The Dismissal of the Greek Envoys

Did You Know?

• Many of the actors in the premiere were royal courtiers.
• Despite its significance, the play failed to inspire many imitators in Poland until centuries later, with works by Stanisław Wyspiański.

Composition

The play was likely written around 1565–66, according to Tadeusz Ulewicz, though Czesław Miłosz suggests Jan Zamoyski commissioned it for his wedding in the late 1570s. It premiered on 12 January 1578 at Ujazdów Castle in Warsaw, performed at Zamoyski's marriage to Krystyna Radziwiłł before King Stephen Báthory and the royal court. Royal courtiers made up much of the cast, and physician Wojciech Oczko directed. English versions include a 1918 translation by George Rapall Noyes and Ruth Earl Merrill, a 1994 one by Charles S. Kraszewski, a 1999 rendering by Barry Keane, and a 2007 translation by Bill Johnston.

Analysis

The play is a blank-verse tragedy of eleven and thirteen syllables, structured as a typical Renaissance work inspired by Horace and later French and Italian developments, particularly the works of Scaliger. It is divided into five acts, from exposition to the announcement of the tragedy and the tragedy itself, with offstage events summarized in dialogues, including a vision of Cassandra. It was the first tragedy written in Polish. Miłosz wrote that the drama is neither a tragedy of passions nor of revealed fate; the fatal outcome results from stupidity and demagoguery rather than inexorable fatality. The tragedy lies in characters who understand what is at stake but cannot stop the wheels of events, ushering the impending doom of the Trojan War, and the play has no heroes outside the state of Troy. Its main themes are the responsibilities of statesmanship, critique of weak rulers, and failings of power, where the voice of the wise and reasonable is drowned by passionate but selfish and poorly educated youth. Edmund Kotarski commented on its universal values concerning the truth about the superiority of the common good and the dependence of the country and its future on its citizens’ stance. The tragedy also connected to 16th-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth reality, with Greek statesmen's deliberations resembling the Polish Sejm and King Priam's weakness commenting on the Commonwealth's constitutional monarchy.