Abstract
Dedicating his Tragicall Historie of Didaco and Violenta to Sir Thomas Gresham, Thomas Achelley claims to find no value in the stories of transgressive classical women like Medea: they are ‘Ethnicke examples’, mercifully removed from Elizabethan, Protestant England by gaps of time, geography and religion. He argues that to ‘discourse’ of Medea’s story is a pointless endeavour, a ‘loste labour’. Having introduced Medea in the dedication to his poem, however, Achelley seems to find her difficult to ignore, and, like his source, William Painter, he likens the murderous, jilted Violenta to ‘a vile Medea fell’ (Fir) as she prepares for her revenge on her faithless husband Didaco. More than this, as I shall go on to show, in the tale itself Achelley builds on his source and on his use of the specific classical example, turning the power of this horrifying Medea-figure to his own didactic ends, and cautioning women to appreciate their difference from her, and avoid her alarming example.1
To discourse of the furious tirannie of the boocherly Medea, in dismembring the innocent infante Absyrtus her owne naturall brother, and scattering his martyred limmes in the hie waye where her father shoulde passe, were but a loste labour … [Such stories] are but Ethnicke examples, farre sette, and a wonderfull waye distant from our climate both by Sea and Lande: and committed among such barbarous people, that had no knowledge of any God nor yet of any sparke of Civilitie. (Aiir–Aiiv)
Thomas Achelley, The Tragicall Historie of Didaco and Violenta (London, 1576)
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Notes
The longer title is A most lamentable and Tragicall historie, conteyning the outragious and horrible tyrannie which a Spanishe gentlewoman named Violenta executed upon her lover Didaco because he espoused another beying first betrothed unto her (London: 1576), STC (2nd edn) 1356.4. The tale was one of the tragic novelle of Matteo Bandello, and was translated into French by Pierre Boiastuau (or Boaistuau). For Bandello’s version, see Matteo Bandello, Opere, ed. Francesco Flora, 2 vols (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1935), 1.496–508.
For Boiastuau’s, see Pierre Boiastuau, Histoires Tragiques, ed. Richard A. Carr (Paris: Librairie Honoré Champion, 1977), pp. 139–67.
William Shakespeare, 2 Henry VI, The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 1997), 5.3.59. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from Shakespeare’s works are from this edition.
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, 2nd edn, text ed. Hiroshi Yamashita and Toshiyuki Suzuki (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007), 5.8.47.
Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 155.
Euripides’ play was translated into Latin by George Buchanan, and printed in 1544. See George Buchanan, Tragedies, ed. P. Sharratt and P. G. Walsh (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1983).
Jason’s promises to Medea and their flight are also detailed in Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica (3rd century BC), a Greek epic that was then adapted into Latin by Valerius Flaccus, in the first century AD. See Apollonius Rhodius, The Argonautica, trans. and ed. Richard Hunter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993),
and Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica, trans. and ed. J. H Mozley (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934).
Quintilian quotes a tantalizing extract from the lost play: Medea demands ‘servare potui: perdere an possim rogas?’ (I had power to save, do you ask, have I power to destroy?). Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell, 5 vols, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), vol. 3, 8.5.6. On the tragedy, see A. G. Nikolaidis, ‘Some Observations on Ovid’s Lost Medea’, Latomus 44.2 (1985), pp. 383–7.
Other lost versions of the Medea story are discussed by Howard Jacobson, Ovid’s ‘Heroides’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 109–10.
The plays are compared by Robin Sowerby, The Classical Legacy in Renaissance Poetry (London: Longman, 1994), pp. 75–82.
See also Carolyn A. Durham, ‘Medea: Hero or Heroine?’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 8.1 (1984), pp. 54–9;
and Hanna M. Roisman, ‘Medea’s Vengeance’, in David Stuttard (ed.), Looking at Medea: Essays and a Translation of Euripides’ Tragedy (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 111–22 (120–2). Evelyn M. Spearing describes Seneca’s heroine as ‘almost a raving maniac … in Seneca’s play she awakens no sympathy, for she is nothing but a savage throughout, except perhaps in one interview with Jason’.
Spearing complains of Seneca that ‘he has followed Euripides almost exactly in the construction of the plot, and yet has contrived to vulgarise and degrade the whole conception’ (Evelyn M. Spearing, ‘The Elizabethan “Tenne Tragedies” of Seneca’, MLR 4.4 (1909), pp. 437–61 (456);
see also Spearing, The Elizabethan Translations of Seneca’s Tragedies (Cambridge: W. Heffer and Sons, 1912), pp. 8–9).
See Aristotle, ‘On the Art of Poetry’, in T. S. Dorsch (trans.), Classical Literary Criticism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), pp. 31–75 (73).
The second-century AD mythographer Apollodorus describes her reconciling with her father, and defeating his usurping brother Perses. He also briefly mentions her afterlife in the Elysian fields, as the consort of Achilles. The classical versions of the myth that were best known in the early modern period, however, resist this kind of closure. See Apollodorus, The Library, trans. J. G. Frazer, 2 vols, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1921) 1.9.28, and ‘Epitome’ 5.5.
Lorna Hardwick, Reception Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 14.
Although in his edition of Seneca’s Medea, H. M. Hine notes of the infanticide ‘it is disputed whether the innovation was [Euripides’], or occurred earlier in a Medea by the tragedian Neophron’ (Seneca, Medea, trans. H. M. Hine (Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 2000), p. 13).
Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989, repr. 2004), pp. 35, 203.
On Seneca’s use of Heroides 6 and 12, see Christopher Trinacty, ‘Seneca’s Heroides: Elegy in Seneca’s Medea’, Classical Journal 103.1 (2007), pp. 63–78.
In his Bibliotheca Historica, the first-century BC Greek historian Diodorus Siculus explains how many of Medea’s most famous feats should not be understood literally. For example, according to Diodorus, when Medea allegedly helped Jason subdue the fire-breathing bulls that guarded the Golden Fleece, she really won round a race of men known as the Taurians, because she was able to speak to them in their own language. See Diodorus Siculus, Works, trans. C. H. Oldfather, 10 vols, Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1933–67), vol. 2, 4.47.2–4 and 4.48.1–3.
Sarah Iles Johnston, ‘Introduction’, in James J. Clauss and Sarah Iles Johnston (eds), Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy and Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 3–17 (4).
For cinematic versions of Medea, see Ian Christie, ‘Between Magic and Realism: Medea on Film’, in Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh and Oliver Taplin (eds), Medea in Performance 1500–2000 (Oxford: Legenda, 2000), pp. 144–65.
John Kerrigan, Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 98.
Nicola McDonald, ‘“Diverse Folk Diversely They Seyde”: A Study of the Figure of Medea in Medieval Literature’ (D.Phil. Thesis: Oxford University, 1994). My thanks to Dr McDonald for permission to quote from this work.
Ruth Morse, The Medieval Medea (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996);
Examples include Clauss and Johnston (eds), Medea; Heike Bartel and Anne Simon (eds), Unbinding Medea: Interdisciplinary Approaches to a Classical Myth from Antiquity to the 21st Century (Oxford: Legenda, 2010);
Domnica Radulescu, Sisters of Medea: The Tragic Heroine across Cultures (New Orleans: University Press of the South, 2002);
and Lillian Corti, The Myth of Medea and the Murder of Children (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1998).
Corti discusses Pierre Corneille’s seventeenth-century French tragedy Médée in Chapter 4, while early modern French renderings are also covered by Amy Wygant, Medea, Magic, and Modernity in France (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
Seneca, Tragedies I: ‘Hercules’, ‘Trojan Women’, ‘Phoenician Women’, Medea’, Phaedra’, ed. and trans. John G. Fitch, 8 vols (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). Unless otherwise stated, all Latin quotations from Seneca’s Medea, and all modern translations, are from this edition.
Stephen Orgel, ‘Nobody’s Perfect: Or Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women?’, South Atlantic Quarterly 88.1 (1989), pp. 7–29 (13).
Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 116; for the ‘knowing’ versus ‘unknowing’ auditor, see p. 120. On the ‘sense of play’ in adaptation,
see Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 7, 14 and 25.
Natale Conti, Mythologiae, trans. and ed. John Mulryan and Steven Brown, 2 vols (Tempe, Ariz.: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006), p. 488.
The tragedy is discussed at greater length in Chapter 3. For the text, see William Alabaster, Roxana, ed. Dana F. Sutton, hypertext edition (Irvine, Calif.: University of California, 1998; copyright University of Birmingham).
Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1983), p. 97.
Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 23.
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 9.
Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 50.
Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), p. 5.
Ruth Morse, Truth and Convention in the Middle Ages: Rhetoric, Representation, and Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 108.
Stephen Hinds, Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry, Roman Literature and Its Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 46.
Colin Burrow, Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) p. 130.
See Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, p. 9; and Hardwick, Reception Studies, ch. 3. On the politicisation of Lucrece’s story, see Ian Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982).
Susan Wiseman, ‘Exemplarity, Women and Political Rhetoric’, in Jennifer Richards and Alison Thorne (eds), Rhetoric, Women and Politics in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 129–48 (146).
Thomas Heywood, The Brazen Age, Works, vol. 3, ed. J. H. Pearson (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964, reprinted from the edition of 1874).
Compare Ovid, Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ translated by Arthur Golding, ed. Madeleine Forey (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001) 7.277 and 7.265–6; and Shakespeare, The Tempest, 5.1.34.
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Heavey, K. (2015). Introduction. In: The Early Modern Medea. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137466242_1
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