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    Hecuba: Full Text and Introduction
    Hecuba: Full Text and Introduction
    Hecuba: Full Text and Introduction
    Ebook96 pages59 minutes

    Hecuba: Full Text and Introduction

    By Euripides

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    Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price
    Hecuba, deposed queen of Troy, has seen her husband humiliated, her son murdered and her daughter sacrificed. Her grief turns to anger and she enacts a bloody vengeance on those responsible for the destruction of her family.
    This English translation of Euripides' classic tragedy, published in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series, is translated and introduced by Marianne McDonald.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNick Hern Books
    Release dateOct 31, 2019
    ISBN9781788502443
    Hecuba: Full Text and Introduction
    Author

    Euripides

    Euripides was a tragedian of classical Athens and one of the few whose plays have survived, Some ancient scholars attributed 95 plays to him but according to the Suda it was 92 at most. Of these, 18 or 19 have survived more or less complete. He is credited with theatrical innovations that have profoundly influenced drama down to modern times, especially in the representation of mythical heroes as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. He was also considered "the most tragic of poets”, focusing on the inner lives and motives of his characters in a way previously unheard of. He was "the creator of...that cage which is the theatre of Shakespeare's Othello, Racine's Phèdre, of Ibsen and Strindberg," in which "...imprisoned men and women destroy each other by the intensity of their loves and hates". However, he was also the literary ancestor of comic dramatists as diverse as Menander and George Bernard Shaw.

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      Book preview

      Hecuba - Euripides

      DRAMA CLASSICS

      HECUBA

      by

      Euripides

      translated and introduced by

      Marianne McDonald

      NICK HERN BOOKS

      London

      www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

      Contents

      Introduction

      Euripides: Key Dates

      Original Production

      Characters

      Hecuba

      Copyright and Performing Rights Information

      Introduction

      Euripides

      Euripides was one of the three great tragedians of ancient Athens. The other two were Aeschylus and Sophocles. Euripides was born ca. 480 BC (the year of the Greek victory over the Persians at Salamis) and died ca. 406 BC. He wrote about ninety plays, of which nineteen survive, as compared with seven surviving from Aeschylus, who wrote about eighty, and seven from Sophocles, who wrote about one hundred and twenty-three. Euripides may not have been the most popular playwright in his own lifetime, but he was certainly the favourite throughout the twentieth century, and continues to be so. More than the other two great tragedians, his works speak to a modern audience because they reveal an understanding of the dire effects of war, human passions, and chaos.

      Although comic poets and later writers who mention Euripides are, for the most part, unreliable sources, certain assumptions can be made about the type of man he was. As opposed to Aeschylus and Sophocles, he was a private rather than a public figure, and some sources claim that he wrote some of his plays as a recluse on Salamis. The comic playwright Aristophanes implied that Euripides’ mother sold vegetables at the market. If this was the case, this experience might have inspired his defence of democracy in his plays, and in general, a sympathy for the common man. Gossip suggested Euripides had an unhappy marriage, to the point that a slave/secretary seduced his wife and possibly wrote some of his plays. Euripides understood both women and suffering, so perhaps some of his writing came from first-hand experience.

      Ancient accounts suggest that Euripides’ father pushed him first to be an athlete, but then he became a painter, and finally a tragedian. Although he first competed in 455 BC with a tetralogy (now lost) that included Daughters of Pelias, he is said to have won his first victory only in 442 BC at the Greater Dionysia, one of the Athenian dramatic festivals. Many philosophers, from Anaxagoras to Socrates, influenced him and his writing. Some characters in Euripides’ plays express philosophical opinions that subsequent writers find out of character.

      Euripides was an open critic of public policy that ignored the rights of individuals. Possibly for this reason, he won only four prizes in his lifetime by contrast with Aeschylus who won thirteen, and Sophocles who won about twenty-four. After Euripides died, his Iphigenia at Aulis and Bacchae were part of another group of plays that took first prize.

      Euripides could be called the greatest anti-war playwright of all time. His Women of Troy was written to warn Athens about its policy on Melos, in which the Athenians voted to kill all the men and enslave all the women and children. This play was written in 415 BC, just before the disastrous Sicilian expedition that Athens launched. A scholiast on Aristotle claimed that in 413 BC, following the defeat of the Athenian fleet, Euripides went as an ambassador to Syracuse to plead for the lives of the prisoners. Even more likely is the anecdote from Plutarch’s Lives that prisoners saved their lives by reciting verses from Euripides’ plays.

      Possibly in disgust at public policy, and also at his own reception as a playwright, Euripides left Athens in 408 BC towards the end of his life to take up residence at Archelaus’ court in Macedon, a haven for intellectuals. The guests included the tragic poet Agathon and the painter Zeuxis. Satyrus, writing in the third century BC, claims Euripides died by being torn apart by Archelaus’ hunting dogs, a parallel too close to Pentheus’ own death in the Bacchae to be taken as fact. Is this any more likely than the story about Aeschylus being killed by an eagle dropping a tortoise on his bald head, mistaking it for a stone? Or Sophocles choking on a grape seed, possibly when he was singing a chorus from Antigone? But then, we must remember that the great playwright Tennessee Williams died choking on the stopper of his medicine bottle.

      Euripides left us our only surviving complete satyr play, the Cyclops. Many of his other plays also have comic elements and anticipate the domestic comedy featured in Menander’s New Comedy, by contrast with Aristophanes’ more politically biting Old Comedy. More than any of the other ancient tragedians, Euripides understood the human comedy, and the comedy that arises from living in a world gone mad.

      The performance dates for eight of Euripides’ surviving plays are known, and others are tentatively proposed on the basis of evidence provided by ancient writers and of his own developing metrical practice:

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