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Book SynopsisIn Brill's Companion to the Reception of Senecan Tragedy, Eric Dodson-Robinson incorporates essays by specialists working across disciplines and national literatures into a subtle narrative tracing the diverse scholarly, literary and theatrical receptions of Seneca's tragedies. The tragedies, influential throughout the Roman world well beyond Seneca's time, plunge into obscurity in Late Antiquity and nearly disappear during the Middle Ages. Profound consequences follow from the rediscovery of a dusty manuscript containing nine plays attributed to Seneca: it is seminal to both the renaissance of tragedy and the birth of Humanism. Canonical Western writers from Antiquity to the present have revisited, transformed, and eviscerated Senecan precedents to develop, in Dodson-Robinson's words, "competing tragic visions of agency and the human place in the universe."
Trade Review"The collection provides a concise yet thorough picture of Seneca’s tragedies throughout the centuries and contributes both to contextualizing the history of classical reception and to understanding how European drama developed and continues to reinvent itself today." - Mary Hamil Gilbert, in: Religious Studies Review 42 (2016) 3 "[U]n précieux outil de référence pour tous ceux qui s’intéressent à l’histoire des tragédies et du théâtre latin en général, à la diffusion de Sénèque, à la circulation des idées et des formes artistiques antiques du Moyen- ge à nos jours.(...) Nous saluerons la clarté de la présentation ainsi que le soin apporté à l’orthographe et à la ponctuation, tel que nous n’avons relevé aucune coquille." - P. Paré-Rey, in: BMCR 2017.07.49 "[A] praiseworthy and beneficial publication, which should also be valued for the English translations from Latin and other languages – this makes the book accessible to a wider circle of readers. (...) [T]hroughout the collection of all texts a red thread weaves, bringing the fascinating realization that, with the exception of certain periods (middle ages and partly 19th century, when his influences was temporarily muted), Seneca “is a perennial contemporary and that his drama is like a cracked mirror in which almost any unsettled age finds its reflection” (R. Remshardt, p. 300)." - Daniela Čadková, in: Eirene LIV 2018
Table of ContentsContents List of Contributors 1 Introduction Eric Dodson-Robinson Part 1 - Antiquity 2 Imago res mortua est: Senecan Intertextuality Christopher Trinacty 3 Seneca Tragicus and Stoicism Christopher Star 4 Senecan Tragedy and the Politics of Flavian Literature Peter J. Davis Part 2 - Renaissance and Early Modern 5 Seneca Rediscovered: Recovery of Texts, Reinvention of a Genre Gianni Guastella 6 The Reception of Seneca in the Crowns of Aragon and Castile in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries 101 Tomas Martinez Romero 7 The Reception of the Tragedies of Seneca in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries in France Florence de Caigny, Translated by Eric Dodson-Robinson 8 Germany and the Netherlands: Tragic Seneca in Scholarship and on Stage Joachim Harst Early ‘English Seneca’: From ‘Coterie’ Translations to the Popular Stage Jessica Winston 10 Shakespeare vs. Seneca: Competing Visions of Human Dignity Patrick Gray Part 3 - Seneca in the Modern Age and Beyond 11 Senecan Gothic Helen Slaney 12 Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Receptions of Seneca Tragicus Francesco Citti 13 Seneca Our Contemporary: The Modern Theatrical Reception of Senecan Tragedy Ralf Remshardt 14 Rereading Seneca: The Twenty-First Century and Beyond Siobhan McElduff Index
