William Alabaster

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Seneca and Neo-Latin Tragedy in England

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SOURCE: Binns, J. W. “Seneca and Neo-Latin Tragedy in England.” In Seneca, edited by C. D. N. Costa, pp. 205-34. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Limited, 1974.

[In the following excerpt from his essay on three neo-Latin tragedies from the Elizabethan age, Binns determines the influence of Seneca upon Alabaster's Roxana.]

A large number of Renaissance plays which were written in Latin survive today from all the countries of Europe.1 In England, the plays which are extant from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries form an interesting by-way of the Elizabethan drama.2 A number of tragedies in particular remain, which, cast in Senecan mould, constitute an aspect of Seneca's influence which has been little discussed. The extent of Seneca's influence on the popular drama of the Elizabethan age continues to be debated.3

On the Latin drama of the age, the drama written by educated men, who were often members of the Universities of Oxford or Cambridge, the extent of Seneca's influence is less open to doubt. Seneca, as the only surviving ancient writer of Latin tragedy, would be familiar to any cultivated man of the times with an interest in literature, especially in view of the pre-eminent position which tragedy then occupied among the literary genres. The plays of Seneca were almost certainly on the syllabus at Westminster School,4 which was attended by two important writers of Academic drama, William Gager and William Alabaster. William Gager, in the prologue to an expanded version of Seneca's Hippolytus which was performed at Christ Church, Oxford, in February 1591/2, could assume that at any rate all the men in the audience, even if not the women, would be familiar with the play.5

Modern scholars tend to consider that Seneca's plays were not written for performance on the stage. Renaissance critics, however, generally believed that Seneca's plays had been performed;6 and several performances are indeed recorded at Oxford and Cambridge during the sixteenth century. G. C. Moore Smith records the performance at Trinity College, Cambridge, of a Troades in 1551/2 and 1560/1, of an Oedipus in 1559/60, and of a Medea in 1560/1 (the 1551/2 performance being certainly of Seneca's play, and the other performances mentioned almost certainly of his plays); of a Hecuba, again at Trinity College, in 1559/60 (probably Seneca's Troades); and of a Medea, perhaps Seneca's Medea, at Queens' College, Cambridge, in 1563.7 G. C. Moore Smith came to the conclusion that ‘the original Latin tragedies of Seneca continued to be given on College stages at least down to 1583’,8 and writing of Cambridge Academic plays performed before 1585, he states: ‘Judging from the titles of acted plays, Plautus, Terence, and Seneca were the Latin authors most drawn upon’.9 At Oxford, F. S. Boas lists a performance at Christ Church of Octavia (probably the pseudo-Senecan play) in 1588, as well as the performance which I have already mentioned of Hippolytus with additional scenes written by Gager in February 1591/2 at Christ Church.10 Gager himself writing in defence of Academic drama refers to the acting of Seneca as a commonplace event:11

We contrarywise doe it [i.e. come upon the stage] to recreate owre selves, owre House, and the better parte of the Vniversitye, with some learned Poeme or other; to practyse owre owne style eyther in prose or verse; to be well acquaynted with Seneca or Plautus; honestly to embowlden owre yuthe; to trye their voyces, and confirme their memoryes; to frame their speeche; to conforme them to convenient action; to trye what mettell is in evrye one, and of what disposition thay are of; wherby never any one amongst vs, that I knowe, was made the worse, many have byn much the better.

Academic acting, then, served the twin ends of amusement and education. It also helped to diffuse a knowledge of and interest in Seneca's tragedies throughout the universities. In all probability, anyone who sat down in the sixteenth century to compose a tragedy written in Latin was thoroughly familiar with Senecan tragedy. Latin tragedies on Senecan lines both are a reflection of the contemporary fascination with Seneca, and help to propagate this interest.

I propose to discuss in this chapter three Latin tragedies to which little attention has been paid, and then to try to see whether it is possible to draw any conclusions which may help us to modify our view of Seneca's influence on the Elizabethan drama.

The first play I shall discuss is Roxana, a Latin tragedy by William Alabaster, the minor English poet and writer of works of mystical theology.12 This play was first published in a pirated edition in 1632, and was followed in the same year by an authorized edition described on the title page as: A plagiarii unguibus vindicata, aucta, et agnita ab Authore (claimed from the claws of the plagiarist, expanded, and acknowledged as his own by the author). Alabaster states, in a dedicatory letter to Sir Ralph Freeman,13 also a dramatist, that the play had, however, been written and acted about forty years previously (at Trinity College, Cambridge, in c. 1592), when Elizabethan drama was entering the period of its greatest florescence. As in most of Seneca's tragedies, the action of Roxana commences when events are approaching a crisis: much that is important for the narrative had already happened before the play begins, and in the authorized version of the play to which I shall refer in my discussion, a brief summary outlines these events for the reader. In performance these would have been explained by an early speech of the ghost of Moleon, who recounts his past history on his return from the underworld.

When Oxiartes, king of Bactria, lay dying, he entrusted to his brother Moleon the tutelage of his kingdom and his son, Oromasdes, until the latter should be of an age to rule. When Moleon found excuses for not handing over the kingdom, Oromasdes fled to India and married Atossa, the daughter of an Indian king. Returning with a military force, he deposed and executed Moleon. Moleon had a daughter, Roxana, whom, lest she fall into the victor's hands, he had sent away to a secret hideout in the depths of the forest, accompanied by faithful attendants and all necessary supplies. Oromasdes, separated from his companions whilst out hunting, chanced upon Roxana's hideaway, made her his mistress, and had a son and a daughter by her.

Oromasdes has known Roxana for ten years when the action of the play begins with the return from the underworld to Bactria, his old kingdom, of the ghost of Moleon. Moleon had been promised his revenge by the ruler of the underworld. The figure of Death approaches and offers his aid. To him Moleon outlines his tale, maintaining that he had always intended to deliver up the kingdom to Oromasdes when the latter was ready for it, but Oromasdes had acted too precipitately. The seduction of his daughter was a further wrong to be avenged. Roxana too must pay for loving her father's murderer and for bearing children by him. Moleon decides to set his vengeance in motion by use of the figure of Suspicion, who enters, and is briefed by Moleon. A chorus concludes the act, telling of strange omens: the howling of an owl, a wolf entering the court, two snakes entering Atossa's bedroom. Suspicion begins now to poison the minds of the characters.

Act II opens with Oromasdes beset by ill-defined feelings of unease. He wonders whether his wife Atossa has found out about the existence of his mistress Roxana. He sends his counsellor, Bessus, to make sure that all is well with Roxana. Bessus is afraid lest the king believe that he has betrayed his secret. He begins to fall in love with Atossa and to her he recounts his love. Bessus informs Atossa of the existence of Roxana and her two children, and says that the king is thinking of divorcing Atossa. Atossa is outraged at the news, pledges her love to Bessus, and plots vengeance against her husband. In Act III Oromasdes debates with a senator, Arsaces, the advisability of divorcing his wife on the grounds that she has produced him no heir. Meanwhile Bessus has brought Roxana and her children from her forest retreat to the court, under the pretence that she is to be made queen. Atossa, pretending to be Oromasdes's mother, greets Roxana fulsomely. In the next scene, Arsaces soliloquizes on the vices of the court.

At the beginning of Act IV a messenger enters, overwhelmed with the atrociousness of the news with which he is burdened. He proceeds to relate this piece by piece to the chorus. The messenger describes a secret chamber to the north of the palace, shaded by trees of yew and cypress. The chamber is haunted, and used for black-magic rites. When Roxana, who thought she was about to go through a marriage ceremony with Oromasdes, entered the chamber, Atossa had chained her hands together, taunted her, and then had her flogged. The ghost of Moleon now appears and interrupts the messenger's narration with exclamations of delight. Atossa had placed a sword in Roxana's hands and then forced her to kill her own children. In the next scene, Oromasdes, ignorant of what has just occurred, begins to suspect Bessus's loyalty; he hears him speaking of his love for Atossa and kills him, thinking that the secret of Roxana is now quite safe.

In the first scene of Act V Atossa is boasting that she has outdone Medea in monstrous crime. She is preparing a banquet at which she will serve up the bodies of Roxana and her children. She has prepared a poisoned garland for Oromasdes, which will drip into his goblet of wine and cause him to die. Oromasdes is meanwhile plotting to murder Atossa in exactly the same way. The ghost of Moleon arrives to watch the consummation of his vengeance. When they have eaten, Oromasdes reveals to Atossa the head of Bessus. In return, she reveals to Oromasdes that he has eaten from the bodies of Roxana and her two children. Both now begin to die from the poison they had prepared for each other. Atossa looks forward to the glory she will enjoy in the lower world for her deeds. Oromasdes dies, and Atossa dies immediately afterwards.

The prefatory material to the authorized printed version of the play tells us a good deal about its composition. In the dedicatory letter to Ralph Freeman, Alabaster calls the play a morticinum … abortum (a dead, unfinished piece), written in two weeks, and intended, not for immortality, but for one performance only. He had hoped that his play could rest undisturbed, but a plagiarist brought the play to light, and printed it from a corrupt manuscript; the plagiarist was responsible for increasing the number of blemishes caused by the hasty composition of the play. Alabaster had been faced with the choice of allowing this faulty version to be perpetuated, or else of supplicating again his youthful Muses, although he was now nearly seventy. He had therefore chosen to issue under his own name a more correct version of the play.

In fact, the pirated version is a good deal closer to the authorized version than one would think from Alabaster's protestations. The pirated version is indeed rather more handsomely printed than the authorized version. The choruses in particular are set out more elegantly. Moreover, the authorized version contains a long list of errata at the end of the play, and the first scene of Act II is headed ‘Actus Secundus, Scena Quarta’. There are numerous differences of word order, of accidence, and of punctuation between the two versions, together with many small differences of phraseology, but otherwise it is the same play, virtually line for line. The title page of the authorized version advertises the work as aucta (expanded), but the expansions are few and far between. The plot summary of events immediately antecedent to the opening of the play does not appear in the pirated version. On the other hand, the authorized version lacks the scene-by-scene summaries which the pirated version possesses. Otherwise the chief additions to the authorized version are nine lines at the end of the first speech of Death in Act I, scene 2; five lines in the middle of his second speech in the same scene; six lines of stichomythia between Death and Suspicion in Act I, scene 4; a short interchange of seven lines between the chorus and Atossa in Act V, scene 1; and four and a half lines added to Oromasdes's last speech in the final scene of the play. It may be that Alabaster wrote these lines especially for his edition of the play, and that this is what he means when he says that he had to supplicate the Muses of his youth once again. The surviving manuscripts of the play,14 strangely enough, stand in close relation to the pirated version of the play, not to the authorized version. Alabaster's indignation is undoubtedly overstated in the dedicatory letter which prefaces the play.

He states furthermore that the authorized edition of the play is crebra linearum interpelatione caperata (wrinkled with interpellation of many lines), although the additions amount to less than thirtyfive lines. Alabaster considered that the style of the play was extravagant throughout. He refers to its dictionis … lolium (the weeds of its diction). In addition he made a plea for the play to be declaimed in a ranting manner (sig. A5r.):

cum spuma soni, ut solent poetae tragoedias suas, quia in grandius quodammodo excoluntur, quae cum ampulla oris leguntur.


(with a foaming sound, in the manner in which poets are accustomed to recite their tragedies, because works which are read in a bombastic voice become even more perfect.)

This suggests that Alabaster prized Roxana for its grandiose, inflated style, the Latin equivalent, perhaps, of the ranting bombast of Elizabethan popular tragedy.

It may well be that, as I shall suggest below (p. 229), Renaissance Latin tragedies, and the tragedies of Seneca himself, were valued more for their style than for their dramatic qualities. Commendatory verses by Hugh Holland,15 who also contributed a dedicatory poem to Shakespeare's First Folio, commend the fluency of the inflated style of Roxana (sig. A5v.):

Quis Graium tonat ore tam rotundo,
Cuius tam cita Musa tamque pressa?

(Which of the Greeks thunders in voice so orotund? Whose Muse is so swift and so concise?)

In another dedicatory poem, Thomas Farnaby,16 the brilliant Elizabethan scholar, renowned for his editions of Seneca and other classical authors, praised the exalted style of the play:

Roxana scenae emancipata pulpitis
Olim, ubi, cothurno nixa, contempsit solum,
Calcavit astra, condidit coelo caput.

(Roxana is freed from the boards of the stage, where once, supported by her tragic buskin, she contemned the ground, trampled the stars, and hid her head in the heavens.)

(sig. A6v)

Modern taste may tend to disparage as inferior imitations the Latin writings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; yet for Roxana to merit the praises of such a one as Farnaby was in its day no mean achievement. Moreover, in his Index Poeticus (London, 1634), a glossary of poetical commonplaces, giving references to treatments of various themes in ancient and modern Latin authors, Farnaby lists Alabaster as one of the seven modern Anglo-Latin authors on whom he has drawn for illustrative material. Although he refers on occasion to Alabaster's poems, most of his allusions to Alabaster are to Roxana. He refers the reader to the chorus at the end of Act III for a description of the power of love; to Act III, scene 4 for the arts of the courtier; to Act II, scene 2 for the mutability of Fortune; to Act II, scene 3 for the Furies; to Act IV, scene 1 for omens; to Act II, scene 4 and Act III, scene 2 for dreams; and to Act II, scene 4 for vengeance. Thomas Fuller too, in his Worthies of England,17 describes Alabaster as ‘a most rare poet as any our age or nation hath produced; witness his tragedy of Roxana admirably acted in [Trinity] college, and so pathetically, that a gentlewoman present thereat (Reader, I had it from an author whose credit it is sin with me to suspect), at the hearing of the last words thereof, Sequar, sequar, so hideously pronounced, fell distracted, and never after fully recovered her senses.’

Dr Johnson too remarked that ‘Milton was the first Englishman who, after the revival of letters, wrote Latin verses with classick elegance. … If we produced anything worthy of notice before the elegies of Milton, it was perhaps Alabaster's Roxana.18

Thus Alabaster himself and those who commend the play seem to stress its stylistic virtues, and we should bear this in mind in any discussion of the play. Although Alabaster complains that a plagiarist has made free with his play, Roxana is an adaptation, with some omissions and additions, of an Italian play, Luigi Groto's La Dalida (Venice, 1572); Alabaster however reduces by about half the great length (some 4,000 lines) of Groto's play. Alabaster's reliance on Groto for the details of his plot again suggests that his interest in literary composition lay not so much in the invention of his material but in his manner of treating it.

None the less, Alabaster's play, by virtue alone of being written in Latin, can succeed in coming much closer to the Senecan style and mood. The Senecan qualities are not transposed by being rendered into another language, as tends to happen in the Elizabethan translations of Seneca, where the language of the translation takes on a life of its own. Roxana is certainly bloodthirsty and horrific; the atmosphere is extravagant and exotic. The setting is the kingdom of Bactria in the Balkans; Oromasdes's wife, Atossa, is an Indian princess; and the names of the other characters too are Oriental: Arsaces, the senator; Sisimithres and Ariaspe, Roxana's children; Damiana, attendant upon Atossa. The whole of the first act is devoted to Moleon's account of his wrongs and his desire for vengeance. He, and the stylized figures of Death and Suspicion, are the only characters to appear in the act. Human characters do not appear until Act II, unless one counts the chorus at the end of Act I. The play is economically constructed with few characters. There is no sub-plot. Bessus and Atossa are balanced by Oromasdes and Roxana, and this symmetry is emphasized by the way in which Oromasdes and Atossa choose to kill each other with poisoned flowers, after having first killed each other's lovers.

That episode provides the horrific climax of the play. Earlier, however, a lengthy and explicit description of the sadistic torture of Roxana by Atossa had been given (sig. D6v.):

                                        creber et roseam cutem
Plagis aravit, lividi vibicibus
Sulci tumescunt, corpus et totum fuit
Pro vulnere uno; …
…                                        saepe ceu tubulis latex
Ruptis, aqualis exilit, fusus cruor,
In ora Atossae purpurae guttas pluit
Tingens pudore debito invitas genas.
At illa spumas sanguinis laeta accipit,
Ut sicca tellus lucidos imbres bibit
Torrente Cancro.

([the assistant] ploughed frequent blows across her rosy skin; the livid furrows swell with weals, her whole body was as one wound. … Her blood, spilt like water when it spurts from burst pipes, showers bright drops on Atossa's face, staining her cheeks with the colour which they ought to have had, but were unwilling to assume. Atossa however happily receives these drops of blood, just as the parched earth drinks up the shining rain at the height of the summer.)

The play dwells lovingly on moments of unnatural horror, on the compelled slaughter by Roxana of her own children, on Oromasdes's feelings when he knows he has eaten his own wife and children. Atossa sees herself consciously acting like a character in a Senecan tragedy. When she hears that her husband has a mistress, she suffers more than Medea (sig. C4v.):

                                                                      non sic ruit
Medea, laesi stimulo amoris saucia,
Quando astra, et omnes ad suos gemitus Deos
Deduxit: hoc maior mihi incumbit dolor,
Furorque maior.

(Medea, wounded by the goad of her injured love, did not rush thus when she drew down to her groaning the stars and all the gods. I am possessed by a greater grief and a greater madness.)

Atossa decorates the chamber where Roxana is tortured with pictures of, amongst others, Medea dividing the limbs of her brother, Hippolytus dragged along by his father's chariot, and Thyestes eating his own children. She boasts that she has excelled the crimes of Medea (sig. E2v.):

Haec dicta Medeae date; haud superbiat
Cristasque tollat propter antiquum scelus:
Atossa maius hoc dedit, maius dabit.

(Bear these words to Medea: let her not be proud, let her not preen herself on her ancient crime. Atossa has committed a greater one, and will commit a greater.)

Nor has Atossa relied on supernatural help, as Medea did, but on her own resources (sig. Ezv.):

Hoc quicquid est ab uno, in uno pectore
Natum et petitum est, nemo laudem hanc dividet.

(Whatever I have done has been conceived and attempted by and in one heart. No one will share the praise with me.)

After Atossa has killed Roxana and her children, and has made from their bodies a dish to be served to Oromasdes, she prepares to kill him too by means of a poisoned garland and replies to the remonstrating chorus (sig. E3r.):

Nihil Thyestem, Tantalum nihil supra
Conabor?

(Shall I not attempt more than Thyestes or Tantalus did?)

Oromasdes sees Atossa as worse than Medea (sig. E5v.):

                    O Furia Scyllae quoque
Pudenda vel Medeae, et orci faecibus.

(O Fury of whom Scylla, or Medea, and the dregs of hell would be ashamed.)

The chorus too compares her crime with that of Atreus in Thyestes (sig. E1v.-E2r.):

Ad tua quondam fata Thyestes
Flexit refugam lampada Phoebus,
Et caeruleo proluit haustu
Nondum emeritos fine iugales:
Non minor haec est causa latendi,
Et digna tuo Phoebe exilio.

(Phoebus once guided a lamp which shunned to look upon your fates, Thyestes; and he bathed in the sky-blue draught the team that had not served their course. There is here no less cause for hiding away, no less cause for your absence, O Phoebus.)

The messenger also says that Atossa has equalled the crime of Atreus (sig. D4r.). The number of such allusions suggests that the play is to be seen within the Senecan tradition. And this suggestion is indeed borne out by the play, with its vengeful ghost, its moralizing chorus, its long speeches on stock themes, its horrific incidents, its stichomythia and sententiae.

.....

Renaissance Latin tragedy is, then, another channel through which the influence of Seneca distils itself. Written in Latin, free from the inevitable distortions which the constraints of another language imposed upon Senecan tragedy in the vernacular, these tragedies constitute a neglected but important aspect of Seneca's influence in the sixteenth century. When performed at a university they would come to the notice of an influential section of educated men. These tragedies would both meet and help to shape the assumptions of such an audience about tragedy, assumptions which they would then carry away with them from the university to regions far beyond.

Notes

  1. A list of original Neo-Latin plays printed before 1650 is given by Leicester Bradner in ‘The Latin drama of the Renaissance (1340-1640), Studies in the Renaissance, iv (1957), pp. 31-70.

  2. The best accounts of this drama are Frederick Samuel Boas, University Drama in the Tudor Age (Oxford, 1914), and George Charles Moore Smith, College Plays Performed in the University of Cambridge (Cambridge, 1923). Plot summaries of most of the important plays were given by George B. Churchill and Wolfgang Keller, ‘Die lateinischen Universitäts-Dramen Englands in der Zeit der Königin Elisabeth’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, xxxiv (1898), pp. 221-323. There is a brief account of Seneca's connections with University drama in Henry Buckley Charlton, The Senecan Tradition in Renaissance Tragedy (Manchester, 1946), pp. clxxi-clxxii. Ghost scenes in Elizabethan drama, including those in Alabaster's Roxana and the Perfidus Hetruscus are discussed by Gisela Dahinten, Die Geisterszene in der Tragödie vor Shakespeare (Palaestra, 225) (Göttingen, 1958).

  3. For a recent article arguing against the influence of Seneca, see G. K. Hunter, ‘Seneca and the Elizabethans: a case study in “Influence”’, Shakespeare Survey, xx (1967), pp. 17-26.

  4. See Thomas Whitfield Baldwin, William Shakspere's Small Latine and Lesse Greeke (Urbana, 1944), ii, p. 560. From the evidence he concludes: ‘It looks as if Westminster was the grammar school center of propagation for Seneca in the sixteenth century.’

  5. ‘Tragoediae summam eloqui, non est opus; Quem Seneca, vestrum lateat?’ (Prologue, lines 29-30). Gager's addition to Hippolytus are edited in my ‘William Gager's additions to Seneca's Hippolytus’, Studies in the Renaissance, xvii (1970), pp. 153-91.

  6. See e.g. George Puttenham, ‘The Arte of Englishe Poesie’, Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. George Gregory Smith (London, 1950), II, p. 27; Martino Antonio Delrio, ‘Prolegomena De Tragoedia’, esp. chapters vi-viii in L. Annaei Senecae Tragoediae, ed. Joannes Casper Schröderus (Delft, 1728), sigs f3v.-g3v.; Daniel Heinsius, De Tragoediarum Auctoribus Dissertatio, also in Schröderus's edition, esp. sig. b4v.

  7. G. C. Moore Smith, College Plays …, pp. 53-7, 106, and ‘Plays performed in Cambridge Colleges before 1585’, Fasciculus Ioanni Willis Clark dicatus (Cambridge, 1909), pp. 269-70.

  8. College Plays, p.5.

  9. ‘Plays performed in Cambridge Colleges before 1585’, p. 272.

  10. Boas, op. cit., p. 389.

  11. See Karl Young, ‘William Gager's Defence of the Academic Stage’, Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, xviii (1916), pp. 593-638. The extract quoted is on p. 614.

  12. See DNB [Dictionary of National Biography] s.v., ‘Alabaster’; the introduction to The Sonnets of William Alabaster, ed. George Morley Story and Helen Gardner. Oxford English Monographs (London, 1959); and Louise Imogen Guiney, ‘William Alabaster 1567/8-1640’, Recusant Poets (New York, 1939), i, pp. 335-46.

  13. See DNB, s.v., ‘Freeman, Ralph’.

  14. Cambridge University MS. Ff, 11.9; Lambeth Palace MS. 838; Emmanuel College, Cambridge MS., III.1.17; Trinity College, Cambridge MS. R. 17.10. There is a further MS. which I have not seen in Yale University Library. Alfred Harbage, Annals of English Drama 975-1700, rev. by Samuel Schoenbaum (London, 1964), p. 307 records also a MS. of an English translation which I have not seen: Folger Shakespeare Library MS. V b. 222.

  15. See DNB s.v. ‘Holland, Hugh’.

  16. See DNB s.v. ‘Farnaby, Thomas’.

  17. (London, 1840), iii, 185.

  18. ‘Milton’, Lives of the English Poets (London, 1959), I, p. 65.

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