SOURCE: "Seneca and English Tragedy," in Seneca, edited by C. D. N. Costa, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1974, pp. 166-204.

In the following essay, Hunter cautions that Seneca's influence on Elizabethan drama was not a simple process, but rather a complex interplay between a multifaceted writer and a dynamic stage tradition.

The Literaturwissenschaft within which the origins or causes of Renaissance (or 'modern') tragedy have been sought is bound, by its method, to give importance to the tragedies of Seneca. The seminal surveys of Cloetta, Fischer and Creizenach adopted (inevitably enough) a chronological view of the development of a separate genre 'tragedy' [W. Cloetta: Beiträge zu Literaturgeschichte des Mittelalters und der Renaissance (1890); R. Fischer: Die Kunstentwick-lung der englischen Tragödie (1898); W. Creizenach: Geschichte des neueren Dramas (1909)]. Cunliffe's article on early tragedy in the Cambridge History of English Literature (vol. v, 1910) spells out the pattern which emerged, with model...