A selfish king plunging his kingdom into chaos; a wise old counselor killed for his efforts; an innocent young woman harried to death. Basic elements of William Shakespeare’s tragedies Hamlet and King Lear, and most likely they entered his creative tool kit from Octavia, a Roman tragedy long attributed to Seneca. For good measure, Octavia also features a royal ghost restless for vengeance.

Probably the first thing to clear away is the question of Seneca’s authorship of Octavia. Unlike Seneca’s other plays, all based on tales from Greek mythology, it deals with events contemporary with him, even to the point of making Seneca a character in the play. The action of Octavia takes place in 62, and Seneca died in 63. Moreover, Octavia portrays Nero ranting that he will burn down Rome to punish its citizens for rioting against his divorce of Octavia and his marriage to Poppaea. In 64, Nero did order part of Rome to be set on fire, and modern scholars are skeptical about such literary foreshadowing. More likely, they suggest, that some now anonymous playwright wrote Octavia, maybe in the 80s or 90s.

In 2014, Emily Wilson wrote about Octavia in her life of Seneca, “This fascinating work was clearly written by somebody who knew Seneca’s dramatic and prose oeuvre very well.” In 1965, E. F. Watling, in the Introduction to his translation for Penguin Books of four of Seneca’s tragedies and Octavia, conceded, “There is no reason why Seneca, in the interval between A. D. 62 and his death, should not have amused himself by composing this grim commentary on contemporary events in the form of ancient tragedy.” Still, he saw a case for someone else writing it and concluded, “One is strongly tempted to assume thar Seneca knew more than nothing about it.”

However, for Shakespeare, there was no question. In 1581, Thomas Newton published in London Seneca: His Tenne Tragedies Translated into Englysh. Among the ten was Octavia. It is fun to speculate whether at school in Stratford young Shakespeare had to read any plays by Seneca in Latin, but certainly by 1600, when he wrote Hamlet, he knew Seneca’s plays at least in English. In his description of the itinerant players, Polonius says, “Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light.”

Mention of Polonius leads right to Seneca. Polonius and Gloucester are parallel characters, and they are analogues to Seneca in Octavia. They are loyal counselors of their respective kings, and in its own way, Polonius’ longwinded “to thine own self be true” speech to his son Laertes is as much an eye-rolling ordeal for the boy as Gloucester’s vulgar palaver about conceiving his son Edmund, probably not the first time Edmund has had to hear his father embarrass him in public.

Moreover, for their steadfast service to their king, both Polonius and Gloucester are murdered. Polonius dies at the hand of Hamlet, and Gloucester dies eventually from his wounds, one of Lear’s daughters ordering the gouging out of his eyes. Although Seneca’s suicide occurred after the events depicted in Octavia, Shakespeare knew enough Roman history to be aware as he read Octavia that Nero ordered Seneca’s death.

When we first see Seneca in Octavia, he is alone and rambling on about his intellectual pursuits, but his philosophical soliloquy is cut short by the arrival of Nero. As Nero enters, he is decreeing the beheading of two senators, and Seneca interjects to advise clemency. Seneca and Nero verbally parry, Nero insisting upon his royal prerogatives, Seneca urging regal character.

In Newton’s edition, typical lines are: “Nay, rather frolicke youthful bloud appears,/To have more neede of counsel wyse and grave” (Seneca); “A madness t’were to Gods for me to bow,/When I my selfe can make such Gods to be:/As Claudius now ycounted is we see” (Nero). Seneca’s proverbs find echo in Polonius’ bromides, and Nero’s stubborn narcissism recurs in Lear.

Given that Nero holds absolute power, his irrational instability, like that of Lear, makes him a man to be feared. One of the more intriguing lines in King Lear is when Edgar, as mad Tom, declares, “Nero is an angler in the lake of darkness.” In these plays, whether by Seneca or by Shakespeare, madness, even pretended madness, reveals character, unlike the pointless and lunatic gibberish of Waiting for Godot.

While the dramatic genealogy of Polonius and Gloucester goes back to Seneca, the literary ancestry of Ophelia and Cordelia traces back to Octavia. None of these noble young ladies has done anything to deserve the bad treatment they receive. For their innocence, Cordelia is murdered, Ophelia is driven to suicide, and Octavia is exiled, there to be executed.

Even to the end of his career, Octavia provided a template that served Shakespeare well. Moreover, the historical pattern for his last history play aligned with that found in Octavia. What for Shakespeare was a Senecan archetype became the basic building blocks not only of Hamlet and King Lear, but also of Henry VIII.

While some lines of Henry VIII could be by John Fletcher (like Harold Bloom, I have my doubts), that play’s essential contours are Shakespeare’s, deriving ultimately from Octavia. Arrayed before us are a volatile king, a blameless queen he seeks to divorce for another woman, and a royal counselor who falls from power. As with Octavia, in Henry VIII the kingdom’s upheaval lies either offstage or in the future, hence the Prologue’s caution that here “mightiness meets misery” and that anyone who could laugh at this play would weep at a wedding.

As Peter Saccio observed in Shakespeare’s English Kings (2000), “The play is less a dramatic chronicle about a monarch than a dramatic myth about monarchy.” Critics and commentators describe Henry VIII as a splendid patriotic pageant celebrating Tudor magnificence. Still, it tells us something about how Shakespeare saw the historical Henry VIII, paralleling him with Nero.

Just as students of Shakespeare want to see him in Falstaff or Prospero, in Romeo or Touchstone, really there are bits of Shakespeare in all his characters. When we think of Shakespeare poring over his copy of Seneca’s tragedies, the description Shakespeare has Griffith give of Cardinal Wolsey could apply to both playwrights: “He was a scholar, and a ripe and good one;/Exceeding wise, fair-spoken, and persuading;/Lofty and sour to them that lov’d him not;/But, to those men that sought him, sweet as summer.”