Senecan tragedy, a form of tragedy developed by the Roman philosopher‐poet Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c.4 BCE–65 CE) in his nine plays based on Greek drama (especially that of Euripides), and further adapted by playwrights of the Italian, French, and English Renaissance. Seneca's plays were almost certainly closet dramas intended for recitation rather than stage performance. Composed in five acts with intervening choruses, they employ long rhetorical speeches, with important actions being recounted by messengers. Their bloodthirsty plots, including ghosts and horrible crimes, appealed to the popular English dramatists of the late 16th century, who presented such horrors on stage in their revenge tragedies. These were preceded by a purer form of English Senecan tragedy, notably in Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville's Gorboduc (1561), the first English tragedy. The conventional five‐act structure of Renaissance drama owes its origin to the influence of Seneca.

The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Copyright © Chris Baldick 2001, 2004. All rights reserved.