The fifteen essays collected in this volume emerged from an interdisciplinary seminar on Trojan Women convened in February 2015 at Ravenna by the Department of Cultural Heritage at the University of Bologna. Like its predecessor, Edipo classico e contemporaneo (2012), this volume juxtaposes a variety of approaches to Euripides’ and Seneca's Trojan Women and their reception in different historical and generic contexts. This review highlights the arguments and methods of the contributions in this wide-ranging volume and considers what is gained by juxtaposing them.
The first three chapters focus on Euripides’ Trojan Women. In the first, V. Andò argues that Euripides subverts binary categories such as masculine/feminine and Greek/barbarian in Trojan Women in order to denounce the senselessness of war. In the differences between Euripides’ representation of the death of Astyanax in Trojan Women and Iphigenia in Iphigenia at Aulis, Andò detects a shifting response by Euripides to the historical circumstances of the Peloponnesian War. The second chapter by N. Croally zooms in on the agon between Hecuba and Helen in Euripides’ Trojan Women, which is anomalous in the following ways: it marks the first and only appearances onstage of Menelaus and Helen; the characterisation of Hecuba shifts radically; and the arguments of Helen and Hecuba engage with the works of earlier philosophers and sophists. Croally argues that these anomalies are not thematic, but tonal, providing emotional relief for the audience after the intense scene that precedes it, in which Astyanax is taken away to be executed. The third and final chapter on Euripides’ tragedy, by G. Fanfani, is a tribute to the late Albert Henrichs. Fanfani builds on Henrichs's work on the choral voice to analyse the choral stasima and the lyric monodies in this long lament of a play. Fanfani argues that through devices like choral self-referentiality, choral projection and the use of musical imagery Euripides develops the theme of the end of a tradition of Trojan choreia.
The next four chapters turn to Seneca's Trojan Women. A. Casamento's rich chapter analyses two father–son relationships: Achilles with Pyrrhus and Hector with Astyanax. Casamento argues that Seneca emphasises the theme of dynastic revenge by inserting the demand of Achilles’ ghost that his son sacrifice Polyxena with his own hand, a detail that diverges from Euripides’ and Ovid's accounts and affirms the distinctively Roman virtue of exalting facta paterna. R. Degl'Innocenti Pierini's contribution focuses on the Senecan Helen's relationship with her complex literary history. Pierini argues that the paradoxical phrase hymen funestus with which Helen begins her speech in Act 4 symbolises the paradoxes of Helen's character in myth by drawing on the conflation of wedding and funeral rituals common in Greek tragedy. The chapter by G. Guastella traces the structural and dramaturgical inconcinnities of Seneca's play, arguing that the sacrifice of Polyxena and the death of Astyanax are connected through the character of Calchas, but not from a narrative or dramaturgical perspective. The final chapter on Seneca's play by T.D. Kohn searches the Trojan Women for ‘indicators’ of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), drawing largely on J. Shay's books on the Homeric epics and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Kohn argues that Seneca depicts the Trojan women as both suffering and recovering from PTSD, a reading that explains some of the dramaturgical oddities identified by Guastella in the previous chapter. Kohn's analysis, however, diagnoses characters in an overly literal way, while ignoring the complex development of PTSD as a diagnostic category in the modern era and the larger body of trauma theory developed by literary theorist C. Caruth and others.
At this point the volume pivots towards reception, through the fulcrum of an essay by G. Brunetti on the manuscript tradition of Seneca's tragedies. In a review of this tradition, Brunetti emphasises the largely unrecognised importance of fourteenth-century Bologna in the diffusion of the manuscripts of Seneca's tragedies. She discusses in detail three important manuscripts of the Troades and concludes with an analysis of three paradigmatic passages from the play that can be re-evaluated through a careful reading of these manuscripts.
The next three chapters usher the reader from the Middle Ages to seventeenth-century Europe with three case studies in Senecan reception. A. Ziosi provides an entertaining romp through Shakespearean textual criticism via reception studies. Ziosi argues that the description of Hamlet's father's ghost, dressed in his armour, echoes two Senecan ghost fathers, Thyestes in Agamemnon and Achilles in Trojan Women. By identifying common generic elements of these ghosts’ appearances, Ziosi solves a notorious textual crux while illuminating Hamlet’s relationship to the ghosts of earlier Senecan performances. M.P. Funaioli catalogues sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French adaptations of the aftermath of the Trojan war. Funaioli argues that French playwrights rework the classical tradition to reflect the tastes of their time by inserting romantic intrigue and gallantry absent from the originals. L. Giuliani turns the reader's attention to some neglected texts of the Spanish Siglo del Oro. He juxtaposes a group of early tragedies by ‘Philippine’ Spanish playwrights between 1575–1585 (at the end of the reign of Philip II) with Jusepe Antonio González de Salas's translation and analysis of Seneca's Troades (1633). Giuliani persuasively demonstrates that González de Salas shapes the text to fit the expectations of the contemporary stage, filtering Seneca through the conventions of the ‘Tragedia Nueva’ of the 1620s and 1630s.
The final four chapters touch on different aspects of Euripidean reception in the modern period. M. Treu applies her experience in dramaturgy to a revealing analysis of postmodern productions of Trojan Women in Italy that ‘contaminate’ the original text with added material and fragment the scenes of the original. Treu argues that this postmodern approach avoids the pitfalls of other contemporary performances, which utilise media to make explicit connections with contemporary wars. The next chapter, by G.L. Tusini, takes the reader on a tour of nineteenth- and twentieth-century visual art depicting characters and themes from the mythological tradition of Trojan Women. Tusini argues that artists from Antonio Canova to Giorgio de Chirico adopt a prosopographic approach to the material, emphasising portraiture over narrative or theme. Casting a wider net, however, Tusini shows that works by Marina Abramovic and Anselm Kiefer tackle a theme shared with the Euripidean play: the suffering of civilians, and especially women, in wartime. The final two contributions analyse two well-known adaptations of Euripides’ play for the screen: Vittorio Cottafavi's TV movie Le Troiane (1967) and Michael Cacoyannis’ Hollywood drama The Trojan Women (1971). Through an analysis of the director's notes, R.M. Danese demonstrates that Cottafavi's directorial choices and Brechtian approach to staging are aimed at enhancing the poetic intensity of the script and universalising the suffering of the Trojan women. In the concluding essay, G. Manzoli examines Cacoyannis’ epic film, which received a negative critical reception in the US. Manzoli argues that the cast of four internationally renowned actresses (Hepburn, Redgrave, Bujold and Papas) endows the film with a quasi-ritual power that transcends its weaknesses.
Scholars of many disciplines will find insights big and small to delight and instruct them in individual chapters. Without an introduction or conclusion, however, the editors require the reader to do the hard work of forging connections between essays that are vastly different in approach or topic and that rarely make explicit mention of other essays within the volume. Each chapter provides valuable insights into its immediate subject area, but the volume as a whole fails to draw larger conclusions about the reception history of Trojan Women from antiquity to today. One thread that does emerge, however, is the enduring appeal of a story that gives voice to the unspeakable experiences of the victims of war-related violence.
