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THE PASSIONS IN PLAY: THYESTES AND THE DYNAMICS OF SENECAN DRAMA. By ALESSANDRO SCHIESARO. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2003. Pp. xii, 284.
THIS BOOK is quite accurately tided. It is not simply a study of Thyestes, but uses such a study to ground a wide-ranging exploration of Senecan tragedy that encompasses a suitably broad array of texts. A brief Introduction lays the foundation by defending the play's particular suitability for sustained literary analysis and detaching it from any narrowly political and Neronian context. Freudian and post-Freudian theory is invoked and, applied with a mercifully light hand, will in fact be used to advantage.
Among various useful observations in the first chapter, "Poetry, Passions and Knowledge," are two important points, viz., that Seneca's prose works do not provide a "key" to the plays but should be taken together with them to understand Seneca's thought, and that a distinction between the "metadramatic" and the "metatheatrical" can get to the heart of the self-conscious quality so often noticed in the plays. Chapter Two, "Staging Thyestes," is in fact an exercise in metadramatic analysis, not "staging" in the sense of performance-a topic Schiesaro treats throughout with great wariness despite his use of terms like "audience" and "stage"-but the process by which the play creates itself, with Atreus as the master poet. The third chapter, "A Craftier Tereus," treats Seneca's engagement with Ovid's Metamorphoses, his use of Vergil, and the relationship between epic and tragedy. In Chapter Four, "Atreus Rex," Schiesaro examines two serious...