Staging Medea: Then and Now, with Oliver Taplin

Abstract

Euripides’s play Medea has continued to fascinate and provoke ever since its first performance almost 2500 years ago. But what did that first performance look like, and how did it contribute to enabling the play’s endurance ever since? In this episode, Shivaike Shah speaks to Oliver Taplin, former Professor of Classics at the University of Oxford, about why Medea’s debut at the City Dionysia festival in Athens in 431BCE, where it only came third, was so groundbreaking - and so shocking.

Bibliography

Paywalled

Euripides, Medea, trans. James Morwood, in Medea and Other Plays (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008)

Euripides, Medea, trans. Oliver Taplin, in Euripides I (Chicago: Chicago Greek Tragedies, 2012), 3rd ed.

Donald Mastronarde, Euripides: Medea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)

Judith Mossman, Euripides: Medea (Liverpool: Aris & Phillips Classical Texts, 2011)

Rush Rehm, Greek Tragic Theatre (London: Routledge, 1992), Part 1

Ruth Scodel, An Introduction to Greek Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)

Transcript

You can find a full transcript of the episode here.