CHAP. V - SENECA IN THE ELIZABETHANS

Summary

From this point the influence of Seneca becomes more and more diffused and elusive, as, streamlike, it loses itself with other tributaries in the great living ocean of Elizabethan drama. And yet it does maintain itself still very distinctly in one academical succession of minor playwrights which we may deal with first. The Countess of Pembroke, “Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother” gathered round her a coterie influenced by the French Senecan Garnier (flor. 1563–90). We have here a second wave of Senecan influence in England. She herself translated his Antonie in 1590; a little later she succeeded in bringing under her wing, of all wild birds, Kyd whose melodramatic Spanish Tragedy of 1585–7 had first really established tragedy on the popular stage. He now produced a version of Garnier's Cornélie (c. 1592).

The version is merely a literary curiosity. From the first act to the last nothing whatever happens. Cornelia weeps profusely at the beginning; she weeps even more profusely at the end; other catastrophe there is none. Act I is a five page monologue by Cicero; next the Chorus inveighs against war. Then for eleven pages Cornelia wails, while Cicero consoles her with the Senecan philosophy of life, death and suicide. A reminiscence of the pseudo-Senecan Octavia here, a would-be Senecan bout of quip and counterquip there, preserve the due classic colour. Such is Act II. The next Chorus sings of the transience and recurrence of all things.