Penny Dreadfuls, 1912 · page 44 of 118
The Medea — page 44: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is a page of running prose—specifically, a dramatic monologue from what appears to be a translation of a classical Greek play. The speaker (a woman, based on context clues) addresses someone who has betrayed her: she recalls abandoning her father and home to flee with him, murdering King Pelias through his own daughters to help him, and now finding herself cast aside for another bride with children. She questions whether oaths and divine law mean nothing, contemplates her own "unclean" hands that clung to him, and despairs over where she can turn—unable to return to her betrayed father or seek shelter with the Peliad maids whose father she killed. The page header identifies it as from "Euripides."
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
28 EURIPIDES That bade thee live. Myself, uncounselléd, Stole forth from father and from home, and fled Where dark Id6lcos under Pelion lies, With thee—Oh, single-hearted more than wise! I murdered Pelias, yea, in agony, By his own daughters’ hands, for sake of thee; I swept their house like War.— And hast thou then Accepted all—O evil yet again! — And cast me off and taken thee for bride Another? And with children at thy side! One could forgive a childless man. But no: I have borne thee children .. . Is sworn faith so low And weak a thing? I understand it not. Are the old gods dead? Are the old laws forgot, And new laws made? Since not my passioning, But thine own heart, doth cry thee for a thing Forsworn. | She catches sight of her own hand which she has thrown out to denounce him. Poor, poor right hand of mine, whom he Did cling to, and these knees, so cravingly, We are unclean, thou and I; we have caught the stain Of bad men’s flesh .. . and dreamed our dreams in vain. Thou comest to befriend me? Give me, then, Thy counsel. ’Tis not that I dream again For good from thee: but, questioned, thou wilt show The viler. Say: now whither shall I go? Back to my father? Him I did betray, And all his land, when we two fled away. To those poor Peliad maids? For them ’twere good To take me in, who spilled their father’s blood. . . . Eomichbooks.com