Page:Tragedies of Seneca (1907) Miller.djvu/27

Rh utterance cited so abundantly by Cunliffe and by Munroe (Journal of Philology, Vol. VI, pp. 70–79), though they could be increased by many passages in Macbeth and King Lear as well as in the plays of other dramatists than Shakespeare, are after all not fundamental. Some other features that seem fundamental may be noted.

In the first place, although it is doubtless true that the scanty scenery of the Elizabethan stage is largely the excuse and the reason for the long descriptive passages with which the dramatists of that time delighted themselves and delight us, their modern readers, this is perhaps not the whole of the story. There are passages of exposition, of reflection, of pure declamation, equally long as well as equally beautiful. The Renaissance love of talk, of fine language, of eloquentia, may explain this in part; but it is doubtless due in part also to the example of Seneca, who never loses an opportunity for a long passage of description or introspection or reflection or mere declamation—making them indeed for the Chorus when the situation does not allow them to the ordinary dramatis personae.

Then we may note that the thoroughly melodramatic character of Elizabethan tragedy is a natural inheritance from Seneca. Greek tragedy had, to be sure, many melodramatic situations, along with others of a milder type. But the religious element in the tragedy of Aeschylus and Sophocles radically modifies the character and tone of the most poignant, and repulsive themes and situations. When Seneca took the most difficult of Greek themes and, following the lead of Euripides, cast away the over-ruling, compulsive dominance of the Greek theocracy, he produced melodrama. Most moderns have been either content to follow him or compelled to do so for lack of the ability to create striking situations without the aid of villains of melodramatic criminality. A few of the French tragedians have had recourse to the method of the Greeks either by reviving the Greek mythology and theocracy or by resorting to Hebrew history for characters whose deeds, however criminal, were necessary parts of a divine plan. Shakespeare, almost alone, has at his best succeeded in substituting for the gods and fate the inevitable results of human character and the moral law, in presenting the worst deeds of his leading figures as less the results of free intention than of futile efforts to deliver themselves from the web of circumstance which their first crimes or follies have woven about them—the whole career of Macbeth, for example, being the necessary outcome of his attempt to get free of the difficulties and dangers brought upon him by the murder of Duncan.

Speculation as to what the English drama might have been if Sophocles