To Seneca and the false Aristotle created by the humanists from the Poetics, the precepts of Horace, the definitions and maxims which sifted down through the encyclopaedists of the Middle Ages, and the example of Seneca, not only the men of the Renaissance but even we of today owe some of our most cherished ideas concerning tragedy. First of all, perhaps, is the belief that tragedy must end unhappily. The Greeks—whether creators or critics—had no such theory. It was enough for Sophocles and Aristotle that tragedy should be serious in theme and dignified in characters and in language. In the second place, we ordinarily believe that a tragedy should have five acts, and many of us can draw a diagram to prove it. Shakespeare and his fellows seem to have been dominated by the same theory, difficult as they sometimes found it to observe. The sacred unities, dominant so long in Italian and French tragedy, though never observed in any English play more notable than Addison's Cato, we have learned to disregard and even to decry, though such an attitude in the Elizabethan age awakened the censure of Philip Sidney and doubtless required some hardihood or even recklessness. The chorus also we have long since abandoned, but Greene and Peele and Kyd and Marlowe and Shakespeare and others of their time used it more than once and with good effect. They even, in some instances, combined with it the ghosts and infernal spirits, which beyond a doubt they owed to Seneca, and made this unearthly chorus, not only the commentator, but in some sense the subtle director of the action. Perhaps the most refined form of this is to be seen in the Ghost in Hamlet, who, though he does not appear technically as Chorus, yet recalls by his original incitement of the action and his later intervention to renew and direct it, as well as by his language and his attitude, the ghosts of Tantalus, Thyestes, Laius, and Agrippina in Seneca, and the spirits of Andrea and Revenge in The Spanish Tragedy. It is perhaps not going too far to find in the dream-setting of Hauptmann's Elga some reminiscence of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew and Greene's James IV, and consequently, in a remote sense, of Seneca's introductory figures, Tantalus, Thyestes, and the rest.
But these matters and the striking resemblances in situation and in utterance cited so abundantly by Cunliffe and by Munroe (Journal of Philology, Vol. VI, pp. 70-79), though they could be increased by many passages in Macbeth and King Lear as well as in the plays of other dramatists than Shakespeare, are after all not fundamental. Some other features that seem fundamental may be noted.
In the first place, although it is doubtless true that the scanty scenery of the Elizabethan stage is largely the excuse and the reason for the long descriptive passages with which the dramatists of that time delighted themselves and delight us, their modern readers, this is perhaps not the whole of the story. There are passages of exposition, of reflection, of pure declamation, equally long as well as equally beautiful. The Renaissance love of talk, of fine language, of eloquentia, may explain this in part; but it is doubtless due in part also to the example of Seneca, who never loses an opportunity for a long passage of description or introspection or reflection or mere declamation—making them indeed for the Chorus when the situation does not allow them to the ordinary dramatis personae.
Then we may note that the thoroughly melodramatic character of Elizabethan tragedy is a natural inheritance from Seneca. Greek tragedy had, to be sure, many melodramatic situations, along with others of a milder type. But the religious element in the tragedy of Aeschylus and Sophocles radically modifies the character and tone of the most poignant and repulsive themes and situations. When Seneca took the most difficult of Greek themes and, following the lead of Euripides, cast away the over-ruling, compulsive dominance of the Greek theocracy, he produced melodrama. Most moderns have been either content to follow him or compelled to do so for lack of the ability to create striking situations without the aid of villains of melodramatic criminality. A few of the French tragedians have had recourse to the method of the Greeks either by reviving the Greek mythology and theocracy or by resorting to Hebrew history for characters whose deeds, however criminal, were necessary parts of a divine plan. Shakespeare, almost alone, has at his best succeeded in substituting for the gods and fate the inevitable results of human character and the moral law, in presenting the worst deeds of his leading figures as less the results of free intention than of futile efforts to deliver themselves from the web of circumstance which their first crimes or follies have woven about them—the whole career of Macbeth, for example, being the necessary outcome of his attempt to get free of the difficulties and dangers brought upon him by the murder of Duncan.
Speculation as to what the English drama might have been if Sophocles instead of Seneca had been its inspiration and its model is idle. The men of the Renaissance did not understand Sophocles; his stage, the mode of production of his plays, his aim, the whole nature of his art, were beyond the scholarship of their day. And it is doubtful whether they could in any event have made so successful a combination of the Greek and the national or mediaeval drama as they made of Senecan tragedy and the dramatic forms they already possessed.
In one thing, at any rate, the English drama was especially fortunate, that is, in the fact that its form and its content were so largely determined by two such remarkable men as Marlowe and Shakespeare. The conditions in France in the sixteenth century were strikingly similar to those in England, except for the number of public theaters. M. Petit de Julleville points out that France as well as England possessed every item of the motley list of dramatic types enumerated by Polonius; and he continues: "Rien n'empêchait alors qu'un Shakespeare naquit en France; les circonstances n'étaient-elles pas merveilleusement favorables? Mais, en dépit de certaines théories, les grands hommes ne paraissent pas tout juste au moment où ils sont nécessaires. Il nous fallait un Shakespeare; il naquit un Alexandre Hardy!"