Aleksandr Fedchin (Tufts University)
This paper offers a quantitative analysis of the reception of Senecan trimeter in four early works of Italian Humanist tragedy, which illuminates the creative possibilities afforded by the basic structure of the meter and identifies specific features important to questions of style and semantics. The four Neo-Latin tragedies, drawn from Grund 2011, represent influential works that date from the early 14th century to mid-15th century and include both historical and mythological subject matter. As such, they provide a perspective both on the compositional variety displayed in the tradition and on certain commonalities in the metrical effects achieved by poets. Our analysis rests in large part on a substantial dataset of scansions of trimeter, which creates a stronger basis for claims about standard and non-standard uses of meter. Besides its support for general claims about pattern usage, the dataset is also a resource for literary critical analyses of a more qualitative nature: in particular, the paper shows across the tradition how resolutions can be used to convey a character’s emotional state or formal register.
To enable quantitative study of the tradition, we produce scansions of over ten thousand lines of trimeter, about a quarter of which are from Neo-Latin plays. This dataset is generated in a two-step, semi-automated process. We first apply a custom program for computational scansion, followed by manual review to account for uncommon vocabulary and unorthodox scansions of familiar words.
As the explicit discussions of certain writers indicate, and as our quantitative analysis of all four texts shows, Neo-Latin tragedians handled the iambic line with varying degrees of adherence to the Senecan model (cf. Blänsdorf 2019, Mahoney 2011). Of the four, Loschi only occasionally departs from patterns featuring in Senecan drama, whereas Correr, whose Procne is prefaced with a discussion of the meters used in the play, employs several major innovations, including lines that do not end in an iamb. The Neo-Latin tradition also shows evidence of generic cross-pollination, with Dati’s Hiempsal - a historical tragedy in terms of its content - composed in a meter that resembles the senarius of comedy more than Seneca’s trimeter.
We next consider the expressive power of resolutions, a topic that has been mentioned by many commentators of Seneca (cf. Keulen 2011: 24, Tarrant 1985: 30-1, Fitch 1987: 192, Boyle 2011: 126) but that has not received systematic scrutiny. We first observe that resolutions are often used to highlight contrasting ideas and moments of emotional agitation. Consistent with this observation, we find that rates of resolution are higher in passages of antilabe, which often mark tense exchanges between characters, than in lines spoken by a single character; this trend is consistent across the whole of our corpus, a striking example of metrical conformity between Seneca and the Humanist tragedians. As a point of contrast, we then examine several passages without resolutions; in the case of Medea’s prayer to Jupiter (Med. 531-7), for instance, we argue that the complete absence of resolutions gives her lines a formulaic quality appropriate to a solemn religious invocation.