Reading & Writing Lounge

Andromache—Unrequited Love

Its book review day again and this week I am in the mood for some nostalgia, especially for the classics. Sifting among my books, I came across Jean Racine’s Andromache in the English translation by R.C. Knight, and that’s what triggered the sentimentality. The smell of old books reminds one of old friends you chance upon on a busy thoroughfare and don’t want to let go. That’s what happened with me and I picked up the play once again after many years. Andromache marked Racine’s transition from Baroque to Modern and is set against the backdrop of the post Trojan War Epirus, Achilles’ son Pyrrhus’ kingdom. Pyrrhus brings back Andromache, the legendary Hector’s wife as slave but loves her much more than he does Hermione, his betrothed. Andromache lives only for her son and the memory of her dead husband but eventually agrees to marry her master to save her son. Hermione, in love with the noble Pyrrhus, is wooed passionately by Orestes, Clytemnestra and Agammemnon’s son, sent to Epirus as an envoy by the Greeks to warn Pyrrhus against love for the vanquished Trojan’s wife. This chain of emotions and betrayal, passion given and rejected sets off a train of actions that leads to the tragic fall of Pyrrhus. Hermione, having ordered Orestes to murder him, is crazed with remorse at the death and kills herself, but not before berating Orestes for the parricide. Orestes is spurned and disillusioned, mad at his own crime and the betrayal of Hermione, and in the last scene, swoons in impassioned rage and despair. The Trojan infant who appears to be a threat to the Greeks lives, as does his mother Andromache.

This then is the basic plot of Racine’s Andromache, rich with irony. The Trojan slave lives to see her Greek conqueror die. What sweet revenge it must have been for the proud and tragic Andromache, who yet tries to save her new husband’s legacy by rousing his people against the other Greeks who murder him. Hermione herself is full of paradox and irony. Having used the hapless Orestes as a murder intermediary, she assails him with vindictiveness, lashes his feelings verbally with a diatribe that plunges him into mad despair.

Racine’s poetry brings alive the passion of love and unrequited affection and proves the fact—difficult to accept in his time—that even royals have flaws and are all too human. What really excited me in this second reading of Andromache though, was the timelessness of the themes—jealousy of a spurned lover, war’s painful realities, passion killing, remorse. While the themes resonate in the modern age, Racine’s characters attain tragic grandeur in the style of all great tragedies.

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