Suicide and Seneca in Two Eighteenth Century Tragedies

Suicide and Seneca in Two Eighteenth Century Tragedies Stephen L. Trainor There is much about George Lillo’s Fatal Curiosity that demands conscious comparison with the more famous tragedy of Cato by Lillo’s contemporary, Joseph Addison. Each play presents in its principal character an advocate of Stoic philo­ sophy and each concludes with the main character’s suicide. Both works are similar in their observance of the classical unities and both attach great importance to the inculcation of a moral theme. Moreover, Lillo alludes to Addison’s tragedy in the opening scene of his play, and William H. McBumey sug­ gests that the important “Discovered, reading” scene in Fatal Curiosity was written to mirror a similarly significant scene in CatoA Yet what connects the two plays most firmly is not any structural similarity but rather their philosophical differences: taken together, Cato and Fatal Curiosity constitute a debate on the ethical merits of Stoicism in particular and secular philoso­ phy in general. Citing Seneca as his source, Addison makes his tragedy consist of “a virtuous man struggling with misfortune,” and chooses as his virtuous man that paragon of Stoicism, Cato. The catastrophe of the play, and the triumph of its philosophy, is the hero’s suicide. Lillo methodically opposes a Christian, essentially Calvinist theology to the secular philosophy of Addi­ son’s play. Using an original Puritan form of tragedy he de­ veloped in The London Merchant, Lillo inverts Cato’s triumph to reveal in the suicide what he sees as the moral bankruptcy of an ethical system operating without God. In Cato Addison turns to Seneca for his tragic theory, his subject matter, and his moral. Writing on tragedy in Spectator 39, Addison notes: As a perfect tragedy is the noblest production of human nature, so it is capable of giving the mind one of the most delightful and 216 Stephen L. Trainor 217 most improving entertainments. A virtuous man (says Seneca) struggling with misfortunes, is such a spectacle as gods might look upon with pleasure: and such a pleasure it is which one meets with in the representation of a well-written tragedy.2 The connection of this tragic theory with the subject matter of Cato is exact, for Addison places as the epigraph of his play the complete passage in Seneca’s Morals from which this idea is taken, clearly identifying Cato as his “virtuous man”: Here is a sight that God himself surveying his handiwork would find worthy to look upon. Here is a pair worthy of God’s behold­ ing: a brave man calm in the face of evil fortune. I repeat, I can envisage nothing that Jupiter, if he turned his gaze on earth, would behold there more beautiful than the spectacle of Cato standing stalwart amid the ruins of the state, though the cause to which he had allied himself had been crushed again and again.3 What moves Addison to look to Senecafor his subject matter and dramatic theory is his concern for the moral effect of tra­ gedy. He asserts that tragedies “wear out of our thoughts every­ thing that is mean and little”; they “cherish and cultivate that humanity which is the ornament of our nature”; they “soften insolence, soothe affliction, and subdue the mind to the dispen­ sations of Providence.”4 And it is precisely on this point of moral effect that Addison sees his classical models transcending those of the modem Christian theater: The modem tragedy excels that of Greece and Rome, in the intricacy and disposition of the fable; but, what a Christian writer would be ashamed to own, falls infinitely short of it in the moral part of the performance. (Spectator 39) With this deficiency in mind, Addison looks to Seneca for his moral and to Cato for his hero. Lillo, in writing Fatal Curiosity, takes up this challenge to the Christian writer. Pope, in his Prologue to Cato, reaffirms Addison’s emphasis on moral instruction, and identifies the proper audience response as imitation. In the opening lines Pope asserts that the proper end of tragedy is To wake the soul by tender strokes of art, To raise the genius and to mend the heart, To...