Inside and Out: The Dynamics of Domestic Space in Euripides’ “Andromache”

Abstract

The interrelation of Hermione and Andromache as mapped out physically in theatrical space is the key aspect of the stagecraft of Euripides’ “Andromache”. Its study enhances the understanding of the critical importance of the females’ juxtapositional contrast in the dramatic design of the play. It also alerts us to the intricacies of Euripides’ game with social norm regulating the semantics of extra-theatrical domestic space and of his creative reworking of Andromache’s narrative space in Homer’s epic. Euripides innovates in combining the two heroines’ post-war story and placing them as wife and concubine under the same roof, Neoptolemus’ house. Andromache sits outside the scene-building at the shrine of Thetis; she is excluded from the oikos, as a concubine would be in the reality of fifth-century experience. Hermione, Neoptolemus’ legal wife, dominates inside. By zooming in onto the particularities of movement, action and interaction (with animate and inanimate entities) of these females, this paper offers a detailed decoding of the dynamics of theatrical domestic space in the “Andromache”.