Ancient Greek Theatre V
Euripides’ Medea
➢ First performed at the city Dionysia in 431 BCE.
➢ A play for 3 actors and the chorus: Using Sophocle’s innovation
➢ Providing a voice to more than one character, interacting with each other
➢ Soliloquy: Medea speaks to herself (rare since the Chorus would always be on stage)
○ Inside someone’s mind
Medea: Dramaturgy
➢ More stichomythia, more short speeches, more direct interaction and dialogue between
characters (In Agamemnon, dialogue is normally transferred via the Chorus)
○ Became a technique that the Greeks adopt
➢ The chorus is not the central character, Medea is, she remains on stage nearly all the time
○ Makes the play less rigid and less artificial than Agamemnon
➢ Actors wear masks
Sidebar: Suffering
➢ We witness Medea’s suffering since the beginning of the play
➢ What is the purpose of making us witnesses of this?
○ The effect of tragedy is Catharsis -> a purging
■ “Tragedy is a representation of an action which is serious, complete and of
a certain magnitude, in language which is garnished in various forms in its
different parts, in the mode of traumatic enactment, not narrative and
through the arousal of pity and fear affecting the catharsis of such
emotions”
■ The only scenarios that evoke the proper pity and fear are the proper pity
and fear are “cases where suffering befalls bonded relations (family
members, strong bonds that are someway violent by perceived betrayal)”
■ Stakes have to be high and have to be negative
Ancient Greek Theatre VI
Core themes
➢ Isolation = a stranger in a strange land
○ Medea has no one to speak to, share her feelings and experience to
○ Isolated on the private (deserted by her husband), social, and cultural (not Greek)
level
○ Allowing the audience to inhabit the stranger’s perspective
➢ Infanticide = a killer of children (Euripides’s innovation)
Euripides’ Medea
➢ First performed at the city Dionysia in 431 BCE.
➢ A play for 3 actors and the chorus: Using Sophocle’s innovation
➢ Providing a voice to more than one character, interacting with each other
➢ Soliloquy: Medea speaks to herself (rare since the Chorus would always be on stage)
○ Inside someone’s mind
Medea: Dramaturgy
➢ More stichomythia, more short speeches, more direct interaction and dialogue between
characters (In Agamemnon, dialogue is normally transferred via the Chorus)
○ Became a technique that the Greeks adopt
➢ The chorus is not the central character, Medea is, she remains on stage nearly all the time
○ Makes the play less rigid and less artificial than Agamemnon
➢ Actors wear masks
Sidebar: Suffering
➢ We witness Medea’s suffering since the beginning of the play
➢ What is the purpose of making us witnesses of this?
○ The effect of tragedy is Catharsis -> a purging
■ “Tragedy is a representation of an action which is serious, complete and of
a certain magnitude, in language which is garnished in various forms in its
different parts, in the mode of traumatic enactment, not narrative and
through the arousal of pity and fear affecting the catharsis of such
emotions”
■ The only scenarios that evoke the proper pity and fear are the proper pity
and fear are “cases where suffering befalls bonded relations (family
members, strong bonds that are someway violent by perceived betrayal)”
■ Stakes have to be high and have to be negative
Ancient Greek Theatre VI
Core themes
➢ Isolation = a stranger in a strange land
○ Medea has no one to speak to, share her feelings and experience to
○ Isolated on the private (deserted by her husband), social, and cultural (not Greek)
level
○ Allowing the audience to inhabit the stranger’s perspective
➢ Infanticide = a killer of children (Euripides’s innovation)
