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This chapter traces representations of the status of women in Ireland through three twentieth-century productions based on the Trojan Women of Euripides. As a tragedy about the brutalities of colonialism, the play was immediately topical when it was produced by the Dublin Drama League in 1920, with Maud Gonne in the starring role as Hecuba. The play’s reception, however, underlined women’s lack of political agency, as did Brendan Kennelly’s Trojan Women (1993) and Marina Carr’s Hecuba (2015). Kennelly’s Trojan women are inspired by suffering Irish women from rural villages, but his Hecuba represents female collusion in sexist oppression from which men escape responsibility. Carr’s women are sexually liberated but they remain prisoners. Female sexuality continues to be connected with disempowerment at a moment when the absence of women from the Abbey Theatre’s 1916 commemoration programme was generating significant public criticism.

This chapter traces the evocation of Antigone in the context of the Northern Irish conflict, from Conor Cruise O’Brien and Tom Paulin to the remarkable number Antigone plays which have appeared post-ceasefire but allude to the conflict and its legacy. The Burial at Thebes by Seamus Heaney (2004) was inspired by the funeral of hunger-striker Francis Hughes in 1981. Ismene by Stacey Gregg (2006) responds to the sisters of Robert McCartney, who was brutally murdered by paramilitaries in 2005. Antigone (2008) by Owen McCafferty alludes to power-sharing and casts Creon as a soldier-turned-politician in ways that have contemporary political resonances. Norah by Gerard Humphreys (2018) portrays the sister of a fictional hunger-striker as an Antigone figure. The proliferation of dead bodies and the contested ownership of those bodies in all these plays show that Ireland is still dealing with the trauma of the conflict.

This chapter provides a contextualized overview of the contents of the book Classics and Irish Politics, 1916–2016. Rather than summarizing each chapter in order of appearance and according to the subsections of the volume, the introduction draws alternative thematic connections across the different chapters. Strands of interpretation include: the different political implications of Irish authors identifying with Greece, Rome, or indeed Carthage; the imperial contexts of neoclassical architecture; pivotal figures such as Patrick Pearse, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Seamus Heaney; the significance of the Irish Literary Revival and the Irish language; classical reception vs. the classical tradition as a theoretical framework; the Classics in Irish education.