Classical Backgrounds to English Literature

Medea’s Daughters: Intro & Chapter One

Study Questions

• How does Shakespeare’s tragedy construct, to borrow Jennifer Jones’s words, both the “idealized woman” and, her antithesis, the “monstrous female” (ix)? Put another way – how can we use Jones’s theory about the on-stage construction of gender ideologies to read Medea (as well as Antigone) into King Lear? (NB: You might have an easier time coming back to this question after answering the questions below.)

• How does the representation of women in Lear support or contest the Renaissance notions of womanhood and woman’s social position discussed by Jones in chapter one?

• Although the Arden murdered occurred some half-century before Shakespeare wrote Lear, Shakespeare no doubt knew of the case from various literary sources written much closer to his time. Where can you see points of conjunction between the Arden case and Lear? Points of contention? Jones argues that “the cultural performance of Alice Arden as a morality tale asserts that a man who cannot control his wife will suffer at her hand” (9). In what way is Lear also a morality tale about gender relations? Does it tell the same moral as the Arden case, as presented by Jones? What, in other words, might be Shakespeare’s motivations in presenting the gender dichotomies that he does?