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This chapter examines the (probably) earliest extant full-length Virgilian cento, Hosidius Geta's Medea, which takes the form of a tragedy. The aim is to explore how Geta accomplishes the feat of turning Virgil's verses into a tragic poem, and to approach that subject through the lens of genre, as well as of allusion. Focus lies upon interpreting the formal and thematic adaptation of Virgil to a drama on Medea, the use of Virgilian lines to allude to Ovidian and Senecan tragedy, and the intertextual relationship between the cento and Virgil's Aeneid 4, the story of Dido.

This chapter examines the use of Greek heroines such as Medea, Antigone, and Alcestis, and historical figures like Xantippe and Aspasia, to explore feminist issues in the work of George Eliot, Eliza Lynn Linton, Augusta Webster, and Amy Levy. In translations, dramatic monologues and novels, ancient heroines could speak eloquently of the wrongs of women in a way which resonated with Victorian readers. Characters from the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides, especially Medea, the vengeful victim whose motivation for killing her rival and her own children could be cast in terms of a rebellion against patriarchal society, and Alcestis, the wife who gives up her life for an ungrateful husband, allowed these writers to explore women's anger and violence in a safely distanced context.

This chapter turns to the exemplary narratives of Confessio Amantis and examines their household-based economics of power through the theme of the exchange of women. Interpretations of Gower's tales are contextualized by discussion of the politics of aristocratic marriage in the late 14th century. The representation of lordship and female will is considered in relation to various challenges to a ‘reciprocalist’ traffic in women, including female independence, rape, and incest. The chapter argues that Gower's tales sponsor a reciprocalist model of marriage exchange that is apparently non-coercive but securely governed by household, seigneurial interests. There are extended treatments of the tales of Rosiphelee, Jason and Medea, Apollonius of Tyre, Jephte's Daughter, and Alboin and Rosemund.

This chapter analyzes the manner in which Valerius recovers a space for heroic virtus by recuperating the figure of Jason. Valerius' recuperative strategy is read as a response not only to Apollonius' controversial depiction of Jason, but also as a timely reaction to Lucan's iconoclastic assault on the very concept of heroic ‘excellence’. Valerius' reintroduction of the aristeia, a device undermined by Lucan's portrayal of anonymously inglorious warfare, is an important element of his restorative program. Since Valerius' rehabilitation of Jason relies heavily on his interactions with Medea, the chapter examines how her presence allows Valerius to advertise his rehabilitative gestures vis-à-vis the issues of epic virtus and Jason's heroism. It is argued that Valerius' recuperative strategy marks the narrative — and historical — present as a time conducive to bona fide heroics, a situation made possible by the Argonautic moment ushered in by Vespasian's accession to power.

The farther east the Argonauts progress along the south coast of the Black Sea, the more tenuous becomes the poem’s ability to define space in Greek terms. In Colchis, the goal of their journey, they confront a space that a different culture has produced, over which they have no control. The story of Medea falling in love with Jason and helping him win the Golden Fleece is set within this alien space. It could be read as the triumph of Greek skill over uncultured “barbarians,” but many elements in the poem go against this. The Colchians have their own culture, which is both like that of the Greeks and radically different. Aietes is portrayed as both civilized and savage; these two sides of his character are reflected in the arrangement of Colchian space. Medea herself is both vulnerable girl who prizes the Greek values of female shame and dangerous witch. According to Herodotus the Colchians were descended from Egyptians, and the Argonauts’ experience among them may parallel Greeks’ experience of cultural contact in Egypt. The Colchian narrative is also analyzed in regard to the significance of various places and the way this is established by movements into and out of them in a way characteristic of human spatial production.

This chapter discusses the ambiguities of self-representation in a world of moral and physical disorder. Particularly in the bare paradoxes exchanged as sententiae it becomes difficult to distinguish the polar opposites of vice and virtue, the inhuman alienation of the maniac from the autonomy of the Stoic sage. Seneca's distinctively artificial style — his presentation of reality and fate as mere constructions — poses distinctive moral challenges for his characters. There are discussions of Medea's knowledge of her own myth, Lycus' statement (in Hercules Furens) that the victors write the histories, and the intervention of the second chorus in Troades which dismisses the reality of Achilles' ghost as empty words, and a play like a bad dream.

This chapter considers which models from antiquity seemed most appropriate to the understanding of the momentous arguments framed (and violently contested) in antebellum America from the 1830s to the Civil War. How and why African Americans mobilized knowledge of classical texts and antiquity in their fight for liberty and equality, and how, along with abolitionists, they legitimated, debated, and contested their political and cultural identity through references to Greek and Roman antiquity, is demonstrated. Those who the ancients saw as ethnically other 'barbarians', the Abolitionists found inspirational: the Carthaginians resistance to Rome, and Medea's defiance of Jason, for example. At the same time proslavery advocates, pointing to the ancient world’s reliance on slavery, also quarried antiquity, particularly Aristotle’s writings, in support of their position, while Herodotus and the texts related to the Roman Republican heroes were used with equal passion by polemicists on both side of the slavery debate.

This chapter examines competing theories for revenge’s appeal in a wide range of plays from 1580-1699. Focusing on the ways that early modern revengers reference and revise earlier classical texts and figures, it examines revenge as a textual practice and affective performance and considers whether classical murderous mothers, such as Medea, embody ancient human anxieties about the uncanny feminine power of revenge to undo human subjects and societies. Exploring the way in which early modern writers take up and rewrite classical texts, it demonstrates how female revengers subvert traditional female roles, exploiting the metatheatrical aspect of revenge as a powerful tool of self-authorship. The chapter also examines different theories as to the genre’s popularity. Using Early English Books Online (EBBO), it surveys the frequency of the words ‘revenge’, ‘avenge’, and ‘vengeance’ (and their derivatives) in order to test whether it was a genre that: peaked in the Elizabethan period and was followed by a period of decline, emerged particularly in periods of political crisis, or has an enduring appeal.

In Greek and Roman antiquity, revenge is represented as a masculine duty, which is usually carried out by relatives or intimate friends. In Seneca’s drama, Medea adopts this masculine role by exacting revenge for her father and brother, which marks her as a transgressive woman. However, Medea also describes her revenge through language that aligns vengeance to the process of giving birth, a quintessentially female act; as Medea herself proclaims in the first act: parta iam, parta ultio est: peperi (‘My revenge is born, already born: I have given birth’). These birth metaphors contribute to Medea’s formulation of a new vengeful subjectivity, complicating Medea’s status as a transgressive woman and demonstrating how Senecan female characters can appropriate forms of self-definition that are often assumed to be male.

This chapter reinterprets the animal metaphors used in ancient Greek tragedy to describe revenging women from a posthumanist perspective. Whereas critics have commonly regarded such metaphors as indicating the female revenger’s inhuman savagery and otherness (whereby a woman’s attempt to assume a male heroic role transforms her instead into a monstrous beast), posthumanism challenges conventional distinctions between animal and human, male and female. Drawing on the work of Rosi Braidotti, it argues that female revengers similarly challenge these distinctions. The metaphorical metamorphosis of Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra and Euripides’ Medea into lionesses reveals their complex figuration as male-female hybrid beings, recalling the tragic suffering and protective violence of the Homeric lion within a new context of interfamilial conflicts. These transformations engender terror but also compassion, evoking new ways of conceptualising humans-as-animals that invite recognition of our own unstable and hybrid nature.

Tony Harrison is widely acclaimed for his ability to make the most complex arguments lucid and accessible. Yet it is this very accessibility that often belies the degree of scholarship that informs his work for the theatre, in particular. It is not just that his versions of ancient Greek plays are underpinned by solid classical learning; it is also that they involve a considerable amount of scholarly research in libraries. To bear witness to this scholar-poet's scrupulous attention to detailed scholarship, this chapter takes as case-study an overlooked text from Harrison’s corpus, Medea, A Sex-War Opera(1985). This work was commissioned by New York’s Metropolitan Opera House as a libretto for a score by Jakob Druckman that was never completed. Indeed, Harrison’s libretto has never properly seen the light of day: the only (albeit truncated) production to date - the 1991 Medea: Sex Warby The Volcano Theatre Company - interwove Valerie Solanis’ 1960’s radical feminist text, The S.C.U.M. Manifesto (Society for Cutting Up Men) into the Harrison libretto. Yet Medea, A Sex-War Opera is an ingenious, witty and hard-hitting piece of social intervention that still speaks powerfully back to, and vociferously against, twenty-first century gender discrimination. Ranging from George Buchanan’s Latin version (c.1540s) to Robert Brough’s demotic mid-Victorian burlesque (1856), the libretto is testament to Harrison’s extraordinary wide reading from ancient to modern versions of Medea’s story.

This chapter examines ancient literature and art, and how they, taken together, can help throw light on tragedies in Greece, both lost and extant. It considers child murder, beginning with Euripides' Medea, and then focuses on the myth of Tereus, Procne and Philomela. The chapter shows how word and image, looked at in tandem, can help to throw light, in this case, on Sophocles' lost tragedy Tereus. This is the myth of the nightingale, the very image of grief in so much of Greek poetry, who laments the death of Itys forever. Children are killed in several of the Greek myths, and the infanticide par excellence is, of course, Medea.

Scholars continually return to Shakespeare’s debt to Ovid in order to draw new insight into the playwright’s work. However, the relationship between The Tempest and Ovid has received relatively little critical attention. In the play’s final act, Prospero delivers a powerful speech that is taken from the sorceress Medea’s incantation in Book 7 of Metamorphoses. With these two iterations of the speech in mind, this chapter explores how performativity and literary history intertwine in the play. This line of inquiry calls into question the distinctions that scholars have previously seen between Prospero and the witch Sycorax, as well as opens opportunities to explore the effects of casting a female lead as “Prospera” in Julie Taymor’s recent film adaption The Tempest (2010).

One of the messages of the Thesmophoria was that the continuity of the polis depended upon the cycle of female life: after risking death in childbirth themselves, women must soon give up their daughters to a similar fate. Euripides' Medea and female characters in the comedies of Aristophanes complain about the lack of appreciation for their contribution of sons to the polis. In ancient Greece, there were tombstones commemorating men who died in battle. If the Greeks did equate death in childbirth with death in battle, we should be able to see similar iconographical signs on monuments for both types of deaths. This is not to deny that the Greeks saw a sort of similarity between these two types of deaths. But the funerary monuments locate this similarity in the Greek grid according to age and gender, making it iconographically clear that the women who are memorialised are passive and worthy of pity, whereas the men are active and heroic.

After the war Samuel Barber was discharged from the United States army. His compositions were continuously loved by its patrons as well as critics, and he was awarded once more, this time the Fifth Annual Award of the Music Critics Circle of New York. He continued to trailblaze his way into music history, with his Cello Concerto dubbed as one of the most challenging contemporary cello compositions. This chapter describes his most “American work”: Knoxville: Summer of 1915. He was reputed to be one of the most promising American composers of his time. Barber even took an interest in ballet, for which he produced the piece Medea. This was however, dampened by the news of his father's deteriorating health and the stress it placed in Barber's mother.

This chapter moves beyond Martin Delrio’s emendations to study his wide-ranging commentary on other aspects of classical culture. Senecan tragedy, and in particular the Medea and the Oedipus, offered the Jesuit the opportunity to discuss witchcraft and practices of divination in great detail. This chapter argues that Delrio took these tragedies to have a historical core; without some basis in history the plays would lose their moral significance. It also suggests that Delrio’s comments should be read as not only explicating individual lines, but as constructing a reading of the plays in which praise and blame were apportioned. As a result, the tragedies did not carry the same moral meaning for Delrio that they have for us today.

This chapter discusses three plays born of second-wave feminism that examine the political potential of re-visioning myths: the monologues The Same Old Story and Medea, co-authored by Franca Rame and Dario Fo (1977), and Sarah Daniels' realist drama Neaptide (1986). Yet if theatre-making is inherently political, as Julia Varley suggests, any such selection may be challenged: why these texts rather than others? First, the discussions presented here aim to facilitate analysis of the political beyond Varley's claim that theatre is already, of itself, resistant. Plays have been chosen in which engagement with political subjects is self-conscious and systematic rather than, in a sense, a coincidence of their theme. Further, these plays manifestly assume a partisan position: they are left-wing in viewpoint, voicing the concerns of those whom society makes vulnerable; they aim to expose and fight injustices, and to provoke in their audiences a heightened recognition of the necessity for social change. Yet whatever analysis such plays offer, a politics of content alone is insufficient to address questions of efficacy.

Re-visions of myth in the contemporary theatre now assume an extraordinary range of forms and test the boundaries of performance as forcefully as they interrogate the myths themselves. Confining the focus of this book more or less exclusively to the work of playwrights has correspondingly meant marginalising the great quantity of activity in the field which falls outside that frame. Myth re-vision in forms other than scripted drama, staged in contexts beyond theatre venues, is by no means new – even if late twentieth- and twenty-first century developments in site-specific performance, installation, live art and more have shaped source materials in increasingly startling and unpredictable ways. In July 2005, the German writer-actress Gilla Cremer presented m.e.d.e.a., the last part in her trilogy of solo shows reflecting on continuities and ruptures in German social history through the last century. It is perhaps ironic that a re-vision of the Medea narrative, a myth widely interpreted as an attack on ‘family values’, should be so decisively structured by the sense of maternal responsibility.