Penny Dreadfuls, 1912 · page 13 of 118
The Medea — page 13: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
# Analysis This is a page of running prose from an **Introduction** (marked "ix" at top right), not a title page, cover, or illustration. The text discusses the characters and dramatic qualities of a classical play called the *Medea*. It characterizes Jason as a career-focused middle-aged man for whom love is merely inconvenient, and Medea as a foreigner whose passionate devotion has curdled into hatred. The passage notes that despite the *Medea*'s intense dramatic power, it won only third prize at its first production in Athens around 432 B.C., perhaps because Athenians found its originality difficult to accept. The author suggests the play's initial failure was not due to subject matter novelty.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
INTRODUCTION ix delineator of disaster into whose hands we are fallen. Jason is a middle-aged man, with much glory, indeed, and some illusions; but a man entirely set upon build- ing up a great career, to whom love and all its works, though at times he has found them convenient, are for the most part only irrational and disturbing elements in a world which he can otherwise mould to his will. And yet, most cruel touch of all, one feels this man to be the real Jason. It is not that he has fallen from his heroic past. It is that he was really like this always. And so with Medea. It is not only that her beauty has begun to fade; not only that she is set in surround- ings which vaguely belittle and weaken her, making her no more a bountiful princess, but only an am- biguous and much criticised foreigner. Her very devotion of love for Jason, now turned to hatred, shows itself to have been always of that somewhat rank and ugly sort to which such a change is natural. For concentrated dramatic quality and sheer intensity of passion few plays ever written can vie with the Medea. Yet it obtained only a third prize at its first production; and, in spite of its immense fame, there are not many scholars who would put it among their favourite tragedies. The comparative failure of the first production was perhaps due chiefly to the extreme originality of the play. The Athenians in 432 B.c. had not yet learnt to understand or tolerate such work as this, though it is likely enough that they fortified their unfavourable opinion by the sort of criticisms which — we still find attributed to Aristotle and Diczarchus. At the present time it is certainly not the newness of the subject: I do not think it is Aegeus, nor yet EORNIE OOO “S (E(0) S