Translator studii: Nicholas Trivet, Senecan Tragedy, and Auctoritas in England and Italy

Hello, all.

Here's a somewhat revised abstract, as submitted to Candace, which offers a metaphorical and more overtly literary take on the idea of diplomats:

T. S. Eliot once mused that “[n]o author exercised a wider or deeper influence
upon the Elizabethan mind or upon the Elizabethan form of tragedy than did
Seneca.” Seneca’s reputation among critics has shifted since Eliot penned his
often unflattering and remonstrative analysis of the Roman dramatist in 1927,
but the importance of Seneca to the development of early modern revenge tragedy
remains widely appreciated. But what of Seneca’s reception and reputation as a
dramatist during the Middle Ages? English literary history is largely silent on
Seneca’s influence on the development of theatrical tragedy in the years prior
to the mid-sixteenth century, and even though Chaucer cites Seneca as a
moral-philosophical authority over thirty times in the Canterbury
Tales, the Roman auctor seems to have been little known as a dramatist to
Chaucer or other Middle English poets and playwrights, with the notable
exception of Lydgate, who refers to Seneca’s tragedies several times in Fall
of Princes. Interest in Seneca’s tragedies does appear to have taken root
more strongly, however, in fourteenth century Italy, where, at the behest of the
bishop of Ostia, the polyglot English Dominican Nicholas Trivet wrote a complete
series of commentaries on all of Seneca’s surviving tragedies. This paper
explores Trivet’s role as a translator studii situated at the nexus of ancient
Latin and medieval English and Italian literary cultures. While Trivet, in the
guise of a commentator on Boethius and as the author of the Chronique
that served as a source for the Man of Law’s Tale, is a figure familiar
to Chaucerians, his readings of Seneca’s tragedies remain relatively unknown.
Building on Henry Ansgar Kelly’s work on tragedy and recent studies by scholars
of medieval drama who have traced the intellectual history of the idea of
ancient theater in medieval thought, this essay considers Trivet’s role as an
antiquarian whose interpretations of the ancient past, rightly described by one
scholar as “quite mechanical and ‘scholastic,’” nevertheless helped influence,
sometimes through yet further intermediaries like Boccaccio, the development of
an English concept of tragedy. This paper argues that Middle
English de casibus literature, including that of Chaucer and Lydgate,
performs its political critique by narrating the falls of famous men and women
in a tragic mode indebted to the auctoritas of Seneca, and of Trivet, to a
greater degree than has previously been claimed either by the poets themselves
or their subsequent readers.

I'm working upstream against Kelly a bit here, who has maintained that the idea of tragedy qua tragedy is limited in late-medieval England, and my final claim in this abstract may prove to be more ambitious than what I can reasonably sustain. But I've been interested for some time in taking a closer look at Trivet's responses to Seneca's plays, which, I suspect, are basically unknown to both Chaucerians and drama scholars (I consider myself among the latter by the way). And a Chaucer conference in Italy seemed just the place to do this! Trivet's remarks are glosses rather than commentative in the sense of producing a kind of working poetics of tragedy, but I'm convinced that much can be gleaned from his observations despite their general restraint. I'm still working through the commentaries and will report back in more detail soon when I'm feeling a bit more capable of reducing Trivet to a coherent observation or two.

Right now I'm mostly concerned that I'm getting sidetracked by the idea of tragedy in England, which Kelly has already handled more than admirably, when really what I'm interested in is the transmission of assumptions about Seneca and Senecan tragedy (rather than, say, a proper Senecan poetics based on his plays) across cultures into England as a kind of exercise in intellectual history. I'm probably not phrasing that helpfully, so let me try this: I'm more interested in what Chaucer, Lydgate, and others say about Seneca and how they appropriate and define him as an auctor rather than in what they might actually have known about him or his plays. I also want to explore how Trivet contributed to a European exchange of ideas about Seneca and Senecan tragedy in the Late Middle Ages. Does that make sense? (That's my question, by the way; all thoughts and reactions are greatly appreciated.)

John Sebastian