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Stuttard ( D. ) Looking at Medea. Essays and a Translation of Euripides' Tragedy . Pp. xii + 219, ills. London and New York : Bloomsbury Academic , 2014. Paper, £18.99, US$32.95 (Cased, £60, US$104). ISBN: 978-1-4725-3051-6 (978-1-4725-2772-1 hbk).
Reviews
Initially S. places Euripides' Medea in its historical context and proceeds to give a general introduction to the religious nature of Attic tragedy in the fifth century b.c.e., its conditions of performance in the Theatre of Dionysus and its role as a didactic tool for the edification and entertainment of the 'demos'. For the average scholar and even relatively advanced student this is familiar ground. One asks, therefore, at whom this volume is aimed, since the accompanying twelve essays composed by a distinguished range of scholars vary in both the quality and depth of their discussions and, indeed, in length. They embrace most of the crucial questions raised when teaching the Medea or confronting it for the purposes of production. Accordingly the volume would be valuable as a teaching aid in a senior high school or undergraduate university class.
J. Griffin's piece on murder in the family elegantly retells the original myth, and comments on Jason's cool calculation of his parlous situation in Corinth and the practical wisdom of his marriage to the Corinthian princess. Griffin advises that the view of Medea as 'mad, bad and dangerous', to use words deployed to describe Byron, panders to the stereotypical and misogynistic male view of womanhood rampant since the time of Hesiod. No room for proto-feminism here as later discussed by other contributors.
Another discussion of sources and Euripides' originality is furnished by C. McCallum-Barry, but she provides little of originality, while her judgement that women in tragedy are 'not meant to be realistic portrayals' (p. 31) begs an enormous question regarding the verism or otherwise of Greek tragedy. I. Karamanou in an essay dedicated to Eric Handley discusses the horrors of...