Medea sent her kids with gifts, a poisoned dress and crown. Medea is the granddaughter of Helios, and her use of his chariot symbolizes her partial divinity and her female pride and strength. The chorus pleads for divine intercession and criticizes Medea, but does nothing By having the Chorus spoil the end of the play before it even starts—Romeo and Juliet die, and only then do their families end the feud—Shakespeare sets up similar possibilities for the development of irony, tension, and catharsis here.
The Chorus is a group of actors that together speak, sing, and dance in one body. The Chorus is part ritual part thematic device that play a much larger role in Greek Tragedy than in the other genres. One of the primary functions of the chorus is to provide atmosphere and, in some ways, underscore the tragic action. Image ID Permalink Copy.
Download Options px. All download options Small px. Standard px. High Res TIF format. Order Art Print. Free to use without restriction. View as book. This Item. View this item elsewhere:. During the escape across the Mediterranean, she killed her brother and dumped him overboard, so that her pursuers would have to slow down and bury him. While in Iolcus, she again used her devilish cleverness to manipulate the daughters of the local king and rival, Pelias, into murdering their own father.
Exiled as murderers, Jason and Medea settled in Corinth, the setting of Euripides' play, where they established a family of two children and gained a favorable reputation.
All this precedes the action of the play, which opens with Jason having divorced Medea and taken up with a new family. The play charts Medea's emotional transformation, a progression from suicidal despair to sadistic fury. She eventually avenges Jason's betrayal with a series of murders, concluding with the deaths of her own children. Famously, the pleasure of watching Jason suffer their loss outweighed her own remorse at killing them.
Jason can be considered the play's villain, though his evil stems more from weakness than strength. A former adventurer, he abandons his wife, Medea, in order to marry Glauce, the beautiful young daughter of Creon, King of Corinth. Hoping to advance his station through this second marriage, he only fuels Medea to a revenge that includes the deaths of his new bride, her father, and his children.
Jason's tactless self-interest and whiny rationalizations of his own actions make him a weak, unsympathetic character. Medea uses them as pawns in the murder of Glauce and Creon, and then kills them in the play's culminating horror. Their innocent deaths provide the greatest element of pathos--the tragic emotion of pity--in the play. Composed of the women of Corinth, the chorus chiefly serves as a commentator to the action, although it occasionally engages directly in the dialogue.
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