The vicissitudes and vagaries of fate

Culture is in some ways the manifestation of those ideas that we wish to transmit into the future. A billion memes are generated but only a few survive even briefly, much less over time. Why is Shakespeare still read some five hundred years after he wrote his plays? Not just read but studied and enjoyed? Because there are things in them, ideas, memes of greater importance and/or which he conveys better than others do. Our language is littered, no, not littered, densely embeued with gleams of inherited wisdom through idioms and phrases, much planted there by Shakespeare.

But not everything survives of course. In fact, the overwhelming majority of memes never gain traction. They sputter a brief moment and then are extinguished by brutal reality ,usually because they serve no useful purpose.

All these thoughts are spurred by reading Hamlet's Soliloquy, (line 520 of Act II, Scene 2), O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!.

In Line 530, Hamlet references

What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,

Who was Hecuba? She was King Priam of Troy's Queen (and mother of other mythological stalwarts such as Paris, Hector and Cassandra). There are many classical accounts of her, most favorable. Shakespeare holds her up as an example of a good wife in her profound grief on the death of her husband.

The annotation I am reading indicates that Shakespeare included Hecuba in six of his works. In addition to Hamlet, she shows up in Troilus and Cressida, Titus Andronicus, Coriolanus, Cymbeline, and in The Rape of Lucrece.

So you have probably the single most consequential writer in the western canon using a classical character in 15% of his works. Our language is riddled with stock phrases from Hamlet (to be or not to be, the primrose path, neither a borrower nor a lender be, giving more light than heat, more honoured in the breach than the observance, something is rotten in the state of Denmark, time is out of joint, murder most foul, there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio than are dreamt of in your philosophy, brevity is the soul of wit, Though this be madness, yet there is method in't, There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so, What a piece of work is a man!, The lady doth protest too much, methinks, Hoist with his own petard, Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, The cat will mew and dog will have his day, There's a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will, etc.). But poor Hecuba somehow doesn't meet muster.

Perhaps 1% read Shakespeare intimately and perhaps 1% of those know of Hecuba. That she is known at all from 3,500 years ago is no small achievement. But such are the vicissitudes and vagaries of fate. Hecuba, sponsored and held in esteem by one of the greatest playwrights in history, surviving but virtually unknown.