Journal of Italian Translation

Daniela Caselli
constant association in English literature, which has made ample
use of Italy as a form of release of restraint. 6 Seneca is not a direct
influence on English theatre; rather, Italian theatre has offered to
Kyd and Peele their blood-thirsty plots. Seneca’s influence, too big
to be ignored, is on the language; without it, it would be impossible
to even conceive of Elizabethan theatre. Most importantly, his influence
derives from the translations of his tragedies which circulated
at the time: the Tenne Tragedies (1559 e il 1566). Among them,
Troas (1559), Thyestes (1560) and Hercules Furens (1561) by Jasper
Heywood, Oedipus of Alexander Nevyle (1563), Octavia of Nuce,
Agamemnon, Medea, Hercules Oetaus and Hyppolitus of John Studley
(1566 and 1567). The publication of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey’s
Aeneid in 1557 provides Elizabethan drama with its ‘blank verse’,
immediately put to use into the English versions of Seneca’s tragedies,
which could not translate the solemn qualities of the Senecan
iambic into the ‘old fourteener’ or the ‘heroic couplet’, and which
therefore contributed both to the birth of the ‘blank verse’ and to
the poetical renewal of the Elizabethan period. Such renewal is
also based on radical modifications to the Seneca’s texts: in
Heywood’s translation of the Troas, for instance, what was a simple
mention of Achilles’ ghost becomes a soliloquy of 13 stanzas, conceived
for the stage and boasting a rhetorical quality which Peele
could not have equalled. Heywood and Studley still use the
fourteener, but they juxtapose it to the blank verse in the chorus –
which gives the translators an opportunity for adding, reducing,
omitting and substituting in order to increase the dramatic effect –
thus creating a contrast between old and new. The Tragedy of Blood
was born thanks to Heywood’s translations, which marked the
boundary between old and new versification.
Eliot links this historical moment to the issue of national identity
by claiming that while Boccaccio and Machiavelli in Italy and
Froissart and Joinville in France had already formed the local mind,
the Elizabethan mind ‘grew and matured through its verse rather
than through its prose’. Prose evolved too, but much more slowly;
the Tenne Tragedies demonstrate instead how the previously ubiquitous
‘fourteener’ will have to give way to the ‘blank verse’ of Henry
Howard whose Aeneid is taken to be not only a model of dignity,
but also apt to the bombast of Seneca. If the fourteener was good
for comedy, this new verse makes language explode ‘like new wine
bursting old bottles’. The Elizabethan bombast is that still present
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