TROJAN WOMEN VS HECUBA: The Old Compare
and Contrast
Let’s consider the historical
reception of two plays by Euripides, the Hecuba, which he wrote about 424 BCE,
and The Trojan Women from 415.
Both focus on Hecuba and deal with exactly the
same mythic material: the sufferings of the queen and of the other Trojan women
in the few days immediately after the fall of Troy and before the enslaved
captives embark with their new masters, the departing Greek victors. But if the
contents of the two plays are similar, their construction is very different.
Hecuba combines two stories
from the fall of Troy, both involving the sufferings of its last queen, Hecuba.
First her daughter Polyxena is sacrificed by the Greeks to the dead Achilles.
Then she learns that her youngest son Polydorus, who had been entrusted for
safekeeping to the Thracian king Polymestor, has instead been treacherously
murdered by him. Hecuba avenges herself upon Polymestor by blinding him and
killing his children; at the end it is foretold that she will be transformed
into a dog. The two stories are tightly knitted together not only by significant
similarities and contrasts of theme and tone but also by specific circumstances
of plot: for it is only when a Trojan handmaid goes to the sea to get water to
wash the dead Polyxena that she discovers the dead Polydorus – Hecuba’s
prolonged mistake, seeing the shrouded corpse and mistaking it first for one
dead daughter and then for another one rather than recognizing it as her dead
son, not only creates a dramatic irony that increases the pathos of her
suffering but also underlines the intricate construction of the plot.
If Hecuba focuses on the queen’s sufferings
and actions, and builds a carefully unified dramatic structure out of first her
misery and then her revenge, Trojan Women by contrast presents a sequence of
tableaux of suffering and does not have a tightly knit plot line. Trojan Women
portrays the fall of Troy from the point of view of the defeated: given that
all of the Trojan men have been slain by the Greek victors, it is their women –
mothers, daughters, wives – who can now alone give voice to the suffering of
the city. After a divine prologue, in which Poseidon and Athena set aside their
opposition during the Trojan War and amicably negotiate the destruction of the
victorious Greeks for their sacrilege during the sack of the city, the play then
moves to a purely human level of unrelieved distress focused above all on
Hecuba and her family. In contrast to the tragedy Hecuba, here the woman who
had ruled Troy, and with her the defeated Trojan women and children, are
deprived not only of the act, but even of the bare hope, of vengeance. Amid the
laments of the chorus of anonymous Trojan captives, the various members of
Hecuba's family are assigned as slaves or concubines to their future Greek
masters; the prophetess Cassandra exults over the death of Agamemnon which she
can foresee; Hector’s widow Andromache announces that Polyxena has been
sacrificed to the dead Achilles; Andromache’s young son Astyanax is carried off
to be killed by being hurled down from the city’s walls. After Helen debates with
Menelaus and Hecuba to what degree she is to be blamed for what has happened,
finally the corpse of little Astyanax is brought on stage and mourned, and
Hecuba and the remaining Trojan women leave to sail off with Odysseus, to whom
she has been assigned.
We do not know how Hecuba fared in
the dramatic competition when it was first produced, but The Trojan Women was
evidently a failure: Euripides came in second that year to the obscure
playwright Xenocles – a scandal in the eyes of Aelian, who reports this. A few
months before the play was produced, the Athenians had captured the small Greek
island of Melos and slaughtered all the adult men and enslaved all the women
and children; it is difficult not to see Euripides' play, with its extended
reflection on the piteous fate of a defeated city and its people, as being
colored by that well-known recent event, and, despite the facts that this was
only one of four plays he produced that year and that Euripides lost in the
competition at the dramatic festivals so many times that we tend to seek
explanations not for his many defeats but for his few triumphs, one cannot help
wondering whether this play’s failure might not have been due in part to the
displeasure of the Athenians at not only being reminded, sharply and
unpleasantly, of that incident but also at hearing the divine announcement, in
the play’s beginning, of the imminent punishment of the Greek victors, which
could easily be interpreted as an only slightly veiled warning against the
Athenians themselves.
Throughout antiquity thereafter,
Hecuba was much more popular than The Trojan Women, as evinced by quotations
and allusions by later authors and by papyri (at least 10 of Hecuba vs. only a
couple of The Trojan Women). Nonetheless, during the Imperial period both plays
were selected among the ten canonical plays, and so both have survived intact.
Why The Trojan Women was made one of the select plays is hard to guess; perhaps
it was chosen in order to strengthen further the already substantial group of
Trojan tragedies (also represented by Andromache, Hecuba, and Rhesus), next to
the smaller ones on Thebes (Phoenician Women, Bacchae), Argos (Orestes), Athens
(Hippolytus), Corinth (Medea), and Thessaly (Alcestis). Be that as it may, the
insertion of The Trojan Women into the group of select plays certainly did help
to secure its survival and influence alongside that of Hecuba. Thus the Latin
dramatists Ennius, in his tragedy Hecuba, and Pacuvius, in his tragedy Ilione,
seem to have taken Hecuba as their model; while The Trojan Women seems to have
inspired Roman tragedies by Ennius (Andromache) and Accius (Astyanax), both
lost, but also Seneca's Troades (Trojan Women), containing many close echoes of
Euripides' play along with some others from his Hecuba, which survives and was
widely read during the Renaissance.
In the
Middle Ages the receptions of the two plays diverged once again. Hecuba was
included in the so-called Byzantine triad together with Orestes and The
Phoenician Women; as a result, it is transmitted by hundreds of medieval
manuscripts and is equipped with very full ancient and medieval commentaries.
By contrast, only three medieval manuscripts transmit The Trojan Women and the
ancient and medieval commentaries on it are much more modest. The mediaeval
predominance of Hecuba continued into the Renaissance. The fact that Hecuba’s
title is alphabetically the first in the Byzantine triad meant that it was
usually the first play of Euripides to be read in medieval Byzantium as well as
in the West during the Renaissance. As early as the 14th century, the first
part of the Greek play was accompanied by an interlinear Latin translation,
intended to make the play more accessible, that scholars attribute to Leonzio
Pilato, who taught Greek to Petrarch and Boccaccio; and a number of other Latin
translations survive, starting in the 15th century and culminating in Erasmus’
successful metrical version. In the same century, Latin and then vernacular
translations began to proliferate; and by the 16th century Hecuba was the most
translated and imitated Greek play of all. Euripides’ play was especially
admired for its demonstration of the mutability of fortune, for its careful
dramatic construction, for the polished eloquence of its speeches, and for its
excessive violence. For the authors and audiences of Elizabethan and Jacobean
revenge tragedies, Hecuba was a particularly compelling study of the nature and
limits of vengeance. So too, the sacrifice of Polyxena fascinated many European
painters starting in the 17th century (Pietro da Cortona, before 1625; Nicolas
Pouusin, ca. 1645-50; Giovanni Francesco Romanelli; Luca Giordano; Giovanni
Battista Pittoni).
The traces of reception of The
Trojan Women in this period are scant. During the Middle Ages and Renaissance
Euripides’ Trojan Women was largely overshadowed by his Hecuba (and by Seneca’s
Trojan Women), but things have been different in modern times. Already in the
middle of the 19th century, Hector Berlioz based the first two acts of his
opera Les Troyennes (1856-59) not only, unsurprisingly, upon Virgil’s Aeneid
but also, innovatively, upon The Trojan Women. And since the mid-20th-century,
the experience of the horrors of war, along with changes in dramatic taste,
have led to a remarkable resurgence in this play's popularity, and in the past
decades it has become – astonishingly – the second most frequently staged of
all Greek tragedies, certainly overshadowing Hecuba. The play has been
successfully adapted by such authors as Jean-Paul Sartre (The Trojan Women,
1965), Suzuki Tadashi (1974), Hanoch Levin (The Lost Women of Troy, 1984),
Andrei Serban (1974/1996; with music by Elizabeth Swados), Charles Mee (n.d.),
and Ellen McLaughlin (2008). It has also been the subject of notable films by
such directors as the Mexican Sergio Véjar (Las Troyanas, 1963) and the Greek
Michael Cacoyannis (The Trojan Women, 1971, starring Kathryn Hepburn, Vanessa
Redgrave, and Irene Papas). In most modern versions, allusions to current
political events, perhaps already implicit in the Greek original, are made
fully explicit and the horror of Euripides’ play is, if anything, heightened
even further.
By contrast, at
the beginning of the 19th century Hecuba entered a period of prolonged
disparagement and neglect. August Wilhelm Schlegel’s influential Vienna
lectures On Dramatic Art and Literature (1808) established a view of the play
as the worst tragedy by the worst Greek tragedian – indeed as the worst
surviving Greek tragedy of all – that dominated for more than a century. The
play’s portrayal of unrelieved suffering, its lyric excesses, the balanced
rhetoric of its speeches, and its claustrophobic focus on Hecuba were regarded
as intolerable weaknesses. It required considerable changes in Classical
scholarship, in modern drama, and not least in our sense of our world as a
whole, changes characteristic of the second half of the 20th century, before
Hecuba could come back into its own. Only recently has this tragedy begun to
recover its prominence, both in the estimation of scholars (especially
philosophers) and as a dramatic force in the theater – and largely because of
the very same features that 19th century readers had scorned.
The greater
popularity of Hecuba from antiquity through the Renaissance is certainly connected
with its inclusion among the Byzantine triad, but probably also reflected a
wide-spread fascination with revenge and a taste for well-constructed dramatic
plots. The contrast with the preference for The Trojan Women over the past two
centuries is quite remarkable and cries out for some kind of explanation, at
least a speculative one. Must we conclude that contemporary audiences are much
less interested in finely shaped plots and in the bloody revenge of those who
have suffered than in the repeated representation of hopeless suffering itself?
There is
something to be said for this view. And yet broadening our focus beyond just
these two plays suggests that it cannot be the whole story. For one thing, the
most popular Euripidean tragedy on the stage today is Medea, more so even than
The Trojan Women, and Medea certainly displays the bloody revenge of someone
who has suffered. So why is Medea such a success today and Hecuba no
In the contrast between Medea and Hecuba, it
is surely crucial that Medea kills her own children while Hecuba kills someone
else’s: Medea’s suffering extends beyond what Jason and other men have done to
her and includes, even worse, what she does to herself and those she loves.
This makes for a far more complex, powerful, and disturbing effect on the
viewer. And the quasi-forensic trial scene between Hecuba and Polymestor at the
end of Hecuba certainly corresponded to ancient tastes but seems inevitably
rather frigid to ours – can Polymestor really be suffering so atrociously, we
think, and can Hecuba really be so furious, if they can still engage in these
legalistic niceties? It is not surprising that Glyn Maxwell left out this scene
altogether from his After Troy. As for The Trojan Women, the opportunity to
make allegorical or even explicit reference to contemporary political events
has certainly been a crucial factor in its success. So too, the extraordinary
lyric quality of the play enables it to create a theatrical space for public
mourning of the dead that is often lacking in other cultural sectors of our
modern Western world. In the end it is perhaps Euripides’ minutely controlled
construction of the plot of Hecuba that lessens its pathos for modern
audiences, and what can be misunderstood as a loss of formal control in The
Trojan Women but in fact is calibrated with great care and precision, that
makes this latter play so appealing to modern audiences. We await with eager
curiosity the new directors, scholars, and poets who in coming years will bring
both plays to life again in unimaginable way
As for The Trojan Women, the opportunity to
make allegorical or even explicit reference to contemporary political events
has certainly been a crucial factor in its success. So too, the extraordinary
lyric quality of the play enables it to create a theatrical space for public
mourning of the dead that is often lacking in other cultural sectors of our
modern Western world. In the end it is perhaps Euripides’ minutely controlled
construction of the plot of Hecuba that lessens its pathos for modern
audiences, and what can be misunderstood as a loss of formal control in The
Trojan Women but in fact is calibrated with great care and precision, that
makes this latter play so appealing to modern audiences.
