«A morte en feminino na lírica galego-portuguesa: o Pranto por Beatriz de Suabia»

Resume: A morte «real» da dama no corpus da lírica trobadoresca non é un tema habitual. Pero da Ponte, un autor innovador e renovador da tradición poética, compón o «único» pranto feminino conservado na lírica galego-portuguesa, Nosso Senhor Deus! Que prol vus ten ora. No artigo estudarase este lamento que deplora a morte de Beatriz de Suabia. Atenderase á contextualización da cantiga na tipoloxía elexíaca, ao personaxe da raíña, e á análise do texto. A arquitectura deste pranto segue o paradigma do planh occitano e, ademais, revela que a sombra de Alfonso X está presente na súa articulación.Palabras clave: Mulleres, Edad Media, pranto, morte, lírica galego-portuguesa.Abstract: The «real» death of the lady is not a common topic in the troubadoresque lyric poetry. Pero da Ponte, an innovative and reformist author of the lyric tradition, writes the «only» female lament conserved in Galician-Portuguese school, Nosso Senhor Deus! Que prol vus ten ora. This paper will study this compostition, which deplores the death of Beatrice of Swabia. It will analyse the contextualization in the elegiac tipology, the character of the queen, and the analysis of the text. The structure of the lament the model of the Occitan planh and reveals that the shadow of Alfonso X is present in the text.Keywords: Women, Middle Ages, Lament, Death, Galician-Portuguese lyric poetry.

Bringing Back the Dead

Chapter 5, “Bringing Back the Dead: Shakespeare’s Alcestis,” argues that, after incorporating Greek tragic women into comedies, Shakespeare increasingly drew on these figures to merge tragic and comic structures in plays featuring miraculous recoveries from apparent deaths. Plays such as Much Ado About Nothing, Pericles, and The Winter’s Tale not only dramatize women’s miraculous return to life from apparent death, but also link these recoveries with the performance of female lament, which elicits sympathies and melts audiences into supportive alliances. Drawing on sources shaped by Greek texts, these plays reconfigure tragedy with a happy ending, a hybrid genre identified with Euripides. In particular, they recreate the ending of Alcestis, in which a grieving man encounters a veiled woman who is eventually revealed to be his lost wife returned from death.

Iphigenia in Illyria

Chapter 4, “Iphigenia in Illyria: Greek Tragic Women on Comic Stages,” argues that Greek tragic women shaped Shakespeare’s sense of comedy’s affective possibilities in plays including The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night. In the wake of Greek-inspired experiments with tragedy, Shakespeare turned to mediating versions of these tragic icons to explore the resources of female lament for soliciting sympathies in comic settings. Comedy of Errors departs from Plautus by invoking the romance Apollonius of Tyre to heighten its tragic backstory, expand the role of Adriana, and introduce a lost mother; Twelfth Night extends on these same revisions, while also alluding to Heliodorus’ Aethiopica to identify Viola with Greek sacrificial virgins, heightening her links with tragedy and her appeal to audiences’ sympathies.

What’s Hecuba to Him?

Chapter 3, “What’s Hecuba to Him?,” observes that when Hamlet reflects on the charged power of the tragic theater, he turns to Hecuba: “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,/ That he should weep for her?” Building on Chapter 3’s account of Hecuba’s prominence in Titus Andronicus, this chapter argues that Hecuba offers Shakespeare a privileged symbol for tragedy, one that defines the genre especially by its power to move audiences’ emotions. In staging Hamlet’s imagined encounter with Hecuba, Shakespeare reflects on his own negotiations with a genre identified especially with grief, sympathy, and the affective impact of female lament.

Lament and Revenge in the Hekabe of Euripides

In this article Christian M. Billing considers the relationship between female lament and acts of vengeance in fifth-century Athenian society and its theatre, with particular emphasis on the Hekabe of Euripides. He uses historical evidence to argue that female mourning was held to be a powerfully transgressive force in the classical period; that considerable social tensions existed as a result of the suppression of female roles in traditional funerary practices (social control arising from the move towards democracy and the development of forensic processes as a means of social redress); and that as a piece of transvestite theatre, authored and performed by men to an audience made up largely, if not entirely, of that sex, Euripides' Hekabe demonstrates significant gender-related anxiety regarding the supposedly horrific consequences of allowing women to speak at burials, or to engage in lament as part of uncontrolled funerary ritual. Christian M. Billing is an academic and theatre practitioner working in the fields of ancient Athenian and early modern English and European drama. He has worked extensively as a director and actor and has also taught at a number of universities in the United Kingdom and the USA. He is currently Lecturer in Drama at the University of Hull.

LAMENT IN EURIPIDES' TROJAN WOMEN

This article summarizes the findings of an unpublished PhD dissertation, "The Form of Lament in Greek Tragedy" by E. Wright, which provide for the first time objective criteria for identification of lamentation in tragedy. It applies these criteria to the Trojan Women, and argues, on the basis of metrical and stylistic devices, that virtually every scene in the Trojan Women shows the characteristics of lament. The play is, from both the minute technical, and the overall structural, point of view, a lament. This provides explanations for some of the long-standing critical issues of the play, e.g., no unity, no plot, an ill-conceived prologue. The article then considers also how the Trojan Women fits into current discussions of lament as a gendered genre. It replies especially to work on the development of 5th-century Athenian attitudes towards female lament, in which a pattern of increased criticism and restriction, it is argued, is reflected in the changing treatment of lament in Athenian tragedy. The treatment of lament in the Trojan Women does not conform to this perceived development. This suggests that there were still a variety of attitudes current and influential in late 5th-century Athens towards female lamentation.