Medea (play)

• 1. Introduction

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  Medea, the ancient Greek tragedy written by Euripides, opens in the immediate aftermath of a betrayal. A woman who gave up her homeland, her family, and her royal identity for a man now learns that man is marrying someone else. Her nurse fears what she might do. Creon, the king of Corinth, fears it too. And the audience, watching this unfold at the City Dionysia festival in 431 BC, was about to witness something no Greek tragedy had shown before.

  The play centers on Medea, former princess of Colchis, wife of Jason, and practitioner of magic. When Jason leaves her to marry Glauce, the daughter of Creon, Medea does not simply grieve. She plots. She kills Glauce and her father Creon with poisoned gifts. Then she kills her own two sons. And then she escapes, carried off in a divine chariot, beyond Jason's reach forever.

  For over two thousand years, audiences and scholars have argued about what this play actually means. Is Medea a wronged woman fighting back against a system designed to destroy her? Is she a monster? Is she both? Euripides offered no easy answer. What he did offer was the most performed Greek tragedy of the twentieth century, a play that has been restaged, rewritten, and reimagined in nearly every language and on nearly every continent. The questions it raises about vengeance, motherhood, betrayal, and justice have never stopped being urgent.

• 2. Third Prize and a Contested Beginning

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  Euphorion won the City Dionysia competition in 431 BC. He was the son of the famous playwright Aeschylus, and his victory placed Sophocles second and Euripides third and last. Medea was part of a tetralogy Euripides entered that year alongside Philoctetes, Dictys, and the satyr play Theristai, none of which have survived.

  The third-place finish has puzzled scholars ever since. Some read it as a sign that the original audience rejected the play. Others point out that the competition in 431 BC was extraordinarily keen. Sophocles, who routinely won first prize, came second. Losing to Euphorion, of all people, was not necessarily a condemnation of Euripides's work.

  The more likely source of controversy was one specific dramatic choice: Euripides appears to have invented the filicide. A scholium to line 264 of the play suggests that in earlier tradition, Medea's children were killed by the Corinthians after her escape, not by Medea herself. An ancient urban legend even claimed that the Corinthians paid Euripides five talents to shift the blame onto Medea. The historian Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first century BC, captured the broader problem neatly: tragic poets, he wrote, desired the marvelous so much that they produced wildly inconsistent accounts of Medea's story. Whatever the first audience thought of the filicide, Euripides's version became the standard. Later writers followed his lead, and the deliberate killing of her own children is now inseparable from Medea's name.

• 3. A Play Unlike Any Other

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  Most Greek tragedies populate their stages with a range of characters in complex configurations. Euripides took a different approach in Medea. Nearly every scene pairs Medea with just one other character and the Chorus, a group representing the women of Corinth. This simplicity is not a limitation. It focuses attention on Medea's ability to read each person she faces and shape herself to match what they need from her.

  When Creon arrives to send her into exile, she drops into the posture of a desperate mother, crouching at his feet. She knows the role of a clever woman, a sophos, would put him on guard. So she abandons it. She says directly in the play: "Do you think that I would ever have flattered that man unless I had some gain to make or some device to execute? I wouldn't have even spoken or touched him with my hands." Creon grants her one extra day. That day is all she needs.

  The play also stands apart in two specific ways that scholars have noted. It is the only Greek tragedy in which a kin-killer escapes without punishment. And it is the only tragedy about child-killing in which the act is carried out in cold blood, not in a state of temporary madness. Both distinctions matter. They make Medea's choices impossible to explain away as divine intervention or momentary insanity. She knows exactly what she is doing, and she does it anyway. Bernard Knox observed that Medea's final scene, arriving above the stage in a divine chariot, mirrors the exit of indisputably divine beings in other Euripides plays, figures who interrupt human violence, justify their actions, arrange burials, prophesy the future, and announce the foundation of a cult.

• 4. Medea Through Many Lenses

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  Classics scholar Fiona Macintosh described Medea as a figure who has "successfully negotiated her path through very diverse cultural and political contexts," sometimes recast as an exemplary wife and mother, sometimes as a proto-feminist wronged by a treacherous husband. Both readings are rooted in the text itself.

  Feminist readings of the twentieth century were drawn to Medea's situation as a foreign woman stripped of every social protection. She left Colchis, betrayed her father, and used her magic to save Jason. When Jason moves on, she has nowhere to go and no one to call on. Her confrontation with Jason in the play is direct on this point: "I rescued you," she reminds him. "I betrayed both my father and my house. Now where should I go?" Jason's response, that he is prepared to give her money for her exile "with a lavish hand," reads as an almost perfect illustration of what she is arguing against.

  At the same time, Medea's identity as a barbarian, a foreigner from Colchis with divine ancestry and magical powers, created tension for a fifth-century BC Greek audience. Her "heroic temper," as scholars have called it, is coded as something non-Greek: a consuming need to avoid the mockery of enemies, even at the cost of actions that contradict self-interest, safety, or moral belief. She says in the play that her enemies would "cause her pain and rejoice" and that her priority was to "avoid her enemies' derision." This framing places her closer to an Achillean warrior-ethic than to the position of a wronged wife. The debate between these readings, the sympathetic and the monstrous, has never been resolved. Pausanias, writing in the late second century AD, recorded five different versions of what happened to Medea's children, evidence that the ambiguity ran deep well into antiquity.

• 5. From Rome to the Stage Today

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  The play's afterlife began in earnest when Roman tragedians rediscovered it. Ennius, Lucius Accius, Ovid, Seneca the Younger, and Hosidius Geta all produced adaptations in the Roman period. Seneca's version in particular shaped how later European writers understood the play. After another eclipse, Medea was rediscovered again in sixteenth-century Europe, and it has not left the repertoire since.

  In 1898, Catulle Mendes adapted Medea into a three-act verse play, Medee, and Alfons Mucha drew a poster for the production, which starred Sarah Bernhardt. Robinson Jeffers's Broadway adaptation in 1947, directed by John Gielgud who also played Jason, starred Judith Anderson. The production opened at the National Theatre on the 20th of October 1947, transferred to the Royale Theatre on the 15th of December, and closed on the 15th of May 1948, after 214 performances. At the 2nd Tony Awards on the 28th of March 1948, Anderson shared the Award for Best Actress in a Play with Katharine Cornell and Jessica Tandy. A 1982 revival at the Cort Theatre brought a Tony win for Zoe Caldwell in the title role. Diana Rigg won the same award in 1994, giving the play a record in American Theatre Wing history: the most Tony wins for the same female lead character.

  Beyond English-language theatre, the play traveled into kabuki in 1983, when Shozo Sato created Kabuki Medea at Wisdom Bridge Theater in Chicago, blending Euripides with classical Japanese staging. In 1988, Lars von Trier made a television version based on a script adaptation by Carl Theodor Dreyer. The BBC1 series Doctor Foster, which aired from 2015 to 2017, was openly structured on the Greek tragedy; its Korean remake, The World of the Married, became the highest-rated cable drama in Korean television history, with its final episode reaching a nationwide rating of 28.371%. A story first performed in 431 BC, about a woman abandoned by her husband in a foreign city, turned out to have no difficulty finding new audiences.