ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a tragic figure—Hecuba, Queen of Troy—and explores her migrations from Greek myth and tragedy into Willaim Shakespeare's Hamlet, where she stimulates Hamlet's anguished reflections on compassion. The increasing presence of "the matter of Troy" in productions today, from revisioned classical plays like Euripides's Hecuba and The Trojan Women to newly created dramas directly inspired by the classics, testify to the continuing timeliness of the matter of Troy, which in the hands of contemporary writers and directors, powerfully refracts the wars and tensions of our time. The figure of Hecuba, the queen of Troy, has haunted English theater and the page and never more so than now, during the extended period of war in the Middle East, offering a geographical as well as a moral coincidence. The Trojan Women by Euripides includes a dramatic and vituperative encounter between Helen and Hecuba, who treats her daughter-in-law with furious contempt and blames her entirely for the war.
