Two Tragedies of Seneca: Medea and The Daughters of Troy / Rendered into English Verse

these Senecan tragedies and the early English drama as it existed in mor

events of equal magnitude follow one another in epic profusion; the classic unities of time and place are unknown, and, so far as unity of action is observed, it is epic unity rather than dramat

s introspectiveness, this interest in spiritual problems and soul processes, we find in the English drama only after it has come under the Senecan influence, and it is found in its most exaggerated form in those dramas which are most closely modelled after the Senecan pattern. While the first effect of this influence was to lessen the dramatic interest, it is

e principle led to the nicer differentiation of character,-to the evolution of true dramatic personag

mitted on the stage, were necessary to the understanding of the drama; this led to the introduction of the stock character of messenger and of the long descriptive monologues so familiar in the classic drama. The widening of the interest in th

true organic structure, into five acts; these acts are separated by choruses, that bear much the same relation to the acts they separate as does the orchestral interlude of to-day-that is, no real relation; such hard-and-fast division into five par

nd most faithful English copies of the Latin model. In the Shakespearian drama the adherence to this classic form is less rigid, and the playwright adds or omits the choruses at will: in "Henry Fifth," the chorus not only separates the acts, as in Seneca, but also speaks the prologue; in "P

t formal but organic, and coincides with the structural divisions of introduction, rising action, climax

Tiberius,-an age when reason had lost its control, when changes were wrought by intrigue, cunning, and brute force; when vicissitudes of fortune and enormities of conduct were witnessed with the same curiosity which is excited by a fascinating drama, and with something of the same apathy, even when the spectat

a horrible caricature of the Senecan tragedy, where the pity and fear of the Greeks are turned to shuddering horror and crocodile tears. The result is seen in the riot of bloodshed and lust of the so-called tragedy of blood. What Mr. J. A. Symonds says of Marlowe's "Tamberlane" is true of this entire school: "Blood flows in

gencies,-of witches, ghosts, and apparitions; these are often little more than stage machinery: in Shakespeare, however, we find them transmuted into powerful adjuncts to the dramatic effect; compare the ghost of Tybalt, that appear

in the Senecan tragedy, the natural concomitant of all this sensational horror, and is evident in the