Medea

Euripides

(c.484-406 BCE)

Euripides as a political playwright

Medea as character

Daughter of a foreign king, she fell in love with Jason of Corinth whom she helped in his quest for the Golden Fleece. She used sorcery and smarts to help him and even save his life several times. But, to help him, she betrayed her father and killed her brother. The gods may have caused her to fall in love with Jason--excessive love. She had several children with him, and he took her back to Corinth as his wife. Once there, though, he casts her aside and marries a younger woman, King Creon's daughter--for political power and wealth.

Medea is consistently depicted as "a figure willful passion" (Worthen 49), and she is also an exile--a refugee from her home. She is then exiled from her husband and her immigrant home, so she is twice exiled.

this exile, however, is also a metaphorical extension of women's position in Greek culture (Worthen 49).

their exile from Greek civic life is rooted in what was believed to be their passionate, unreasoning nature

by killing the children, and his new wife (and her father), Medea has ensured that Jason, too, is exiled from civic life--the children are "an extension of himself" (Worthen 50), and a sign of his continued value in civic life of the polis. This is the peripetia, the "reversal that defines the tragic action" (50).

Euripides innovated her killing her children as a way to get at the tragic circumstances more fully.

Staging?

NOT

FIXED!

(metaphor

for theater

itself)

Historical, or contemporary? Why? What emphasized? How speak to culture?

How would you stage it? Why?

Medea (1866-8), by Frederick Sandys (Wikimedia Commons)

Medea

female characters

played by men

female characters, who are not citizens and are afforded few rights and privileges, can help him explore the "categories organizing Athenian life" (Worthen 48)

Medea (1870), by Anselm Feurbach (Wikimedia Commons)

skeptical and non-conforming

Jason's heroism is questioned

Medea herself is treated as a hero

Despite killing her children, she does not die at the end, herself!

Questions the ability of reason to be free from self-interest

Euripides' sense of tragedy

tragedy arises from a "deeply dialectical, contradictory way of representing human experience" (Worthen 49)

Aristotle sees Euripides as the most tragic of tragic poets!

we are forced fully to contextualize Medea's act--to understand the full, complex, contradictory rationale that makes her actions make sense

Can you justify the action?

What is useful from historical staging practices?

How did this contemporary performance look? (and 25:02-end)