The Mobile Queen: Observing Hecuba in Renaissance Europe

t has become customary for critical discussions of Euripides’sHecuba to mention the famous scene in Shakespeare’s Hamlet where the leading player of the troupe visiting Elsinore, upon Hamlet’s urging, delivers a speech featuring the “mobled” queen, as the early quarto editions call her, or the “inobled” queen, as the first folio would have it. Even the most recent general introduction to Hecuba opens not with Euripides but with Shakespeare. Not just to Renaissance scholars, it seems, but to all readers and spectators the figure of the grief-stricken Trojan queen must arrive mediated by her brief Shakespearean appearance. In Shakespeare’sHamlet, her misfortunes are described to us by an actor who is, in fact, quoting Aeneas as he is telling the story of his misfortunes to Dido, and the actor speaks the speech while observed byHamlet, who is in turn carefully observed by Polonius, all of them observed by an audience, real or imagined. If we encounter Shakespeare’s Hecuba at all, it is at a considerable distance and through several mediating agents. If we resemble Hamlet at all, it is because, like him, we are unable to answer the question of what Hecuba is to us without