him the flesh of his own children!
Considered in the bald outline, could any facts be more gruesome? And yet these plays were constantly read by the Elizabethan poets, and were regarded as the best examples of dramatic art. Violence and murder were before them as model themes for imitation, and in at least two of Seneca's plays the protagonists were themselves villains. Having the sanction of classicism, and appealing to the imagination of mat era, these tragedies undoubtedly exercised some influence in directing the Elizabethan playwright's choice and handling of theme, so that Seneca, if he did not furnish the actual models, may be said at least to have suggested the plot with the villain as hero.
The Elizabethans, however, must be credited with one distinct advance. The tragedy of Thyestes does not end unhappily for Atreus: he is successful in his designs and suffers no punishment. The same is true of Medea. Of course, the fact that the plays open only with the last phase of an action, and that those who do meet with misfortune are suffering because of their own past or the deeds of their ancestors, and likewise the fact that he who triumphs now will suffer in the play to follow, makes it excusable for the villain to succeed; but the effect, nevertheless, upon the reader at the close of one of these tragedies is anything but pleasing; it is distressing. Successful villainy adds shock to the horror of the crimes. If these plays served in any way as models for the Elizabethans, the reversal of fortune at the end for the villain-hero was their own addition. In presenting the whole of an action, though they were not squeamish in the actions they imitated, they recognized that a spectator demands at least some satisfaction for his moral sense if he cannot be elevated, and they consequently saw to it that the villain perished for his crimes before the curtain fell, though they had to strain a point to kill him.
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