Senecan Trimeter and Humanist Tragedy

The lack of extant contemporary comparanda obscures the workings of iambic trimeter in Senecan tragedy. This article 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...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:American journal of philology 2022-09, Vol.143 (3), p.475-503
Main Authors: Fedchin, Aleksandr, Burns, Patrick J, Chaudhuri, Pramit, Dexter, Joseph P
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Drama
Latin literature
Meter
Poetry
Quantitative analysis
Semantic analysis
Tragedies
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The lack of extant contemporary comparanda obscures the workings of iambic trimeter in Senecan tragedy. This article 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. Our analysis demonstrates, among other things, that both Seneca and the Humanist tragedians use clusters of resolution in conjunction with antilabe as a literary device to convey high emotion.
ISSN:0002-9475
1086-3168
1086-3168
DOI:10.1353/ajp.2022.0019