Shakespeare’s time and ours each engage intensely with Troy. What both periods share is a view that the matter of Troy, with its tensions and contradictions, is relevant to their own contemporary world issues. Departing from more usual synchronic or diachronic approaches, this volume seeks to provide insights into how and why Troy matters by analysing a selection of Trojan afterlives across those two periods. Probing different cultural and national contexts, the volume’s contributors compose a picture of multiple Troys — the Troy of destruction alongside the Troy of love, the Troy of heroism alongside that of bondage.
Francesca Rayner is Associate Professor at the Universidade do Minho and Janice Valls-Russell is a retired researcher of France’s National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) at Université de Montpellier Paul Valéry.
Down the ages, reconnecting with Troy has been an ongoing process of ‘rediscovery backwards’ of what is known, quoted, imitated and deconstructed, and this is especially true of the two periods this volume invites readers to explore, early modern Europe and present-day Europe. The popularity of the myth of the Trojan War was already fundamental to the fashioning of historiographical discourses in the Middle Ages — medieval chroniclers viewed the ‘gest de Troy’ and the Bible as jointly structuring the ladder of the world’s history. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, as in the twentieth and early twenty-first, poets, dramatists, philosophers and scholars have anatomized contemporary crises by looking back on the physical and cultural erasure of Troy. 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.
On a large funerary pithos dated to around 675 BCE from the island of Mykonos, a series of panels shows the women of Troy taken captive and their children slain before their eyes. The experiences of the captive Trojan women were already emblematic of wartime suffering. The lessons taught by the Trojan War have changed with each new era of history, and yet today, no less than in the seventh century BCE, we look to the legendary past in an attempt to make sense of present conflict.
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47-60
Jean Miélot’s Trojan Additions to Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea (Brussels, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, MS 9392) Yves Peyré doi:10.59860/t.c380e5c
In fifteenth-century Europe, many dynasties sought to invent Trojan origins for themselves. For Burgundy in particular, the claim to antiquity was a key unifying bond in a nascent state formed from many disparate duchies. Jean Miélot (1420–72) was Philip the Good’s ‘secrétaire’, copying, translating, and fabricating books for the Burgundian court. His extensive additions to Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea drew heavily on the Burgundian reception of Guido delle Colonne’s 13th-century Historia Destructionis Troiae. This text was itself a reworking of Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie (c. 1165), and claimed to contain eye-witness accounts unavailable to Homer: an underpinning of ‘truth’ for the history Burgundy was constructing about itself.
Troia Britanica: or, Great Britaines Troy (1609) is an artful blend of classical and medieval sources in support of the popular belief that Britain was founded by Aeneas’s great-grandson Brutus. This was an idea emphasised in Jacobean civic ceremonies, and seen as both patriotic in general and supportive of Stuart rule. Heywood’s Troy is a mercantilist city, drawing on wealth from the mining industry, and the Troia Britanica not only presents London as a new Troy, but also Troy as an old London.
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77-90
Ruin Representations and the Trojan War in Troilus and Cressida Vassiliki Markidou doi:10.59860/t.c59f686
Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (1602?) is not quite a history. An enigmatic play, meditating on ruin and dissolution, it pivots on the behaviour of individual martial heroes, and on their fallibility. At the time of its first staging, the Earl of Essex, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Sir Philip Sidney, among others, had all recently fallen in battle or been disgraced; and the chilling fate of fallen cities in the Netherlands, racked by Spanish wars, lay well within the living memory of Londoners. As the archetypal fallen city, Troy served as a warning, and as a symbol of this turbulent world.
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93-110
Reinventing Trojan Origins, Figuring Race and Nation in John Higgins’s First parte of the mirour for magistrates (1574) Joseph Bowling doi:10.59860/t.c69642d
In the 1570s the poet and scholar John Higgins tasked himself with extending the Tudor Mirror for Magistrates project back to the legendary origins of ancient Britain, a task he describes as cleansing the chronicle tradition of all ‘talk of the Romains, Greekes, Persians, &c.’ and of foreign ‘fables’. He weaves together historiographical sources and draws on Virgil’s epic model for his narratives, beginning with the tragedy of Albanact, the son of Brutus of Troy. This chapter reads Higgins’s First parte as participating not only in the broader Tudor construction of national identity, but more specifically in the imagining of an English racial identity — an emergent notion of whiteness — through Higgins’s displacement of Tudor imperialist discourse and national fantasy onto the figure of Brutus.
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111-24
‘A Fortunate Journie unto Troye’: Gender and Geography in Jane Lumley’s Iphigeneia at Aulis Marion Wynne-Davies doi:10.59860/t.c6b124c
Jane Lumley (1537–78), born to a Catholic aristocratic family which flourished under Queen Mary, had access to the library which had formerly belonged to Thomas Cranmer. Possessed both of political and literary connections, she made a loose translation of Euripides’ Iphigeneia at Aulis which repositioned it as a story of early modern women. Uncomfortable echoes of the execution of Lady Jane Grey (1554) — Lumley’s cousin — and of the political fall of the Earl of Arundel — her father — would have lent an incendiary edge to this play, yet it seems to have been composed for performance, and not simply for private circulation. Lumley’s Troy echoes the physical geography of Nonsuch Palace, her home, in whose banqueting hall the work may have been performed — perhaps even before Queen Elizabeth on her royal progress.
When Lavatch, the Clown of All’s Well That Ends Well, is ordered to fetch Helen to the Countess, he bursts into an impromptu ballad about Troy. The Countess complains that ‘you corrupt the song, sirrah’, a remark with multiple layers of meaning. This chapter considers how the Clown’s ‘corruption’ or altering of the song is part of a wider refashioning of the Troy story for strategic purposes in retellings by Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
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143-58
‘And mark how well the sequel hangs together’ (Richard III, III. 6. 5): Trojan Fragments in the Henry VI Trilogy Janice Valls-Russell doi:10.59860/t.c053190
Classical references in Shakespeare’s history plays receive relatively little academic attention and are often elided in contemporary productions, as if considered only incidental or ornamental conceits. Thus the Henry VI trilogy is read as a retelling of English historical chronicles, overlooking its many references to the Trojan Wars, particularly in Parts 2 and 3. A parallel with Troy runs through Shakespeare’s telling of the Wars of the Roses, both in terms of ruin and hopes of renewal.
Thersites, a minor character in Homer, nevertheless plays a key role in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. A put-upon figure in the Greek army at Troy, physically deformed, hairy, and with no kingship of his own, Thersites serves Shakespeare as a vehicle for the clown actor Robert Armin: yet he is not a comic turn, and his scenes are marked by sadism and cynicism. Early quartos of the play sometimes called it a comedy, sometimes a tragedy, and productions can seem a muddle of the two, but the character of Thersites forms a unifying connection between the romance-plot and the war-plot.
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175-90
‘Mobled queens’ and ‘dunghill idiots’: The Trojan War as Metatheatre and Parody Natália Pikli doi:10.59860/t.c271a14
‘What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, that he should weep for her?’, asks Hamlet, having heard the players performing a Trojan story — though they had done so at his own request. Elsinore, like Elizabethan London, was evidently saturated in tales of the Trojan war, and all present know that Hecuba was the ‘mobled queen’ of Troy. Filled with dubious rhetorical flourishes, and doubtless over-acted, the Trojan story made an ideal vehicle for a parody and critique of the theatre, if only because it was so hackneyed and familiar.
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193-206
Decolonizing the Narrative of Troy: The Trojan Women as a Textual Template for Drama Therapy and Community Engagement with Syrian Refugees Myla Skeiker, Fadi Skeiker doi:10.59860/t.c380e5b
Euripides’ The Trojan Women is reinvented in the tragedies of each generation’s refugees. In the 2010s, the Trojan Women Project, which took its name from the play, used drama and documentary as therapy for Syrian refugees in Jordan. Syria: Trojan Women is the story of one such group as they present an Arabic translation of Euripides. Made stateless, and despite their success refused performance visas to the US, these were women with as good a claim as any to be the descendants of Troy.
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207-20
‘A new and harsher world’: Sharing the Spoils of Narrative in Marina Carr’s Hecuba Francesca Rayner doi:10.59860/t.c49023e
The contemporary playwright Marina Carr has adapted a number of Greek myths, sometimes transposing them to her native Ireland. Hecuba, premiered by the RSC at Stratford in 2015 and then performed in the round in Dublin in 2019, is written in a blunt, direct language, which though heightened is far from the poetry of traditional stagings of Greek drama. Its stagings forced audiences to see the Trojan War both as a genocidal, racist enterprise and also as a story riven with multiple possible perspectives.
It is possible to tell the story of the Trojan War without any of its familiar protagonists. Punchdrunk’s The Burnt City (2022-23) deployed ‘twenty-eight performers spread throughout 100,000 square feet of performance space’, but these dancers did not include Achilles, Hector, Odysseus, Paris, Menelaus, or Helen — as indeed a number of Greek plays set around the story of the War do not. In such a telling, the city of Troy itself emerges as the central character.
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Bibliography entry:
Rayner, Francesca, and Janice Valls-Russell (eds), Engaging with Troy: Early Modern and Contemporary Scenes, Transcript, 27 (Legenda, 2026)
First footnote reference:35Engaging with Troy: Early Modern and Contemporary Scenes, ed. by Francesca Rayner and Janice Valls-Russell, Transcript, 27 (Legenda, 2026), p. 21.
Subsequent footnote reference:37 Rayner and Valls-Russell, p. 47.
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3 February 2026 • 276pp