Killing Hercules ─ Deianira and the Politics of Domestic Violence, from Sophocles to the War on Terror

Why, when he wrote about the most famous martial hero of the ancient world, did Sophocles turn Hercules into a callous and serial adulterer, and his murderous wife into a sensitive and compassionate woman, more sinned against than sinning? Subsequent generations, from Roman poets and playwrights, through the Church Fathers and the first generation of humanist translators, wrestled with the awkward legacy that Sophocles left them, and produced wildly different interpretations of the story. By the middle of the eighteenth century, an English clergyman represented Hercules as a model of enlightened civility, and Deianira as an insane harridan, and yet Handel set this text to music that reversed these positions completely. Why does this tale of global and domestic violence continue to demand reinterpretation, and how does it come to figure in comic strips, and plays about the ’war on terror’?

Richard Rowland is Senior Lecturer in Drama in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. He has edited plays by George Chapman and Ben Jonson for the Penguin Dramatists series, Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II for the Oxford University Press Complete Works, and Edward IV for the Revels series (Manchester University Press). He is also the author of The Theatre of Thomas Heywood, 1599-1639: Locations, Translations and Conflict (2010).