Seneca

Shakespeare and Senecan Tragedy

“…14 Recent work in Classics has also emphasized Seneca's innovative and influential perspectives on the self, both in his philosophical writing and in his tragedies. 15 Part of what I am doing in this book is connecting these dots, linking Shakespeare's supposedly epoch-making interest in radical individuation with aspects of Senecan tragedy that he drew upon and which might be said to explore the same thing. But Seneca's own interest in self-shaping and self-command, as Shadi Bartsch has explained, is inextricable from his historical situation in early-imperial Rome: the inward turn in his philosophical writing can be described as compensatory, a way to think about virtue after the collapse of a republican environment which had allowed for a more community-based sense of ethical duty.…”