Tragedy and passions

I am painfully aware that the title of this chapter could well be the subtitle to a general essay on Senecan drama. This is a possible source of confusion I would like to dispel right away. It is true that the contrast between passion and reason is often named as the crucial tension animating these tragedies. But, as I am not attempting to offer here a general introduction, I do not focus primarily on the usual issues concerning the articulation of passions in the plays. My topic is more circumscribed: how passions can be described as the driving force not just behind the actions of characters but also behind the very existence of the tragedies, and especially how this genetic function is represented in the tragedies themselves.

Merely entertaining the hypothesis that passions might generate tragic poetry inevitably makes us face some familiar questions on the relationship between the tragedies and the rest of the Senecan corpus. One could claim that those questions are useless. Some critics could invoke the principle that we should read each tragedy as a separate and self-standing unit. Others could claim that the attempt to relate the tragedies, at any cost, to Senecan philosophy is a petitio principii: we ask how the tragedies can be compatible with the philosophy because we have already decided that they must be, since they were written by the same person.