[In the following essay, Wood asserts that the diverse works of Ginzburg, Franca Rame, and Dacia Maraini share connections in feminist roots.]

In 1954 the American writer and theater critic Eric Bentley commented that “Italy, ever as poor in drama as she is rich in theatricality, is finding that a profession of playwrights cannot be legislated into existence even with the help of subsidies.”¹ Bentley was echoing the despair expressed by Luigi Pirandello in Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore some thirty years previously: in the absence of good new writing in Italy what was there for a company to put on if not a translation of a foreign play or something by the incomprehensible Pirandello himself? And forty years on from Bentley's own essay there are those who will say that not much has changed: the theater in Italy continues to surprise by its failure to foster new writing, and to alarm by its dependence on state subsidy to the point where political allegiance rather than artistic merit stands as guarantor for both jobs and productions. In the arguments about public funding of the arts Italy in some ways plays the part of the devil's advocate in suggesting that it simply does not work, and there are those who would dearly love to see a temporary moratorium on ill-directed backing as on yet another production of Pirandello, Goldoni or Shakespeare, or of pieces which could be labelled ‘experimental’.²

Yet, as Bentley comments, Italy is a country rich in theatricality, the dramatic impulse diverted perhaps from the stage onto the street. Such theatricality was clearly in evidence when feminism in Italy was at its most public: and I would perhaps be better off in this paper speaking not of some putative feminist aesthetic of theater but of the theatricality of Italian feminism. Women's marches and demonstrations in the late sixties and seventies were remarkable for their color, show, and vivid representations of women's lives. Judith Malina's accounts of productions put on with Italian women in the mid seventies by the Living Theater, based on women's own lives and experiences, underline the point that much grass-roots Italian feminism expressed itself, often for the first time, outside the institutions, outside established genres, outside language even, in forms which were inherently theatrical rather than discursive or even linguistic.³

It is no accident that in Italy a great number of those who have written for the theater have first established their credentials in other genres.

Of the writers I wish to highlight in this paper, Natalia Ginzburg and Dacia Maraini are known principally as novelists, while Franca Rame made her name primarily as a performer. Ginzburg works within the conventions of mainstream theater, even while she questions some of its practices. Maraini's more overtly political and politicized theater takes account both of ideological shifts in the cultural practice of the political left in Italy and of pan-European experiments and developments in dramatic form. Franca Rame incorporates her feminism within a left wing political stance which meshes closely with, but does not displace, the artistic practice of popular theater. I would like to relate the very diverse dramatic aesthetic of each writer, working within mainstream, political or popular theater, to their own reflections on feminism and politics, tracing connections in their work between the aesthetic and the political as they are embodied in dramatic form.

I should say that the involvement of women in Italian theater has a very long, if obscure tradition. Women were closely involved with the Commedia dell'arte not just as actresses but as capocomico, running companies and producing their own material. In his memoirs Goldoni gives due credit, for example, to women such as Isabella Andreini, and Franca Rame traces her own artistic practice back to these women. In more recent times too women have written for the stage, even if their work has been completely sidelined by a very maschilist literary tradition. Caterina and Cecilia Stazzone both wrote for the theater in Sicily in the late nineteenth century⁴: Annie Vivanti, now seen by many critics as little more than an appendage to her more famous lover Carducci, wrote some powerful pieces for the Milan stage around the First World War, describing polemically the plight of women when a hostile army invades, and raising the uncomfortable call in a rigidly Catholic Italy for ethically sanctioned abortion.⁵ I should also say that there has been almost no critical work done on these writers, and it is still difficult even to get hold of texts.

Natalia Ginzburg began writing for the theater in the 1960s. Like many of her contemporaries, she despaired about the state of Italian theater: the paucity of new material, the stifling predominance of a few, almost exclusively dead, masters, the ease with which even poor productions could be given extensive runs and tours if the right backing—meaning the right political contact—was available.

Ginzburg's plays have been strongly criticized by some for having very little about them that is theatrical: indeed, they consist entirely of dialogue or rather monologue, a narrative in which the speaker recalls his, or more often her, past experience. These are intensely undramatic in the Shavian sense. Ginzburg cannot be placed within the tradition of bourgeois realist theater or the well-made play; nor does her work directly reflect the avant-garde formal experimentalism taking place in European theater at the time. One critic has commented of her work that:

the most conspicuous characteristic of Ginzburg's theater is precisely the absence of any kind of action … when there is something happening it is secondary, if not fortuitous; what matters is what is said, what matters above all is the selfish silence of the world outside, ready to swallow up and eliminate the voices of the speakers.⁶

To stop speaking is often, for her characters, to recognize the fragility of their own position in the world and to admit the abyss at the heart of their own lives. Language is not used as exchange of information, unless it be to convey a sense of the collapsing world outside, the disintegration of a relationship or the impossibility of dialogue. In this sense perhaps there is some connection between the work of Ginzburg and that of Beckett. Language represents not communication but non-communication: the difficulty of speaking together symbolically represents the difficulty of living together, the profound isolation of the individual.

If Ginzburg's theater hovers on the edges of ‘realism’, her relationship to feminism is equally complex. She pleads against the limiting reductiveness of any orthodox ideology of male oppression even as she recognized it as one mode of inter-gender relationships. While agreeing with all the practical demands of feminists, she finds unacceptable the ideological assumption she sees underpinning second wave feminism, and a prior assumption that women are simultaneously oppressed and somehow superior beings. She acknowledges the imprint of our sex on our minds and characters, but simultaneously aspires to a transcending of the specifically personal and sexual:

The difference between men and women is the same difference that exists between the sun and the moon, or between day and night. … In our best moments, our thought is that neither of woman nor of man. And yet it is equally true that on everything which we think or do there lies the imprint of our individual physiognomy, and if we are women, the female signs of our temperament stamp themselves on our words and actions. But our ultimate aim is to reach a domain where men and women alike can recognize themselves in us and where our personal physiognomy is forgotten.⁷

Ginzburg does not accept that thought, or art, is gendered. Paradoxically it is in accepting that she writes like a woman (after several misbegotten attempts to write ‘like a man’) that Ginzburg sees herself writing as a human being.

Ginzburg began writing for the theater relatively late in her career, and she approaches the theater very much as she does her much better known stories and novels. Writing remains for her an essentially private act which is then translated into dramatic form. Ginzburg comments particularly on the way in which her female characters are rewritten, re-cast perhaps, in the transition from text to performance.

I usually imagined my women small, fragile, restless, and untidy. But the theater plays terrible tricks on you. The people putting on the play didn't care a bit if I said I had imagined these women small, and often they chose instead tall, well-built actresses. And sometimes I had poor people in mind, but on the stage we got people with beautiful clothes who looked quite well off. I would protest, but I couldn't fight them. They would say to you that the theater has its laws. Sometimes these laws are absurd and inexplicable, and they take you miles away from the creature born in your imagination.⁸

Even while she echoes the anxieties of many a writer for the theater about loss of control over their work, Ginzburg betrays here an essentially idealist, writerly approach which does not see the writer as involved in a joint collaborative effort with director, actor, designer, and so on. Ginzburg as ‘begetter’ of the text, born in her imagination and which yet escapes her can be juxtaposed with the maternal figures she potrays who must at all costs be eluded, transcended almost, who attempt to determine meanings which are on the contrary inevitably in flux. It is tempting to see this an unwitting metaphor for Ginzburg as writer for the theater.

The figure of the mother, already examined in Ginzburg's prose works, is dominant in her theater, even if she frequently never even appears on stage. In L'inserzione, premiered in London in 1965 with Joan Plowright, the lonely and abandoned Teresa and the young student who comes to her flat in response to an advertisement for a lodger, find in their mothers an immediate topic of conversation. In La porta sbagliata (1970) the mothers of the troubled couple, Angelica and Stefano, are always on the phone, an invisible but constant presence suggesting a distant hold not yet broken, like an uncut umbilical cord.

In Ginzburg's first real success, Ti ho sposato per allegria (1964) Giulia and Pietro are recently married, an apparently spontaneous and almost unmotivated decision. Their union, not based on traditional bourgeois grounds of social compatibility or economic interest, is examined in the light of the attitudes of their parents, mothers in particular. Pietro's mother is convinced her son has made a ghastly mistake taking in this girl who is poor, unconnected and who shows no due respect. The figure of the mother, as presence or object of conversation, dominates all three acts, and is finally dismissed as the couple resolve to determine their own lives, to make their own decisions: “At a certain point we have to send them packing, don't you think? We can love them very much, but we have to send them packing.”⁹

Ginzburg's main characters are frequently those who do not appear on stage—for whom no actor will get paid. A number of the plays are structured around an absent character, usually male: what happens or is said onstage are ripples or reflections, the flotsam and jetsam of bigger events being played out elsewhere. In this sense Ginzburg's theater has been set alongside that of Ionesco, Albee, Pinter, and Beckett and defined together with theirs as il teatro delle chiacciere, the ‘theater of chat’, indicating as the critic Pullini puts it “not so much a defective lack of dramatic action as a deliberate and intentional filling of the scene with lines which appear to wander at random and which in fact are the face of an underlying dramatic substance which barely makes itself felt.”¹⁰

The distance between the teatro delle chiacchiere and contemporary intellectual and political movements of the late sixties and early seventies was underlined by Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose “Manifesto for a New Theater” was based less on some dubious notion of committed literature than on his idea of the Teatro di Parola—a Theater of the Word—which was to be neither the traditional/academic bourgeois theater of chat nor the avant-garde theater of the Gesture and the Scream, Theater, wrote Pasolini, should be a “debate, an exchange of ideas, literary and political struggle.”¹¹ Dacia Maraini was similarly interested in finding a way between more traditional theatrical forms in which language degenerated into empty and meaningless exchange, and extreme forms of modern experimentalism which avoided engagement with language at all.

For Maraini the refusal to acknowledge the primacy of the word in theater indicated the rejection of thought, a narcissistic pandering to the subconscious:

Theater has lost the word. It has become deaf and dumb—an angelic, paralysing deafness. A devastating, violent muteness. Theater now expresses itself through more sublime images which are abstract and diabolical: more and more suggestive, but less and less significant.

The sleep of reason generates monsters: white, libidinous larvae, cackling birds which rise up out of the darkness as Goya's painting, while man sleeps …

Our cellars pulsate with these larvae which have emerged from the great night of our dreams. The unconscious clothes itself in paper, paints its face and walks barefoot on the boards of our underground stages.

But the unconscious is indiscriminate and mixes what is sublime with what is stupid and vulgar, and has no desire to distinguish between them. The unconscious excludes choice. It comes out as a spontaneous gushing and slides heavily over things.¹²

We have here an implicit statement of the dilemma of Italian theater, torn between those who approach it as literature and those who approach it as performers and directors. Directors will accuse the writers of being bourgeois: writers will accuse performers—as Pasolini accused Dario Fo—of being anti-intellectual. For Maraini the absence of writers in the theater leads to excessive formalism, abstraction, and a distancing of the theater from the real needs and concerns of ordinary Italians. The separation of the functions of writer and director, fused together in figures such as Pirandello and Lorca, and the cult and power of artistic and theater directors, left little space for the autonomous writer.

Unlike Ginzburg, Maraini was—indeed is—actively involved in the business of setting up and running theater companies, and her theater has consistently taken into account both her feminism and her politics. She began writing for the theater in the late sixties, together with Moravia, Siciliano, Gadda, and a number of others. Her company La compagnia blu and later Teatroggi were set up under the aegis of the Communist party and attempted to establish themselves in the Roman suburb of Centocelle with the given cultural aim of decentramento, decanting theater from established theatrical spaces inhabited only by the élite.

Later Maraini set up the very successful theater workshop, the Teatro della Maddalena, run by and for women writers and including seminars and workshops for a number of women at the beginning of their writing careers.¹³

Relations between innovatory theatrical practitioners and the Communist Party were never particularly smooth. Dario Fo, for example, clashed with the Party over their reformish tendencies. Opening up the theatrical process to a new public risked greater consequences than perhaps the PCI was prepared to contemplate. Observers such as Marco de Marinis have commented on the way in which the Party took fright once its theoretical pronouncements on the need for self-managment, alternative touring circuits, and decentering began to be put into practice.¹⁴

Maraini explores the dialectic of the problematic conundrum of theater and politics, the confluence of artistic and political practice, and the innovatory possibilities of dramatic form:

… irritation of politics made theater and at the same time the need to make political theater. Our love of form is polluted by the doubt that this love is a privilege reserved for those on the side of power. There is a cruel feeling about the impotence of the word and simultaneously the certainty that only the word can say with clarity and poetry what we want.

There is the refusal of the theater of shadows, the theater of the irrational, the theater of terrorism, in other words the avant-garde, and at the same time the awareness that the best of our theater today comes from the most formalistic directors, the ones most dedicated to shadows and aestheticism.

There is our love for collective work and at the same time horror at the approximations and fudges which pass for the democratic process, the clashes and hostility which are held in check only by ideological necessity.¹⁵

Time permits a look at just one of Maraini's plays, and I would like to consider briefly I sogni di Clitennestra [The dreams of Clytemnestra], written in 1973.¹⁶ In this reinterpretation of Aeschylus, Clytemnestra is both the character from Aeschylus and a housewife from a town somewhere north of Florence whose husband has emigrated to America in search of work; Aegistheus is a good-for-nothing incapable of holding down a job and living off his lover; Orestes is the avenging, tormented son and a “gastarbeiter” in Germany. Iphigenia is both killed as propitiatory sacrifice and married off to settle a debt, subsequently dying in childbirth.

Maraini does rather more than turn tragedy into soap opera. The merging of lines from Aeschylus with a more modern idiom, the shading in and out of Aeschylus's story with the experiences of an ordinary Italian in the 1970s, lead to some startling and sometimes moving juxtapositions, and some intensely dramatic moments when what is dreamt overlays—or undermines—what actually occurs. The death of Agamemnon takes place as he lies in bed with his American mistress Cassandra: she believes the murder is only a terrible dream, and sings him a lullaby to soothe him. In the modern version of the story, Clytemnestra's belief that she has murdered her faithless man reveals itself to be a delusion, as she is threatened with electric shock treatment in the asylum.

Clytemnestra's ‘madness’, her unconscious, her dreams, her sexuality which she refuses to suppress during the long absence of her husband, represent a disestablishment of patriarchal order, an inversion of roles. This is why Clytemnestra must die at the hands of her son, her throat cut at a family dinner while all the other characters calmly proceed with their meal. The central clash in the play is between Clytemnestra and her daughter Electra, and constitutes a hard-hitting debate about the allegiances of women which takes the form of a power struggle between patriarchy and matriarchy. Agamemnon states the fundamentally Western philosophical claim of patriarchy to Electra: “I gave birth to you with my imagination. Your mother contributed her guts. I gave the truth” (25). Mother and daughter are as clay within the patriarchal hands, to be given shape, form and life by him alone. Clytemnestra makes her own plea for solidarity:

You and me, face to face. I'm the same as you. A woman who stinks of onions and the washing. Just like you. But you don't look at me. You don't see me. You think of him, over the sea. Your eyes are heavy with black light. You, my daughter, a woman like me, instead of being on my side you live only for him, you lick the ground where he walks, you keep his bed warm, you are his spy, his guard-dog.

(37)

In this play Maraini makes a sustained attack on the family as institution, as purveyor of a petit-bourgeois hypocritical morality, as a perversion of eroticism. Yet just as I sogni di Clitennestra is more than tragedy in modern dress, so it is also more than feminist tract informed by a healthy dose of psychoanalysis. The real polemic of the piece emerges at the end of the play when the Furies—both the Furies of the ancients and three wizened old prostitutes—appear to Clytemnestra in her cell.

The matriarchy, powerful force of the unconscious, the hidden power of femininity which they represent, have been tamed, defused, have sold out. “It is science which has changed us,” they say.

We have been converted by democratic reasoning … we have been tamed for the sake of good relations between men and women. We who used to defend the reasons of women bearing epidemics into the midst of men, now we do penance licking the floor of the house of God. … We have been tied up, cut into pieces. We have lost our fury like an ancient illness. … Now we are happy. We are putrid with happiness. Livid with pleasure.

(41)

I would like briefly to mention another of Maraini's plays, Mary Stuart. Anybody familiar with Liz Lochhead's play Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off may be interested to see how close the two writers are in their solution to specific problems of staging. The central relationship in Maraini's play is that between Mary and Elizabeth, each of whom act—literally almost—as a mirror to the other. The fascination of intra-female relationships leads to the dramatic casting solution of having the actress playing Elizabeth also playing the part of Mary's servant, and vice versa.

Maraini states repeatedly her refusal to put her politics above her art. This most politicized and consistently feminist of writers still recognizes the supremacy of art over propaganda, of creativity over political rhetoric, the greater power of the imagination than the ideological tract. Readers of her plays might question how far she succeeds in this. The writer/performer who clearly does succeed in keeping politics subservient to drama is Franca Rame, longtime companion and partner of Dario Fo. The attribution of authorship to Franca Rame even of her feminist monologues is clearly problematic, given the working relationship with Dario Fo and the finalization of texts not on the page but on the stage, in rehearsal. Fo and Rame established their own theater cooperative, La Comune, which was to dispense with traditional hierarchical working practices and make decision-making and planning collective while playing to an alternative circuit. Like Maraini they discovered the project to be a utopian one, but they shared with the radical intellectual Left the need to break with traditional forms and traditional spaces. Also like Maraini, Fo and Rame identified with the non-sectarian Left, critical of the Communist party which was perceived to be too rigidly authoritarian, hierarchical as well as patriarchal, too locked in rigid ideology, too inimical to culture as well as too timid for revolution.

Their political stance led to serious consequences: in 1973 Rame was kidnapped and raped by a fascist gang.

Rame is by no means a radical feminist, and is critical of what she calls brutal, hard-line feminism: “I am in complete agreement with those women who are struggling for liberation, once and for all, from those senseless inhibitions which have been inculcated into us over the years. But I would always, even when dropping my knickers, like to achieve that with a minimum of style.”¹⁷ She differs from an orthodox feminist interpretation of Euripides's Alcestis, for example, preferring to see in the play not an exhortation of women's selflessness and self-sacrifice but a condemnation of a collective failure of nerve. The jointly authored Coppia apperta turns out to be a heartfelt defense of the family as institution, of strict monogamy. She will have nothing to do with feminism in its more theatrical form:

On the subject of feminism, things seem to have taken a turn for the better, now that certain forms of hysterical extremism have been done away with. Many of the women who, in the early days of passion and fervour, celebrated their emancipation with witches' dances leading up to the final rite (thankfully merely allusive) of castration of the male, have now returned to humdrum normality as home-owners, happy mothers and smiling brides.

(182)

Laughter with anger, riso con rabbia, is Rame's guiding principle. Humor and satire are the essential elements of Fo and Rame's style of theater. As long as satire exists there remains the possibility of democratic politics, and it is satire which becomes the great debunker of the phallocratic myth.

You have to agree that from the very dawn of time, men have always given the most grandiloquent of names to their organ … but that word organ always sidetracks me. It makes me think of St. Peter's. Anyway, the anatomical details of the male organ have always rejoiced in high-sounding names. Phallus! what a ring it has to it … Gland! This could be the name of some exotic flower. ‘Here, darling, take this sweet scented bouquet of glands and clasp it to your breast.’ There could be a Sophoclean epic constructed with this terminology. …

Nothing of the sort could be attempted with the terminology foisted on us women … ‘Vagina’! The best you could do with a vagina is slip on it. The word uterus is even nastier. It sounds like an insult, or an offensive weapon. … And I don't want to hear about the ‘vulva’! … Peruvian ant-eater. In any case, it is unquestionably poisonous. … These words are only fit for horror stories:

The first prize must go to another term, one that I can hardly bring myself to utter—orgasm! It is a word addressed almost exclusively to women. Men experience pleasure, but women orgasm. The very sound is enough to make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. It summons up monsters. … Can you see the headlines in the morning paper: “Giant orgasm escapes from city zoo!” “Nun assaulted by mad orgasm on run from American circus.”¹⁸

Rame is only being half ironic here. Yet her range as an actress enables her to embody not only the farcical absurdity of much of women's lives, but also its deeper pathos and even tragedy. Her dramatic and multi-voiced monologues range over issues of rape, terrorism, work and housework, childcare, and the Church. Like Maraini she turned also to the classics, and in her interpretation of Medea made common cause with Clytemnestra in decrying the abandonment of the older woman for the younger. While Pasolini's wonderful film has Medea suggest the primitive, the rawly emotional, the rural, the unruly unconscious even, defeated by the thrusting, urban ambitious Jason, Rame's Medea posits the more banal but equally tragic situation of the woman who, having lost her looks, loses her claim on society and on her man. “Everyone's embarrassed by a woman who's surplus to requirements.”¹⁹ The murder of her children becomes for Medea a conscious act not of revenge but of breaking the patriarchal law which demands that women sacrifice themselves to their children.

While Ginzburg is less concerned than either Maraini or Franca Rame to directly tackle political issues in her plays, all three writers use their writing to turn the spotlight on contemporary society, and more specifically on relationships between the sexes. There is obviously—and happily—no such thing as a feminist dramatic aesthetic. The very diversity of women's approaches to the theatrical representation of their experience reflects and underlines the dramatic multiformity of that experience. Art will not be subject to ideology, and it is paradoxically in claiming the independence of aesthetics from politics that these women writers enact the liberation which they seek.

Notes

1. Eric Bentley, Thinking about the Playwright (London: Macmillan, 1986) 278.

2. Guido Anselmi, Che cali il sipario' in Lo stato del teatro edited by Renzo Bortolotti (Bari: Laterza, 1992).

3. Judith Malina describes a play put on jointly between women of the Living Theater and the local women of Faenza, in 1976:

   November 11, 1976 (Faenza)

   The Women's Play: at the OMSA factory … taking the theme from our discussion: The inability to speak—and even the unwillingness to speak in what Dimitra called “the male rhetoric.” …

   We face the entrance to the workers' cafeteria, standing in a line in which we cannot see one another. At a sound cue we raise our arms in the Delta symbol of the Feminists: We are silent, a tape speaks for us. It's a tape of Women's stories, complaints, abuses. It speaks alternately of the abuses of daily life, and of the local and dramatically known incidents—of rape, abortion, deaths, lost jobs …

   We try to take a step forward, silently, our symbols over our heads, and we balance slowly and precariously, but we do not speak—cannot, will not, do not speak … Tape speaks …

   And then the tape stops and we strain in a chorus of non-verbal sounds, we stretch forward and our mouths move and our faces are contorted with the years of our oppression and we want to speak—but we have no voice. … As in the common dream.

   Quoted in Women in Theater: Compassion and Hope, ed. Karen Malpede (New York: Knopf, 1983) 216.

4. See for example Caterina Stazzone, Cinque Commedie (Siracusa: Morandi, 1989).

5. Annie Vivanti, Gli invasori (Milan: Quintiani, 1918).

6. E. Clementelli, Invito alla lettura di Natalia Ginzburg (Milan: Mursia, 1972) 95-96.

7. Natalia Ginzburg, “La condizione femminile,” Vita immaginaria (Milan: Mondadori, 1974) 182-90.

8. Natalia Ginzburg, quoted in Alan Bullock, Natalia Ginzburg (Oxford: Berg, 1992) 65.

9. Natalia Ginzburg, Ti ho sposato per allegria e altre commedie (Milan: Mondadori, 1968).

10. G. Pullini, Tra esistenza e coscienza: Narrativa e teatro del '900 (Milan: Mondadori, 1986) 274. Alberto Moravia comments on the teatro delle chiacchiere that “the chatter certainly alludes to something serious, tragic even: but this something is not revealed, and remains wrapped in a mysterious darkness. As a result we have a maximum of conventionality, absurdity, fragmentoriness—in other words, chatter—and at the same time the tormenting, mystical feeling that cannot be the whole world, that it is impossible not to go behind the chatter and discover something higher, deeper, complex: in other words, the dramatic” (“La chiacchiera a teatro,” Nuovi Argomenti 5 [1967]: 10).

11. P. P. Pasolini, “Manifesto per un nuovo teatro,” Nuovi Argomenti 7 (1968): 24.

12. D. Maraini, Fare teatro (Milan: Bompiani, 1974) 66.

13. The Teatro della Maddalena finally closed in 1990. Maraini blames consistent lack of public funding for its demise.

14. Marco de Marinis, Il nuovo teatro 1947-1970 (Milan: Mursia, 1987) 345.

15. Fare teatro 5-6.

16. D. Maraini, I sogni di Clitennestra in I sogni di Clitennestra e altre commedie (Milan: Bompiani, 1974).

17. Franca Rame in Dario Fo, Tricks of the Trade, trans. Joseph Farrell (London: Methuen, 1991).

18. Ibid. 105-06.

19. Dario Fo and Franca Rame, Medea in A Woman Alone and Other Plays, ed. Stuart Hood (London: Methuen, 1991) 64.