Medea - The Witch of Corinth

In this Greek play written by Euripedes, Jason, a prince by blood, is married to a witch of sorts named Medea. Medea helped Jason to milk the fire breathing ox, defeat the undead army which sprang from the ground and to slip past the dragon to reach the Golden Fleece. After this Medea fled with Jason, being disowned by her family and married him. The play begins, en medius res, we see Medea is mourning because Jason has decided to marry Creon’s young daughter Creusa, so that he may gain power over the land of Corinth. Jason claims that his purpose in this is to make sure that his sons, whom he has with Medea, will have a chance to become royalty when they grow older.

When reading the play, you get a sense of simplicity to the set and characters. There isn’t much of a set that would be needed because the stage directions simply call for people entering and exiting. Plays nowadays are so complex, with multiple levels and machines, moving buildings and things to make people fly, it would be amazing to see where theatre would be now if there weren’t all of these inventions to make theatre more entertaining. When reading the play, there are only a few characters that are the main speakers: Medea, Jason and the Chorus. In modern plays we have much more complex character systems. But when we compare Euripedes play to that of Sophocles, we see a much larger character base. The chorus in this play seems to be a force that pushes Medea’s character development, not a huge character in itself like it was in Oedipus. Medea gets more hateful towards people as the chorus tells her to calm down, and that they love her and only want to help her.

One thing that I believe both the play and the film were missing was the character of Creusa. She is the entire reason that Medea has lost Jason and does all of these terrible sins. It is understandable to not have her in the play as written originally, but in the film adaption it would have made more sense. It would have been nice to see some sort of action between Medea and Creusa. This would have been very useful in the fall of Medea into madness, to see her anger towards Creusa, although she continually says that her true hate is towards Jason, she ends up killing Creusa which means she must really hate her just as much.