A revision on the contest about Seneca's influence upon Shakespeare

Abstract

This article aims toward a revision on the problematic contest about Seneca's influence upon Shakespeare and the Elizabethan dramatists from its own historiography. From general assumptions on this matter is reviewed how it was historically treated, recurring between utterly favorable or unfavorable arguments among the different methodological approaches. Started at the end of the 19th century, with John W. Cunliffe and his Seneca and The Elizabethan Tragedy (1893), that by means of parallels passages, established one kind of debit among the authors that lasts throughout the 20th century. Over the time the common elements have been studied and in the meantime the discussion has reached the opposite extreme by proposing the denial of Seneca's influence with Howard Baker (1939) and G. K. Hunter (1967 and 1974). Later, new ways of thinking about this issue have emerged revealing the complexity of the matter, generally reduced to a simple acceptation of Seneca's influence upon Shakespeare's tragic work and leaving out the contemporary dramatists as well as the theatrical forms that preceded it.