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This introductory chapter explains that when ghosts come before the law, they are sometimes treated as if real insofar as they have legal effect. Indeed, for legal purposes—in cases of undue influence, defamation, or fraud—spectral emanations may become proof, just like any facts. On this bewitched ground, the fantastic and the commonplace intermingle. In the case of wills, especially, even when the law does not acknowledge the unique gifts of spiritualists, it sometimes admits as valid the communications of the dead. In numerous eighteenth- and nineteenth-century appellate cases, especially, courts sustained the wills of those advised by mediums channeling the wishes of deceased loved ones into the minds of believers. The chapter also looks at the story of Hecuba. Changed into a dog, at once mystified and historicized, ghostly and corporeal, Hecuba shows the interstices of human and animal, person and god, living and dead.

This chapter examines the presentation by Sophocles of Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles. In Homer he is a flawless hero; in most other archaic poetry and art, he is mainly a perpetrator of atrocities; in the whole output of Aeschylus and Euripides he is never made a dramatic character at all. In Sophocles he is sometimes noble (The Scyrians, Eurypylus) and sometimes base (Hermione and probably Polyxena), far baser than he is made to seem in the corresponding Euripidean plays (Andromache, Hecuba) in which he does not appear. In Philoctetes, where his very presence is innovative, he gradually changes before our eyes from apprentice villain to true hero — but we are reminded at the end that he is destined not to maintain that standard.

This chapter asks about the ethics of (lyric and structural) beauty and the politics of pathos in two plays, Trojan Women and Hecuba. The first, Trojan Women, presents a tale of unmitigated misery and renders it self-consciously beautiful. But how are we to watch this sublime suffering? The play won't let us maintain a safe spectatorial distance; it demands that we watch with pity, but also suggests the insufficiency of that response. Our tears do no good. The insufficiency of pity is also a central theme of the second play, Hecuba. Here pity is shown to be not only politically ineffectual, but in fact morally dangerous: the beauty of tragic suffering generates a perverse investment in that suffering itself, and our longing for the beautiful symmetry of justice makes us complicit in a vicious act of injustice. Both plays thus propose that aesthetic judgments bear ethical and political consequences, but neither takes it for granted that beauty will make us just.

This chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. It argues that Euripides' imperfect alignment of form and meaning forces form itself onto center stage. It makes us aware of a play's form, granting it density and texture. Even at its emptiest, form is always full, replete with meaning. We have seen Euripides exploring that meaning, thinking in form about tragic form and its fullness and emptiness. The plays have shown us form as generative and enabling, producing, for example, an aspiration to justice (in Hecuba and Trojan Women), or a renewed attachment to the polis (in Ion), or even history itself (in Suppliants and Orestes. We have also seen the constraints and oppressions of form, both dramatic and social. In Electra, empty forms encrusted with outdated content constrained human behavior and foreclosed radical social possibilities. Form functioned as a deadweight upon the play's own imagination.

This chapter discusses the similar emphasis placed on spectating and speaking back by Euripides' Hecuba but from an alternative Odyssean strategy, which maximizes unease over tragedy's recuperative powers. It traces how this play makes a spectacle of Hecuba's suffering, maximizing sympathy for her as she first endures unending sorrow and then takes revenge. The play's Odyssean insistence on the authority of her suffering culminates when an on-stage judge (Agamemnon) sets up an agon in order expressly to deal with the fallout from her revenge, as Euripides establishes the most extreme test case of the agon's capacity to control and make use of dissent. Yet, the play ends not with the agon but with Polymestor's dissenting voice continuing to ring out, exposing Agamemnon to a few home truths and leaving the audience to make sense of dissent outside the secure comfort of any institutional framework, even the play itself.

This chapter examines Hecuba's musings on the deficiency of language by focusing on her debate with Polymestor. In her debate with Polymestor before Agamemnon, Hecuba defends the revenge she has already taken on Polymestor, and her defense is a masquerade, a pretense, since Agamemnon is a complicitous judge. In an earlier scene, Agamemnon had already agreed with Hecuba that she should seek revenge. This chapter discusses the rhetorical art of Euripides's characters and suggests that its measure and qualification are always dependent on some aspect or connotation of sophia: skill, expertise, shrewdness, deceptiveness, sophistication, wisdom. It argues that Euripides's sophia is often able to disregard its own polysemic connotations and intends to deliver a truly “wise” message.

This chapter examines the notion that the lewd gaze is what triggers erotic passion. It considers Gorgias's expression in his Encomium of Helen: “What wonder, then, if the eye of Helen, delighted by Paris's body, provoked in her soul desire and craving for love?” This view, according to which the lover is the source of his/her own passion, goes along with the alternative traditional explanation suggesting that the source of sexual desire resides in the object itself—for instance, in the cheeks or the eyes of the seducing object. As the subjective gaze in viewing a desirable object produces erotic passion, the text implies that the enemy is not outside but inside us. This chapter also discusses Hecuba's claim that Paris's beauty is the source of Helen's craving, but it is Helen's wanton and greedy glance at Paris's beauty and wealth that turns her mind into lewd and wicked desire and adultery.

This chapter examines how sophia depersonalizes Aphrodite and divinizes sexual power in Euripides's poetics. It considers the intellectual predicament in which Euripides must have found himself, as a thinker and a dramatist, in interpreting the irrational and perverse nature of human sexual drive. It explains how Aphrodite's presence could account for the irrational behavior of Helen, and her return to make love with Paris after having strongly rejected that intercourse. It suggests that the mysterious, mad, and commanding force of erotic passion can be attributed to Aphrodite's instigation and imperious will. It also reflects on the debate between Helen and Hecuba in relation to the nature and effects of eros.

This chapter examines the spiritual misery of human life in Euripides's poetry. In Troades, Hecuba frames the whole glorious and painful adventure of Troy as the song that the poets will sing. Hecuba speaks in harmony with epic poetry and borrows from it the power to reduce the senseless and manifold devastation of the world to a sensible and simple image. For the proud aristocratic characters such as Polyxena, Cassandra, and Hector, sacrifices, defeats, and heroic death are sources and themes for songs immortalizing their glory. This chapter considers how the prospect of immortality through song gives sense and meaning to the violence that has been shown on stage. It also discusses Euripides's belief, implied in Troades, that living your life in order to warrant a great postmortem celebration is meaningless.

This chapter focuses on the choral discourse of pity in Euripides’ Hecuba and Trojan Women and suggests that both Athenocentrism and a panhellenic scope are often integral to the emotional politics of Athenian tragedy. By proposing the inclusion of pity in the morality and practice of war, the two choruses construct a highly politicized concept of pity. Such concept can be shared, they suggest, because emotional experience and understanding are shaped by participation in the social, religious, and political institutions of the polis. In addition to giving prominence to Athenian institutions, the choruses also foreground the communal practices and values of the panhellenic Greek polis. They thus render their concept of pity potentially effective in the context of different Greek political communities. Given the centrality of the representation and evocation of pity in tragedy, this aspect of its choral manipulation contributes to the panhellenic appeal of the plays.

This chapter explores early modern responses to Hecuba, arguing that whereas Euripides’ Hecuba is a sympathetic tragic heroine and successful avenger, this model was not replicated in early modern plays. Instead the two aspects of Hecuba’s role, that of lamenting mother and ruthless avenger, bifurcate in English revenge tragedy. Pitiful, mourning mothers such as Isabella from Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy are unsuccessful, while savage ones, such as Tamora from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Queen Margaret in Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy, are abhorrent and aberrant, inflicting violence from a position of power. In contrast to Germany and France – where artistic treatments of the Biblical Judith decapitating General Holofernes offer a heroic, political image of female vengeance – the chapter argues that in early modern England revenge was definitively not a woman’s business.

When Hamlet reflects on the charged power of the tragic theater, the figure who haunts his imagination is Hecuba, Queen of Troy, whose tragedy came to define the genre in sixteenth-century Europe. As a bereaved mourner who seeks revenge, Hecuba offers a female version of Hamlet. Yet even while underscoring her tragic power, Shakespeare simultaneously establishes a new model of tragic protagonist, challenging the period’s longstanding identification of tragedy with women. In exploring why both Hamlet and Shakespeare are preoccupied with Hecuba, this chapter argues that ignoring the impact of Greek plays in sixteenth-century England has left a gap in our understanding of early modern tragedy. Attending to Hecuba highlights Shakespeare’s innovations to a genre conventionally centered on female grief. In invoking Hecuba as an icon of tragedy, Shakespeare both reflects on and transforms women’s place in the genre.

This chapter examines Euripides's treatment of sex as the cause of the Trojan War. The first aspect of sexuality in Euripides that strikes us is the violence with which it assails its subjects—most often women—in excessive, perverse, and sometimes destructive forms. This violence is deployed in a particular way and has particular effects: it dislocates and dispossesses the self, making it a puppet of a drive that the subject often cannot clearly diagnose or identify. Eros is one of the most insidious and piercing instantiations of otherness and can ensnare the whole of a human being. This representation of sexual drive threatens Euripides's metaphysics, which gestures toward an imagined self, which, through its sophia, is able to build a solid and sure stronghold against forces that would pierce through it. This chapter discusses the debate between Helen and Hecuba in Troades and suggests that it represents a typical metalepsis of Euripides's sophia.

This chapter focuses on figures of metalepsis in Euripides's plays. In her attack on Helen's self-defense, Hecuba explicitly mocks the most sacred epic and tragic convention, the divine epiphany. The audience must have thought that she had suddenly left the cultural frame of the story and had taken on a metadramatic role, declaring to them that she did not belong to the traditional story. This change in narrative sequence, tone, and consistency is a rhetorical phenomenon known as metalepsis. Analogous cases, in which a character plays an extended and coherent enlightened role, include Phaedra in Hippolytus, Theseus in Suppliant Women, and Teiresias in Bacchae. This chapter examines Euripides's enlightened transformation of traditional characters. More specifically, it considers how, in their adversarial roles, Hecuba and the others abandon the specific phenomenology of the myth and become what we call “literary” characters.

This chapter describes Dido, queen of Carthage, in Francesco Cavalli's La Didone. It also explains the tragic despair of Hecuba and Didone's guilt. It concentrates on the relationship between recitative and aria—that is, between “operatic speech” and song. It also considers the significance of Cavalli's somewhat idiosyncratic use of tonal language. La Didone provides an ideal vantage point from which to investigate the operatic encoding of women's voice and to view the emergence of a feminine musical rhetoric in the first decades of Venetian opera. Dido's story warns women about the debilitating nature of female desire and the necessity of retaining control when dealing with a client. The Trojan act highlights the difference between male and female virtues, and the importance of civic duty over private passion. Didone's political power and protestations about chastity must necessarily be overthrown.

This chapter explores Carl Schmitt’s engagement with early modern texts, in particular Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It argues that Schmitt’s early work on Hobbes was influenced by Leo Strauss and that, in his later work, Schmitt finds in Hobbes a harmful emphasis on poiesis, whereas he sees Hamlet, by contrast, as dramatizing a genuine understanding of “the political.”

This chapter presents Carlo Galli's introduction to the Italian edition of Carl Schmitt's Hamlet or Hecuba: The Irruption of Time into the Play. In “Hamlet: Representation and the Concrete,” Galli links Schmitt's Hamlet essay to Nomos of the Earth, which Schmitt published in 1950 and which he considered to be his most important work. For Galli, Hamlet or Hecuba is not an incidental piece of amateur literary criticism, but rather the text in which Schmitt most openly confronted the tragic structure of his own thought.

The paper discusses the relation of the plays third and final choral ode to the other two, in themes, narrative design, mood and tone, and as climax. The ode's metrical character and pictorial quality are given special notice.