Seneca and Celestina »

This book examines the reason and intent behind the many Senecan and pseudo-Senecan quotations in Fernando de Rojas' masterpiece, Celestina (1949), which enjoyed enormous popularity in sixteenth-century Europe. The author considers the importance attached to Senecan thought in the oral, scholarly, and literary traditions of fifteenth-century Spain, and shows how readers, tastes and sensibilities were shaped by it. The main themes of Celestina, such as self-seeking friendship and love, pleasure and sorrow, benefices and riches, greed, suicide, and death, are demonstrated to be rooted in this intellectual background. The Senecan tradition is seen as underlying the later additions and interpolations to the text, with a shift toward Seneca's Tragedies in response to changes in fashion. Fothergill-Payne also reveals that even Celestina's petrarchan quotations have Senecan sources.