Medea

Description

A student edition of this challenging and popular tragedy with notes and commentary. The most controversial of the Greek tragedians, Euripedes is also the most modern in his sympathies, a dramatist who handles the complex emotions of his characters with extraordinary depth and insight. Wronged and discarded by her husband, Medea gradually reveals her revenge in its increasing horror, while the audience is led to understand the incomprehensible; a woman who murders her own children. Since its first production (431 BC), the play has exerted an irresistible attraction for actors and directors alike. Translated by J.Michael Walton.

Euripides was born near Athens between 485 and 480 BC and grew upduring the years of Athenian recovery after the Persian Wars. His firstplay was presented in 455 BC and he wrote some hundred altogether. Hislater plays are marked by a sense of disillusion at the futility ofhuman aspiration which amounts on occasion to a philosophy ofabsurdism. A year or two before his death he left Athens to live at thecourt of the king of Macedon, dying there in 406 BC. Nineteen of hisplays survive, including Hippolytos, The Bacchae, Iphigeneia at Aulis,Hecuba, Medea, and The Trojan Women.