The Trojan Women

euripides brendan kennelly

After the fall of Troy, the Greeks slaughtered the Trojan women or carried them off as prizes. The men they'd fought for ten years all lay dead, the city was burning, yet still the widows, sisters and children had to be put to the sword. The women were the spoils of war, even Helen, the flighty queen whose face had launched a thousand the great beauty became the men's most prized booty. A whole city, a whole civilisation was in flames, but Helen would go home with the husband she'd jilted. The war need not have happened.
Euripides shocked his audiences by portraying their great heroes as cruel and cowardly. His Trojan Women is one of the most powerful indictments of war ever written. In this new version for Dublin's Peacock Theatre, Brendan Kennelly gives the play a twentieth-century edge. The women are usually seen as passive victims at the whimsical mercy of their male conquerors, but Kennelly draws from them a strong, active, resolute and shrewd note. This note of active resolution, so closely linked with seemingly utter hopelessness, is brought forth through the poet's language in waves suggesting both the women's spirits and the sea itself.
Through Kennelly's words, the Trojan women come to know despite total humiliation, they will keep their dignity, aware that they will be the moral and emotional victors in the continuing war with the men. He turns the play into an active drama exploring the complexities of the women, defining the nature of their courage. 'It was their different kinds of intensity that I found most magnetic,' he says. 'This play tries to present those mesmeric intensities in a fit language.'
'Almost fifty years ago, I heard the women in the village where I grew up say of another woman, She's a Trojan, meaning she had tremendous powers of endurance and survival, was determined to overcome disappointment and distress, was dogged but never insensitive, obstinate but never blackscowling, and seemed eternally capable of renewing herself. And she did all this with a consciousness that seemed to deepen both her suffering and her strength.' And so Kennelly draws upon the spirit of all those Trojan women, not just the stalwart country women of his childhood, but Irish women in all the towns and cities, and women throughout the world, women everywhere.

Genres playsclassicsdramamythologyfictiontheatreancienttragedyschoolgreece

80 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1,-0415

This edition

Format: 80 pages, Hardcover
Published: August 1, 1993 by Bloodaxe Books Ltd
ISBN: 9781852242404
ASIN: 185224240X
Language: English

Characters More characters

Menelaus

In Greek mythology, Menelaus (Ancient Greek: Μενέλαος, Menelaos) was a king of Mycenaean Sparta, the husband of Helen of Troy, and a central figure in the Trojan War. He was the son of Atreus and Aerope, brother of Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and, accordin...
Athena (greek Goddess)

In Greek religion and mythology, Athena or Athene (Παλλὰς Ἀθηνᾶ; Παλλὰς Ἀθήνη), is the goddess of wisdom, courage, inspiration, civilization, law and justice, just warfare, mathematics, strength, strategy, the arts, crafts, and skill. Minerva is the Roman...
Andromache

In Greek mythology, Andromache (Ancient Greek: Ἀνδρομάχη) was the wife of Hector and daughter of Eetion, and sister to Podes. She was born and raised in the city of Cilician Thebe, over which her father ruled.During the Trojan War, Hector was killed by Ac...
Hecuba

Hecuba (Ancient Greek: Ἑκάβη Hekábē]) was a queen in Greek mythology, the wife of King Priam of Troy during the Trojan War, with whom she had 19 children. These children included several major characters of Homers Iliad such as the warriors Hector a...
Talthybius

Talthybius was herald and friend to Agamemnon in the Trojan War. He was the one who took Briseis from the tent of Achilles. Preceding the duel of Menelaus and Paris, Agamemnon charges him to fetch a sheep for sacrifice. He died at Aegium in Achaia....
Cassandra

In Greek mythology, Cassandra (Greek Κασσάνδρα, also Κασάνδρα) was the daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy. Her beauty caused Apollo to grant her the gift of prophecy. When Cassandra refused Apollos attempted seduction, he placed a curse...

About the author

euripides

Euripides (Greek: Ευριπίδης) (ca. 480 BC–406 BC) was a tragedian of classical Athens. Along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, he is one of the three ancient Greek tragedians for whom any plays have survived in full. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him, but the Suda says it was ninety-two at most. Of these, eighteen or nineteen have survived more or less complete (Rhesus is suspect). There are many fragments (some substantial) of most of his other plays. More of his plays have survived intact than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, partly because his popularity grew as theirs declined—he became, in the Hellenistic Age, a cornerstone of ancient literary education, along with Homer, Demosthenes, and Menander.
Euripides is identified with theatrical innovations that have profoundly influenced drama down to modern times, especially in the representation of traditional, mythical heroes as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. This new approach led him to pioneer developments that later writers adapted to comedy, some of which are characteristic of romance. He also became "the most tragic of poets", focusing on the inner lives and motives of his characters in a way previously unknown. He was "the creator of ... that cage which is the theatre of William Shakespeare's Othello, Jean Racine's Phèdre, of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg," in which "imprisoned men and women destroy each other by the intensity of their loves and hates". But he was also the literary ancestor of comic dramatists as diverse as Menander and George Bernard Shaw.
His contemporaries associated him with Socrates as a leader of a decadent intellectualism. Both were frequently lampooned by comic poets such as Aristophanes. Socrates was eventually put on trial and executed as a corrupting influence. Ancient biographies hold that Euripides chose a voluntary exile in old age, dying in Macedonia, but recent scholarship casts doubt on these sources.