Medea in Performance 1500-2000

by Edith Hall

Overview

This book provides an exhaustive account of the performance history of Euripides' tragedy and its various versions and adaptations from 1500 to 2000, filling some of the yawning gaps left by previous accounts of Medea.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781900755351
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	12/01/2000
Series:	Legenda Main Series Series
Pages:	321
Product dimensions:	5.44(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: The Performer in Performance 2. Medea in the English Renaissance 3. Medea on the Eighteenth-Century London Stage 4. Medea Transposed: Burlesque and Gender on the Mid-Victorian Stage 5. Medea e mobile: The Many Faces o f Medea in Opera 6. Performing Medea; or, Why is Medea a Woman? 7. Between Magic and Realism: Medea on Film 8. Medea in Greece 9. Central European Medea 10. The Japanese Presence in Ninagawa's Medea 11. Medea Comes Home 12. Medeas on the Archive Database

Editorial Reviews

Medea has so far been to the 2000s what Sophocles' Electra was to the 1990s. In Medea in Performance, two excellent essays by Edith Hall and Macintosh on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries' approach to Medea's infanticide show how cultural sensibilities and political debates on divorce and the position of women led to an amelioration of her crimes on stage.

For 2,500 years, Medea has been variously interpreted: as the self-knowing "performer" by Euripides, the majestic witch by Seneca, the sexually predatory femme fatale by Renaissance playwrights, the sanitized victim by eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century adapters, and the feminist resistance fighter-cum-post-colonial-revolutionary by twentieth-century directors. She has also provided generations of operatic prima donnas with a stepping stone to "diva" status. Medea in Performance analyses each stage of this metamorphosis in theatre, opera and film, and, in a wonderful essay by Margaret Reynolds, makes the important additional point that the static iconography of Medea is often as dramatically charged as her stage incarnation.
—Times Literary Supplement

Jane Montgomery