Seneca Our Contemporary: the Modern Theatrical Reception of Senecan Tragedy

CHAPTER 13 Seneca Our Contemporary: The Modern Theatrical Reception of Senecan Tragedy Ralf Remshardt When Polish critic Jan Kott published his book Shakespeare Our Contemporary more than fifty years ago, he set in motion not just a theoretical reconsideration of Shakespeare’s relevance in the cultural aftermath of the Second World War but (in a surprisingly far-ranging effect for a literary scholar) sparked count- less revisionist theatrical stagings as well. Forcefully positing a thematic con- nection between Shakespeare and postwar dramatists such as Bertolt Brecht, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, and Samuel Beckett, Kott’s influential readings (e.g., his chapter on “King Lear, or Endgame”)1 led to landmark productions such as Peter Brook’s grimly absurdist take on King Lear (1962). This essay stands in the wake of Kott but attempts the obverse. That Seneca is our contemporary— that he is perceived, in other words, as a pertinent writer whose dispatches from the extremes of the Julio-Claudian Roman Empire speak to our own sense of fragmentation and ethical ambiguity—is manifest in the fact that his plays appear on contemporary Western stages with some frequency, often in tandem with periods of social transition or upheaval. My question here is what the Senecan values might be that communicate themselves most readily to current audiences, and what forms of mise-en-scène directors use to explore them. The question of the plays’ performance in antiquity has remained a kind of parlor game among some Seneca scholars, who have expended much ingenu- ity to prove either that they were intended for production on the public stages of the early Roman Empire, or that, to the contrary, Seneca had no interest in the theater at all, or some contested middle ground: public recitation, private recitation, etc. Unfortunately, all evidence is internal and circumstantial, and thus inconclusive. In fact, whether a critic believes in the presence of Senecan drama on the Roman stage seems determined less by tangible evidence than by the critic’s biases; as John G. Fitch points out (2000: 1), the anti-performance view became canonical in the late nineteenth century after leading Romantic 1 Kott (1964: 90) wrote that in King Lear, “the tragic element has been superseded by the grotesque.” © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��6 | doi ��.��63/97890043�0988_0�4 Seneca Our Contemporary 283 critics uttered their distaste of what they perceived as Senecan excess. For the purpose of this essay, what matters is not whether they were meant to be staged (as I believe they were), but whether they are stage-worthy.2 1 The ‘Senecanization’ of the Modern Theater Arguably, the modern and postmodern theater has affirmed the stage-worthiness of Seneca’s tragedies; it has been more hospitable to Seneca than any theater since the Renaissance. In concrete terms, the number of performances speaks volumes. Using the most comprehensive listing currently available, Oxford University’s Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama,3 we find almost as many documented productions of Senecan tragedies between 1900 and 2015 (244) as we do between 1450 and 1900 (249). Medea remains the most popular, with 113 attested productions prior to 1900, versus 90 between 1900 and the present. Interestingly, there have been twenty-seven performances of Thyestes since 1900, but only six are recorded before that date. Hercules on Oeta, however, has come to the stage just twice since the advent of the twentieth century, although it appeared thirty-one times before 1900.4 Because of the comparatively much better documentation of modern and contemporary performances, these figures are not absolute. Nevertheless, it is evident that Senecan tragedy experienced something of a boom in the modern theater, with a high percentage of twentieth-century productions occurring after 1950, and clustering in the 1960s through 1990s. There were a few scattered stabs at reviving Seneca in the first part of the twentieth century, though. For instance, the early 1900s saw two opera productions incorporating both Euripides’s Hippolytus and Seneca’s Phaedra: a 1903 production of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s 2 I see no reason to disagree with Léon Herrmann (1924: 195), who writes: “The theory that we adopt is that all of the tragedies of Seneca, without exception, were intended by him for pre- sentation at a public or private theater, with actors, chorus, and music.” For a brief summary of the performance discussion, see Anthony J. Boyle 2014: xli–xliii. Boyle is unequivocal in his judgment: “Senecan tragedy belongs, if anything does, to the category of Roman performance theatre” (xliii). Regarding its stage-worthiness, Frederick Ahl (2008: 4) points out that when he undertook to stage Seneca (in his case, Oedipus), he “was delighted at what good theater it was.” 3 Accessible at http://apgrd.ox.ac.uk. 4 Other figures: there are four documented productions of Agamemnon after 1900 compared to fourteen in the entire period prior to 1900. Hercules also received four productions (four pre- 1900); Octavia four (nine pre-1900); Phoenician Women one (two pre-1900); Oedipus twenty- six (nineteen); Phaedra forty-seven (thirty-four); and Trojan Women twenty-six (sixteen)..

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