The Trojan Hecuba, widow of Priam, enters Hamlet – Shakespeare's second revenge tragedy – in the player's rendition of Aeneas’ speech to Dido. After Pirrhus’ bleeding sword has fallen on Priam, Hecuba, her body, we are told, worn out with childbearing, covered only by a blanket, is distracted with fear and grief at her loss, milking tears from the burning eyes of heaven. The player performs with tears in his eyes and, according to Polonius, manages to ‘turn’ his own colour to match his performance. The evocation of Hecuba's emotion is too much for Polonius and he asks for ‘no more’. Hamlet too is deeply affected and in his ensuing soliloquy he muses on the performance he has witnessed:

Hecuba is here the paradigm of the grieving, lamenting woman evoking pity in the actor who recounts her story and in the audience. It is a role that Hecuba assumes in Euripides’ tragedy as she asks Agamemnon to pity her, to look at her as at a picture, studying her sufferings, ‘homeless, forlorn, of all mankind most wretched’ (E. Hec. 811). And it is as a figure of pity that Hecuba produces such empathy in player and audience. And, yet, as Hamlet remarks in a brilliantly compacted line, the player and Hecuba have no relationship: ‘What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?’ In this chiasmus there is an implicit contrast between a fictive and an actual cause for grief, the player's and Hamlet’s. The submerged contrast emerges in the strange ‘he to Hecuba’ with its suggestion of a deeply personal, familial, relation. What is significant here is the choice of Hecuba as a figure to embody the power of fiction to move actor and audience alike, offering, as Tanya Pollard has stated, ‘a distinctive model of tragic impact, one that shadows, complements, and competes with that produced by men’.