Andromache

Overview

About eighty pages, Jean Racine’s tragedy, first performed in 1667. After the fall of Troy, Hector’s widow Andromache is the captive of Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, who loves her and will spare her son Astyanax only if she marries him. Pyrrhus is betrothed to Hermione, who loves him; the Greek envoy Orestes loves Hermione and has come to demand the child’s death.

Andromache agrees to marry Pyrrhus intending to kill herself afterwards. Hermione orders Orestes to kill Pyrrhus, then turns on him when he does, and Orestes goes mad.

What happens

Andromache’s captivity. After Troy’s fall, Andromache, Hector’s widow, lives as Pyrrhus’s captive, her son Astyanax’s survival entirely dependent on the conqueror’s own uncertain and conditional goodwill toward her.

Pyrrhus’s coercive demand. Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, loves Andromache and will spare Astyanax only if she agrees to marry him, weaponizing his considerable political power into coercive romantic leverage over a captive widow.

Hermione’s betrothal and love. Pyrrhus is betrothed to Hermione, who genuinely loves him despite his evident preference for his captive, a betrothal increasingly strained by his open pursuit of Andromache instead.

Orestes’s arrival and demand. The Greek envoy Orestes, who loves Hermione, arrives to demand Astyanax’s death on behalf of the assembled Greeks, his diplomatic mission entangled from the start with his own unrequited romantic feeling.

Andromache’s fatal agreement. Andromache agrees to marry Pyrrhus, intending to kill herself immediately afterward, accepting a marriage she finds genuinely repugnant purely to secure her son’s continued survival.

Hermione’s order and Orestes’s madness. Hermione orders Orestes to kill Pyrrhus, then turns on him the moment he actually does it, and Orestes descends into madness, completing the play’s chain of catastrophic, mutually destructive passion.

How to read it

Read the play’s chain of unrequited loves, Orestes for Hermione, Hermione for Pyrrhus, Pyrrhus for Andromache, Andromache still bound to her dead husband, as creating a genuinely closed circuit of desire guaranteeing catastrophe regardless of any character’s actual individual choices.

Pay close attention to Andromache’s decision to marry Pyrrhus while secretly intending suicide afterward; this stages maternal duty and personal integrity in irreconcilable tension, accepting a repugnant marriage purely to save her son while privately refusing to survive the compromise.

Notice how Hermione ordering Orestes to kill Pyrrhus and then turning on him the moment he does it exposes desire’s genuine irrationality with unusual psychological precision, wanting an act performed while simultaneously despising whoever proves willing to perform it.

Consider Orestes’s final descent into madness after fulfilling Hermione’s own contradictory demand as completing the play’s demonstration that passion pursued without any check from reason produces total psychological destruction for everyone genuinely caught within its grip.

Read this tragedy alongside Racine’s own later Phaedra to see how his sustained interest in passion overwhelming reason, developed here across an entire chain of mutually destructive lovers, intensifies into that later play’s single, even more consuming central obsession.

Questions it raises

• Does Andromache’s decision to marry Pyrrhus while secretly planning suicide represent the play’s genuine moral center, a wrenching but admirable sacrifice, or does this resolution feel like an artificial escape avoiding the harder consequences a less theatrical solution would require?
• How does Pyrrhus’s conditional threat against Astyanax shape your understanding of his declared love for Andromache? Does coercing marriage through a child’s life at stake complicate or entirely undermine any claim to genuine romantic feeling on his part?
• What does Hermione’s contradictory response to Orestes, ordering Pyrrhus’s death then turning on the man who obeys her, reveal about the play’s broader understanding of desire’s rationality? Does this reversal represent psychological realism or dramatic excess?
• How should a reader weigh Orestes’s final madness against his own culpability in Pyrrhus’s murder? Does his descent into insanity represent just punishment, tragic victimhood, or some combination the play refuses to fully resolve?
• Given that every major character in this play loves someone who loves someone else, what does this structural pattern of unrequited desire suggest about Racine’s broader view of passion’s capacity to produce order or inevitably generate chaos and destruction?
• What does this tragedy’s continued relevance to discussions of coercion, obligation and desire’s irrationality suggest about the durability of Racine’s specific dramatic achievement? Do these seventeenth-century characters’ entangled passions still illuminate genuinely contemporary psychological and ethical questions?