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What You’ll Love about… Medea by Euripides
Euripides breaks everything in Medea. Instead of focusing on the noble struggle of a great but flawed man, he focuses on a sordid domestic squabble between a spurned witch, Medea, and a deadbeat “hero” and adulterer, Jason. Four people are dead by play’s end, but neither Medea nor Jason are among the dead. They will both live long, miserable lives while the innocents who are dear to them suffer and die. It is a wild, relentless play.
The tale of Jason and the Argonauts is customarily presented as a tale of adventure and cunning, but Euripides signals at the beginning of Medea that that adventure had awful consequences for most of the people involved.
Medea’s opening lines are delivered by a nurse, which is a little unusual. We might expect the opening lines to come from Medea herself, since this play is supposed to be focused on her. The nurse wishes that the events leading up to the beginning of the play had never happened, which suggests that the household of Jason and Medea is in serious trouble. Beginning with the nurse is also a novel way of delivering important exposition about the events leading up to the beginning of the play. The nurse, being a detached third party, can think and speak more clearly about the state of things at the beginning of the play.
