[Deianeira explains her plans to win Heracles back, asking the women of Trachis for their advice.]

DEIANEIRA
Friends, our guest is still in there
saying goodbye but I had to slip out.
I want to tell you what my hands have done
and I want sympathy, too,
for what I'm suffering.
A virgin ... no,
what virgin? A slut, cheap, outrageous trade,
has come into my house to weigh me down and now
we'll all spin under the same blanket.
That's the reward I have from Herakles,
my true, good love, for having taken care
of his home through all this miserable time.
Am I angry? I don 't know how to be.
He's had the same infection often enough before...
But to have her here! To live with her,
to have to share him-can I stand for that?
And she's just blossoming. Men love plucking them
when they're like that. I'm on the path down,
drying up. Do you know what I'm afraid of?
That I'll be calling Herakles husband
but that child will be calling him to bed.

But no, I told you, anger is wrong for a wife.
I accept that. And besides,
I have a way to get us out of this .
When I was still a girl, one of the monsters
from the old time gave me something that I've kept
sealed in a bronze jar ever since. It was Nessos,
the centaur. I took the life's blood from his wound:
it was his dying present, the hairy animal
He used to ferry people in his arms across a river;
no boat, no oars, no anything, just him.
When I first left home after my father
married me to Herakles, Nessos was carrying me like that
and when we got to mid-stream, he put his hands on me
I screamed. Herakles shot an arrow in him,
deep, through his chest, to the lungs.
As he was dying, Nessos started to talk to me.
"You're Oineus' daughter, aren't you?" he said.
"Since you're the last person I'll carry across here,
I'm going to give you something. Pay attention
If you take a handful of the clots from my wound.
from where Herakles stained the arrow
with black poison from the blood of the Hydra,
you'll have a love-potion, a drug so strong
that Herakles would never look at another woman."

Well, I thought of all that now because after he died.
I did it: kept it, locked up, hidden.
And now I've impregnated this robe with it,
exactly the way his last words told me to.
It's done. I hate evil. I don't like
being obvious. I don't even like knowing about it
and I hate women who are that way...
But in this case, if charms or spells can defeat that girl,
can get Herakles back to me, then I'm ready ...
Unless I'm being rash ... Do you think so?
Say so if you do ... I'll stop ... I will ...

[After putting on the poisoned robe, Heracles writhes in agony begging for death and cursing his wife who has brought him to such an end. His son Hyllos and an old man do what they can to help.]

HERAKLES
Kenaion .. . The altar! All my sacrifices!
Mine! And you, Zeus! This . . .
Is this the thanks you give me back?
This agony you've made of me, this outrage?

I wish these damned eyes had never seen you
and never had to see myself this way,
this incurable madness blossoming in me.

Can't somebody sing spells to me?
Lay your hands on? Heal this horror?
Do you need Zeus to say you can?
It would be a miracle to me.

(The OLD MAN tries to prop him up.)

Leave me alone! Let
me be! Let me die!
Alone!

Why are you touching me? Don't
touch me! You're killing me! Killing me!
You've woken up what was asleep!

It has me . .. Again. It's lunging through.
Where are the Greeks? Ungrateful!
I wore my useless life out
clearing monsters from your woods
and seas and where are you now? Somebody
put a sword in me! Set fire to me!

Tear the awful
head
from my abominable body!

OLD MAN
You're his son, boy. Give me a hand. He's
too much for me . You're strong.
Your hands can help him more than mine

HYLLOS
I'm trying. My hands are trying.
But I can't make his life forget itself.
And neither can anyone. It's Zeus. He's doomed.

HERAKLES
Son, where are you? Lift me.
Hold me ... O god , what's happening to me?
The thing, again, again, it's pouncing.
lunging in me, leaping, destroying,
this unbelievable plague, this savage agony!
O goddess, Pallas, Sister, again, again!
Son, have pity on your father.
Take your knife. No one would blame you. Put it
in my chest. Heal the wild pain your damned mother
put there. O god, I'd give anything to see her suffer this,
the same destruction, this, she's given me.

Dear Death, you're God's brother. Do it!
End me! Let the pain sleep! Quick! Give me doom!

CHORUS
A great Lord
to hear cry. What pain
must have him! Huge!

HERAKLES
It's torment even to speak of the sufferings
these hands have labored through; the hot, awful loads
on this back. But nothing Zeus' wife
or that contemptible slavedriver, Eurystheus,
ever made me do was anything to what the beautiful,
two-faced daughter of Oineus has woven me in,
this net of Furies, this mutilation.
It's nailed in me ... It's eaten to inside me ...
It's moved in ... Sucking my lungholes,
all my good blood is swallowed. Its coils
have wasted everything, my body, all my meat.
No one, no hero I ever fought, not even the horde
of giants born of the earth nor any monstrous,
savage animal could do it ... and no Greeks either,
and not another place ... Not anyone, from anywhere
I ever purified, could do what she, a weak,
meaningless woman, without a sword, with nothing, by
herself,
has done to me, defeated, conquered me, completely.
Son, if you are my son and not your mother's boy,
give me that woman, give me that dam of yours.
Take your hands. Put her in my hands.
I want to know which hurts you more ... Me,
like this, my agony, or her, when I make her suffer
the punishment she deserves to suffer.
Go on, boy. Don't be a coward. Pity me.
Anyone else would. Look at me,
moaning, bellowing like a wispy girl. Nobody
ever saw me like this before ... never,
no matter where my damned luck took me.
Look! The hero!
All that time I was a woman!

Come here ... closer ... I'll show you your father.
I'll show you what's been done to me.
Look, under the cover, here ... LOOK! ME! LOOK!
EVERYONE! ... My muscles ... ruined, pitiful ...
Look again ...
O DESTROYED!

Pain! Fire! The torment! Another time! Again,
wait, again, it's coming, I have to fight it,
that cruel, that eating in my sides, eating, eating ...
O Lord down in the dark of Hell, take me now!
Give me fire, Zeus! Blast your bolts down! KING! KING!
Here, Father, my head, here. The thing's
consuming me, it's blossoming, festering ...

O hands, my hands ... Shoulders ... Chest ...
My arms .. .
Is it still you? Did I really kill the man-eating lion
in Nemea with you? No one else could come close,
no less strangle it. And the Hydra
from Lerna, you tamed that. And that din
of double-creatures, monstrosities, half-men, half-horse,
who spoke to no one and had no law but violence
and power? And the wild boar of Erymanthos
and the three-headed whelp of the Viper, horrible,
who lived under the earth, in Hell, unconquerable,
and the dragon guarding the golden fruit
at the end of the world, him too.
And all the innumerable others.
These hands: no one ever triumphed over them.

And now I'm broken. Pieces . Waste.
And by what? I can't see it! It's invisible!
ME! Whose mother everyone says was the noblest of all.
ME! They said my father was Zeus himself, King of
Heaven ...

But let me tell you this: I might be nothing,
paralyzed in nothingness, but the one who did this
will know these hands, what they can do: give me her!
I have a message she can take back to the world:
I punished evil when I was alive
and I punished it when I was dead.