Medea [Paperback]

Before opening the play, my knowledge of Medea had been limited to the occasional reference to it in news reports involving infanticide -- not something that made me eager to read the original.

Though Medea does take the lives of her children in a twisted revenge plot, it would be a serious mistake to consider that unforgettable act the central part of the play. Instead, it is Medea's evolution that is most important.

Despite the fact that she gave up her life to follow Jason, Medea is revealed as a kind of proto-feminist early on in the story, a woman defined more by cleverness than by rage ... and yet never seeming merely cunning or calculating. Sadly, this kind of dominating and complex female character would be somewhat unusual by the standards of popular literature today; she must have been exceptionally remarkable in the day of Euripedes, the play's author.

The tragedy itself indicates this kind of reversal in several ways, ranging from the manner in which Creon reacts to Medea in their conversation near the end of the story to the way the chorus makes mention of streams flowing upwards in the mountains.

But for all its value, Medea does not stand on its own. Readers must know what ancient Greek audiences already knew: that Medea sacrificed everything, including her life in her home country, to help Jason win the treasured Golden Fleece and to mother his children. But soon she is abandoned in favor of a woman of more noble birth, which is where the play begins. This edition -- not the play itself -- loses a star for failing to explain that context in what could have been a very brief but invaluable introduction.

In layout and movement of the plot, Medea closely matches the form of Aristotle's standard example of a tragedy--Sophocles's Oedipus Rex. Medea shares Oedipus's convention of beginning with the perspective of a mournful look back on the events that are about to be told.

Medea is highborn and descends from the lineage of the Gods. This in some ways fulfills Aristotle's requirement that the protagonist be exceptional. Likewise, both Medea and Oedipus depict what Aristotle would call "terrible and piteous events." However, this is where the similarity with Aristotle's ideal of the tragic ends.

The character of Medea is the main wrench that Euripides throws into Aristotle's description of tragedy. Aristotle's idea of the tragic hero demanded a change of experience and fortune that entails unmerited suffering on the part of the character and a fearful viewing of events on behalf of the audience. These things do not happen in Medea.

Medea has a history. She has killed spitefully and coldly in the past. She continues to do so throughout the play. She never even faces the threat of a fall from a high station because she secures sanctuary in Athens before she sets her revenge into motion (incidentally, one comes to feel like the psalmist who wrote: "I have seen a wicked and ruthless man flourishing like a green tree in its native soil"--though in this case it is a wicked woman). Euripides uses Medea to make a commentary, not to bring about that lynch-pin of Aristotelian drama: catharsis.

Medea does not attempt to meet up with Aristotle's requirements. Instead, it is becomes new form of art--tragedy as social commentary. Euripides shows himself to be among the great artistic innovators in history by his transformation of a received dramatic form into something different but wholly effective in its own way.

"Medea" tells a story involving the classical Greek hero Jason and Medea, by whom he has fathered two children. As the play opens, Jason has angered Medea by taking on another woman to be his wife. This conflict drives the drama forward. "Medea" is a gripping story about love, parenthood, politics, betrayal, anger, and revenge. There is a subtle but fascinating theme of ethnic tension as Medea and Jason clash. Finally, I believe that, after all these centuries, Euripedes' sociological and psychological insights remain compelling.