96 Books Like Medea and Other Plays

My journey to specialising in gender and revenge in ancient Athens began when I read this trilogy of tragedies by Aeschylus in the original ancient Greek. These plays captivated me because of their stunningly powerful and breathtakingly beautiful use of imagery and language.

The characters are equally striking, especially the clever and determined queen Clytemnestra, a ruthless and duplicitous killer who murders her husband in the bath. In turn, her son Orestes is faced with the dreadful prospect of killing his own mother to avenge the death of his father. Performing matricide brings forth the terrifying Erinyes, goddesses of vengeance, who demand that Orestes pay the price.

The powerful female characters and the dilemmas of the revenge plot are what make this trilogy one I return to time and time again.

This lucidly written scholarly book considers how revenge was understood in ancient Athens and what the implications of this understanding are for reading tragedies whose plot lines feature revenge.

My favourite chapter is the one on Sophocles’ fragmentary Tereus, in which Procne takes revenge against her husband, Tereus, for raping and mutilating her sister Philomela, by killing her son Itys and serving him to his father in a pie. It is a compelling and horrifying storyline that influenced Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.

Burnett’s careful reading seeks to reconstruct the fragments of the play to explain how the playwright delivered this extreme violence as a tragic revenge plot.

The focus of this book is on the power women could wield through public lamentation of the dead, with particular attention to their abilities to demand vengeance through their songs. Holst-Warhaft makes use of modern Greek laments to put forward an argument about the dangers of women’s voices instigating violence and to suggest this is why the ancient Athenians wanted to restrict women’s lamentation.

I find particularly fascinating the preserved laments of women from Mani where they claim to have taken revenge themselves, such as the nineteenth-century lament of Kalopothos Sakkakos in which his sister Paraski says she poisoned his killers (her husband, father-in-law, and brother-in-law) in revenge.

The intersections between motifs in these folk songs and ancient tragedies are enlightening.

Sophocles’ play depicts Electra beautifully, from her bitter mourning for her dead father to her grim determination when she contemplates taking vengeance herself as she believes her brother Orestes is dead. The debate between Electra and her sister Chrysothemis over what they, as women, should do is a high point for me.

This edition features the Victorian translation of Jebb that matches the majesty of Sophocles’ play well and is enjoyable to read. Easterling’s introduction to the scholar’s career and approach is also fascinating.

Euripides is the Greek tragedian who, in my humble opinion, appeals most to the modern sensibility. Even in his own time (5th century Athens, BCE) he was regarded as an innovator who questioned the certainties of previous ages. The Bacchae is probably his greatest play, but Ion is the play set in Delphi. It includes the oracle (the Priestess of Apollo), as well as Apollo and Athena, as characters and, in it, the playwright begins to question the legitimacy of the gods themselves. Ion is the result of a divine rape, taken from his mortal mother at birth. The son of Apollo, he believes his parents abandoned him and works as a dogs-body and general helper in Apollo's Temple in Delphi. Then his mother and her husband, childless, arrive for a consultation...

This modern edition gives readers a sample plays by the remarkable Margaret Cavendish, who privately published 2 volumes of plays in 1662 and 1668 though many were probably written earlier.

I find her plays fascinating for the ways they deal explicitly with women’s experiences in love, in war and in marriage.

In this selection Love’s Adventures Parts I and II features a cross-dressing heroine in pursuit of her intended husband; Bell In Campo Parts I and II, dramatizes the experience of a superheroine leading an army, while The Bridals and The Convent of Pleasure satirize love and marriage.

I love The Convent of Pleasure’s depictions of same-sex retreat and desire. Cavendish’s witty prefaces on the difficulties of writing plays for a woman are included as appendices to Shaver’s edition.

This book gives an excellent introduction to women’s involvement in theatre in the age of Shakespeare by making 6 of their texts easily available for the first time.

It publishes Queen Elizabeth I’s translation of a section by Seneca; The Tragedy of Antony (1595), a translation of a French play about Antony and Cleopatra by Mary Sidney Herbert, (aunt to Lady Mary Wroth).

It also publishes three original plays by women: Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam (1613), The Concealed Fancies (1645), by the sisters Elizabeth Brackley and Jane Cavendish, and a valuable edition of Love’s Victory (but in a short section on p. 122 misprints the order of pages in the manuscript).

Cupid’s Banishment (1619) by Robert White is an entertainment, written to be performed by schoolgirls. 

While learning who she is, Leslie, the lead character, makes choices based on her insecurities and those choices affect not only her, but the people around her. As she attempts to fix the mistakes she’s made, she is faced with some tough decisions. Her road to redemption will make you want to shake her back into reality. It’s a novel that will have you yelling at the book, as if Leslie is a friend and you want to help her. The characters are very relatable, they felt as if they could be people in your circle, or people you know in real life.

Shaw believed he was a better writer than Shakespeare, and I think he may be right in this play. His wit and language combine to inform and entertain. Cleverness and iconoclasm abound. You can't help but revel in Shaw's pin-pricking of cherished beliefs. In response, we are forced to reevaluate customs and standards. If you want intellectual fun, this play is for you.

I also love Eliot’s poetry (and his comments on the creative process) because of how different they are from Wordsworth’s—and equally profound. In essays including Tradition and the Individual Talent, Eliot argues that keeping your poetry “personal” artificially limits your material. And I think he’s right: some of my own best poems come from imagining my way into someone else’s mind.

Eliot’s own poetry, including The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, illustrates the value of this approach in how it crafts its titular character. Eliot can also write deeply intellectual poems like The Waste Land that transcend purely “personal” concerns by exploring history and that repay many re-readings. In addition to their thematic richness, Wordsworth’s and Eliot’s poems are also beautifully musical.