Medea—Sorceress or Woman? c. 1750 and Beyond

Abstract In Lysell’s chapter, the stage presence of Medea comes to the fore, in twentieth-century productions of the versions by Euripides and Grillparzer. With specific focus on the last years of the eighteenth century, and the beginning of the nineteenth century, Lysell emphasizes the return of the mythical and metaphysical forces in the play. He discusses the move from the humanized eighteenth-century Medea to Klinger’s tragedies where the gods are ‘evil horror forces’, and he extends his analysis to Franz Grillparzer’s seminal Medea of 1821. Here in this early nineteenth-century tragedy, it is both exile as existential determinant and the ineluctability of ‘the ancient demonic forces’ that are foregrounded. With Grillparzer, Lysell argues, the stage is set for the twentieth-century Medea, and her relevance as a psychologically complex figure.