SENECAN POSTSCRIPT

Eliot was always right to a degree, banally so. Much of the visceral, emotional and intellectual force of Senecan tragedy, like that of the great Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists whom Seneca inspired, is necessarily verbal. But, as Trinacty's closural analysis and the other studies of this volume attest, there are ‘further realities’—many and diverse: poetic, theatrical, political, rhetorical, psychological, moral, cultural—‘behind’ the language itself. This collection of critical essays is the latest manifestation of the resurgence of Senecan scholarly and intellectual energy which has taken place in the thirty plus years since the 1983 publication of the Ramus volume on Seneca Tragicus. That volume not only displayed with disdain the above quotation from Eliot, but paraded itself lamentably as ‘the first collection of critical essays devoted specifically to Senecan tragedy to be published in English’.