Self-Representation and Illusion in Senecan Tragedy (review)

Reproducing reality, or rather a carefully scripted and musically enhanced version of it, seems to be the goal of cinematic tragedy these days, most notably (or notoriously) in Paul Greengrass' United 93 and Oliver Stone's World Trade Center. C. A. J. Littlewood's perceptive monograph on Senecan tragedy reminds us of the power of unashamed dramatic artificiality to remake our mental landscapes. Appropriately for a scholar primarily concerned with the creative aspects of literature, Littlewood is less interested in whether the plays were performed on stage than in their close engagement with the Greek and Latin literary tradition and Stoic philosophy. His book is a thoughtful exploration of the plays' characters, language, and central themes, with occasional ventures into matters related to the Neronian context and the nature of "Silver" Latin. Most of his topics will be familiar to readers of recent scholarship on Seneca, but this is no criticism. Littlewood's method of developing arguments through intertextual analysis, along the lines of Stephen Hinds' work on Ovid and Alessandro Schiesaro's book on Seneca's Thyestes, produces new and consistently illuminating interpretations. His phrasing is sometimes wooden (perhaps a sign of the book's origins as an Oxford D. Phil. thesis), but the arguments are generally well structured and clear.

The introduction, which doubles as chapter 1, establishes the book's literary priorities and scouts the terrain of the four chapters to come. Chapter 2 is really two chapters bundled into one. The first part (15–56), a treatment of the relationship between Stoic philosophy and tragedy, develops the book's most innovative arguments. It begins with the sage and tyrant. Set in opposition in the philosophical and oratorical tradition (think of Dio Chrysostom facing Trajan, ventriloquizing the defiant voice of the Cynic Diogenes), the two become harder to distinguish in the disordered world of Senecan tragedy: the self-sufficient sapiens who cares nothing for external goods bears an unsettling resemblance to defiantly autonomous, fearless criminals like Atreus and Medea. Littlewood is especially effective in teasing out the implications of his argument for Seneca's style, especially his use of stichomythia, which he reads as a Brechtian oral exercise in the will to power—Stoic self-sufficiency unsettlingly translated into the willful misreadings of an alienated, alienating verbal combat. The second part of the chapter better reflects its title. Focusing on "the broken world" of the tragedies, notably Agamemnon and Hercules Furens, Littlewood shows how the disorder of the temporal and topographical landscape underscores the confusion of the characters' moral rhetoric. The chapter turns last to the impact of Seneca's artfully allusive style on the characters who are subject to two coercive forces: the coercion of violence or fate within the action of the drama, and the coercion of literary history, which compels them to act out a story that has been scripted many times before.

In chapter 3 (awkwardly titled "Images of a Flawed Technical Genesis"), Littlewood argues that Seneca's conspicuous appropriation of a variety of texts—which he calls a "pluralistic style"—create a plural self-consciousness in his characters, while his reworking of images of poetry-making problematizes the process of poetic inspiration. His reading of the significance of Ovid's Phaethon for Hercules Furens and Thyestes is more ingenious than persuasive; more plausible are his arguments on behalf of Medea as a model poet, and the points of resemblance between Medea and Seneca's representation of a maternal, destructive Nature (Q Nat. 3.27.2).

A timely probing of the motivations of spectatorship, especially the spectatorship of violence, rage, and suffering, chapter 4 surveys the range of models of spectatorship in Senecan drama and its intertexts, from the sadistic (the well-known desire of Atreus and Medea to watch their victims suffer) to the sympathetic (the Messenger's eyewitness account in Troades) and the alienated (Cassandra in Agamemnon). These last two plays are illuminated by excellent close readings, especially of the transition...