SOURCE: "Seneca and European Tragedy" and "Seneca & the Idea of Lyric Tragedy," in The New Criterion, Vol. XII, Nos. 4 and 5, December, 1993 and January, 1994, pp. 16-25, pp. 29-38.

In the first section of the following two-part essay, Gioia analyzes Seneca's contribution to the formal aspects of Elizabethan drama, including the five-act structure, the introduction of essential secondary characters, and the presentation of the ghost figure. In the second part Gioia characterizes Seneca as "the creator of a new theatrical genre—lyric tragedy. "

In 1543 Giambattista Giraldi Cinthio, the influential Italian playwright, critic, and writer of novelle (from whom Shakespeare borrowed the plots of Othello and Measure for Measure), judiciously summarized the Renaissance view of Seneca's dramas: "In almost all his tragedies he surpassed (in as far as I can judge) all the Greeks who ever wrote—in wisdom, in gravity, in decorum, in majesty, and in memorable aphorism."

Renaissance criticism...