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Seneca in Early Elizabethan England*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Jessica Winston
Jessica Winston*
Affiliation:
Idaho State University
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Abstract

In the 1560s a group of men associated with the universities, and especially the early English law schools, the Inns of Court, translated nine of Seneca’s ten tragedies into English. Few studies address these texts and those that do concentrate on their contributions to the development of English drama. Why such works were important for those who composed them remains unclear. This essay examines the translations against the background of the social, political, and literary culture of the Inns in the 1560s. In this context, they look less like forms of dramatic invention than kinds of writing that facilitated the translators’ Latin learning, personal interactions, and political thinking and involvement.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 59 , Issue 1 , Spring 2006 , pp. 29 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © 2006 Renaissance Society of America

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Footnotes

*

Research for this essay was funded by a Humanities and Social Sciences Research Committee Grant from Idaho State University.

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