The Mobile Queen: ObservingHecubain Renaissance Europe

Abstract

Previous articleNext article FreeThe Mobile Queen: Observing Hecuba in Renaissance EuropeIvan LupićIvan LupićStanford University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIt has become customary for critical discussions of Euripides’s Hecuba to mention the famous scene in Shakespeare’s Hamlet where the leading player of the troupe visiting Elsinore, upon Hamlet’s urging, delivers a speech featuring the “mobled” queen, as the early quarto editions call her, or the “inobled” queen, as the first folio would have it.1 Even the most recent general introduction to Hecuba opens not with Euripides but with Shakespeare.2 Not just to Renaissance scholars, it seems, but to all readers and spectators the figure of the grief-stricken Trojan queen must arrive mediated by her brief Shakespearean appearance. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, her misfortunes are described to us by an actor who is, in fact, quoting Aeneas as he is telling the story of his misfortunes to Dido, and the actor speaks the speech while observed by Hamlet, who is in turn carefully observed by Polonius, all of them observed by an audience, real or imagined. If we encounter Shakespeare’s Hecuba at all, it is at a considerable distance and through several mediating agents. If we resemble Hamlet at all, it is because, like him, we are unable to answer the question of what Hecuba is to us without being forced to consider what she was to someone else—to Hamlet and to Renaissance Europe.The purpose of this article is to situate Shakespeare’s Hecuba in this complex network of early modern mediation, which extends far beyond England but in which England fully participated. Contrary to the honored custom, I intend to come to Shakespeare not at the outset but at the end, because his encounter with Euripides occurs after almost one entire century of creative engagement with the Greek dramatist and his revengeful queen. Like Shakespeare in Hamlet, one of his most European plays, we need to turn to different parts of Europe, some of them habitually neglected by scholars, to form a more integrated understanding of what Hecuba may have meant in the early modern period before Hamlet somewhat too hastily dismisses her: “and all for nothing— / For Hecuba?”3 It is important not just to reinforce the recognition that Euripides’s Hecuba was widely disseminated in print, regularly studied, and frequently translated but also to ask why this particular play proved so fascinating to the Renaissance and to what extent its special dramatic qualities were absorbed and transformed by early modern playwrights. It is equally important to consider theatrical and literary meanings, the stage and the page, as working jointly rather than, as is still commonly assumed, in opposition to each other.4Roughly half a century before Hecuba was conjured up and then apparently rejected by Hamlet on the stages of early modern England, she was made to speak on the public stage of the Ragusan Republic (Dubrovnik), a city-state on the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea, in the only vernacular production of Euripides’s play surviving from Renaissance Europe. The argument of this essay is that both William Shakespeare (1564–1616) and Marin Držić (1508–67), the author of the Ragusan adaptation, independently yet analogously respond to certain elements in Euripides’s drama that have been obscured by the traditions of modern criticism. These elements concern the dramatic structure and, I argue, the special metadramatic quality of Hecuba, best captured in the double meaning of “observing.” Renaissance Hecubas are dramatic subjects who observe others and interact with them while knowing that they are at the same time tragic objects, exposed to view and rendered meaningful only through a special relation with an audience.Shakespeare may not have known about Držić, but the two dramatists should nonetheless be seen as participating in the same history and engaged in a common dialogue.5 It is precisely because they come from opposite sides of early modern Europe that Shakespeare and Držić can show the value of studying Renaissance drama in transnational contexts. Euripides’s Hecuba, the mobile queen, though captive, crosses boundaries; by speaking different languages, she both offers a powerful illustration of how the literature of Renaissance Europe—from Spain and England to France, Italy, and Croatia—is held together and represents a timely reminder of what still remains to be done if the interconnectedness of Renaissance literature on the larger European scale is to be fully appreciated.I. Hecuba’s EuropeWhat sort of tragic protagonist is Hecuba, and why is it that Renaissance scholars, translators, and dramatists from different parts of Europe were so consistently drawn to this particular Euripidean drama? How exactly did Hecuba travel, and in what linguistic and material forms did the play reach its audiences? Revisiting these questions and considering specific examples means understanding how Hecuba appealed to Renaissance audiences both as an example of poetic drama, distinguished by its remarkable literary traits, and as a theatrical script that demands a vivid dramatic imagining.6Unsurprisingly, Euripides’s Hecuba was at the very center of the history of the tragic genre in the Renaissance. As Gustave Lanson persuasively argued more than a century ago, early Renaissance understandings of tragedy were deeply indebted to the medieval tradition, especially to the influential formulations of two Roman grammarians from the fourth century, Donatus and Diomedes.7 Their views on drama were conveyed and elaborated in early print editions of Terence, in particular, because Donatus was the author of a commentary on Terence’s comedies. For example, in the frequently reprinted Praenotamenta to his edition of Terence, first published in 1502, Jodocus Badius Ascensius discusses at length the differences between comedy and tragedy along the lines drawn by Donatus and Diomedes. Noting in particular that tragedy depicts “the fortunes of heroes in adversity,” Badius goes on to observe that the aim of this kind of drama is to exhibit “the frailness of human things”; as importantly, while “tragedy always concerns lofty people,” it is also always “written in high-sounding style.”8The translator of the most influential sixteenth-century Latin version of Euripides’s Hecuba, the great Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus, thought about tragedy in the same way, following Donatus and Diomedes, despite the fact that Aristotle’s Poetics was as available to him, as it was to Badius (the Latin translation of the Poetics by Giorgio Valla was published in 1498, and the Greek original followed ten years later from the Aldine press).9 As Lanson shows by sifting through Erasmus’s Adages, his conception of tragedy is taken from Donatus, not from Aristotle, and his chief interest seems to have been the grand style and the rich rhetorical texture of tragic drama: the concern with persons of high rank expressed in high-sounding language.10 This conclusion can be reinforced by noting that the definitions of Donatus and Diomedes are found printed together with Erasmus’s translation of Hecuba as late as 1544.11 The point is of considerable importance because it shows that, through the extremely influential translation by Erasmus, what was to become the most popular Greek tragedy of the Renaissance reached its audience prompted not by a return to the Greek sources of dramatic theory but by a living interest in the legacy of the medieval period. Lanson’s conclusion, which still holds true, is that Hecuba was an inevitable translation choice, as it embodied better than any other Greek play the traditional definition of “tragedy” inherited by the early Renaissance.12Although Erasmus was not the first, or indeed the last, translator of Hecuba into Latin, he was by far the most influential.13 First published in 1506 and dedicated to the Archbishop of Canterbury, his edition of Hecuba and of Iphigenia in Aulis was reprinted numerous times in the course of the sixteenth century. According to the most recent survey, there were already thirty different editions of the Hecuba translation by the end of the 1560s.14 As Malcolm Heath notes, this was the first play students encountered in the course of their Greek studies, and Erasmus’s faithful, literal rendering could serve a useful educational function.15 More importantly, perhaps, Hecuba was the first Greek play read by all those—and they were in the majority—who did not have any Greek but who were taught enough Latin to gain access to the riches of the ancient tradition rapidly disseminated through the technology of print. Given the wide diffusion of Erasmus’s translations of Euripides in sixteenth-century Europe and the importance of Erasmus in the humanist curriculum, the question is not whether Hecuba was known to Renaissance dramatists, including Shakespeare, but whether it was possible for them to avoid engaging with the play.16Translations of Hecuba into the vernacular languages of Europe were more often than not indebted to Erasmus. One of the earliest such translations was Giambattista Gelli’s Italian rendering titled Hecuba tragedia di Euripide poeta greco tradotta in lingua volgare and published in Florence probably around 1519.17 Whereas Gelli’s Hecuba was addressed to his former schoolmate and thus directly linked to the male world of the humanist classroom, the next Italian Hecuba, translated by Matteo Bandello a couple of decades later, recommended the Trojan queen to female readership and protection. It also went beyond Italy in that its principal reader was meant to be Marguerite de Navarre, whom Bandello calls Margarita di Francia and to whom he addresses a long and colorful dedicatory letter in Italian, written from Castel Goffredo and dated July 20, 1539.18Bandello’s Hecuba set an example for the first French version of the play, which looks back to the male world and to the humanist classroom but remains within the same royal family. Hecuba is ushered into the French vernacular not as a new and unfamiliar thing but as a drama that easily fits the long-standing literary and political traditions. Long believed to have been authored by Lazare de Baïf, La tragedie d’Euripide, nomee Hecuba, first printed in 1544, five years after Bandello’s letter to Marguerite de Navarre, was in reality the work of Guillaume Bochetel, counselor and secretary to Francis I, the French king and Marguerite’s brother.19 Writers of tragedy, argues Bochetel, tower above the rest because their compositions are characterized by “a lofty style, exalted arguments, and serious thoughts.”20 Tragedies do not merely feature kings as their protagonists; they were originally invented “to show kings and lords the uncertainty and slippery instability of worldly things.”21 And all this so that kings would rely on their own virtue instead of trusting fortune—the way Francis, it can be said “without flattery,” already does.22 If kings find themselves suffering, Bochetel concludes, they should endure because this is to be understood as a test of their virtue; if they are doing extremely well, they should still be careful not to abuse the fact, as their fortune might change. Bochetel clearly wants Francis to approach tragedy as a speculum principis, the kind of work that Bochetel’s predecessors, the counselors of the Middle Ages, regularly wrote for their kings.Bochetel narrates how his children, to prove that they are studying hard, used to show him the lessons their teacher gave them on Euripides’s Hecuba, in which the play was rendered from Greek into Latin word by word. Noticing the sublimity of the play’s style and the gravity of its thoughts, Bochetel decided to turn it into French. It is not clear from what Bochetel says whether he translated Hecuba from Greek or from Latin and whether the sublimity of the play’s style and the gravity of its thoughts became apparent to him in the original or in the literal Latin translations. The title page announces the play as “translated from Greek into French meter,” but it is likely that Erasmus was of great assistance to him, as he must have been to his children and to their preceptors. What is undeniable is that Bochetel appreciated Hecuba for the same reasons that Erasmus did: on one hand, for its treatment of a royal figure buffeted by fortune, and on the other, for the grandeur of its style and for its rich sententiousness. Bochetel’s intention must have been to communicate something of that sublime style and deep thought in his own language for the appreciation not just of the king but of the multitude of those who could not read any other language except French.Tracing the life of Euripides’s Hecuba in the Renaissance means rethinking the idea of Europe customarily promoted in Renaissance studies. Italy remains central to this rethinking, but its cultural centrality needs to be understood in geographic terms as well. Texts often traveled east of Italy much quicker than in the opposite direction. Just one year before Bochetel’s translation was printed, Lodovico Dolce published his Italian version of Hecuba (1543), which he similarly introduced by dwelling on the vicissitudes of fortune.23 According to Dolce, the basic lesson of ancient drama is that fortune is changeable. With this changeability of fortune below is to be contrasted the permanence of heavenly happiness, and Hecuba, for Dolce at least, is a comforting play because it shows miseries that surpass anything one is likely to experience personally.24 As Antonietta Dal Pra points out, Dolce’s Hecuba contains more Christian elements than his other adaptations from the Greek. This is particularly noticeable in his elaboration of Polyxena, who is represented as a Christian virgin envisioning a happier life in heaven at the moment of her sacrifice.25 Along similar lines, Steffano Giazzon recognizes in Dolce’s Polyxena the image of the sacrificial lamb and in his Hecuba a mater dolorosa figure.26 Making his adaptation more than 1,000 lines longer than either the Erasmian translation or the Euripidean original, Dolce had many opportunities for amplification and minor innovations.Like other vernacular translations, Dolce’s versions of ancient Greek drama drew mostly on Latin translations. Unlike others, however, Dolce quickly proved to be one of the most significant mediators of Greek drama to the rest of Europe. For instance, we know that his Giocasta (1549)—an adaptation of Euripides’s Phoenician Women—was the primary source of George Gascoigne’s and Francis Kinwelmersh’s Jocasta (1566) even though their title page, like Bochetel’s, mentions only the original (“written in Greke by Euripides, translated and digested into Acte”).27 It is much less widely known that Dolce’s versions of Greek drama also served as models for playwrights on the eastern coast of the Adriatic. Thus, Giocasta was adapted in Croatian by Miho Bunić Babulinović (1541–1617), a playwright from Ragusa. Bunić evidently relied on the Greek original in addition to Dolce’s version.28The most interesting dramatic composition inspired by Dolce is at the same time the most remarkable Hecuba of the entire sixteenth century. This was a verse adaptation produced in Croatian by another Ragusan playwright a generation before. Marin Držić (1508–67) was the foremost dramatist of the Ragusan Republic and of the Croatian Renaissance as a whole. He authored several hugely successful vernacular comedies and various poems. His poems, with some shorter dramatic compositions, were published in Venice in 1551, alongside an edition of his chief pastoral play, Tirena. Both editions were reprinted in the seventeenth century. However, the majority of Držić’s dramas circulated in manuscript until the nineteenth century. For the Ragusan Republic, manuscript circulation in the age of print was not an exception; it was the norm.29 On Edit16, the national census of books printed in Italy in the course of the sixteenth century, Držić is still described as “a Hungarian dramatist” (“drammaturgo ungherese”), which is a painful illustration of how little is, in fact, known in the larger scholarly world about this fascinating playwright.30Hecuba was Držić’s only tragedy. Perhaps for this reason it was for centuries ascribed to Mavro Vetranović (1482–1576), Držić’s eminent contemporary and a prolific author in multiple genres, including drama.31 Vetranović was famous for his plaintive style, and other works by Držić were wrongly attributed to Vetranović by his contemporaries, who obviously thought that whatever was good must have come from Vetranović’s senior pen. It seems that from very early on, and as early as the late sixteenth century, Držić’s Hecuba circulated in manuscript separately from the rest of Držić’s oeuvre and sometimes in with Vetranović’s For example, it is not found in the manuscript of Držić’s plays, from the sixteenth century and in the in also circulated without any In many however, the title of the and are the of the early of the Ragusan Hecuba extremely we know from Vetranović’s that Hecuba was Držić’s In a written on the of his contemporary and in a manuscript early in the century, Vetranović calls on Hecuba to from the and Držić’s from the I Hecuba, / and come to this / queen, / to / For a has / and he is to be the famous / and / by It is a particularly and a clear that Vetranović not only of Držić’s Hecuba but also the play well. Hecuba is a to come and she is represented by Držić in his play, but she can also of the drama to observe her it be to a dramatic feature central to Držić’s conception of Euripides’s important critical in the century that, in addition to Dolce, Držić must have also relied either on the Greek original or on Erasmus’s Latin translation and, more importantly, that his Hecuba is far from being a of its its to Dolce’s and in to the different forms in its significant rhetorical but not in the Croatian literary tradition the of Držić’s play a different what is particularly fascinating about Držić’s Hecuba is that it was also in early modern on probably after it was know this to the on the title of a late or early manuscript of Držić’s Hecuba in only in the and then regularly to as the This is the only manuscript known that Hecuba to Držić, thus for on Hecuba was as all the other Držić wrote were written for the The manuscript also us that Hecuba was by a of Ragusan It not us the in the where it was we can be that Držić’s Hecuba was after its which it the vernacular Hecubas in Renaissance of the manuscript of Držić’s Hecuba Držić as the Euripides as the and the Ragusan that the play in on of the Croatian of and version available as an about of Euripides’s Hecuba in the sixteenth century is extremely know that the play was in a couple of humanist in either Greek or by in the at between 1506 and and by students in in In a recent mentions any other production of Hecuba in the sixteenth century Držić the early or The earliest Croatian is but she to observe that this was not a of Euripides’s Hecuba but of Držić’s adaptation of and, more that the same dramatic composition had been in more than centuries manuscript of Držić’s Hecuba is significant not just because it us that the play was but also because it is with that, as in the rest of Europe, the play had a rich literary and was for its and for its sublime style In his Držić the changeability of or through the play like a with the of his In one however, Držić from what we in other dramatic Hecubas from the Renaissance. His version contains between the that the experience of the play, especially we its The which some of the us that these were of Držić’s play from the If his Hecuba is to be special must be to these dramatic for in the Hecubas he could have he had It is th

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