The Role of Chorus in Euripides Medea Essay -- Euripides Medea Essays

The Role of refrain line in Medea   In section 18 of the Poetics Aristotle criticizes Euripides for not allowing the chorus to be one of the actors and to be a part of the whole and to share in the dramatic action, . . . as in Sophocles. Aristotle may be thinking of the embolima of Euripides afterward plays (satirized also by Aristophanes), but he is certainly wrong just about the Medea. Its choral odes are not only all intimately related to the action but are also essential for the meaning of the play, curiously because here, as elsewhere (e.g. Hecuba), Euripides forces us reevaluate his main protagonist in midstream and uses the chorus (in part) to indicate that change.   In her first speech Medea wins over the chorus by a plea to solidarity in the face of womens victimization by a male-dominated society, and this response by the chorus is an essential step in the poets paradoxical task of winning sympathy and understanding for a fetch who kills her children. But as that first speech itself indicates, Medea both is and is not a typical (Greek) woman she is a foreig...