What's Jephthah to Hecuba, or She to Him?

Hamlet's references to Jephthah and Hecuba may have more to do with each other in the broader context of the tales of the Trojan War than Hamlet footnotes lead one at first to believe.

Many students today make up the largest group of fresh audiences or readers of Shakespeare's Hamlet. As such, most come to the play without knowing who Jephthah or Hecuba were (I certainly did not when I first read the play in high school). Both Jephthah and Hecuba are alluded to by the prince in Act 2, scene 2, a long scene.* Hamlet remains on stage consistently from the Jephthah reference through all the Hecuba speech and references ("What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?"). 

              [Dame Judi Dench as Hecuba in Hamlet, 1996, directed by Kenneth Branagh. Image via HamletsCloud. Fair use.]

Shakespeare's original audiences fresh to the play would have included a greater percent of people more familiar with the Bible and the tales of the Trojan war (at least from Chaucer and the Iliad, if not other sources) than modern ("fresh") audiences and readers. Other references to Hecuba, Achilles, and other figures from the Trojan War, in other Shakespeare plays and poems, give evidence of this.

OCCURRENCES OF "HECUBA" & "JEPHTHAH" IN SHAKESPEARE TEXTS:
A web search at OpenSourceShakespeare shows that, with the search term <Hecuba>, there are at least 13 occurrences; these include five plays and one poem. Four of these are in Hamlet, and six (as might be expected, as it's about the Trojan War) are in Troilus and Cressida.

A search for occurrences of <Jephthah> reveals four instances, three in Hamlet and one in Henry VI Part 3. The last of these is very explicit about "impious" oaths and "sacrifice" of a daughter.

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM, vs. LARGER/CONTEXTUAL RELEVANCE OF HECUBA:
There are at least four conventional points of relevance for the Hecuba-Pyrrhus-Priam speech, but we might find more if we dig a bit deeper.

Conventional Wisdom:

1. Pyrrhus exacts revenge upon Priam  for the death of his father.  Pyrrhus kills Priam because Paris, son of Priam, killed Pyrrhus father, Achilles; that seems the most immediate motivation for his action. In a larger sense, King Priam allowed his son Paris to cause the war in the first place by taking Helen, so Pyrrhus might cite this as additional motivation for his revenge. Of course, sons avenging the death of fathers is an important theme for Prince Hamlet: He was asked by the apparent ghost of King Hamlet to avenge his murder by Claudius. So a tale of a son exacting revenge for the death of a father is very relevant.

2. Hecuba is shattered to witness her husband's death at the hands of Pyrrhus. Even if we don't know the rest of the tale, we might think Hecuba is unlikely to get over it soon, unlike Gertrude, who (at least in the mind of Hamlet) seems to have recovered from the death of her first husband too quickly by marrying his brother.**

3. The tale about Pyrrhus killing Priam in the presence of Hecuba allows Hamlet an opportunity to imagine the potential effect on Gertrude of avenging his father's death by killing Claudius while Gertrude is still alive. Hamlet has been told by the ghost that he must avenge the father's murder by killing Claudius, but Claudius is the new husband of Gertrude, and Gertrude may not know Claudius is a murderer. This offers Hamlet an ethical framework*** for his imagination: If he kills Claudius, new husband of his mother, he will cause her new pain, as Pyrrhus causes Hecuba unspeakable pain by killing Priam in her presence.

4. The Hecuba speech offers Hamlet a chance to see an actor, the First Player, greatly moved by this tale, and in contrast, Hamlet feels perhaps he himself should have been moved by this point to avenge his own father's death. Hamlet therefore scolds himself for not acting, given that he has great personal reasons for potentially being motivated to act, while the actor is merely imagining an old tale.

These are helpful insights. Modern readers, especially students new to the play and unfamiliar with the Iliad or Chaucer, might leave it at that.

But is there nothing more in the Hecuba allusion, falling as it does after the Jephthah allusion?

We might paraphrase Laertes at Ophelia's grave:
What insight else?  Must there no more be discerned?

It is likely that the broader resonances of invoking the name of Hecuba after Jephthah meant much more to early audiences of the play who were, on average, more familiar with the larger context of the Trojan War tales.

Ways that the Trojan War Context of Hecuba Resonates with Daughters Sacrificed or Lost:
Shakespeare's audiences would have been much more likely to know that tales of the Trojan War included at least five or six important moments in which daughters or women are sacrificed or lost:

1. Helen, wife of Menelaus, becomes lost to him when she elopes with or is abducted/raped by Paris of Troy: One of the tales claims that Paris had been chosen to decide which of three goddesses was most beautiful; they all bribed him, but the bribe of Aphrodite was that he would be given Helen, the most beautiful mortal (who also happened to be married). So Helen is lost to her husband, King Menelaus, leading eventually to the Trojan war.

2. Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter, Iphigenia: Agamemnon had offended Artemis by accidentally killing a sacred deer, so if he wishes the wind to blow so he can continue in his pursuit of the war, he must sacrifice his oldest daughter, Iphigenia.
- Agamemnon is in that way a kind of Jephthah-figure, often mentioned as such.

3. Calchas figuratively sacrifices his daughter Cressida: In Chaucer's poem, "Troilus and Criseyde" (as in the later Shakespeare play that used Chaucer as one of its sources), the prophet Calchas can be viewed as having sacrificing his daughter's wishes about determining her own future, in favor of his own plans and desire to be reunited with her. He uses her as a bargaining chip in a prisoner exchange between the Trojans and Greeks. This forces her to be separated from her beloved, Troilus.
- Calchas is a bit like Jephthah in that way, withholding his daughter from her beloved;
- Polonius (who thinks at first that he can foretell future doom for his daughter's reputation, and therefore, for a time, withholds her from Hamlet) is in this way not only like Jephthah, but also like Calchas.

4, 5. Chryseis and Briseis are lost, given up, taken away. In the Iliad, Briseis is the wife of a prince, but captured and enslaved as a war prize and concubine for Achilles. When Agamemnon is forced to give up one of his own favorite prize concubines, Chryseis, Agamemnon demands Briseis of Achilles, to compensate for his loss. This results in Achilles withdrawing from the fight against Troy (like the inaction of Hamlet bereft of Ophelia).

6. Polyxena, daughter of Hecuba, is required as sacrifice. After Troy is lost and Achilles is dead, Polyxena, a daughter of Hecuba and Priam, is required to be sacrificed on Achilles' grave. She adds to the list of daughters and women lost or sacrificed.

So the allusive gestures by Hamlet, at first toward Jephthah, and then toward Hecuba, may have been far richer to original audiences more familiar with the Iliad and Chaucer, richer certainly than many modern readers new to the play might think - if they merely scratch the surface to find only the most obvious parallels for the First Player's Hecuba speech.
 
For Shakespeare to follow the Jephthah allusion with a request for the Hecuba speech - as a gesture toward Trojan War tales - was perhaps to underscore the theme of daughters and women who are sacrificed or torn away at great cost: Helen, Iphigenia, Cressida, Chryseis, Briseis, Polyxena.

For those thoroughly familiar with the Trojan War tales as well as Jephthah of the Bible (and the Reformation English Books of Homilies), this would have contributed to an even stronger sense of foreboding about the fate of Ophelia
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Footnote & Acknowledgements:
* Act and scene divisions were added late by editors, not the playwright, after the early quartos; but in fact Hamlet never leaves the stage between comparing Polonius to Jephthah, and asking the first player to perform his speech on Hecuba, and later asking, "What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?" So any way one views it, this is all one scene from Jephthah through all of Hecuba, because Hamlet does not exit.

** The assumption of Hamlet that Gertrude proves to have easily forgotten her first husband does not consider the possibility that she may have married the brother in part because she didn't really get over her first husband's death; productions that cast the same actor in the role of the ghost as they do in the role of Claudius tend to highlight this possibility.

*** This idea of the ethical framework comes from Mary Jo Kietzman (mentioned below in acknowledgements) in which Hamlet might imagine himself in the place of Pyrrhus, causing a wife and mother pain by killing her husband. Pyrrhus kills Priam, causing Priam's wife Hecuba great pain that the First Player says the gods must have witnessed with pity; yet if Hamlet kills Claudius, he will be like Pyrrhus, causing Hecuba unspeakable pain.

Acknowledgements:
I am indebted in part to Mary Jo Kietzman's treatment of the Jephthah theme in Hamlet and in Judges, in her book, The Biblical Covenant in Shakespeare.

I am also indebted to Carol P. Christ for the connection of Jephthah to Agamemnon and his daughter:
"My midrash glossed over the fact that Jephthah and his counterpart Agamemnon each sacrificed a daughter."

And I am also indebted to my daughter for the gift of a book, and to its author Pat Barker, for The Silence of the Girls, for its retelling of the Briseis tale, which includes the sacrifice of Hecuba’s daughter, Polyxena, as well as its mention of other women lost or sacrificed.

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Hamlet quotes: All quotes from Hamlet are taken from the Modern (spelling), Editor's Version at InternetShakespeare via the University of Victoria in Canada. They are often first identified by way of the advanced search feature at OpenSourceShakespeare.org.

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RECENT BLOG POSTS ABOUT POLONIUS & JEPHTHAH:

October 6, 2020: Power-Broker Polonius, Ungenerous Jephthah
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2020/10/powerbroker-polonius-ungenerous-jephthah.html

November 24, 2020: Is Hamlet's Jephthah remark in part about Cecil & the Bond of Association?
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2020/11/hamlet-jephthah-cecil-bond-assn.html

December 1, 2020: Polonius, Apuleius, Golden Ass, Arras, & Hidden Lovers
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2020/12/polonius-apuleius-golden-ass-arras.html

December 8, 2020: William Cecil: Top Among 12 Polonius Satire/inspiration Candidates
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2020/12/william-cecil-top-among-12-polonius.html

December 15, 2020: Jephthah-Figures in Hamlet: Ambitious, Desperate, Traumatized Outsiders?
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2020/12/jephthah-polonius-cecil-ambitious.html

December 22, 2020: Jephthah, Cecil, & Three Instruments in Hamlet
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2020/12/jephthah-cecil-three-instruments-in.html

December 29, 2020: J.G. McManaway: Ophelia & Jephtha's Daughter
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2020/12/jg-mcmanaway-ophelia-jephthas-daughter.html

January 5, 2021:  What Art Might Remind Us About Jephthah, Polonius, & Ophelia
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2021/01/what-art-might-remind-us-about-jephthah.html

January 12, 2021: Jephthah & Polonius: What’s prostitution got to do with it?
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2021/01/jephthah-polonius-whats-prostitution.html

January 19, 2021: What's Jephthah to Hecuba, or She to Him?
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2021/01/whats-jephthah-to-hecuba-or-she-to-him.html
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Disclaimer: If and when I quote or paraphrase bible passages in many of my blog posts, I do not intend to promote any religion over any other, nor am I attempting to promote religious belief in general; only to point out how the Bible may have influenced Shakespeare, his plays, and his age.
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Thanks for reading!

My current project is a book tentatively titled Hamlet’s Bible, about biblical allusions and plot echoes in Hamlet.

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https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2019/12/top-20-hamlet-bible-posts.html

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