Shaw's Troy: Heartbreak House and Euripides' Trojan Women

Among the many dimensions of reference between the lines of Heartbreak House (written 1916–1917) are King Lear, Alice in Wonderland, The Cherry Orchard—and The Trojan Women. Not, in the latter case, the original tragedy by Euripides, but (as in The Bacchae, which Shaw exploited openly in Major Barbara) the adaptation of Euripides by Shaw's friend and adviser on Greek and Roman history and literature, classics professor Gilbert Murray, who had first assisted Shaw on Caesar and Cleopatra (1898). "I am rather exercised in my mind," Shaw wrote to Murray in June 1907, "by the proposed performances of Medea & The Trojan Women; and I have a quaint suggestion to make." He had seen the first production of Murray's version of The Trojan Women at the Royal Court Theatre in April 1905, and his memory of the play was strong.

Shaw's successor in the theatre columns of the Saturday Review, Max Beerbohm, had dismissed the Court's production as little more than "an interlude of lamentation" and "an afternoon of wailings," while Shaw's colleague William Archer, an even more influential critic, had deplored the adaptation as more fitting for a lecture hall than the stage.

Shaw himself had not been left so cold by the overwhelming, in Euripides, of the drama by the poetry. He had grown up aware of the Irish tradition of keening, and understood that the overt theatrics had occurred before the play began, and that the action was the sweeping up of the leavings—what was inevitable after the fall of Troy. In his play You Never Can Tell, written nearly a decade earlier, he wrote in a stage direction about a character's distressing realization, "The consciousness of it goes through the father with so keen a pang that he trembles all over; his brow becomes wet, and he stares dumbly." It was not quite keening, but a related emotion evoking despair.

Gilbert Murray, Shaw claimed, "has not merely translated Euripides—many fools have done that, and only knocked another nail into the coffin of a dead language—he has reincarnated Euripides and made him a living poet in our midst." Recalling the performance at the close of the Court Theatre seasons, Desmond MacCarthy observed that of Murray's three adaptations from Euripides, The Trojan Women was seen as the most impressive—"a piece of acting to treasure in the memory." For him the lamentations were less significant than that "over all hangs the sense of an implacable fate."

For a new production, Shaw urged, two years later, Murray needed "a strikingly beautiful and rather magical Hecuba. She ought to touch the imagination as to make men see a past in her—not merely a personal or historical past, but the tragic past of all the destinies." He suggested casting Lillah McCarthy, who at thirty-one had already played several Shavian leading ladies, including Ann Whitefield in Man and Superman. The Hell scene, first performed separately, had opened with Miss McCarthy as Ann's aged mythic counterpart, Doña Ana. "She makes a curiously beautiful old woman," Shaw explained; "and her notion of conveying the dignity of age is to speak much better than she does in a young part. And her blitherings and lunacies will become Cassandrated in the Euripidean atmosphere."

Shaw hadn't yet realized it (such seem to be the subterranean intricacies of the creative mind), but the concept of Hesione Hushabye was beginning to coalesce in his consciousness, although he would not write a word of Heartbreak House until March 1916. The earliest extant draft, a hand-corrected typescript made from Shaw's shorthand original, reveals the first Euripidean clues. In the text as published and performed, persuasive Trojan hints survive (in what he subtitled, to suggest yet another subtext, "A fantasy in the Russian manner on English themes") in characters named Hesione, Ariadne, even Hector. In the draft, we also discover that Hesione's original name was Hecuba, as in Euripides, and other hints of Troy survive into the final text, although the action of the play is not the aftermath...