I wish to focus on the structure of the Trojan Women's parodos and first episode in order to argue that it is strongly influenced by Euripides' response to the Agamemnon . I will demonstrate that this response consists in turning Aeschylus' use of myth and lyrics into spectacular drama and in undermining the religious and cosmic pattern of the Agamemnon. I will start by examining the complex dramatic structure of this first part of the Trojan Women, especially the striking changes in tone occurring while Cassandra is on stage. I will then reflect upon the conflict of authority thus created between Cassandra's inspired voice and that of the suffering Hecuba. This conflict, I believe, is Euripides' way of dramatizing the mortals' inability to grasp the meaning of their actions and woes.

A common approach to Irish theatre during the last years has been the identification of the interest by the playwrights in rewriting, adapting or translating Greek tragedies. This article examines Euripides’ Hecuba by Frank McGuinness (2004) and Marina Carr (2015) from a comparative approach and emphasizes the revision and redemption of the figure of the queen of Troy in the hands of both Irish contemporary playwrights. From this perspective, a new image of Hecuba is suggested which adds to the classical heroine modern traits that allow to parallel her story with Ireland’s (hi)stories of war as well as to redeem her from the burden of the myth which is then unmasked. The analysis of Hecuba’s speeches in the three versions reveals language and plot variations that have allowed the myth to continue traveling in time.

A discussion of my approach to translating Euripides' Andromache, Hecuba, and Trojan Women, including an introduction to Euripides' poetic meters. Full volume published by Hackett Publishing in 2012.

Hecuba counted among the most passionate and insane heroines who play a significant role in Tragedy. She is an unusual creature, forced to act in a place beyond human limits 1. Euripides, by using the war as cause, shows how the old queen faces the absolute misery. Her story illustrates emphatically the changes of human fortune. Hecuba has not lost only her home or her family: she was a queen. Now she is a slave, poor, fully depended on other's desires. Once she was healthy and prosperous, now is exhausted. Mother of many children, she lost her sons during the war and she saw her elderly husband and her daughters dying at Troy's conquest. She also saw her daughter Cassandra, the virgin chaplain of Apollo, becoming the concubine of her enemies' leader. She is also too old and physically weak 2. All these – within the framework of stage action – are just the 'prehistory' of the tragedy. Soon Hecuba will lose the most precious thing of was left, her two last and youngest children, Polyxena and Polydorus 3 , and we will learn this too early 4. From the beginning of the drama Polydorus' Ghost foretells that his mother will be in Thrace soon and will discover his body 5. At the same day his sister is predetermined by fate to die, an unfair sacrifice which requires the spirit of dead Achilles 6. The sequence of deaths urges us to focus upon the elderly heroine and her suffering. Specifically we are anxious to see how Hecuba is about to react to this pain. But the addition of second death opens a new direction on plot, as the play turns from a drama of misery to a drama of revenge. We are no longer on the path that leads straight to justice: we are going to feel the profound burst of a human heart, we are going also to feel the pain which joins another. The plot builds on this disastrous and enormous wrath, that leads to murder and simultaneously to moral disintegration in which a human being sink and disappears 7. Before moving to this impressive but degenerative change she will fight using peitho as weapon: Hecuba is urged to face rhetoric agones in order to convince a neutral or enemy audience. This old woman based primary on her obvious suffering due to her appalling situation, and secondarily on her motivation to ensure sympathy and assistance. But her belief turns out to be 1

Adaptation of Classical Greek plays has been with the theatre throughout its development in the west; and has also gained traction in the post-colonies. These adaptations are undertaken by their authors not merely (and/or necessarily) for a form of emergent neo-classicist purpose, but to use them as background texts for making certain salient contributions to the ruling sociopolitical issues within their own societies. This is exactly what Charles L. Mee and Femi Osofian have done in their The Trojan Women 2.0 and Women of Owu respectively, which are re-writings of Euripides' Trojan Women. The thrust of this paper is to use these adaptations to highlight the various permutations of postmodernism and post-colonialism with a view to eliciting a critical interrogation of their points of convergence and divergence. The intention is to draw attention to the variations in the appropriation of various elements of drama within these plays in conformity to the critical "movements" to which we necessarily have to attribute them respectively.

In this paper we attempt a tentative answer to the following question: in Trojan Women, is Euripides criticizing a certain degeneration of agonism ― something we could label as “‘asymmetric conflict”’? Why this question? Trojan Women are well known as a powerful tragic play, which puts on stage the condition of the enslaved (and barbaric, to a Greek eye) women of Troy. Interpretations and academic studies of Trojan Women are more than abundant, given the undoubtable value of the play. Our tentative attempt does not gain inspiration by secondary literature about the play, but from a problem that we face nowadays and that seems to be displayed in this classical tragedy.

Greek Drama V, University of British Columbia, July 5-8, 2017

This essay investigates the influence of Euripides’ Hecuba on Renaissance ideas about tragedy, from Italy and Spain to France, England, and, especially, the Ragusan Republic (Dubrovnik). Hitherto left out of the standard accounts of Euripides in the Renaissance, Marin Držić’s Hecuba (1559) is shown to be the only vernacular version of Euripides that was performed in Renaissance Europe. Informed by a fresh analysis of the play's manuscript tradition, the essay argues that through its sustained interest in theatrical spectacle and observation the Ragusan Hecuba responds to certain elements in Euripides’ drama that have been obscured by the traditions of modern criticism. An analogous response is identified in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.