Fall Of Troy Research Articles

Lucrece

"Lucrece" takes its theme from the ekphrastic episode in Shakespeare's "The Rape of Lucrece" in which Lucrece gazes at the image of Hecuba in a painting about the fall of Troy. The poem becomes a meditation on the problems of scholarship-both the reading poems and the analysis of pictures.

Ekphrastic catharsis: Christopher Marlowe’s mural of Troy’s fall in The Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage

This article examines Act 2, Scene 1, of Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage (printed 1594) through the lens of the mural ekphrasis in Book 1 of Virgil’s Aeneid. It argues that this scene is Marlowe’s attempt to stage the mural ekphrasis and thereby appropriate to himself an aesthetic enterprise that Virgil authorizes: the construction of a new version of an old story, the fall of Troy, as an ekphrasis. It demonstrates that Aeneas’s Troy narrative in Dido is a “speaking picture” that Aeneas constructs in his mind’s eye and responds to emotionally with a kind of catharsis yet to be recognized in the critical history of the term, which is called ekphrastic catharsis. Further, it argues that Marlowe imitates Virgil’s labor of artistic fashioning in dramatizing the Troy narrative, and hands to his Aeneas, as does his classical precursor, the emotional construction of an artwork that brings Aeneas into poetic being as another Achilles. Special attention is paid to Marlowe’s use of the “cinematic silhouettes” and “sonic tapestries” of classical ekphrasis, devices he puts to work in the narrative’s many references to hands, and in the emotion literally written into the narrative’s text. Tracing the intricate linguistic patterns of Aeneas’s Troy story enables one to see it as a pictorial tableau comprising eight panels, that is, as Marlowe’s mural of Troy’s fall. This new artwork reveals a post-Virgilian Priam and Hector as signifiers of Marlowe’s ekphrastic ambition, and a “Virgilian-ness” that resides in, and is condoned by, its differences from the mural ekphrasis. After assessing Marlowe’s engagement with the ut pictura poesis doctrine, it is concluded that his mural of Troy’s fall is a bridge linking “ancient” and “modern” traditions of ekphrasis.

На пути к возрождению метафизики: С.Л. Франк и Э. Корет

На пути к возрождению метафизики: С.Л. Франк и Э. Корет

Gadir, su estructura plural.Un modo de ver su fundación fenicia en el espacio y en el tiempo

According to classical texts, Phoenicians from the city-state of Tyre found in the West, on a long island in front of the nearby coast, the city and a temple dedicated to Melqart -protector god of Tyre- at both ends. What happened in the year 1100 B.C., eighty years after the fall of Troy. This myth has been believed for centuries and even until a few years ago. The archaeological findings on the island of Cadiz and other point in the south of the Iberian Peninsula show more complexity and reality compared to written texts. The date of 1100 B.C. it can not be maintained and the foundation of the city must be located at the end of the 9th century B.C. or beginning of the 8th B.C. The Phoenician city was founded at the same time as Castillo de Dona Blanca (CDB) (El Puerto de Santa Maria, Cadiz), a fortified Phoenician city in the ancient mouth of the Guadalete River, and below the Sierra de San Cristobal. On the other hand, the oldest Phoenician materials of the West has been founded in the current city of Huelva, dated in the second half of the 9th century B.C., decades before the foundation of Cadiz. We have to see the foundation of Gadir in this spacial mode and in this time.

Virgilio, Eneide 2: Introduzione, traduzione e commento ed. by Sergio Casali

Reviewed by: Virgilio, Eneide 2: Introduzione, traduzione e commento ed. by Sergio Casali Joseph B. Solodow Sergio Casali (ed.). Virgilio, Eneide 2: Introduzione, traduzione e commento. Edizioni della Normale. Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore Pisa, 2017. Pp. 390. €25,00. ISBN 978-88-7642-572-1. The author, already well known for his work on Vergil—a number of articles, on a variety of topics, some in Italian, some English—here turns his attention to an entire book of the Aeneid. The text he offers agrees with N. Horsfall (Virgil, [End Page 449] Aeneid 2: A Commentary. Mnemosyne Supplements, 299 [Leiden 2008]) against G. B. Conte's Teubner (Berlin and New York 2005) twice as often as vice versa. It is accompanied by a facing-page Italian translation and is preceded by an introduction and followed by a substantial, detailed commentary, as well as the usual indexes and bibliography of works cited. Given the translation, Casali rarely explains the grammar, but on 664–667 his note is somewhat fuller than those of R. G. Austin and Horsfall. Austin's commentary on book 2 (Oxford 1964) is considerably shorter than Casali's and very much shorter than Horsfall's. As a result of the differing scale and also of readers' growing expectations, it now appears spotty in its coverage of relevant subjects. On the quo me vertam? topos in 69–72, Austin says nothing. In regard to the flame that plays harmlessly about Ascanius's head (682–684), he settles decisively the disputed meaning of apex, but offers no general comment on auguria oblativa and impetrativa within the poem, as Casali does, usefully. Nonetheless, of all commentaries Austin's does the most to view Vergil's poem within the broadest context of European literature. On 643 he adduces a passage from a thirteenth-century Sicilian writer that makes for a helpful contrast, and prints in an appendix three modern poems that illustrate the continuing power of the Troy tale. The remainder of this review will be a comparison between Casali's and Horsfall's editions. Not that they address the same audience. Whereas Casali addresses university students and their teachers, Horsfall aims his commentary at advanced scholars, who overlap, one hopes, with the latter group of Casali's readers. In their content, the two commentaries necessarily share much material and many stances. Both regard the Helen episode (567–588) as not authentic. Yet Casali regularly refers and defers to Horsfall's treatment of certain, often rather technical matters, such as the confusions among the Latin terms for lightning and meteors (698), or the relation of Vergil to the Vatican statue of Laocoon and sons (199–227). Conversely, he expatiates on matters upon which Horsfall hardly touches, such as the role of the various forms of augury in the poem (685–691) or the many competing traditions about Aeneas' sons (563). Casali is more of a literary interpreter than Horsfall. He sometimes goes beyond his predecessor in treating echoes from earlier authors—Lucretius, for instance. Both commentators note the Lucretian echoes in quidquid id est (49) and salsus … sudor (173–174), but Casali alone suggests that the former phrase is particularly appropriate as uttered by Laocoon, the demystifier of falsa religio, and that the latter is paradoxical in that it relies on Lucretian language to express a divine prodigy. Some remarks of this sort may strike readers as overly subtle and unpersuasive. The more literary, more interpretive nature of Casali's commentary is especially evident in his introduction. Especially keen throughout to employ the pre-Vergilian accounts of Troy's fall and Aeneas's escape in order to sharpen the reader's sense of Vergil's innovations and so of his aims, Casali argues here, inter alia, for the following positions: that the puzzling episode in which Aeneas and his men exchange armor with Greeks (386–395) may be an attempt to explain how the tradition arose that Aeneas had betrayed Troy; that Venus' words to Aeneas at 619–620 may allude to a version of the story that he has in fact discarded, one in which she herself guided her son from Troy to Rome; that ultimately Aeneas is responsible for the...

La selección del mito en la definición de la memoria de Troya: Eneida II

Nos proponemos indagar el tema de la destrucción de Troya, narrada en el libro II de la Eneida de Virgilio, siendo ésta la primera fuente completa sobre los eventos acerca de la caída de la ciudad. Analizamos la especificidad del tratamiento del tema desde la perspectiva de un poeta romano, quien, en la selección mítica, pone énfasis en los siguientes puntos para definir la perfidia griega y la entrada del caballo a la ciudad manifestando la valoración con la que conforma los acontecimientos de un pasado mítico que en el texto perpetúa la memoria: el perjurio de Sinón, el portento mal interpretado de Laocoonte y la voluntad de los hados.

Ekfraza kot izkustvena pripoved: primer Vergilijeve Eneide

V interpretacijah Vergilijeve Eneide, ki izhajajo iz strukturalistične teorije (in v anglofonem svetu iz »nove kritike«), se učeni bralec/interpret pogosto obnaša kot tolmač, ki besedilo razume kot samozadosten sistem. Opisi likovnih umetnin so značilen primer »pripovedne pavze«, zato so pogosto razumljeni kot interpretativni ključ, ki razkriva globlji pomen pripovedi. Celo pri opisih, ki niso le podvrženi žariščenju, temveč so izrecno posredovani »skozi oči« literarnega lika, interpret, ki išče skrivni pomen opisanega, rad zanemarja odziv literarne osebe. Značilen primer je Enejev čustveni odziv na slike v Junoninem svetišču v Kartagini (1.453–495). Enej te podobe bere kot izraz univerzalnega sočutja; kljub temu je večina interpretov prepričana, da Enej kot »ekfrast« podlega usodni utvari, saj se ne zaveda, da je tempelj posvečen njegovi sovražnici Junoni in da upodobitev padca Troje pomeni Junonin triumf nad Trojanci; po tej razlagi se bo »pravi« pomen slik razkril šele med punskimi vojnami. Vendar ti prihodnji dogodki niso del pripovedi; Didona jih kvečjemu nakaže s prerokbo maščevalca Hanibala. Temeljna ideja pričujočega prispevka je, da je Vergilij Eneju kot gledalcu oz. fokalizatorju slik namenil povsem avtonomno vlogo. V poznejšem besedilu se pojavi vrsta odzivov na ekfrazo, ki imajo jasno psihološko motivacijo. Opis je posredovan skozi osebno izkušnjo literarnega lika; retrospektivna pripoved v 2. knjigi razkrije motive njegovega odzivanja in srečanje z Didono v podzemlju se s »fokaliziranim citatom« naveže na Enejevo doživetje pred slikami v Junoninem svetišču.

L’avènement des récits picturaux au VIIe siècle

The Advent of Pictorial Narratives in the Seventh Century. In this paper— translated from chapter III of Bild und Kunst. Geschichte der Bilderzählung in der griechischen Kunst— Luca Giuliani demonstrates how Greek artists in the seventh century BC invent new processes allowing them to tell stories, whereas in the former period, the so-called geometric period, no narration was possible through images. The study concerns two cases, both of them concerning the relation between Homer and his context : how an unique vase, the relief amphora of Mykonos on the neck of which is very clearly a horse with wheels, tells the fall of Troy ; in the friezes of the same vase, no image allows an identification of the characters by name : they are anonymous Trojans, men being killed, women threatened with a weapon, children savagely executed. The adopted point of view seems that of the vanquished people, which might have been justified in a Cycladic context. The second part of the article discusses a series of vases depicting Polyphemus’ blinding ; several details differ from known versions in folktales : in many of the vases the Cyclops is shown drinking (of course, the wine used by Odysseus to make him drunk and then asleep) ; a big olive wood stake is used rather than a brooch. A third part expands the question of the relation between tale, epos and images.

Weeping verse: Jasper Heywood's translation of Seneca's Troades (1559) and the politics of vicarious compassion

Jasper Heywood's Troas (1559) was the first English translation of one of Seneca's tragedies. Although Heywood's and later Tudor translations of Seneca's tragic corpus have predominantly been studied for their influence on Elizabethan revenge tragedy, recent criticism has focused on the way they respond to contemporary politics. This article takes a fresh approach to the question of the translation's political significance by analysing its intended emotional effect on its readers. Dedicated to Queen Elizabeth I as a New Year's gift in the month of her coronation, his translation seeks to intervene in the new queen's religious politics. By arousing Elizabeth's pity with the Trojan women, Heywood's Troas was intended to kindle vicarious compassion with English Catholics, for whom the death of Queen Mary I was as momentous as the fall of Troy.

THE WRATH OF POSEIDON

There is a major problem in connection with the wrath of Poseidon in Homer's Odyssey. We are told by Homer and Zeus (Od. 1.20-1, 1.68-75) that Poseidon raged continually against the hero from the time that the Cyclops was blinded until Odysseus reached Ithaca; and, when back on Ithaca the man complains to Athena about her absence and lack of help during the whole period of his wanderings after the fall of Troy, she says at 13.341-3 that she was avoiding confrontation with her angry uncle during all that time. But the only specified manifestation of that anger is the storm roused by the sea-god after Odysseus leaves Calypso in Book 5, in the tenth year after Polyphemus’ prayer to his father for revenge. It seems extraordinary that Poseidon should have waited so long before acting against him, and then have attacked him only once, merely causing him difficulty before he reached Scheria, and not (since it was fated for him to get home, and troubles there are already assured thanks to the suitors) ensuring his late return in a miserable plight on another's ship after losing all his companions, as his blinded son had requested (at 9.532-5).

Helen of Rome?: Helen in Vergil’s Aeneid

Helen of Rome? Helen in Vergil’s Aeneid Meredith Prince (bio) Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the world, abandoned her country and family for a foreign lover, caused the Trojan War, brought death and destruction to Trojans and Greeks alike, and yet returned home after the war, un-divorced, unscathed, unpunished. Held to varying degrees of responsibility for her adultery and the war, this paradox of a woman proved both fascinating and problematic to ancient writers. In Homer’s Iliad, Helen weaves, appears on the walls of Troy, and converses with Priam. She has a love-hate relationship with Aphrodite. She rebukes Paris, but makes love to him. She laments the death of Hector. With the notable exception of herself, others mostly place the onus of the Trojan War elsewhere, on Paris or the gods. Although Helen suggests that some Trojans may not have been too friendly toward her, both Greeks and Trojans exculpate her from bringing death and destruction to so many. As Ruby Blondell (2010, 6) recently has argued, since both sides need to be fighting and dying for a worthy goal, “Blame would compromise Helen’s value, contaminating her reputation. . . . Why would anyone in his right mind fight to regain such a woman? Helen must be worth it.”1 Tragedy, however, reverses this picture. Numerous characters, especially in Euripides’ tragedies, condemn her, blame her for the war, or attribute individual events or deaths to her. Often presented within the context of war’s effects on individuals, families, and communities, the Helen of tragedy is a manipulative, arrogant, wicked, or hated woman.2 In the post-Trojan War world of Vergil’s Aeneid, which chronicles the journey of Aeneas and his fellow Trojan refugees from a ruined Troy to the foreign land of Italy, what role does Helen play? At first glance, she does not factor into Aeneas’s mission. The war has ended, Troy has fallen, and Helen has returned to Greece with her husband Menelaus. Directed by the gods and fate, Aeneas must wage war in Italy, defeat the natives, and establish there the remnants of Troy, where his descendants eventually will found the mighty city of Rome. Since Rome will rise, Aeneas must forget the past and focus on the future. In contrast to the Helen of the Iliad, the Helen of the Aeneid, for the most part, has been silenced and removed from view, as she figures most prominently in an [End Page 187] episode in which she has hidden herself and whose authenticity is debated. As Sharon James (2002, 139–40) has noted, Aeneas “is restrained by his mother from killing Helen, who then vanishes from his sight and the reader’s.” Yet just as Helen lurks in the shadows of Vesta’s temple during the fall of Troy, she lingers in the background of the Aeneid and Rome’s founding and never completely disappears.3 Regardless of Helen’s agency or accountability, would the Trojan War, the fall of Troy, or Aeneas’s journey to Italy have happened without her? Perhaps they would have, considering that fate has a mind of its own.4 Yet as Helen (of Sparta, of Troy, of Rome?) resurfaces at several points throughout the poem and Aeneas’s journey, Vergil reminds the reader of her importance to the fall of Troy and the establishment of Rome. Scholarship on Helen in the Aeneid has focused primarily on the authenticity of the Helen episode in Book 2 and, to a lesser degree, on its sources.5 Scholars also have attempted to reconcile the inconsistencies between Aeneas’s Helen of Book 2 and Deiphobus’s Helen of Book 6, emphasizing the verbal and/or thematic parallels between them.6 Yet little attention has been paid to how Vergil (re)constructs Helen, in all her appearances, throughout the Aeneid.7 How do Vergil and different characters view, judge, and construct her, and what purpose(s) does she serve within the poem? Furthermore, in a period headed toward legislation criminalizing adultery and touting the Trojan origins of Rome, how does Vergil handle her? Does he draw on Homer’s depiction of Helen as a sympathetic and self-chastising pawn...

Античні ремінісценції в трагедії Крістофера Марло “Дідона, цариця Карфагена”

Analysis of Christopher Marlowe’s works highlights unexplored issues in Ukrainian literary English writer, contributing to a better understanding of the Renaissance in general. The article touches classical receptions problem analysis based on the play by the writer in the Renaissance. Investigates the socio‑cultural events of the day and their impact on drama writer. In this article are not researching aspects of C. Marlowe “Dido, Queen of Carthage”, it appears more interested in the writer’s image of Dido and installed originality single elaborate female image artistically playwright. The play “Dido, Queen of Carthage” was written in 1583 while studying at the University of C. Marlowe. It corresponds to the tradition of Renaissance drama, which absorbed at Latin literary norms and models of Roman plays L. A. Seneca and is a generalization about the ancient Greek tragedies and myths of Oedipus, Medea, Hercules, the fall of Troy and others. “Aeneid” by P. Virgil, who was taken based on plot C. Marlowe, was part of educational programs in almost all schools and became an integral part of humanistic education in England and Europe in the XVI century. So, Dido is the only elaborate images of women throughout their careers playwright. It is, without doubt, is the central figure in the play, dominating over all others, including the above Aeneas. C. Marlowe absorbed in developing the image of Dido. Her moral problems dominate the play.

Hamlet, the Heike and the Fall of Troy

This essay explores some of the ways in which the Ryutopia Company's 2007 production of Hamlet reimagines Shakespeare's play as a global, intercultural work. The production's innovative approach to the First Player's speech on the death of Priam (2.2.453–500), here played in a style that evokes the performance traditions of the recitation of the central epic of Japan, the Tale of the Heike, creates a dialogue not only between Hamlet and its contemporary Japanese adaptation, but also between the epic texts and performance traditions of Japan and Shakespeare's own epic sources, especially the Aeneid. The essay also considers the Ryutopia Hamlet in the light of recent scholarship, including Margreta de Grazia's “Hamlet” without Hamlet, in which the epic affiliations of the play are reconsidered.

Horatio’s Philosophy in Hamlet

Horatio’s Philosophy in <i>Hamlet</i>

Andromaque de Racine, vraie fausse héroïne tragique ?

This article revisits Racine’s Andromaque by positing that critics have wrongly portrayed the eponymous main character. They have depicted her as a flawless and defenseless woman with no ambition who struggles in a pathetic situation until the final coup de theâtre, in which her status unexpectedly rises from that of slave to that of queen. It is the purpose of this essay to demonstrate rather that Andromaque fits Aristotle’s definition of the tragic hero, that is, one perceived as both imperfect and somehow guilty of his situation. In fact, Andromaque is in motion to accomplish her duty: saving the future of Troy. To succeed, she does not hesitate to resort to trickery, to be merciless, and to disregard the concept of honor. That said, her share of responsibility for the tragedy appears in her refusal to forget the horrifying fall of Troy and in her willingness to keep the past alive, visualizing again and again the violence of the Greeks against her people. In so doing, she refuses to grant forgiveness to Pyrrhus and to exit the cycle of revenge. Caught in an impossible dilemma—saving her son by wedding her worst enemy or being faithful to the memory of her dead husband and Troy—she reaches the ultimate tragic “moment” when she finally accepts her tarnished reputation of fidelity by quietly agreeing to be perceived as the faithful widow of Pyrrhus at the end of the play. Successful on the political front, she has to sacrifice her inner self, her identity as the faithful widow of Hector, thus becoming a truly tragic heroine.

Shamed Guiltless:

Shamed Guiltless:

“Sallets in the Lines to Make the Matter Savoury”: Bakhtinian Speech Genres and Inserted Genres in &lt;i&gt;Hamlet&lt;/i&gt; 2.2

“Sallets in the Lines to Make the Matter Savoury”: Bakhtinian Speech Genres and Inserted Genres in Hamlet 2.2 Philip D. Collington In a conversation with the players visiting Elsinor, Shakespeare’s Hamlet requests a performance of Aeneas’s speech to Dido about the fall of Troy. “I remember one said there were no sallets [i.e., herbs or spices] in the lines to make the matter savoury,” Hamlet recalls, “nor no matter in the phrase that might indict the author of affectation, but called it an honest method, as wholesome as sweet.”1 In addition to its rhetorical purity, Hamlet appreciates the exclusivity of a speech that “pleased not the million” but received approbation by “others whose judgements in such matters cried in the top of mine” (2.2.428–30). In his sensitivity to the way literary utterances can be affected by stylistic interpolations (“sallets”), semantic insertions (“matter”), and audience responses (“’twas caviare to the general. But it was—as I received it . . . an excellent play” [lines 428–31]), Hamlet evokes signal concerns of Russian cultural philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. In his essay “Discourse in the Novel” (1934–35), Bakhtin outlined how cultural contexts and individual responses prove as important in determining meaning as authorial intention or the language’s denotative content.2 Anticipating by a half-century such approaches as intertextual, new-historical, and reader-response criticism, Bakhtin posited a triangular hermeneutic whereby the author’s voice, sociohistorical contexts, and audience responses intersect and “interanimate” discourses whose words are already stratified with semantic layers (DN 296). The intersection of semantic elements renders each utterance a “hybrid construction” whereby the speech of one becomes the speech of many: many styles, many speech manners, many “semantic and axiological belief systems” (DN 304–5). To Bakhtin, the novel exemplifies such hybridity because there stylistic and semantic interpolations coexist within a higher artistic unity. In the novel, centrifugal energies of heteroglossia (the existence of a “diversity of individual voices” [DN 262]) are harnessed by centripetal energies of [End Page 237] monologism (the organizing presence of the author’s or narrator’s voice [DN 272]). A novelist is therefore less an originator than an “orchestrator” (DN 366) of languages yoked together by the “superstructure” of this most encompassing literary form (DN 409).3 One factor that has discouraged the application of such insights to Shakespeare’s plays is Bakhtin’s insistence that drama is precluded from dialogism because plays lack a centralized controlling presence: “the system of languages in drama is organized on completely different principles, and therefore its languages sound utterly different than do the languages of the novel. There is no all-encompassing language, dialogically oriented to separate languages” (DN 266). Drama is purely centrifugal, a cacophony of characters and voices with no organizing principle.4 This present study will argue the contrary; that the plurivocality of drama can generate the lively dialogic interanimations that Bakhtin limited to novelistic discourse. Using as a test case a single scene from Hamlet (act 2, scene 2), I will outline how Shakespeare incorporates what Bakhtin terms social “speech genres” and literary “inserted genres,” ranging from Voltemand’s language of diplomacy, Polonius’s hair-splitting pedantry, and Hamlet’s sentimental letter and poem to Ophelia; to Hamlet’s bizarre riddles, philosophical musing, and sophomoric gossip with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. There are also a street ballad, a satirical character sketch, an excerpt of Senecan bombast, and a soliloquy by the prince. Each social speech genre and literary inserted genre is set against more naturalistic exchanges of dialogue (whether in prose or in verse), exchanges that advance plot and characterization without being encoded with identifiable literary or social subgenres. These framing passages do not represent an authorial presence or voice (as they might in the novel); instead, they provide an unobtrusive linguistic baseline against which the embedded forms and styles contrast markedly. Rather than simply juxtapose disparate linguistic styles and forms, Hamlet creates what Bakhtin terms “dialogic reverberations” (DN 284) when interpolated styles and forms overlap and interanimate one another, creating multiple layers of meaning—such as when individual characters appropriate the speech genres of others (e.g., Rozencrantz attempts to debate philosophy with the more erudite...

II - The Iliad

The Iliad is not an Achilleid, although Achilles is the most important character in the epic. One of the most striking features of the poem is the way in which it embraces the action of the whole Trojan War by retrospective and prospective references, rather than by narrating the events in full. In this, as is evident from ancient testimony, the Iliad was markedly different from the ‘cyclic’ epics (see esp. Hor. Ars P. 136–7). The human characters refer to the abduction of Helen, the initial embassy to the Trojans, the mustering at Aulis, the earlier campaigns and clashes; the prophecies and comments of the gods, particularly Zeus and Thetis, anticipate the doom of Achilles and the ultimate fall of Troy, also grimly foreshadowed in other ways. In an important passage which seems to be deliberately reserved for a late stage in the poem, Homer himself looks back to the origin of the whole conflict, the judgement of Paris which aroused the implacable anger of Athena and Hera against Troy.

Age of Iron Adaptation and the Matter of Troy in Clements’s Indigenous Urban Drama

In Age of Iron, Clements freely adapts Euripides’s Trojan Women. In Hutcheon’s terms, she “indigenizes,” drawing on the ancient play selectively and localizing it. Her localization is unusual because she creates a double setting and a palimpsest of Trojan and Indigenous referents. The action occurs in a place which is both contemporary Vancouver and ancient Troy; the fall of Troy is also the conquest of BC’s Aboriginal peoples. This duality allows Clements to lament historical suffering even as she insists that conquest is happening now on the streets of Vancouver. The superimposition of different frames of reference politicizes the gesture of adaptation: Clements’s transformative art implies that past patterns of oppression can be re-shaped. Yet adaptation of a classical text is an ironic gesture, given that the play stages the destructive imposition of European culture. The layered ironies of the play derive, as well, from Clements’s appropriation of the “matter of Troy.” Exposing the instability of national mythologies, she rejects the mythic descent of Britons from exiled Trojans, and claims Troy for her Aboriginal-identified characters. She revises British triumphalism, and instead of prophesying Troy reborn uses setting, set, and performance to dramatize the exilic present of “Trojans” in their homeland.

Ancient Chronology, Eratosthenes and the Dating of the Fall of Troy

Ancient Chronology, Eratosthenes and the Dating of the Fall of Troy