PROLOGUE Euripides’ Andromache 1-56

 

PROLOGUE Euripides’ Andromache 1-56

The whole prologue shows that "Brechtian" could just as easily be "Euripidean."

Her opening monologue was outside the play proper. It was the actor, more than his part, who spoke, saying in effect: "I play the role of Andromache, and here is the situation in which I find myself." The composed tone of lines I-56 might have led one to presume that Hector's widow is superbly dispassionate, but she quickly dispels that suspicion with emotional (though not inordinately lyrical) elegiacs. Elegiacs are songs of mourning.

 As soon as her opening speech ends, she gets some terrible news from her handmaid and sings her sorrow to the sky.

Lines 103·ll6. This elegiac threnos is unique in extant tragedy. The hexameters are almost pure dactyls. Next, I will discuss this passage, alone in tragedy for Elegiac Couplets, and the imitation of laments sung by women that Nagy has identified in this work of Euripides the anthropologist.