The Chorus in Medea

By [unknown]

significance of the choral odes

An essay hosted at LiteratureClassics.com

'...and a chorus of Corinthian women...':
Use of the Chorus in recent productions of Euripides'
Medea

Ruth Hazel, The Open University

'...as almost anyone who has ever seen a Greek play can attest, the chorus is every director's nightmare. It almost never
""works"".'

Thus, Herbert Golder, in the Preface to the first issue of Arion to be devoted to 'The Chorus in Greek tragedy and Culture'
(3.1, Fall 1994/Winter1995). It is true; like the witches in Macbeth, like the fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream, like the
epiphanies in the Mystery plays, Greek tragic chorus is so culturally different from what a twentieth-century English audience is
used to in everyday life and entertainment that the director has to find ways to interpret it. Nor, like my other examples
(Shakespeare's witches and fairies, or personal appearances by God), can the tragic chorus conveniently be cut from a
performance text which purports to be the original or the 'real' play, since it is formally and thematically - though not necessarily
narratively - integral. Very often it sails into the theatre under the flag of convenience of being 'classical'; a signal to the audience
that however strange or, indeed, risible, it may seem, it should not be laughed at. (With comic choruses, of course, there is not
the same problem; with them, the director has to worry how to make them humorous) Admittedly, the latter part of this century
has seen the re-emergence of non-naturalistic, ritual and single-performance aspects in English theatre, and companies who
specialise in ancient drama, like the Actors of Dionysus, Chloë and Aquila, can hope for an audience which has fewer problems
with essays at authentic chorus work. But conventional, 'middle-class' theatres across the UK, as well as the giants of
Establishment theatre, continue to present the occasional Greek play as part of a varied programme, and in order not to tax
audience loyalty, directors must find a way of 'translating' not just the subject of the play, but those of its formal aspects which
are 'other', and of these the chorus is, surely, one.

What are the problems a modern audience might have with the tragic chorus? Helen Bacon, in her Introductory Essay to the
issue of Arion already cited, suggests that problems with the role of the tragic chorus may arise from our lack of understanding
of the pervasiveness of music and dance in ancient Greek culture,1 our feeling of the strangeness of the choral 'voice' - the
shared identity - and perhaps, too, our incomprehension of the role of the lyrics. Alistair Elliot ( 'Translating Poetic Forms',
p.78) says 'If you have ever seen a Greek tragedy performed in Greek, you may not be aware that there is a problem in
translating the choral odes. If you do not understand the play...the singing and dancing may seem the best bits...But as soon as
you translate it, the choral singing and dancing appears to be merely an interruption of the action.' Why, an audience may
wonder, does the story stop so these people can start singing about something which seems to be only marginally, or
tangentially, related to the action?

One would think that to an audience which, if it has not encountered opera, must at least have experienced the 'musical' genre
(and that not just in comedy mode - note such successes as West Side Story and Les Miserables), the inclusion of song and
dance in a serious drama would not be incongruous, nor would the practice of pausing the action in order to supply a sung
commentary or reflective passage. However, the truth is that most 'straight' productions of Greek tragedy have tended to shy
away from choral authenticity, and, if they presented a multiple chorus at all, used a minimum of unison speaking, not singing,
with the Lyric passages broken up between individual voices. The effect of unison speaking - particularly when a female chorus
is played by women - can be to give a dismal echo of Women's Institute verse-speaking festivals of the mid-century. Small
wonder the director's heart may sink when, having decided to present an English translation of Medea this season, and agreed
on the star, the management or artistic director says : 'Oh yes, and you'll need a chorus of Corinthian women....'

However, productions of Greek tragedy in the last three decades of the twentieth century, even in England, that bastion of
Peter Brook's 'Deadly Theatre',2 show a rediscovery, thanks to a number of influences, of the effectiveness of a Chorus
which does more than interrupt the story with embarrassing verse recitation. The 'ladies in white nighties doing Greek tragedy'
(whom Harold Wilson reputedly wished would appear across all T.V. channels on an election night when a high turnout would
have been advantageous to Labour) are disappearing from our stages.

Euripides, clearly, revelled in female choruses. Of eighteen (possibly nineteen3) extant texts the vast majority has a female
chorus, even where the play is named after a young man.4 A female chorus might not be thought appropriate for Heracles
and The Heracleidae; Lattimore (1959, p.225) would place Rhesus and Alcestis early in Euripides' career '...before he
achieved the General style familiar from his other preserved plays...', and The Cyclops is a satyr play. In some cases the
Chorus, though giving its name to the play, has in terms of plot, only an incidental role (for example, The Phoenician Women),
whereas in others it plays an integral part (The Trojan Women, The Bacchae, Hippolytus), fulfilling pretty well Aristotle's
desire that 'The Chorus should be regarded as one of the actors; it should be a part of the whole, and should assume a share in
the action...'5 in spite of his judgement that this happens in Sophocles but not in Euripides.

To some extent we can recognise modern equivalents to Greek theatre's executive divisions: the choregos, like a producer (or
in the case of synchoregoi, in 405/6, a group of 'angels'), puts up the money for a show, and might have very little or a good
deal of involvement in its staging. The archon's choice of choregoi, and, nearer the event, of which poets were to be 'granted a
chorus' is impossible, because of its civic and communal significance, to find equivalence for in modern theatre, but a
comparable role might be that of Chair of the Arts Council, or an Artistic Director or theatre manager, whose task is to find
writers who are able to come up with plays that will appeal to a known audience, and financiers who are prepared, whether for
selfish or altruistic reasons, to sponsor them. It is easier to see the modern version of the didaskalos in musicals than in straight
plays - he is become the choreographer, musical director and voice coach. But the poet, who, at least in regard to tragedy in
the fifth century, was likely to have been responsible not only for training the chorus and rehearsing the actors, but for
undertaking one of the acting allocations,6 has been usurped in his role of bringing the poem to the stage by a director.7 We
know that Aeschylus and Phrynichos were famous for inventing their own choreography when working as didaskalos, but
though Plutarch gives evidence for Euripides being present at the read-through of his work with the chorus,8 there is
apparently little information about his involvement or otherwise with its training. Reprehensible though it is, it is tempting to
hypothesize; was there a didaskalos who was particularly gifted in training choruses as 'women', or who opened up this area
for development over the second half of the fifth century? Was the potential for conspicuous display of lavish expenditure
greater for a choregos who had a 'female' chorus to dress - maenads with elaborate wigs, fawnskins and thyrsoi, perhaps, or
the Phoenician women dedicated to Apollo, the most beautiful of their towns?9 Conversely, in contrast to the allowably or
deliberately caricatured female choruses of comedy, did the tragic female choruses favoured by Euripides approach nearer to
mimesis in their representation of women than might be felt proper in young epheboi doing no more than their civic duty?
Though Zeitlin ( in 'Playing the Other') is talking mainly about the acting roles in discussing Aristophanes' attack on Euripides in
the Frogs, the judgement against Euripides and in favour of Aeschylus may reflect, in 'popular contemporary perception of
Euripidean theater'10 an awareness that the poet was encouraging in the usually normative and corrective voice of the
Chorus, tones of subversive femininity. Did Euripides' innovative - or as Aristophanes' Aeschylus would have it, decadent
rag-bag - eclecticism extend to importing new dance movements or shapes into the choreography of the tragic chorus,
permitting, perhaps, the sinuous circularity of the dithyrambic choruses to disrupt the rectangular precision of the group of
fifteen?

We may never know. What a modern director has to work on, and it is quite enough, is the text. Let us return to our modern
chorus of Corinthian women, waiting patiently to begin rehearsal for Medea. The first thing an actor (and in a modern theatre
this term embraces chorus members) does on being cast is to scan the script, count lines, and identify good scenes. The wise
director will also approach the chorus as if it were a discrete character, identifying its strong moments, its changes of attitude, its
varying functions. The entrance of the chorus in Medea is deliberately delayed until the story-so-far has been related by the
Nurse (who thus acts as a prologue as well as revealing her own naive, partisan allegiance to Medea), and until what is to come
has ominously been suggested by the Tutor's news of the rumours in the city and the Nurse's nervous response. The chorus
professes itself a friend to the foreign woman, and though its first loyalty would seem to be the oikos of Jason (l.137), it is
prepared to take Medea's side, and extend to her the sympathy of one woman for another. The exchanges with the Nurse,
punctuated by the off-stage cries of Medea, serve to heighten the feelings of curiosity and forboding shared by chorus and
audience, and effectively set up the surprise of Medea's entry, when, expecting a distraught ruin of a woman, the audiences (off
and on-stage) see a princess, rational, composed, and with the capacity to speak with the common touch; to engage the
sympathies of her listeners to the extent that they agree to keep quiet about her intentions, and, indeed, condone her desire for
revenge against Jason.

The first two stasimons certainly suggest that the chorus has responded as women to Medea: the first (ll. 410-445) starts with
strophe and antistrophe celebrating the turning of the tide - rivers flowing upstream - with regard to the reputation of women: 'a
time comes when the female sex is honoured...' (ll. 416-20). But of course, this apparent improvement is relative; it is
compared to the faithlessness of men that the hitherto much trumpeted faithlessness of women will pale into insignificance -
overall, the song is negative about human nature while seeming positive about women. If there is a suggestion of proto-feminist
sympathies here, it is less in the naive crowing of the first strophe and antistrophe than in the sympathetic recognition, in the
second pair, of Medea's disempowerment through loss of role and status.