Elizabethan Seneca

Wallace again on Seneca in Shakespeare: “The first separat e publication of De Benficiis in an English translation was Nicholas Haward’s The Line of Liberalitie in 1569, which included only the first three books, but William Baldwin’s popular Treatise of Morall Philosophie had appeared in 1547 and contained one chapter ‘Of benefyttes, and of unthankfulness’ which Baldwin soon expanded into a longer essay in later editions entitled ‘Of giving and receiving.’ Arthur Golding’s translation of De Beneficiis was published in 1578 and was not replaced until Thomas Lodge issued in 1614 what was to become the standard seventeenth-century edition in English of Seneca’s Works Natural and Philosophical . In this collection, reprinted and expanded in 1620, De beneficiis is printed first, immediately after Lipsius’s ‘Life of Seneca,’ suggesting that to Lodge, and probably to many of his readers, De beneficiis was the most important of Seneca’s moral treatises. Allusions to it, or borrowings from it, are frequent in the first half of the seventeenth century, and in 1678 Sir Roger L’Estrange published a lengthy redaction of it which was reprinted every two years until the end of the century and enjoyed a still vigorous life in the next.”