Seneca also introduced the catalyzing figure of the ghost who returns from death to provoke revenge. Seneca (the son) had emerged to be a major scholar in the fields of philosophy, politics and drama. -��,'gߝ��&&a�u����xE�0��"���;�2/�x��S�>.O�}��\>˫X&W1ÀZ1. Such combination of styles serves Seneca’s adherence of the stoic convention that his characters live through. Moreover, The Spanish Tragedy embraces the motif of madness as a key element in producing its melodramatic effect that Hieronimo and other characters’ experience. His own revenge is consciously committed to the morality of gods in restoring the order of things. Ed. In his Essays on Elizabethan Drama, Eliot points out that “several scholars…have called attention to a trick of Seneca of repeating one word of a phrase, especially in stichomythia, where the sentence of one speaker is caught up and twisted by the next. Edwards P ed (1959). As evident in a number of his tragedies, the rendering of the melancholic monologues with the concise dialogues results in a highly rhetorical and well-polished language. His tragedies appealed most to the Elizabethan taste and served the playwrights’ purpose in expanding the theatrical effects of tragedy and its dimensional elements to an audience that demanded a mastering manipulation of plot, action, and character development. There is nothing like this in Seneca…The tragedy of Blood is very little Senecan, in short, though it made such use of Senecan machinery; it is very largely Italian; and it added an ingenuity of plot which is native. There has been much speculation amongst critics as to how many plays Seneca wrote, but some assume that “ten tragedies [were] linked to his name; Hercules Furens (The Madness of Hercules), Troades (Trojan Women), Phoenissae (Phoenician Women), Medea, Phaedra (also entitled Hippolytus), Oedipus, Agamemnon, Thyestes, Hercules Oetaeus (Hercules on Oeta), and Octavia” (Slavitte, 1995, p. 29). The fourteen chapters collected here explore a wide range of topics clustered. However, it was the tragedies that stood supreme. Hence, this paper is an attempt to revisit the historical writings of Seneca and observe his artistic vision of staging tragedies as adapted and projected in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. The importance of the Latin Senecan tragedies on the Elizabethan theatre was quite immense and far-reaching. Thus, to Seneca, man has no hope in escaping his own fate or even in strive to free himself from the inevitable catastrophes. Its Seneca’s five-act structure and chorus were evident, although it ignored his convention of presenting the horror off stage: “the heroin here dies in the sight of the audience, and the hero’s heart is brought bleeding upon the stage” (Brooke, 1911, p. 197). They are presented in long speeches reported by messengers. As intellectually innovative and brilliant in their mastery of composing drama, the Elizabethan playwrights could not resist the magical allure of Seneca’s conventions in the writing of tragedies. New York: Charles Scribner's. %%EOF INTRODUCTION Born in 4 B. C. in the Southern city of Cordova in Spain, Lucius Annaeus Seneca was a son of an intellectual family; his father, known as Senecan the Elder, was a history writer. In Euripides its connection with the action is often slight; in Seneca this connection disappears altogether; the chorus is already in its way to exclusion from the play and final abuse….When this change was once effected, the presence of the Chorus was no longer necessary to the conduct of the action. Seneca: The Tragedies: Ure P (1974). This was an effective stage trick, but it was something more; it is the crossing of one rhythm pattern with another” (33). Looking back at the Roman drama, we realize that “the division into five acts was apparently established by Varro [a Roman scholar and a satirist], and is noted by Horace [a Latin lyric poet] in the Ars Poetica as a rule to strictly observed; but it was the example of Seneca that governed the practice of the modern stage” (Cunliffe, 1965, 32).