Euripides’ Choruses and Notes on the Choral Ode at Andromache 274-308.

 

Euripides’ Choruses and Notes on the Choral Ode at Andromache 274-308.

Forget the invincible textbooks of theatre history that repeat the irresponsible misconception that  Euripides “de-emphasized” the role of the Chorus. What is true is that  Euripides differently emphasized the chorus, and some of the most beautiful and powerful moments in Greek poetry are in his choral odes.

We are continually reminded in tragedy that, despite their use of mythical tradition in their songs to point parallels or retrace the causative history of the story, the chorus, like other characters, are ignorant of the future, unlike deities or their prophets. They are, in a sense, spectators, an internal audience whose response the theatre audience can use as a correlative for its own.  It is a subjective correlative and tied to the chorus’s identity, their particular limitations and preconceptions. 

Euripides’ choice of choral identity is always tuned to the larger framework of the play. Of the seventeen tragic choruses we have of his, fourteen are female. Frequently their marginal status and limited agency is emphasized by their also being slaves and/or foreigners. Might this have something to do with why male theatre scholars considered the choruses of Euripides to be “minimized” in some way? (Anyone need a dissertation topic intersecting reception, feminist and postcolonial theory and hegemony?)

In the Andromache as in the Medea,  the chorus are local women, whose very rootedness underlines the displacement and isolation of the foreign woman protagonist.  In both plays the bond of womanhood partially bridges the racial divide.

In the first strophic pair, the chorus describes the Judgement of Paris, often evoked in Euripides' plays on the Trojan War. The second strophic pair goes back in time to Paris’ birth,  and deals with the suffering that would have been avoided.

The ode is related to the action, but also contrasts with it. The chorus’ account of the Judgement of Paris takes its cue from the quarrel of human females in the preceding scene. The end of the ode connects the survival of baby Paris to the subsequent sufferings of Greeks and Trojans and of Andromache in particular. On the other hand, the ode makes a sharp break with the preceding action.  It begins, like many odes in tragedy, at a point remote in space and time. 

  In contrast to the realistic tone of the argument (agon) that preceded it, the first part of the ode is decorative and lyrical. The ode takes a dark turn and stays there at the line “Hecuba should have thrown him ( the infant Paris)  backwards over her head like a polluted object and walked away without looking back.”

    The review of the folly that started the Trojan War sets up Andromache’s insulting remark to Menelaus in the next scene “ One should not bring about great evils for small reasons."

    The Euripidean chorus offers not merely reflections of events, or reactions to them, but with the capacity and intent of modifying  our interpretation of the surrounding action. They do not stand outside the play, delivering a commentary from some more objective, authoritative position.