Euripidean Ambiguities in Titus Andronicus: the Case of Hecuba.

It has been remarked that the funeral scene in Titus Andronicus 1.1 may be compared to Seneca’s Troades, a play which, with Erasmus’ Latin translation of Euripides’ Hecuba (1506) and Golding’s rendition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1567), contributed to passing down the story of Hecuba to early modern England. Like Titus, Seneca’s Troades includes human sacrifice (of Astyanax and Polyxena), but compared to that (Latinized) Greek myth, human sacrifice in Titus’ Rome bears deeper consequences symbolically and dramatically. Titus’s opening scene reveals a precise intent to connote from the outset the course of the action as a clear response to a crisis of funeral rituals endowed with political connotations within the context of Rome’s war with the Goths and the relation between Rome and the barbarians. The Hecuba imagery in 1.1.138-44 legitimizes Tamora’s revenge against the Romans, and implicitly likens them to the traitorous and cruel Greeks in the narrative of the destruction of Troy. Tamora-as-Hecuba dismembers and resignifies the Trojan legacy assumed by the play, embodying a story of suffering and fierce revenge which turns that same Trojan myth against Rome within the translatio imperii tradition. This article examines the function of Hecuba in Titus Andronicus, exploring the many ways in which the Euripidean subtext might have affected the complex shaping of revenge in this possibly co-authored play, following the representation of the crisis of communal rites and Roman pietas as figures of contemporary forms of ‘wild’ and ‘excessive’ justice.