Weeping for Hecuba

Although there is no doubt that the original Athenian audiences wept for Hecuba, the first individual we know to have done so was the cruel tyrant Alexander of Pherae - much to his own sense of shame.

According to Plutarch, the monster was so moved to pity by the spectacle of the Queen of Troy without husband, sons or city, reduced to slavery, that he jumped up and ran from the theatre as fast as he could. But he said it would be terrible if, when he was killing so many of his own subjects, he should be seen to be shedding tears over the sufferings of Hecuba and her daughter Polyxena. Alexander almost went so far as to insist that the actor who played Hecuba be severely punished for having softened his heart "like iron in the furnace".

In Euripides' two plays, The Trojan Women and Hecuba, set in the immediate aftermath of the Trojan war, the poet creates one of our great archetypes of suffering. For an actor it is a role with the tragic grandeur of King Lear, except that for Queen Hecuba the play begins by cutting straight to Shakespeare's third act: the storm and the heath and the sense of total deprivation. Hecuba enters having lost everything: husband, sons, city, wealth, status. She is reduced to ending her days as a Greek slave scrubbing Agamemnon's latrines.

This reversal of fortune was one of the themes that appealed to the earliest appreciators of Hecuba in the 16th century, when it was translated from Greek into the more accessible Latin by Erasmus and Philip Melanchthon, who put on his version acted by students of his University at Wittenberg, where Hamlet was said to have studied.

The other theme was revenge. But it is a strange play about revenge that begins with the ghost of a murdered Trojan boy asking simply for burial and a last embrace from his mother, Hecuba. He also tells us of another, angrier, unresigned ghost: that of Achilles, who can't rest without the shedding of more innocent blood. We are encouraged to cheer Hecuba on to her revenge against Polymestor, who has murdered her son Polydorus for gold, though we are chilled by the action when it happens. Euripides never makes it easy for us, tears or no tears.

Tony Harrison sobre Hécuba, num texto escrito a 19 de Maio de 2005 aquando da estreia da sua versão desta tragédia no Albery Theatre.