In the following excerpt, Harsh examines Seneca's works against the backdrop of his life and times.

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.

In the essay below, the critics scrutinize the actions of Seneca's protagonists inorder to demonstrate that the characters willfully choose their courses of action.

Below, Marti contends that modern critical disparagement of Seneca's plays is, in part, the result of inappropriate comparisons with Greek drama. She asserts that Seneca was not attempting to imitate the earlier models, but rather was trying to adapt the "technique of drama to the teaching of philosophy. "

In the first section of the following two-part essay, Gioia analyzes Seneca's contribution to the formal aspects of Elizabethan drama, including the five-act structure, the introduction of essential secondary characters, and the presentation of the ghost figure. In the second part Gioia characterizes Seneca as "the creator of a new theatrical genre—lyric tragedy. "

Perhaps the most influential poet and critic to write in the English language during the first half of the twentieth century, Eliot is closely identified with many of the qualities denoted by the term Modernism: experimentation, formal complexity, artistic and intellectual eclecticism, and a classicist's view of the artist working at an emotional distance from his or her creation. The following essay was originally published in 1927 as an introduction to the Tudor Translation Series edition of Thoma...

Henry and Walker examine the "emotional and imaginative content of the philosophical concepts and abstractions " that Seneca treats in his plays, focusing particularly on Agamemnon.

Motto and Clark study the literary merits of the seven plays that can be ascribed to Seneca with certainty. They postulate that an over-emphasis on the importance of his philosophical writings to his drama impedes appreciation and understanding of the plays.