Medea addresses the women of Corinth after learning that her husband Jason has abandoned her to marry the princess. She delivers a powerful argument about the plight of women in ancient Greek society before setting in motion her terrible revenge.
Medea has just emerged from her house, where she has been heard wailing offstage. Jason, for whom she abandoned her homeland, killed her brother, and bore two sons, has left her to marry the daughter of Creon, king of Corinth. Medea is a foreigner with no legal standing, no kin to return to, and the imminent prospect of exile with her children. The Chorus of Corinthian women has gathered out of concern and curiosity. The Nurse and the Tutor have already established the scale of Medea's rage in the prologue. This is Medea's first direct address to the chorus and to the audience, and she is making a calculated bid for their sympathy and silence — she will need both to carry out the revenge that is already forming. The speech is famously the first surviving extended argument about the structural position of women in Greek literature, placed in the mouth of a woman whom the play will then push toward infanticide.
Medea wants the chorus's silence. Everything in the speech is engineered to recruit them as allies — or at minimum to prevent them from warning anyone of what she might do. She does this by making a sophisticated, generalisable case about the position of women: bought into marriage, transferred between households, subject to a husband's whims, expected to be experts in a domestic world they had no part in choosing. She is, crucially, making this case in the rhetorical mode of the Greek law courts — she is performing as a male orator would, and the Corinthian women would have noticed. What she wants beneath the argument is to be seen accurately by someone, for the first time in the play. Psychologically she is brilliant, controlled, and on the edge of something the audience already half-suspects. The control of this speech is what makes the later violence terrifying — she is not a hysteric, she is an analyst.
Translation choice is again crucial — Robin Robertson, Anne Carson, Ben Power, and Kenneth McLeish all produce very different speeches. Whatever you use, find the lawyer. Medea is making a case, and the speech should sound like an argument, not a complaint. Address the chorus specifically — they are individual women, not an abstraction. Make eye contact, pick faces, modulate the appeal. The pitfall is rage. If you start angry, the speech has nowhere to go and the argument disappears under the affect. Start controlled, almost reasonable — the universalising claims about women's lives need the chorus to nod, and they will not nod if you are already screaming. Mark the structural movement: from "of all creatures that have breath and sensation, we women are the most unfortunate" through the catalogue of marital indignities, to the closing turn where she asks for the chorus's silence. Find the moment when the personal breaks through the general — usually around the lines about her own situation as a foreigner — and let it crack the rhetorical surface briefly before she recovers. Tempo: measured, with sudden intensities. The speech is the trap baited; the chorus must want to agree.
An excellent and increasingly popular audition piece for serious dramatic work. Strong for MFA programs, classical companies, prestige film and television (which has rediscovered Greek tragedy as a register), and any room interested in sustained female anger as a dramatic resource. Shows intelligence, rhetorical control, the capacity to play a character whose mind moves faster than the situation around her, and political awareness. Best for actors in their late twenties through forties. Has become more common in audition rooms over the last decade as the canon has been re-examined, but is still nowhere near as worn as Lady Macbeth's "unsex me here." Choose your translation carefully and be ready to defend the choice. Pair with something more vulnerable or comic to show range — Medea's control is so impressive that the panel may want to see what happens when you are not in command. Cut to two minutes, focusing on the central argument about women's position rather than the framing apologies.
Women of Corinth, I have come outside to you lest you should be indignant with me; for I know that many people are proud, some in their secret hearts and some before the world, and others, who live quietly, get a bad name for indifference. There is no justice in the eyes of men, for they refuse, before they learn a man's true character, to hate him on sight though he has done them no injury. A foreigner especially must adapt to the city, and even the citizen is to be condemned who is too proud to prevent ill-feeling among his fellow-townsmen by his manner.
But on me this thing has fallen so unexpectedly, it has broken my heart. It is all over, my friends; I would gladly die. Life has lost its savor. The man who was everything to me, well he knows it, has turned out to be the basest of men. Of all things that have life and sense, we women are the most hapless creatures: first we must buy a husband at a great price and take a master for our bodies. And the outcome of our life's striving hangs on this—whether we take a good or bad husband. For separation is discreditable for women and it is not possible to refuse a husband. And a woman coming among new customs and ways must be a prophet to know how best to handle her bedfellow; and if our efforts are successful and a husband lives with us without resenting the marriage-bond, our life is enviable. Otherwise, death is preferable.