Barbara Burns speaks to Francesca Rayner and Janice Valls-Russell, co-editors of Engaging with Troy: Early Modern and Contemporary Scenes, which was published recently in Legenda’s Transcript series.

cover of Engaging with Troy

BB. The story of Troy has fascinated the Western imagination for almost 3,000 years. Why is this epic tale so important, and what are the universal themes that it explores?

 
Francesca Rayner and Janice Valls-Russell

FR & JV-R. Recently, archaeologists have been stunned to discover a papyrus fragment of the Iliad in a Roman-era Egyptian mummy that was embalmed 1,600 years ago. The fragment, from Book 2 of Homer’s epic, catalogues the Greek ships massing before Troy. Whatever the reason behind its presence in that mummy, it offers yet another, unexpected, instance of the multiple ways in which the story of the 10-year siege and the destruction of the city by the Greeks circulated.

The 2026 papyrus, possibly placed on the belly of a mummified body to serve as a protective charm, was not even the first fragment of the Iliad book 2 disinterred from Oxyrhynchus. This one was found by Grenfell and Hunt in 1897, indefatigable diggers in the sands. At almost any time or place in the ancient Mediterranean world, a random sample of writing or art would have a good chance of mentioning the Trojan Wars.

Couched on papyrus and parchment, gaining readers thanks to the printing presses of the Renaissance, fascinating global audiences in blockbuster productions, the story of Troy has produced countless iterations as well as prequels and sequels. One prequel was the lost epic poem Cypria. The best-known sequel, of course, is Homer’s own Odyssey, which narrates Odysseus’ (known as Ulysses to the Romans) 10-year journey back to Ithaca. Euripides dramatised the plight of the women of Troy, who were captured, killed or enslaved by the Greeks. Virgil focused on Aeneas’ flight from Troy and the founding of a new Troy.

Medieval authors refashioned the Greek and Trojan warriors as medieval knights and the abduction of Helen as a tale of courtly love. Recurring Troy-related themes include the notions of glory and honour, treachery, the entanglement of love and war, the rivalry of the gods who take sides in the war, the fate of women and children. Alongside graphic accounts of gory fighting, Homer’s Iliad also offers poignant moments, such as the domestic scene of Hector with his wife Andromache and their son Astyanax playing with his father’s helmet, and the supplication scene in which Priam asks Achilles to return Hector’s body.

Antonio Zucchi’s 1773 painting of Hector and Andromache, from the collection at Nostell Priory, a grand Palladian house in Yorkshire. Zucchi was pretty committed to ancient subject matter: his other works include ‘Catullus Comforting Lesbia over the Death of Her Pet Sparrow’, a slightly less well-known tragedy. But the Trojans were his bread and butter, just as they were for plenty of working artists. You could tell the story of the entire Trojan War with paintings alone, from Rubens’s Judgement of Paris to Tiepolo’s studies of the building of the Trojan Horse.

BB. The enduring mythological appeal of Troy has resulted in innumerable literary reworkings across the centuries. Your study homes in on two periods of European writing: the age of Shakespeare, and the present day. What was the rationale for combining these early modern and contemporary perspectives on Troy?

FR & JV-R. Down the centuries, the story has been reshaped to address new concerns. What both periods share is a view that the matter of Troy, with its tensions and contradictions, is relevant to national and/or world issues. It invites reassessments of heroism and draws attention to individual fates trapped in collective upheavals that undermine landmarks and values. This is particularly true of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Jean Giraudoux’s 1935 pacifist play, La Guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu, which inspired Simone Weil’s equally pacifist essay on the Iliad, published in 1940, to a French Shakespearean, Richard Marienstras, inviting readers in the 1990s to view the fate of Troy as an early instance of genocide. Shakespeare and his contemporaries circumvented censorship by looking back on the impact of war on Troy and the erasure of its physical and cultural identity to address sensitive issues such as the succession of Elizabeth, religious strife, civil conflicts. Today, as in Shakespeare’s time, ironic reassessments of heroism go hand in hand with humanist or emotion-driven responses to individual fates trapped in collective upheavals.

As everyone knows, the Trojans didn't only found Rome: they also founded London, Britain, and the British Empire. This epic poem, by the prolific playwright Thomas Heywood, is in part a popular history connecting the Trojan Wars to Britain via Aeneas’s great-grandson Brutus. The printer also named on this title page, William Jaggard, is now best remembered for publishing the First Folio of Shakespeare — another volume alluding to Troy on many, many pages.

BB. How did your book come about, and in what ways does the international, interdisciplinary mix of contributors enrich its scope?

FR & JV-R. The book began in a Shakespeare seminar, and contributors from this seminar analyse references to Troy in several Shakespeare plays from a variety of perspectives. However, we were also keen to widen the scope to include scholars who could bring different sources, retellings, recontextualisations of the Troy story to the volume. Our contributors are representative of different fields and theoretical approaches: Hellenistic, medievalist, early modern, political, postcolonial, performance and gender studies. Much of the book’s strength lies in this intercultural and interdisciplinary breadth which emphasizes the multiple ways in which the Troy story shifts in focus and meaning in different geographies and time periods. Our contributors come from locations as diverse as France, Hungary, Greece, Portugal, the UK and the US.

BB. The devastating impact of war in the chronicle of Troy, especially on women and children, is a theme that has inspired numerous literary reworkings of the tale. Which modern sites of armed conflict and displacement provide the context for works covered in your study?

FR & JV-R. The current wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have had a major influence on the shape and resonance of the volume. Indeed, the study includes references to Ukrainian literature on the ongoing war. The earlier displacement of Syrian refugees, and contemporary attitudes towards refugees and immigrants have also been influential. Many retellings of the Troy story function as warnings about the devastating consequence of war in the present; the philosopher Simone Weil wrote an important essay on force during the Second World War which made clear that war brutalized not only the victims but also those who won temporary victories.

Since Antiquity and, more especially, Euripides’ Trojan tragedies, there has been an important focus on the victims in war, particularly women and children. In the Renaissance, Erasmus’s translation into Latin of Euripides’ Hecuba and Iphigenia at Aulis helped to unlock access to the dramatization of the women of Troy’s fates, a theme that is at the heart of the work of present-day dramatists, directors and novelists. These include the Irish dramatist Marina Carr’s rewriting of the story of Hecuba, and Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, where the war is viewed from the perspective of the slave Briseis. Interestingly, in poems such as Alice Oswald’s Memorial, the deaths of the often anonymous fighters are connected to natural images of trees, plants, and water, as humans merge with their environment.

BB. There have been two significant exhibitions about Troy in the twenty-first century, one in Germany called ‘Troy: Dream and Reality’ which toured major cities in 2001, and one at the British Museum in 2019-10, entitled ‘Troy: Myth and Reality’. In what ways have these exhibitions both responded to and influenced contemporary thinking on this subject?

FR & JV-R. The titles ‘Dream and Reality’ and ‘Myth and Reality’ pick up on two consistent approaches to Troy: the desire to pinpoint an exact location for Troy, and the ways in which the Trojan War functions as myth in literature and other cultural forms. The exhibitions and the interest generated by them reveal how people continue to be fascinated by the story of Troy and its larger-than-life characters. At the same time, as Germany and the UK have become more multicultural societies, both exhibitions worked to include more diverse cultural artefacts that widened perspectives on the history and myth of Troy.

BB. How do people react when you tell them the subject of your book? Is the apparent familiarity of tropes such as the Trojan Horse or ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’ an advantage or a disadvantage?

FR & JV-R. Reactions to a new book on Troy have varied. Some wonder what can be said about Troy that hasn’t already been said. For some, the story of Troy is not even something they are familiar with. For others, the tropes you mention about the Trojan Horse or the effects of Helen’s beauty are part of their cultural references, whether through Homer, Virgil, Marlowe or Shakespeare, contemporary television series such as Troy, or the novels of Madeleine Miller on BookTok. We think both those who are familiar with the story and those who are less so can find something of interest in a volume which offers such a variety of perspectives on Troy and the Trojan Wars.

BB. Writing the Introduction to this book must have been quite a challenge.

FR & JV-R. Indeed. On the one hand, there is such a wealth of material on Troy that it was hard to choose what to include and what not to include. On the other hand, creating some form of critical coherence when the contributions to the volume are so varied risked homogenizing very different material. We hope we have created an Introduction that deals with these challenges and is both wide-ranging and accessible.

 
The Women of Troy are the University of Southern California women’s basketball team, one of America’s best. On the left, Jazzy Davidson takes a shot in 2026 (photo: Luis Ochea): on the right, her predecessors of a century earlier. They seem worlds apart. But the gulf of time between these shots is less than 1/30th of that between us and whatever it was that happened on the coast of Turkey.

BB. Francesca, you teach courses in Theatre and Performance the University of Minho in Portugal, and Janice, you’re a retired researcher of France’s National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) at the University of Montpellier Paul-Valéry. Can you tell us a bit about your academic backgrounds and how you both met?

FR. I work on contemporary performance, with a particular interest in performances of Shakespeare in Portugal. Before working on this project, Janice and I already knew each other together through our common interest in Shakespeare. Our different academic specialisms combined very well to facilitate a variety of approaches to the story of Troy. I was keen to bring theatre into the volume because it has often reacted immediately to wars and conflicts, and because it has been a public forum for debating those wars. Theatre has also been used with refugees to bring their stories to life in ways that make use of but also reshape the story of Troy.

JV-R. As Francesca says, we were brought together by our shared interest in Shakespeare, especially present-day adaptations of his plays. For many years I was Performance Editor of the peer-reviewed, English-language journal Cahiers Élisabéthains, besides pursuing my own research in classical mythology and the ways it infuses early modern drama.

BB. Is there evidence that this ‘greatest secular story of the Western world’ is continuing to be retold for new generations and make its presence felt in popular culture?

FR & JV-R. The story is still very much alive. Here are just a few recent examples. The Trojan horse trope is recurringly used to evoke a form of malware – as well as unreliable allies on the international scene. The complex geopolitical and environmental challenges that seem to darken the horizon may account for several revivals in France in recent months of Giraudoux’s anti-war play. Action-driven takes on the Trojan War inspire video games and a rock opera in Québec (Agamemnon in the Ring). Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, to be released in July 2026, described by Universal Studios as a ‘mythic action epic’, follows in the wake of Uberto Pasolini’s The Return (2024) and the series Troy: Fall of A City (2018), directed by David Farr.

But that's another story

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