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1 COMPARATIVE •rama Volume 23Spring 1989Number 1 Trial and Terror: Medea Prima Facie Anthony Kubiak In the third act of Seneca's Medea, Jason, in a spasm of guilt occasioned by his decision to divorce Medea and marry Creon's daughter, cries out to his spurned wife, "Quid faceré possim, loquere" ("What can I do? Tell me"). "Pro me?" she responds, "vel scelus" ("For me? Crime"). But Jason, both fearful of the law and hungry for the power that it will confer on him, is paralyzed by such a challenge, "Hinc rex et illinc—" ("A king on this side and on that—").l Jason is indeed encompassed by the law in different and corresponding ways. He is constrained as the mythic/historical Jason to obey the demands of myth and history and replay his already consummated fate in "the bliss of memory." He is likewise obligated as the citizen Jason to submit to the laws of propriety and common statute laid down by Creon: "Dum licet abire, profuge teque hinc eripe;/ gravis ira regum est semper" ("Depart while still thou mayst; take thyself hence; grievous ever is the wrath of kings" [1. 493]). Finally, he is compelled as the character Jason to perform whatever the text demands of him in the theater: "lumina hue túmida alleva,/ ingrate Iason. coniugem agnoscis tuam?" ("Lift thy tear-swollen eyes hither, ungrateful Jason. Dost recognize thy wife?" [11. 1020-21]). The ANTHONY KUBIAK is currently an Assistant Professor at Harvard University, where he teaches courses in theater theory and history. 4 Comparative Drama interplay of these strata of law and propriety and the compliance they demand suggest a performative correspondence. The constraints of legal statute, the historico-mythic traditions that authorize them, and the limits of theater are all revealed in a folded, forensic space—the site of the legal hearing and the theatrical performance appear superposed. Theater and law betray in this a critical affiliation that is delimited by representation and exhibited as performance. In both the Euripidean and the Senecan Medeas, for example , the boundaries of the stage mark the limits within which essential questions of law are investigated: JASON Obicere tandem quod potes crimen mihi? MEDEA Quodcumque feci. JASON Restât hoc unum insuper tuis ut etiam sceleribus fiam nocens. MEDEA Tua illa, tua sunt illa; cui prodest scelus is fecit. (U. 497-501 ) JASON What crime, pray, canst thou charge to me? MEDEA Whatever I have done. JASON This one thing remains still for me, to become guilty of thy sins as well. MEDEA They are, they are thine own; who profits by a sin has done the sin. Staging legal debates such as this produces conceptions of justice and law that necessarily coincide, either openly or covertly, with the conventions of the form—theater, in this case—that articulates them. The enunciation of evidence through syllogism, the stichomythic question-answer of the arraignment, the taking of depositions, the manipulation of Carefully staged conflict as a means to Truth, in short, the quantification of evidence through performativity—surveillance, interrogation, indictment, correction—demonstrates the profound cross-penetration of theatrical structure and legal technique in the maintenance of limits on the acting body. Kenneth Burke speaks to this specific aspect of Greek law/theater: Anthony Kubiak5 the greater complexity of relationships that went with the development of trade and urban living led to a proliferation of the forensic, as exemplified in the law courts and in parliamentary procedure. Out of legal sophistication there grew the vast metaphysical structures, that eventually imposed scientific concepts of causality upon the earlier patterns of magic and religion. The new attitude reaches its culmination explicitly in Aristotle, but we find it implicitly in the great writers of tragedy that preceded him. Their plays, we might say, are complex trials by jury, with plaintiff, defendant, attorneys, judges, and jury all rolled into one—or, otherwise stated, we get in one piece the offence, the sentence, the expiation. . . . [T]he events of a tragedy are made to grow out of one another in keeping with the logic of scientific cogency, the Q.E.D. of Euclid and the political oration.2 Burke's larger point is that while...

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