With bloody verses charmd? Spenser and Seneca

The writings of Lucius Annaeus Seneca seem to have been, to exaggerate only a little, everywhere in early modern Europe: widely printed, read, translated, cited, imitated, and, in the case of Seneca’s tragedies, even occasionally performed.[1] It is therefore surprising that relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to Spenser’s engagements with this most prolific and various of classical authors. Although Senecan texts are quite widely cited as sources for particular episodes and passages in The Faerie Queene by eighteenth-century editors and commentators, references have not led to sustained analysis: Seneca has no entry or general presence in the Spenser Encyclopedia, nor much consideration in discussions of Spenser’s classical influences and sources in more recent handbooks and companions.[2] Although prose works by Seneca such as De beneficiis (On Benefits) have been occasionally cited as sources for specific passages or themes in Spenser’s writing, the question of what Seneca can bring to our reading of Spenser more broadly is as yet – save a few notable exceptions – unanswered.[3] This essay will outline the reception of Seneca in early modern England and as a literary resource in scholarship as relevant to Spenser, before setting out an alternative model for understanding Spenser’s Senecan engagements. Drawing upon recent work in classics and literary studies that stresses the intertextuality of Seneca’s writing, it will suggest that ‘Seneca’, with all the complexities that this name presented in the early modern period, is a potent source for Spenser in the broadest sense of the term: a large, suggestively intertextual corpus of texts; a means of thinking through, and of performing, one’s relationship to past texts and their authors, and a model of the possibilities of genre play and parody.

Modern readings of Seneca’s literary influence in early modern England have been substantially inflected by the chequered reception of Seneca more generally, probably starting with Quintilian, who in the Institutio Oratoria (The Orator’s Education) rather ambivalently describes him as a good moralist but a mediocre philosopher, and a man of ‘ready and prolific talent, diligent study, and deep learning’ who nonetheless has a ‘decadent’ [corrupta] style.[4] Ambivalence veering frequently into the negative was the prevailing tone in much work on Seneca until at least the 1960s, whether based on his style (not Virgilian), his biography (‘[t]he hypocritical millionaire mouthing Stoic pieties’), or the themes and topics of his writings.[5] It is only relatively recently that the tragedies in particular have been re-evaluated as sophisticated literary productions, rather than unstageable texts full of ranting megalomaniacs, gory violence, and unsettling changes of pace and time.[6] This ‘Senecan Renaissance’, as William Calder calls it, is still ongoing, with much recent work on Seneca in classical studies focusing on Senecan literariness and intertextuality, self-fashioning and self-performance, and the place of his works in the philosophical and literary contexts of first-century Rome.[7]

English literary scholarship has run along similar lines, with the longer and generally more deleterious history of Seneca’s writings until relatively recently shaping critical ideas about what Senecan writing and influence could be and do in early modern England. Much early scholarship on Seneca and early modern literature tended to take the form of skirmishes for or against ‘influence’ in these terms, as measured by the citation of parallel passages or the incorporation of Senecan sententiae into early modern texts.[8] Subsequent critical reaction against this conceptualization of Senecan ‘influence’ led often to the denial that Seneca was a significant source for early modern writers at all: Seneca thus conceived was ‘derivative, static, overly bombastic, and essentially non-dramatic’, and so at best a limited set of literary potentialities for early modern writers.[9] Taking its cue from Seneca’s rehabilitation in classical studies, however, recent work on the reception of Seneca in early modern England has stressed his identity as a political thinker and actor; and as an allusive, intertextual writer who provides a model for how one writes oneself into literary traditions ancient, contemporary, and mixed.

How has Spenser fitted into this picture to date? With the exception of Jeff Espie’s recent work on classical tragedy and The Shepheardes Calender, in general he hasn’t.[10] The reasons for this appear to be due firstly to the way in which Seneca has been presented as a source for Elizabethan writers, and secondly to assumptions about Spenser and genre. Critical work on the reception of Seneca in early modern England has tended to split along both formal and disciplinary lines. For all that Seneca has been seen as an ‘undramatic’ writer, literary criticism has nonetheless tended to focus only on the most strikingly ‘literary’ texts in the Senecan corpus: the influence and translation of the ten tragedies, predominantly in relationship to the development of Elizabethan drama.[11] While this division has as we shall see some historical justification, since ‘philosopher’ and ‘tragedian’ Seneca were often, if not always, seen as two separate individuals in the early modern period, the emphasis upon Senecan tragedy in literary studies has largely prevented Seneca from featuring in scholarship on Spenser, who wrote no plays (or, whatever the nature of the ‘nine Englishe Commoedies’ mentioned by Gabriel Harvey in the Familiar Letters, no surviving ones).[12] This lacuna overlaps with broader questions about Spenser’s engagement (or not) with drama more generally, which has received comparatively little attention.[13] As a result, Spenser studies has remained largely insulated from much of the attention early modern literary scholarship has paid to Senecan tragedy and translation since the turn of the twentieth century.

The only two references to Seneca by name in Spenser’s poetry provide a helpfully concise illustration of some of the features of Senecan writing that seem to have been particularly interesting to Elizabethan writers, and that have formed the focus of much modern scholarship. In the ‘Julye’ eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender, E. K. glosses Thomalin’s moralising remark that ‘oftentime | great clymbers fall vnsoft’ with the comment that Thomalin is speaking ‘according to Senenca [sic] his verse, Decidunt celsa grauiore lapsus’ [lofty things end with a heavier fall].[14] The culling of brief but incisive maxims, or sententiae, from both Seneca’s prose and dramatic works has a long pre-modern critical history, with florilegia of quotations from works both dubiously and genuinely Senecan circulating from the fourteenth century.[15] The brevity and ‘quotability’ of such sententiae were also an important part of what sixteenth-century readers appreciated about Seneca. Collections of maxims lifted from Seneca’s works were printed throughout the early modern period, including an assemblage of quotations by Erasmus, who edited Seneca’s prose works in 1515 and 1529; and quotations from the tragedies feature prominently in poetic anthologies such as Octavianus Mirandula’s Viridarium illustrium poetarum (1507), and from the tragedies and the prose works in Domenico Nani Mirabelli’s Polyanthea (1503).[16] Such collections gave early modern readers the opportunity to engage with Senecan materials without accessing the plays or the other works only in toto. Decontextualised Senecan quotations appear in The Spanish Tragedy and The Malcontent, to mention only a few plays at random, and English writers’ apparent fondness for sententiae was famously mocked by Thomas Nashe in 1589, who complained that ‘English Seneca’ – possibly in reference to the 1581 collection Seneca His Tenne Tragedies – ‘will affoord you whole Hamlets, I should say handfulls of tragical speaches’.[17] E. K.’s identification of Thomalin’s remark as a sententious sentiment seems to fit into such a ‘line by line’ use of the author – though, as we will see, not without serious problems.[18]

This is not all there is to say about the Calender’s ‘Seneca’, for the references also tap into more recent critical perceptions of the author as a moralist and a politician, and as a purveyor of a particular dramatic ‘aesthetic’.[19] The particular sentiment expressed by Thomalin here – that ambitious ‘clymbers’ should beware their inevitable, and weighty, fall, in contrast to the security of those content to remain in ‘humble dales’– has also been central to critical readings of Senecan tragedy and its translation as a political resource. This work sees the tragedies as advisory texts concerned with, to quote one seminal article, ‘the liberties and responsibilities of monarchy’, and understood by their first English translators as ‘a classical version of advice-to-princes poetry’.[20] Moreover, in ‘Nouember’, E. K. glosses a line from Colin’s elegy for Louise of Savoy, ‘Up grieslie ghostes’, as in ‘The maner of Tragicall Poetes, to call for helpe of Furies and damned ghostes: so is Hecuba of Euripides, and Tantalus brought in of Seneca’.[21] ‘Grisly’, that which causes horror and terror, and a favoured word of Seneca’s early Elizabethan translators, is often identified as a paradigmatic ‘Senecan’ quality, part of the ‘cosmos-rending violence, prodigious agents driven by furor, and weighty language’ perceived by modern readers in particular as central to the tragedies.[22]

E. K.’s two Senecan invocations seem straightforward enough, and we might thus say that Spenser’s Calender is in line with longstanding scholarly perceptions of the way that Senecan tragedy was read and used in Elizabethan England. But things are not in fact as they seem in either instance: both references are, as Jeff Espie has recently pointed out in a searching analysis of these passages, erroneous.[23] The Latin sententia that E. K. attributes to Seneca in ‘Julye’ is not found in any text by the author. Even quoting a particular author here is perhaps unexpected, for Thomalin’s remark that ‘this reed [i.e., saying] is ryfe’, suggests, as Espie says, that he is repeating common wisdom, rather than a specific classical, Senecan quotation.[24] A similar imprecision is visible in E. K.’s second Senecan reference. Although, as E. K. says, Tantalus does indeed appear in Seneca’s Thyestes, he reluctantly participates in fomenting the play’s dreadful events only on the orders of the Furies: the only plea that the play features, as Espie points out, ‘comes from the grisly ghost, not the tragical poet’, when Tantalus implores his descendants to limit the violence of their revenges (which they don’t).[25]

What do these apparent inaccuracies mean? Espie argues that Spenser’s errors are deliberate, ‘imply[ing] a knowing absorption of several Senecan traditions’, including Seneca’s own engagements with his literary antecedents both Augustan and Greek.[26] Seneca’s name in the Calender thereby connotes ‘a web of intertextual mediation’, drawing the Calender’s pastoral ambitions together with, and through, Seneca’s revisions of Virgilian epic into tragedy.[27] In this stimulating reading Spenser’s Senecan references are not just literary filler – bits of sententious decoration, and horrible thrills – but a key into the Calender’s own intertextuality: its engagement with non-Senecan texts and their genres. I find Espie’s reading of the literary and intertextual opportunities Seneca presents to Spenser persuasive. I would add, though, that Spenser may also, like Nashe, be having more immediate fun, at the expense of contemporary sententiae- and horror-obsessed readers of Seneca like E. K., by presenting material that sounds stereotypically ‘Senecan,’ – ‘Up grisly ghosts’! – but which is not actually in any text by Seneca. The Calender may thus be reproducing – or imitating – a kind of undesirable or incomplete ‘Senecan’ reading, leaving a trail of clues for those readers with a first-hand knowledge of the texts themselves. The need for this type of careful attention to what E. K. says about the Calender’s sources, and what the Calender itself does, may be a playful warning to its readers: watch your step (or your footing).

If Spenser is responding to the circulation of what we might call ‘Senecan’ discourse, or even ‘Senecanism’ in England in the 1570s, perhaps for the same readership who so eagerly bought Jasper Heywood’s translation of Troas that it was on its third edition by 1562, then he learned from the master: that is, from ‘Seneca’ himself.[28] Seneca was for his Elizabethan readers a perhaps surprisingly self-reflexive author, presenting opportunities for the keen-eyed reader to observe instances of self-quotation and sometimes genre-bending self-parody. The clever but distasteful satire Apocolocyntosis, or, the ‘gourdification’ of the Emperor Claudius, or Ludus de morte Claudii, as early modern printed editions often title it, provides the most direct instance of these possibilities.[29] The text deals with the apotheosis of the recently-deceased Claudius, and the subsequent debate in heaven, modelled on the Roman senate, as to whether he should be admitted as a god. Upon arrival at the entrance to heaven, an unrecognizable Claudius is met by a rather cowardly Hercules. Afraid of the monstrum which has presented itself, and unable to reason with it, Hercules decides that the only way to deal with the situation is to go into tragic mode, so as to be more imposing: ‘et quo terribilior esset, tragicus fit’, and proceeds to declaim in verse, in the manner of a Hercules in tragedy.[30] The success of this passage – and of the joke – depends upon readers’ knowledge of Hercules as a tragic figure, as well as the buffoon in Greek Old Comedy and satyr plays, and it may have a particular tragedy in mind close to home. Although we cannot be sure of the order in which Seneca produced his works, the Hercules ‘tragicus’ that springs most readily to mind is Seneca’s own Hercules in his play Hercules furens.[31] The episode slyly fits genres inside genres for readers widely read enough to notice.

Hercules’ sudden breakout into tragic verse illustrates the prosimetric and multi-generic nature of the Apocolocyntosis, and provides one instance of the way that the satire sets up textual situations and passages that not only allude to or echo other texts, but parody them, for entirely different tonal and generic purposes. It also incorporates proverbial material and extensive quotations from earlier classical texts, and dramatizes the act of quotation, and all that it entails.[32] Since Seneca appears to include his own Hercules furens in the texts that he sends up, the Apocolocyntosis surely provides an object lesson in the pleasures and the perils of allusion, parody, and quotation more broadly, whether of yourself or others, and thereby perhaps a slightly different writer to the ‘heavy’ Seneca described by Polonius and many non-fictional Elizabethans.[33] This is a Seneca available for generic appropriation, and for far more than the culling of moral sententiae.

Arguably ‘Seneca’ in the early modern period was – or at least had the potential to be – an even more playful and self-parodic author than modern ‘Seneca’. Early modern uncertainty about the identity of the author as an individual persisted at least until the first decades of the seventeenth century, provoking considerable discussion about whether ‘Seneca’ was two historical persons, a philosopher and a tragedian, or the same person and author of all texts (a minority view), or even, in the case of the tragedies, several different authors responsible for different plays in the corpus.[34] Such questions and hypotheses affected the whole canon: the Controversiae, declamations authored by ‘our’ Seneca’s father, Seneca the Elder, were often seen as the work of the same author as the prose philosophical works, as were pseudo-Senecan works such as St. Martin of Braga’s Formula vitae honestae, and even a purported correspondence between the philosopher and St. Paul.[35] The early modern ‘Seneca’ was potentially an author of very many different types of texts. Readers could even point to Quintilian as an authority on Seneca’s variety: ‘[h]e put his hand to almost every type of literature. Speeches, poems, letters, and dialogues of his are in circulation.’[36]

Since several of these works are Senecan imitations themselves, such uncertainties over authorship rather perversely make Seneca more intertextual and even self-referential than he appears to modern readers working with a different configuration of his corpus. Although modern scholarship holds that Octavia and Hercules Oetaeus are the work of later authors, not Seneca the Younger, there was no such settled consensus about their authorship in the early modern period: these plays were no more likely not to be thought the work of a ‘Seneca’ than the other eight, ‘genuine’ plays.[37] Seneca philosophus appears in a scene with Nero, while Hercules Oetaeus borrows phrases and echoes passages from across the ‘real’ Senecan corpus. Such imitations and engagements with Seneca’s tragedies – and, in the case of Octavia, with the person of Seneca himself – makes Seneca seem like a much more intertextual author than he does when the plays are definitively excluded from the ‘genuinely’ Senecan canon.

What happens if we incorporate this allusive and generically unsettling Seneca into our readings of Spenser? One particular allusion demonstrates something of the range of effects that Spenser uses Seneca to create. During his battle with the dragon in canto xi of Book I of The Faerie Queene, Redcrosse takes to hitting the dragon repeatedly on the head with his ‘trenchand blade’. Although the blows leave no mark, they do bother the dragon, so that he attempts to fly off.[38] But he finds that the wound that Redcrosse inflicted on him with his spear a few stanzas previously disables him from doing so. As a result, he attempts to broil Redcrosse alive:

Then full of griefe and anguish vehement,
   He lowdly brayd, that like was neuer heard,   
   And from his wide deuouring ouen sent
   A flake of fire, that flashing in his beard,
   Him all amazd, and almost made afeard:
   The scorching flame sore swinged all his face,
   And through his armour all his body seard,
   That he could not endure so cruell cace,
But thought his armes to leaue, and helmet to vnlace.

Not that great Champion of the antique world,
    Whom famous Poetes verse so much doth vaunt,
    And hath for twelue huge labours high extold,
    So many furies and sharpe fits did haunt,
    When him the poisoned garment did enchaunt
    With Centaures blood, and bloody verses charmd,
    As did this knight twelue thousand dolours daunt,
    Whom fyrie steele now burnt, that erst him armd,
That erst him goodly armd, now most of all him harmd (FQ, I. xi. 26-27).[39]

What has probably been most frequently remarked upon and wrestled with in these two stanzas is their focus on Redcrosse’s armour. Following the Letter to Raleigh’s identification of the armour as the ‘armour of a Christian man’, that the armour harms Redcrosse here might be understood (after some thought) as a feature of that Christian armour, which is sometimes painful, for ‘the life of faith includes suffering and sinfulness as parts of purification and strengthening.’[40] Even readers who have excavated the stanzas’ theological significance in detail have found both the events they depict, and the manner in which they depict them challenging. ‘The treachery of the armor… is the most fully elaborated and at the same time the most puzzling detail of the whole incident’, remarks Carol Kaske, one of the most insightful and learned expositors of these stanzas, while ‘the tone of this passage wavers curiously between that of the heroic and moving… and the farcical quality of the dragon assaying the can-can’.[41]

We will return to the curious tonal qualities of these stanzas shortly, but we will start with the question of Redcrosse’s armour, and what Seneca adds to this picture. I would argue that the ‘flake of fire, that flashing in his beard’ afflicted by the dragon on Redcrosse is an allusion to the burning of Hercules’ beard on the pyre in the pseudo-Senecan Hercules Oetaeus:

Nunc ora flammis implet: ast illi graves
luxere barbae; cumque iam vultum minax
appeteret ignis, lamberent flammae caput

Now he thrusts his face full into the flames. His heavy beard blazed up… the menacing fire attacked his face and the flames licked around his head[.]

[42]

(With steaming countnaunce vnapaulde his mouth now doth he fill) 
With burning coals, his comely Bearde then blazde about his cheekes: 
And now when as the sparkling fier vnto his visage seeks, 
The flame lickt vp his singed hayre[.][43]

Spenser’s next stanza in fact builds on the allusion, by comparing Redcrosse’s torments to those of Hercules ‘when him the poysoned garment did enchaunt’, as vaunted by ‘famous Poetes verse’. The ‘poysoned garment’ is of course the shirt of Nessus – another ‘cruell cace’, for ‘case’ is also a word for a garment – which Hercules unwittingly puts on and is only released from by immolating himself on the pyre so gruesomely described in Hercules Oetaeus.[44] Redcrosse’s subsequent feelings in the following stanza, ‘Faint, wearie, sore, emboyled, grieued, brent | With heat, toyle, wounds, armes, smart, and inward fire’, and desire for death, are in a sense a paraphrase of Hercules’ lamentations after putting on the shirt of Nessus in Hercules Oetaeus, which he describes as a burning, inner scourge (FQ, I.xi.28).[45] Spenser seems to anticipate that readers will notice that Redcrosse and ‘Seneca’s’ Hercules have similarly flammable beards and burning insides, for the first line of the stanza introduces Hercules with the word ‘Not’, as if to pre-empt, and control, readerly association of Redcrosse with Hercules. This may be a theological differentiation: Redcrosse’s torments are inordinately greater than those of the ‘great Champion’ of the classical world because in Spenser’s eyes the stakes are higher: the heavenly Jerusalem is the prize rather than apotheosis to Olympus. Spenser’s Senecan beard may thus function as a sort of corrective allusion: a subordination both of pagan, Herculean suffering, and possibly pagan ‘Poetes verse’, to Redcrosse’s suffering, and their poet.

This reading would make the allusion a relatively simple instance of poetic overgoing, but Hercules Oetaeus itself suggests that something more complex is going on. As its early modern editors sometimes noted, the play is full of quotations and echoes from the other Senecan tragedies, especially Hercules furens, as well as other prominent literary tellings of the end of Hercules, particularly Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The play puts its own events, often critically, into the context of events related in Hercules furens: both Hercules’ son and mother initially mistake his sufferings in the shirt of Nessus for the madness that is the subject of the earlier play (‘People thought his old madness had returned’ [vulgus antiquam putat | rabiem redisse]), and at times the poison and Hercules’ madness in both plays are described as a pestis.[46] When Hercules understands the source of the shirt’s venom, and that it fulfils his destiny, he exclaims ‘It’s done, all over!’ [Habet, peractum est!], a gladiatorial formula which is also used to describe the moment of Agamemnon’s death in Seneca’s Agamemnon.[47] For modern readers, partly because we know that Seneca the Younger is almost certainly not its author, the play has attracted terms such as ‘cento-like’, reflecting a view that the play is inferior in comparison to Seneca’s ‘real’ plays, and more of a patchwork than a sophisticatedly intertextual piece of writing.[48] Whatever we think about the quality of the play, our relative certainty about its provenance was not available to sixteenth-century readers such as Spenser. Perhaps early modern readers might have taken the play’s allusiveness as more serious and potentially self-referential, in conversation both with other tragedies by ‘Seneca’, and with other poetry. Certainly early modern editors of the tragedies in collection sometimes changed the order of the plays from the order in which they were circulated in manuscript, and place Hercules Oetaeus directly after Hercules furens, perhaps indicating their sense of a connection between the plays.[49]

How might this have shaped early modern readings of Hercules Oetaeus? One of the ways in which Hercules Oetaeus is rather un-‘Senecan’ is its positive conclusion, which the play presents perhaps at the expense of thematic and dramatic effectiveness. Since this ‘hero’ achieves the deification that the Hercules of Hercules furens desired in his madness, Hercules Oetaeus starts to look like a triumphant completion of the ‘story’ of Hercules started in Hercules furens, and one which turns Hercules into the exemplar that he fails to be in the earlier play.[50] Early modern readers might reasonably have read Hercules Oetaeus as ‘Seneca’ – whether Seneca tragicus, or someone else – rather self-consciously rewriting Hercules furens, creating and accomplishing the connection between the texts through both their shared protagonist, and textual echoes and quotations. We might consider whether the types of repeated self-quotations instanced above provide one model for Spenser’s own occasional repetitions of clusters of rhyme words, such as charmd/armd/harmd here. And in fact, like the triad of ioyes, toyes, and boyes which appears most famously twice in the Bower of Bliss, and also in other moments of lust and incontinence, charmd, armd and harmd also bookend two other episodes of self-destructive and distinctly fiery concupiscence in canto vi of Book II.[51]

First of all, having been successfully tempted by Phaedria, Cymochles lays ‘his head disarm’d’ in her lap, and soon sleeps, ‘fearing not [to] be harm’d, | The whiles with a loud lay she thus him sweetly charm’d’ (FQ, II.vi.14). He later fights with Guyon, which ends inconclusively, but the canto itself closes with the re-entrance of Cymochles’ brother Pyrochles, who is desperate to quench the internal fire with which Furor had infected him in the previous canto. Archimago comes to his rescue, and the final stanza of the canto records that he ‘disarmd’ Pyrochles, seeks out those inner parts of him that are ‘harmd’, and ‘with mighty spels them charmd’ (FQ, II.vi.51). Given these rhyming triads, we might pay closer attention to the canto’s language, at which point we might identify Pyrochles’ suffering as very much akin to that of Seneca’s Hercules in his ‘cruell cace’:

I burne, I burne, I burne, then loud he cryde,
O how I burne with implacable fire,
Yet nought can quench mine inly flaming syde,
Nor sea of licour cold, nor lake of mire,
Nothing but death can doe me to respire. (FQ, II.vi.44)

Like Hercules in Hercules Oetaeus, who also longs for death, and declares that ‘[n]ot even Ocean, though vaster than all lands, can quell my fever’ [non ipse terris maior Oceanus meos | franget vapores], Pyrochles is ‘consum[ed] by ‘flames’ ‘within my secret bowels’, and Furor’s ‘deadly wounds within my liuers swell, | And his whot fire burnes in mine entrails bright’ (FQ, II.vi.49-50).[52]

‘Seneca’s’ visceral descriptions of burning insides, and habit of self-quotation apparently provided Spenser with both an allusive nexus and a means of incorporating it into The Faerie Queene. But what does this pattern of Senecan allusion mean for Redcrosse and his ‘cruell cace’? First of all – and rather obviously – the allusions point to the importance of sin and sinfulness as topics in Redcrosse’s battle with the dragon, as scholars have long elucidated.[53] This much we might also have already guessed from the stanza’s mention of Hercules, whose fatal encounter with the shirt of Nessus was indeed moralized as concupiscence.[54] Spenser’s charmd/armd/harmd rhymes invites us to think of Redcrosse, Cymochles, and Pyrochles in relation to the death of Hercules, as they all suffer burning internal torments, even if their causes are slightly different. But the Senecan connections between these incidents in Book I and II also illustrate how they are not alike. In Redcrosse’s case the stanza itself declares this: the knight is ‘Not’, we are told, like Hercules, even as Spenser repurposes material from Hercules Oetaeus to shape his broiling at the paws of the dragon. Although like Hercules Redcrosse desires death as a release, he only ‘thought his armes to leaue’, unlike the desperate and gruesome attempts of Hercules to remove the shirt from his body.[55] More importantly, while Redcrosse is ‘new-borne’ after his scorching (FQ, I.xi.34), rather like the deified Hercules of Hercules Oetaeus, the agent of Redcrosse’s salvation (in every sense) is not the decree of Jupiter, or the sorcery of Archimago, but the well and the tree of life. All the differentiations above can be quite straightforwardly slotted into the episode’s Christian allegory, even if its precise theological meanings are, as Kaske points out, hard to precisely pin down.[56]

As we said above, then, Spenser’s uses of Seneca here are corrective, subordinating the Herculean to the Christian. But the episode’s strange tonal qualities point to another way in which Spenser makes use of Hercules Oetaeus here. The stanzas depicting Redcrosse’s burning seem to emphasise, or even revel in, the paradoxical situation that they depict, taking euphuistic pleasure both in the antithesis of ‘armd’ and ‘harmd’, and in the anadiplosis of ‘erst him armd’ and ‘erst him goodly armd’, and the pun of the ‘cruell cace’ that Redcrosse finds himself in, which is both the situation itself, and the enclosure of his armour.[57] Although we could find a parallel to these types of verbal antitheses elsewhere in Elizabethan literature, as for instance in Sidney’s gory pictorial descriptions of battlefields in the ‘new’ Arcadia, something about these particular stanzas has tended to offend critical sensibilities.[58] Spenser’s eighteenth-century editor John Upton found the stanza’s verbal plays bordering upon the edges of taste, acknowledging that ‘Spenser intended here a play or jingle with the like sound of words, the reader cannot but own, however his delicacy might be offended’; and Joseph Campana finds that the stanzas depict a Redcrosse devoid of sympathy and ‘increasingly impassive, impervious’ and violent – which is in fact a rather good description of the Hercules of Hercules Oetaeus.[59]

I agree that these two stanzas are indeed strange, first of all because, as the charmd/armd/armd/harmd repetitions and rhymes emphasise, they change the terms of the object they focus on: the ‘armour of a Christian man’ here takes on a new signification that is not quite compatible with its previous significations in Book I. This point stands even if we decide that while the armour can’t quite be what is it said to be in the Letter to Raleigh, it is still allegorically sound: that it now represents the potential harms of (for instance) Mosaic law, or is an Augustinian paradox, or another part of the Christian pilgrimage.[60] For the armour to work allegorically it must be said to have shifted in meaning, and as such it is a moment or object of transition in the episode. Like Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis, Hercules Oetaeus is a useful text for thinking about transitions, both because of its subject matter – a mortal or demi-mortal aspires to become a god – and because of the way in which it deals with apotheosis. The play undergoes a rapid change in tone – perhaps even in genre – in its final section, in which Hercules ceases raging and lamenting, and transforms rather abruptly from a figure of monstrous appetites and rather un-Herculean lack of endurance into a sort of ultimate Stoic hero, remaining dry-eyed on the pyre, and instructing his weeping son, mother, and associates not to mourn his death. The play pointedly rewrites one of its own major sources, Ovid’s account of the death of Hercules in Book 9 of the Metamorphoses, to emphasise this newfound steadfastness. Hercules Oetaeus seems to have drawn heavily on Ovid’s account, as early modern commentators note amusedly – ‘our tragedian loves to follow Ovid’, remarks Georg Fabricius, for instance – but the play recounts Hercules’ death with far more fervent solemnity, removing (for instance) Ovid’s comparison of Hercules on the pyre to the hero at his banqueting couch.[61]

The consequence of these tonal and intertextual choices in Hercules Oetaeus is the separation of Hercules and his ‘plot’ from the other mortals in the play, and the presentation of the mournful alongside the triumphant, with no reconciliation between the two. Both Hercules’ mother Alcmene and a choral ode mourn his death at length, before the hero himself re-enters at the very end, and declares triumphantly that he has indeed been made a god. All this may well be a product of the play’s flaws, but their effect is to create an ending in which a curious array of tonal and generic possibilities are still on offer. Until the very end of the play, the pyre is an uncertain point of transition: will it transform Hercules to a god, or not? Spenser’s Senecan allusion to Hercules on the pyre marks Redcrosse as a figure also at a moment of uncertain transition. His scorching takes place at the close of the first of his three days of battle with the dragon, the outcome of which is at yet also uncertain – especially if the circumstances in which the charmd/armd/harmd triad appears in Book II point towards his as yet imperfect spiritual progress. The allusion balances the first day of the battle between tragedy and tragicomedy. In its difficult transition between different strata of experience, Spenser’s Senecan allusion also suggests that perhaps the translation of Redcrosse’s armour into ‘the armour of a Christian man’ is itself a heroic feat.

Comments

• Boston Pro Mobile Mechanic Co. 2 days, 4 hours ago

  Much early scholarship on Seneca and early modern literature tended to take the form of skirmishes for or against ‘influence’ in these terms, as measured by the citation of parallel passages or the incorporation of Senecan sententiae into early modern texts.

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