Shakespeare vs. Seneca: Competing Visions of Human Dignity

Abstract

Critical examination of the possibility that Senecan tragedy influenced Shakespeare has moved through several distinct phases. Early interest in verbal parallels and analogous literary conventions met with resistance from critics such as G. K. Hunter who sought to emphasize Shakespeare’s debt to medieval English drama, rather than classical Latin precedent. More recent scholarship, however, such as that of Robert S. Miola tends to present Shakespeare as well-versed in Senecan tragedy. Critics such as Gordon Braden, A. J. Boyle, and Colin Burrow, as well as Miola, have assembled illuminating studies of local allusions to Seneca’s tragedies in specific plays. Most studies of Shakespeare’s reception of Seneca tend to remain somewhat superficial, however, engaged with a myriad of discrete formal details, rather than diving deeper into more synthetic, probing questions of meaning, values, and worldview. How is Shakespeare the thinker responding to Seneca the thinker? I argue here that the most important distinction between the two playwrights is a difference of opinion about human dignity. Shakespeare’s Christian sensibility leads him to undermine and overturn Seneca’s more typically classical sense of human grandeur.