Abstract
The history plays of Christopher Marlowe, George Peele, Henry Chettle and William Shakespeare are indebted to their forebears’ Senecan ambles. Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville’s Gorboduc (1561/2) and Thomas Legge’s Latin Richardus Tertius (1579) are both Senecan in style and conventions, in their narratives of high-born and ambitious characters brought low. Both adapt historical subjects to the forms and conventions of Senecan tragedy, owing to their common origin in academic settings, where their authors witnessed performances and read translations and imitations of Senecan plays: Norton and Sackville were students of the Inns of Court, while Legge was a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Each of these plays reflects its academic origins by combining domestic history with a Senecan form. And Norton, Sackville and Legge’s choices of Seneca as a model of style and conventions influenced the development of the English history play later in the century.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Bibliography
Manuscripts
BL Add. MS 48023.
BL Cotton MS Titus F3.
Printed works
Abbot, George, A Sermon Preached at Westminster May 26. 1608. At The Fvnerall Solemnities of the Right Honorable Thomas Earle of Dorset, late L. High Treasurer of England (London: Melchisedech Bradwood for William Aspley, 1608).
Axton, M., ‘Norton, Thomas (1530x32–1584)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and B. Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
— The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977).
— ‘Robert Dudley and the Inner Temple Revels’, The Historical Journal, 13 (1970), 365–78.
Baker, H., ‘Blank Verse before Gorboduc’, Modern Language Notes, 48 (1933), 529–30.
Baldwin, William, A Myrroure for Magistrates (London: Thomas Marsh, 1559).
Binns, J. W., Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: the Latin Writings of the Age (Leeds: Cairus, 1990).
Boas, Frederick S., University Drama in the Tudor Age (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914).
Brooke, Christopher N. L., A History of Gonville and Caius College (Woodbridge: Brewer, 1985; repr. 1996).
— ‘Legge, Thomas (c. 1535–1607)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and B. Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Budra, Paul, A Mirror for Magistrates and the de casibus Tradition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000).
Bullough, Geoffrey (ed.), Narrative and Dramatic Sources for Shakespeare (8 vols; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957–75).
Charlton, H. B., The Senecan Tradition in Renaissance Tragedy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1921; repr. 1946).
Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).
Churchill, George B., Richard the Third up to Shakespeare (Berlin: Mayer & Müller, 1900).
Cunliffe, John W., Early English Classical Tragedies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912).
Escobedo, Andrew, Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England: Foxe, Dee, Spenser, Milton (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004).
Fortescue, John, A Learned Commendation of the Politique Lawes of England (London: Richard Tottel, 1567).
Gadd, Ian and Alexandra Gillespie (eds), John Stow (1525–1605) and the Making of the English Past (London: British Library, 2004).
Grafton, Richard, A Chronicle at large and meere History of the affayres of Englande and Kinges of the same (London: Henry Denham for Richard Tottel and Humfrey Toy, 1568; 2nd edn, 1569).
Graves, Michael A. R., Thomas Norton: Parliament Man (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).
Griffin, Benjamin, Playing the Past: Approaches to English Historical Drama, 1385–1660 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001).
Harbage, Alfred and Samuel Schoenbaum (eds), Annals of English Drama, 975–1700, rev. Sylvia Stoler Wagonheim (London: Routledge, 3rd edn, 1989).
Higden, Ranulph, Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden monachi cestrensis, ed. J. R. Lumby, Rolls Series, 9 vols (London: Longman, 1865–86), vol. 4.
Johnston, Alexandra F., ‘The Inherited Tradition: the Legacy of Provincial Drama’, The Elizabethan Theatre, 13 (1989), 1–25.
Jones, Norman, The Birth of the Elizabethan Age (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).
Jones, Norman and Paul Whitfield White, ‘Gorboduc and Royal Marriage Politics: an Elizabethan Playgoer’s Report of the Premiere Performance’, English Literary Renaissance, 26 (1996), 3–16.
Kastan, David Scott, Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time (London: Macmillan, 1982).
Kewes, Paulina, ‘The Elizabethan History Play: a True Genre?’, A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Vol. II: The Histories, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003).
Knapp, Robert S., ‘The Academic Drama’, A Companion to Renaissance Drama, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002).
Legge, Thomas, The Complete Plays, ed. and tr. Dana Sutton, 2 vols, American University Studies. Series XVII: Classical Languages and Literature, vols 13–14 (New York: Lang, 1993).
— Richardus Tertius, ed. Robert J. Lordi, Renaissance Drama: a Collection of Critical Editions, series ed. Stephen Orgel (New York: Garland, 1979).
Loades, David, Power in Tudor England (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997).
Lucas, D. W., ‘Introduction’, Aristotle: Poetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968).
Lydgate, John, Troy Book. AD. 1412–20, ed. Henry Bergen, 3 vols (London: Early English Text Society, 1906–75).
Meres, Francis, Palladis Tamia. Wits Treasury (London: P. Short for Cuthbert Burbie, 1598).
Miola, Robert, Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: the Influence of Seneca (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
Nashe, Thomas, Pierce Penniless, His Supplication to the Devil (London: Abel Leffes for John Busbie, 1592).
— The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, rev. F. P. Wilson, 5 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958).
Nelson, Alan H. ‘Cambridge University Drama in the 1580s’, The Elizabethan Theatre, 9 (1985), 19–31.
— Early Cambridge Theatres: College, University, and Town Stages, 1464–1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
— ‘Early Staging in Cambridge’, A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
— (ed.) Records of Early English Drama: Cambridge, 2 vols (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989).
Newton, Thomas, Seneca His Tenne Tragedies, Translated into English (London: Thomas Marsh, 1581).
Norland, Howard B., ‘Adapting to the Times: Expansion and Interpolation in the Elizabethan Translations of Seneca’, Classical and Modern Literature, 16 (1996), 241–63.
— ‘Legge’s Neo-Senecan Richardus Tertius’, Humanistica Lovaniensia: Journal of Neo-Latin Studies, 42 (1993), 285–300.
Norton, Thomas, Orations of Arsanes agaynst Philip the Trecherous Kyng of Macedone (London: John Day, 1560).
Norton, Thomas and Thomas Sackville, Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex, ed. Irby B. Cauthen, Regents Renaissance Drama Series (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970).
Peyré, Yves, ‘“Confusion now hath made his masterpiece”: Senecan Resonances in Macbeth’, Shakespeare and the Classics, ed. Charles Martindale and A. B. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Pincombe, Mike, ‘Robert Dudley, Gorboduc, and “The Masque of Beauty and Desire”: a Reconsideration of the Evidence for Political Intervention’, Parergon, 20 (2003), 19–44.
— ‘Two Elizabethan Masque-Orations by Thomas Pound’, Bodleian Library Record, 12 (1987), 349–80.
Ribner, Irving, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1957; repr. 1965).
Schwyzer, Philip, Literature, Nationalism and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, Seneca, tr. Frank Justus Miller, 9 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979–87).
— The seconde tragedie of Seneca entituled Thyestes faithfully Englished by Jasper Heywood (London: the house of the late Thomas Berthelette, 1560).
— Thyestes, trans. Jasper Heywood, ed. Joost Daalder (London: Ernest Benn, 1982).
Sessions, W. A., Henry Howard, The Poet Earl of Surrey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999).
Share, Don (ed.), Seneca in English (London: Penguin, 1998).
Sidney, Philip, Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973).
Siraisi, Nancy, ‘Anatomizing the Past: Physicians and History in Renaissance Culture’, Renaissance Quarterly, 53 (2000), 1–30.
Smith, Bruce R., ‘Toward the Rediscovery of Tragedy: Productions of Seneca’s Plays on the English Renaissance Stage’, Renaissance Drama, 9 (1978), 3–37.
Spevack Martin and J. W. Binns, ‘Prefatory Remarks’, Thomas Legge: Richardus Tertius and Solymitana Clades, ed. Robert J. Lordi and Robert Ketterer, Renaissance Latin Drama in England, Series II, vol. 8 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1989).
Stein, Peter, The Character and Influence of the Roman Civil Law: Historical Essays (London and Ronceverte: Hambledon Press, 1988).
Venn, John, Caius College (London: Robinson, 1901; repr. 1923).
Winston, Jessica, ‘Expanding the Political Nation: Gorboduc at the Inns of Court and Succession Revisited’, Early Theatre, 8 (2005), 11–34.
— ‘Seneca in Early Elizabethan England’, Renaissance Quarterly, 59 (2006), 29–55.
Woolf, D. R., The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500–1730 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
Woudhuysen, H. R., Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts 1558–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).
Zim, Rivkah, ‘Sackville, Thomas, first Baron Buckhurst and first Earl of Dorset (c. 1536–1608)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and B. Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2008 Michael Ullyot
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ullyot, M. (2008). Seneca and the Early Elizabethan History Play. In: Grant, T., Ravelhofer, B. (eds) English Historical Drama, 1500–1660. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230593268_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230593268_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-52503-4
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-59326-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)