Seneca: Oedipus by Susanna Braund (review)

Braund’s Oedipuscompanion has four chapters, a bibliography, and a guide to further reading. The first chapter (1–10) glances at the variety of Oedipus myths in classical antiquity (and beyond), warning us against reading Seneca through the lens of Freud and resisting claims of universal relevance for Sophocles’ version—a theme Braund takes up again in the final chapter. Chapter 2, “Seneca in his Time” (11–33), surveys relevant historical context. Braund addresses Seneca’s political career and philosophical oeuvre and situates Senecan tragedy in the broader tradition of ancient Roman drama. I wished here for a slightly more expansive treatment of the topic “Drama and Stoicism,” with extended discussion of how Seneca’s Stoic philosophical writings inform his tragedies; for example, their complementary views of the relationship between human behavior and cosmic or natural order. On the other hand, Braund’s treatment of the question of Senecan tragedy’s ancient performance amounts to a masterful précis of this vexed scholarly debate, into which she manages to introduce decisive clarity. The final two chapters are longest. Chapter 3, “Structure, Themes, and Issues” (25–81), identifies and briefly explores a range of thematic complexes important to the play (“Kingship”; “Unnatural Monstrosities”; “Fate and Fortune”). It closes with a learned and efficient discussion of Senecan style. Chapter 4, “Reception and Influence” (83–128), traces the play’s reception history from Lucan’s Civil Warto Wajdi Mouawad’s play Incendies(2003, translated into English as Scorched), later cinematized by Denis Villeneuve (2010). The book closes with notes, bibliography, guide to further reading, and index (129–63)

Braund’s volume constitutes an exemplary addition to the expanding corpus of “companions” or “handbooks” to classical literary texts. In fact, I have never encountered a work of this genre that does a better job of “opening up” for students the text it addresses. Braund’s treatment of themes in chapter 3 deserves special mention. She isolates a set of themes that are urgently relevant to Seneca’s Oedipusand whose identification has the added benefit of being hermeneutically provocative. Moreover, Braund’s discussion of them, which usually amounts to brief analytical comments on a handful of relevant passages, gives students a sense of the sort of additional textual evidence they might adduce, as well as of how they might pursue sustained interpretations of these or related themes on their own. One could easily imagine requiring as an interpretive exercise that students in an upper-division seminar choose one of the themes Braund identifies and write an original essay elaborating her brief comments, or responding to them by heading in an alternative interpretive direction. While I certainly learned from Braund in this chapter (I found her discussion of “riddles” in the play especially illuminating), I was most excited by how easily I could imagine students employing her thoughtful comments for initial leverage on their own interpretive analysis of the play.

My response to the companion’s final chapter is similar. Braund begins by discussing ancient and medieval responses to the Oedipusbefore moving to Senecan tragedy’s rediscovery in the early Renaissance, with a focus on the Oedipus’influence on Renaissance English tragedy. Later sections of the chapter are more narrowly focused: Oedipus in France (looking mainly at the versions by Corneille and Voltaire); Oedipus in seventeenth-century England (looking at the version by Dryden and Lee); and then various twentieth-century versions influenced by Seneca’s play (Freud, Stravinsky, Hughes, Mouawad). Here too I learned much from Braund, especially from her original treatment of the libretto to Stravinsky’s opera, but at the same time I found myself imagining how easily I might employ this chapter in my teaching, either as the foundation of a syllabus on the Oedipus tradition, or, more discretely, as the basis of a writing assignment directing students to explore one of the later receptions of Seneca’s play which Braund identifies. In addition to surveying...