The Senecan Aesthetic

A Performance History

Helen Slaney

Classical Presences

Provides a broad historical overview of the reception of Seneca's plays, from the Renaissance to the present day
Covers both French and English reception
Offers readers a fresh perspective on Seneca's writings by focusing on performance
Employs a comparative, interdisciplinary methodology

The Senecan Aesthetic

A Performance History

Helen Slaney

Description

Alongside the works of the better-known classical Greek dramatists, the tragedies of Lucius Annaeus Seneca have exerted a profound influence over the dramaturgical development of European theatre. The Senecan Aesthetic surveys the multifarious ways in which Senecan tragedy has been staged, from the Renaissance up to the present day: plundered for neo-Latin declamation and seeping into the blood-soaked revenge tragedies of Shakespeare's contemporaries, seasoned with French neoclassical rigor, and inflated by Restoration flamboyance. In the mid-eighteenth century, the pincer movement of naturalism and philhellenism began to squeeze Seneca off the stage until August Wilhelm Schlegel's shrill denunciation silenced what he called its "frigid bombast." The Senecan aesthetic, repressed but still present, staged its return in the twentieth century in the work of Antonin Artaud, who regarded Seneca as "the greatest tragedian of history." This volume restores Seneca to a canonical position among the playwrights of antiquity, recognizing him as one of the most important, most revered, and most reviled, and in doing so reveals how theory, practice, and scholarship have always been interdependent and inseparable.

The Senecan Aesthetic

A Performance History

Helen Slaney

Classical Presences

Acknowledgements
List of Figures
Editions and Citations
Introduction
i. Senecan, Performance, Reception
ii. What's Senecan About Seneca?
1. The Open Book
i. In Defence of Student Theatre
ii. Neo-Latin Performance Practice
iii. Progne
iv. Theatre in Education
2. 'Excess is her Disease'
i. Translating the Tenne Tragedies
ii. English(ed) Seneca
iii. Jacobean Variations
3. Nourished on Blood
i. Enter the Diva
ii. The Art of Tragedy
iii. Realisme Senequien
iv. Translation and Adaptation
v. The Merveilleux
4. The Great Repression
i. Tragedy Regulated
ii. Phaedra/Phedre
5. Hypertragedy
i. Neronian gambols
ii. Horror Plays of the Exclusion Crisis
6. Seneca Censored
i. The Long Eighteenth Century
ii. A Backdrop to Schlegel
iii. Colossal, Misshapen Marionettes
7. Signalling Through the Flames
i. Shelley's Cenci
ii. Artaud's Cenci
8. Seneca in '68
i. Deeper into Language
ii. The Fetters of the Eyes
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

The Senecan Aesthetic

A Performance History

Helen Slaney

Classical Presences

Author Information

Helen Slaney is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in Classics at St. Hilda's College, Oxford.

The Senecan Aesthetic

A Performance History

Helen Slaney

Classical Presences

Reviews and Awards

"Remarkable and very appreciable ... is the effort to renew the study of the senequista theater and its successors and force the reader to value otherwise certain phenomena already well known as rhetoric pathetic, the metatheality and also the dynamic structure that drives to the Senecan characters of the furor al scelus nefas (the monstrous crime). ... Undoubtedly, his greatest achievement consists in proposing, from Seneca, a diachronic reflection on the essence of the theater that goes beyond the aesthetic framework to interrogate also their anthropological foundations." --Florence d'Artois, Bulletin of the Comediantes

"a welcome addition to the growing body of work on the reception of Senecan tragedy and the plays' performance history ... Slaney provides an excellent history of the reception of Senecan drama since the early modern period. She is particularly sensitive to how complex this history is, especially during periods when Seneca was officially out of favour." --Christopher Star, Classical Journal Online