| Sumario: | The mythological figure of Orpheus haunts the margins of queer history. Appearances of Orpheus within musical performance going back to the Renaissance have already been explored in previous scholarship, but the queer dimension of Orpheus' character has not previously been considered in concert with Anaïs Mitchell's 2019 musical Hadestown. Through both a philological analysis of the lyrics of Hadestown and an examination of the intertextuality between the musical and its ancient Latin sources—namely, Ovid's Metamorphoses and Vergil's Georgics —this paper provides a queer reading of Hadestown 's Orpheus as an embodiment of vulnerability, community, and ultimately, queer history itself.
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