Anna Lydia Motto and John R. Clark in their recent article on Seneca's Hercules Furens sought to refute what was becoming the orthodox approach to the play — an approach based on Aristotelian poetics and the view that Hercules' madness is a natural phenomenon arising from a tragic flaw, usually identified as pride and ambition. A long list of scholars have contributed to this orthodox approach, which was most fully articulated by Jo-Ann Shelton, who saw Hercules' madness as ‘an internal, psychological development.’ In Shelton's very negative view of Hercules, ‘pride and ambition motivate [his] actions. And madness is an extension of his boastfulness.’ According to Shelton, ‘through [Juno's] words, we learn of, even as they are occurring, the progressive stages in the development of Hercules' pride, ambition and madness.’ This ‘naturalistic’ interpretation of Hercules' madness may appeal to twentieth century psychological critics, but it fails to account for the literary tradition behind the figure of Juno in Seneca's play, and in failing to do so it accepts at face value her allegations that Hercules is an ambitious, overreaching adventurer intent on storming the heavens. Motto and Clark rightly perceive that Hercules is ‘persecuted’ by Juno and persecuted ‘not for what he does,’ but ‘for what he is’ (that is, the bastard offspring of her husband's latest amour with a mortal woman) and that the play is not a story of ‘the abuse of strength and the growth of destructive pride,’ but ‘the story of deliberately oppressed and maligned greatness.’
The title of Thomas Rosenmeyer's book, The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric, points to a conception of the pastoral as a closed world, set off from the real world outside, despite the author's disclaimer that the title is a misnomer.… the clarity with which the landscape is articulated suggests the limited confines of an interior, (vii) … the freedom of the herdsman is incorruptible; sealed in the bower … it survives and flourishes … (109)In seeking to define the essence of pastoral, Rosenmeyer strips off later accretions and sets the pastoral in sharp contrast to Hesiodic peasant poetry, drama, lyric, romance, and the poetry of Horace and Tibullus. He concentrates on a small number of passages from a limited number of texts to show what he regards as central in Theocritean pastoral: a restricted world of simplicity, freedom, and leisure (otium) that finds its closest corollary in the garden of Epicurus.Yet, even in Rosenmeyer's view, the pastoral ‘pleasance’ is not entirely isolated from the real world. There are, he admits, ‘intimations of a sterner and more hurtful life ostensibly excluded from the arbor’. (23)
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