Page:Tragedies of Seneca (1907) Miller.djvu/24

6 fellow there. Certainly his famous Damon and Pythias shows some evidences of the influence of Seneca.

It is well known also that the most successful writers for the public stage in the years just preceding Shakespeare's advent, the years that determined the forms and the methods of the popular drama, were educated at the universities, and, however clearly they may have recognized the necessity of supplying to the populace story, action, the raw material of life and philosophy, cherished as an ideal the Senecan interest in situation, the Senecan love for broad description, for introspection and reflection, for elaborate monologue, and catchy sententiousness. Such were Greene and Peele and Marlowe; and Thomas Kyd, author of that most popular of plays, The Spanish Tragedy, and probable author of the version of Hamlet which held the stage for fourteen years before Shakespeare revised it and gave it a new and a different life, though not bred in either university, was more zealous about his Latin and apparently more influenced by Seneca than the university men themselves.

But, says some modern classical scholar, granting that these early dramatists were university men or men, like Kyd and Shakespeare, not trained in the universities but all the more zealous to match their productions with those which bore the official mark of classical scholarship, why should Seneca, a second-rate Roman tragedian, be continually cited in connection with classical influence instead of Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides, the supreme masters of ancient tragedy, and Aristotle, the unique expositor of the theory of the drama? The men of the Renaissance would have had a ready answer. In the first place, they knew very little about the Greek tragedians, or, for that matter, about Greek literature in general; for although the rediscovery of Greek literature was undoubtedly one of the events of that remarkable spurt of the human intellect and spirit which we call the Renaissance, Greek literature and life were, after all, in every country of Europe, far less important than Latin, as models for imitation, as sources of inspiration, as objects which engaged the attention of the moderns and set the pace which they tried to follow. As for tragedy, a few scholars in Italy and France and Germany and England knew Sophocles and Euripides—Aeschylus was almost unknown—but the theory and the practice of tragedy among the classicists were based almost exclusively upon the example of Seneca and the precepts of Horace. Aristotle is, indeed, often cited as the ultimate authority, but, although the voice may be the voice of Aristotle, the opinions are usually those of Scaliger or Minturno or Robortelli or Castelvetro, opinions which reduced to