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The Influence of Seneca on 1934) Pp. 33-54; Philip Edwards, Thomas Kyd Notes CHAPTER ONE. COMMON ELEMENTS I. For Senecan influence, see John W. Cunliffe, The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy (London: Macmillan, 1893); F. L. Lucas, Seneca and Elizabethan Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922); T. S. Eliot, 'Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca', in Elizabethan Essays (London: Faber, 1934) pp. 33-54; Philip Edwards, Thomas Kyd and Early Elizabethan Tragedy, Writers and their Work Series (London: Longmans, 1966) pp. 10-11. The importance of Senecan influence has been denied by Howard Baker in Induction to Tragedy: A Study in Development ofForm in •Gorboduc', 'The Spanish Tragedy' and 'Titus Andronicus' (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1939), and by George Hunter in 'Seneca and the Elizabethans: A Case Study in "Influence"', ShS, XX (1967) 17-26. 2. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (London: Nelson, 1965) p. 118. 3. John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (London, 1583). For a pictorial anthology of 'sundrye kindes ofTormentes' (including blinding), see pp. 794f. at the end ofvol. 1. A chained copy of this immensely popular work was made available in every cathedral, and regular public readings were prescribed by Church ordinance. 4. This meaning has not been recorded by the OED. For examples, see Chapman, Hero and Leander, Ill. 59-64,146; Middleton and Rowley, The Changeling, I.i.l91; Hamlet, v.ii.289-90. 5. Romeo and Juliet, II.vi.9-15; Othello, I.iii.341-2, u.i.219-20. 6. On the Greek attitude to change, see J. B. Bury, The Idea ofProgress (London: Macmillan, 1932) pp. 8-19. For the persistence of this attitude in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, see C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964) pp. 85, 184; Herschel Baker, The Wars of Truth: Studies in the Decay of Humanism in the Earlier Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952) pp. 43-78. 7. Plato, Timaeus, 31-2, and The Republic, IV.443; Ovid, Metamorphoses, !.5-433; Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia, trs. Winthrop Wetherbee (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973) pp. 67-75, 117-27 (!.i-ii, u.xii-xiv); Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, II, metre 8, and III, metre 9; Alain de Lille (Alanus de Insulis), The Complaint ofNature, trs. Douglas M. Moffatt, Yale Studies in English XXXVI (New York: Holt, 1908) p. 24 (prose III), 43-5 (prose IV), 87 (metre IX); Pierre de Ia Primaudaye, The FrenchAcademie, trs. T. Bowes eta/. (London, 1618) pp. 523-5, 528 (n.lxiv). See also John Burnet, Greek Philosophy: Part I: Thales to Plato (London: Macmillan, 192J) pp. 22, 48, 61, 106; Leo Spitzer, 'Classical and 236 Notes 237 Christian Ideas of World Harmony' Traditio, II (1944) 409-64, III (1945) 307-64; S. K. Heninger, Touches of Sweet Harmony: Pythagorean Cosmology and Renais­ sance Poetics (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1974) pp. 146-200, and The Cosmographica/ Glass: Renaissance Diagrams of the Universe (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1977) chs 4-5. 8. My quoted phrase is from Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, Pt 11, IV.ii.86. On hierarchical correspondence and analogy, see James E. Phillips, The State in Shakespeare's Greek and Roman Plays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940) chs 4-6; E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London: Chatto, 1943) chs 4-7, and Shakespeare's History Plays (London: Chatto, 1944) pp. 10-17; W. R. Elton, 'Shakespeare and the Thought of his Age', in A New Companion to Shakespeare Studies, ed. Kenneth Muir and Samuel Schoenbaum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971) pp. 180-8. Analogy and polarity have been usefully studied as modes of analysis in early Greek thought by G. E. R. Lloyd in his Polarity and Analogy: Two Types of Argumentation in Early Greek Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966). On the decay of nature and the strife of the contraries, see John Norden, Vicissitudo Rerum (1600), Shakespeare Association Facsimile no. 4 (London: Oxford University Press, 1931), Preface, stanzas 9, 33-6, 40-6; Godfrey Goodman, The Fall of Man (London, 1616) pp. 34-7, 51-2, 123-5,206. 9. See Willard Farnham, The Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1936) pp. 78-9, 85; J. M. R. Margeson, The Origins of English Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967) ch. 4. 10. See Raymond B. Waddington, 'Antony and Cleopatra: "What Venus did to Mars"', ShakS, II (1966) 210-27; Robert G. Hunter, Shakespeare and the Mystery of God's Judgements (Athens, Ga: University of Georgia Press, 1976) pp. 137-50. (Neither critic refers to Marlowe or Kyd.) On the symbolism of the myth, see Plutarch, Moralia, ed. and trs. F. C. Babbitt, Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1936) v 116-21; N atalis Comes (Conti), Mytho/ogiae ( 1567; Hanover, 1619) p. 164. See further Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, 2nd edn (London: Faber, 1967) pp. 77-88. 11. Joel B. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1978). 12. For the absurdist interpretation, see A. C. Spearing in his edn of The Knight's Tale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966) pp. 78-9. 13. Apart from exercising a strong influence on A Midsummer Night's Dream, Chaucer's Tale was adapted twice for the stage in the sixteenth century (both plays are lost) and once in the seventeenth- as Shakespeare and Fletcher's Two Noble Kinsmen. See Ann Thompson, Shakespeare's Chaucer: A Study in Literary Origins (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1978). Miss Thompson does not concern herself with the philosophical aspects of Chaucer's poem, a subject I have dealt with in a forthcoming article, 'Cosmology, Contrariety, and The Knight's Tale'. 14. The contrarious cast of Renaissance and especially Shakespearean drama­ its 'ambivalent', 'dialectical', or 'complementary' vision- has not Jacked attention. Until recently, however, this has been due more to the influence of Hegel and Nietzsche, and the effects of the New Criticism, than to any special interest in the intellectual background of the dramatists. Most critics who have investigated the dualisms of Renaissance drama have been intent on counteracting the impression, given by much historicist criticism, that the playwrights of this period obediently 238 English Renaissance Tragedy endorsed all the more simplistic teachings of the time on the nature of man, society, and the universe; with a few exceptions, therefore, such critics have been non- if not anti-historical in their methodological stance. See, for example, W. B. Yeats, 'At Stratford-on-Avon' ( 1901 ), repr. in Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1961); G. Wilson Knight, The Shakespearean Tempest(London: Oxford University Press, 1932); A. P. Rossiter, 'Ambivalence: The Dialectic ofthe Histories' ( 1951 ), in Angel with Horns (London: Longmans, 1961 ); Eugene M. W aith, 'Marlowe and the Jades of Asia', SEL, v (1965) 229-45; Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York: Free Press, 1967); Bernard McElroy, Shakespeare's Mature Tragedies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973); Robert F. Whitman, 'The Moral Paradox of Webster's Tragedy', PIMA, LXC (1975) 894-903; Michael Long, The Unnatural Scene: A Study in Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Methuen, 1976). Shakespearean contrariety has been studied in relation to its intellectual environment by Marion Bodwell Smith, Dualities in Shakespeare (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966); and Robert Grudin, Mighty Opposites: Shakespeare and Renaissance Contrariety (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1979). Sacvan Bercovitch has related Kyd's contrarious vision to a somewhat narrowly understood Empedoclean cosmology in 'Love and Strife in The Spanish Tragedy, SEL, IX(1969) 215-19. There are also some pertinent comments on the contrarious aspect of Renaissance cosmology in Rolf Soellner, Shakespeare's Patterns of Self-Knowledge (Athens, Ohio: University of Ohio Press, 1972) pp. 53-8. Lastly, historical justification for dualist interpretations of Renaissance drama has been supplied in Theodore Spencer, Shakespeare and the Nature of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1942); Hiram C. Haydn, The Counter­ Renaissance (New York: Scribners, 1950); Rosalie F. Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966); and William F. Elton, King Lear and the Gods (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1966). These critics present the period as one of intense intellectual activity when different ideas were in competition with one another and men had to learn to live with uncertainty, contradiction, and paradox. 15. De Lille, The Complaint of Nature, pp. 24-8 (prose III), 46-7 (metre v), 85 (prose VIII); Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1-11, qq. 82, 85; de Ia Primaudaye, The French Academie, pp. 418 (!.xi), 528 (I.lxv); Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Everyman's Library (London: Dent, 1907; repr. 1969) I, pp. 161, 173-4; Milton, Paradise Lost, vn.l92ff., x.640ff.; Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Everyman's Library (London: Dent, 1932) 1 133-4. 16. Alwin Thaler, 'Shakespeare and Sir Thomas Browne', in Shakespeare's Silences (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1929) pp. 97-138. For Religio Medici, I have used the text in Browne, The Major Works, ed. C. A. Patrides (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977). Page references to this edn henceforward appear in the text. 17. Shakespeare spells out his contrarious conception of villainy in the passage on Sinon in The Rape of Lucrece (ll. 1555-61): Such devils steal effects from lightless hell; For Sinon in his fire doth quake with cold, And in that cold hot burning fire doth dwell; These contraries such unity doth hold Notes 239 Only to flatter fools and make them bold; So Priam's trust false Sinon's tears doth flatter That he fmds means to bum Troy with his water.
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