Brill's Companion to the Reception of Senecan Tragedy

Book excerpt: In Brill's Companion to the Reception of Senecan Tragedy, Eric Dodson-Robinson incorporates essays by specialists working across disciplines and national literatures into a subtle narrative tracing the diverse scholarly, literary and theatrical receptions of Seneca's tragedies. The tragedies, influential throughout the Roman world well beyond Seneca's time, plunge into obscurity in Late Antiquity and nearly disappear during the Middle Ages. Profound consequences follow from the rediscovery of a dusty manuscript containing nine plays attributed to Seneca: it is seminal to both the renaissance of tragedy and the birth of Humanism. Canonical Western writers from Antiquity to the present have revisited, transformed, and eviscerated Senecan precedents to develop, in Dodson-Robinson's words, "competing tragic visions of agency and the human place in the universe."