Prudency and the Inefficacy of Language: Re-politicizing Jean de la Péruse’s Médée (1553)

Despite the fact that the story of Medea is fundamentally political—an outsider threatens the stability of a polis and a dynasty—critics generally read the first French tragedy to take up this muthos, Jean de la Péruse’s Médée (written 1553), apolitically. While a “formal analogy or even identity between [the spectators’] experience inside and outside the theater”¹ is generally acknowledged regarding the tragedies of Ancient Athens, such is not always the case for the tragedies of sixteenth-century France, especially the Médée. According to one reader, La Péruse selected the legend about the daughter of King Aeëtes of Colchis because its inherent pathos (a mother kills her children) would please both theoreticians and readers of tragedy; or else, says the same critic, because the subject matter would allow for both long speeches (rheseis) and quick-fire exchanges (stichomythia), judgments that seemingly reduce the play to little more than an exercice de style.² Another critic opined more recently (in an important study with which I otherwise agree) that due to the sheer lack of information regarding the play’s political importance at the moment it was composed, such as direct traces of authorial intention or of contemporary reactions to the play’s (potential) references to historically-grounded political events, “an argument for a politicized agenda … would thus be on shaky ground at best,”³ again foreclosing attempts to read the text otherwise than as a depoliticized site of reception for classical authors.⁴ But must the political nature of this tragedy—or of any text—rely on such extratextual data? Unless the critical aim is to plot authorial intentions regarding the purposeful creation of political allegory (à la 1984, à la Sartre, etc.), the answer must surely be in the negative. Indeed, we would do well to recall at this early point the (now famous) words of Jean-Paul Vernant who argued that Greek tragedy raised political issues not as allegory, but as hermeneutic problems. In other words, that Athenian tragedy did not merely reflect reality—rather, through ambiguities and tensions, it called reality, especially political reality, into question.⁵ In addition, as regards the choice of a legend about a female hero, several generations of classicists⁶—and indeed not just classicists—have offered commentary on the centrality of female heroes to the political philosophies of Greek tragedy. My purpose here then is to call for a repoliticization—in a deeper, non-allegorical sense—of French Renaissance tragedy.⁷ More specifically, I want to ask how we might attempt a political reading of La Péruse’s Médée, about which it cannot be said unambiguously that it relates to any specific historical political context. It might be more precise to say, then, that I will seek out how the play engages not with politics per se, but more precisely with political philosophy. In the pages that follow, it will thus be necessary to consider how La Péruse’s play differs from the classical versions by Euripides and Seneca, what question(s) of political philosophy are at stake in this specific adaptation of the Medea myth (for which Agamben’s archaeology of the oath will be essential), and how these questions, in a third moment that returns to history, resonate with La Péruse’s contemporaries. I assume that translation and time could not have obliterated all that was politically and socially vital in the original and hope that the methods for, and limits of, a political reading of Médée will, from these various strands, begin to emerge.⁸

Médée, then, is the only surviving tragedy of Jean de La Péruse who died, aged only twenty-five, before he could expand his œuvre. As forgotten as he may be today, we should note that Ronsard listed La Péruse as one of the seven members of the Pléiade, even calling him the “second ornement de la tragique Muse” (the second ornament of the Tragic Muse), i...