Visible Hecubas

Abstract

Renaissance tragedies represent fury in diverse shapes: mortal, immortal, monstrous, ordinary, male, female. If these plays are filled with furious significations, how is it possible that anyone could ignore or avoid them? In the study from which the epigraph above derives, Ruth Padel offers one reason when she shows that the ancient Furies, so hideous in aspect and action, appear in Greek tragedies after reciprocity has been violated. To “see” them is to imagine great “damage” in a process of social bonding that often extends across families, cities, and generations.¹ Single them out according to type or focus upon them through a gender-specific lens and Padel’s Furies may disappear. In this chapter on the angry descendants of Hecuba I will emphasize incremental and collective elements of their roles and suggest other reasons for their reduced visibility to Renaissance scholars. These include the vitality of Senecan conventions on the Renaissance stage, ethical and psychological views that devalue anger, and a tendency in current critical discourse that Luke Wilson terms “hysteresis,” an “elision” of the agencies through which events unfold.² I will argue that Renaissance playwrights often distribute the active fury of women among their relatives and henchmen—not to stigmatize these agents as feminine, but, instead, to expand a tragic investigation of how justice and creativity become damaged.

It is madness to see them [the Furies]. It may be madder not to.

—Ruth Padel, In and Out of Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self