Reviewing Colin Burrow’s Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity in the TLS, Michael Silk refers to Dante’s debt to Virgil, and then observes:
“There is surely no counterpart to this in the case of Shakespeare - though one might perhaps consider it (Burrow himself doesn’t quite) in connection with Seneca.”
He finds that TS Eliot agrees: “There is in some of the great tragedies of Shakespeare, a new attitude. It is not the attitude of Seneca, but is derived from Seneca. . . . It ismodern and it culminates in Nietzsche. . . . It is the attitude of self-dramatization assumed by some of Shakespeare’s heroes at moments of tragic intensity.”
So perhaps it was ultimately Seneca and not Shakespeare who “invented the human”?
