Looking at Medea Read online

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  To Theo

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  List of Contributors

  Foreword

  Introduction – Medea in Context David Stuttard

  1 Murder in the Family – Medea and Others Jasper Griffin

  2 Medea Before and (a little) After Euripides Carmel McCallum-Barry

  3 Otherness and Exile: Euripides’ Production of 431 BC Ioanna Karamanou

  4 Staging Medea Rosie Wyles

  5 The Nurse’s Tale Ian Ruffell

  6 Re-evaluating Jason James Morwood

  7 The Final Scene Richard Rutherford

  8 ‘It Wouldn’t Happen Here … Could It?’ – Chorus and Collusion in Euripides’ Medea Sophie Mills

  9 Medea’s Vengeance Hanna M. Roisman

  10 Medea: Feminism or Misogyny? Douglas Cairns

  11 Divine and Human in Euripides’ Medea Edith Hall

  12 Black Medeas Betine Van Zyl Smit

  Euripides’ Medea, translated by David Stuttard

  Bibliography

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  1 Medea in her chariot drawn by serpents, depicted on a Calyx-Krater attributed to Near the Policoro Painter c. 400 BC (© ArtPix/Alamy)

  2 The rejuvenation of a white haired male: a ram springs from a cauldron towards Medea who is sprinkling the ram with a magic potion. (© The Trustees of the British Museum)

  3 The Pronomos Vase, showing a tiara on an actor’s mask, top left (© Leemage/UIG via Getty Images)

  4 Modern stage production of Medea, produced and performed by the Actors of Dionysus 2013 (© David Stuttard)

  5 Tamsin Shasha as Medea in Actors of Dionysus’ 2013 production at the Rose Theatre, Kingston.

  Acknowledgements

  I first translated and directed Medea in 1996 for a touring production by Actors of Dionysus (aod), which included a residency at London’s Turtle Key Arts Centre. Many performances were introduced by talks given by eminent UK academics, a combination of scholarship and drama which was, in some respects, the inspiration for the present volume. My translation was thereafter recorded by aod for Penguin Audiobooks, and my subsequent adaptation has since been staged several times. I am grateful to the many actors involved in these productions for enhancing my understanding of the play.

  At the heart of this volume are the essays, and my profound thanks go to all the contributors, who have given so generously of their time and expertise. I for one have greatly enjoyed reading and working through this collection, and have learned a great deal from it. Special thanks go to Charlotte Loveridge at Bloomsbury Press, who has been an enthusiastic champion of the project from the start, to the excellent copy editor, Jon Ingoldby, and to Ian Buck and Claire Turner, for designing the book and its cover. My greatest thanks go to my wife, Emily Jane, whose support is fundamental to everything I do, and without whom (like Jason on his Argo) I would truly be at sea.

  List of Contributors

  David Stuttard is a freelance writer, classical historian and dramatist who founded the theatre company, Actors of Dionysus

  Jasper Griffin was Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, Public Orator and Professor of Classical Literature at the University of Oxford until 2004

  Carmel McCallum-Barry is Lecturer in Classics at University College, Cork

  Ioanna Karamanou is Assistant Professor in Greek Drama at the University of the Peloponnese

  Rosie Wyles is Lecturer in Greek Language and Literature at King’s College, London

  Ian Ruffell is Lecturer in Classics at the University of Glasgow

  James Morwood is Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford

  Richard Rutherford is Tutor in Greek and Latin Literature at Christ Church, Oxford

  Sophie Mills is Professor of Classics at the University of North Carolina at Asheville

  Hanna M. Roisman is Professor of Classics, Arnold Bernhard Professor in Arts and Humanities at Colby College, Maine

  Douglas Cairns is Professor of Classics at the University of Edinburgh

  Edith Hall is Professor of Classics at King’s College, London

  Betine Van Zyl Smit is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Nottingham

  Foreword

  Medea is one of the most frequently performed of all Greek tragedies. With its universal themes of love, betrayal and revenge, it resonates with modern audiences. However, although the ‘script’ has remained (for the most part) unaltered since Euripides wrote it two and a half millennia ago, the experience and expectations of audiences have changed significantly. Today’s religious beliefs, political structures and social norms are very different from those of polytheistic, imperial, slave-owning, patriarchal fifth-century BC Athens. So, while the human emotions at the heart of the play may be immediately recognizable, their context cannot but be alien, and, as a result, Euripides’ audience is likely to have experienced Medea very differently to a modern one. Certainly, Euripides cannot have imagined that Medea would have proved an inspiration to the early twentieth century suffragette movement, and it is debatable to what extent he conceived the play as the psychodrama as it is so often presented today.

  To set Medea firmly in its fifth-century BC context and to trace something of its later history, this volume presents twelve new essays by some of the leading authorities on this play in particular and Greek tragedy in general, along with my introduction and a slightly revised version of my 1996 translation. The subject matter of the essays covers a wide range of issues from earlier versions of the Medea myth and the play’s original performance context to twentieth-century interpretations. As was the case in Looking at Lysistrata, authors were given great freedom to choose which aspect of the play to write about, and each was relatively unaware of what the others intended to say. For this reason, there is occasionally a small degree of overlap between some of the essays, with which (to preserve the integrity of each piece) I have deliberately not interfered. Similarly, certain authors disagree with each other (and with me) about the extent to which Euripides used Medea as a vehicle for his own political comment. Again, I have deliberately not tried to impose a three line whip, believing that both this diversity of views and the occasional commonality of subject matter lend a special dynamic to the collection, underlining the fact that Medea remains as vibrant and controversial a play today as it was when it was first performed.

  Revisiting the translation has been interesting. Since 1996, when I originally wrote it for a production (and subsequent Penguin Audiobook recording) by Actors of Dionysus (The Independent kindly declared that it ‘gives Euripides’ wisdom a classic turn of phrase’), my style has changed considerably. However, publication of this translation still (I hope) has something to recommend it, not least because it benefited greatly from having been closely read and rigorously commented upon by the late Sir Kenneth Dover. So, aside from a very few revisions, I have kept that original translation essentially as it was. This also means that anyone wishing to hear the words performed can listen to the Penguin Audiobook, a CD of which is now available directly from www.actorsofdionysus.com. Readers wishing to compare my 2001 adaptation of Medea can order it from www.davidstuttard.com, where applications for perfor
mance of both translation and adaptation should be made before the commencement of any rehearsals.

  David Stuttard

  Brighton, 2013

  Introduction – Medea in Context

  David Stuttard

  ‘In peace time sons bury their fathers, but in war fathers bury their sons.’ If the historian Herodotus was in Athens’ Theatre of Dionysus on that brisk March morning in 431 BC, he may well have thought of these, his own words, as he watched Medea unfold to its bitter end, where Jason cannot even touch his dead sons, let alone bury them.

  For, that spring, war was in the air – indeed, tradition suggests that it was to chronicle the coming conflict that Herodotus returned to Athens at around this time – and, although the democracy’s ‘first citizen’, Pericles, was promising a relatively easy victory, many knew that, once conflict is unleashed (in the words of the late American political scientist, George Kennan), ‘war has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it’. To judge by his later works, Euripides was probably cautious of Athens’ escalating conflict with Corinth and her Peloponnesian allies, and it may be that he was hinting at these cautions in Medea.

  So, to set Medea in its historical context and to provide something of a general background to the play and to this book, we should begin by outlining a little of the history of the times and (first) of some of what Medea’s original audience might have come to the theatre expecting to see.

  Greek Drama – a brief history and some technicalities

  Tragedy was only one of a number of performing art forms current in classical Athens. Music, song and literature pervaded private homes as well as village and state festivals, where audiences could hear soloists and small ensembles sing to the accompaniment of oboes (auloi) or lyres. In the Theatre of Dionysus itself, its wooden benches set on the southern slope of the Acropolis above the flat orkhēstra (‘dancing ground’), where the chorus sang and danced in front of the skēnē (stage building), they could enjoy not only dramas but also performances of choral dithyrambs (hymns to Dionysus). Indeed, it was from these that tragedy was said to have been born, when at a village festival at Icaria one performer, Thespis, assumed the role of one of the songs’ characters and interacted with the chorus to become the first recorded actor. Drama had been born, but it took until just before the middle of the fifth century BC for it to settle into the form we see in Euripides’ Medea.

  Performed by three actors and a chorus of fifteen (all masked, all male), plays were written entirely in verse: iambic trimeters for much of the dialogue and soliloquies, with other verse forms used for choral songs, or for passages of heightened emotion, sung by actors. All (surviving) tragedies began with a prologue given by one or two actors. The chorus then entered (parodos), usually to remain in view in the orkhēstra until they exited at the very end, generally to the accompaniment of a brief song.

  The rest of the play consisted of scenes of monologue or dialogue between actors and chorus (episodes), linked by stasima (singular = stasimon), bridging passages of choral singing and dancing. These stasima were often used to add new layers of meaning, to provide moments of reflection, or to widen the focus out from the specific story being explored in the play, sometimes through references to parallel myths. The accompanying music (now sadly lost), as well as the chorus’ physicality, would have added considerably to their emotional impact.

  Most plays included at least one debate (agon) between two characters, in the form of a relatively lengthy speech from each (with concluding two-line comments from the chorus) followed by punchy dialogue, in which characters conversed in (often) one-line sentences (stichomythia). All extant plays also include a messenger speech, a relatively lengthy account of a usually violent incident, which has happened offstage, and which typically begins in the calm world of the everyday before reaching a crescendo of horror, and ending with a sometimes generalized aphorism.

  So popular was the new genre of drama that, in 534 BC, just over a century before Medea was first performed, an annual state dramatic festival, the City Dionysia, was introduced into the Athenian calendar. Held in the month of Elaphebolion (mid-March to mid-April), this part-religious, part-artistic festival was attended not only by Athenians but by foreigners, too, and soon became a showcase for not just Athens’ creative prowess but her political might as well. Spanning five days, by 431 BC the City Dionysia began with sacrifices, parades and propaganda – an elaborate procession to the theatre, a display of military hardware and of tribute from Athens’ subject states, donations of armour to war orphans, and the slaughter of bulls – all before a contest between choruses performing dithyrambs.

  Competition was at the heart of the City Dionysia: not just Athens’ competitiveness to be recognized as the leading polis (or city state) in the Greek world, but a contest between performers striving to be judged the best in their class. Thus, while the final day of performances was (probably) devoted to a competition between the writers and producers of five comic plays, the other three days were given over to a contest between three tragedians.

  Each day one author presented a tetralogy, three tragedies followed by a satyr play, a light-hearted romp based loosely on an episode from mythology, in which the chorus were costumed as Dionysus’ anarchic snub-nosed, horse-tailed, rampant followers, the satyrs. The satyr play was in part an emotional safety-valve, designed to dissipate the undoubted pressures built up during the highly-charged trilogy of tragedies which preceded it and allow the audience some respite before leaving the theatre.

  Earlier in the fifth century BC, some tragic trilogies (exemplified by Aeschylus’ extant Oresteia) had explored different episodes from the same myth over several generations, but by 431 BC tastes had changed. Now the three tragedies (and probably the satyr play) were linked not narratively but thematically. Thus (as Ioanna Karamanou explores), Medea was linked to its ‘sister’ tragedies, Philoctetes and Dictys, and perhaps to the satyr play, Reapers, by themes of otherness and exile. Although these ‘sister’ plays survive only in fragments, it is important to recognize that, as it was in conjunction with them that Euripides intended his audience to enjoy and judge Medea, understanding them more fully can afford us greater insights into his original intentions. It should remind us, too, that, although Euripides’ tetralogy of 431 BC did badly (it came last in the competition), the judgement was not based on Medea alone, and, lacking, as we are, not only Medea’s ‘sister’ plays but the two competing tetralogies, we are in no position to criticize the judges’ decision.

  In fact, the artistic merits of a script (the only element, which now survives) were only one of the criteria by which a production was judged – and probably a minor one at that. Of more immediate and popular impact were elements like choreography and music, actors’ performances, costumes and stage effects (discussed by Rosie Wyles). Even a dislike of something as superficial as Philoctetes’ ragged costume may have been enough to consign the tetralogy to third place.

  Incidentally, we know that, even if Euripides very rarely came first at Athens’ City Dionysia, many other Greeks did appreciate his dramas; in 413 BC, eighteen years after Medea, enemy Syracusans (presumably barred from recent City Dionysias and craving their ‘fix’ of Euripides) freed Athenian prisoners of war, who could sing his latest choruses, while when, in 404 BC, at the end of the Peloponnesian War, Athens was defeated, the recollection of a Euripidean threnody (from Electra) is said to have spared the city from destruction and her people from slavery and death.

  Foreigners may have appreciated Euripides more than his fellow citizens, but who was Medea’s first audience? In recent years, evidence has begun to emerge, suggesting that in 431 BC the Theatre of Dionysus was smaller than previously supposed, being able to hold not 15,000 spectators, as was once believed, but perhaps under half that number – roughly the same as that of the citizens who could be accommodated in the (exclusively male) democratic Assembly on Pnyx Hill. However, 7,500 is still a sizeable
audience, around a quarter of Athens’ citizenry (although some seats were reserved for foreign visitors), and the correspondence between Assembly and theatre has often been noted. Indeed (as personal experience reveals), because of the architecture and acoustics of Greek theatres, performers must direct their lines not to each other but ‘up and out’ towards the audience in the manner of an orator addressing a crowd. Even ‘internal’ monologues, such as Medea’s soliloquy (1019–1080), in which she debates killing her children, must be delivered with no little volume to the audience, almost as if seeking their advice or approval – something which increases spectators’ involvement in her decision-making. So, if the Church of England was once described as ‘the establishment at prayer’, the City Dionysia may in many ways be thought of as the Athenian Assembly at play.

  This is one of several reasons why I personally believe that the audience at the City Dionysia was exclusively male. Another has to do with Athenians’ shamefully misogynistic view of women, especially clever women. Literary sources for fifth-century BC Athens come exclusively from men and cannot conceal the vitriol (worthy of the worst modern tabloid journalism) with which the average Athenian male viewed talented, well-educated women. They smeared one, Elpinice, with rumours that she not only posed for a publically-exhibited painting (which was beyond the pale for a decent matron) but regularly committed incest with her brother, while they accused another, Aspasia (wife of Pericles), of prostituting free-born women. A decent woman’s place was in the home. Her role was childbearing and housekeeping, not cleverness, and I find it unlikely that most Athenian males would have countenanced exposing their womenfolk to the kind of political and moral debate which raged in the Theatre of Dionysus, not to mention potentially destructive role models such as the much-too-clever Medea.

  The presence of (albeit Greek-speaking) foreigners in the staunchly patriotic Athenian audience had certain implications. It encouraged high production values, as playwrights and producers vied ever more spectacularly to utilize the latest technology – such as the mechanē, or crane, which allowed actors and props to ‘fly’, or the ekkuklema (the ‘rolling-out machine’), on which tableaux showing horrors committed ‘inside’ could be shown – or to dress their characters in sumptuous costumes (another reason why Philoctetes’ rags may have provoked a hostile reaction among judges). However, the presence of foreigners had another, less positive effect. It tended to prevent playwrights from openly expressing views which could be construed as hostile to the Athenian political consensus. Just four years after Medea, the young Aristophanes was prosecuted for slandering Athens at the Great Dionysia in his comedy, Babylonians.