The Fiend-Like Queen: A Note on ‘Macbeth’ and Seneca’s ‘Medea

Summary

Not everyone is, perhaps, prepared to say that ‘ Macbeth without Seneca would have been impossible’; but many would agree with Henry N. Paul when he calls Macbeth ‘the most Senecan of all of Shakespeare’s plays’. Scholars and critics have pointed out affinities with Seneca in the structural and rhetorical features of the play, as well as in those less easily definable aspects which are usually grouped together as ‘atmosphere’: the presence in action or language, or both, of night, blood and the supernatural. A number of verbal resemblances to lines in Seneca (both the original tragedies and the translations in the Tenne Tragedies) have also been pointed out, and especially Agamemnon, Hercules Furens and Hippolytus (or Phaedra) have thus been suggested as sources for Macbeth. Some critics feel that in preparation for writing Macbeth Shakespeare may have read, or re-read, at least part of Seneca’s dramatic works; and one of them thinks that, as most of the verbal echoes are from the Hippolytus and the Hercules Furens—both plays in which ‘the protagonist’s crimes are accompanied or followed by violent fear and remorse’—this indicates that Shakespeare, in turning to Seneca, paid particular attention to those plays which, compared with the others, he found ‘closer in spirit to the theme he had chosen for his next drama’. This may sound too deliberate an imitative process to those who like to think of the workings of Shakespeare’s imagination as being less conscious.