“Come Home with Me” “…who are you?”

In the musical Hadestown, when Orpheus first sees Eurydice, Hermes asks Orpheus if he wants to talk to her, warning him not to “come on too strong.” Orpheus, who as has already been introduced in the show as a boy “working on a song,” does not heed Hermes’ advice, but instead turns to Eurydice and says:

ORPHEUS
Come home with me

EURYDICE
Who are you?

ORPHEUS
The man who’s gonna marry you
I’m Orpheus

EURYDICE
Is he always like this?

HERMES
Yes

EURYDICE
I’m Eurydice

ORPHEUS
Your name is like a melody

EURYDICE
A singer, is that what you are?

ORPHEUS
I also play the lyre

EURYDICE
Oh a liar and a player too
I’ve met too many men like you

         The title of this song is “Come Home with Me”, and in many ways, it, as well as the following song “Wedding Song” fit the genre of (male-authored) Troubadour poetry. Orpheus, in this first introduction to his lady-love, inadvertently reveals his identity as a singer and lyre-player just by paying attention to the way her “name is like a melody,” but the first thing he says to her is a plea worded as a command: “Come home with me,” and when she asks who he is, his response is “the man who’s gonna marry you.” It is Eurydice who identifies him as a “singer…a liar and a player too,” something which she is able to do because she has “known too many men like you.”

          I begin with a discussion of Hadestown in a response about the “Songs of the Women Troubadours” in an effort to parse how the female Troubadours both participate in and question the troubadour genre. Similarly to Eurydice, whose first words to Orpheus’ plea to “come home with me” is the question “Who are you?”, so too the women Troubadours seem to perform their “come home with me” genre, and then interrogate that genre. Women Troubadours turn to the Troubadour genre and ask “Who are you?”

          One example of this can be seen in poem #23, which is a dialogue between Domna H. and Rofin (“Rofin, digatz m’ades de quors”). In this poem, two women have a conversation about whether or not men would-be-lovers should be made to swear that “before she lets them lie beside her / that they’ll embrace and kiss her / and do no more than that” (6-8). Of the two men, one swears readily because oaths mean nothing to him, and the other is so worried he won’t be able to keep his word that he doesn’t swear at all. Which man does better? is the question at the heart of the poem. The first woman, in defense of the man who cannot control himself, mounts an argument that might be a quote straight from a male Troubadour poem:

Rofin, a true lover does not let fear

prevent him from enjoying pleasure,

because desire and excessive ardor

presses him so that, despite the pleas

of his honored lady,

he can’t contain or rule himself.

For as he lies with her and gazes at her, heartfelt love becomes so hot

that he can neither hear, see

nor know if he does harm or good. (21-30)

 

This is a “come home with me” quote, but this time in the mouth of a woman speaking to another woman. Men cannot rule themselves, but rather lovesickness so sends them into a humoral imbalance that, medically speaking, makes them blind and deaf to the harm or good he does to his lady. Despite her pleas, a “true lover” cannot contain himself. This of course reeks of rapey-vibes to a modern audience, but in the context of this poem and the hypothetical scenario that one female speaker presents to another, these lines instead become a pseudo-performance of Troubadour poetry which a second female voice is then given the opportunity to answer. Domna H responds with the equivalent of Eurydice’s “Who are you?”:

Lady, it seems to me a lover

errs if, loving from the heart

he’s pleased by any joy

that does no honor to his lady. (31-4)

 

In this moment, the female response to Troubadour poetry is heard. “It seems to me a lover errs” is a critique of the genre these women troubadours are aware they are participating in. Echoes of this “who are you?” can be heard in many of the other poems, where women are given the opportunity to protest the pains of childbirth and the effects such an ordeal has on the female body (#27), or protest laws that strip them of their jewels (#29) among other things. #28 describes a “sermonizer” who speaks ill of unbelievers and women alike, spouting antifeminist literature, to which the female speaker responds she

“can’t help it: I must speak my mind

about the thing that is confounding my hear,

and it will give me pain and grief to write,

for I say those old-time troubadours,

who are dead now, gravely sinned,

putting the world in confusion,

when they openly spoke ill of women” (1-7)

 

So let’s return to Hadestown. While in the original myth, Eurydice ends up trapped in the underworld because she has died, in the musical by Anais Mitchell (a woman writer participating in an ongoing tradition of myth-adaptation and musical theater) Eurydice voluntarily goes to work in Hadestown in order to have enough money to eat and escape the storms that ravage the surface world. She calls out for Orpheus before she goes, but Orpheus doesn’t hear her, because so consumed with writing his song. While I don’t mean to imply that the women-authored troubadour poetry is as simple as “previously ignored women finally voice their opinion,” (especially since the question of authentic female authorship is so fraught), I do think it’s useful to think about these poems as a disruption of and intrusion upon the Troubadour genre with a single question “who are you?” as well as a somewhat cynical answer: “Oh, a liar and a player too. I’ve met too many men like you.”