Hercules Asleep

This chapter elucidates the early English humanist revival of Stoicism through a case study of Jasper Heywood's 1561 translation of Seneca's tragedy, Hercules Furens. The play's central action hinges on a Stoic vision of the unruly cosmos and the volatile physical mixtures that constantly threaten to upend the care of the virtuous soul. The argument of the chapter shows how early modern writers could find in Seneca's tragedy a cosmological framework investing scenes of dormant life with an ethical power grounded in the therapy of rest—a power all the more remarkable in that it eludes Herculean self-mastery while nonetheless sustaining his virtuous labors. As an unconscious physical event, sleep escapes the muscular attention and purposive discipline of self-care for which Hercules is a paradigmatic figure. In Hercules Furens, sleep's ethical and physiological dimensions thus elaborate a tragic biopolitical friction between the life of virtue and the demands of the oikos, which Seneca's hero attempts to preserve against the motions of a turbulent physical cosmos.