Page:Tragedies of Seneca (1907) Miller.djvu/25

Rh laws what Aristotle had merely stated as observed practices, and which supplemented these rules by others drawn from the plays of Seneca, who was, according to these critics, the most majestic, the most tragic, the most perfect of the ancient tragedians. That Seneca's majesty seems to critics of today bombast, that his triumph in tragic quality consists in an accumulation of horrors and a consistently unfortunate ending, that his perfection of form is no more than a formal schematism, clear because it is simple and lifeless—all this may be true but is beside the mark. To the best spirits of the Renaissance, whether critical or creative, the ten tragedies which bore the name of Seneca presented the ideal of tragic art toward which modern writers should strive if they would be perfect.

What, then, was the influence of Seneca in England? Two excellent studies of different phases of it have been published, both, unfortunately, less known than they should be.

The purely formal influence, the influence upon dramatic technique and upon composition in the large sense of the term, is the subject of Rudolf Fischer's Die Kunslentwicklung der englischen Tragödie, perhaps the most ingenious and adequate scheme ever devised for the analysis of the technical and compositional features of any form of art. Fischer sees in the history of English tragedy before Shakespeare a steady approximation to the Senecan type. His argument is open to several objections. In the first place, he treats as if they belonged to the same simple line of development plays written for the public stage and the popular taste and those written for special audiences dominated by scholastic ideals. In the second place, as Professor Luick has pointed out, he has disregarded the influence exercised by the original form of the story dramatized upon the dramatic presentation of it. And, furthermore, he, in common with other students of the subject, has proceeded upon the assumption that only tragedy could have had any influence upon tragedy. He has neglected that remark of Ben Jonson's, which phrases the view not of his own time only but of all ages, "The parts of a comedy are the same with a tragedy," and has failed to see that for the structure of English tragedy, Roman comedy and the serious imitations of it by the men of the Renaissance—such as Gnapheus' Acolastus, Macropedius' Asotus and Rebelles, and their anonymous English offspring, The Nice Wanton—are no less important than the example of Seneca himself. But his book is interesting and enlightening as few books on any subject are.

Entirely different problems are dealt with in J. W. Cunliffe's little volume on The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy, a book which,