Penny Dreadfuls, 1912 · page 9 of 118
The Medea — page 9: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is the introduction page to what appears to be a scholarly or literary edition (not a penny dreadful, despite the prompt's framing). The prose discusses Euripides' *Medea*, arguing it is fundamentally a tragedy of character rather than romance. The text traces the legendary background of Jason and Medea through Greek literature—from early Corinthian lays through Pindar and Apollonius Rhodius—before summarizing Jason's origins: son of the exiled King Aeson of Thessaly, raised by the Centaur Chiron, who later descends to reclaim his ancestral throne, famously appearing one-sandalled in the marketplace.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
INTRODUCTION THE JZedea, in spite of its background of wonder and enchantment, is not a romantic play but a tragedy of ~ character and situation. It deals, so to speak, not with the romance itself, but with the end of the romance, a thing which 1s so terribly often the reverse of romantic. For all but the very highest of romances are apt to have just one flaw somewhere, and in the story of Jason and Medea the flaw was of a fatal kind. The wildness and beauty of the Argo legend run through all Greek literature, from the mass of Corin- thian lays older than our present Iliad, which later writers vaguely associate with the name of Eumélus, to the Fourth Pythian Ode of Pindar and the beautiful Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius. Our poet knows the wildness and the beauty; but it is not these quali- ties that he specially seeks. He takes them almost for granted, and pierces through them to the sheer tragedy that lies below. Jason, son of Aeson, King of Idlcos, in Thessaly, began his life in exile. His uncle Pelias had seized his father’s kingdom, and Jason was borne away to the mountains by night and given, wrapped in a purple robe, to Chiron, the Centaur. When he reached man- hood he came down to Id6lcos to demand, as Pindar tells us, his ancestral honour, and stood in the market- place, a world-famous figure, one-sandalled, with his EOmichboo <S (E(0) S