Abstract
In writing that was somehow concerned with England’s present or historical politics, Medea’s threat, which is rooted in her magic, her foreignness and her ruthless violence, was often appropriated to teach lessons to the monarch or the country about the damage that an untempered will can wreak on the body politic. Introducing the 1701 edition of his translations of Seneca’s tragedies, which comprised Medea (first printed 1648), Phaedra and Hippolytus (i.e., Hippolytus) and Troades, Edward Sherburne suggests,
[I]n the order they lie exposed to view, they seem to offer this Political Lesson, that the hidden Malice of revengeful (though seemingly reconcil’d) Enemies, together with the flagitious, unbridled Lusts of dissolute Princes, have been the Ruin of most flourishing Kingdoms (A7r)
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Notes
Anthony Munday, The Triumphs of the Golden Fleece, Pageants and Entertainments of Anthony Munday: A Critical Edition, ed. David M. Bergeron (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1985), pp. 137–43.
Tracey Hill, Anthony Munday and Civic Culture: Theatre, History and Power in Early Modern London, 1580–1633 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 157.
Thomas Heywood, Londini Status Pacatus, or Londons Peaceable Estate, Thomas Heywood’s Pageants: A Critical Edition, ed. David M. Bergeron (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1985), pp. 123–41.
Peter Elmer, ‘“Saints or Sorcerers”: Quakerism, Demonology and the Decline of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester and Gareth Roberts (eds), Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 145–79 (160).
See also Peter Lake, ‘Anti-popery: The Structure of a Prejudice’, in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds), Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics, 1603–1642 (London: Longman, 1989), pp. 72–106 (75, 93).
On the Protestant perception that Catholicism ‘inappropriately empower[ed] women, spiritually, symbolically, and socially’, see Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 8.
Ruth Morse, The Medieval Medea (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996), p. 15.
Excerpts from Elizabeth’s speech are from Janet M. Green, ‘“I My Self”: Elizabeth I’s Oration at Tilbury Camp’, Sixteenth Century Journal 28.2 (Summer 1997), pp. 421–45 (426). In her consideration of the ways in which tyranny might be aligned with the feminine, Rebecca Bushnell notes that Elizabeth privileges her masculine aspects here: ‘while she admits that her body is that of a woman, she stresses that her “affections” or emotions are masculine, thus implicitly at once both strong and under control’ (‘Tyranny and Effeminacy in Early Modern England’, in Mario A. Di Cesare (ed.), Reconsidering the Renaissance (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1992), pp. 339–54 (341).
On Elizabeth’s presentation as both masculine and feminine, and unlike other women, see Louis A. Montrose, ‘“Shaping Fantasies”: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture’, Representations 2 (1983), pp. 61–94 (78–80).
For an alternative view of Studley’s Medea, which argues that the play does speak to Elizabeth’s rule, by presenting ‘the pitfalls of an uncounseled woman in power’ and ‘a warning about the risks of a female monarch manipulated in matters of marriage and divorce’, see Allyna E. Ward, Women and Tudor Tragedy: Feminizing Counsel and Representing Gender (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013), pp. 100 and 102. For me, this reading is problematic because it is Creon, not Medea, who enjoys monarchical power in Corinth.
M. L. Stapleton, Fated Sky: The ‘Femina Furens’ in Shakespeare (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000), p. 41.
See Christine M. Neufeld, ‘Lyly’s Chimerical Vision: Witchcraft in Endymion’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 43.4 (2007), pp. 351–69 (352), for the
Mihoko Suzuki, Metamorphoses of Helen: Authority, Difference, and the Epic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 178;
Bart van Es, Spenser’s Forms of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 150–1.
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, 2nd edn, text ed. Hiroshi Yamashita and Toshiyuki Suzuki (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007).
Syrithe Pugh, Spenser and Ovid (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. 84. She notes that Acrasia is also an echo of the Virgilian Dido, herself an adaptation of Apollonius Rhodius’ Medea (Spenser and Ovid, p. 83).
For Radigund as representative of Mary, see Michael O’Connell, Mirror and Veil: The Historical Dimension of Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’ (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), p. 140. For Radigund as representative of Elizabeth’s ‘strict control’ over her male courtiers, see Suzuki, Metamorphoses of Helen, p. 190. On the blurring of distinctions between Radigund and Britomart,
see Elizabeth D. Harvey, Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 41–2;
and Mary Villeponteaux, ‘“Not as Women Wonted Be”: Spenser’s Amazon Queen’, in Julia M. Walker (ed.), Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 209–25.
Justin Kolb, ‘“In th’armor of a Pagan knight”: Romance and Anachronism East of England in Book V of The Faerie Queene and Tamburlaine’, Early Theatre 12.2 (2009), pp. 194–207 (196);
Judith H. Anderson, ‘Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book V: Poetry, Politics and Justice’, in Michael Hattaway (ed.), A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 195–205 (203).
See also Richard F. Hardin, ‘Adicia, Souldan’, in A. C. Hamilton (ed.), The Spenser Encyclopedia (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 7–8.
For works published in Edinburgh and Oxford that use Medea to criticise Mary, see James Emerson Phillips, Images of a Queen: Mary Stuart in Sixteenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), pp. 44, 261.
On the debate over the letters’ veracity, see Hans Villius, ‘The Casket Letters: A Famous Case Reopened’, Historical Journal 28.3 (1985), pp. 517–34, esp. 523 and 534.
Cathy Shrank, ‘“This fatall Medea”, “this Clytemnestra”: Reading and the Detection of Mary Queen of Scots’, Huntington Library Quarterly 73.3 (2010), pp. 523–41 (527).
Shrank, ‘“This fatall Medea”’, pp. 527–8. On the widespread equation of Mary and Medea in ballads and pamphlets printed in Scotland and on the Continent during the 1560s and 70s, see this article and also John D. Staines, The Tragic Histories of Mary Queen of Scots, 1560–1690: Rhetoric, Passions, and Political Literature (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 58, 69, 79.
Marianne McDonald, ‘Medea as Politician and Diva: Riding the Dragon into the Future’, in James J. Clauss and Sarah Iles Johnston (eds), Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy and Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 297–323 (301–2).
Michael Drayton, Works, ed. J. William Hebel, Kathleen Tillotson and Bernard H. Newdigate, 5 vols (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, for the Shakespeare Head Press, 1931–41), vol. 2. All quotations from Drayton’s poems are from this edition.
Danielle Clarke, ‘Ovid’s Heroides, Drayton and the Articulation of the Feminine in the English Renaissance’, Renaissance Studies 22.3 (2008), pp. 385–400 (400).
See also Alison Thorne, ‘Large Complaints in Little Papers: Negotiating Ovidian Genealogies of Complaint in Drayton’s Englands Heroicall Epistles’, Renaissance Studies 22.3 (2008), pp. 368–84 (381–2). She suggests that, for Elinor, Medea’s story is a ‘beguiling fantasy’ of ‘a woman triumphing over personal and political humiliation by dint of her indomitable capacity to wreak destruction on her enemies’. The word ‘fantasy’ is crucial here: as Drayton’s readers would be aware, things were not so easy for Elinor, and thus the threatening spectre of Medea’s power is implicitly neutralised even as it is represented. On the Elizabethan male-authored complaint which makes use of the female voice,
see John Kerrigan (ed.), Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and ‘Female Complaint’, a Critical Anthology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991);
and Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), ch. 4. She argues that in complaints which make use of the Heroides, the Elizabethan female speaker ‘acts as a more complex literary figure’ than her classical forebear, moving ‘ in a complicated fashion between justification and penitence’. This is a fitting description of Drayton’s Elinor, although the Heroidean Medea is not simply the ‘lamenting and powerless paramour’ who, Wall argues, is typical of Ovid’s collection (Imprint of Gender, p. 252).
Medea’s method of murdering Pelias, by encouraging his daughters to stab him and then slitting his throat, would have been particularly troubling for an early modern male readership: see Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 52, for the supposedly feminising nature of bleeding and blood-letting in the early modern imagination.
See also Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 92.
Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 155–6.
Louis A. Montrose, ‘Gifts and Reasons: The Contexts of Peele’s Araygnement of Paris’, ELH 47.3 (1980), pp. 433–61 (441). Through an account of George Peele’s use of the mythical Judgement of Paris, Montrose shows how entertainments presented to the queen gradually moved from promoting marriage to singing the praises of virginity and chastity, as it became increasingly clear that Elizabeth would not marry. Richard F. Hardin notes that the ‘self-centred Plantagenet monarchs’ such as Henry II are presented ‘groaning in a most unkingly fashion’: their susceptibility to desire means that they are not examples to be followed (‘Convention and Design in Drayton’s Heroicall Epistles’, PMLA 83.1 (1968), pp. 35–41 (39)).
Philip Edwards, Threshold of a Nation: A Study in English and Irish Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 110.
William Shakespeare, The Second Part of King Henry VI, ed. Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 5.
T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Less Greeke, 2 vols (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1944), vol. 2, p. 420.
DeWitt T. Starnes and Ernest William Talbert, Classical Myth and Legend in Renaissance Dictionaries: A Study of Renaissance Dictionaries in Relation to the Classical Learning of Contemporary English Writers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), p. 112. Inga-Stina Ewbank argues that Studley’s Medea is the likely source of Shakespeare’s knowledge of the fratricide.
Inga-Stina Ewbank, ‘The Fiend-Like Queen: A Note on Macbeth and Seneca’s Medea’, in Kenneth Muir (ed.), Shakespeare Survey 19 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, repr. 2002), pp. 82–94 (88). Studley’s play mentions the crime several times, for example at 978–9 and 1374–5; and Yves Peyré notes that he adds an extra gruesome detail, having Medea claim to have cut off her brother’s genitals (‘Absyrtus’, 2014, in Yves Peyré (ed.), A Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Classical Mythology (2009), http://www.shakmyth.org/myth/1/absyrtus/analysis, accessed 12 August 2014).
On Margaret herself as a Medea-figure, on account of her cruelty to Rutland’s father, see Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, ‘Hamlet’ to ‘The Tempest’ (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 3.
Ronald S. Berman, ‘Fathers and Sons in the Henry VI Plays’, Shakespeare Quarterly 13b (1962), pp. 487–97 (491). He suggests, ‘The juxtaposition of the myths of Aeneas and Medea by Clifford condenses the intermingling of piety and barbarity’ (p. 494).
For a classic discussion of how, in Shakespeare’s history plays, ‘actions that should have the effect of radically undermining authority turn out to be the props of that authority’, and how in the two parts of Henry IV, ‘moral values — justice, order, civility — are secured paradoxically through the apparent generation of their subversive contraries’, see Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V’, in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (eds), Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism, 2nd edn (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 18–47 (39–40). For an argument that sees the history plays as more genuinely subversive,
see David Scott Kastan, ‘Proud Majesty Made a Subject: Shakespeare and the Spectacle of Rule’, Shakespeare Quarterly 37.4 (1986), pp. 459–75.
Page duBois, Trojan Horses: Saving the Classics from Conservatives (New York and London: New York University Press, 2001), pp. 16–17. There is, perhaps, a comparison to be made here between modern, conservative rewriting of myth and the medieval catalogue tradition (lampooned by Chaucer in the Legend of Good Women) that sought to present such a contentious figure as Medea simply as an example of women’s suffering for love, and made no mention of her crimes.
Matthew H. Wikander, ‘The Spitted Infant: Scenic Emblem and Exclusionist Politics in Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Quarterly 37.3 (1986), pp. 340–58 (346). Compare the avowal of Aaron, in Ravenscroft’s adaptation of Titus Andronicus, that he will eat the body of the infant that Tamora has killed. At other points, too, Crowne enthusiastically embellishes the witchcraft scene in 2 Henry VI, and adds extra scenes describing and depicting robbery, rape and violence.
See Stuart Hampton-Reeves and Carol Chillington Rutter, The Henry VI Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), pp. 27–9.
Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 107.
Susan J. Owen, Restoration Theatre and Crisis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 76.
The conflicted political attitudes of Crowne’s plays are discussed by Owen in Chapter 3, and by Nancy Klein Maguire, ‘Factionary Politics: John Crowne’s Henry VI’, in Gerald MacLean (ed.), Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration: Literature, Drama, History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 70–92.
See Euripides, Medea, trans. Rex Warner, The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, 3 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), vol. 1, lines 408–9. All translations from this edition.
Luc Racaut, ‘Accusations of Infanticide on the Eve of the French Wars of Religion’, in Mark Jackson (ed.), Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550–2000 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 18–34.
As well as noting the association of witchcraft with Catholicism, Peter Lake sees its foreignness as a ‘central characteristic of popery in the eyes of English Protestants’ (‘Anti-popery’, p. 79). See also William S. Maltby, The Black Legend in England: The Development of Anti-Spanish Sentiment, 1558–1660 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1968).
Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989, repr. 2004), p. 35.
On the perceived foreignness of even English Catholics, see Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth Century Print Culture (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 34 and 37. On Catholicism and racial difference, see pp. 39–41. For the Puritan association between the Catholic and the barbaric,
see Mary Nyquist, ‘“Profuse, proud Cleopatra”: “Barbarism” and Female Rule in Early Modern English Republicanism’, Women’s Studies 24 (1994), pp. 85–130 (92).
Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 1632–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 87.
Francis Herring, Pietas pontificia (London: 1606), STC (2nd edn) 13244. For a useful account of Herring’s original, see the introduction by Estelle Haan to another treatise on the Gunpowder Plot, Phineas Fletcher’s Locustae (1627). Phineas Fletcher, Locustae, vel, pietas Jesuitica, ed. and trans. Estelle Haan (Louvain: Leuven University Press, 1996), pp. xxxiv–xxxix.
Dagmar Freist, ‘The King’s Crown Is the Whore of Babylon: Politics, Gender and Communication in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England’, Gender and History 7.3 (1995), pp. 457–81 (465); and Dolan, Whores of Babylon, pp. 94 and 124–5.
See also Susan Wiseman, ‘“Adam, the Father of all Flesh”: Porno-Political Rhetoric and Political Theory in and after the English Civil War’, in James Holstun (ed.), Pamphlet Wars: Prose in the English Revolution (London: Frank Cass, 1992), pp. 134–57. On suspicion of Charles’s Catholic queen Henrietta Maria in particular, see Dolan, Whores of Babylon, pp. 97–101.
Elmer, ‘“Saints or Sorcerers”’, pp. 163–6 and 174; and Diane Purkiss, ‘Desire and Its Deformities: Fantasies of Witchcraft in the English Civil War’, in Brian P. Levack (ed.), New Perspectives on Witchcraft, Magic, and Demonology, 6 vols (New York: Routledge, 2001), vol. 3, pp. 271–300 (274–7); reprinted from the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27.1 (1997), pp. 103–32.
Stuart Clark, ‘Inversion, Misrule and the Meaning of Witchcraft’, Past & Present 87 (1980), pp. 98–127 (119); and see Elmer, ‘“Saints or Sorcerers”’, pp. 165 and 178, for sermons that associated witchcraft with rebellion.
Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 145.
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Heavey, K. (2015). Political Medea. In: The Early Modern Medea. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137466242_6
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