Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements and Dedication
- Introduction: Female Fury and the Masculine Spirit of Vengeance
- Part I The Gendering of Revenge
- Part II Friends and Family – ‘Revenging Home’
- Part III Women’s Weapons
- Part IV Women Transmogrified
- Part V Lamentation, Gender Roles and Vengeance
- List of Contributors
- Index
11 - ‘She’s Turned Fury’: Women Transmogrified in Revenge Plays
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 May 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements and Dedication
- Introduction: Female Fury and the Masculine Spirit of Vengeance
- Part I The Gendering of Revenge
- Part II Friends and Family – ‘Revenging Home’
- Part III Women’s Weapons
- Part IV Women Transmogrified
- Part V Lamentation, Gender Roles and Vengeance
- List of Contributors
- Index
Summary
The Trojan Hecuba, widow of Priam, enters Hamlet – Shakespeare's second revenge tragedy – in the player's rendition of Aeneas’ speech to Dido. After Pirrhus’ bleeding sword has fallen on Priam, Hecuba, her body, we are told, worn out with childbearing, covered only by a blanket, is distracted with fear and grief at her loss, milking tears from the burning eyes of heaven. The player performs with tears in his eyes and, according to Polonius, manages to ‘turn’ his own colour to match his performance. The evocation of Hecuba's emotion is too much for Polonius and he asks for ‘no more’. Hamlet too is deeply affected and in his ensuing soliloquy he muses on the performance he has witnessed:
Tears in his eyes, distraction in 's aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing.
For Hecuba!
What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her? (2.2.557–62)
Hecuba is here the paradigm of the grieving, lamenting woman evoking pity in the actor who recounts her story and in the audience. It is a role that Hecuba assumes in Euripides’ tragedy as she asks Agamemnon to pity her, to look at her as at a picture, studying her sufferings, ‘homeless, forlorn, of all mankind most wretched’ (E. Hec. 811). And it is as a figure of pity that Hecuba produces such empathy in player and audience. And, yet, as Hamlet remarks in a brilliantly compacted line, the player and Hecuba have no relationship: ‘What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?’ In this chiasmus there is an implicit contrast between a fictive and an actual cause for grief, the player's and Hamlet’s. The submerged contrast emerges in the strange ‘he to Hecuba’ with its suggestion of a deeply personal, familial, relation. What is significant here is the choice of Hecuba as a figure to embody the power of fiction to move actor and audience alike, offering, as Tanya Pollard has stated, ‘a distinctive model of tragic impact, one that shadows, complements, and competes with that produced by men’.
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- Information
- Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018