Trojan
Women always reminds me of Beckett’s Endgame, “You’re on the earth. There’s no
cure for that.” Like Endgame the Trojan Women starts after the “end of the
world.”
At
the heart of the play is Hecuba, in the very literal sense that she remains on
stage throughout, while others come and go. Though there are lots of entrances
and exits, there is little forward movement in the plot. Instead what we see is
a relentless assault on Hecuba, as she is struck by blow after blow. Already in
Homer Hecuba is associated with suffering, as she watches her son Hector hunted
and killed by Achilles. In this play she continues to suffer. Hecuba begins the
play at what in theatre terms looks like the lowest point in her fortunes. At
the opening of the play Poseidon points her out, prostrate on the ground. We
almost seem to have wandered into the end of the story, a sense reinforced by
the gods taking their leave of Troy and deciding the fate of the departing
Greeks. It seems that all is now over for Hecuba. This is the drift of her song
of lament, the first words she utters in the play. She is now a slave, her head
shaved, her city destroyed, waiting to see the survivors sent off to Greece as
slaves. But the play will show that this is not the end but just another
beginning of new kinds of suffering. During the scenes that follow her world is
dismantled around her, as members of the family are physically removed from her
by the Greek herald and parcelled off or slaughtered.
The first to come and go is Cassandra, who
reprises in this play the cameo role she played in the Agamemnon of Aeschylus as the wild prophet who sees what other people
cannot. Already raped by Locrian Ajax, as we know from the divine conversation
at the beginning, she is now to become the concubine of Agamemnon, the leader
of the victorious army, reduced like Hecuba from high to low but in her case to
become and object for others' use, from princess and virgin priestess to sex
slave.
The next refugee to enter is her
daughter-in-law, Andromache, Hector's widow. Before she introduces us to her
own suffering Andromache brings news of another daughter of Hecuba, Polyxena.
This is not the first we've heard of Polyxena in this play. Talthybius, the
Greek herald, had spoken of her earlier in a very obscure way. Hecuba did not
understand him. The audience did, because one of the elements inherited from
epic and earlier tragedy was the appearance of the spirit of Achilles to demand
the sacrifice of Polyxena as an offering on his tomb; Sophocles had written a
tragedy on the subject. So Hecuba receives a second blow. The loss is
emphasized by the brutal way Hecuba describes the death - Polyxena has her
throat slit on Achilles' tomb. Euripides treats the same story in another of
his plays, Hecuba, where the nobility of Polyxena in meeting her death is
stressed. Here there is no nobility, just brutality and helpless victimhood.
This scene thus gives us not one but two
female victims, since Andromache not only tells Hecuba about Polyxena but also
laments her fate. At the end of Andromache's lamenting Hecuba, who suffers for
and with all of them, sees herself as literally overwhelmed by waves of
suffering. But worse is still to come. Hecuba in encouraging Andromache to
endure in spite of everything points out that if Andromache survives, she can
rear her son by Hector, Astyanax, to manhood. Troy is not lost completely,
since there is another generation. While Astyanax survives, so does Troy. At
this point the Greek herald enters again to announce a mission which even he
finds distasteful. The army has decided that it would be stupid to let Hector's
son live to avenge his father's death. At one stroke Hecuba's hope for a Trojan
revival is obliterated.
But
now the Greeks will add insult to injury. Guess who shows up? Tune in tomorrow.
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