Medea, therefore, has rather offbeat divine associates in Hecate and Helios. She is not exactly a goddess, but neither is she susceptible to most of the constraints of mortality – she can physically escape what, for a mortal woman, would now be certain death at the hands of Jason and the Corinthians, and she can fly in a supernatural vehicle; what is more, there is no known ancient tradition, in any Greek or Roman author, that she ever died. ‘Witch’ is far too weak a term for her; she sees herself as the agent of Zeus’ justice, and, as some sort of demigod, she never reveals exactly what goes on when she is communing with Hecate and Helios. No wonder the chorus, and the audience, end the play so baffled.
The play, therefore, is paradoxically both traditional and extremely peculiar in its metaphysics. It offers a relatively simple explanation of the role of the major gods in the action: Jason is punished by Zeus Horkios, through Medea, for perjury; Corinth is the kind of place where sex becomes an issue, especially in the case of a man already patronized by Aphrodite; the events are a theological explanation for the origins of rituals at the cult of Hera Akraia. But Medea herself destabilizes this simple explanation. At first one of Euripides’ apparently most accessible heroines, who speaks in ways that can seem astonishingly direct and immediate even today, she turns out to have been completely unknowable all along. She has not been playing the game of life according to the ethical rules understood or decipherable by humans at all.
Perhaps the most important theological moment in the play occurs at the point where Medea makes up her mind to kill the children. After the scene with Aegeus, she calls out, triumphantly (764–6):
Oh Zeus, and Justice, child of Zeus,
and flaming Helios – now, my friends,
we’ll triumph over all my enemies.
Medea, astonishingly, counts amongst her ‘friends’ and allies not only Helios and Justice, but the top Olympian god, Zeus himself. The chorus hear this strange note that she strikes, and respond in what are the most telling lines, perhaps, in the whole play (811–13):
Since you’ve shared your plans with me, I urge you not to do this.
I want to help you, holding to the standards of human law.
The chorus are, in fact, articulating a view consonant with the contemporary agnostic political theorist and philosopher, Protagoras, who insisted that humans had only their own powers of observation and reasoning to rely on in looking for explanations of events and phenomena. He famously said:
About the gods, I am not able to know whether they exist or do not exist, nor what they are like in form; for the factors preventing knowledge are many: the obscurity of the subject, and the shortness of human life.8
The chorus are insisting, quite rightly, that human law does not sanction the murder of children in punishment of oath-breaking husbands. Medea, on the other hand, instantiates the philosophical principle underlying the whole play – that human reason is not a sufficient resource for ensuring happiness, since life is uncontrollable, disaster is unavoidable, the principles driving the universe are inscrutable, and suffering is indiscriminate and unfair. Most people who attend a production of Medea today do not think very hard about the role of the gods, if they think about them at all. But they still feel just as powerfully the philosophical bewilderment that Medea’s role arouses. This is surely an important explanation for the translatability of the tragedy into every cultural and religious tradition that has performed it in the global village.
In the European Renaissance, the Euripidean Greek Medea was rediscovered, and began to be read alongside the Senecan version, which was more accessible because it was in the more widely understood Latin language. Seneca had reacted to the metaphysical bafflement which Medea inspired, in all who watched her on stage or heard about her in epic poetry, by making her summon the help of what feels at the time like half the divinities in the pantheon. This is his Medea’s opening imprecation (1–12):
You, gods of wedlock and you,
Juno Lucina of the wedding bed,
And you, Minerva, who taught Tiphys
To conquer seas in his new craft,
And you, cruel ruler of the deep Ocean,
and Titan, who shares out daylight to the world,
and you, triple-bodied Hecate, whose shining countenance
ratifies the silent rites of the mysteries,
and whichever of the gods Jason swore his oaths to me by –
gods to whom Medea may appeal more lawfully than he did –
and Chaos of eternal Night, realms remote from the gods, Unhallowed Ghosts
and Lord of the kingdom of despair, with your Queen, abducted by force …
Some of these gods are culturally ‘translated’ into their Roman avatars from the Euripidean Medea’s own speeches – thus Hera becomes Juno Lucina, Helios becomes Titan and Hecate remains Hecate. But Seneca’s Medea adds and names other gods altogether. They include ‘gods of wedlock’ (presumably Hymen), Minerva (because she helped make the Argo and supported its helmsman), Ocean, Night, the ghosts of the unburied, Pluto and Proserpina. Seneca’s Medea then explicitly summons to her side the ‘Furies who avenge crime, Furies with loose unkempt hair, writhing with snakes, and clutching the smoking torches in your gory hands’ (13–15). If they compared Euripides’ heroine with Seneca’s, and her liberally invoked divine assistance, new dramatists attempting a play about Medea must have felt even more confused. They will have been further perturbed by the newly philosophical tone of Seneca’s Jason. Seneca, being a Stoic, was not fully satisfied with such a god-centred explanation of Medea’s crime, either: something closer to his own philosophical position on her crimes may underlie the final lines of the play, in which Jason tells Medea to be gone to the furthest regions of the universe as understood in the physics as well as the metaphysics of the Stoic and Epicurean schools of philosophy: ‘Travel on, then, through the lofty spaces of high heaven and bear witness, where you ride, that there are no gods!’ (1026–7). If the Roman dramatist could so drastically amplify, supplement and rewrite the religious and philosophical dimension of Medea’s story, no wonder much later playwrights felt that they had every right to make it comprehensible to their own, very different, audiences.
By the eighteenth century, Euripides’ play, as well as Seneca’s, had become increasingly familiar through translation into modern languages and adaptation for performance. Christianized neoclassical Medeas were the eighteenth-century norm in spoken theatre. The horror of the intentional child-killing needed to be ameliorated for an audience with strong ideals of femininity and equally strong Christian beliefs. One way of making Medea acceptable was to allow her exculpating fits of madness in which she committed her murders, as Agave in Bacchae is deranged when she kills her son Pentheus, or Heracles is psychotically deluded when he commits triple filicide in Heracles Mainomenos. In Richard Glover’s Medea, performed in London at Drury Lane in 1767, for example, a good deal of emphasis was given to Medea’s temporary madness or ‘phrenzy’. Another strategy was to bestow an altruistic motivation upon Medea, for example, that the Corinthians would kill them by a much worse death if she did not kill them quickly herself. This was the expedient selected by Ernest Legouvé for his popular Médée, much performed after its 1857 premiere in Paris.9 In more recent times, adaptors and theatre directors have adopted several different strategies for dealing with the play’s pagan religion. The first strategy has been wholesale deletion – many adaptations and stagings of Medea simply omit many of the references to the gods, certainly to the more obscure figures such as Themis and Dikē. The specific references to Zeus and Hera often become rephrased as vague reference to ‘god’ or ‘gods’ or ‘heaven’, adaptable to almost any cultural context. More importantly, very few productions suggest in the final scene that Medea is perhaps not a human, after all.
Since the early twentieth century, the chief strategy used to make the religion in Medea comprehensible to theatre audiences has, however, been allegory. ‘The gods’ have been made to stand
for something else, for another force of immense destructive potential, which is not fully comprehended or controllable by humans, any more than the chorus of Euripides’ Medea understand her or can control her actions, when she claims that ‘Zeus and Justice’ are her allies. One of the first productions to allegorize the chariot scene was also the first in a translation (rather than adaptation) into the English language. This production, directed by Harley Granville-Barker in London in 1907, was very important in cultural history because of its connection with the movement for women’s equality in the United Kingdom.10
The translation was by the Oxford Greek scholar Gilbert Murray, who had supported the women’s suffrage movement since 1889. Murray and Barker may have been influenced by the success of Max Reinhardt’s Berlin production of Medea, in a translation by the famous German classicist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, in 1904. But the political climate also made Medea a significant choice. In 1906 the movement for women’s suffrage had been inaugurated, and in 1907 the first mass arrests of suffragettes shocked the public: no fewer than sixty-five served sentences in Holloway Prison. Support for the movement grew rapidly, inspiring Barker to produce the first of the whole series of suffrage plays, which flourished on the commercial stage, Votes for Women, by the Ibsen-influenced Elizabeth Robins. This impassioned piece staged a suffragette meeting in Trafalgar Square. October 1907 saw the staging at the Royal Court of Mrs W. J. Clifford’s dramatic examination of the effects of divorce on women, Hamilton’s Second Marriage. But it also witnessed the actress Edyth Olive, in the title role of Euripides’ Medea, emerging from her house in Corinth and lecturing her audience on the injustices suffered by women at the hands of men.
Yet this 1907 suffragette Medea was no divinity. Reviewers remarked on how surprisingly ‘human’ Medea was, and complimented Olive on winning the audience’s sympathy. In a seminal study of Euripides, published in 1913, Gilbert Murray writes about Euripides thus:
To us he seems an aggressive champion of women; more aggressive, and certainly far more appreciative, than Plato. Songs and speeches from the Medea are recited today at suffragist meetings.11
Murray’s book has proved perhaps the most influential interpretation of Euripides of all time. But Murray’s translation, Harley Granville-Barker’s production and Edyth Olive’s acting combined to present the theatrical machina as a metaphor. It symbolized something very real – the scale of the consequences of a man hurting a very human woman. Although his translation was fairly conservative – even archaizing – in style and idiom, and kept almost all of the references to specific divinities, in the ‘Introduction’ Murray saw the ancient gods, and Medea especially, as designed to be read allegorically:
The truth is that in this play Medea herself is the dea ex machina. The woman whom Jason and Creon intended simply to crush has been transformed by her injuries from an individual human being into a sort of living Curse. She is inspired with superhuman force. Her wrongs and her hate fill all the sky. And the judgment pronounced on Jason comes not from any disinterested or peace-making God, but from his own victim transfigured into a devil.
Medea is a hate-filled woman, transformed by her injuries into something almost superhuman – a human victim of male irresponsibility and cruelty transformed by injustice into a daemonic negative force of almost cosmic potency.
Gilbert Murray himself regarded Medea’s child-killing as realistic: ‘Euripides had apparently observed how common it is, when a woman’s mind is deranged by suffering, that her madness takes the form of child-murder.’12 The prominent suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst recalled how the great stirring of social conscience in 1906 had led to economically privileged women noticing the hardships of women in the lower classes. The focus was on a number of tragic cases of poor women, ‘which in other days might have passed unnoticed’, but were now used to underline women’s inferior status:
Daisy Lord, the young servant sentenced to death for infanticide; Margaret Murphy, the flower-seller, who, after incredible hardships, attempted to poison herself and her ailing youngest child … Julia Decies, committed to seven years’ penal servitude for throwing vitriol at the man who had betrayed and deserted her; Sarah Savage, imprisoned on the charge of cruelty to her children for whom she had done all that her miserable poverty would permit. By reprieve petitions, by propaganda speeches and articles, the names and the stories of these unfortunates were torn from their obscurity, to be branded upon the history of the women’s movement of their day.13
The dismal crimes of these modern Medeas – infanticide, violence against their husbands, child abuse – were now seen as caused by their social status. Even intentional child-murder by women was now being seen as connected with male irresponsibility: like Daisy Lord and Margaret Murphy, Medea could now kill her children with premeditation and be given, at least in the progressive theatre, a sympathetic hearing.
Many productions of Medea have followed this seminal theatrical event by ‘allegorizing’ Medea’s wrath and superhuman power as the potential reaction of women suffering under a patriarchal social system. This was especially the case in the late 1970s and 1980s, when the Feminist and Women’s Rights movements were at the top of the political and cultural agenda, at least in Western Europe and the USA. But in more recent productions, the divine element has often also been ‘allegorized’ in a psychological way, as representing Medea’s disturbed psyche. This was certainly the case, for example, in Deborah Warner’s production, starring Fiona Shaw, which was such a commercial hit in both London and New York in 2000–1. There was no sign of any god from the machine; Medea clearly had a mental breakdown, and ended the play in a bizarre dialogue with Jason, washing the blood from her body. Similarly, the 2006 Medea at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, directed by Barbara Frey and starring Nina Hoss, was a psychological interpretation, although the damage to Medea’s psyche was clearly caused in part by sexism. Medea spent most of the play confined inside a box-like house that represented both her dismal apartment and her inner mental world. Disturbing images and sounds were experienced by her and the audience, which seemed to represent the fluctuating pictures and sensations in her disturbed consciousness, while hands and other objects protruded inwards from the walls, when her subconscious or conscious violent impulses were threatening to overwhelm her.
But there has been another way in which the divine element has been understood over the last half-century, and that is more to do with post-colonialism than with either feminism or psychoanalysis. Medea’s revenge has very frequently been ‘allegorized’ as the violence of an oppressed people or ethnic group against their long-term imperial masters. This is an interesting development, because before World War II, Medea’s religion was often represented precisely as a retrograde, primitive, barbaric belief system, in contrast with what was presented as the more enlightened, Western, Christianized religion practised by Jason and his countrymen. This pattern can be seen, for example, in the Russian verse tragedy Georgian Night of the 1820s by A. Griboedov, where the Medea figure was a superstitious pagan Georgian serf-class mother, taking revenge on her owner with the aid of the Ali, malicious female spirits of Georgian paganism. Griboedov almost wilfully ignored the actual official Christian status of Georgia in this presentation of the mother as an atavistic Asiatic barbarian.14
As Betine Van Zyl Smit explores in her chapter for this volume, Henri-Rene’s Lenormand’s rewriting of Medea as Asie in 1931 similarly substituted a Christian religious framework by contrasting his Medea-figure’s ‘heathen’ religion with the Christianity practised by her errant husband’s culture. The Indo-Chinese Princess Katha Naham Moun’s children have been educated in the Christian faith by French missionaries, and this has alienated them from her. De Mezzana (Jason) tells his significantly blonde European Creusa (Aimée) that his marriage was scarcely valid as it was performed to the sound of tom-toms in the presence of tribal demons.15 Only a year later, Maxwell Anderson’s The Wingless Victory (1932) staged a North American marrying a Mal
ay wife, Aparre. He comes from strict Puritan family and Creusa’s name could not be more Christian – ‘Faith’. But Aparre comes to realize that she must carry out the fate that her old religion dictates must befall the children of someone who elopes from her Malaysian culture with an alien, and that fate is death.16
In the era of European empires, such an interpretation of Medea’s religion as inherently inferior but extremely frightening was frequent. But over the last few decades, the gods, in whom Medea believes, have often been used in anti-colonial and anti-racist productions to symbolize the original, pre-colonial identity and culture of people who have subsequently been subjugated, oppressed, deracinated and transplanted, and therefore as a potentially liberating force. Medea’s escape in the machine can become, in such productions, a metaphor for the acquisition of political independence, but with a warning: alongside liberation comes the threat of terrible, violent reprisals against the colonizing power. This was the way in which the religious element in the play was used, for example, in a South African production directed by Mark Fleishman and Jenny Reznek at the Arena Theatre, Cape Town, in 1994.17 The different cultural and religious backgrounds of the people of South Africa were suggested by the use different languages including Xhosa and Zulu, as well as English and Afrikaans. The production was ‘a timely reminder to South Africans rejoicing in their new freedom that a meeting of different cultures must be managed in a transparently fair and equitable way if disaster is to be avoided’;18 Medea’s superhuman quality therefore embodied the potential for catastrophic anarchy to break out in post-apartheid South Africa.
Looking at Medea Page 20