Lucius Anneus Seneca

Kyd adapted Seneca to the English stage. Seneca was a Greek philosopher who wrote these plays, called closet dramas, which were made to be read to oneself and not acted aloud. Plays like Hercules, Medea, and Oedipus. Kyd took the elements of the Senecan closet dramas-  histrionic soliloquies, moralization of the tragic narrative through a philosophical lens, classical unities of time and space- and made them into popular theater. However, Senecan closet dramas were timid in comparison with Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, which featured bloody violence right on stage. This is what I will be capitalizing on in my vision of Kyd’s play. In essence, I want to take the brutal violence and gore that characterizes so much of our popular entertainment and put it back where popular entertainment used to thrive, back on the stage.  I want to see how my modern audience, so used to graphic violence in video games and television and movies, reacts to this same violence when it takes place in the theater. I think this will have a very unique impact on the modern audience, and will be also a commentary on the roots of theater as well as the long standing tradition of violence in public entertainment. It might also raise discussion about the division of entertainment into the categories of “high” and “low,” and why graphic violence is relegated to the latter, and what that means in terms of morality.