Looking at Medea

by David Stuttard

  Even before the parodos, Medea’s isolation has already been suggested by her heightened emotional state in contrast to the nurse’s through the difference in the delivery of their lines (Medea sings, while the nurse chants). Despite the potential solidarity suggested by the chorus joining Medea through singing too, the jarring dislocation of Medea’s cries serves to emphasize her emotional distance (already expressed spatially through her positioning within the house) from those on stage. The uniqueness of this parodos should not be underestimated. Nowhere else in extant tragedy does a character interject in the parodos from within the skene. Ever since Jason’s breaking of his oaths, Medea’s world has become one of disturbance and disjunction and Euripides shows it through the disruption of the expected form of the parodos. Thus the audience encounters the world of Medea, and her sense of disruption, even before she has come on stage.

  Beyond preparing for Medea’s entry, the staging of the parodos also has important thematic significance for the tragedy. Medea, like Clytaemnestra in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, has symbolic control over the house and the parodos demonstrates her influence on the action on stage even from within. Later, she will take the gifts which begin the tragedy’s chain of violence from inside the house. She remains fully in control of this space right until the end when she chooses to leave it.

  The second theme introduced by the staging of the parodos is the idea of disrupted order. Euripides exploits the sense of order suggested by the formal symmetries of his tragedy’s structure and staging in order to emphasize the disruptive force of Medea’s emotion. Throughout the tragedy the audience will experience this tension between this structural order and the emotional forces of disorder, which finally gives way at the end of the tragedy to the complete inversion of power between the genders (again represented disturbingly within the formal framework of a familiar convention, the deus ex machina – see below).

  Enter the woman from Colchis

  The anticipation for Medea’s first entrance is built up both through the nurse’s anxious anticipations of how she might behave and through the unusual tactic of off-stage cries before the protagonist’s entry. The audience’s expectation, or fear, of what they might see could have been partly informed by Sophocles’ previous stage presentation of the mad Ajax (as explored above). Another production may also have played in the audience’s mind in anticipation of Medea’s entrance – it is just possible, if we accept arguments for its new dating earlier than 428 BC, that the extant Hippolytus had already been performed and if so, it offers an important point of reference for Medea’s entrance.6

  In Hippolytus, as in Medea, the chorus arrive through concern over the female protagonist, having heard that she is wasting away and refusing food (132f). It is not unreasonable, given the similarity of the preparation for the entrance of Medea and the information that the audience have been given, that, if she does not appear raging like Ajax, then they might fairly expect that she could make her first entrance, like Phaedra, lying on a stretcher (170f). Both expectations (or ‘ghosts’) are aroused only to be frustrated, when in the event Medea calmly enters at line 214 and makes her ‘closely reasoned’ speech to persuade the chorus.

  The costuming of Medea is another potential surprise to the audience. Since tragedy used mythological material, the same characters were presented time and again on stage, and so elements of their costume (mask, signature props, or particular garments) developed a performance history or a ‘stage life’. It was not the first time that Medea had appeared on stage and Euripides could have chosen to exploit the existing ‘stage life’ of this character in his production. The iconographic evidence, however, suggests that Euripides, rather than opting for continuity, chose to surprise his audience’s expectations at the entrance of Medea by presenting her as a barbarian for the first time in the history of the Dionysia (in earlier myth, Medea’s family came originally from Corinth).

  Recent commentaries have been strangely reluctant to entertain the possibility that Medea was costumed as a barbarian. The shift in iconography following Euripides’ production, however, weighs heavily in favour of her stage presentation in oriental costume. Beyond the evidence of vase paintings, it would seem characteristic of Euripides to choose to invert previous theatrical treatments, where Medea seems to have been presented as a Greek amongst barbarians, by portraying her in this play as a barbarian amongst Greeks. If making Medea a barbarian was an innovation by Euripides, then why would he not wish to exploit the available theatrical means of reinforcing this visually through costume? This could be achieved most obviously through the use of the pointed hat (tiara), which had already been used on stage to mark Darius as a barbarian in Aeschylus’ Persians and which is also evidenced as stage costume on the Pronomos vase, or the kidaris (floppy cap), also depicted in vase painting in a theatrical context. It is possible that Medea’s mask could also have been dark-skinned to indicate her origin, though the iconographic tradition tells against this. Dramatically there could have been value in alluding to previous productions through offering a visual continuity in the features of Medea’s mask: the contrast of her costume would put emphasis on Euripides’ innovation of making her barbarian (although the word ‘barbaros’ is used only four times – if the term had never before been applied to Medea, then each of these four utterances would have had a deep impact on the audience); it would also play on the dynamic of her ability to ‘play the Greek’ (if the audience is made constantly aware that she is a barbarian through her costume, it makes the effect of her Greek-style oratory all the more terrifying).

  It is striking that in their very first reference to Medea, the chorus do not use her name but refer to her as the unhappy Colchian woman, an address which ‘emphasizes her exotic origin’.7 This acts as a form of embedded advance entrance announcement and is, I would suggest, the first hint to the audience of what she will look like. Equally striking is the choice of Medea to address the chorus not simply as women, but as Corinthian women. The very first words of both the chorus and of Medea (once on stage) draw attention to the ethnic difference between them; an emphasis which could have been visually supported by Medea’s costume. The rhetoric of Medea’s following speech is changed if we think that she was dressed in barbarian costume – while it risked undermining her arguments of solidarity, it would certainly drive home her play for sympathy in her point about being taken from a barbarian land and now having no home.

  Possibilities for dramatic effect (and meaning) open up at every reference to ethnicity throughout the play, if Medea’s origin is visually reinforced through her barbarian costume. It is especially important to the impact of the play’s ending which changes considerably depending on whether Medea is dressed as a Greek or a barbarian. Some years ago now, Sourvinou-Inwood recognized this and made the very attractive suggestion that Medea could have changed her Greek-style costume for a barbarian costume at the end of the play when she is in her chariot.8 While it is true that costume changes are usually verbally acknowledged, it may be that the tiara or kidaris was such a striking element of costume that it required no comment. It seems to me to remain an intriguing possibility and preferable to the assumption that Medea appeared costumed as a Greek throughout the play. Costuming Medea as a barbarian would have had the theatrical advantages not only of surprising the audience but also of subsequently contributing to the central thematic exploration of ethnicity in this play. The use of this costume is supported by the iconographic record and its dramatic value becomes clear when considering its potential effects in performance. It seems to me the likeliest choice of costuming.

  Poisoned gifts

  The poisoned gifts of a peplos (robe) and golden crown, brought out of the house at Medea’s command at 950–1, set in motion the sequence of events which will end in Medea killing her children. As she puts it, on hearing about the deaths her gifts have caused: ‘My friends, the die is cast. I must lose no time now, but I must kill my children and so flee this land’ (1236f).

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

  The audience’s response to these significant objects could have been mediated through the performance history of the Dionysia and the previous use of both kosmos (finery) and poisoned gifts. In Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, Deianeira unwittingly kills her husband (Heracles) by sending him a poisoned peplos (which she had mistakenly believed to be infused with a love potion). This play is likely to have been performed before Medea and is therefore one of the plays which may have haunted this production.

  While the general context could recall this earlier play, if the casket used for the gifts in Medea were made visually similar to the stage prop in Women of Trachis, then this would reinforce the allusion. Any audience member who had watched Sophocles’ play would have seen the terrible effects of a poisoned robe, as Heracles is brought on stage in agonizing pain after putting it on. The casket symbolizes very graphic suffering for these audience members by evoking memories of that performance. Their anticipation over what will happen when the gifts are taken is therefore heightened and it may even arouse an expectation of seeing the princess’ suffering on stage. Even though that death is, in fact, only described, one of the effects of the allusion to Heracles’ on-stage suffering is that the already graphic messenger speech in Medea lines 1136–230 presumably becomes even more vivid in the minds of some audience members (who have seen the equivalent staged in Women of Trachis).

  The possible allusion to Women of Trachis also invites a comparison between Medea and Deianeira whose ‘gentleness and innocence’ have been described as ‘unique among major tragic heroines’.9 Just at the moment when Medea’s destructive plan is about to gain momentum, her lack of innocence is emphasized by contrast to Deianeira.

  A second layer of symbolic meaning is added to the gifts through reference to them as kosmos (finery). This particular term has the power to suggest both wedding and funerary contexts. In Euripidean drama, its symbolic ambiguity (as a term alluding to both contexts) is exploited to create pathos for young female characters who, through dressing in the finery associated with their wedding day, evoke great pathos for their imminent death. Seven years before the production of Medea, Euripides had already portrayed Alcestis, a young woman dressed up in what is explicitly described as kosmos (finery), dying on stage. While her suffering is not as graphic as Heracles’, her finery (which should be worn for festive occasions, such as weddings) creates a deep sense of pathos at her death. The allusion to this dramatic exploitation of kosmos may have been supported by a visual similarity between the fabric of the peplos in Medea to the finery worn by Alcestis, though to evoke the symbolic meaning established in the earlier production it need not have been: the verbal reference and context would offer a sufficient signal.

  The comparison between plays, which this allusion invites, is instructive since in Medea Euripides goes even further in exploiting the wedding motif (evoked by both the term kosmos and peplos) than he himself had in Alcestis or than Sophocles had in Women of Trachis.10 It has long been noted that the inclusion of both a peplos and crown as the gifts had to be significant since one or other of them would have been sufficient for Medea’s purpose. I would argue that it enables a far more poignant allusion to bridal wear since a bride in fifth-century Athens would have worn both. There is emphasis on the princess as a bride both at the initial bringing out of the gifts, in the subsequent choral ode, and finally when she is described putting on this kosmos (finery) by the messenger (e.g. 985, 1002, 1137, 1179).

  The true meaning of the gifts and the kosmos’ full symbolic potential is shown through her death: the fine garment and crown are equally appropriate to a corpse. In fact this layer of symbolic meaning for the gifts, the potential of which is already apparent to the audience from previous stage productions, is vocalized by the chorus (and confirmed for the audience) who juxtapose in a single line (985) the idea of ‘dressing up as a bride’ (expressed in a single word in the Greek) and being amongst the dead. The underlying ambiguity and symbolic potential of the kosmos is here made explicit, and the comparison to Alcestis, which it naturally invites, could only make the fate of the princess in Medea all the more pitiful: in Alcestis, the death kosmos will in fact attain a bridal symbolism by the end of the play whereas the opposite development in symbolism occurs here.

  Dying inside

  Following tragedy’s convention of off-stage violence, Medea kills her children inside the skene at 1270f. The build-up to this moment in the play is considerable – in fact, the first hint that Medea may harm the children comes as early as line 95. It is possibly Euripides’ innovation to make Medea the murderer of her own children (in other versions it is the Corinthians who kill the children). The use of off-stage cries during the murder, however, is not new (see above) but I would argue that dramatically they function quite differently from any other example in Greek tragedy.

  Oresteia offers an important forerunner of off-stage cries and the murder scene of Agamemnon (1343–71) is neatly alluded to by Euripides here through the general pattern of the scene and the chorus’ deliberation over whether they should go into the house. But in Medea there are significant differences to the handling of this scene, which push it beyond the limits of a conventional pattern and suggest that it would have produced a unique dramatic effect in its original tragic production.

  The choice to make Medea the murderer of her children offers dramatic potential for new levels of pathos to the off-stage cries since in this case they can include the desperate question of how the victims can escape the attack of their own mother. Euripides could have drawn inspiration from elsewhere in Agamemnon, since the chorus report how Iphigenia cried out ‘Father’ (228) before she was gagged and sacrificed. In Medea, the pathos of this reference to the killer parent is heightened through its dramatization – the audience actually hears the child cry out.

  The actual off-stage cries in Aeschylus’ play at the death of Agamemnon (1343f) are also crucially different to Medea in two other ways. Firstly the structuring of the cries in Euripides’ play is carefully manipulated to produce a unique dramatic effect: ‘Medea achieves its most powerful climax of violence by having the child’s cry break into what begins and ends as a regular choral ode’, which ‘forces the chorus into a shockingly direct contact with the crime that it has reluctantly abetted’.11

  The second major difference in this staging is that the victims inside actually respond to what the chorus say. This is unparalleled in extant Greek tragedy. Here it adds another aspect of the unexpected and exploits the uncomfortable tension caused by the convention of the chorus being unable to enter the skene. The chorus, like the audience, can do nothing to stop the dramatic actions from unfolding. The powerlessness of the spectator is emphasized to an even higher degree in this play where the convention is pushed to its limits by the response from one of the children imploring the chorus to act. This cuts short the Aeschylean-style deliberation and forces the point of the inevitability of violence in a passage which has already implicated the chorus more closely in the ‘crime’.

  This difference is also perhaps Euripides’ means of drawing attention to his independence and ability to innovate. The hopelessness of expecting choral intervention is further underlined through their return to the singing of a final stanza which metrically corresponds to the cries of the children and completes the ode. A mother may have just killed her children (and reversed the natural order of the universe) but the formal structures of tragedy will nevertheless continue to impose an ordered world on this chaos.

  The structure of the scene also offers a form of dramatic correspondence on another level. The ‘extraordinary arrangement’12 here actually mirrors the unusual structural form of the parodos. The cries from within, which disrupt the opening choral ode, create a sense of chaos and the emotional turmoil of Medea’s world, which will lead her to this point in the play where she murders her children. The unusualness of the chorus
’ opening and last ode, both of which include off-stage cries, makes the murder of the children a form of ‘mirror scene’ to the parodos. This creates a frame around the action between the parodos, where Medea first expresses her wish to see Jason and his bride crushed (163–5), and its effective fulfilment (albeit perhaps in a different form from what may have been initially expected).

  This mirroring therefore produces a disturbing sense of closure which sits in sharp disjunction to the sense of horror at Medea’s actions. Reflection on this earlier scene at this point in the play can only inspire a further sense of distance from Medea as the children’s cries make it clear that it is possible to hear from inside the house and it becomes apparent that Medea’s earlier failure to engage with the words of the nurse and chorus in the parodos was perhaps a deliberate choice.

  Serpents to Athens

  In the final scene of the play, Medea appears above the house in a chariot supplied by her divine grandfather Helios (as she tells us at 1321–2). This seems to have been another Euripidean innovation and her appearance is carefully managed to produce maximum surprise.

  After the choral ode incorporating the children’s death cries, Jason appears, ironically expressing his concern that the Corinthians might harm his children (1293f). Once Jason discovers that they have already been killed, he demands that the palace doors should be opened (1314–5). Convention would lead the audience to expect that the doors will open and the ekkyklema (platform) will be rolled out to show a tableau with the corpses on it. In fact, the chorus assume this too since they are the ones to suggest that Jason will see the bodies of his children if he opens the doors (1313).