Oedipus at Dover Cliff: Early Modern Receptions of Seneca’sPhoenissae

Abstract

AbstractMajor accounts of Renaissance Senecanism argue that tragic protagonists in Seneca and his early modern imitators draw on overwhelming fury to achieve autarkic selfhood. Yet not all plays follow this mould: unlike the better-known Thyestes and Medea, Seneca’s Phoenissae locates tragic identity in the self-conscious rejection of a sudden resolution to violent strife. Oedipus, the play’s protagonist, temporarily relents in response to Antigone’s pleas against self-harm; despite his swift reversion to anger, this short-lived reconciliation aligns the tragedy with structural elements of comedy as understood by Renaissance genre theorists, inviting early modern authors to craft their own versions of the play’s ‘mixed mode’. In the New Arcadia, Philip Sidney rewrites the Phoenissae to privilege reconciliation over rage, but reframes this apparent comic gesture as the source of an escalating cycle of tragedy. In King Lear, William Shakespeare mobilizes the illusion of comic resolution that he found in Seneca’s play to heighten his protagonists’ irreversible suffering. Attending to the nuance and variety of Seneca’s tragic corpus as it was received by Renaissance readers reveals underexplored strands of Senecan influence on early modern literature, broadening the set of generic possibilities afforded by Seneca’s plays in the Renaissance to include tragicomedy and romance.