Seneca, perhaps to check the seeds of vice in Nero, his pupil, to whom incest and blood were afterwards so familiar[1], composed the Latin tragedy on the subject of OEdipus, which is alluded to by Dryden in the following preface. The cold declamatory rhetorical stile of that philosopher was adapted precisely to counteract the effect, which a tale of terror produces on the feelings and imagination. His taste exerted itself in filling up and garnishing the more trifling passages, which Sophocles had passed over as unworthy of notice, and in adjusting incidents laid in the heroic age of Grecian simplicity, according to the taste and customs of the court of Nero[2]. Yet though devoid of dramatic effect, of fancy, and of genius, the OEdipus of Seneca displays the masculine eloquence and high moral sentiment of its author; and if it does not interest us in the scene of fiction, it often compels us to turn our thoughts inward, and to study our own hearts.
The OEdipe of Corneille is in all respects unworthy of its great author. The poet considering, as he states in his introduction, that the subject of OEdipus tearing out his eyes was too horrible to be presented before ladies, qualifies its terrors by the introduction of a love intrigue betwixt Theseus and Dirce. The unhappy propensity of the French poets to introduce long discussions upon _la belle passion_, addressed merely to the understanding, without respect to feeling or propriety, is nowhere more ridiculously displayed than in "OEdipe." The play opens with the following polite speech of Theseus to Dirce:
_N'ecoutez plus, madame, une pitie cruelle, Qui d'un fidel amant vous ferait un rebelle: La gloire d'obeir n'a rien que me soit doux, Lorsque vous m'ordonnez de m'eloigner de vous. Quelque ravage affreux qu'etale ici la peste, L'absence aux vrais amans est encore plus funeste; Et d'un si grand peril l'image s'offre en vain, Quand ce peril douteux epargne un mal certain._ Act premiere, Scene premiere.
It is hardly possible more prettily to jingle upon the _peril douteux_, and the _mal certain_; but this is rather an awkward way of introducing the account of the pestilence, with which all the other dramatists have opened their scene. OEdipus, however, is at once sensible of the cause which detained Theseus at his melancholy court, amidst the horrors of the plague: