| Author | Euripides |
|---|---|
| Genre | tragedy |
| Form | verse |
| Code | Eur.0004 |
| Language | Greek |
| Title | ΕΥΡΙΠΙΔΟΥ ΤΡΩΑΔΕΣ. Euripidis Troades |
| Ancient Title | Τρῳάδες |
| Introduction | This anonymous edition of Euripides’ Trojan Women is the first Greek play ever printed in England. The printer is John Day, one of the leading printers of the time thanks to his rocketing career interrupted only during Mary Tudor’s reign. His cutting-edge printing technique attracted the attention of John Foxe: the theologian chose Day for his four editions of Acts and Monuments, which became the printer’s goldmine (Pettegree 2008). While this edition of the Trojan Women is hardly the only Greek text printed in the period, it is the only Greek text printed by John Day (Milne 2007). The work has no paratextual material that provides information as to why John Day decided to print precisely this tragedy or a Greek tragedy at all. Day certainly diversified but the core of his business was mainly religious works (Pettegree 2008). However, printing a text entirely in Greek must have been a stimulating challenge for Day’s technical expertise, since it had to cope with accents, breathings, and ligatures (see Description of the Witness). As paratexts, the play is preceded only by an argument and the list of the dramatis personae, as is customary in editions of Greek texts; the argument is the same printed in the Aldine edition (Venice, 1503), which this anonymous one seems to reproduce. The tragedy was originally performed in 415 BC in Athens as the third play of a tetralogy. The play’s locale is Troy, in the immediate aftermath of the war, just before its complete destruction by the Greeks before they sail back to Greece. The plot is rather uneventful and centred on the grief of the Trojan women, most prominently on that of Hecuba. In the prologue, the gods Poseidon and Athena establish an alliance against the Greeks; their dialogue is followed by Hecuba’s lament for her miserable destiny. She is bound to become a slave to one of the Greeks and so are the Trojan women that form the chorus. In the parodos, they equally lament their impending slavery and exile from their mother-country. In the first episode, one of the Greeks, Talthybius communicates to the women the Greek soldier to whom they have been assigned by lot, with the exclusion of those who have already been chosen by the leaders of the army: Cassandra is going to become Agamemnon’s concubine; Andromache, Hector’s wife, is assigned to Neoptolemus, Achilles’ son; Hecuba has been allocated to Ulysses as his slave. Cassandra enters the stage in a frenzy, inappropriately invoking the god of marriage, Hymenaios. The prophetess also predicts Agamemnon’s death as well as that of his wife, thereby rejoicing in the upcoming accomplishment of her thirst for revenge. The chorus’ first stasimon introduces Andromache, who arrives on a chariot together with her son Astyanax. In the second episode, Andromache shares Hecuba’s pain and evokes her dead husband, Hector. However, their complaints are aggravated by Talthybius’ announcement that the Greek army has decreed Astyanax’ death: he will be thrown from the walls of Troy. After the second stasimon, in which the Trojan women sing the fall of Troy, the third episode opens with the character of Menelaus but is centred on Hecuba’s agon with her sworn enemy, i.e., Helen. Helen pleads her case, deflecting her fault on the irresistible power of Aphrodite. Hecuba belies Helen’s account and presents her as the responsible for all of the evils the Trojan have endured, urging Menelaus to kill her. Menelaus takes Hecuba’s side and is persuaded that Helen willingly eloped with Paris. Hecuba also warns Menelaus against Helen’s charm. After the third stasimon, the chorus announces the arrival of Talthybius, who enters with the corpse of Astyanax on Hector’s shield. In the fourth episode, Hecuba mourns her grandson’s untimely death and deplores the Greek army’s decision to kill a boy. The chorus engages in a kommos with Hecuba, thereby sharing her sorrow, which is further enhanced by yet another painful news by Talthybius: Troy will be burned down. To Hecuba this is what she defines “the endpoint of all [her] sufferings” (τὸ λοίσθιον και τέρμα πάντων τῶν ἐμῶν ἤδη κακῶν, 1272-3). Together with the chorus, she casts the last glance on the flames devouring up Troy and turning it into smoke and ashes. Considering the centrality of grief in this play, one may conjecture that a possible reason for choosing it amongst others is its topical relevance. Since the outbreak of the Reformation, one matter of dispute in England had been mourning rituals, especially after the abolition of the purgatory; in 1590 reformers would even denounce excessive lamentations during burials (Goodland 2016 [2005], 135, 137). John Day had the monopoly for the printing of Sternhold and Hopkins’s English Psalter, the best-selling book at the time (Pettegree 2008); psalms were sung at funerals (Greaves 1981, 696). In this context, Day’s choice of a play so imbued with lamentations such as Trojan Women seems less idiosyncratic.
References Goodland, Katharine. 2016 [2005]. Female Mourning and Tragedy in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama. London: Routledge. Greaves, Richard L. 1981. Society and Religion in Elizabethan England. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Milne, Kristy. 2007. “The Forgotten Greek Books of Elizabethan England”. Literature Compass. 4, 3: 677-687. Pettegree, Andrew. 2008. “Day [Daye], John (1521/2-1584)”. In ODNB. |
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| Witness Description | This edition of the original text of Euripides’ Trojan Women was published in London in one single quarto edition in 1575 by John Day (STC (2nd ed.), 10567.5). Only one copy is extant and is held at the British Library. The witness is printed entirely in Greek except for the title page, which features the translation of the title (“Euripidis Troades”) and the information on the edition in Latin (“Londini, Apud Joannem Daym 1575. Cum gratia et priuilegio”) within a highly decorated frame. Other decorations appear before the argument, in the initial letter of the play, and at the end of the play. Except for the argument and the list of the dramatis personae, also printed in Greek, there are no paratexts. Overall, the witness, which can be accessed in a digitized version on EEBO, has very few ink stains and missing letters (signalled in the diplomatic version through an asterisk). The readability of the text is made difficult by a constant use of ligatures, which are sometimes ambiguous at least to the modern reader: for instance, the ending ους can be easily confused with οις. For the modern reader, the edition contains several print mistakes in the positioning of accents and breathings: in diphtongs accents are usually placed above the first vowel, not the second; some circumflex accents are misplaced; breathings of vowels in capital letters are missing. There is a scant use of commonplace marks and, where they are used, the first word of the line is often capitalized. Although Canter had already published in 1571 the first edition of Euripides’ plays with the marks of strophic divisions in the choral odes (Tessier 2015, 185), this anonymous edition does not report any. Speech headings are abbreviated: χο stands for χορός ἑκά stands for Ἑκάβη, etc. Pages are unnumbered but are ordered by means of signatures, which run from A. β´.r to F.β´.r, although one can infer that they actually start from Α.α´.r (the title page) and end with F.δ´.r. (the last, blank page). Each page has a running title: recto pages have ΤΡΩΑΔΕΣ, verso pages ΕΥΡΙΠΙΔΟΥ. |
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