Italians in his lyrics, and followed Sannazzaro in the 'Arcadia.' The bookstalls of London were flooded with translations of loose Italian novels, to such an extent that Ascham trembled for the morals of his countrymen.1 Harrington's Ariosto, Fairfax's Tasso, Hoby's Cortigiano, proved that the finer products of Italian literature were not neglected. This absorbing interest in the creations of Italian genius was kept alive and stimulated by the almost universal habit of sending youths of good condition on an Italian journey. It was thought that residence for some months in the chief Italian capitals was necessary to complete a young man's education; and though jealous moralists might shake their heads, averring that English lads exchanged in Italy their learning for lewd living, their religious principles for atheism, their patriotism for Machiavellian subtleties, their simplicity for affectations in dress and manners, and their manliness for vices hitherto unknown in England, yet the custom continued to prevail, until at last, in the reign of the first Stuart, the English Court competed for the prize of immorality with the Courts of petty Southern princes.

II.

Trained in classical studies, and addicted to Italian models, it was natural enough that those men of letters who sought to acclimatise the lyric poetry of the Italians, who translated their novels, and adopted the style of their romance, should not neglect the tragic drama. This had long ago established itself as

1 See Schoolmaster, ed. Mayor, pp. 81, 82.

CLASSICAL MODELS.

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a branch of the higher literature in Italy. Mussato in the first years of the fourteenth century, with his Latin tragedy on the history of Eccelino da Romano; Trissino in 1515, with his Italian 'Sofonisba ;' Rucellai at the same epoch, with ' Rosmunda;' Speron Sperone, Cinthio Giraldi, Lodovico Dolce, Luigi Alamanni, Giannandrea dell' Anguillara, Lodovico Martelli, in the next two decades, with their 'Canace,'' Orbecche,' Giocasta,' Antigone,' Edippo,' Tullia;' all these Italian poets wrote, printed, and performed tragedies with vast applause upon the private and the courtly theatres of Italy. That England should remain without such compositions, struck the 'courtly makers' as a paradox. The English had their own dramatic traditions, their companies of players, their interludes in the vernacular, their masques and morris-dances and pageants; in a word, all the apparatus necessary. It only remained for men of polite culture to engraft the roses of the classic and Italian styles upon this native briar. Reckoning after this fashion, but reckoning without their host, the public, as the sequel proved, courtiers and students at the Inns of Court began to pen tragedies. Under Italian guidance, they took the classics for their models. The authority of Italian playwrights, incompetent in such affairs, enslaved these well-intentioned persons to a classic of the silver age; to Seneca, instead of the great Attic authors. Every tragic scene which the Italians of the Renaissance set forth upon the boards of Rome or Florence or Ferrara, was a transcript from Seneca. Following this lead, our English scholars went to school with Seneca beneath the ferule of Italian ushers.

Seneca's collected works include eight complete tragedies, two fragments of tragic plays, and one complete piece in the same style, but posterior to the author. The eight dramas are: Hercules Furens,' 'Thyestes,' 'Phædra,' 'Edipus,' the 'Troades,' 'Medea,' 'Agamemnon,' and 'Hercules upon Mount Eta.' The fragments of an Edipus at Colonus and a Phœnissæ have been pieced together to make up a 'Thebais.' The later play, belonging to Seneca's tradition, is a tragedy upon the subject of Octavia. With the exception of the last, all these so-called dramas are a rhetorician's reproduction of Greek tragedies. Sophocles and Euripides, familiar to that rhetorician's learned audience, have been laid under contribution. But he has invented for himself a sphere of treatment, apart from the real drama, and apart from translation. It was Seneca's method to rehandle the world-worn matter of the Greek tragedians in the form of a dramatic commentary. Instead of placing characters upon the stage in conflict, he used his persons as mere mouthpieces for declamation and appropriate reflection. Instead of developing the fable by action, he expanded the part of the Messenger, and gave the rein to his descriptive faculty. For a Roman audience, in the age of Nero, this new species of dramatic poetry furnished a fresh kind of literary pleasure. They had the old situations of Greek tragedy presented to them indirectly, in long monologues adorned with sophistical embroidery, in laboured descriptions, where the art of the narrator brought events familiar to all students of Greek plays and Græco-Roman painting forth in a new vehicle of polished verse. Rhetoric and the idyll, philosophical

analysis and plastic art, forensic eloquence and scholastic disputation, were skilfully applied to touch at a dramatic point the intellectual sense of men and women trained by education and the habits of imperial Roman life to all these forms. It is more than doubtful whether the pseudo-tragedies produced upon this plan were intended for scenical representation. We have rather reason to believe that they found utterance in those fashionable recitations, of which the Satirists. have left sufficient notices. Roman ladies and gentlemen assembled at each other's houses, in each other's gardens, in clubs and coteries, to applaud a Statius declaiming his hexameters, or the school of Seneca reciting their master's studies from the Attic drama. An audience which could appreciate whole books of the Pharsalia' or the Thebais' at a sitting, may have gladly enough accepted one of Seneca's orations in two hundred iambics. A tragedy recited was anyhow less tedious than a declaimed epic.

Such, however, being the nature of Seneca's tragedies-regarding them, as we are bound to do, in the light of a decadent, pedantic, reproductive period of art ascribing their originality and merit to the author's sympathy with very special intellectual conditions of his age-it follows that we must condemn them as pernicious models for incipient literature. Pernicious undoubtedly they were in their effect upon the Italian theatre. At its very outset the authority of Seneca stifled tragedy and set tragedians on an utterly false scent. The society of Italy in the sixteenth century had certain points in common with that of Neronian Rome. There was the same taste for

pedantic studies, the same appreciation of forensic oratory, the same tendency to verbal criticism, the same confinement of the higher literature to coteries. Meeting, then, with a congenial soil and atmosphere, Seneca's mannerism took root and flourished in Italy. It is not a little amusing to find Giraldi openly expressing his opinion that Seneca had improved upon the Greek tragedians, and to notice how playwrights thought they were obeying Aristotle, when they made servile copies of the Corduban's dramatic commentaries.1

1

III.

Between the years 1559 and 1566, five English authors applied themselves to the task of translating Seneca. The Troades,' Thyestes,' and 'Hercules Furens' were done by Jasper Heywood; the 'Edipus' by Alexander Nevyle; the Medea,' ' Agamemnon,' 'Phædra,' and 'Hercules on Eta' by John Studley; the Octavia' by Thomas Nuce; and the Thebais' by Thomas Newton. These ten plays, collected and printed together in 1581, remain a monument of English poets' zeal in studying the Roman pedagogue. In all of these versions rhymed measures were used; and the translators allowed themselves considerable latitude of treatment, adding here and there, and altering according to their fancy.

The impulse thus given, was soon felt in the production of a great variety of classical or classical-Italian plays. Only two of these call for special notice.

But

1 Scaliger's and Malherbe's opinions might be quoted to prove that this strange preference of Seneca was not confined to Italy.