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Hello and Hello and welcome to literature and history.

Episode 67, Jaws Dripping Blood.

This episode is about the Roman playwright Seneca's tragedy Thiasies, probably written sometime after 54 CE, following the reigns of the Emperor's Caligula and Claudius and during the rule of Nero.

The plays of Lucius Anaya Seneca, generally speaking, have never enjoyed a great literary

reputation.

Even at the height of their popularity, say the turn from the 1500s to the 1600s, when Seneca was

acknowledged as the greatest Latin tragedy, he was elsewhere disparaged for other faults.

The eight tragedies generally attributed to Seneca share things in common.

They are unremittingly bleak and intensely violent, their characters compelled by a double bind of predestination,

and their own uncontrollable passions to commit and suffer from often grisly atrocities.

Yet there is more to Senecan tragedy than grinding and gory determinism.

Seneca was instrumental to the beginning of early modern drama, his works exploding in popularity

over the course of the 1500s in a series of printings and translations that brought his unique

brand of blood and thunder tragedy widely to European stages by the time Shakespeare was born.

In 1581, when Shakespeare was about 17, a collected edition of Seneca's plays was published in English,

bundling together a diverse catalog of English translations that had been floating around

two decades beforehand.

And whether European dramatists like Shakespeare read Seneca in Latin or their own vernacular

languages, Seneca's plays were everywhere in Europe by the time Elizabeth the first died in 1603.

Seneca's reputation has had two distinct apexes over the course of literary history.

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