Seneca Rediscovered: Recovery of Texts, Reinvention of a Genre

Between the first century A.D and the medieval era, Seneca’s tragedies had no great relevance and were soon largely forgotten, like most Latin classic texts. It was not until the 13th Century that the first manuscripts reappeared and circulated in northern Italy and in France, emerging as the main – and, at the time, only – model of ancient tragedy. They would maintain this status for over three centuries. Within the European tradition, Seneca’s plays thus acquired a relevance that they had not had (and could not have had) in antiquity. Three people had an essential role in their rediscovery and in the development of the later tradition: Lovato Lovati and Albertino Mussato from Padua, and the English Dominican friar Nicholas Trevet. Lovato correctly identified and analysed the tragic meters used by Seneca, while Mussato first tentatively composed a “Senecan” play, Ecerinis, that resorted to both tragic and epic forms, and was not meant to be staged; Trevet wrote the first commentary of the entire body of Seneca’s tragedies. Both Mussato’s and Trevet’s readings of Seneca’s works were strongly prejudiced by medieval ideas about tragedy, which, being based solely on poor and indirect information, had greatly distorted the genre’s original features. The few medieval attempts to restore literary form to comic and tragic plots had resorted to elegiac meter within narrative settings somewhat removed from those of the ancient texts. Ideas about theatrical performances in Greece and Rome were distinctly confused. Both Mussato’s compositional experiment and Trevet’s analysis represent two extraordinary attempts to reinvent the ancient genre, by projecting onto it the prejudices and conventions of a culture as yet ignorant of Classical dramatic forms. Such a complex weave of medieval and ancient culture, after some experimentation in Latin during the 15th Century, was to shape the basic modern theatre forms elaborated in the different European languages.