Comparative Drama

278 Comparative Drama tent of his plays," and "the problem was most acute when the latent content was most at odds with the current literary conventions" (p. 234 ) . In Phedre as i n Berenice but with a much richer orchestration, the poetic echoes are innumerable, and they perhaps account for the per­ sistent attempts at reducing the whole play to a single character, as if they all drew their life from Phedre, whereas they all are caught in the pervading poetry of the play. There are constant echoes of course be­ tween Phedre and Hippolyte: "Vous perissez d'un mal que vous dis­ simulez." "Elle meurt dans mes bras d'un mal qu'elle me cache." And there are many also with Aricie, who is not an insipid concession to the amorous conventions of the 17th century, but "a significant element in the poetic pattern" (p. 257) . Aricie, "Reste d'un sang fatal conjure contre nous," intent on "porter la douleur dans un creur insensible," is, "at the prelogical level," Hippolyte's enemy, Venus herself {p. 256) , whom Phedre begged to attack "un ennemi qui te soit plus rebelle," for in a sense it is Aricie and her love that kill Hippolyte. The meaning of Phedre is the whole play: "characters and events merge and decompose and shift in the service of an otherwise inexpressible meaning" (p. 257) . True classicism, if that is what Racine stands for, as opposed to the neo-classical doctrine, would then appear to be the transmutation of dramatic and psychological material, which, without losing its dramatic or psychological relevance, assumes an entirely different dimension and a symbolic or poetic value. And Mr. Pocock's conclusion is that Ra­ cine's genius was to express a tragic and poetic vision through a medium which had been carefully contrived to exclude it. This is an important book, perhaps the most stimulating study now available in English of Corneille and Racine, and one that brings new insight into 17th-century tragedy in France and into 17th-century scholarship. PHILIP BUTLER University of Wisconsin, Madison C. D. N. Costa, ed. Seneca. London and Boston: Routledge, and Kegan Paul, 1974. Pp. ix + 246. $18.00. This work, another in the series Greek and Latin Studies: Classical Literature and its Infiuence, reflects the careful scholarship and wide scope that we have come to associate with this important synthesizing endeavor. Devoted to Seneca, this volume presents essays on his social and educational context, his Moral Essays, the Letters to Lucilius, the influence of Senecan philosophy, and, of greater relevance in these pages, three essays on aspects of Seneca's dramatic works. The first is by C. D. N. Costa, on "The Tragedies." This welcome piece seeks neither to rehabilitate Seneca's plays in an uncritical manner, nor to make obvious and once-fashionable remarks about their turgidity and bombast. Rather Costa effectively puts Seneca's dramatic activity in Reviews 279 the context of Greek and Latin writing for the stage; and emphasizes the virtual identity of the rhetorical and what we regard as "literature" in much first-century Latin poetry. Seneca's special kind of declamatory drama is assessed, and its features are shown to be appropriate to closet drama. Its style, redolent in its sententiae and epigrammatic quality of the rhetorical schools, is well suited for advancing plots by means of set-pieces, and should not be faulted because it is different from the style found in other types of drama. Costa does not omit to mention the cold, mechanical quality imparted to characters' speeches by continued reliance on rhetorical techniques, just as he correctly suggests mental boredom as a possible reaction to unvaried meters going on too long in the choruses. In contrast to much previous and subsequent drama, Costa reminds us, Seneca's plays do not seek merely to present human beings in tension and struggle with hopeless or near-hopeless situations, but rather concen­ trate their energies "on the formulation of the arguments by which pas­ sionate individuals in conflict justify themselves. . . . Seneca's characters, like Chekhov's, spend much of their time exposing their souls to us; but in Seneca it is not the revelation but the...