A Quick Look at Medea and Phaedra on Stage: Mothers, Mental Illness, and Tragedy

From the Guardian: a look at Medea, Phaedra, and stories of love, mental illness, loss, and tragedy.

Below, a selected bibliography:

On Medea

Fraden, Rena, Imagining Medea: Rhodessa Jones and Theater for Incarcerated Women (University of North Carolina Press, 2001).


Just, Roger, Women in Athenian Law and Life, (Routledge, 1989).

Kubiak, Anthony, Stages of Terror: Terrorism, Ideology, and Coercion as Theatre History (Indiana University Press, 1991).

Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Philosophy, Literature, and Art (James J. Clauss and Sarah Iles Johnston, eds.; Princeton University Press, 1997).

On Phaedra

Constable, Marianne, "Our Word Is Our Bond," in Speech and Silence in American Law 18 (Austin Sarat, ed., Cambridge University Press, 2010).

McCabe, Richard A.,  Incest, Drama, and Nature's Law, 1550-1700 (Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Heinze on Political and Social Mythmaking In Early Modern Drama

Eric Heinze, Queen Mary University of London, School of Law, is publishing Selecting the Memory, Controlling the Myth: The Propaganda of Legal Foundations in Early Modern Drama in Injustice, Memory, and Faith in Human Rights (K. Chainoglou and B. Collins, eds.; Ashgate, 2016). Here is the abstract.

Notwithstanding age-old aspirations to ground law in rational thought, the constitutive role of myth perennially resurfaces. Political mythology is always a reconstruction of historical memory, and that process becomes crucial at times of systemic political and legal re-constitution. We witness such a political moment in Western Europe in the late 16th and 17th centuries with the emergence of political modernity and the nation state. It is no accident that, in those years, theatre becomes a dominant art form, in which historical memory becomes ritually re-enacted to crystallise the political and social myths which will furnish European legal regimes with value systems. The Shakespearean Henry IV: Part One and The Tempest, along with Jean Racine’s Andromaque, are examined as evidence for that transformation from memory into myth, and history into normativity.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Legal Procedure In Racine's Les Plaideurs

Claude Witz and Martin Hlawon, both of Saarland University, have published On Racine's The Litigants in Oñati Socio-Legal Series, Vol. 4, No. 6, 2014. Here is the abstract.

English Abstract: French tragedian Jean Racine’s only comedy The Litigants (1668) is a theatrical caricature of the people of the law and of legal procedure at the time when Louis XIV’s councillor Colbert was undertaking important reforms of the judicial system. Litigious claimants, a maniac judge, a masochistic bailiff and loquacious lawyers all concur in the frantic display of a justice drowned in formalities and the pursuit of individual interests. The study of this play reminds us of the importance of constant efforts to reduce the complexity of legal procedure. Spanish Abstract: Los litigantes (1668), la única comedia del dramaturgo francés Jean Racine, es una caricatura teatral del mundo del derecho y el procedimiento legal de la época en la que Colbert, canciller de Luis XIV, impulsó importantes reformas del sistema judicial. Demandantes litigiosos, un juez maníaco, un agente judicial masoquista y abogados locuaces coinciden en una exhibición frenética en la que la justicia se muestra ahogada en formalidades y la búsqueda de intereses individuales. El estudio de esta obra nos recuerda la importancia de los esfuerzos constantes para reducir la complejidad del procedimiento legal.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link. 

The Language of Power in Racine

Eric Heinze, Queen Mary University of London School of Law, has published "'This Power Isn’t Power If It’s Shared': Law and Violence in Jean Racine’s 'La Thébaïde'" in volume 22 of Law & Literature (2010). Here is the abstract.

The Seventeenth century witnesses the steady demise of the fragmented or overlapping power regimes that had been rooted in the European Middle Ages. Centralised control increasingly structures emerging states. Jean Racine's La Thébaïde, recreating a chapter in the Oedipus myth, displays the Hobbesian drive for undivided sovereignty pushed to its logical conclusion: even two shareholders in power become one too many. Legal norms are constantly invoked to resolve a political and military power struggle, including discourses of absolute and shared sovereignty, separations of powers, popular consent, public welfare, national interest (raison d’état), natural law, and just war. Far from overcoming a brute power dynamic, however, those legal discourses show how the emerging modern state turns them into a tool of coercive power.

Download the abstract from SSRN here.