Ajace (Ajax)

Foscolo committed himself to writing a tragedy for Salvatore Fabbrichesi's company in July 1809; apparently he had chosen the subject at the end of the year but, disrupted by literary polemics with the pro-Monti group, he did not talk about the tragedy again until February 1811, when he announced that he had started to put Ajace into verse. In the middle months of the year Foscolo worked rapidly on putting the work into verse, and this was finished in October 1811; it was staged for the first time at La Scala theatre on December 9. The subject stems from the Trojan series and it had already been evoked in vv. 215-225 of the poem Dei Sepolcri: after the death of Achilles, Ulysses and Ajax both aspire to have the hero's arms; Agamemnon and the other chief Achaeans are wary of Ajax and propose giving the arms, unjustly, to Ulysses. After a series of plot twists and suspected betrayals, Ajax commits suicide; while he is lying in agony in the presence of his unhappy wife Tecmessa, his loyal brother Teucer reveals that the arms had been assigned to Ulysses.

The premiere took place in a climate a major tension and high expectations, with a large audience that gave a lukewarm reception to the tragedy, which was judged too long even though it did not lack a certain degree of poetry. But it was savaged on the pages of “Poligrafo”, the means of expression for a group that was hostile to Foscolo, with a series of negative, sarcastic reviews by Urbano Lampredi, published between December 15 and January 5 1812. The tragedy was banned after its second representation with a decree dated December 13 because of the political allusions to the situation of the time that the work was thought to contain. In truth there is no proof of any real "political" intentions on the poet's part, although it is undeniable that the tragedy is driven by a strong libertarian spirit and denounces tyranny, represented by Agamemnon (possibly the figure of Napoleon), who is given the last lines that contain an Alfieri-style allusion to the unhappiness of the powerful.