Senecan Shakespeare
Reviewing Colin Burrow’s Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity in the TLS , Michael Silk refers to Dante’s debt to Virgil, and then observes:
“There is surely no counterpart to this in the case of Shakespeare - though one might perhaps consider it (Burrow himself doesn’t quite) in connection with Seneca.”
He finds that TS Eliot agrees: “There is in some of the great tragedies of Shakespeare, a new attitude. It is not the attitude of Seneca, but is derived from Seneca. . . . It ismodern and it culminates in Nietzsche. . . . It is the attitude of self-dramatization assumed by some of Shakespeare’s heroes at moments of tragic intensity.”
So perhaps it was ultimately Seneca and not Shakespeare who “invented the human”?
Peter Leithart
Peter J. Leithart is President of Theopolis Institute. He is the author of numerous books on theology, literature, and culture, including Theopolitan, Defending Constantine, and Baptized Body.
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