By A. J. Boyle
Tragic Seneca undertakes a thorough re-examination of Seneca's performs, their dating to Roman imperial tradition and their instrumental position within the evolution of the ecu theatrical tradition.
Following an advent at the background of the Roman theatre, the ebook presents a dramatic and cultural critique of the entire of Seneca's corpus, analysing the declamatory kind of the performs, their rhetoric, interiority, stagecraft and spectacle, dramatic, ideological and ethical constitution and their overt theatricality. every one of Seneca's performs is tested intimately, finding the strength of Senecan drama not just within the ethical complexity of the texts and their representations of strength, violence, historical past, affliction and the self, however the semiotic interaction of textual content, culture and culture.
The later chapters specialise in Seneca's effect on Italian, English and French drama of the Renaissance. A.J. Boyle argues that tragedians comparable to Cinthio, Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Webster, Corneille, and Racine owe a debt to Seneca that is going past allusion, dramatic shape and the remedy of tyranny and revenge to the improvement of the tragic sensibility and the metatheatrical mind.
Tragic Seneca makes an attempt to revive Seneca to a relevant place within the ecu literary culture. it's going to supply readers and administrators of Seneca's performs with the basic serious advisor to their highbrow, cultural and dramatic complexity.