Women on the Edge: Four Plays (review)

This volume of brand new translations of Euripides' tragic plays offers a distinctive, fresh, and dynamic approach to the ancient classical texts. The editors, leading feminist critics in fields of classics, comparative literature, and theatre arts, have selected four important plays in which female characters occupy a crucial role in the dramas. The shared project is to confront the very limits and margins of how "woman" was played out on the classical Athenian stage. In an extensive and informative introduction to the volume and in meticulous essays that precede the translation of each play, the editors boldly undertake the challenge of answering the invariable question: why are female figures so prominent in and so central to the tragic drama of Euripides? The collection achieves exceptional success in tackling this complex problem of interpretation because the editors judiciously regard the plays "not as a set of stable documents but as the intersection of such factors as the material conditions of production, the historical, social, and political contexts, and the audience's responses, as well as individual playwrights' visions" (xi). The translations offer an unparalleled awareness of the context of the original performances. The instructive introductions and editorial commentaries skillfully illuminate how the cultural environment of late fifth-century Athens, as it was explicitly and implicitly gendered, influenced the onstage representation of women as characters in the tragic dramas.

The comprehensive introduction to the volume deals in detail with such wide-ranging issues of relevance as the political history of Athens and its critical place in Greek culture; the role of Attic tragedy as a civic institution, its circumstances of production and performance, and the formal elements of the dramas themselves; the historical conditions of women in Athens, the rituals that punctuated transitions in their lives, and the ideologies of gender that marked them; the life and works of the poet Euripides; and the history of the textual criticism of his plays. As such, the essay offers an excellent and eminently useful inauguration for any general course on Greek tragedy and on Euripides in particular, as well as for courses that investigate the tensions and ambiguities among the various roles of women in ancient society and their several portrayals on the classical stage. The four individual translations that follow are outstanding. They are conscientious with regard to the beauty, nuance, and detail of the Greek poetic language, but also governed by aspiration—sure to be much appreciated by teachers, students, actors, and directors—to attain a powerful and convincing English rendition suitable for performance on the modern stage or in the university classroom.

In the first translation of the collection, the Alcestis, Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz introduces us to the earliest extant play of Euripides (438 BCE), in which Queen Alcestis gives up her life in exchange for that of her husband, Admetos. Rabinowitz's prefatory essay explores the myth, the cultural context, and several interpretive issues applicable to this play, and she opens the discussion of how women are portrayed in Euripidean drama, noting that the figure of Alcestis "establishes that pattern as a criterion for excellence in womanhood" (93). The second translated play, the Medea (431 BCE), is perhaps Euripides' most famous, or infamous, drama to survive from the ancient world. The tale of Medea's sexual abandonment by Jason and her act of filicide as retribution "offers a startling challenge to contemporary Athenian assumptions about gender roles" (150), as Ruby Blondell asserts in her essay. Blondell surveys the myth of Medea, her representation as other, the relationship of her character to the themes of marriage and the sanctity of oaths, and the essential problem of Medea's heroism. In the third translation of the volume, Bella Zweig presents the Helen, one of Euripides' later plays (412 BCE), and one that puts a startling...