King Lear is structured by a surprisingly comprehensive and sustained engagement with Senecan tragedy. The play is about the collapse of society, and the antisocial nature of Senecan tragedy is its major intertextual resource for thinking about the tragic self in relation to community. The play’s first two acts draw heavily on Senecan language to imagine Lear’s furious response to his daughter’s independence. The middle portion of the play, especially the part with Lear in the storm, interrogates a style of high-flown Senecan rhetoric as the voice of a tragic brand of solipsism. The final movement of the play draws heavily on scenes of fraught and partial reconciliation in Seneca’s Hercules Furens and Phoenissae. Since the 1960s, King Lear has been celebrated as the preeminent dramatic representation of deracinated modern subjectivity, at once uplifting and corrosively skeptical. The play has come to be seen as a representative example of the type of modernist allegory Benjamin finds in Trauerspiel – as a representation of what it means to be human after having lost the ability to feel like part of any larger whole. But since Shakespeare achieves this via Seneca, it may be worth revisiting how modern the perspective actually is.

Senecan tragedy is also imperial in that it often locates its characters in relation to the disorientation of global empire. Hercules Furens places its hero’s violent madness at the very moment of world conquest, for instance, and Medea, which features a very famous choral ode about how sea-voyaging rewrites the world, is about the global reach of Roman ambition and desire. Several of Seneca’s philosophical writings (and especially his De Consolatione ad Helviam) likewise examine the tension between stoic self-command and the expansive restlessness of imperial desire. This chapter reads Titus Andronicus as a Senecan exploration of a late-imperial Roman moment in which the Roman scepter commands the whole world and in which racially heterogeneous people and competing modes of imaging civic life are all uneasily incorporated at once. It understands Senecan tragedy as a literary resource for imagining the resulting disorientation. The last section of the chapter examines Titus together with George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar, and argues that Senecan tragedy provides a model of psychological interiority that is paired with blackface to create the emergent stage stereotype of the wicked Moor.

Senecan tragedy is also imperial in that it often locates its characters in relation to the disorientation of global empire. Hercules Furens places its hero’s violent madness at the very moment of world conquest, for instance, and Medea, which features a very famous choral ode about how sea-voyaging rewrites the world, is about the global reach of Roman ambition and desire. Several of Seneca’s philosophical writings (and especially his De Consolatione ad Helviam) likewise examine the tension between stoic self-command and the expansive restlessness of imperial desire. This chapter reads Titus Andronicus as a Senecan exploration of a late-imperial Roman moment in which the Roman scepter commands the whole world and in which racially heterogeneous people and competing modes of imaging civic life are all uneasily incorporated at once. It understands Senecan tragedy as a literary resource for imagining the resulting disorientation. The last section of the chapter examines Titus together with George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar, and argues that Senecan tragedy provides a model of psychological interiority that is paired with blackface to create the emergent stage stereotype of the wicked Moor.