In Seneca’s Thyestes (c. 62 CE), the Ghost of Tantalus poses a question:

Tantalus is doomed to spend eternity starved and parched, grasping at elusive fruits and water. The Fury who has raised his ghost from the underworld promises (in anticipation of the play’s conclusion, where Thyestes unwittingly eats his own children) events so terrible that they will ironically reverse Tantalus’s stricken situation: ‘I’ve planned a feast even you will flee from’ (‘inueni dapes/ quas ipse fugeres’). The play Thyestes not only poses but also answers Tantalus’s question: a father cannibalising his own children is something worse than eternal hunger and thirst. Several early modern authors, however, were not satisfied with this. They took up Tantalus’s question like a dare and competitively explored ever more terrible answers. The three texts I examine in this essay – Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great (first performed 1587), Thomas Dekker’s If It Be Not Good, The Diuel Is In It (first performed 1611), and John Milton’s Paradise Lost ([1667], 1674) – rise to this challenge with explorations of multisensory triggers and ensouled punishments. Without explicit mention of Tantalus, all three authors choose to present versions of his punishment, drawing not only on classical mythology but also ideas from Abrahamic religions. They employ a range of methods, including tableaux, dialogue, stagecraft, and amphibolous poetic descriptions, to present torments that involve but also exceed the pangs of eternal hunger and thirst.

Thomas Kyd’s play The Spanish Tragedy (1587) was inspired by Thyestes, perhaps via Jasper Heywood’s 1560 translation. Kyd mirrors the Senecan dialogue between Tantalus and the Fury when he has the Ghost of Andrea describe hell to Revenge, and Revenge promise lavishly bloody vengeance. Here, the Senecan augmentation of Tantalus’s punishment has been submerged within a lengthy hypotyposis of a hell,