Seneca’s Thyestes: From Lodovico Dolce to the 21st century

Abstract

The essay presents the Fortleben of Seneca’s Thyestes from the 16th century to contemporary times. The first part focuses on Ludovico Dolce’s vernacular rewrite (1543), the first and best complete rewrite of the Renaissance, dwelling in particular on the vernacular’s repetition of certain themes and stylistic features by the Latin poet, with particular attention to the term furor and the exhortatory apostrophe to the ‘I’. The second part of the essay reviews the main rewritings of the Thyestes between the 16th and 20th centuries, highlighting their links, the tendency to mitigate the rawness of the model, to emphasize the love relationships and to create new characters, with the aim of procuring the audience’s favor.