The Spanish Seneca and the Black Legend in English Revenge Drama: Spaniards, Moors, and Stoics Onstage

Abstract

The classical playwright and philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca (ca. 4 BCE–65 CE) was born in Roman Córdoba. Following the Reconquest of Iberia, the Catholic Monarchs embraced Seneca as a national icon evincing Spain’s classical past. This essay uncovers Seneca’s dual roles within Spain’s imperial project and Renaissance Europe’s humanist movement. On the English Renaissance stage, a body of Hispanized revenge tragedies featuring Senecan themes and tropes represented Spain’s documented cruelty in global conquest as a dangerous distortion of Seneca’s Stoic philosophy. Drawing from Christian humanists, English dramatists traced Spain’s presumed corruption of Seneca’s moral lessons to the North African Berbers and Muslim Arabs who conquered Iberia. As this essay reveals through examination of Spanish and Moorish Stoic characters in Titus Andronicus, The Spanish Tragedy, and Lust’s Dominion, English dramatists exploited the bloodline obsessions informing the so-called Black Legend of Spanish Cruelty in order to suggest that Spain’s empire was destined to fall by the ancestral sin of miscegenation.